Hallucinations in the sane - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Hallucination

A hallucination, in the broadest sense of the word, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid,...

may occur in a person in a state of good mental and physical health, even in the apparent absence of a transient trigger factor such as fatigue, intoxication or sensory deprivation

Sensory deprivation

Sensory deprivation or perceptual isolation is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as blindfolds or hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing respectively, while more complex devices can also cut off the sense of smell, touch,...

.

It is not widely recognized that hallucinatory experiences are not merely the prerogative of those suffering from mental illness

Mental illness

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...

, or normal people in abnormal states, but that they occur spontaneously in a significant proportion of the normal population, when in good health and not undergoing particular stress

Stress (biology)

Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...

or other abnormal circumstance.

The evidence for this statement has been accumulating for more than a century. Studies of hallucinatory experience in the sane go back to 1886 and the early work of the Society for Psychical Research

Society for Psychical Research

The Society for Psychical Research is a non-profit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand "events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and to "examine allegedly paranormal phenomena...

, which suggested approximately 10% of the population had experienced at least one hallucinatory episode in the course of their life. More recent studies have validated these findings; the precise incidence found varies with the nature of the episode and the criteria of ‘hallucination’ adopted, but the basic finding is now well-supported.

Types

Of particular interest, for reasons to be discussed below, are those hallucinatory experiences of the sane which are characterised by extreme perceptual realism, sometimes to the extent that the subject does not at first achieve insight, indeed may only achieve insight after the experience has ended.

Apparitional experiences

A type of hallucinatory experience occurring to sane people is the apparitional experience

Apparitional experience

In psychology and parapsychology, an apparitional experience is an anomalous, quasi-perceptual experience.It is characterized by the apparent perception of either a living being or an inanimate object without there being any material stimulus for such a perception...

, which may be defined as one in which a subject seems to perceive some person or thing that is not really there. Self-selected samples tend to report a predominance of human figures, but apparitions of animals, and even objects are also reported. It is interesting to note that the majority of the human figures reported in such samples are not recognised by the subject, and of those who are, not all are of deceased persons; apparitions of living persons have also been reported.

Out-of-body experiences

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) have become to some extent conflated in the public mind with the concept of the near-death experience. However, the evidence suggests that the majority of out-of-body experiences do not occur near death, but in conditions of either very high or very low arousal. McCreery has suggested that this latter paradox may be explained by reference to the fact that sleep may be approached, not only by the conventional route of low arousal and deafferentation, but also by the less familiar route of extreme stress and hyper-arousal. On this model OBEs represent the intrusion of Stage 1 sleep processes into waking consciousness.

OBEs are to be regarded as hallucinatory on the grounds that they are perceptual or quasi-perceptual experiences in which by definition the ostensible viewpoint is not coincident with the physical body of the subject. Therefore the normal sensory input, if any, that the subject is receiving during the experience cannot correspond exactly to the perceptual representation of the world in the subject’s consciousness.

As with hallucinatory experiences in general, attempts to survey samples of the general population have suggested that such experiences are relatively common, incidence figures of between 15 and 25 percent being commonly reported. The variation is presumably to be accounted for by the different types of populations sampled and the different criteria of ‘out-of-body experience’ used.

Dreams and lucid dreams

A dream has been defined by some (e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica) as a hallucinatory experience during sleep.

A lucid dream may be defined as one in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is asleep and dreaming. The term ‘lucid dream’ was first used by the Dutch physician Frederik van Eeden, who studied his own dreams of this type. The word ‘lucid’ refers to the fact that the subject has achieved insight into his or her condition, rather than the perceptual quality of the experience. Nevertheless, it is one of the features of lucid dreams that they can have an extremely high quality of perceptual realism, to the extent that the dreamer may spend time examining and admiring the perceptual environment and the way it appears to imitate that of waking life.

Lucid dreams by definition occur during sleep, but they may be regarded as hallucinatory experiences in the same way as non-lucid dreams of a vivid perceptual nature may be regarded as hallucinatory, that is they are examples of 'an experience having the character of sense perception, but without relevant or adequate sensory stimulation […]'

False awakenings

A false awakening

False awakening

A false awakening is a vivid and convincing dream about awakening from sleep, while the dreamer in reality continues to sleep. After a false awakening, subjects often dream they are performing daily morning rituals such as cooking, cleaning and eating...

is one in which the subject seems to wake up, whether from a lucid or a non-lucid dream, but is in fact still asleep. Sometimes the experience is so realistic perceptually (the sleeper seeming to wake in his or her own bedroom, for example) that insight is not achieved at once, or even until the dreamer really wakes up and realises that what has occurred was hallucinatory. Such experiences seem particularly liable to occur to those who deliberately cultivate lucid dreams. However, they may also occur spontaneously and be associated with the experience of sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis is paralysis associated with sleep that may occur in healthy persons or may be associated with narcolepsy, cataplexy, and hypnagogic hallucinations. The pathophysiology of this condition is closely related to the normal hypotonia that occurs during REM sleep. When considered to be a...

Auditory hallucinations

Auditory hallucinations, and in particular the hearing of a voice, are thought of as particularly characteristic of people suffering from schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...

