Focused Review Article

Left temporal lobe structural and functional abnormality underlying auditory hallucinations

1
Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway
2
Division of Psychiatry, Haukeland University Hospital, Norway

In this article, we review recent findings from our laboratory that auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia are internally generated speech "mis-representations" lateralized to the left superior temporal gyrus and sulcus. Such experiences are, moreover, 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 behavioural, 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 or not during scanning. Structural imaging data have shown reduction of grey matter density and volume in the same areas in the temporal lobe. The behavioral and neuroimaging findings are moreover hypothesized to be related to glutamate hypofunction in schizophrenia. We propose a model for the understanding of auditory hallucinations that trace the origin of auditory hallucinations to uncontrolled neuronal firing 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, planum temporale

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

Received: 06 October 2008; Paper pending published: 08 January 2009; Accepted: 08 January 2009; Published online: 01 May 2009.

Edited by: 
Francisco Barceló, University of Illes Balears, Spain

Reviewed by: 
Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, Fujita Health University, Japan; Kyoto University, Graduate School of Medicine, Japan
Francisco Barceló, University of Illes Balears, Spain

Copyright: © 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

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