British woman heard voices no one else could hear -- and they saved her life 

In 1984, a British homemaker was reading at home when a voice told her, “Please don’t be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.” She tried to ignore it, but the voice said, “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following,” and gave her three pieces of information that she had not known. When these proved to be true, she consulted her doctor, who referred her to Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye, a consulting psychiatrist at the Lambeth Healthcare NHS trust.

An examination found nothing, so he diagnosed her with a functional hallucinatory psychosis, and after two weeks of counseling and thioridazine the voices ceased and she went on holiday. But they soon returned, telling her that she needed immediate treatment and giving an address, which turned out to be the computerized tomography department of a large London hospital. The voices told her that she needed a brain scan because she had a tumor and her brain stem was inflamed.

Azuonye found no evidence of this, but she was so distressed at this point that he ordered the scan anyway, and it showed evidence of a meningioma with a left posterior frontal parafalcine mass extending through the falx to the right side. She elected immediate surgery (the voices agreed), and the operation was carried out in May 1984. When she regained consciousness, she heard the voices for the last time. They said, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.”

When Azuonye presented this case at a conference in 1996, three opinions seemed to prevail. Some thought that the voices had been telepathic communications from people who had learned about the tumor psychically and were trying to warn the patient. Others thought that the patient had known about the tumor before coming to the U.K. and had invented the story in order to get free medical care under the National Health Service (this seems unlikely, as she’d been living in the U.K. for 15 years before hearing the voices).

The third explanation, which Azuonye shared, was that the presence of the meningioma had triggered enough residual sensations to alert her that something was wrong, and that her fear had led her unconsciously to take in information about London hospitals, which was expressed by the voices. The fact that the voices stopped when the tumor was removed showed that the symptoms had been related to the presence of the lesion.

Azuonye, I O A Difficult Case: Diagnosis Made B Hallucinatory Voices British Medical Journal, Vol. 315, page 685-6 (1997)

It was a lonely time in Jessica’s life. She was living away from home for the first time, and she thinks her grandmother was drawn by some sense of that. She eventually told her parents what happened, and according to her they were concerned, but not overly panicked. “My parents are probably the least judgmental people I know,” she said.

As Jessica tells it, over the next two years, spirits visited her every now and again. Her brother-in-law’s deceased father began forming before her, ghostlike, just as her grandmother did. And while the experiences were intense and at times made her feel “crazy,” she said, they were infrequent, and insists that they were never a real source of suffering.

Jessica later moved back home and got a job as a pharmacy technician, all the while figuring out how to cope with what was happening to her. At a co-worker’s suggestion, she went to the Healing in Harmony center in Connecticut. In 2013, she says, she enrolled in classes there that taught her to use her “gift.” A self-described psychic medium, Jessica tells me she hears voices that other people do not (in addition to sometimes seeing people others do not see), at varying intensity, and mostly through her right ear.

Meeting others like her at the center gave Jessica a sense of relief. “Just being around people who are going through similar things—that helps a lot, because I could talk to anybody about those things and not feel like I was crazy,” she said.

It was through a friend from the center that Jessica ended up in the lab of Philip Corlett and Albert Powers, a psychologist and a psychiatrist at Yale. In a study published last fall in Schizophrenia Bulletin, Powers and Corlett compared self-described psychics with people diagnosed with a psychotic disorder who experience auditory hallucinations.

“A lot of the time, if someone says they hear voices, you immediately jump to psychotic illness, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia,” Corlett said. But research suggests hearing voices is not all that uncommon. A survey from 1991—the largest of its kind since—found that 10 to 15 percent of people in the U.S. experienced sensory hallucinations of some sort within their lifetime. And other research, as well as growing advocacy movements, suggest hearing voices isn’t always a sign of psychological distress.

The researchers at Yale were looking for a group of people who hear voices at least once a day, and had never before interacted with the mental-health-care system. They wanted to understand, as Corlett put it, those who do not suffer when “the mind deviates from consensual reality.”

What corlett calls consensual reality—the “normative shared experience we all agree on”—is probably not something you spend too much time thinking about. But you know when it’s being violated. The sky is blue, the sun is hot, and as Corlett points out, most would generally agree that people don’t receive extrasensory messages from one another.

Jessica was quite frank with me about the way some people may view her. “We know these experiences are weird and they’re seen as weird,” she said. “You just can’t go into a room and say ‘Hey, I’m a psychic medium’ and people are gonna accept you.”

Finer points of what counts as reality can change over time, and vary based on geography or culture. For centuries people walked the earth believing the sun orbited around them, which today would be considered unreasonable. Who decides that consensus, and where along its boundaries voice hearers fall, depends on a wide range of circumstances.

The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who has studied voice hearing in psychiatric and religious contexts, has written that “historical and cultural conditions … affect significantly the way mental anguish is internally experienced and socially expressed.” Noting that there is no question psychiatric distress and schizophrenia are “real” phenomena that call for treatment, Luhrmann adds that “the way a culture interprets symptoms may affect an ill person’s prognosis.” Every psychiatrist I spoke to shared the belief that unusual behavior should only enter into the realm of diagnosis when it causes suffering.

