(Nov 11, 2018 02:43 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: I love caving and I’ve shown several people the Spelunker’s illusion. If your mind can do that within a few minutes, I’d hate to see what it’s capable of after a significant amount of time. Do you remember those isolation experiments?
During my childhood I'd see hallucinations in the darkness of my room (ghosts, etc). But as I gradually acquired a more skeptical mindset about supernatural affairs they stopped (apparently a more critical stance made me less receptive). In later years, however, I would experience the hypnagogia phenomena of sleep paralysis states. Don't really consider that as counting though, since the waking state is still half-disabled along with the partial amnesia of dreams lingering faintly.
Those sensory deprivation tanks that John C Lily started are probably quite the thing for testing just how well any intentionally "vigilant" stance can hold-up to lack of external input from even the skin touching against clothes, etc.
Not sure I've ever encountered the distinct types of
form constants which researchers make hay over. Though they'd rarely apply to non-migraine or non-drug influences via simply closing the eyes in trying to engender their occurrence, anyway. I tend more toward perceiving mutable, blurry blobs which suddenly acquire sharp details as objects and surroundings should I be in bed and my initially causal interest collapses into sleep.
I'd read about "parallel world" hallucinations of people under the influence of whatever exotic drugs, as well directly as from people whose reputations didn't encourage much reason to believe them fully. But I have to admit it was more striking coming from a relative I knew wasn't prone to exaggerating. While recovering from heart surgery and flooded with medication, he reported that he was switching back and forth between two utterly different worlds or external environments. With his eyes open he'd be in the hospital room; but upon closing them in a sustained manner he found himself overlooking a swampland occupied by aquatic reptiles, with flying insects annoying him. No matter how many times he repeatedly opened and closed his eyes, the same "other place" would still be there, in progress.
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Brain Metrics: "
For example, there is Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which [Oliver] Sacks describes in his opening chapter. The brain's intelligent guesswork about the outside world is normally informed by a stream of activity from the sense organs. What happens if you cut off that stream of incoming information? In some cases, the brain keeps on ‘making up a story' - except now, it has no information to go on, so the percepts that are produced bear no relation to reality. For example, diseases of the eye can deprive someone of the visual input their brain has been used to receiving. If part of the retina is damaged, this can leave a blind patch called a ‘scotoma', and people with a scotoma can sometimes have vivid hallucinations in just their blind patch.
Charles Bonnet type hallucinations can also occur if someone goes completely blind. These hallucinations can be highly ornate - for example little ‘lilliputian' people are sometimes seen, often in very colorful and ornate clothing. Some people describe these hallucinations as being like a movie. For most people, however, Charles Bonnet syndrome involves simpler hallucinations - shapes, colours and patterns. The patterns in the scotoma can ‘scintillate', giving the impression of constant movement.
Just because the retina is damaged doesn't imply that the visual parts of the brain are damaged too - this isn't necessary for hallucination. Charles Bonnet syndrome reflects the normal activity of a brain forced to guess in the absence of information - and people with Charles Bonnet are often well aware that their hallucinations aren't real, even if they seem very solid and detailed. Interestingly, some people with disrupted sensory input experience hallucinations and some do not - it isn't clear why.
Does this mean that you could hallucinate too if you were deprived of sensory input? Yes - though as with Charles Bonnet syndrome, it seems to vary from person to person. "
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Nov 11, 2018 02:43 PM
