Medicine & Society Keynote Address: Dr. Tanya Luhrmann
Join us as we welcome Tanya Luhrmann, Ph.D. (Albert Ray Lang Professor in Anthropology, Anthropology Department, Stanford University) to campus to deliver the Medicine & Society keynote address titled "Voices".
How do we know what is real? Voices (auditory hallucinations) are experiences in which someone has a thought that they feel is not their thought but a “real” voice from outside. This work draws on data from extensive fieldwork and from hundreds of interviews conducted across multiple countries to examine the prevalence and variability of these experiences. Dr. Luhrmann will discuss what we know about the difference between the voices found in psychosis and in the general population, and the evidence that three factors (trait, practice, culture) facilitate voices in the general population. Most fundamentally, Dr. Luhrmann will argue that voices teach us something about consciousness more generally: that we have contradictory intuitions about our own thoughts which are elaborated or ignored by local culture, and that these intuitions facilitate this felt sense that a mental event has qualities of something real in the world.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department, with a courtesy appointment in Psychology. Her recent work has been on voices, visions, felt presence and other remarkable events in psychiatric illness and in religious experience. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She has written about psychiatry.
She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. In 2027 Norton will publish Voices.