So what is this really saying. Auditory hallucinations can range from primitive noises such as bangs, whistles, claps, screams, ticks, and others to speech and music .Commonly people who have auditory hallucinations hear voices which utter short comprehensible phrases. Sometimes the person may recognize the voice as one of a family member or deceased friend and sometimes it may be the voice of a stranger or even God. The voices or sounds can be thought to originate from anywhere. The walls, the ground, trees, a shoe are all possible origins of hallucinatory sounds.
Schizophrenics characteristically have auditory hallucinations.
Sometimes there is a running commentary and at other times there are whispers. Sometimes auditory hallucinations may take on the form of imperative statements asking the patient to kill someone or themselves. Ralph Hoffman at the Yale University medical school has proposed a theory that since the development of feeling which are not physically present happens in normal people all the time during dreams , that it is probably not just the presence of voices that cause create problems for schizophrenics, but that it is the conflict between the voices and the will of the schizophrenic patients that make the symptom so aversive. The sound is heard by us only when our auditory cortex receives the information from the ear and interpretes this, converting it into a form our brain perceives as a particular sound. When there is no external source of sound waves our ears do not normally register any sound to our brain and so we do not hear anything.