A promising approach to treating people who hear voices, also known as auditory hallucinations, is to get the patient or therapist to interact with the speaker
Somebody hears a voice, but nobody is speaking. It seems reasonable to assume that there is something going on in the head of this person that is similar to what is going on in the head of somebody actually hearing someone speak. The challenge is to explain why this is happening in the absence of a speaker.
One popular strategy is to explain it in terms of someones ordinary inner speech somehow becoming loud. This will explain why somebody has an auditory, and specifically verbal, experience in the absence of sound waves hitting their eardrum. However, it does not explain why so many cases of voice hearing are perceived to come from another speaker.
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