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Visual Hallucinations Are a Normal Grief Reaction
Hugh Pickens writes "Vaughn Bell has written an interesting essay at Scientific American about grief hallucinations. This phenomenon is a normal reaction to bereavement that is rarely discussed, although researchers now know that hallucinations are more likely during times of stress. Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. A study by Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. It's not unusual for people who have lost a partner to clearly see or hear the person about the house, and sometimes even converse with them at length. 'Despite the fact that hallucinations are one of the most common reactions to loss, they have barely been investigated and we know little more about them. Like sorrow itself, we seem a little uncomfortable with it, unwilling to broach the subject,' writes Bell. 'We often fall back on the cultural catch all of the "ghost" while the reality is, in many ways, more profound.' "
Yet, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
..they are actually not hallucinating? (I, for one, welcome our dead, elderly, overlords)
The dead only live on in people's memories.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, misfiring braincells are way more profound than the possibility of a life after death and all that it entails.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common
Yes, this is very common, and is usually attributed to the caffeine withdrawal symptoms prior to morning coffee.
Better known as 318230.
For several weeks after a beloved cat of mine died, I swear I saw him out of the corner of my eye a few times! Most of the "hallucinations" were brief glimpses, but one I particularly remember I turned a corner and swear I saw him sitting there. I even said involuntarily "Hi, Prince..." then realized after a few seconds that nothing was there. Pretty creepy, huh? After about a month or so I stopped "seeing" him around. So long, my friend.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
That's quite clearly just a simple glitch in the Matrix.
Psychosomatic auditory hallucinations...
Most people have to pay for such a thing.
But that's because the only time I ever lost a friend (you expect to lose grandparents) all the young folk she knew went and dropped acid. It's what she would have wanted...
I believe that life is eternal and that our body(ies) are like shirts. If one gets torn on a nail or worn out then it is discarded and a new one is put on for a new life experience.
The eternal part of us certainly can travel and assist the grieving family members just by being present with them. Time and space is an illusion and the only moment we have is the present one. Basically all time is now.
The eternal part of us knows only love... we as a body tend to exist in a state of fear and yet after enough lifetimes we (our consciousness) tends to shift from the fear side towards the love side.
To call this phenomena a hallucination seems to be a great stretch on somebody's part and certainly such an assumption is not from a level playing field. Of course, for those in fear of an afterlife... calling it a hallucination reduces the personal impact that it might have.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I'm not trying to start a flamewar (seriously), but I wonder if this is what happened when Jesus' disciples reportedly met with him after his death.
Although that would require multiple people to have similar hallucinations at the same time, since some of the accounts describe Jesus meeting with groups of disciples after his death.
But I see pictures of him every day on my computer's desktop background. Maybe I don't need to hallucinate about him because of that.
He was the coolest. He was given to me as a father's day gift. His name was Dude, and he fit that name perfectly. He was only 4 years old and showed up one morning out of the blue with some kind of brain disorder. I never thought I saw or heard him again, I just cried a lot.
They were right - the revolution did not get televised. It was posted on YouTube instead. All in 120 characters. SLOOSH!
That in 80% of cases some remnant, some energy of that person was left behind? Just because it happens frequently doesn't mean it is *not* supernatural in nature.
Do they have MRIs of people while they are experiencing a hallucination like this? Something to show the brain is dreaming, and not simply observing?
By the same token, I suppose we can't really prove that there is an observation going on. I've had family members relate to me that they remember a sequence of events, in a very specific way. I remember the same events differently. Either we are people from different dimensions who have slipped between worlds to share this one, or we have altered our own memories to suit what we would have liked to happen. One of these is more consistent with current science. It doesn't guarantee that the other option won't be found to be possible at some point.
You've been living with someone for years, you develop a model of their behavior in your brain. With them there, this helps to predict where they are likely to be, what they said in that indistinct murmur from the other room, how they are likely to react when you say that you're late for the third time this week.
So this model is going to be still running even after they have gone. You "know" that your spouse will be in the living room watching "Strictly Come Dancing" because it's 7pm. So your mental model will fill them in, and as you walk into the room it will take a little time for the model to adjust. Is this the "corner of the eye" effect at work?
