Introduction

is about offering you insights that will make you more successful in your work towards unravelling madness – as a voice hearer, carer, family member or friend, researcher, policy maker, educator, therapist, applied scientist, communicator, journalist, activist or curious citizen of the world. 

The idea is to offer an understanding from a different perspective – to stimulate your thinking in a different way. Wherever possible I will:

• Try to contrast a ‘normal’ mind experience with an equivalent ‘hearing voices’/anomalous perception experience. Using natural mind experiences as the basis of comparison will help you relate and help get the message across that what we are dealing with is incredible natural minds distressed by a constant stream of invalid inputs
• Offer a logic path to describe the process from input, to ‘unusual belief’ or working truth to experience in the mind, to expressed behavior
• Indicate where I feel my logic is incomplete and I am using an intuitive explanation based on my experience. I will float a few crazy ideas in the hope that it sparks a brain storm

I am venturing into a field fraught with confusion, complexity and vested interests – my aim is to explain and simplify as much as I can. I am not suggesting it will be right first time – instead I am looking for expert collaborators who can build on existing knowledge and move it forward with a new paradigm.

In addition to the in person services described on the services page, the plan is to make this financially viable by offering content on a subscription basis. The experience has severely depleted my resources and to continue this work I have to pay the rent and eat, lol.
Content will be arranged around a big picture framework (as below) to help you pinpoint where it fits into the overall scheme of things and which content areas will be of most interest to you.

 

This interaction between an ‘other world’ and this world frames the interaction between “voices” and the hearer and voices become whatever the hearer is prepared to believe or hypothesizes they might be. This is the basis of the experience of madness, particularly if the input is auditory and verbal, which the majority are.

(A note: -  I am allowed a few crazy ideas to stimulate thinking, lol.  We have “lived with” this phenomenon for millennia and it is unlikely to change drastically overnight in terms of the effect on us – should we be asking if there is merit in working with researchers in parapsychology and dreams to explore any potential insights? Crazy idea? Maybe – we should at least be considering whether we are doing enough to study the phenomenon at the bigger picture level. See Article 3 Incredible Mind MADBeliefs MADExperience to hear how voices change tactics overnight – difficult to explain as brain behavior. We happily talk to voice hearer’s as if voices ARE external, yet research looks for problems in the brain – this does not make sense and happens because we cannot conceive of it as an external phenomenon)

Future insights

Future insight articles and videos will adopt this similar approach of outlining the mind process as usual in a way that all can relate to then showing how the ‘hearing voices’/anomalous perception experience disrupts those processes. There will be free ‘summary articles’ listed here with a commitment to adding detailed articles/videos in the subscription service within a short period. I plan short videos focused on particular topics every week – ideally in conjunction with researchers and experts in the field.

I plan ten detailed articles over the next nine months which will amount to writing a book aimed at those who live with and care for people who experience hallucinations. Working title: Someone You Know Hears Voices.

Discount annual subscriptions will be offered soon. You can provide your email here to be informed as we make progress.

 

 

Articles

To whet your appetite and convince you to share your email and interests here are the first few articles:

Article 1: A new paradigm brings new understanding: the components of anomalous perception

Objective: Since the experience is so difficult to describe, I compare it to the ordinary experience of you talking to a friend to the ‘hearing voices experience’ to make it easier for you to relate to the experience and to break it down into logical components based on how the mind functions. 

Summary: For you, talking to a friend is a safe, happy, predictable experience with most of the data/info processing happening automatically and so quickly you don’t even notice it – you simply enjoy! For a voice hearer, fixed values become variables, there are gaps in the info and it arrives in a confusing and most often threatening way that engages threat systems our mind/body won’t let us ignore. An ‘other world’ with strange qualities demands to be understood. Making sense of it leads to ‘unusual beliefs’ that confuse our thought flow. 

Article 2: The Phenomenology of Anomalous Perception

Objective: To show that we can build a breakthrough model for sharing and integrating research on the topic. The phenomenology is the focus of much research since it is the ‘origin’ of the experience – the anomalous input. These studies offer the opportunity to make great strides in our understanding. Clarity in how we experience it, the boundaries between input | perception | belief | experience are critical to making sense of it. 

Summary: The anomalous nature of the input keeps it in the aware mind. Varieties of input maintain a level of surprise that ensure we pay attention to it. The various modalities logically lead to different types of unusual belief. The big research opportunity lies in recognizing the factors common to all anomalous inputs – the mechanism by which they arrive without the traceability or provenance that we usually have with our environmental inputs.

Article 3: Incredible Mind, MAD beliefs, MAD Experience – the good, the bad and the ugly

Objective: To show that the experience is a result of our natural mind processes being engaged by an unusual input that mimics significance in our lives. Our mind naturally synthesizes a perception and tries to make sense of it in the context of our everyday world, a process which fails at many identifiable points.

Summary: Evolutionary principles show that our mind seeks to reliably project happy experiences – we choose from a variety of options we are able to engineer. We acclimatize to a certain level of poor environments/experiences. The mad experience is best explained as a natural mind response to unusual inputs that we seek to explain in ordinary real life contexts – the failure to find congruence with expectations/beliefs about self and context can be used to explain the ‘symptomatic’ behaviors we observe and the difficulty in changing them.

Please sign up to be informed on progress in adding content to the subscription service. We expect annual subscription rates to be comparable to a few articles from any of the research article aggregation and distribution sites – and presented in a more fun and practical way.