Auditory verbal hallucinations, the "voices in your head" that schizophrenics often hear, are usually male. The reason is that female voices are harder for the brain to spontaneously produce, report University of Sheffield psychiatrists in the journal NeuroImage. Dr. Michael Hunter and his colleagues came to that explanation by scanning the brains of a dozen males listening to male and female voices. The female voices lit up the brain's audio cortex where sounds are "read" and analyzed, but the male voices activated a very different region. From the University of Sheffield Media Centre:
"When men hear a male voice the part of the brain that processes the information is towards the back of the brain and is colloquially known as the `mind´s eye´," (Hunter says.) This is the part of the brain where people compare their experiences to themselves, so the man is comparing his own voice to the new voice to determine gender….
The reason (hallucinatory) voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find it much harder to create a false female voice accurately than a false male voice.
"This research could also explain why female voices are considered to be clearer then male voices. This could be linked to the fact that female voices are interpreted in the auditory part of the brain, and are therefore more easily decoded."
