Can you tell difference what's hallucination and reality?

Unusual Beliefs
21

Nah, according to the article from Scientific American, one was in Ohio University.

I think Cat Stevens said it best:
Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
'Cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are

And if you want to live high, live high
And if you want to live low, live low
'Cause there’s a million ways to go
You know that there are

You can do what you want
The opportunity’s on
And if you can find a new way
You can do it today
You can make it all true
And you can make it undo
You see, ah ah ah
It’s easy, ah ah ah
You only need to know

Well, if you want to say yes, say yes
And if you want to say no, say no
'Cause there’s a million ways to go
You know that there are

And if you want to be me, be me
And if you want to be you, be you
'Cause there’s a million things to do
You know that there are

You can do what you want
The opportunity’s on
And if you can find a new way
You can do it today
You can make it all true
And you can make it undo
You see, ah ah ah
It’s easy, ah ah ah
You only need to know

Well, if you want to sing out, sing out
And if you want to be free, be free
'Cause there’s a million things to be
You know that there are

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22

“Claps for Cat Stevens”. :smile:

23

Why imagine it flush? You dont need a lot to enjoy life. If you got a lot of debt though, go on the run. It will create fear that will be exhilarating…for a while, at least.

24

At this point in my life the scariest part of this disease is that sometimes even though I’m well medicated I can’t always tell the difference between the two.

25

I have zero debt and stick to a monthly budget. The bank thing just slipped past my filter and came out. Seriously no financial unhappiness or unresolved material issues behind the comment…it is 3am and I can’t sleep …probably the reason for my meaningless post.

26

I gave it more serious thought. My new response is: Cool I’m going to imagine my cat owns a car and can drive.

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27

Thank you Vasu

I am not a Dennet fan at all.

Thank you for your last paragraph especially.

Yes.

[quote=“Vasu_Devan1, post:16, topic:160399”]
Both love and fear need each other. Each only has meaning with the the existence and knowledge of the other. [/quote]
Yes! Thank you.

But on the other hand…

I am not into choice. It seems to me that my “choices” are vocalisations that come after unconscious decision.

I could, theoretically, get into, espouse, recommend “unconscious decision.”

But it seems to me that my “unconscious decisions” are very woolly, plural, immediately
retracted, and generally indecisive. It seems to me that behind the scenes there is something
vegetable going on: a pushing and pulling of a variety of, er, impulses, and this tug of war
results in a winner that is said to be “chosen.” In this way, I don’t think, in my case there is
a “choice,” but only a bogus explanation for a variously buffeted behaviour.

I am not sure.

Thanks again.

29

You are very welcome, Timtak.

I am not into choice. It seems to me that my “choices” are vocalisations that come after unconscious decision.

I am not sure what you mean by this. One cannot know the changes in the unconscious mind; that’s why its called unconscious. We can only watch the changes in the conscious reality. Most of the time we are not aware of these changes. But when something troubles us but is also not a physical threat, we can focus our awareness of the conscious mind by watching it as it changes from moment to moment. Meditation is a good stepping stone for this. In fact, my entire schizophrenic experience for the following future changed when I decided to meditate during an extreme psychosis.

Once the human child is self-conscious, it can know 2 truths no matter what.
I am
I know that I am
the first comes from the brain our body is linked to. the second comes from the formless Witness of reality which we also are. The brain is aware only of itself. The witness is aware of reality and aware of itself on to infinity. The witness is definable only as an existing awareness of all reality. You can think of it as God, the universe, yin/yang, collective consciousness etc but it is best not to try and fit it into symbolic thinking. No matter how negative your current is being, as long as you are conscious, you can become just the witness to watch the reality unfolding before you. It is essentially a safe existence to retreat to, to make our choices when we are confused or scared. I know this personally because I tried doing so inside a psychotic reality and the resulting effect, after some extreme fear(that was witnessed quietly) just blew my mind.

30

I can’t always, but my psychiatrist is teaching me ways to reason and tell the difference.

31

I mean, that’s an interesting theory, but kind of dumb, no offense. So all other types of hallucinations are genuine hallucinations, but auditory hallucinations are from your own voice? That doesn’t make any sense. How do they explain multiple voices talking over each other, or unintelligible voices, or auditory hallucinations that aren’t voices (laughing, screaming, sirens, footsteps, animal noises, gun shots, explosions, etc.)?

32

The actual experiments they use as evidence are pretty old.

Gould, L.N. (1948). Verbal hallucinationsand the activity of vocal musculature. American Journal of Psychiatry, 105:367-372,
Gould, L.N. (1949). Auditory hallucinationsand subvocal speech. Journal ofNervous and Mental Disease,109:418-427,
Gould, L.N. (1950). Verbal hallucinationsand automatic speech. AmericanJournal of Psychiatry, 107:110-119.

Those are all before even the 50s started. I dont know how much backup there is for them now.

33

I can tell because all of them are violent and angry.

34

Depends how far I am into psychosis, if I retain my insight, I can usually figure out the shadow people arnt real. When in full psychosis, nope, can’t distinguish reality from fiction

35

After some of my really terrifying episodes the shadow people are more of a warning I need to take better care before I cannot reason.

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36

Short Answer,
Not whan im psychotic, (which is rare these days cos im medicated) - most Sz’s will probably tell you reality and hallucinations get intertwind. So no i can never ever tell the difference.