On the other hand, Luhrmann tells me “it’s a terribly romantic idea” to overinterpret the effects of culture. To say, for instance, that “anybody who would be identified with schizophrenia in our culture would be a shaman in Ecuador” is, in her mind, a clear mistake: “Flagrant psychosis” exists in some form in every culture where anthropologists have looked.

“Goodness knows what psychosis actually is.”

In the past decade, researchers have taken a greater interest in the experience of hearing voices outside the context of psychological distress. In his book The Voices Within, the psychologist Charles Fernyhough traces the way thoughts and external voices have been understood by science and society throughout time.*

Reflecting on Fernyhough’s book, Jerome Groopman notes that in the early parts of the Bible, the voice of God gave direct commands to Adam, Abraham, and Noah. It spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush, going by the Book of Esther, making itself known again to the apostle Paul in the New Testament. Socrates, who wrote nothing down, heard a “sign” from childhood. The voices of three saints guided Joan of Arc as she rebelled against the English. Groopman cites Martin Luther King, Jr.’s autobiography, in which he describes “the quiet assurance of an inner voice” telling him to “stand up for righteousness.”

The social context in which these people lived can impact how they’re seen. It’s impossible to say how the prophet Ezekiel was understood within his cultural moment. But in most places today, if a person claimed—as Ezekiel does—that he ate a scroll because the Lord commanded him to do so, some eyebrows might be raised. In a community where a personal, verbal relationship with God is normal, the reception may be different.

Powers and Corlett’s work orbits the idea that schizophrenia is, as Powers put it, an “outmoded” label that describes a cluster of different symptoms rather than a single unified condition, he says.

“Goodness knows what psychosis actually is,” Luhrmann said. “There are clearly different kinds of events in the domain we call psychosis,” and when it comes to the relationship between voice hearing and psychosis, she says, “there’s so much we don’t understand.”

Many now antiquated psychiatric diagnoses reified fear, misunderstanding, or prejudice toward people at society’s margins. At the time of the women’s suffrage movement in London, hysteria was leveled as a charge against women who broke social codes. A Mississippi psychiatrist in the 19th century proposed that slaves who attempted escape suffered from “drapetomania.” And until 1973, homosexuality was considered a disease of the mind rather than an accepted way of being in the United States—and was only fully removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1987.

In his book Hallucinations, the late Oliver Sacks details a controversial experiment in which eight participants showed up at hospitals throughout the U.S. in the early ’70s and complained only of “hearing voices.” All of them were immediately diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and hospitalized for two months, despite reporting no other medical symptoms, family history, or signs of personal distress. The single symptom, Sacks writes, was seen as cause enough.

People with psychiatric disorders do hear auditory hallucinations in relatively high numbers. According to Ann Shinn, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, 70 to 75 percent of people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and between one-third and one-tenth of people with bipolar disorder report hearing voices at some point in their life.

In the case of voice hearing, culture may also play a role in helping people cope. One study conducted by Luhrmann, the anthropologist, found that compared to their American counterparts, voice-hearing people diagnosed with schizophrenia in more collectivist cultures were more likely to perceive their voices as helpful and friendly, sometimes even resembling members of their friends and family. She adds that people who meet criteria for schizophrenia in India have better outcomes than their U.S. counterparts. She suspects this is because of “the negative salience” a diagnosis of schizophrenia holds in the U.S., as well as the greater rates of homelessness among people with schizophrenia in America.

The influence of social context was part of what motivated Corlett and Powers: The two were interested in whether the support of a social group can help them understand where disorder and difference intersect. When they set out to design their study, they needed an otherwise healthy group of people who hear voices on a regular basis, and whose experiences are accepted in their social group.

Next, they needed to find some psychics. Corlett told me he got the idea to reach out to a Connecticut-based organization for psychics after noticing the ads for psychics and tarot-card readers on his daily bus route. When the two interviewed those participants, they noticed something striking: The psychics described hearing hearing voices of similar volumes, frequencies, and timbres as the patients. Powers and Corlett took this to mean that the psychics were actually hearing something. The two also vetted their participants with the same techniques that forensic psychiatrists use to determine whether a person is pretending to experience psychiatric symptoms, giving them more reason to believe what they were told.

Compared to their diagnosed counterparts, more of the psychics described the voices as a force that “positively affects safety.” And all of the psychics attributed the voices to a “god or other spiritual being.” The patients, meanwhile, were more likely to consider their voices a torment caused by a faulty process in their brain. Many of them described the voices as “bothersome,” and also claimed that the first time they told anyone what they were hearing, they received a negative response.

Just like Jessica, the psychics were more likely to say that they received a positive reaction the first time they spoke about their experience. Jessica’s mother, Lena, told me she maintained a supportive, nonjudgmental attitude toward her daughter’s accounts, just as she did when her other daughter converted to Scientology. She waited for Jessica to bring them up and discussed them with an open mind. She says she was happy Jessica found the center, adding that her only concern was that Jessica’s experiences did sometimes seem to be distressing her and leaving her “drained.”

When Jessica tells me about the people and things she hears, she describes a range of experiences rather than one consistent phenomenon. Her most meaningful episodes of voice hearing are those like the visits she had from her grandmother and her brother-in-law’s father. But she also describes things like hearing the number a friend is thinking, and the persistent and vivid presence of a childhood imaginary friend (her mother told me Jessica demanded the table be set for him at every meal). To Jessica, these experiences differ in degree rather than kind from the ghosts of the dead who appear in front of her with persistent messages for her and for others. Though these might not all fit into the popular conception of a psychic, she understands them to exist along that same continuum.

