What hallucinations reveal about our minds (Oliver Sacks)

This information is amazing and I knew right away to share it with others after listening to the Ted Talk by Oliver Sacks. At the end of this post I will reveal interesting information about some of his other accomplishments as a writer. I think you will recognize the movies he wrote.

According to Oliver Sacks a percentage of people never reveal they are having hallucinations out of fear of being seen as crazy.

He ends by saying this is normal to think of the hundreds of thousands of blind people, that have these hallucinations but are too scared to mention them. This sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public.

Oliver Sacks works with a lot people at nursing homes and was called out to see Rosalie, a woman in her 90’s having hallucinations. In the talk it is quite fascinating as he goes into what she is hallucinating and why he found her sane. Many people could end up being misdiagnosed and even put on medication. Rosalie told him to tell the nurses what was wrong with her. It is called the Charles Bonnet syndrome.

The hallucinations are from the theatre of the mind by the machinery of the brain. Charles Bonnet said 250 years ago.

Charles Bonnet discovered his grandfather had the syndrome 250 years ago when testing was not available like it is today with the fMRI.

What I have done is taken his video and highlighted some of it, however it is wonderful to listen to him talk on the video. If nothing else read through this post and absorb some important information from Oliver Sacks.

The video is titled, “What hallucination reveals about our mind” and the Ted Talk is done by Oliver Sacks. Thank goodness he took the time to do this video.

VIDEO

First he points out we see with our eyes and with the brain as well, the brain being the imagination. He goes on to talk about how we are familiar with out imagination but there are hallucinations as well; that hallucinations are not under our control and seem to come from the outside. When you listen to the video you will enjoy how he explains this.

Oliver Sacks works in nursing homes where people are visually impaired or hearing impaired. That 10% of the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations; the same is true for the visually impaired people about 10% get visual hallucinations.

You don’t have to be completely blind just sufficiently impaired. He goes on in the video to describe different very interesting hallucinations his patients have had and how Charles Bonnet first discovered the syndrome.

Out of the 10% of people that get these 1% do not mention them because they may be seen as going insane and may be misdiagnosed.

This information can help reassure people they are not going insane.

This got me to thinking of the aging population and how families experience their loved ones hallucinations and think they are losing it.

Here are some of his explanations of hallucinations and their differences

Psychotic hallucinations are quite different

Quoting him: Psychotic hallucinations whether visual or vocal they address you; they accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them he says. There is none of this being addressed with the Charles Bonnet syndrome. You are seeing a film that has nothing to do with you. That is how people think about it.

Rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy

With this he says one can feel their selves transported by to a time and place into the past. He goes on to describe this.

All different levels of the Charles Bonnet syndrome

Geometrical hallucinations
Elaborate hallucinations
Most common: with faces and figures and sometimes-deformed faces.
2nd most common is a cartoon

So what is going on?

Brain imagery with fMRI while people are hallucinating shows different parts of the brain are activated while hallucinations is going on.

Simple geometrical hallucinations

Primary visual cortex is activated with simple geometrical hallucinations (part of brain that perceives edges and patterns) you don’t form images with this part of the brain.

When images are formed (Let’s activate some of ours)

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Ability to recognize faces
Higher part of the visual cortex is involved in temporal lobe
The one particular area is the fusiform gyrus; if people damage they may lose the ability to recognize faces. There is an area in the gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented. That part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations.

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Cartoons
There are parts of the brain activated when you see, draws or hallucinate cartoons.

Other brain recognition
There are other parts of the brain involved in recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes.

Inferotemporal cortex level there is only visual images, or figments or fragments. It is only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion.

In the 1970’s it was found that not only parts of the brain but particular cells; Face Cells were discovered around 1970.

Now we know there are 100’s of other sorts of cells, which can be very, very specific.
Such as, car cells so you recognize certain cars.

Charles Bonnet syndrome

You don’t go to higher levels; you are at the level of the inferior visual cortex

Where you have 1000’s, 10s of 1,000s and millions of images, figments, or fragments of figments all neutrally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells. Normally these are all a part of the integrated stream of perception, or imagination, and one is not conscious of them.

It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted. Instead of getting normal perception you are getting an anarchic, convulsive stimulation and release of all these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex. So suddenly you see something and the mind does its best to organize, but not terribly successfully.

He ends by saying this is normal to think of the 100s of thousands of blind people, that have these hallucinations but are too scared to mention them. This sort of thing needs to be brought into notice, for patients, for doctors, for the public.

This has given insight into how the brain works. Watch the video and he will describe patients and the different things they were experiencing.

Oliver Sacks, born and educated mostly in Great Britain, he spent most of his career in the United States. Source of this statement and image is Wikipedia.

When you leave this post my hope is this has helped you in some way giving you more information. If you are like me you will walk away from this with a sense of relief and amazement in what science knows about the brain now with the imaging. I find it even more amazing that Charles Bonnet figure this out over 250 years ago.

Oliver Sacks is known for writing movies
Awakenings (1990)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987)
The Mind Traveller Himself. (1998)
At First Sight (1999)

I believe the mind and the brain are fascinating, in this world with all the stress and everything going on it is important to learn as much as we can about the brain. Please join me in the future when I present information on quantum physics and the science of the brain and mind.

Thanks for reading
Steem On

source for images 1 and 2 creative commons