>What's the distinction between 'hearing voices' and just thinking internally to yourself? When you hear voices, it's just that, you can hear them. It's almost

>What's the distinction between 'hearing voices' and just thinking internally to yourself? When you hear voices, it's just that, you can hear them. It's almost impossible to believe they aren't real, because they sound real. They have that quality of a real sound that nothing imagined ever has, for most people. And everything in our lives has taught us to trust our senses. If you're crossing a road, if you see/hear no cars coming, you trust that with your life. If you see a car, you trust that. Imagine if one day you couldn't trust that? I think why auditory hallucinations are particularly misleading/noxious is that with visual hallucinations, like seeing a car when there's none there, the hallucination is there in one spot. With hearing, there's no one spot to focus on - we can't pinpoint and look at the spot in the way we can with sight. So then the mind tries to make sense of the voices, to be rational about them, taking into account every imaginable hypothesis (except not, unfortunately, that they aren't real)..which gets ever-more-complicated and soon is a 24-hour-a-day job. Ever-more-complicated conspiracy theories have to be built. e.g. I thought people were watching with hidden video cameras in my bedroom - how else to explain what they knew. Unfortunately my voices were all negative! After a year or two I starting taking pills which immediately stopped the voices and I returned from sleepless, shaking, total falling-apart madness to living in the real world. Sometimes after that I'd faintly hear things and wasn't sure if I was hearing them or imagining them. But now I know that 'heard' voices probably aren't real, so they don't have that power, don't escalate. I guess it's like seeing ghosts. Put a ghost-believer in a scary place at night, they will see/feel something, panic, then probably see/hear a lot more stuff. A sceptic won't get agitated like that. So I guess I learnt to be a 'voice sceptic'. Because it's very difficult and unnatural not to believe what your senses tell you in plain daylight.