In his book, Fernyhough describes a series of experiments meant to provide evidence for the connection between inner speech and hearing voices. In one, participants were played recordings of other people’s speech alongside recordings of their own, disguised and distorted, and told to mark whether the voice was their own or someone else’s. Those who experienced hallucinations were more likely to misidentify their own altered voices. A much older experiment found a kind of unconscious ventriloquism among a group of people with schizophrenia: When participants began to hear voices, researchers noted “an increase in tiny movements in the muscles associated with vocalization.” The voices they heard came, in some sense, from their own throats.

(Sarah Jung)

These experiments suggest that auditory hallucinations are the result of the mind failing to brand its actions as its own. Watching what the brain does during these hallucinations may clarify how that works, and what differences in the brain create these experiences.

“When your brain signals to generate a movement,” Shinn, the psychiatrist at Harvard, told me, “there is a parallel signal [known as an efference copy] that basically says ‘this is mine, it’s not coming from outside.’” This helps creates the sense of where a person is in space, that their hand belongs to them and it is moving from point A to B. In this way, the body labels its motions, and a possible parallel may exist for speech and thought. When people hear voices, they may be hearing ‘unmarked’ thoughts they do not recognize as their own.

Beyond that, Shinn told me, what is understood about the experiences of people who hear voices is limited. She sees Corlett and Powers’s study as part of a growing interest in the lives of “healthy voice hearers”—an interest spurred, in part, by the Hearing Voices Movement. A network of advocacy groups, the Hearing Voices Movement presents an alternative to the medical approach based on the belief that the content of a person’s voices can reflect the hearer’s mental and emotional state. The groups encourage an approach in which, with the help of a facilitator or counselor, hearers listen to, speak back to, and negotiate with the messages they hear in hopes of learning to cope.

“I’m not gonna talk right now. ... I still have to live this human life.”

The hearing-voices advocate Eleanor Longden has said she considers her voices “a source of insight into solvable emotional problems” rooted in trauma rather than “an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia.” As Longden tells it, that’s how her own experiences with voices were understood when she first sought treatment for anxiety. Her psychiatrist told her how limited her life would be by her voices, she says, and the voices grew more adversarial.

Many mental-health-care providers—Shinn, Corlett, and Powers included—seem receptive to the Hearing Voices Movement’s critiques, including an overemphasis on medication and an imperative for patient-focused treatment. Shinn credits the network with encouraging an approach that treats voice hearing as more than a checklist item adding up to a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and helping to reduce the stigma attached the experience of voice hearing.

But “there are certainly a lot of people for whom that will not be enough,” she says. For some patients, voices can be impossible to reason with, and the burden of other symptoms of psychosis—disordered thought, delusions, the inability to feel pleasure—can be too great. And Powers and Corlett expressed concerns that the Hearing Voices Network may promote a false divide: the idea that the voices’ perceived roots in trauma—rather than some accident of biology—means hearers should avoid medication. Biology and experience, they say, can’t be so neatly separated. (Longden has written that “many people find medication helpful,” and that the International Hearing Voice Network advocates for “informed choice.”)

While Powers and Corlett don’t believe the psychics and patients are experiencing the exact same thing, the two are cautiously hopeful that about a potential lesson in the greatest difference between those groups: the ability to control the voices they hear, which is something the psychics, including Jessica, showed in greater number than their counterparts. “When I’m in certain situations, I’m not open,” Jessica said. For instance, when she’s at work, the voices “can come in,” she says, they “can hang out, but I’m not gonna talk right now. ... I still have to live this human life.”

While learning control was a major part of Jessica’s experience, so was learning to summon the voices she heard. Before training as a medium, she heard voices sporadically, she says, and began to hear them every day only after intentionally practicing at the center. Powers and Corlett acknowledge this general trend in their study: The psychics they spoke tended to seek out and cultivate the voice-hearing experiences.

In her work, Luhrmann has come across groups of people who—unlike Jessica—hear voices only as a result of practice. She gives the example of tulpamancers: people who create tulpas, which are believed to be other beings or personalities that co-exist along inside a person’s mind along with their own. “Somebody in that community estimated to me that one-fifth of the community had frequent voice hearing experiences with their tulpas, that their tulpas talked in a way that was auditory or quasi auditory,” Luhrmann said, a practice that she was told takes two hours a day to develop.“That’s connected to work. Psychosis is not connected to effort. It happens to people.”

Longden, the Hearing Voices Network advocate, describes how she later learned to extract metaphorical meaning from the sometimes disturbing messages the voices had for her. Once when the voices warned her not to leave the house, she thanked them for making her aware that she was feeling unsafe, and firmly reassured the voices—and by extension, herself—that they had nothing to fear.

Though Jessica has a different understanding of her voices’ source, it’s hard not to hear echoes of Longden’s account when she speaks about the sense of control she’s developed. Longden talks to the voices as aspects of herself that call for a response, while Jessica addresses them as visitors who need to learn the rules.