OK, so I'm not a clinical psychologist, not even close. But it seems a very plausible model to me.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
I wonder that if your cat was named "The Dude", instead of just "Dude", he'd be the one hallucinating. I think it'd be great to have "The Dude" sleeping in your carpet :)
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
One thing I never understand about certain religions and spiritual beliefs is this importance that's placed on love. Sure, love is a powerful force that we generally consider "good", but love can be quite dark and twisted at times, and certainly hate can easily be just as powerful in terms of what one will accomplish in the name of it, and heck, it can definitely be very rewarding, too.
Why does love get touted around on a pedestal like it's some miracle thing? Seems a little silly to me. Any emotion can be beneficial when used in the appropriate context and detrimental when it isn't. Love is no different, and not particularly worth special praise.
eom
It ties the whole room together!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I seem to remember seeing a really good (although creepy) documentary about this very thing. Ah, here it is.
This guy's the limit!
Sounds to me like the social equivalent of phantom limb pain: "My other half is gone, but I still feel his/her presence."
I'm also reminded of sensory deprivation -- when deprived of normal sensory input, the mind generates hallucinatory sensations.
-kgj
Truly madly deeply
Non-Linux Penguins ?
and couldnt be anything else.
because, as mankind, we have discovered all secrets of existence up to this point.
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or, when you did, you should have done it controlled, with you waiting on top of him and keeping him in sight at all times.
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Good night, sweet Prince
conservation of energy.
nothing comes out of nonexistence, and nothing goes to nonexistence. they only transform.
this is a universal rule, dont err - it does not only relate to electricity, heat and whatnot, it is valid for EVERY kind of thing. you have to go a bit theoretical and philosophical here.
a human is also an entity and a form of energy, in addition to the body mass and the heat it generates.
but the effect of an entity (any living entity) is much more greater than its bodily production - imagine cities around you, machines, works of art, music, anything -> every existent thing is a part of this universe, and they are various forms of energy themselves.
the simple point is this, if a human entity complex's total energy had been as much as the bodily heat it generates and mass it contains, physically it should have been impossible for 20 of them to combine and create exponentially higher impact on their environment. therefore, their power should not be limited to their bodily complex's heat and mass, there has to be more, some form of energy which we dont know about. this is not too far fetched when you think that at the time bohr introduced his atom model, we didnt know that that atom nuclei contained energy that could destroy cities.
therefore, philosophically, according to conservation of energy (existence actually), nothing comes out of nonexistence, and nothing goes to nonexistence.
this tells that when a human complex dies, there is some other form of energy released that equals everything that human complex did in his life minus his body mass and heat.
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That would be one cat you would be HONORED to have pee on your rug.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They've barely been investigated because one of the best avenues for investigating them, hallucinogenic drugs, has been actively suppressed. Take the tryptamines for example. Here we have a class of chemicals that are, for the most part, physically harmless, that can be administered in a controlled setting and are all but guaranteed to produce hallucinations. Hell one of them, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), is even produced naturally in the human brain. This is the most powerful hallucinogen known to exist, yet we know almost nothing about it or what it's doing there, because (ironically) it's a Schedule I drug. Technically, we're all guilty of possession of a controlled substance.
Whether these things should be legalized is another topic, but at least make it easier for researchers to do legitimate science with them. Just tell me where to sign up.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
it is evident that today science tags stuff it cant yet explain with established mathematical and physics models with the label 'supernatural' and tries to dismiss. its too much an effort to establish a new science branch and its calculation/measurement medium anymore.
science grown too stale and complacent. lazy.
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it takes time for a soul passed to the other side to adjust to higher frequency and eventually become unperceptible for us.
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On the human brain: Large enough to support a vast, fertile imagination, yet still too small to often recognize imagination for what it is.
Obviously there aren't ghosts, so any evidence to their existence must be explained some other way. That's what the scientific method is all about!
I observed this phenomenon with grief over a girlfriend. We broke up after four years together. Afterward, I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye, and my heart would skip a beat. It was always someone else, though.
Another unusual visual phenomenon: when the grief was particularly overwhelming, I started seeing in black-and-white, or at least with muted perception of color.
Since then I have avoided this problem by always breaking up with a girl as soon as things start getting serious. Hey, it works.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I've used my phone as my alarm clock, and the alarm was set to a 'ship siren', a truly fearsome, horribly loud and mean signal.
