Auditory verbal hallucinations across the wellness spectrum: Leveraging Human Neuroscience to Fathom the Unfathomable

I will define auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), discuss who has them, and describe our efforts to study them using human neuroscience methods. More specifically, I will describe their phenomenological similarities across various groups that are both help seeking (psychiatric and neurological patients) and not help seeking (people without a psychiatric and neurological diagnosis) and explore several conceptual models of AVH and our efforts to use EEG methods to study one of the dominant models. I will then link this conceptual model to a well-described neural mechanism that allows all animals to distinguish between self-generated internal thoughts and external auditory voices.