Blind man's hallucinations
NPR has an interesting audio and written feature on David Stewart, a blind man who also has Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition marked by incredibly vivid hallucinations. He first recognized that something wasn't quite right while listening to the book 1776 on tape. He suddenly "saw" one of the sailors described in the book in a "highly detailed, very real-like hallucination." The sailor winked at him. From NPR:
A surprisingly large percentage of people who lose sight start seeing things, says ophthalmologist Jonathan Trobe of the University of Michigan.Link to NPR, Link to 2004 Fortean Times article "Eye Spirits and Macular Degeneration" (via Mind Hacks)
"The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says Trobe. When visual cells in the brain stop getting information — which happens when your rods and cones stop working — the cells compensate, he explains. If there's no data coming in, they make up images. They hallucinate.
Trobe thinks maybe 10 percent of all people who go blind will have this experience. "It's very common," he says.
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Do cells get bored?
Hey, they also said the same exact thing last week about auditory hallucinations in the deaf! And yes, Patrick, apparently the cells do get bored. So they do their own thing to keep busy. Sort of like phantom pains for the deaf or blind, I guess. Well, sort of.
The book Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran has a great chapter on this. I think it's called Charles Bonnet syndrome. There are some people who lose vision in the bottom half of their sight, and in that "blind" area, they see incredibly vivid cartoons (!) dancing randomly around.
As far as visual diseases, that one sounds like it wouldn't be all bad.
I heard this driving home last week. It was a wonderful story even if I'm not a fan of how Robert Krulwich puts his stories together. It could have been a rich story and was instead edited to resemble a commercial. Slow down Robert.
That said, I immediately thought of a SF story that could be told where the person's brain is so in tune with the other senses they it's able to "hallucinate" the world around them, effectively making them alternately sighted.
@Xadrian ... yeah, it's called Daredevil.
@Xadrian
http://www.wie.org/j35/zoltan.asp
I stumbled upon this article last year; apparently this guy did exactly that. Pretty interesting stuff.
@xadrian, I understand Krulwich is an acquired taste and, although his editing style was jarring and I was not sold at first, I have grown to love his stories. I perk up when I hear the overlapping dialogue and occasional interview bloopers woven into something wholly different from any other NPR news story.
Related to this piece on hallucinations and blindness, he recently did a story on deafness and auditory hallucination, "Hearing Things: When Sounds Come Unbidden"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17818400
If you find that you like Krulwich's delivery and style in these smaller news pieces, he and Jad Abumrad do a wonderful show on WNYC called Radio Lab that is also available as a podcast.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
I must be hallucinating myself. I could swear, odd as it sounds, that I was just reading a post about "inhaling pig brains." I posted a comment but it said that no such page exists.
And now I'll be darned if I can find any such post.
Here's what I typed in my hallucinogenic state - in the interests of science:
Too bad it isn't as easy to make things better - say a similar aerosol concept that stimulated the brain in positive ways to help Alzheimers patients.
Paul - originalfaith.com
@ Paul - I believe the story may have been posted here before and was thus "pulled". But I could be wrong.
If I'm reading, am tired, and close my eyes for a few seconds, but don't fall asleep, sometimes I'll "see" the pages in front of me, but the words won't match what I've been reading--in fact, they don't make sense at all; the sentences are grammatically correct, but they aren't really telling a story. I'm not consciously trying to imagine them, either. I just assumed that it was some sort of hypnagogic state.
The Insult by Rupert Thomson is a wonderful whodunnit based around a character with Charles Bonnet syndrome.
This sounds a bit like what happens to me when I am in bed trying to fall asleep -- I start to "hear" voices in my head, little snatches of conversations. It is quite relaxing. I guess cells do get bored!
@Xadrian: I actually read a short sci-fi story in some post-chemical-war setting, I'm almost certain the title was "The Giftie Gie Us" (apparently a Robert Burns quote) where one character has half his face deformed due to a leak in his gas mask, and another character who can only see through the eyes of other people if they are close enough. I thought it was a great story, but I was considerably younger and thought most sci-fi stories were pretty cool.
Do they worry that they are going crazy? Or that they will stop 'seeing' those things, however imaginary it now is, because it must be so tempting to feel like you are watching something when you couldn't anymore.
"Hallucination" seems like an unnecessarily pejorative word for this experience ... which may very well involve the same visualizing faculties involved in dreaming ... or, for that matter, in visualizing the "real" outside world (all of which our brains create from sense data!)
Since there's no danger involved (apart from possible superstitious abreactions), why not enjoy such experiences rather than get all uptight about them?
"Hallucination" seems like an unnecessarily pejorative word...
You need a better acid dealer if you think that hallucination is pejorative.
Damn Interesting has some information on the topic as well.
Is it not normal to see almost everything you read? I stop seeing the page after about a minute, and it's like watching a movie - till someone disturbs me an hour or two later. I would not read nearly as much, if I couldn't "see" the story.