One morning I just couldn't get myself to wake up.
Then one of the characters in my dream scolded me:
"What the hell are you doing? This is the Fucking Rabid Titanic. These who ignored this signal were found in the morning smeared on the wall over their bed."
woke me up.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I don't wanna hallucinate just because somebody else died.
I know my imagination, he's a dick. This will be terrifying when it happens.
Or, they're ghosts.
--
make install -not war
The mind is a wierd thing to live in. I've "seen a ghost" twice in my life. Both were wierd. Neither was explicable.
The first time my oldest was an infant and my youngest wasn't born. We lived in a funny shaped house by a railroad track (we were dirt poor). The (now ex) wife and I had just gone to bed, and both of us saw a thin, very pale woman with long black hair and wearing what looked like a "dressing gown"' from ages past walking past the bedroom door! We thought there was an intruder. We both jumped up, I looking for the intruder and she checking to make sure the baby was alright.
It was extremely strange that we would both have the same hallucination at the same time. We finally decided that we'd seen the ghost of a woman who'd been struck by a train.
The second time I saw a ghost I came to the conclusion that seeing ghosts isn't a hallucination or sight of a disembodied spirit but a wrinkle in the spacetime continuum. The girls were visiting the wife's family in Missouri and I had the house to myself. I was sitting on the toilet, and since I was alone I didn't bother shutting the bathroom door.
I looked up just as a woman wearing contemporary-looking clothing walked up to the door, startled out of her wits as if she'd seen a ghost, as was I, -- and then she vanished.
There is a lot about the physical world that we not only have never investigated, but never expected or suspected.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm no psychologist, but I had a thought as to the cause of this.
When you know someone for a time, you build a little model of them within yourself. It contains every aspect of the person that you have experienced: your expectations of them, the way they sound, the way the act, and, in some cases, the way they smell. You begin to guess what their answer to a particular question might be, or where they will be on Sunday mornings. You could hold whole conversations with this model and expect that the real person would react the same way (this isn't always true, but you expect it is).
Just because the person has past, or left, does not mean that this model has ceased operating. So, for instance, if every Saturday Jane could be found sitting in her rocker in the corner, and she had done this for as long as you could remember, then I wouldn't be surprised that you'd see her there, even if she wasn't. Or, if on Tuesday's, John could be found playing out a game of checkers in the other room, you may hear the pieces hitting the board.
Expectation can have a huge impact on reality.
I'm sorry I didn't see you behind the car.
What?
But they are starting to fade away ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I first read the tag as "I seed 'ead, people"...very confusing...too much torrenting for me, I guess.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Ah yes, this reminds me of the time I was involved in research of this nature. I was asked a series of questions, one of which was "Have you ever had a sexual encouter with a ghost?", to which I replied "Yes, of course, who hasn't?". A moment later I realised she hadn't said goat.
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception.
Dammit.
Next thing you know those awful secularists will be claiming that anecdotal stories of "I saw Jesus three days after He died" represent something fundamentally normal about the human experience.
Those damn secularists might suggest that such anecdotes may say more about the grief and mourning of people for a really nice peaceful human guy, than about the magic powers of the dead really really nice peaceful human guy. It's a good thing that no one ever made claims that differed from the early Christian church that ended up dominating the orthodoxy.
And don't even get me started about Elvis. I saw the King with my own eyes the week after he faked his own death, I tell you what.
Yes I don't think this is a surprise. I've experienced this during various types of distress- extreme stress, fatigue, grief and even hunger. I have a very active imagination and I wonder if this reinforces this. However I'm always aware to some degree of what's real and what's not. Sometimes, like in case of hunger, the hallucinations are kind of encouragement- your body's way of telling you something. Like eat something you fool. ;)
I'm not surprised that since we experience physical symptoms of distress, that we would experience mental symptoms as well.
need to learn the meaning of "irony".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are we just a figment of a cat's imagination?
But then I realise that this is just pure nonsense - cats don't give a shit.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Grief is now capable of producing a distinct drug like intoxication. As far as I'm concerned mourning and the like should be moved on to the schedule one class of drugs.
There is obviously no medical use for mourning and/or grief, and these intense visual hallucinations could force some one to rob a war widow or rape a war widow.
