Detailed hallucinations (Sorry, a bit long)

Great Debates
1

Over the last couple of days I’ve been going though alcohol withdrawal.

It’s certainly not a good experience (far from it) but the fact that I’ve chosen to quit will make the pain worth while.

I’ve had the cramps, the sweats, palpitations, insomnia and I’m finding this quite hard to type as I have the shakes.

One thing I did get that fascinates me is hallucinations. This is something I’ve never experienced before, nothing like how I would imagine, not ‘trippy’ or scary.

I thought I could see them only with my eyes closed but they were also visible in a darkened room.

It started off as a sideshow of photographs - complete with Ken Burns effect!

Some of the photo’s are animated.

The sideshow was very detailed and not of photos I remember seeing before. The refresh rate was quite quick but but each photo was distinct and nicely overlapped.

Next the next day they changed to a "windows desktop’. Every couple of seconds programs would pop-up or disappear with all the relevant dialogues. All quite readable. (At this point I was paranoid enough to briefly consider I was getting a heads-up display a-la Robocop or The Terminator)

Next, as they faded, they changed to text. Pages from books and newspapers. Again, quite readable.

Finally to my question…

There appear to be a couple of types of Hallucination (I think this was Eidetic).

How can my brain generate so many and such detailed images. And such detailed text?

It could have been it was being generated as I read it but (as you can tell) I am no word-smith. Each was a full page that was removed before I could read it but they appeared complete.

Or were the images not so good and my hallucination was overriding my quality control.

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Reported for forum change.

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The hallucinations could objectively be of very bad quality. However, if it is part of the hallucination that you believe what you’re seeing is highly detailed, then that’s the end of it. Can you go into the details, or do they just ‘seem’ very specific?

I ask because you said this:

which to me sounds more like the idea of a vivid hallucination rather than the real mccoy (which I infer is far easier for the brain to generate than hallucinations that are immersively real because the details are so, you know, believable). Of course parts of your OP suggest otherwise.

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It was certainly convincing - hence my question.

What I intended to say was: “Each was a full page that was removed before I could read more than mabey half it but they appeared complete.”

I also started reading from halfway down on some pages.

The slideshow definiatly appeared of quality and I did not recognise most of the photos. It also contained some pronography (all vanilla I might add - at least my subconscious isnt a perv :slight_smile: )

Newspaper articles made sense. I distinctly remember there was one about a train crash that I read almost in it’s entirety and noted that they were single article ‘clippings’. But I cannot recall details.

There were cartoons - The type that Leonardo da Vinci would do - not daffy duck.

There were manuscripts - Like Newton’s Principia (although none were in latin)

I think I’m going to go with the concept of quality and that my brain was playing two tricks on me. On was the visual stimulus, the other was quality interpretation.

5

Well that’s very interesting. I want to stress right away that I am not a professional psychologist nor philosopher.

There is certainly some kind of phychosexual aspect if you are hallucinating pornographic images, vanilla or no. My guess is that both you and others will find you more sexually attractive if you aren’t stinking drunk, and that idea is sexually appealing to both you and other people, such like you know people want to try it out.

You can recall details of the readings but have the impression of at least an order of magnitude more detail. So yeah, your brain is playing (at least) a double trick on you.

I suppose a lot of alcohol intake is pretty stimulating, and that you’re missing the stimulation right now. Alot. I mean, you’re hallucinating. You are missing the stimulation so ooo ooo ooo much that your brain is making shit up. But at least you get to experience what that is all about, and can come out the other end just as sober as you please!

DaVinci cartoons are interesting. Like, a genius, only it’s the 14th century, so what’s a genius to do? Actually we moderns could learn alot from ancient geniuses, since so many of us have such narrow views of what ‘technology’ really is. Why not social technology? Although the Principia is hardly a wasted effort, Latin or no. Me, I think it was in Math, and had not very many errors.

I think you had convincing hallucinations And also the idea of detailed hallucinations. Which made the whole thing more confusing, and even more convincing. Congratulations!

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reported.

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Well, of course, there isn’t really any ‘objective quality’ about hallucinations – they’re not real pictures that could be taken out of the OP’s mind to be examined. There’s no objective fact of the matter regarding how they really are vs. how they seem, as how they seem is all there is to them.

As for how the brain could generate such complex illusions, there’s a nice account in the beginning of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained – long story short, it doesn’t, because it doesn’t have to. All it does have to do is to make it seem as if it is creating vivid, complex imagery, which is a much easier task. Think about visualizing something – let’s say something simple, like a cube. In your imagination, you can then manipulate this cube. You could, for instance, imagine it rotating on an axis through two vertices; it’s easy enough to do. However, if you think that somewhere in your mind, the image of this cube is processed, then projected onto an internal screen, frame by frame, then I think you’re mistaken. This would be much too much effort, computationally speaking, for something that can be achieved in a much ‘cheaper’ way.

What do you do in examining the picture of the spinning cube? Well, you’re thinking about how it looks; in a sense, you’re asking yourself questions. But to answer these questions, it is wholly unnecessary to first generate an actual internal representation of the cube spinning in your mind – in fact, your mind has to know the answers to these questions before it even could generate this representation! So it is much easier to answer these questions – about how it looks – directly, bypassing the ‘generate an image to look at’ step entirely. It only seems to you as if you were visualizing anything, without there being an actual image present in your mind’s eye – and in the mind, what seems to be is what is.

The same thing is probably going on with your hallucinations – rather than generating these pictures in their details to show them to you (think about it – why would you go through the trouble of generating them to show them to yourself – you must already know them to generate them, eliminating the necessity to generate them!), your introspection is just met with data that makes it seem as if there were some kind of pictures, or some kind of text ‘actually’ there.

Oh, and thumbs up to you for deciding to go the difficult route and quitting.

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Removed spam.

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Where you sleep deprived during these hallucinations?

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Heck, I’ve had dreams that seemed especially vivid and detailed and plausible, but if I mull them over while awake, I realize they made no sense whatsoever.