When people drink ayahuasca, the psychedelic brew that originates from the Amazon rainforest, they sometimes have visual hallucinations. They might see geometric patterns and fractals, or visions of animals and human-like beings. Often, when talking about psychedelic experiences, people are quick to relate what visual phenomena they saw, but they leave out what they might have heard, said David Dupuis, a research fellow at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris.
As an anthropologist, Dupuis has done field work on shamanic tourism, studying people who go from Europe to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies. “I began to observe that voices were quite important,” he said. Dupuis wondered why he rarely read about them in the literature which was “all about visions.”
In forthcoming published papers, Dupuis and colleagues surveyed people who have taken ayahuasca—some just a few times, and others more than 100 times. Nearly 80 percent said that they had experienced voice-hearing, and some continued to hear voices after the effects of the plant had worn off.
These hallucinated voices were important to Dupuis’ subjects— they conversed with the voices, took advice from them, and saw them as having separate identities and personalities. The Microdose talked to Dupuis about why hallucinated voices, and not just visions, demand more attention.
I often hear about dramatic visual encounters or hallucinations that people have when they take psychedelics. Is it actually typical to have visual hallucinations?
I followed around 100 participants— international travelers going to take ayahuasca. My database has been mainly built on doing interviews and observing those people, and also working with local leaders. In those testimonies, clearly visions were super important, but surprisingly it was not so common.
I had the idea that ayahuasca was a visionary plant, it’s a visionary experience. And I was surprised because for some people, the visions were very fragmented, and there was a learning process—people were having more clear visions only with more time.
The most common visions that I heard about in the interviews were psychological visions and autobiographical visions. People will see memories of a very precise sequence of one’s biography. Usually those visions are connected with strong emotions.
Of course there are the geometrical patterns; that was a very common testimony. And we know that those geometric patterns are very common. It seems that it’s more dependent on brain activity and some biological processes; those geometries were described by everybody. It didn’t seem to be depending on the social context of the use of ayahuasca. The local leaders were talking to me about them, the people who were international travelers, and also people from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, even Mexico, and so on.
Then, there is another stage of the visionary process: you can have more figurative images that are beginning to emerge: landscapes, architectures, city-like structures, and beings or agents. Those agents can be very diverse. For some people it can be passed-away people, ancestors, or just humanoid beings. Also more chimerical beings—mixing humans, plants, animals, or insects. Finally, more culturally-grounded beings, like angels and demons.
How often did you find voice hearing in these ayahuasca experiences? Do people just listen to the voices, or do they interact with them?
As a postdoc, I joined the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University, which is an interdisciplinary voice hearing research group. We are exploring voice-hearing experiences in different contexts. People hear voices in psychosis, but also there is non-clinical voice hearing, for instance, among spiritualists in the northeast of England.
I was responsible for the group of ayahuasca users, so I did a questionnaire with them, and then very deep interviews to explore the frequency and the phenomenology of the voice hearing experience. Then I compared it with groups like psychosis and spiritualist ones. The idea was to check in a quantitative way what I observed qualitatively on ethnographic fieldwork. What I observed is that voice hearing was super frequent; nearly 80% of ayahuasca users were hearing voices during the ayahuasca, and then also after ayahuasca.
There was a learning aspect to it too. It seemed that after 20 ceremonies, people developed the ability to distinguish voices, to engage with voices, and to limit or erase disturbing voices. They learned how to focus and cultivate the supportive teaching healing voices. It’s not just pharmacological automatism, based on the psychopharmacological property of ayahuasca. There is something like social learning around the voices based on ritual.
Are the auditory hallucinations connected to the visual, as the soundtrack of the visions? Or are they distinct?
Let’s say a complete visual experience you might have would be seeing a being, a mixed vegetal insect human being. That being begins to speak to you, asking questions. Usually it’s not fully auditory. It’s perceived and described as a kind of telepathy—a dialogue that doesn’t need sounds. Stuff speaks to you, but you don’t necessarily see a mouth moving, or you don’t necessarily hear a sound, but there is that voice-like experience, which is a bit like inner dialogue. You have the clear meta-cognitive feeling that this voice is external.
Sometimes you have those beings speaking directly to you, but you can also hear only voices, while having at the same time very fragmented or confused visions, It can be de-correlated.
