An inner voice

I’m sure you’ve heard (pun intended) about the “inner voice”; but today I’m going to allow myself to tell you something about another inner voice, which also (as always) is linked to the anomalous integration of sensory data and ultimately to #consciousness (gotcha!). And I’m going to do so by talking to you about a disease that some of you may know, which also affects a sensory organ and gives rise to a curious paradox: I’m going to start talking to you about otosclerosis.

We could very quickly define otosclerosis as an “arthrosis” of the chain of ossicles in the middle ear: yes, the famous hammer, anvil and stirrup. These tiny ossicles have a fundamental function: they are the transducers that transform the vibrations of the eardrum into waves inside the saccule of the inner ear, to be exact in a liquid called endolymph, through the so-called oval window, and that make the famous “snail” vibrate with a fundamental frequency according to these waves: a whole system that nature has designed to make us aware (note the importance of the word) of two important circumstances, namely, sound, but also our position in space. These waves then travel through the auditory pathway to the auditory center and allow us to hear, by integrating the information that reaches it to the auditory cortex, which as I think you know is located in the temporal area of ​​the brain (and this detail that seems to be of no importance is very important).

In some people, these little bones end up changing their shape, so that they stop performing their function: so the person has what we call non-central deafness, that is, they lose hearing ability (because they still have some) due to a failure in what we could call the sensor that collects data from the outside (sound waves), and it gives rise to hearing loss, as well as other symptoms such as peripheral vertigo, which is very annoying for people who suffer from it, because we must remember that the ear is not only the organ of hearing, but also of balance, or if you prefer, the organ of positioning ourselves in space. But in addition, this disease gives rise to a curious paradox, which I think will surprise you.

I don't know if you know that we hear in two ways: through what is called the air conduction and through the bone conduction: this double hearing is responsible for why when we hear our voice on a recording it sounds so strange to us: in fact, normally our voice is the one we hear "internally" together with the external voice, while those who listen to us speak can only hear the external voice (for this reason I have always admired people who can imitate others so perfectly despite the fact that they have double hearing). Well, the fact is that these patients, despite the fact that they don't hear well, normally use a very low volume of their voice, so much so that sometimes those of us who are supposed to hear well have to ask them to raise their voice, and this is precisely because unconsciously (this is where I wanted to get to) their vocal system adjusts the volume of their voice in relation to the volume they perceive directly: they "hear" themselves perfectly because they are using the bone conduction for hearing (remember that this is independent of the chain of ossicles), while they have a natural "mute button" on all outside noise: the result is that they automatically lower the volume of their voice.

And you may wonder (not without reason), what could this have to do with anomalous integrations? First of all I want you to remember that these people unconsciously regulate the volume of their voice: now we are going to carry out what we could call a “mental experiment” (it is only speculation): think for example of the case of a person who claims to have the ability to have certain “sensations” that others cannot: could it be that this increase in sensitivity is due to an alteration of some sensory organs? What if some senses always need to lose “external” sensitivity in order to gain “internal” sensitivity? In other words, a kind of sensory “mute” is necessary, and what reason would there be for this “external isolation”? If we analyze it from a neurological point of view, the brain (to be exact, the cerebral cortex, which until now is the only part of the central nervous system that we know is capable of shedding the light of “consciousness” on what surrounds us) would be constantly “integrating” the information it receives from not only the sense organs as such, but from the multiple sensors (temperature, pressure, chemical components, etc.) that are distributed throughout our economy (the way we health professionals call our body) and that are used to determine both the external and internal situation. This creates a kind of “background noise”, like the noise that accompanies us during the day and prevents us from hearing certain sounds that become more evident at night, when there is less activity and allows the brain to interpret and integrate those signals that are no longer diluted into a signal of greater intensity.

I don’t know if you have noticed that most of the time people who have a certain capacity, for example “precognitive”, are represented with their eyes covered, when they are not directly blind: is it a coincidence or does it have some relation with that need to “silence” what we could call “sensory noise” to allow certain signals to be integrated in an anomalous way by the integration pathways of perception? Would this fact support again that for the manifestation of Psi capacities one of the factors is the absence of sensory noise? If not, let's go to another characteristic that we could call "disturbing" that accompanies some phenomena in this case of sightings of UAPs, UFOs or FANIs depending on the nomenclature you like best: and it is the phenomenon of the so-called "Bell of silence", which also occurs in a not so frequent way in other cases of anomalous or paranormal events, where the witness claims that in an unusual way, both the noise, as well as the thermal sensations, or the wind, etc., stopped being so evident. If we analyze it carefully, we are faced with a "sensory silence". However, what is not very clear is whether this silence is the reason why we can "notice" the anomalous phenomenon or is the anomalous phenomenon itself that causes this situation: that is, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

I hope that these questions will make you think, because they also give us the opportunity to design various experimental or quasi-experimental models to test this hypothesis. By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to leave you with a link to a magazine on Transcommunication that I sometimes collaborate with and that I think may be of interest to you. I hope you liked this story and see you next time.

Leo Aitu #3