Hearing Voices: A Call More Common Than Believed

In the critical and popular hit “Field of Dreams,” a baseball fan played by Kevin Costner repeatedly hears a voice talking to him in his cornfield at night. It’s loud. It’s direct. And very spooky.

Costner is a little freaked out, but he’s intrigued--enough to test the voice’s advice. It leads him on a grand adventure that culminates in his finally forgiving his deceased father for a long-held grudge, and saving the family farm from foreclosure.

“Field of Dreams” has been hailed by critics as a glorious fantasy, a momentary escape into make-believe that proved to be just the box-office ticket this spring.

More Admit to Privately

It’s also kindled interest in the ages-old phenomenon of “hearing voices”--an experience therapists say more people will admit to privately than in public.

Even W. P. Kinsella, author of the novel “Shoeless Joe” on which “Field of Dreams” is based, thinks his story is an utter fabrication. He’s especially irritated that some of his fans think he must hear voices himself to have produced such a moving depiction of the way the experience reportedly occurs.

“I’ve had some annoying calls from people who confuse me with the person in the story,” Kinsella said by phone from his home in White Rock, British Columbia. “I don’t believe in the supernatural in any form at all. I’m strictly a storyteller. I know how to manipulate people’s emotions. I certainly don’t believe in the things I write about. . . . There are no gods. There is no magic. I may be a wizard only because it takes a wizard to know there are none.”

Though they debate about wizards and magic, psychologists and psychiatrists typically acknowledge that significant numbers of people do have what they call auditory hallucinations, or “outer” voices.

By contrast, inner voices are most frequently reported--and may be called by other names: conscience, intuition, hunches or gut feelings. Outer voices are heard as if coming from outside the person, just as if somebody else were standing nearby and talking. Only when the hearer turns around to look for the speaker, nobody’s there.

Judy Rosenberg, 29, a court reporter who lives in Anaheim Hills, has heard an outer voice call her name. “I’ll say, ‘What? What?’ and turn around and nobody’s there,” Rosenberg said. “The outer voice is very scary to me. But the inner voice . . . any time I’ve ever listened to it, it’s never done me wrong. It’s strange. When I was really young, a little girl, this voice--I thought it was myself talking to myself. It doesn’t sound like another person. . . .

Voice’s Opinion

“I’ll be looking for something and it will tell me where to find it. Any time I need it, it’s there. I don’t always want it though. I’m now dating a guy who’s getting serious and wants to get married. This voice is telling me, ‘Don’t do it.’ It’s been telling me that since I met the guy. I’m going, ‘Nah,’ like I’m not listening. If I’d just listen and pay attention, I’d be better off.”

Psychologist Julian Jaynes, a visiting fellow at Princeton University, suspects that as many as one-third of the U.S. population may have heard an outer voice during childhood or at another time in their lives.

Jaynes, the author of the popular and controversial “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” has written on the outer voice phenomenon, noting that it exists in varying percentages in every population in the world where it’s been studied.

Hearing outer voices is reported most widely by schizophrenics, he observed. But his research shows that the experience also occurs in significant numbers of “normal” individuals.

Jaynes admits that he has heard a distinct outer voice on a couple of occasions. One time, “I was trying to puzzle out the mind-body problem (the influence of the mind on the body and vice versa) and it really was frustrating,” he recalled. “I heard a voice say, very distinctly, ‘Include the knower in the known.’ It was so clear, I had to go outside the apartment to see if somebody was there.”

Only trouble was, he didn’t find the voice’s tip particularly useful: “It’s not something I agree with, though I thought about it a great deal.”

Controlled Study

When Jaynes and his assistants conducted a “carefully controlled” study of Princeton students about a year and a half ago, they found that “fully one third of the students have heard (outer) voices at some time during their lives.”

As for why the phenomenon occurs, Jaynes doesn’t claim to have the definitive answer to what he considers a profoundly important and mysterious phenomenon. He speculates that auditory hallucinations were once “the basis of a mentality different than the one we have now. There is evidence suggesting that this ability to hallucinate evolved along with the evolution of language”--sometime between 50,000 and 10,000 BC.

Non-academics also report that the phenomenon may be more popular than is recognized.

“I do have people in my church who say they have heard (outer, external) voices and who give high importance to it,” said George Regas, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. “You do not quickly discount it. I think the world of the spirit is a world of mystery. I think we are more and more accepting the fact that the spiritual world is a world where miraculous things do happen.”

Regas does not hear an outer voice. But he tries “to be still for long periods of time and let that (inner voice) speak to me. That kind of inner voice is a very important part of my own journey.”

Heart of Experience

Rabbi/psychotherapist Ted Falcon also listens to an inner voice and does not discount reports of healthy people claiming to hear outer ones.

“At the heart of all religious tradition is the experience of revelation that comes through an individual. It’s experienced as an inner voice, outer voice, an image, symbol, some kind of a call,” said Tarzana-based Falcon, founder of Makom Ohr Shalom, a synagogue for Jewish meditation that regularly draws about 300 participants to Friday evening services.

A prominent Jewish businessman recalled hearing a voice and receiving what he terms a “revelation” during a trip to Israel in which he visited what are assumed to be the tombs of several Old Testament figures.