Instead of tying these experiences to a discrete diagnosis, Powers and Corlett imagine a new kind of frame for voice hearing. Drawing a parallel with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the two are interested in the extent to which the psychics they saw “might occupy the extreme end of a continuum” of people who hear voices. “Much of what we perceive and believe about the world is based on our expectations and our beliefs,” Corlett said. “We can see hallucinations as an exaggeration of that process, and the psychics as a sort of way-station on that continuum, and slowly but surely we can creep towards a better understanding of the clinical case and therefore better treatment. We haven’t had new treatment mechanisms in schizophrenia for many years now.”

The two freely admit the gaps between their ambitions and what they know so far. The study is preliminary, qualitative work—a follow-up brain-imaging study is in the works—and they did only interview a small number of people. Psychics, they say, are not so easy to come by.

Luhrmann speculates that most of the psychics are experiencing something separate from psychosis: “I think it’s also true that there are people who have psychosis who manage it such that they don’t fall ill and avoid this stigma and who really function effectively.” This difference aside, she says, “it may still be possible to learn from people who have more control over their voices. .... to think about how to teach people.”

At least as subtext, Powers and Corlett’s study might suggest a kind of chicken-or-egg question: Were the psychics insulated from suffering because they were socialized to accept and cope with their voices, and were the psychotic patients suffering because they weren’t? The better question is: to what extent were the two groups experiencing the same thing?

Shinn believes the fact that far fewer diagnosed participants were employed at the time of the study (25 percent, versus 83 percent of the psychics), and that the diagnosed participants experienced more symptoms of psychosis, suggests that they were suffering beyond the point of being useful comparisons. She thinks, rather, that a “constellation” of symptoms—not just auditory hallucinations or the stigma associated with auditory hallucinations—explain the difference in functionality. “The Powers study provides interesting results with potentially helpful clinical implications,” she added, “but they compare very different groups.”

Shinn, Powers, and Corlett are all adamant that people who hear voices and experience psychological distress shouldn’t turn away from conventional psychiatric treatment, and that a “symptom”—in this case, voice hearing—only calls for clinical attention if it is a cause of suffering. But for those who are distressed, the level of understanding of their experience and the treatments available to them are still lacking. As Powers notes, many of psychiatry’s more effective drug treatments were developed by accident. Shinn likens the current body of knowledge of schizophrenia to a group of people describing different parts of an elephant while looking through a high-power lens: There are robust bodies of work on the trunk, the tail, and the ear, but no clear picture of the entire animal.

Shinn’s all too aware of the ways in which the diagnosis can overshadow the patient. “There have been psychiatrists,” she says, “who will tell a patient: You have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and you need to modify or adjust your goals in life, forget grad school, forget that Wall Street career,” Shinn said. “And that absolutely can be compounding and impairing. I don’t disagree that that’s a problem.”

As Luhrmann put it: “Are those cultural judgments the cause of the illness? Absolutely not. Do those cultural judgments make it worse? Probably.”

Jessica doesn’t live near the center anymore. While she’d love to find fulltime work as a medium, she says, she’s focusing on her graduate studies to become a dietitian for now.

Still, she’s grateful for the community she found at the center, she says, and for the help they gave her. “I cannot imagine having no control over this,” she told me. “I don’t know, if I never went to the center, maybe I’d be diagnosed with schizophrenia.”

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/psychics-hearing-voices/531582/

Here's an odd little story recounted by Robert S. Bobrow, M.D., in his fascinating new book The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine.

The story was originally reported in the British Medical Journal by Dr. I.O. Azuonye in 1997.* It involves a British housewife known in the case history only as A.B., who was about 40 years old and had no history of serious illness or psychiatric disorders.

While reading quietly one evening, A.B. heard a distinctive voice inside her head. The voice politely said: "Please don't be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you." While A.B. knew of this hospital, she had never been there and didn't know where it was.

The voices assured her of their sincerity, even supplying some factual tidbits for A.B. to confirm (she did).

Despite this confirmation, A.B. understandably feared that she had developed some form of mental illness. She promptly saw a psychiatrist, the aforementioned Dr. Azuonye, who diagnosed the episode as "hallucinatory psychosis." When A.B. started taking a prescription antipsychotic medicine, the voices went away for a while. But when she was on vacation abroad, they came back.

This time, they told her that she needed immediate medical care, and should return to England right away. She returned, and the voices gave her an address to go to; her husband was good enough to humor her, and actually took her to the address just for reassurance. It may not have been that reassuring when it turned out to be the CAT-scanning department of a large London hospital, and that as she arrived, the voices told her to go in and have a brain CAT scan.... [The voices] informed A.B. that she had a brain tumor.

Again consulting with Dr. Azuonye, she was advised to get the brain scan simply in order to set her fears to rest. Since she had no symptoms of a brain tumor, both she and the doctor expected nothing to be found. After some squabbling with the government-run health-care system, the CAT scan was eventually carried out.

The result? A brain tumor, which doctors thought to be a meningioma.

Meningiomas are neither the rarest nor the most common of cranial growths. Their cells, which arise from the brain's coverings, generally grow slowly without eating through the brain and only rarely float off to start new colonies elsewhere in the body (called metastasizing). But the space they take up squashes good brain. Removal, as soon as possible, is usually recommended. So while there were no headaches or specific neurological abnormalities, A.B.'s neurosurgeons opted for immediate surgery. The voices told her they agreed.