. However, normal subjects also report auditory hallucinations to a surprising extent. For example, Bentall and Slade found that as many as 15.4% of a population of 150 male students were prepared to endorse the statement ‘In the past I have had the experience of hearing a person’s voice and then found that no one was there’. They add:

‘[…]no less than 17.5% of the [subjects] were prepared to score the item “I often hear a voice speaking my thoughts aloud” as “Certainly Applies”. This latter item is usually regarded as a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia[…]’

Green and McCreery found that 14% of their 1800 self-selected subjects reported a purely auditory hallucination, and of these nearly half involved the hearing of articulate or inarticulate human speech sounds. An example of the former would be the case of an engineer facing a difficult professional decision, who, while sitting in a cinema, heard a voice saying, ‘loudly and distinctly’: ‘You can’t do it you know’. He adds:

‘It was so clear and resonant that I turned and looked at my companion who was gazing placidly at the screen[…] I was amazed and somewhat relieved when it became apparent that I was the only person who had heard anything.’

This case would be an example of what Posey and Losch call ‘hearing a comforting or advising voice that is not perceived as being one’s own thoughts’. They estimated that approximately 10% of their population of 375 American college students had had this type of experience.

The ‘Sense of Presence’

This is a paradoxical experience in which the person has a strong feeling of the presence of another person, sometimes recognised, sometimes unrecognised, but without any apparently justifying sensory stimulus.

The nineteenth-century American psychologist and philosopher William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

described the experience thus:

'From the way in which this experience is spoken of by those who have had it, it would appear to be an extremely definite and positive state of mind, coupled with a belief in the reality of its object quite as strong as any direct sensation ever gives. And yet no sensation seems to be connected with it at all... The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming saturated with the sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only sensations bring.'*

The following is an example of this type of experience:

‘My husband died in June 1945, and 26 years afterwards when I was at Church, I felt him standing beside me during the singing of a hymn. I felt I would see him if I turned my head. The feeling was so strong I was reduced to tears. I had not been thinking of him before I felt his presence. I had not had this feeling before that day, neither has it happened since then.’

Experiences of this kind appear to meet all but one of the normal criteria of hallucination. For example, Slade and Bentall proposed the following working definition of a hallucination:

‘Any percept-like experience which (a) occurs in the absence of an appropriate stimulus, (b) has the full force or impact of the corresponding actual (real) perception, and (c) is not amenable to direct and voluntary control by the experiencer.’

The experience quoted above certainly meets the second and third of these three criteria. One might add that the ‘presence’ in such a case is experienced as located in a definite position in external physical space. In this respect it may be said to be more hallucinatory than, for example, some hypnagogic imagery, which may be experienced as external to the subject but located in a mental ‘space’ of its own.

Hallucinations in bereavement

Rees conducted a study of 293 widow

Widow

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died, while a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed widowhood or occasionally viduity. The adjective form is widowed...

ed people living in a particular area of mid-Wales

Wales

Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...

. He found that 14% of those interviewed reported having had a visual hallucination of their deceased spouse

Marriage

Marriage is a social union or legal contract between people that creates kinship. It is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged in a variety of ways, depending on the culture or subculture in which it is found...

, 13.3% an auditory one and 2.7% a tactile one. These categories overlapped to some extent as some people reported a hallucinatory experience in more than one modality. Of interest in light of the previous heading was the fact that 46.7% of the sample reported experiencing the presence of the deceased spouse.

Psychological

The main importance of hallucinations in the sane to theoretical psychology lies in their relevance to the debate between the disease model versus the dimensional model of psychosis

Psychosis

Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...

. According to the disease model, psychotic states such as those associated with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

and manic-depression, represent symptoms of an underlying disease process, which is dichotomous in nature; i.e. a given subject either does or does not have the disease, just as a person either does or does not have a physical disease such as tuberculosis. According to the dimensional model, by contrast, the population at large is ranged along a normally distributed continuum or dimension, which has been variously labelled as psychoticism (H.J.Eysenck

Eysenck

Eysenck is a surname, and may refer to*Hans Jürgen Eysenck , psychology professor*Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, a psychological test developed by Hans Eysenck*Michael Eysenck , psychology professor, son of Hans...

), schizotypy

Schizotypy

Schizotypy is a psychological concept which describes a continuum of personality characteristics and experiences ranging from normal dissociative, imaginative states to more extreme states related to psychosis and in particular, schizophrenia...

(Gordon Claridge

Gordon Claridge

Gordon Sidney Claridge is a British psychologist and author, best known for his theoretical and empirical work on the concept of schizotypy or psychosis-proneness.- Biography :...

) or psychosis-proneness.

The occurrence of spontaneous hallucinatory experiences in sane persons who are enjoying good physical health at the time, and who are not drugged or in other unusual physical states of a transient nature such as extreme fatigue, would appear to provide support for the dimensional model. The alternative to this view requires one to posit some hidden or latent disease process, of which such experiences are a symptom or precursor, an explanation which would appear to beg the question.

Philosophical

The ‘argument from hallucination’ has traditionally been one of those used by proponents of the philosophical theory of representationalism against direct realism

Direct and indirect realism

The question of direct or "naïve" realism, as opposed to indirect or "representational" realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience; the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself...

. Representationalism holds that when perceiving the world we are not in direct contact with it, as common sense suggests, but only in direct contact with a representation of the world in consciousness. That representation may be a more or less accurate one depending on our circumstances, the state of our health, and so on. Direct realism, on the other hand, holds that the common sense or unthinking view of perception is correct, and that when perceiving the world we should be regarded as in direct contact with it, unmediated by any representation in consciousness.

Clearly, during an apparitional experience, for example, the correspondence between how the subject is perceiving the world and how the world really is at that moment is distinctly imperfect. At the same time the experience may present itself to the subject as indistinguishable from normal perception. McCreery has argued that such empirical phenomena strengthen the case for representationalism as against direct realism.