October 18, 2023
"Some years ago, scientists in Switzerland found a way to make people hallucinate. They didn’t use LSD or sensory deprivation chambers."
"Instead, they sat people in a chair and asked them to push a button that, a fraction of a second later, caused a rod to gently press their back. After a few rounds, the volunteers got the creeping sense of someone behind them. Faced with a disconnect between their actions and their sensations, their minds conjured another explanation: a separate presence in the room. In a new study... researchers... found that volunteers were more likely to report hearing a voice when there was a lag between the push of the button and the rod’s touch than when there was no delay. The findings suggest that the neurological roots of hallucinations lie in how the brain processes contradictory signals from the environment, the researchers said."
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15 comments:
It works with verbal provocation, too. Beware the press, media, and steering engines.
It's amazing how you can fk with the human mind.
For example, Mitt Romney convinced Mitch McConnell that totally not a Fed Ray Epps was gonna burn his house down.
Poor Mitch has been Glitching ever since.
Better to have been probed gently by the Swiss than never to have been probed at all.
Yeah, I will call bullshit on this study.
This isn't surprising. The brain is built to look for patterns; it's our fundamental means of survival. We aren't the fastest, strongest, have the sharpest claws, etc., but we're very good and picking up when there's something prowling out in the tall grass, and knowing to get away. Unfortunately, that means that the brain will look for any patterns, even with very limited data.
I have terrible motion sickness and can vouch for this. Motion sickness is at root the brain's inability to process contradictory signals. When I am severely motion sick, I definitely hallucinate. It is horrible. I hate the motion sickness medicine, but I take it proactively because anything is better than being motion sick.
I heard the voice of my stepmother calling me a few days after she passed.
What I'm hearing these days resembles an earworm. There is a wrinkle, however, I believe. My impression is that an earworm is a few lines from a song playing over and over in your head, a song that you must've heard recently.
What if I told you I'm listening to the first lines of a song I haven't physically heard play in a long while. At least, I don't recall listening to it recently.
I'm hearing the first line of the Smashing Pumpkins "Bullet with Butterfly Wings": "The world is a vampire." and that's it.
Maybe this is connected to "free will" and that Petersonesk professor.
My opinion and I'm not a lawyer to qualify as an expert, there is no such thing as "free will" because someone with a will would not ask a lawyer to draft a will pro-bono.
That would just break the bounds of jurist prudence... or something. Highly irregular.
Where was I?
Oh yes, Free Will. The Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith... entanglement.
The World is indeed a Vampire.
My husband grew up sleeping w/a fan. White noise. I never used anything. When we got together we never used a fan b/c I needed to hear my kids at all times during the night. Now, we have our youngest living w/us w/boyfriend &baby. I love the fan, it hides all other sounds: except the imaginary voices if I don’t chide myself.
I’m an over thinker. I could be slightly paranoid to which I blame my paranoid schizophrenic brother for- I say a little paranoia was still left from him in my Mother’s womb when I was conceived. It’s a joke, people!!
As someone who used to have no fear of heights, and now experiences vertigo, this makes a lot of sense. But feeling like I'm moving sideways while standing still, perched on a narrow trail in the mountains, came as quite a shock to me a few years back as I'd merrily leapt along such trails before then.
I don’t much like this. People should be encouraged to develop and listen to their sixth sense. Back in the day I assisted my Aikido sensei presenting anti-rape classes (he told his students that if someone tried to rape them it would not be someone about their size and strength, but someone big and ugly like me). One of our basic drills was to have us assistants scattered around a blindfolded student. Bill would not at us and the designated attacker would begin moving towards the student. She would have to sense the assault and respond by facing the attacker in a defensive stance. And all our students learned how to sense attacks. As my sensei put it, if the first time a woman knows that she’s in danger is when a man claps his hand over her mouth, pulls her head back, puts a knife against her throat, and hisses “Scream and you’ll die!” in her ear, the situation has already become pretty fraught. Quite a bit better to sense danger and move towards safety.
This was big news 100 to 200 years ago, per early photography and the Gestalt psychologist's work on perception. For example, we routinely imagine motion where none exists. The brain fills in the time-based cause-and-effect sequence:
https://exploringyourmind.com/the-phi-phenomenon-the-optical-illusion-your-brain-creates/
Humans and all animals do a ton of internal processing of sensory inputs, and nerves use fuzzy electro-chemical processes too. This means all sorts of perceptual gremlins happen, and we are not unlike an old-fashioned tube radio or television.
No shit.
This reminds me of something I heard awhile back about the cause of "haunted house syndrome." Seems that non-lethal carbon monoxide poisoning can cause auditory and visual hallucinations and a feeling of dread.
Shocking that the brain has learned that the sensation of something invisible behind you brushing up against you for no obvious reason convinces you that there is something behind you talking to you for no obvious reason.
I can't imagine how this would be useful to humans over the last 200,000 years.
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