Surgeons found and removed a meningioma that measured two and half by one and a half inches -- about the size of an egg. When A.B. awoke from the anesthesia, the voices spoke once more: "We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye." They never returned. [Pp. 43-45]

In his discussion of the case in the British Medical Journal, Azuonye notes:

It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.

Azuonye reports that while some doctors accept the case as genuinely paranormal, others have suggested either fraud or a subconscious motive.  Those who allege fraud speculate that the patient

had been given the diagnosis of a brain tumour in her original country and wanted to be treated free under the NHS. Hence, they surmised, she had made up the convoluted tale about voices telling her this and that.

Azuonye objects:

But AB had lived in Britain for 15 years and was entitled to NHS treatment. Besides, she had been so relieved when the voices first disappeared on thioridazine that she had gone on holiday to celebrate the recovery of her sanity.

As for those who think something was going on in A.B.'s subconscious:

Their view was that, the total lack of physical signs notwithstanding, it was unlikely that a tumour of that size had had absolutely no effect on the patient. "She must have felt something," they argued. They suggested that a funny feeling in her head had led her to fear that she had a brain tumour. That fear had led to her experience of hallucinatory voices. She may have unconsciously taken in more information about various hospitals than she realised, and this information was reproduced by her mind as part of the auditory hallucinatory experience.

I think it's more likely that A.B. tapped into some channel of higher consciousness - whether that of "spirit guides" or deceased well-wishers or God - and obtained the information that way. Conceivably the tumor itself brought about changes in the brain that made her nervous system more receptive to such extracerebral influences.

One other interesting aspect of Azuonye's write-up is that apparently quite a large number of the doctors who heard his presentation were entirely comfortable with the paranormal interpretation. I doubt this would have been true a generation ago. Despite skeptical resistance, minds are changing - slowly but surely.

Or as the old Arabian proverb has it: The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

"Each human being is the dwelling place of an infinite power – the root of the universe" – Mani

The woman had settled down to a quiet evening in, curled up with a book. She was engrossed in the story and at first was not sure what she had heard. It then repeated itself. It was a voice that was somehow inside her head and yet not part of her thought processes.

The voice was absolutely insistent. It had arrived from nowhere and was quite clear about its purpose. It told her that she had a medical problem but that she was not to worry because it was there "to help her".

After a few weeks of these strange communications, some of which where precognitive, the woman, known as AB, decided that her only course of action was to go and see her doctor. The local doctor simply could not understand what was happening but assuming that the problem was psychological referred her to Dr Ikechukwu Azuonye of the Mental Health Unit at London's Royal Free Hospital. In the winter of 1984 Dr Azuonye diagnosed a straight-forward case of hallucinatory psychosis. He prescribed a course of the anti-psychotic drug thioridazine and expected that would be the end of it. How wrong he was.

Initially the thioridazine seemed to work. Thinking the voice was simply a peculiar psychological interlude AB and her husband went off on holiday. However whilst out of the country, the voice had found its way through the drug barrier and was more insistent than before. It pleaded with her to return to England as soon as possible saying that she needed urgent medical treatment. Indeed it even told her an address that she should go to for help.

The voice was now becoming quite precise as regards AB's medical problem. It told her that it had two reasons for wanting her to have a scan – firstly that she had a tumour in her brain and, secondly, that her brain stem was badly inflamed. She convinced her husband that they had to go and find the address the voice had told her. Much to her surprise, and concern, the address turned out to be the computerised tomography unit of a large London hospital.

This scared her so much that she went back to see Dr Azuonye. The psychiatrist was, not surprisingly, reluctant at first to do as the voice requested. He knew that the woman had none of the symptoms associated with a brain tumour and for him to force the issue would reflect badly on his professional reputation – particularly if he divulged the source of the diagnosis. Against his better judgement he agreed that he would write to the clinic and see what they said. AB agreed and Dr Azuonye took her home.

A few months later, and after many letters, the clinic agreed to do the scan. Much to the surprise of all concerned, with the clear exception of 'the voice', the scan clearly showed an unusual mass in the brain.

AB was called in to meet with a neurological consultant. The consultant explained that the mass was probably a "meningioma tumour". As he said this, AB heard the voice agree with this diagnosis. However the voice was concerned that there had already been too much delay. It demanded that she be operated on straight away. Not only this but the voice wanted the operation done at Queen's Square Hospital. This was because it knew that that particular hospital specialised in neurological diseases.

This time the hospital authorities agreed, but the operation was to take place at the Royal Free. The voice considered this and decided that it was acceptable. A few days later AB, and, presumably, the voice itself, were under full anaesthetic and being wheeled into an operating theatre.

As AB came too after the operation the first thing she was aware of was the voice. All the insistence had gone. It said "I am pleased to have helped you. Goodbye".

When the surgeon came round to see her she already knew that her life had been saved. He explained to her that he had removed a 6.4cm (2.5 inch) tumour from her brain. He added that he was sure that had it not been removed she would have most certainly died.

Over the years this case continued to fascinate Dr Anzuonye. By 1997 he had moved to Lambeth NHS Trust and had mentioned the AB case many times to his associates. He found that the response was always either extremely positive or extremely negative and with this in mind he decided to submit an article describing the event to the British Medical Journal. He was pleased when he received a positive response and the article appeared the December edition.

