Hearing The Voice Podcasts

A public lecture by Professor Tanya Luhrmann on 'The Voice of God', recorded at Durham University on 16 February 2017 as part of the linked programme of events associated with the 'Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday' exhibition. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing the Voice, Durham University.

This lecture features Professor Corinne Saunders on 'Otherworldly Encounters: Voices and visions in the medieval period'. It was recorded on 18 February 2017, at a public symposium on 'Voices, Visions and Divine Inspiration' organised by Durham University's Hearing the Voice project. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing the Voice.

This podcast was recorded as part of a public symposium on 'Literary Minds' organised by Durham University's Hearing the Voice project. It features Professor Patricia Waugh on 'Experimenting with Voices: Virginia Woolf's fiction as a risky kind of life writing'. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing the Voice

This podcast explores visitors reactions to 'Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday' - an exhibition on voice-hearing produced by Hearing the Voice in collaboration with Durham's Palace Green Library. The exhibition runs from 5 November 2016 to 26 February 2017. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing the Voice.

Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday is a major exhibition on voice-hearing produced by Hearing the Voice and Durham University's Palace Green Library. During the summer of 2016, nine young people who hear voices took part in a series of arts workshops in Bradford, Leeds and Durham. With the support of Rai Waddingham (a voice-hearer and facilitator) and Mary Robson (Creative Facilitator, Hearing the Voice), they came together to share experiences, challenge stigma and create artwork for the exhibition that sends a positive message to other young voice-hearers and their families. In this podcast, the participants reflect on their contribution to the workshops and what they gained from the experience. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday.

'Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday' is a major exhibition on voice-hearing produced by Hearing the Voice and Durham's Palace Green Library. In this podcast, Dr Angela Woods, Emma Hamlett and Dr Victoria Patton provide an introduction to the exhibition and its main aims and themes. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday.

Professor Pat Waugh, Dr Peter Garratt and Dr Marco Bernini explore the links between voice-hearing and literary creativity. Includes a discussion of the representation of voice and voice-hearing in the literary work of Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and Samuel Beckett. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday

An exploration of the communities and collectives that can form around voice-hearing, with particular emphasis on the development of the hearing voices movement. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday.

Professor Corinne Saunders, Professor Chris Cook and Dr Hilary Powell explore voice-hearing and divine inspiration. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for 'Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday'.

Charles Fernyhough, Ben Alderson-Day, Peter Moseley and Sam Wilkinson explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying hearing voices and the link between voice-hearing and inner speech. Produced by Andrea Rangecroft for Hearing Voices: suffering, inspiration and the everyday.

Recorded on 7 July 2016 at a Hearing the Voice workshop on Hallucination and Prediction, Dr Ben Alderson-Day gives an introduction to the predictive processing framework for understanding hearing voices and other unusual experiences.

This podcast was recorded on 16 June 2016 and features Professor Chris Cook (Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University) on ‘Hearing Voices in the Christian Mystical Tradition’. Abstract: Christian mysticism embraces a diverse range of religious experiences. For William James, ineffability was one of the hallmarks of mystical experience and it has often been the case that such experiences have neither involved the hearing of a voice, nor have they been easily conveyed in words. Despite this, the literature is rich with examples of written accounts of mystical experience, and many such experiences are reported as having included the hearing of a voice. In this seminar, Chris considers a series of such examples, illustrating some of the different ways in which voices contribute significantly to, and interpret, mystical experience.

