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.
About Us
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.
Find Out More
Highlights from the Blog
Understanding Voices: Family and Friends Online Survey
As part of the next step for Understanding Voices, we’d like to invite the friends and family members of voice-hearers to complete our latest online survey.
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Literary Voices: Edinburgh International Book Festival, 18–20 August 2018
How do writers experience the voices of the characters they create? How do their readers? Do you hear different voices for different characters? Have you ever experienced those characters saying things beyond the pages of a book? Hearing the Voice is delighted to...
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