"I would have expected more brain activity in Wernicke's area, which is where you hear the usual assumption is that people are listening to thoughts during auditory hallucinations. Jerome Engel, a neurologist at the medical school of the University of California at Los Angeles. "Broca's area is a surprise, since that's where you make sounds, not where you hear them," said Dr. None of the men reported having the auditory hallucinations during the second test, which allowed a comparison with brain activity in the first test. In the first test, the men were trained to raise a finger to signal they were hearing voices so that the brain imaging could capture activity while they were hallucinating. The test was done on 12 men with schizophrenia who reported hearing voices, and was repeated an average of five months later, after a course of medication had reduced their symptoms, including the auditory hallucinations. This was the first study to use the method with patients while they were hearing voices, thus offering a picture of the parts of the brain most active during auditory hallucinations. ![]() The isotopes, swept along with the blood, quickly flow to the parts of the brain that are most active at that moment, lighting up those areas in X-ray images. The study used single photon emission computed tomography, an imaging technique that offers a snapshot of blood flow in the brain of a person who has been injected with a brew of short-lived radioactive isotopes. "It's one of the first times we've been able to localize a specific, focal area of the brain active during a cognitive process in a living person with schizophrenia." Richard Jed Wyatt, chief of the neuropsychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. McGuire and colleagues at King's College Hospital in London. The findings are reported in the current issue of Lancet, a medical journal published in Britain, by Dr. ![]() They found that the greatest neural activity during the auditory hallucinations was in Broca's area, the brain's speech center. ![]() The researchers used a brain scanning technique to study the cerebral blood flow in schizophrenic men while they were having auditory hallucinations and again later when the men were not hallucinating. The results support a leading psychological theory of auditory hallucinations, which proposes that when people with schizophrenia hear voices, they are unable to recognize them as their own thoughts, and so perceive them as words spoken by someone else. HEARING voices, the hallmark symptom of schizophrenia, occurs when there is a heightened activity in the same part of the brain people use when they speak or think words, new findings suggest.
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