Structural alterations in early auditory cortex in borderline personality disorder with auditory verbal hallucinations

Description

Yéléna Le Prieult, Marie-Luise Otte, Mike Schmitgen, and a wider team wrote this research paper, published in 2026. It scans the hearing cortex of women with borderline personality disorder who hear voices, and finds the brain's folding pattern altered exactly where sound is first processed.

Hearing voices is not unique to schizophrenia; it also strikes people with borderline personality disorder, where its brain basis is barely studied. The team compared twenty patients with a history of voices, twenty-seven without, and thirty healthy women on detailed brain scans. Measures covered the folding, thickness, and volume of frontotemporal speech regions. Only one difference stood out: the voice-hearing group showed reduced folding in the right transverse temporal gyrus, home of the early auditory cortex. The authors read this as a structural vulnerability that may bias the brain toward generating voices.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13526128