The Evolution of Hearing Voices - Daniel Smith

Hallucinations as an automatic signifier of mental illness is a surprisingly recent paradigm. Traditionally, hearing non-corporeal voices was viewed as a supernatural event, the realm of religious prophets, ecstatic poets, and inspired painters. In those circumstances, hearing voices was viewed through the lens of divine inspiration, indicative of an active relationship with the metaphysical.

Today, auditory hallucinations are often sensationalized into a non-normative pathology, a situation where the response to even a mildest case is often tinged with fear - of violence, of contagion, of impurity. In these conditions, the deep, spiritual significance of the event is devalued, the meaning erased.

Our guest today, the writer and scholar Daniel Smith, is here to talk about the ideas in his book – Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and The Borders of Sanity. The book is an exploration of the dual nature of hallucinations, heavily inspired by the Bicameral Mind Theory of Julian Jaynes. Centered, also, is Smith's own experience - while his father lived “terrorized by the thought of what might happen if he revealed his voices,” his grandfather consulted his for "picking horses at the track and beating retirees at gin rummy."

Our conversation with Mr. Smith runs the gamut. We explore non-normative conscious experience, moral choice, optimism vs. pessimism, and the prevalence of loneliness in the modern milieu, and the evolutionary role that auditory hallucinations might still play.

Audio-only version available at all usual podcast locations or here: https://anchor.fm/demystifying-science

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Music:
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Shilo Delay: https://soundcloud.com/laterisgone