Azuonye, I O A Difficult Case: Diagnosis Made B Hallucinatory Voices British Medical Journal, Vol. 315, page 685-6 (1997).

Many hypothetical suggestions were made as to what had taken place in 1984 but none have been considered satisfactory. However there is now a possible answer to the question of what was happening to AB and what was the source of 'the voice'.

Who or what was this 'voice' and how did it know what was about to take place? How did it know that AB was dangerously ill? How did it know exactly what the cure could be? And how did it know who would be of the greatest help Could it be that we all have a secret lodger in our brain – a being that has knowledge far greater than that of our own?

The central concept of my recent book The Daemon, a Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self is exactly this; that all conscious beings consist of not one but two semi-independent entities – one of which knows what will happen in the future. In this article I wish to present the evidence for such an idea. I will firstly review the philosophical, historical and theological background to such a belief and then I will apply some astonishing evidence from modern neurology and consciousness studies that may show that such a belief may, in fact, be true.

The Evidence from Theology

Although early civilisations such as the ancient Egyptians had a form of duality that implied more than a simple soul-body dichotomy it was the ancient Greeks who refined this into a coherent philosophy. For the Greeks human duality was reflected in two beings; a lower, everyday self called an eidolon and an immortal, transcendental being that they called a daemon.

The word daemon (or daimone as it is sometimes written) has a fascinating history that tells in its letters a good deal of social and cultural history. The ancient Greek word was daimön, meaning deity, or god. As such the Greeks saw the word in a very positive, or at least ambivalent, way. The Romans Latinised the Greek word, turning it into daemon. For the Romans a daemon was an inner or attendant spirit that sometimes gave humble man a touch of genius (hence the term 'the demon of creativity' that is still used by people who never seem to see how curious the statement is).

The word eidolon also has an interesting philological history. Originally this word was used to describe an image or statue of a god. In turn it became associated with copy of something divine. This copy looked like the original but lacked all the qualities. For The Pagan sages this was a perfect description for the part of the human duality that was trapped in the Realm of Darkness; this entity thus became known as the Eidolon. This is the embodied self, the physical body and the personality. Put simply, this is the person. This 'lower self' is mortal and is totally unaware, unless initiated into the mysteries, of its higher self. It is very much part of this world of darkness. It is a slave to emotion and all the other ills that beset the physical being. The Daemon on the other hand, is the immortal self. This Daemon is always with the Eidolon and where possible, tries to assist and guide.

The idea of this daemon-eidolon duality was to fascinate the ancient Greeks and soon a whole philosophy of universal structure was to be built around this relationship. The earliest known writer on the subject was Empedocles. For him the daemon, although semi-imprisoned in the body, is a divine being exiled from its rightful place among the gods. It exists totally independently of its lower self, or eidolon, and has great knowledge and power.[2] However our knowledge of this interesting belief really comes from the writings of Plato and his descriptions of the teachings of his master, the famed Socrates.

Plato tells that throughout his life his great teacher had assistance from a 'guide'. Socrates called this disincarnate voice his 'Divine Sign'. From childhood this voice had communicated to him its opinions on what he was doing, or intended to do. According to Plato this 'voice' forbade Socrates from doing things and regularly gave prognostications on whether good or bad luck would follow a certain action. It is as if Socrates 'Divine Sign' was directly aware of the philosopher's potential future. Indeed Plato was at great pains to point out that many of these predictions were marked by extreme triviality; as if this spirit was tied very closely to the minutiae of Socrates' life. Socrates explained this in the following speech to the jury who were about to condemn him to death:

"I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course". [3]

In this final act of his life Socrates was to find that his 'Divine Sign' did not oppose him. It was as if his lifelong guide and mentor was resigned to the inevitable; Socrates had to die as decreed both by fate and the jury. The hemlock goblet could not be avoided. The voice remained silent.

However the idea that all human beings have two independent elements did not remain silent. The theology proposed by Empedocles and refined by Socrates was to find many followers in the ancient Greek world and was to become a central tenant of the school of philosophy that was to become known as Stoicism.

Epictetus, the major Stoic philosopher, was quite fascinated by this duality. As with Socrates and Empedocles nothing remains of his original writings. However his pupil Arrian wrote down his teachings, recording them in two works; Discourses and the Encheiridian, or Manual. In these works it is clear that he had taken the evidence of Socrates' 'Divine Sign' and the old belief of human duality and created a cogent philosophy. He wrote:

"God has placed at every man's side a guardian, the Daemon of each man, who is charged to watch over him; a Daemon that cannot sleep, nor be deceived. To what greater and more watchful guardian could have been committed to us? So, when you have shut the doors, and made darkness in the house, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone. But God is there, and your Daemon is there".[4]

Here we see the ongoing idea that this other entity, the daemon, is more than simply another facet of human nature. It is an independent being that watches over its lower self. That it has an ongoing consciousness is stated by the phrase that it 'cannot sleep'. Indeed the implication is that the Daemon perceives even when the Eidolon sleeps.

