So far all I know about them is that they are not real. Well why are they there. What’s the purpose. And I am talking both audio and visual. Does anyone have any insight into them? What occurs when they are happening. What is the process.
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this is a amazing question. i wish i knew the answer
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It’s like dreaming when you are awake but you see it through your eyes and hear it through your ears instead of in your mind.
That’s the best way I can describe it. The trick is learning to figure out it’s not real but it’s hard to do when you can see it and hear it.
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The sensory areas of your brain produce signals by error that are not due to external stimuli. Signals in sensory areas not due to external stimuli are not uncommon. It happens when you sleep and it happens when you use your imagination. The difference here is that they happen while you’re awake and that you’re still not able to immediately tell that they aren’t real.
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It’s thought that the superior temporal gyrus along with a place called Brodmann Area 42 (auditory association area in the brain) work together somehow to produce this phenomenon. It’s an area of hot research since interventions could be used to target these areas and “quiet” the voices down.
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I hallucinated I saw demons above me. My eyes and mind saw demons
Those are just auditory areas.
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The dreaming part of your brain is on overdrive and producing auditory and visual stimuli that you perceive as real.
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They happen becoz errors in processing voices and pictures in outer world
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Thanks guys. So it’s like a false register. That just appears. But it’s like the old question to me. Where do thoughts come from anyway? I guess it would be the same as picturing something. What compelles us to picture what we do or want to. What are the origins. It can’t just be random generation.
Mine can be pretty scary so they definitely aren’t fantasies but it would be nice if they were I could just hallucinate all day.
But I have had some harmless ones too. The brain is a complex organ. No one really understands how it works.
pretty sure life is a hallucination
just a big weird dream we can’t wake up from
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Our bodies cause some thoughts like “I’m hungry.” Or you see a friend unexpectedly “I recognize you.” As a teen, I engaged in a lot of love fantasies just because it was what I wanted. Nothing very real about them, though.
In the past it was believe that thoughts are will and that by means of making them we evaluate, instigate, and control behavior.
There is now quite a lot of research to show that this is not the case.
First came the research on split brain patients that would with their speaking hemisphere give bogus reasons for what their other hemisphere had done, even though it did not know, and even though there other hemisphere acted on other stimuli entirely.
Then Nisbett and Wilson extended this to normal subjects of social psychology experiments who gave similarly bogus reasons for behaviour that had, on average at least, been cause by other facors. E.g. if you give subjects a placebo that is said to cause anxiety and ask them to give themselves electric shocks, they give themselves on average higher voltage shocks than those not given the placebo, presumably because at some unconscioys level they are bkaming the placebo not the shocks fir the anxiety they ate feeling, since electric shocks cause anxiety. However, Nisbett and Wilson found that when you ask the subjects, “why did you give yourself higher voltage shocks?” they respond with plausible but bogus (on average) reasons such as “I made radios and othe electrical shicks when I was a kid and got used to getting electrical shocks.” Even when tokd about the placebo, subjects all still deny its effect on themselves, even though the experimentersan be sure it had an effect due tothe signifucant difference between the placebo and non placebo group. Further the explanations that subjects give are the same as thise given by thurd party observers, so, like the disconnected hemispheres the expkanations seem to be plausibles rather than causations.
Further more recent neurological research using measures of brain activity by Libet and Soon et al. Finds that the brain activity that is causing behaviour is coming before the conscious thought. Thus free will is an after the event expkanation of behaviour rather than its cause.
Further, and this is something I noticed, the only non human primate to learn to use language, Kanzi a bonobono chimpanze, did so when his fister mother became busy with rearing her own child and he was left on his own. He the starte using the kanguage symbols board to ‘say’ what he was about to do such as ‘kanzi eat apple’. (I’ll return to this)
In the face of the realusation that thought is not causal will but post causation explanation, more than one researcher such as Haidt argues that thought is preoaration fir soeaking, oerhaos excuse generation so that we are always ready with a justification for our behaviour.
There is a problem with this in that it does not explain imagination. Peopke also imagine what they are going to do, particularly here in Japan. Even if you are really good at drawing manga it is unlikely that one could draw ones imaginings. So it is unlikely that thought is practice for communication.
So what is it?
Reconsidering Kanzi, lending a ear to the psychologist and economist Adam Smith, and also to the strange French philosopher Derida, and Freud, it could be that thought is a kind of ‘narcissistic’ ‘auto-affection’ game to void loniness, like Narcissus in the myth who loved his reflection.
For the individual it provides help, and comfort in time of solitude. And for the species, as argued by Adam Smith, it encourages us to be very active and industrious in the service of our vanity.
Perhaps now though, in these times of environmtal concern, it is time we stopped doing it, so much any way, perhaps.
And how does this relate to schizophrenia? A researcher calked Philippe Rochat ckaims that a (partial?) realisation of the multiple nature of self can result in schizophrenia. It seems that rather than realize our dual or tripleness of ourselves and our thoughts, humans have a tendency to create extra thoughts and or more selves instead, perhaps.
I do not have schizophrenia but I did experience the disintegration of my thoughts and felt, well, that described above was going on.
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