This could be the most dangerous cycle of all as the stress of being robbed or raped could produce just as strong "dangerous" visuals in the attackee as well as the attacker.
The times they are a changing.
Should have been:
from the who-GHOST-there dept.
bah, undoing misclicked moderation
Your brain is not a computer.
For months after my mom died I used to "see" her out of the corner of my eye in public places. Then I would turn to look and it would just be someone that resembled her (same body type, or hair or shape of the face). I just assumed that it was due to the fact that she was on my mind. Later I started to think about the brain's pattern recognition system. The one that lets us see faces in electrical outlets and the grills of cars. It allows us to get a pretty good sense of something without complete information. And for all of my life whenever I saw someone from a distance, or in poor light or out of the corner of my eye that vaguely resembled my mother it probably was my mother. That shortcut to recognition usually serves us well. Its just that it doesn't turn off instantly when someone dies. Its that flash of pain you get when you remember "oh yeah she's gone" that makes these misidentifications memorable. That being said, when you start having conversations with dead loved ones outside of a dream its time to call in a professional.
If all of our rich sense of self is the result of a set of impersonal deterministic processes; that seems to me much more fascinating than simply ascribing all that to a single imaginary particle called a soul.
No other society has "imaginary friends" and "grief halucinations" to quite the extent as the US seems to.
Hard to say if it's due to poorly regulated toxic waste management practices, chemical food additives, or simply a prevalence of the same mental illnesses that make religion such an easy sell over there.
The even more terrible truth: That mammoth nuclear stockpile is in the hands of a people who regularly see people who don't exist. *shiver*
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
So in bereavement, suddenly you're deprived of the actual stimulus. But that doesn't mean that the brain is going to let those circuits sit idle. No... the moment any unknown stimulus comes in, it's going to try to match it to the "wife" circuit. And if the "wife" circuit triggers better than anything else, then that's what I'm going to see.
In other words, we don't see things as they are; we see them as we interpret them.
So I suspect that this is just a case of the bereaved person mistaking a cat streaking around the house for their spouse. Or a bird in the air, etc.
Which doesn't mean that I don't believe in the human soul, and heaven and hell. But I don't think this is it. There's a better, simpler explaination at hand, and one that matches my occasional experience even nowadays, when I'm not bereaved.
"Laura, is that you out there?" ... oh no, sorry. It's just my son's friend.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Hey, you are out of your mind! I never wrote this comment, you are hallucinating my post.
As a matter of fact, I don't even exist, and neither does Slashdot. Get real, do you think the comments you see here could be anything but a figment of your sick imagination?
Aaah... what do they teach in schools these days?
It sounds like both you, and the poster somewhere above who had a problem with religous marketing departments, have made up your mind about the possibility of evidence, a priori.
So therefore, there is no need to consider any evidence at all.
That sounds quite similar to the "science" that Asimov introduced in his Foundation series, in which scientists of the dying Empire has concluded "the scientific method involves looking at historical records, and deciding for yourself what is true."
Asimov's subtle point was that that ain't science. Might I point out that neither is your scientific method.
The scientific method is observation, followed by experimentation, followed by theory to explain the experimentation and make as-yet unobserved predictions, followed by the repeatable experiment to test the theory. It has a partial basis in philosophy, but does not expand as wide as philosophy, and therefore will not be able to conclude certain truths, though they are truths.
So science is very useful within its limited range. Of course, for most human purposes in our very limited current society, science is useful. But philosphy is less useful over a much wider range.
Oh, and by the way, scientifical is not a word. It's intellectualizationabilizing-speak. Such usage is a way of pointing out that your opinions are much smarter than they are. Or, if you will, that you have no humility.
So... let me suggest, if you want to approach truth, try a little of that humility. Realize that you don't have all the answers, that you aren't the be-all end-all of anything, and that others -- including religions -- do sometimes have answers that are righter than yours.
Then, as part of that humility, set yourself not to deny truth when it confronts you. In other words, don't discount evidence just because it doesn't fit your preferred world view. Then be willing to learn.
Finally, let me say that I have found Christianity to be right on, including having experiences in things that scientifical people would say don't happen -- even when it happened in front of them. But I have also found that certain experiences of sin blind one to truth. That is, innocence is more humble, and more open to truth, than experience. Those who eat the apple think their eyes are opened. But that very day, their eyes become closed.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Everything we know says it isn't so.
unbelievable. what is that 'everything' ? like conservation of energy ? like dewey larson's physics ?
