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He says:
I’m not sure if he has had other visions though…
This happened 22 years ago. In the interval, he could have worked it up until he is remembering something quite different. The original experience could have been nothing more than a feeling of peace and well-being, which became more dramatic each time he recalled and recounted it.
God once told my Grandmother “Drop”.
It was extremely pertinent at the time.
Was she a bombardier?
Totally and completely agree, this probably accounts for the vast majority of people’s “visions.”
You’re not entirely wrong, but keep in mind that to make a movie audience understand even remotely what it was like for the man, the best way was to create visual hallucinations that were so real the viewers would be taken in. After all, Nash thought his hallucinations were real, but to a movie viewer, hearing voices in the air when nobody was around would be a good clue that what he was experiencing was only in his mind. It was much more convincing to create a visual hallucination that seemed real, then let the viewer find out it wasn’t.
There were definitely massive inaccuracies in that movie, but I don’t mind the way they related his problem to the audience.
I would really love to see this empirical evidence and historical argument.
Please do start a GD thread with whatever you have in this way.
photopat writes:
> After all, Nash thought his hallucinations were real, but to a
> movie viewer, hearing voices in the air when nobody was
> around would be a good clue that what he was experiencing
> was only in his mind.
Yeah, but auditory hallucinations were only a small part of Nash’s schizophrenia. As I said, most of his schizophrenia was not about seeing things that weren’t there or about hearing things that weren’t there, it was about interpreting things that were there in some strange fashion. In other words, it was about creating conspiracy theories to explain things that really were there. In fact, I believe that that is generally true in schizophrenia. Schizophrenics sometimes have hallucinations, but most of their problems are with “disordered thinking” (creating confused and mistaken explanations of things), not problems with what they see and hear.
As for the argument that the filmmakers had to do this to appeal to the audience, well, let me make an analogy: Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son made a very powerful statement about racism in the U.S., and Wright tried to get it made into a movie. Nobody in Hollywood would touch it. The producers in Hollywood thought (perhaps correctly) that too many people in the U.S. would hate the way it demonstrated their racism. One producer, though, went to Wright and said that he was willing to make a movie of the novel - as long as he could change the main character from a black man to a white man and eliminate the theme of racism. Not surprisingly, Wright turned him down. The producers of A Beautiful Mind actually did the same thing as that producer was prepared to do to Native Son. They changed huge portions of Nash’s story because they thought that audiences wouldn’t accept the truth.
No argument Wendell. As I said, there were unquestionably some gross inaccuracies in that movie. I just meant to point out that, since most audience members wouldn’t be able to conceive of exactly how a schizophrenic would think, the film makers came up with a way of drawing us in and suggesting that what seems to be real may not be.
I was really irritated when I read about Nash’s actual life and saw how much it had been sanitized for the screen. Personally I think his actual story could have made a great film.
Not to continue to hijack the thread though, I do have to wonder if the person describing the incident on the road was interpreting a feeling he had, and hadn’t actually experienced a hallucination. On the other hand, maybe he was extremely tired and was already starting to think in born again terms, and he just had one of those road hypnosis occurrences, like I did once when I thought a white dog was in front of the car, and there was nothing there. (I wasn’t alone in the car at the time.)
Interesting…
AFAIK, generally speaking schizophrenics hear voices and “know” things but do not see hallucinations. As pointed out, “Beautiful Mind” used hallucinations as a sort of stage device. But if the person referred to in the OP was schizophrenic, it would be expected that he would have gotten worse and less connected with reality over time. So I doubt he is/was so affected.
Also, if he had some kind of epilepsy that was not caused by outside factors (like being hit in the head or somehting), then I think we’d have expected more than just this one vision-causing seizure. And we’d also have expected a car wreck that would have prevented him from relating his story, though he would have had the opportunity to meet Jesus directly.
So perhaps sugaree has it in saying
“This happened 22 years ago. In the interval, he could have worked it up until he is remembering something quite different. The original experience could have been nothing more than a feeling of peace and well-being, which became more dramatic each time he recalled and recounted it.”
Which isn’t to say the guy is a liar. Perhaps the experience was so deeply moving that it prompted him to intrpret it unconciously or semi-conciously as a very specific religious vision. My thought is that if the guy has maintained his religous beliefs and lifestyle constantly for the intervening 22 years, then he genuine believes what he experienced was real. If he is an on-and-off believer and practiconer, then quite possibly he’s full of baloney.
Here’s his latest reply: (I emphasized some things)
He often uses the devil to explain lots of things - such as mental problems like epilepsy. It seems that in the gospels, demons were sometimes blamed for causing epilepsy… (Matthew 17:14-18, Mark 9:17-29, Luke 9:38-42)
So anyway, he has had a lot of visions… also he appears to be a very strong believer based on all the other things he has written. His visions and religious experiences are probably the main reason for his seemingly unshakeable faith.
Is it possible he fell asleep, and was fortunate enough not to crash his car before he work up? Or was just really tired? Tired drivers see a lot of things that aren’t reality…I’ve seen things while driving home late at night that weren’t really there several times: the common ones like thinking that leaves are small animals running across the road (I can never remember that the things I think they are are diurnal until after I “see” them. This a sign that you’re really too tired to drive and should stop soon. Fortunately this almost always happens within five miles of getting home) but other things too, like mailboxes I mistake for old bent over people standing on the side of the road until I get right on top of them.
Once I thought I drove through a city (Lowell MA) on 495, and found out 15 minutes later that I hadn’t :eek: Since the route was something I knew backwards and forwards, and I know there was no city nearby that I’d likely to have mistaken it for, because no others ones before that were as large or visable from the highway. I must have imagined it. If my sleepy mind could conjure up an entire city, I think his could have imagined God.
elfkin477:
Check out my latest post… apparently he’s had other visions too and heard voices and felt the presence of God. So his brain isn’t very normal… (or he has genuine contact with the supernatural realm…)
Maybe he has temporal lobe epilepsy as others have said.
Sorry to take so long to answer, toadspittle. She wasn’t a bombadier. Her leg was on fire. With the word came the image and the kinesthetic feel of how she could drop down and sit on the leg that was on fire, smothering it. It worked.
when people see visions, they can either accept that they’re insane and delusional or write it off as the creator of the universe talking to them.
This sounds like a drunk driver nodding off at the wheel to me.
Back to the OP. I vote for good acid.
I think that a tendency to have vision experiences is part of being human. It’s how we’re wired. Grandma had two. I’ve had two. Subjectively, they do feel like they’re coming from outside. Grandma interpreted them as coming from god, but I had changed my outlook between my first and my second, so I experienced the second one differently.