Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: (1) cultural, social, and historical; (2) experiential; and (3) biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include (1) informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; (2) “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and (3) suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.

There has been no sustained sociological analysis of a near ubiquitous feature of psychological laboratory experimentation: the task. Yet the task is central in arranging the means by which phenomena are isolated and brought into the experimental scientist’s purview. As scientific objects, states such as mind wandering and daydreaming have been made visible in experiments that draw on a (sometimes) sharp distinction between what it means to be either “on task” or “off task”––which entails a long history of what it means to have a subject attend to her task, a central aspect of the psychology experiment since its foundation. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews with research participants in studies of so-called “mind wandering,” it becomes clear that task is deployed and understood in multiple ways: it is often hard to distinguish when a person is on task and when they are not; when participants reflect on their own internal states the boundedness that the concept relies upon is drawn sharply into question; and the complex spatio-temporal organization of experiences of both mind wandering and task disrupts the metaphorical structures that the scientific literature has baked into these terms. The term “operational pliability” allows us to understand how the pliability of the practice and concept of task is central to how task functions. Operational pliability offers a way of understanding how particular elements in scientific investigation are easily adaptable and at the same time are able to hold some kind of shape or form.

stood in his ivied tower, Alembic, crucible, all were there; When in came Nick to play him a trick, In guise of a damsel passing fair. Every one knows How the story goes: He took up the tongs and caught hold of his nose. 2 Richard Harris Barham was correct in his 1837 lay lampooning the legend of St Dunstan: the tale of the saint tweaking the devil's nose was indeed one which everyone knew. In fact, so famous was the tale that Barham felt it needed no further explanation. 3 Few in the nineteenth century, however, could have known of its origins, nor indeed have imagined its 1 I wish to thank Julia McConville, Ralph Norman and Mary Carruthers for their help in discussing various aspects of this essay. This research was funded by the Wellcome Trust

This article examines methods for identifying folklore in hagiography. Using hagiographical materials from eleventh and twelfth century England, it critiques the current trend of equating folklore motifs with oral transmission and argues in favour of a "performer-centred" understanding of folklore and hagiographical composition.

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