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If these are actually encounters with ghosts of the departed, then it should be possible to prove (in a scientifically non-rigorous way) that the ghost is not a hallucination, provided that the ghost can convey some information to the living that could not be known any other way, but could later be proved.
For example:
Of course, such an experiment could be hoaxed, and even if not hoaxed, it would not be a repeatable experiment. But if it happened to you and you knew it wasn't a hoax, it'd be pretty convincing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I see lots of investments being buried these days. What would I hallucinate about then?
or, should I say, what's with izzy stevens still having hallucinations of denny?
well, I guess it's a good way for the writers to get back at katherine heigl for her comments about them: make her look crazy so they can write her off the show.
Here's a thought experiment on how to test whether these are hallucinations or ghosts: lie to some people that their family member has died with an elaborate hoax (fake body, send the family member on vacation, etc.) See if the person "hallucinates" or not. If yes, then that's consistent with "ghosts" being all in the mind. If not... Of course this particular experiment would be grossly unethical to implement, but maybe similar experiments would get at it. Do relatives that go on long vacations or to war etc. prompt hallucinations?
As long as he's not the one making the bed warm.
I've had one hallucination, without any grief or drugs. I think stress is enough.
I was kayaking nears rocks, surfing very high waves, lost my kayak, and spent 15 minutes in the surf, hitting rocks multiple times. I got out, retrieved my kayak, launched, and paddled to a place where I could relax... then I had a pretty long and elaborate hallucination.
It involved three-four deities (Tangra, Athena, Poseidon and the Lady) and the appropriate sacrifices I should perform for my pretty damn miraculous survival. I'm an atheist, and I cannot help but think that this is how religions get started.
No good deed goes unpunished...
The grieved-for party doesn't even have to be dead for this to occur. I distinctly remember waking up one morning after breaking up with a long-term (4yrs) girlfriend and hearing her cooking breakfast, feeling the warm depression in the bed where she had slept, and "remembering" her climbing over me to go to the kitchen. The illusion was so vivid that I actually smelled bacon cooking and called out to ask her when her flight had got in (she had been living in another country at the time of the break up). When I went into the kitchen and saw nobody there, the sounds and smells of cooking immediately stopped, and I was hit with the most profound sense of grief I had ever experienced. I actually became suddenly convinced that she had passed away and somehow come to say "goodbye."
And get this- when I called her up and explained that I didn't want to bother her but I had had a very weird experience and just wanted to make sure she was OK, she told me that she had had a very similar experience. She was at a video store about to pick up a video, and without thinking she held it up for approval to someone across the room. She had somehow convinced herself it was me (in fact, it turned out to be someone who looked very similar). Not quite as profound, but still we both experienced the effect described in the article.
Unfortunately due to presence of an ocean and most of two continents between us, this did not lead to awesome reunited-and-it-feels-so-good nookie. It did, however, take much of the sting of a very bitter break-up away.
*gulp*,*sniff*
The ghost-hypothesis actually does make a prediction that is different than if there are no ghosts. Study people who have every reason to believe that they are bereaved, but in fact their loved one is not dead due to some freak situation. If people still have these hallucinations at the same rate, then no ghosts are involved, at least not in the way we usually think about ghosts.
Of course finding enough such people and asking them about it before they find out that their loved one is in fact not dead would be hard, and it has to be before, or people might just forget about or explain away what they saw. Ideally they should be compared to people who are in the exact same situation, except that they really are bereaved. Perhaps just interviewing enough people whose loved one's have died of the same cause might work - some of them are bound to be mistaken, even if only a small fraction, and a follow-up would identify some of those cases.
Whether this is a study even worth doing depends on your perspective.
I've noticed a similar effect learning foreign languages... when I came back from Japan, every conversation I half-heard in the background sounded like Japanese until I got close enough to make out what was being said. When I got back from Argentina, everything sounded Spanish.
So even after our loved ones are gone, our minds keep them on as specters. On the one hand, as many have mentioned, this would seem to indicate that a lot of what we see in our moved ones is probably built out of assumptions and memory... we see and hear them around us because we expect to do so.
