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Why You Hear Voices in Your White Noise Machine
If you've ever heard music, voices, or other sounds while trying to sleep with a white noise machine running, you're not losing your mind. Here's what's going on.
Even if it’s a word you don’t know—something in ancient Greek, for example—you’ll still recognize some letters and some sounds, and your mind will fill in the spaces in order to replicate a pattern you already know. Any app or machine you listen to that produces a color of noise, like white, brown, pink, green, or otherwise, is based on an algorithm or a code. For a while, I’d been calling these noises auditory hallucinations—which led to Reisman’s focus on psychological evaluations, and to Bauman’s quick refutation of the H-word.
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