What it is like to hear voices that no-one else can hear?
Hearing voices is an important aspect of many people’s lives. It is an experience that can be distressing and upsetting, but also positive and meaningful.
We seek to provide a better understanding of this experience by examining it from different academic perspectives and working with voice-hearers, clinicians and mental health professionals.
Hearing the Voice is a large interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing, based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Our international research team includes academics from anthropology, cognitive neuroscience, history, linguistics, literary studies, medical humanities, philosophy, psychology and theology. We also work closely with clinicians, voice-hearers and other experts by experience.
In addition to shedding light on the relations between hearing voices and everyday processes of sensory perception, memory, language and creativity, we are exploring why it is that some voices (and not others) are experienced as distressing, how they can change across the life course, and the ways in which voices can act as important social, cultural and political forces.
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Highlights from the Blog
In collaboration with Rai Waddingham, Hearing the Voice are offering free workshops in Glasgow and London, which will explore the way in which we can use information and resources to help people distressed by their voices feel more empowered and reduce internalised stigma.
On 11 September 2019, over two hundred people attended our public symposium on ‘Hearing Voices: What do we need to know?’ at The Assembly Rooms in Newcastle upon Tyne. If you couldn’t join us at the event, you can catch up by watching films of all the talks and presentations in this post.
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If you would like to keep up to date with the progress of Hearing the Voice research and receive information about forthcoming events and activities, sign up for our bi-monthly e-bulletin.