But it also makes me wonder how much of ourselves we "store" in these relationships. The image of an elderly person having a conversation with a dead spouse is striking, because it makes us wonder: what if those conversations are just the way that person thinks?
Plato wrote long, long after his master Socrates had died, but he kept on Socrates as a protagonist in all his dialogues. What if Socrates wasn't a memory to Plato, or even a character, but rather an essential part of the way he thought about the world?
The human brain seems to be very good at making shortcuts to speed up processing.
So when I'm around my wife, my human brain assumes that the person I see is my wife (shoot, it even assumes the warmth next to me in bed is my wife, and that the person I'm talking to is my wife), and interprets it that way for me.
If your brain was REALLY good at making shortcuts, it'd skip all that and use the only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear" ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Like when before a back operation I "asked" my dead grandfather to watch over me and then later on when I mentioned it my sister who was visiting me in the hospital after the operation turned white because at the time of my operation my then alive grandmother heard my dead grandfather calling MY name from the TV room where he used to watch TV and take his naps. I know, just a coincidence to the dedicated atheist. (sigh)
I can't understand why people think there's something illogical about religion:
What I find interesting is that people who will run Linux because it's The Right Thing To Do (TM) and spurn Microsoft because it is evil will, in a strident display of cognitive dissonance, dismiss those who believe in God, in right and wrong, etc... as somehow uninformed or illogical. Could it be that believers are simply applying the same principles to their lives as a whole? That is, they desire to be ethical and honest, and to do the right thing. It seems like if one would attend a University to expand one's capacity for thought, it would be only logical to attend a church, to believe in a God, in order to expand one's capacity for virtue.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Imagine trying to prove magnetism with plastic, paper and wood. You need to use the right tools, which in this case are outside of the realm of physical science. Using the right tools (faith and belief would be more proper), you can easily see that there is an entire universe awaiting.
Or maybe, what they're measuring is that there really are ghosts, and they're common.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Ooohh! Oohh! I know this one!
Batman! It's Batman, right? It's gotta be.
Psh. Everyone knows that when the dead rise, you call Ash. He can usually be found in housewares.
sudo eat my shorts
Sorry folks. It turned out all of the test subjects were on acid.
---
The views expressed here are completely are unworthy of publication.
when deprived of normal sensory input, the mind generates hallucinatory sensations.
This explains my imaginary girlfriend.
LOL!
-kgj
but all of them are refused and discarded, and the undeniable ones are just ignored.
The undeniable ones are denied, eh? The reason this evidence is being ignored is because either it is garbage or doesn't actually prove what is claimed.
Julian Jaynes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes [wikipedia] wrote about stress causing hallucinations in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. This article relates to many of the same points Jaynes makes in his arguments.
(Or maybe I'm just not nuts enough yet. Yikes.)
"You will be. You will be."
- Yoda
-kgj
Read Shulgin's book. Phenethylamines but still. There is real research going on with tryptamines too, search for a recent Harvard article about mushrooms producing religious experiences. (read the bible passage about mana. Moses was eating shrooms when he talked to God...oh wait I can't say that or I'll upset all masses of dummies)
What do you want to know about tryptamines? yeah some important neurotransmitters are tryptamines, like DMT and serotonin. Flooding yourself with them will damage you and could kill you. What happens if you take 3 months worth of prozac at once? Nice knowin ya. My body also produces it's own piss and shit, but that doesn't mean I want to ingest more of either.
Explaining (disproving) religious experiences with science will upset the vast majority of folks, who all happen to be believers. Unless you have a bunch of money, don't expect anyone to research this field except the companies who want to make a pill to sell you. If a compound can't get FDA approval, then you won't see anything about it.
I would love to see real science work at explaining everything (and be right) I want all the answers, but I can accept that I won't live to see them all. I would agree that it is unfortunate that stupid people stand in the way of progress. I've read that cannabis can halt tumor growth... Why the hell isn't available to the sick? If it's true, then all those who oppose pot use get cancer. If it's not true, then why not do a study to prove it? At least the cancer patients in the study could get high and maybe feel better for a time before they die painfully. Or maybe we could give the terminally ill hallucinogenic drugs, like mushrooms, and let them talk to god or other ghosts. What the hell, they'll be dead soon anyway.
