Illusions
Illusions are disorders in which real-life objects are perceived as completely different items and objects.
Perception errors in mentally healthy people with difficulties in obtaining objective information about the outside world should be distinguished from pathological illusions. Thus, errors are quite natural in a darkened room or with significant noise, especially in people with hearing and vision impairment. A hearing aid wearer may feel as if people are talking to each other, calling his name, discussing or judging his actions.
The occurrence of errors in a healthy person is often associated with the presence of an attitude towards the perception of a certain object, with a state of expectation. Thus, a mushroom picker in the forest easily mistakes a bright autumn leaf for a mushroom cap.
Illusions in mental illness are of a fantastic, unexpected nature and arise when there are no obstacles to obtaining reliable information. Often the basis for the formation of such illusions is a darkened or affectively narrowed consciousness.
Affectogenic illusions appear under the influence of extreme anxiety and feelings of fear; they are most clearly visible in patients with an acute attack of delirium, when it seems to them that pursuers are surrounding them from all sides.
In a conversation between a random group of people, patients hear their name, insults, and threats. In the unexpected exclamations of those around them, they imagine the words “war”, “execution”, “spy”. The patient flees from pursuit, but in different parts of the city he catches new phrases in the speech of passers-by, consistent with the fear he experiences.
Pareidolic illusions (pareidolia) are complex fantastic images that forcibly arise when viewing real objects.
At the same time, against the will of the patient, the fuzzy, indefinite pattern of the wallpaper turns into a “tangle of worms”; the flowers depicted on the tea cup are perceived as “the evil eyes of an owl”; stains on the tablecloth are mistaken for a “clump of cockroaches.” Pareidolic illusions are a rather severe mental disorder, usually preceding the appearance of hallucinations and most often observed in the initial period of delirious stupefaction (for example, during delirium tremens or infections with severe intoxication and fever).
A 42-year-old patient, who had been abusing alcohol for many years, felt extremely anxious when hungover, could not sleep, and constantly walked from room to room, as it seemed that there was someone in the house. Having opened the bathroom door, I clearly saw a man with a gray beard in a turban and a long oriental robe standing at the door. He grabbed it, but found that he was holding a bathrobe. Angrily he threw it on the floor and went to the bedroom. At the window I again saw the same oriental man, rushed to him, but realized that it was a curtain. I lay down, but could not sleep. I noticed that the flowers on the wallpaper became convex and began to grow out of the wall.
The natural desire of healthy people to “fantasize” when looking at clouds or a frosty pattern on glass should be distinguished from pareidolic illusions. Artistically gifted people have a developed ability for eideticism - the ability to sensually, vividly imagine imaginary objects (for example, a conductor, when reading a score, can clearly hear the sound of an entire orchestra in his head). However, a healthy person always clearly distinguishes between real and imaginary objects and is able to stop the flow of ideas at any time at will.
Mass hallucinations exist
Sometimes a person is visited by visions, and sometimes the same visions are visited by a number of people at once. Humanity has quite often encountered this phenomenon, which, according to some, has not yet received a comprehensive rational explanation,2 and according to others,3 it has been well studied... E. Parrish’s book “Hallucinations and Illusions” (1897) examines a well-known case of vision: a few days after the death of the ship’s cook, members of the crew of a ship at sea saw and unmistakably recognized the silhouette of the cook, who, limping (he had one leg), shorter than the other), walked towards them on the water. When the vision approached, it suddenly turned into a pile of floating debris left over from a shipwreck.
E. Parrish suggested that at first someone alone thought, reflecting on the loss of a friend, that he saw him, and, sharing this with others, instilled this assumption in them. As E. Parrish believed, this could serve as an explanation of how ghosts arise.
But not everything can be explained so easily.
V. M. Bekhterev told how, during one religious holiday in Sarov, pilgrims suddenly began to see the saint - Father Seraphim - at the bottom of an abandoned well. Moreover, some even noticed the movement of the hand. This continued until one praying mantis approached, not knowing about the “miracle.” And she said that there was nothing at the bottom except debris and stones.
And then the “vision” (mass hallucination) instantly ended, and everyone began to see only stones and garbage...