38

With regard to the validity of the theory that auditory hallucinations are, in part at least, a product of subvocal (very quiet) speech, there is a 1990 paper (available from ResearchGate if you create a free account)
Green, M. F., & Kinsbourne, M. (1990). Subvocal activity and auditory hallucinations: Clues for behavioral treatments?. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 16(4), 617-625.
which concludes (regarding the theory)

“In summary, the studies that have considered subvocal activity and auditory hallucinations have often used very small sample sizes, poor or absent diagnostic procedures, relatively insensitive measurements, and inappropriate analyses. Nonetheless, the preceding studies have yielded provocative findings and some support for a potentially useful theory.If auditory hallucinations are associated with subvocal activity, this relationship could be helpful in developing an effective intervention technique.” p.619

The paper goes on to compare auditory hallucinations in control (baseline), mouth open, biting tongue, making a fist, raising eyebrows and humming conditions and finds that auditory hallucinations are reduced in the latter humming condition only, consistent with the theory that auditory hallucinations are produced by or related to subvocal speech.

More recent research…

This paper finds that vocal auditory hallucinations are associated with activity in the language producing parts of the brain.
Anthony, D. (2004). The cognitive neuropsychiatry of auditory verbal hallucinations: an overview. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 9(1-2), 107-123.
I have asked if the author would post to Research Gate.

This 2013 paper, which is available in pdf on the Net, measured EMG measured micro muscular movements of lips and (as a baseline) the forearm, and found that the lips moved more when auditory hallucinations were present.
Rapin, L., Dohen, M., Polosan, M., Perrier, P., & Lœvenbruck, H. (2013). An EMG study of the lip muscles during covert auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

I have no idea about non vocal auditory illusions such as gunshots, and multiple voices at the same time, and I agree that these phenomena do demonstrate that the theory is weak, or even dumb.

The Russian psychologists, such as Vygotsky and Solovkin saw linguistic thought as developing from children’s babbling that gradually becomes quiet, and thus I presume that subvocal speech is a sort of developmental throwback to the time when thought was spoken. If this theory were correct, it would be reasonable to assume that some or all adults can produce inner speech without sub-vocalisation some of the time, but it would still suggests that inner speech is in essence, or at least in origin, silenced speech. If vocal auditory hallucinations were similar in nature, then humming and other activities that use the vocal cords might help, to an extent.

I am not particularly into humming.

I am interested in what thought is, and what it implies.

Vygotsky claimed that speech and linguistic thought implies a listener, real or imagined. He attempted to demonstrate this by putting young babbling children into a room with other children that do not speak the same language. He found that these children stop babbling on about what they are doing when they realised that no one was listening. He argued therefore that self-talk, and thought, is predicated by the dream of, or accompanied by, an imaginary friend. That was my experience, in my case.

I am reminded of Gollum, in the Hobbit, talking to “my precious,” “the ring”. I guess that was what Tolkien was going on about.

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40

Thought is usually vocal or visual representations of concepts in mental space. Usually the senses of sound or vision but also on a lesser level tactile too. Taste and olfactory seem to be the weakest. In fact, thoughts may be what creates the physical change - not the other way around. I have some recent interest in this since a couple days ago I discovered that imagining a workout(mostly situps and pushups) actually flexed the relevant muscles in my physical body when I did so. In a very slight way ofcourse. In fact, there have been a few recent studies proving that simply imagining muscle movement actually strengthens those muscles over time. Since I am lazy and have a gut, I am trying to see if I can avoid weight gain by imagining a workout for 20 mins twice a day for a week. So subvocal speech as you say MAY be the physical muscles of your voicebox moving in response to imagined speech. I am currently on Day 4 of my experiment. It will end on Saturday. In the meantime Google (“how to grow stronger without lifting weights” “scientific american”). Use both phrases in the search bar or even just google imagining exercise.

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41

Thanks again. I read the Scientific American article.

I have a feeling that in respect of things related to the mind, the arrow of causality always seems to point both ways. E.g. if people who are similar like each other, people who like each other become similar to each other, and if thought causes subvocalisations/whispers then subvocalisations/whispers will probably cause thought. I mused that this might be because time is a product of how we see the world, whereas in the mind there is no time, as some on this forum have suggested.

Does this apply to imagining lifting weights causes us to be stronger, becoming stronger will cause us to imagine exercise? I am not sure.

I do a lot of cycling, swimming, press ups, and occasionally karate, very badly. I recommend cycling. It is one of the few (?) ways of getting a work out sitting down.

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42

the cause and effect theory in science is critically flawed. It is the best approach for physical sciences but just wont work for social, behavior or consciousness sciences. Simply because those things involve multiple factors effecting multiple elements. Its easy to isolate causation in a physical object — but the mind just has too many variables acting on it.

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43

There have been times when I’ve been hallucinating and I was aware that it was a hallucination. Perhaps there were times that I was unaware, I’m not sure how I would know for sure if one got by me. I have frequent hallucinations that have tells, like bugs, but they are a matte black, and that gives it away because real bugs have more color to them. But when you see something move like a bug you startle anyway, it takes a few seconds to realize it’s just your mind playing tricks on you. By then you’re already an ass for jumping for no reason. Same with shadow people, they are matte black, real bad guys have more detail, still scary and makes the heart skip a beat or two. Other, more elaborate visual hallucinations that I’ve had were obvious, like the ceiling ripping open and the heavens glowing through the roof down on me and people stepping out of the curtains or out of the wood grain.

As far as auditory hallucinations go, if it’s in my head I can tell. If the sound is outside my head I have a harder time and have to get up and go investigate to see if there is a source for the sounds. Except whispering, obviously, because I can easily see there is no one standing there whispering in my ear. But if I hear someone laughing outside, I have to go look. Or if I hear men talking outside my window, i have to peek out the window to know for sure.

If I was having an extreme hallucination I accept that I may never know that I wasn’t based in reality. That’s the scary part of having a psychotic disorder, you just never know. I can’t count on myself 100%. Thats hard.

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