A patient describes hearing something with no external source. Before revealing the answer, decide what distinguishes a true auditory hallucination from a pseudohallucination.

Ask about the perceptual quality and location of the experience: does it have the full force and external quality of a real sound, or is it experienced more as an inner, 'as-if' phenomenon, located in inner subjective space rather than the external world? A true auditory hallucination is experienced with full perceptual force, as coming from outside the head or at least with the quality of a real sound, occurring without conscious effort. A pseudohallucination lacks that full perceptual force and external quality — it is recognised, at some level, as an inner experience rather than a genuine external perception, even though it is vivid and involuntary rather than simply imagined at will.