Dr Sam Warner: 'Visions, voices, dissociated parts and child sexual abuse: from living life in crisis to moving on to recovery', Joint Special Interest Group in Psychosis, 24 February 2016 In this talk, Sam Warner demonstrates how visions, voices and dissociated parts sometimes develop in response to the overwhelming trauma of child sexual abuse. She explores how splitting parts off in these ways helps people to mentally survive the trauma of abuse, but can also cause additional stress, which may undermine their recovery. This is particularly the case when services view visions, voices and dissociated parts as symptoms of mental disorder, rather than as meaningful and potentially helpful starting points for recovery. Drawing on her work with children and adults who hear voices, see visions and experience different identities, she demonstrates how victims of childhood sexual abuse can be supported to use their visions, voices and dissociated parts to understand abuse-trauma and to provide direction for recove

This podcast features a presentation by Dr Sam Wilkinson (Department of Philosophy, Durham University) on ‘Explanation and explanatory power in psychiatry: The case of voice-hearing’ (Thursday 11 February 2016, 5 pm – 7 pm) Abstract: What is it to provide an explanation of something? In this seminar, Sam will explore different accounts of what an explanation is, and present his own preferred account, which he calls interrogative pragmatism. Against the backdrop of this account of explanation, Sam will elaborate an account of what makes something not merely an explanation, but also a more powerful explanation than a potential competitor. In other words, he will give an account of explanatory power. Finally, Sam will apply this to psychiatry in general, and voice hearing in particular, and illustrate instances of some explanations being more powerful than others.

This podcast features a lecture by Professor Charles Fernyhough on 'The Voices in Our Heads'. It was recorded on Thursday 4 June 2015. Abstract: A dominant psychological model of voice-hearing holds that it involves a disturbance to the process by which inner speech—our ordinary internal dialogue—is attributed to the self. Accounting for the phenomenological richness and varied pragmatics of voice-hearing requires, however, an equally nuanced conception of the functional and structural heterogeneity of the ordinary voices in our heads. Professor Fernyhough reviews some key recent findings on voice-hearing and inner speech, and explores their implications for three main areas of enquiry: the paradox of the apparent ubiquity of inner speech, the value of reading some forms of voice-hearing as inner dialogue rather than as atypical communicative acts, and the dynamic interaction in voice-hearing of inner speech and memory.

This podcast features a presentation by Professor Patricia Waugh on 'Voices Becoming Characters: Insights from the Experimental Novel'. It was recorded on Thursday 7 May 2015 as part of the Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series. Abstract: From Defoe onwards, novelists have been fascinated by hearing the voice and, indeed, many novelists have written autobiographically about their own voice hearing experiences. Foregrounding the functional role and the nature of voice in narrative fiction, Patricia Waugh explores how experiment with voice, from Daniel Defoe to David Foster Wallace, has been a major source of the novel’s capacity to generate new insights into human existential and socio-cognitive capacities.

This podcast was recorded on Thursday 12 March 2015 as part of the Hearing the Voice Lecture Series. It features a presentation by Dr David Smailes (Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, Durham University) on ‘Tailoring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to Sub-types of Voice-hearing’. Abstract: Several meta-analyses have suggested that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) for psychosis has small to moderate effects on positive symptoms (e.g., auditory hallucinations and delusions). However, a recent meta-analysis reported that these effect sizes are substantially inflated because of methodological problems in many trials of CBT for psychosis. In this talk, Dr Smailes focuses on CBT for voice-hearing and suggests that one reason for its limited effectiveness is that current interventions tend to treat voice-hearing as a relatively homogenous experience, despite evidence that voice-hearing is highly heterogeneous. These heterogeneous experiences do, however, appear to cluster into a set of subtypes, and it

This podcast features a presentation by Dr Ben Alderson-Day on 'Voices, Agents, and Presences: Asking the “who” question of auditory verbal hallucinations’. It was recorded on Thursday 22 January 2015 as part of the 2015 Hearing the Voice Research Seminar series. Abstract: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) or ‘hearing voices’ are often described as being characterful or having their own persona. This, along with reports of voices that lack auditory characteristics but retain “presence”, has led some authors to argue that AVH may be primarily be experienced as social actors or agents, rather than simply hallucinated sounds. In this talk, Dr Alderson-Day reviews such claims and considers how existing cognitive theories of AVH may accommodate the presence of social or agent-like representations, focusing on inner speech, memory, and predictive processing accounts. He argues that the “social presence” of voices can be accommodated by existing models, but only via better recognition of how social interaction