The auditory cortex can fabricate sounds indistinguishable from real perception

Evidence

Hallucinations, either visual or auditory, can be indistinguishable from reality. One of the maladies that Oliver Sacks recounts in his fascinating book Musicophilia can be distracting to the point of despair: people quite suddenly hear music that isn’t there, and it doesn’t tend to go away. The sensation is nothing like the tune you can’t get out of your head. The music sounds completely real. The genre of the music heard is often not a match you would imagine for the patient, who may or may not be musically inclined. If, for whatever reason and through whatever mechanism, the auditory cortex decides to create and send phony data, there is apparently no way for our conscious minds to tell it is not real. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2288

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia and to the broader theme in this library of silent listening systems and hallucinated perception. — connects to: Auditory perception runs parallel bottom-up and top-down processes — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1321; Imagining extended auditory range opens perception of unheard frequencies; The default mode network may mediate perception of internally generated sound. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 2747
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 2288

Broader Connections

• Imagining extended auditory range opens perception of unheard frequencies #exemplifies (0.80)
• Auditory perception runs parallel bottom-up and top-down processes #expands (0.75) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1321