Inner speech
The brain normally tags our own inner voice as self-generated; when that tagging slips, thoughts can feel as if they come from outside.
Never tested separately
Clairaudience
Clairaudience is the claimed ability of hearing voices or sounds beyond ordinary hearing. It has never been tested as a distinct ability.
The other claimed abilities put to the same test: medium, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, psychometry, empathy, astral projection, healing and aura reading.
What people describe
Clairaudience, or "clear hearing", is described as hearing messages, voices, music or sounds that others cannot — sometimes externally, more often as a distinct inner voice that feels separate from ordinary thought.
How it entered the record
Voices that guide or warn appear throughout history: Socrates spoke of a daimonion that warned him against mistakes, and Joan of Arc said she was directed by the voices of saints. Spiritualist mediums from the nineteenth century onward described clairaudience as one of their main channels.
The experiment
None isolating it
How it was run
Same problem as clairsentience: scoring is by correctness, not by channel.
Sample
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Result
Untested as a distinct ability.
Auditory experience without an external source is well documented in ordinary psychology. A 2011 meta-analysis by Beavan, Read and Cartwright pooled 17 studies across nine countries and put lifetime prevalence in the general population at 13.2% — one person in eight, most of them with no mental illness at all. That is a real, replicated finding, and it is not the same claim as clairaudience: hearing a voice is common, and hearing one that knows something you could not is what would need testing.
The gap between those two is where this term lives. Roughly one in eight people will hear something with no external source at some point, so the experience needs no special explanation — it is ordinary enough to be near universal across cultures. What has never been tested is whether any of those voices carry information the listener had no way to obtain. Not once, in the whole literature, has that specific question been put to an experiment. The claim is not disproven; it has simply never been asked properly, while the underlying experience has been studied extensively and turns out to be normal.
Claim
Hearing voices or sounds beyond ordinary hearing
Word from
French clair "clear" + Latin audire "to hear"
Status
Never tested separately
Where the word comes from
Nineteenth century, alongside clairvoyance.
What psychology offers instead
Hypnagogic experiences
Hearing one's name called or voices while falling asleep or waking is common and harmless.
Auditory pareidolia
The brain finds words and voices in fans, running water and white noise.
How to test it fairly yourself
If messages contain information, write them down with the date before checking whether they prove true, and count every message. Distressing or commanding voices are a reason to talk to a doctor — hearing voices is common, and help is effective.