Mental Illness 2015; volume 7:6065 Musical hallucinations in reported having musical hallucinations.4 Notably the musical hallucinations tended to Correspondence: Robert G. Bota, UC Irvine schizophrenia be sudden in onset, familiar, and mixed instru- Health Neuropsychiatric Center, 101 The City mental and vocal, with most patients having a Drive South, Orange, CA 92868, USA. Jessica Galant-Swafford, Robert Bota soothing affective response to the music Tel.:+1.714.456.2056. Department of Psychiatry, University of (62%). Interestingly, when the musical halluci- E-mail:
[email protected] California, Irvine, CA, USA nations had more religious content, the patients claimed to have less volitional control Received for publication: 8 June 2015. Accepted for publication: 8 June 2015. Musical hallucinations (MH) are complex over them. This suggests that the presence or phenomena that are associated with hearing absence of religious content in the musical This work is licensed under a Creative Commons loss, brain disease (glioma, epilepsy, cere- hallucination may be useful for differentiating Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 License (CC BY- brovascular disease, encephalitis), and psychi- between musical imagery and musical halluci- NC 3.0). atric disorders such as major depressive disor- nations. ©Copyright J. Galant-Swafford and R. Bota, 2015 der, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia. MH Baba and Hamada suggest that musical hal- lucinations in patients with schizophrenia are Licensee PAGEPress, Italy are also commonly seen in people without Mental Illness 2015; 7:6065 phenomena that originate as memory repre- otorhinolaryngological, neurological, or mental doi:10.4081/mi.2015.6065 illness pathology.1 sentations or pseudo-hallucinations akin to In his novel Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks evoked musical imagery, which transition into true hallucinations during the progression of writes that his patients with musical halluci- cal content that were obsessive-compulsive in the disease.