In the book “Ghostly Images” (1930), Professor E.R. Jaensch tried to explain the case of animated statues and paintings. He argued that it was about persistent visual images that superimpose normal vision.
In an attempt to explain mass hallucinations for which no definite assumptions exist, some authors have put forward the theory of telepathic contact. According to its original version, as outlined in Crowe's book The Mysterious Sides of Nature (1854), the viewer who perceives a vision can, by establishing contact with other members of the group, cause others to notice the vision.
For example, the famous Indian rope trick...
Andri Puharich's book "Beyond Telepathy" (1962) published the observations of two psychological researchers who saw this trick along with hundreds of other spectators.
The trick is that a boy climbs up the rope, a magician climbs behind him with a knife in his hand, and both of them disappear somewhere above. Screams are heard, and then body parts cut into pieces fall to the ground in a hail. The magician comes down with a bloody knife, puts the pieces in a box, and then a smiling boy jumps out. At some performances, spectators see a dog trying to drag off a leg or arm, but it is forced to return the prey.
Psychologists also saw how, having collected the boy’s parts in a basket, the magician climbed up a rope with it and descended with a living boy.
Having watched this performance filmed, they were amazed: on the screen, the fakir and the boy stood indifferently all the time next to a rope coiled in a ring on the ground.
The whole performance turned out to be imaginary!
A. Puharich concludes that “a hallucination occurred in the fakir... it was telepathically excited and transmitted to several hundred spectators.”
In 1934, this trick was repeated twice in London, and the organizers filmed the second session with hidden film cameras. The developed film showed a rope lying on the ground and a boy running away towards the bushes. The spectators present witnessed an event that did not happen in reality.
In 1980, William Seabrook described to the Ladies Home Journal a version of this trick he saw in West Africa: “Next to me were two living children whom I could touch with my hands. At the same distance from me there were two men armed with... steel triangular sharp blades.
What happened next was what I “saw” with my own eyes, but below you will understand why I speak about this with reluctance and why I do not understand what the word “see” means.
Both magicians held the blades tightly in their left hands with the tip up and, throwing the children high into the air, caught them on this tip... There was no blood... The spectators screamed and fell to their knees.
Some covered their eyes with their hands, others remained on the ground without moving.
The magicians walked through the crowd (each of them carrying a child impaled on a blade above his head) and disappeared into the sorcerer’s home.” Later, W. Seabrook saw and felt children who were not harmed by this test. The trick turned out to be an illusion, demonstrated to spectators who could not believe their eyes.
Faivishevsky V., commenting on these cases, says that “visual hallucinations are reproduced so well under hypnosis that the possibility of their occurrence is beyond doubt. But for the success of suggestion, a readiness for it is necessary, or, in modern language, a psychological attitude.”
D. N. Uznadze, the head of the Georgian psychological school, wrote: “In the presence of a need and a situation of its satisfaction, a specific state arises in the subject, which can be characterized as an inclination, as an orientation, as a readiness to commit an act that can satisfy this need.”
It must be said that all kinds of attitudes often guide our behavior. Moreover, sometimes they make us see something completely different from what actually is! For example, such an experiment was conducted in one school. Before the lesson, the teacher agreed with all the students, except one, that they would argue: the lines, which are actually different lengths, are equal. At first this one student was perplexed and tried to convince the others that the segments were different.
But gradually, under the influence of general opinion, he agreed and really began to “see” that the segments were equal in length!
This behavior, when a person unconsciously obeys the opinions of others, is called suggestibility. It manifests itself in ideas, emotions, sensations, and actions. The extreme is lack of initiative, passivity, and uncriticality. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all suggestible. Since the 1950s, psychologists and sociologists began to carefully study this area of human relations. It turned out that a person’s exposure to the moods of others depends on many factors. First of all, it depends on personality traits: the degree of suggestibility, the stability of self-esteem, the level of self-esteem, intelligence, the need for the approval of others...
In children, suggestibility is much higher than in adults, and in women it is higher than in men. In addition, a person’s attitude towards others matters - how he perceives his position among them, their significance for him, how much he is “allowed” to differ from everyone else, etc.
