Scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have demonstrated the possibility of creating auditory hallucinations using a robotic chair without the use of drugs. The research was published in the journal Psychological Medicine.
A few years ago, the authors of a new study conducted an experiment: They asked volunteers to sit in a chair and press a button. Then, after a short pause, a small finger-sized stick was gently pressed into their backs. After a few sessions, the volunteers began to feel as if someone was standing behind them. Scientists hypothesized that this reaction was due to a disconnect between the action (pressing the button) and the sensation experienced by the volunteers. In the new study, researchers used the same device to trigger auditory hallucinations in volunteers.
As in the first experiments, 48 people sitting in a chair pressed a button. This was again followed by a back tap, but this time the research team varied the delay between the button press and the tap.
In the new experiment, the researchers also added headphones that played soft white noise, and some recordings included random samples of the volunteers’ own voices or the voices of others. Each volunteer was asked whether they heard a sound coming from the headphones. The researchers found that when volunteers began to sense a presence behind them, they sometimes began to hear voices that weren’t there. Their brains created a sound that matched the “ghost” behind them. In addition, some volunteers, whose backs were immediately touched by the device, began to hear voices. However, this only happened when a recording of their own voice was played through the headphones.
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