Many people are auditory only. A lot of people were telling me, “Ayahuasca told me this, and ayahuasca told me that.” Before having my own experiences, I thought it was a metaphorical way to talk about insights that were popping up during ayahuasca sessions. Then, when I had my own experiences, I realized, “Wow, sometimes it is the feeling of clearly chatting with something.” An interesting aspect of those chats is, again, that quite clear feeling that it’s external, it’s not yourself speaking to yourself.
When I was interviewing other ayahuasca ceremony participants, I was listening to them, wondering, “Okay, but how do you know that it’s not your own voice? Your own thoughts?” And a lot of them were saying, ‘Well, it’s way smarter than me. I couldn’t have those ideas by myself.” Also, there is frequently the fact that this voice is way more empathetic and encompassing to you than you could be with yourself. A lot of people talked to me about being surprised by the content of the voice, and that there were jokes. This was something that came up very frequently among participants—the idea that ayahuasca is a joker.
What about distressing voices— did you come across any of those in your interviews?
There are distressing voices, just as you have distressing visions. Some people, they can hear very critical voices, voices pushing them to feel guilt, or make them feel disempowered in the face of their daily life situations. Some voices inspire despair, and usually those voices are combined by disturbing visions, like rats or demons.
What I observed is that there is a group focused on speech following ayahuasca ceremonies. During the speech group, the leaders were inviting every participant to share their experience of the former ceremony, and leaders would sometimes say, “Okay, this voice, it’s not good. It’s a demon. This voice is good, it’s the voice of ayahuasca.”
For instance, if a voice is inspiring fear or guilt in you, it’s not coming from the good side, and you don’t have to listen to that voice. On the other hand, if a voice is inspiring you, giving you solutions, insight, support, joy, hope— it’s good. What I also observed is that people seem to be able to learn to avoid and to limit the depressing voices.
Why do you think voice hearing has received so much less attention than visual experiences when people describe their psychedelic experiences?
These are different aspects of the experience. If you look at the discourse of Mestizo leaders in the Peruvian Amazon, where I work, they will evaluate mainly the purgative properties of ayahuasca. So it’s a lot about purging, vomiting, and at the end of the set of a ceremony, they would ask you, “Did you throw up? No? You will have to take ayahuasca again.”
There are also the emotional properties of ayahuasca. We know that some Indigenous groups of Peru use ayahuasca to produce fear, and to train themselves to confront fear.
They will train the young men to stay strong for the future when they might be confronted with real fear, in case of hunting or war.
In Europe, in the West, and the global north, it’s all about agency. I think this is underlying the importance of vision. Vision is probably the most important sense for our societies. Also visions are more spectacular, like when people describe seeing jaguars, serpents, luminous beings, and so on. It’s so striking that people memorize it, they write about it, it’s exciting.
Voices are more subtle. It can be a sentence, a conversation, or just the feeling of being addressed. Unless you ask specifically about them, even my own investigations, they tended to remain a bit in the background of the interview. Most questionnaires on the phenomenological include many questions about the visual experiences, but almost none about voices.
Maybe voices are a more challenging theoretical question than visions, because a vision can be interpreted as a symbolic image, it’s intuitive and easy. But a voice immediately implies communication, external agency. Who is speaking? It shifts from a perception to a relationship, and that is more complicated to deal with.
Some ayahuasca expert users develop the ability to keep hearing voices even without taking ayahuasca. People in our group talked about being able to keep that relationship alive, and that’s a very interesting aspect. One could think, okay, that’s too many hallucinogenic substances, the person just had a kind of psychotic breakdown.
But the phenomenology is not the same as voice hearing in psychosis; the voices are very supportive. We have begun to document those cultivation techniques that people use to keep that relationship alive, which by the way, is in line with a lot of ethnographies of traditional indigenous shamanism.
In those indigenous contexts, shamans will use substances during their shamanic training, and then they stop, and use tobacco to feed the spirits, and to cultivate the relationship with spirit. There is probably something like the frequent use of psychedelics plus social learning that can lead you to have a relationship with those perceived beings for a long time, even without needing to take psychedelics again.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length. (Editor’s note: We are taking a summer break and won’t be back with a new This Week in Psychedelics Friday post until August. We will continue publishing on Mondays with 5 Questions and keep an eye out for a fascinating new book excerpt too.)
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