This belief, however, was not unique to Epictetus or even the Stoics. According to the noted historian of the late classical and early Christian period, Robin Lane-Fox the Romans had an ancient but popular belief that each man had his own attendant 'spirit' that followed him throughout his life. This being, termed his genius, was born with him and as such was honoured, therefore, by each individual, on his birthday. [5]

For many of the early Christians the idea of such a duality of spirit was a dangerous heresy, particularly as it clearly had Pagan roots. In order to deal with this the early Church Fathers applied simple semantics. They took the word daemon and consistently applied it to designate it to a disincarnate spirit that has been spawned by the devil to tempt man away from the true God. Over time the letter 'a' was dropped and the word mutated into one we all know so well, demon. Job done.

Well not exactly. There was another group of Christians who found a good deal of theological justification for the daemon-eidolon duality. These were the little known, and quite intriguing, Gnostics.

According to the Gnostics the universe was under the influence of two conflicting forces; Light and Darkness. Human beings are in turn a reflection of this duality. Our soul is a spark that comes from the Light. It is therefore part of the positive side. However our bodies are made up of matter. Matter is part of the Darkness. As such there is this ongoing conflict within the human condition. Man is imprisoned in this body of darkness but a part of him retains memories of his divine origin. The part of man rooted in the darkness equates to the Eidolon. This being is made of matter and will cease to be when the body dies. However that part of him that retains the memory is the Daemon.

The central tenant of Gnosticism was that an eidolon had to reach a state of gnosis – literally 'knowledge' – and having done so they could achieve union with the daemon and in doing so move away from this corrupt world of matter. To do this they would need to spend many years being initiated into the secrets of Gnosticism.

However there are times when the Daemon chooses to make itself seen or heard by its Eidolon without initiation. The Eidolon in these circumstances will perceive the Daemon to be some form of guardian angel or spirit guide. Indeed Plato teaches

"We should think of the most authoritative part of the soul as the Guardian Spirit given by God which lifts us to our heavenly home"[6]

The Gnostic sages carried this belief forward in its entirety. Valentinus taught that a person receives gnosis from their Guardian Angel but that in reality that being is simply that person's own higher self[7]. This implies that the angels that communicate between the World of Light and The World of Darkness are in fact not independent beings at all; they are Daemons from this world. We are our own teachers!

This is all very interesting with regard to the history of religion and mysticism but it really has no relevance to 21st century psychology and neurology. Or has it?

The Evidence from Neurology

That human consciousness may be dual rather than unitary may fly in the face of common sense but for those who study the brain such an idea is not only possible but probable. A swift review of brain anatomy cannot but support such a proposition. The most immediate thing that strikes you when you observe a brain for the first time is that it is not, in fact, a brain at all. It is two, virtually identical brains, joined together by a mass known as the corpus callosum. Every structure in one side is mirrored in the other, with one, curious exception, the pineal gland. There are two of everything; two limbic systems, two temporal lobes two amygdalas, the list goes on. The singularity of the pineal gland was noted in ancient times and because of its unique position it has been thought of as the location of the soul.

Neurologists have long been puzzled by this. Why should the brain be structured in this way? Indeed the puzzle has deepened in that it has been shown that certain individuals continue as normal people even when one of the hemispheres is damaged or removed. Indeed in the last fifty years or so surgery has advanced to such an extent that the corpus callosum can be cut and in doing so the two hemispheres cease to have a line of communication. When this is done these patients literally have 'split brains'. They also end up with two independent centres of consciousness. The implication of this is both clear and mind-blowing; we have two independent beings sharing our perceptions.

It is generally the case that one side of the brain is dominant and one is passive. The dominant hemisphere (usually, but not always, the left) is rational, objective and unemotional. The non-dominant (right) is understood to be irrational, subjective and emotional. However this does not on its own imply two foci of consciousness, just simply two aspects of the same consciousness. The two elements are simply seen as aspects of a unitary consciousness with the left hemisphere being generally in control with the occasional eruption of emotion from the right. This is why in recent years there have been so many 'self help' books suggesting techniques by which people can attune to their intuitive right brain. But the reality is far more complex – and fascinating.

Usually the two hemispheres work in tandem with the left generating a constant stream of inner dialogue that gives us our sense of self. Meanwhile the right hemisphere is still actively involved in all cognitive processes, working away in the background. However, and here comes the surprise, the being known as 'I' or 'me' is generally completely unaware of what its silent partner is up to. Indeed for most of the time 'I' is completely unaware of its partner. Problems arise when the two fall out of phase. Suddenly 'I' senses 'us'. However it is much more disturbing than that. The dominant hemisphere perceives its non-dominant twin as an external presence, a being that is not self but other. To the experiencer this 'sensed presence' is not themselves at all but an outside ego-alien being.

Michael Persinger of the Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, has spent many years studying this peculiar psychological effect. He even has a term for this perception. He calls it the 'Visitor Experience'. Indeed he has been able to reproduce the sensation under laboratory conditions. Persinger considers that the experience shows a linear progression. At its weakest the subject just feels that they are not alone – that there is something else in the room that he or she cannot see. However at its strongest the subject perceives an objectively existing being of tangible reality, a being that has great emotional significance to him or her. For some this may be perceived as an angel or even a god.

As the intensity increases the manifestation may become even more immanent in the sensual world of the subject. Sensations such as weird buzzing sounds, tingling sensations and, occasionally, a huge energy release from within the body itself.

