Auditory hallucinations cover a variety of elementary experiences,
such as hearing noises or sounds, and complex experiences, such as
hearing music or voices. Complex auditory hallucinations are most
often characterized by the hearing of a voice or voices that are generally
called auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). About 70% of patients with
schizophrenia and a variety of psychiatric and neurological patients suffer from AVHs. While literature on AVHs in psychiatric patients is extensive, only a few reports are available on AVHs in neurological patients.
Several functional and neural mechanisms have been proposed
to account for AVHs. Auditory verbal hallucinations have been attributed
to 1) aberrant perceptions of altered auditory processing [9];
2) language-related deficits such as a failure in self-attributing inner
speech (self-monitoring deficit) [10]; and 3) a memory deficit, i.e., abnormal
remembering of memories of speech [11], among others [12].
Neuroimaging studies in psychiatric patients have provided evidence