An example of very high collective suggestibility is panic that grips huge masses of people. This was well described by V. Hugo in the novel “Les Miserables”:
“The army suddenly wavered from all sides at the same time... Behind the cries of “Treason!” followed by “Save yourself!” A fleeing army is like a thaw. Everything settles, cracks, hesitates, breaks, rolls, collapses, collides, hurries, rushes... People crush, crowd each other, step on the living and the dead. Countless crowds flood the roads. There are no longer any comrades, no officers, no generals—only unimaginable horror reigns.”
This is possible when people are imbued with a common mood and feelings. And then it is enough for a spark to appear for a fire to break out, sweeping away everything. This is especially characteristic of periods of religious upsurge in the history of mankind.
When people are in a crowd, everyone usually loses the feeling of independence and the reflex of imitation awakens. A kind of mutual infection occurs, as a result a common emotional state is created, it is transmitted by facial expressions, movements, eye expression, breathing rhythm, etc. and is often perceived at the so-called subsensory level (when the impression does not reach the level of consciousness).
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Creating hallucinations without any drugs is surprisingly easy
The human brain is a wonderful thing. It can do things that our primate relatives are thousands, perhaps millions, years old in evolution, and our most sophisticated machines are not even close to competing with our powers of higher consciousness and ingenuity.
And yet those 80 billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile.
If a tiny thing goes wrong with a particular connection—maybe something goes wrong or a certain neural pathway is blocked—the whole thing can fall apart very quickly.
And, oddly enough, even without any trauma or structural failure, the human brain itself can become strange - it turns out that it is surprisingly easy to trick into seeing and hearing something that is not really there.
And no, we're not talking about taking a bunch of drugs to cause hallucinations. The brain can do all this on its own, you just need to know how to manipulate it.
As the guys showed in this 2020 Scam Nation video on YouTube, If you create a situation of intense sensory deprivation using some common household items, you can cause some really intense hallucinations that interfere with both your vision and sound.
You will need:
- Sheets of light, white paper
- Cotton upholstery
- Rubber bands
- Office supplies, including scissors, tape, stapler and cord
- YouTube video of old TV white noise or static running continuously for at least 30 minutes
- Noise canceling headphones
Watch the video to see how they use each of these things to basically deprive themselves of any sensory input, and try it yourself.
Effects usually begin to appear in about 10 to 30 minutes.
Within 20 minutes, the folks at Scam Nation reported seeing a "colorful bloom"—like the kind you see when you rub your eyelids—that will soon form shapes like silhouettes of dinosaurs, jellyfish, and the Eye of Sauron.
One heard screams, and the other heard laughter.
Sounds crazy? Well, of course, we have to take the word of two guys on YouTube for this particular scenario, but what they are doing actually follows the principles of a scientific phenomenon known as the Ganzfeld effect.
The Ganzfeld effect describes how when you are exposed to an “unstructured, uniform field of stimulation,” such as seeing blackness and constantly listening to television static, your brain responds by increasing neural noise in an attempt to find missing visual cues.
This can lead to visual and auditory hallucinations, as the guys in the video describe.
Of course, each person will experience the effects differently.
When Veritasium's Derek Mueller tried his own version of sensory deprivation—locking himself in a black, ultra-silent anechoic chamber for 45 minutes—he debunked the myth that lack of stimulation will drive you crazy, but reported a few strange sensations.
“Perhaps the strangest thing I noticed was the feeling in my heart,” he says.
“I just felt like it was really hard and I could almost feel like blood running through me. It wasn't as if I heard it, it was as if I felt it. And it felt like my heart was shaking my body in a way. It was something strange."
Derek wasn't exactly hallucinating in this situation, but what he describes in his heart suggests that his brain was amplifying things in the absence of any stimuli.
Interestingly, researchers demonstrated a similar effect in a 2020 experiment when they asked volunteers to look into each other's eyes for 10 minutes straight.
“Participants in this amazing group said they had a powerful experience unlike anything they had felt before,” Christian Jarrett reported at the time for the British Psychological Society's Research Digest.
Of course, it's not an exact science because everyone's brain reacts differently to the weird things we throw at it (metaphorically), but you can try the Scam Nation method and see what happens to you.