What is of significance for Persinger is that when measured using an encephalograph the brain activity of the subject is seen to focus in on a particular part of the brain, the temporal lobes. As the activity becomes more intense it spills over into the occipital lobes. When this happens there is a sudden externalisation of the sensation. This involves the 'sensed presence' manifesting itself as a visual being fully external to the subject. A common description is of a cowled figure with just a face and hand visible through the folds.

What is very interesting is that if the lower portion of the temporal lobes become activated at this time then long dormant memories may spontaneously enter the subject's mind. The 'being' will then communicate information that seems intensely personal. This may be interpreted as telepathy or omnipotent knowledge. However there is more. According to Persinger past-life memories can be evoked in a panoramic life re-run similar to those reported during the phenomenon known as the Near-Death Experience.

If this is the case then could it be that the other major element of the NDE experience – the 'Being In White' – is really an external projection of the experiencer's non-dominant consciousness? If so it would certainly explain how this being shows such intimate knowledge of the dying person's past life.

Could it be that this being really is an independent focus of consciousness that has shared the life of its alter-ego? Could the experiments of Persinger shown that the Daemon is a very real aspect of every human being's neurological make-up?

Cheating The Ferryman?

In my first book, Is There Life After Death, The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die I present evidence that that during the last few seconds of life we all split into the two entities I term the Daemon and the Eidolon. Up until this moment both entities have perceived themselves as a unitary being. The Daemon, suddenly discovering its true vocation, is aware that it is responsible for the experience called the past-life review. It begins the review whilst at the same time manifesting itself as an image perceived by its Eidolon as a figure. For some this will be seen as a classical 'Grim Reaper' figure whereas to others the Daemon may be seen as a relative, religious figure or even an animal. Anything that will fit to fill in the Eidolon's preconceptions of who will be there to welcome him or her into the next life. The Daemon then starts the past-life review using the memory stores of the temporal lobes. However to be a reported Near-Death Experience actual death does not take place. The subject lives to tell the tale. Many of these survivors describe how 'my life flashed before my eyes'. This may be because the Daemon, suddenly becoming aware that death will be avoided this time, metaphorically presses the 'fast forward' button and aborts the process.

What happens in a Real-Death Experience is that the Daemon starts the past-life review without the need to fast-forward. The dying Eidolon, in the last few seconds of its life, falls out of time and re-lives again its whole life in a minute by minute three dimensional recreation of a life that is indistinguishable from the real thing. However there is one major difference – this time the Daemon is not only self-aware but remembers what happened last time. In this way the Daemon reproduces exactly the role as described by The Gnostics, the Stoics and the Pagan sages. It becomes a guardian angel looking after the life of its lower self – exactly as described by Socrates.

Could it be that most of us are living our lives in a three dimensional illusion? Well it would help to explain certain ongoing mysteries. Precognition suddenly does not defy scientific knowledge because it is simply a memory. Déjà vu can be seen for what it is – a jump in the playback mechanism or simply a flashback. And what about those weird hunches, synchronicities and intuitions that seems to regularly enter our consciousness? Could they be just messages from our own higher self – our Daemon?

Anthony Peake lives near Liverpool in England. As well as writing two books he has also written many articles for magazines and journals in the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the UK. He is also regularly in demand as a lecturer and public speaker.

On July 25th 2009 he will be involved in a Platform event at The National Theatre in London. He will be discussing the time theories of J W Dunne.

For details on Anthony's work please check out his website at:

http://www.anthonypeake.com

Source: https://grahamhancock.com/peakea1/ 

Case 1:

A couple of years ago I was in our kitchen washing dishes. Just sort of staring out the window, zoning out, while washing dishes. Not thinking of anything in particular. All of a sudden a voice "popped" into my head, a "not me" voice, and said "Bonnie's going to walk in here and say 'thanks for going with me.'" About a minute later my wife walked into the kitchen and said those exact same words. 

I had gone to town (45 minutes away) and attended a meeting with her. She could've thanked me anytime between the time we left till we got home, but instead she chose to thank me less than a minute after that voice inside my head said she would. I don't think it was telepathy because I heard an actual voice inside my head, a voice that wasn't the normal voice in my head. 

It really was strange. It had never happened before, and hasn't happened again since, but that one time in my life it happened. It was an amazing mystical experience. So, I accept and believe that woman's story for what it was. I remember reading a story about a boy who was told to get down in his car as his mother was approaching an intersection, they had a crash, and his sliding down had saved his life. 

Case 2:

Okay, one more story then I promise I'll quit. I guess this would be classed as a synchronicity. A few years ago I was having quite a bit of dental work done. The dental tech who worked on my teeth and I were having a discussion and she asked me "are you afraid of a terrorist attack?" I replied to her, "Why worry?, God is in control." So, a few months later as I was driving back to the dentist I was going over that conversation in my head. 

Just when I got to the point where I was thinking "Why worry? God is in control," a silver car pulled in front of me and it had a bumper sticker on the back that said, "Why worry? God is in control!" It was so amazing, because right as I was thinking those words, a car with that exact same thought pulled in front of me. It drove down road in front of me for a couple of miles then turned off. 

I had never seen that bumper sticker before, and I haven't seen again since. What was so amazing about it was the timing. Right after I had that thought, it appeared. "Why worry? God is in control." I've had a few other "mystical experiences" but those two were the most profound, a voice telling me what my wife was fixing to say, and an amazing synchronicity.