“The question I had . . . was . . . did these people really live, were these real stories or not,” said the man, who was willing to be interviewed on the condition that his name be withheld. “At the tomb of Rachel, I put my forehead to the tomb and received what you would call revelation. There was an understanding, directly to me that ‘these people did live in these valleys. The stories you heard about them are more or less true.’ A higher voice was speaking to me, saying, ‘They are your ancestors.’ I absolutely knew this was truth. My whole body understood it. . . .”

But another time, the man said, he was at a retreat in the desert, in a deep meditation, when he heard two distinct voices--sounds that appeared to be coming from outside himself: “I picked up a conversation between two men. It was like picking up someone else’s conversation on a car phone and listening. It was mundane, hearing these two, normal voices talking. I decided I really didn’t want to hear it. It was too weird for me. I shut it off.”

According to brain-mind researcher Willis Harmon, many people hear voices of both the inner and outer persuasion but few are willing to admit it to anyone but their closest friends.

“It’s just one of the things we don’t talk about,” said the president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Sausalito. But Harmon, who is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, doesn’t mind revealing that he has heard both an inner voice and an outer voice on occasion and that he knows many others who hear voices as well.

“I’ve talked to businessmen, scientists, educators, well-educated professional people and not only is it reasonably common, it’s cherished. It’s invited,” said the author of the book “Global Mind Change.”

Strong Awareness

Call it an outer voice, an auditory hallucination, or an awareness so strong you’re certain you heard it speak to you. How do you tell if it’s the benign, perhaps beneficial variety, or a symptom of mental illness?

“I don’t think (people hearing outer voices) are always psychotic,” offered Encino-based psychiatrist Dr. Hyla Cass, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine.

“I would look at what their lives look like, their social relationships, their family backgrounds and their belief systems.

“Did God speak to the prophets? We don’t know. The fact is that we do have sub-personalities, or different states of mind that can be heard as voices.”

Psychiatrist/attorney Dr. Ronald Markman, who occasionally testifies on the sanity of voice-hearing individuals in criminal cases, cautions that the hearing of outer voices is “something to be concerned about, something to be taken seriously.” Markman subscribes to the theory that outer voices are part of an individual’s psyche from which he or she has dissociated.

“(Certain information) may be unacceptable for the body to deal with internally and so the psyche throws it out that way,” explained Markman.

Criminals sometimes claim a voice they heard instructed them to commit a crime, and it’s Markman’s job to determine if they’re telling the truth and if they were sane at the time they committed the crimes. His experience has been that some criminals readily lie about hearing voices in hopes of improving their defenses.

“I meticulously have to ask them where the voices are coming from,” to which “the best answer is ‘I don’t know,’ ” said the author of the recently published “Alone with the Devil, Famous Cases of a Courtroom Psychiatrist.”

“Criminals often trip themselves up by making the messages too specific. The real messages are usually global and not very specific.”

Dr. Marvin Gillick, a specialist in child psychiatry and forensic psychiatry and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, observes that hallucinations and imaginary companions are often reported by non-criminal types, particularly children.

“It’s a way of protecting against feelings of abandonment and rejection. It’s them hearing their own consciences, but the children externalize it,” he said.

Yet another theory on outer and inner voices comes from former Portland advertising agency owner Lee Coit, author of the self-published book, “Listening: How to Increase Awareness of Your Inner Guide.”

Coit thinks that voices offering beneficial guidance are a part of the person, but come from a part that is not contained in the body.

“My basic core belief is that we all have a connection to ‘eternal knowing’ and ‘universal mind’ and that we can access it individually and it’s well worth doing,” he said, adding that though his book espouses no particular religious faith, he has received letters from Catholic priests, Buddhist monks and others commenting on the effectiveness of his listening techniques.

Coit says he hears a wise inner voice guiding him “almost continually” and that it directed him to sell his mid-sized ad agency in the late ‘70s and later to open Las Brisas, a retreat in Wildomar, Calif.

On a few occasions, however, he has heard an outer voice as well: “It’s a startling experience, really. . . . It’s not threatening . . . but it’s not the way I think we get most of our guidance. Most of our guidance comes internally. (Continually hearing an outer voice) would be like using exclamation points all the time.”

Coit sometimes tells lecture audiences how, after his divorce, he set out for Europe. He had hoped to make the acquaintance, along the way, of someone with whom he could travel. But his daughter, attending college in Paris, asked him if she could come along instead.

Coit says that he really didn’t want to take her, figuring she would “cramp my style.” But an inner voice advised him, clearly, that his daughter was supposed to accompany him.

“After I’d been with my daughter a while, she told me she’d been very depressed and considered suicide,” he remembered. “(At the end of the trip) I put her on the train and she said she felt better. When I walked out of the depot, I heard my inner voice saying, ‘Now which (travel partner) would you choose?’ ”

Coit, who has discussed the ways in which voices are heard with hundreds of his readers, said he enjoyed “Field of Dreams” and found it to be such an accurate portrayal of the voices phenomenon that he presumed the story’s creator was intimately familiar with the experience.

And though “Shoeless Joe” author Kinsella claims to be a complete non-believer, his wife suggests he is hardly unknowing.

‘His views are that it’s all pretty silly,” Ann Knight said, cheerfully.

“But he lives with me and I hear (inner) voices. He has said he based Annie (the Costner character’s wife) on me.”