Many people hear voices that aren’t really there. It drives some to seek psychiatric treatment, but others are able to make use of it in healthy ways. In this episode, Al Powers and Phil Corlett from Yale University talk about their research into the similarities and differences between these two groups, and what the rest of us can learn from their experiences. They tell their stories behind developing their open-access article “Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors,” which they co-authored with Chris Mathys, published in the August 2017 issue of the journal Science.

Video of visual and auditory stimuli

Audio file of auditory stimuli

Still image of visual stimuli

Still image of confidence rating

Websites

• Phil’s Research Lab
• Specialized Treatment Early in Psychosis (STEP)
• PRIME Psychosis Prodrome Research Clinic

Press coverage

• Nova: Anyone Can Be Trained to Hallucinate, and That’s Teaching Scientists About Perception
• Scientific American: Do You Hear What I Hear? Auditory Hallucinations Yield Clues to Perception
• BoingBoing: Auditory hallucinations induced with Pavlovian conditioning
• PubMed (first paper): Varieties of Voice-Hearing: Psychics and the Psychosis Continuum
• The Atlantic: Psychics Who Hear Voices Could Be On to Something

Open Science Resources

• Model code, behavioral data
• Imaging data

Bonus Clips

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