What Happens In The Brain of A Schizophrenic

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/201106/hearing-voices-what-s-happening-in-the-brain-schizophrenics

In the article “Hearing Voices: What’s Happening In The Brain of Schizophrenics” written for Psychology Today, Gary L. Wenk explains how this disorder truly works in the brain of an individual suffering with it. Wenk begins his article by explaining how the body senses work together with the brain, sending signals when needed, he explains that it is not possible for an individual to tickle themselves because their body is sending signals to their brain, letting the brain know where their fingers are going, and what they plan on doing, so the individual would not be surprised by the action. But if someone else where to tickle them, it would come as a shock causing them to laugh and jerk their body, because the brain is not receiving signals informing the brain/individual of what is going to happen. Wenk compares this process to speech and explains how an individual has the ability to produce speech and hear what they are saying, having the power to recognize their own voice. Those who suffer from Schizophrenia may not have this ability to identify their own voice, their brains generate words in the mind but does not recognize these words as their own, causing them to become an auditory hallucination.  Scientists in the Netherlands produced studies and investigated the chain of events in the brain that cause these auditory hallucinations in individuals suffering from the disorder. Majority of our hearing is processed in the temporal lobes of the brain, and during auditory hallucinations certain regions of the left temporal lobe have been proven to be more active.  These individuals that suffer from Schizophrenia, or other disorders that cause this type of hallucination, do not have the ability to make the connection that they are hearing their own voice during a hallucination, they believe that they are hearing someone else speaking to them. Their brain does not have the ability to make connections with what it is experiencing, they believe they are experiencing a “real” auditory experience.  Thus, if one doesn’t expect to hear their own voice, they will assume the voice must belong to someone else.  Wenk concluded that the brain signals originated in the speech-generating section of the brain, also known as Broca’s Area, were not able to reach the auditory processing region of the brain, also known as Werneck’s Area, letting this section of the brain know that the thought or ‘voice’ the individual is hearing was self-generated and not someone else speaking to them. This was discovered to be caused by an abnormality in the fiber bundle that connects the areas together. 

I found this article relevant to the functions and areas of the brain we learned in class, mainly focusing on Broca’s and Werneck’s Areas, because Wenk explain how the process of producing speech and hearing are not functioning properly and sending the signals the brain needs to adequately process the information it is receiving. Although I did enjoy this article, I wish Wenk went into more detail about these functions and are of the brain, which would have explained them in a better/clearer way for his readers.  

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