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Focused Review ARTICLE

Left temporal lobe structural and functional abnormality underlying auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia

Kenneth Hugdahl^1,2*, Else-Marie Løberg^1,2 and Merethe Nygård¹

Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Division of Psychiatry, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway

In this article, we have reviewed recent findings from our laboratory, originally presented in Hugdahl et al. (2008) . These findings reveal that auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia should best be conceptualized as internally generated speech mis-representations lateralized to the left superior temporal gyrus and sulcus, not cognitively suppressed due to enhanced attention to the ‘voices’ and failure of fronto-parietal executive control functions. An overview of diagnostic questionnaires for scoring of symptoms is presented together with a review of behavioral, structural, and functional MRI data. Functional imaging data have either shown increased or decreased activation depending on whether patients have been presented an external stimulus during scanning. Structural imaging data have shown reduction of grey matter density and volume in the same areas in the temporal lobe. We have proposed a model for the understanding of auditory hallucinations that trace the origin of auditory hallucinations to neuronal abnormality in the speech areas in the left temporal lobe, which is not suppressed by volitional cognitive control processes, due to dysfunctional fronto-parietal executive cortical networks.

Keywords:

auditory hallucinations, schizophrenia, positive symptoms, dichotic listening, fMRI

Citation:

Hugdahl K, Løberg E-M and Nygård M (2009). Left temporal lobe structural and functional abnormality underlying auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. Front. Neurosci. 3:1. doi:10.3389/neuro.01.001.2009

Received:

06 October 2008;

Paper pending published:

05 November 2008;

Accepted:

08 January 2009;

Published online:

01 May 2009.

Edited by:

Francisco Barceló, University of Illes Balears, Spain

Reviewed by:

Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, Kyoto University, Japan; Fujita Health University, Japan
Francisco Barcelo, University of Illes Balears, Spain

© 2009 Hugdahl, Løberg and Nygård. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Kenneth Hugdahl, Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, P.O. Box 7807, N-5020 Bergen, Norway, Hugdahl@psybp.uib.no