Lucidity is pretty simple, two major components, awareness and emotional control. Lucidity is sort of a base marker for a persons personal evolution. One must be aware what is occuring around them and not blinded by their thoughts. This allows the person to realize they're dreaming. Any sort of emotional outburst will break the lucidity, hence amount of emotional control dictates how long the session of lucidity.
> he only shortcut a married man needs: "Yes dear"
Better than that one is ...
"Whatever you think is best."
Your wife will think you actually care about her opinions. [I got that one from my soon-to-be brother-in-law days before I was married.]
1) There's no scientific theory that would explain that our "spirit" still live after our death.
Data exists independently of theory. The data in this case is a shitload of first-person accounts coming from all of recorded history. Are they all lies? If they're hallucinations, what's the mechanism that produces them? What about hallucinations that provide the subject with valid, verifiable information about real-world events the subject didn't know and couldn't have known to begin with?
Real scientists see data that doesn't fit any known theory as a chance to do good science. Maybe the data gets invalidated. Maybe the data when looked at within the right perspective does fit a known theory. Maybe the data requires new theory to explain it. Perhaps it's possible to do controlled experiments to get new data.
Science is the search. The attempt to explain things using dogma and to say that if it doesn't fit your dogma, it can't exist is religion, not science. No matter what you call your beliefs. When you try mixing religion and science, you get misbegotten abortions like Creationism.
Most of today's "cutting-edge" theories are going to be as outdated as "phlogiston chemistry" a century from now and college students will be asking each other 'how could anyone with a functioning brain believe that bullshit?', making your assertion that modern scientific theory is a complete explanation of everything "not even wrong". If it were really true, we could shut down scientific research on the basis that what we know is a complete description of the universe and all that's left to do is engineering R&D to transform what we know into what we can do.
know that some will invoke traditions and culture,
The only tradition I need to use to debunk your bullshit is the tradition of science itself.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I hope this doesn't turn all the non-violent hippies into free hallucination seeking murders.
Maybe consciousness is what happens when you build a world simulator using some aspects of quantum computing (for the massive parallelization with finite resources ), and then get it to recursively (and infinitely?) simulate itself and the world.
:)
;). Or also "Nope, that's not it".
Where at the singularity/infinity is that "weirdness".
I disagree with the popular concept of "I think therefore I am". You don't really have to think to experience the "I am" phenomenon - whether in language or in pictures or in sensation. Hellen Keller was self-aware before she was taught symbols/language. Language makes it easier to store, recall, process and transmit thoughts - it quantizes them. If you learn another language it is easier to realize there can be thoughts that language has no words for.
The internal monologue is not the awareness itself, anymore than the characters being typed on our screens are. The monologue allows the actual "awareness" to go "yes that's the word/symbol I was thinking of" - even though it wasn't exactly thinking of it before
To me it is interesting that God in Genesis 3 says "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" in response when asked for his name.
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My father is a WWII vet who raised a family of 10 on a modest salary by being hard-nosed, no-nonsense, practical realist. So one day (when I was a kid), he's blowing his top because SOMEONE was messing in his dresser drawer! His box of cards was opened, and a prayer card that he had saved since he was a kid was standing up on top. The prayer card was from a wake for a childhood friend who had killed himself as a kid. My father kept in touch with the family through the annual Christmas card exchange. Nobody fessed up to rifleing through his drawer (a capital offense). Then later that same evening he gets a call from the family with the bad news that the childhood friend's father (same name) had passed the night before. Please explain that.
Be heard || Be herd
Of course, it helps if you can do math in your head without writing anything down :)
If I could just visualize a sheet of paper better, I wouldn't have that problem... ;)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
(read the bible passage about mana. Moses was eating shrooms when he talked to God...oh wait I can't say that or I'll upset all masses of dummies)
Right, mushrooms growing in the desert.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Not long after my Grandfather died, my Grandmother walked in to her living room and freaked out because she swore she saw him sitting in his favorite recliner. It freaked her out so bad that she ended up giving the recliner away.
IMHO, IANAL, TINLA, etc...
This happens because people are brought up to believe that death is not the end. Then when it occurs, they are COMPLETELY unprepared for the reality that the deceased no longer exists. So being unable to accept that, their mind creates illusions.
It's too bad that religion teaches people that they never have to lose anything. It's not true. When someone dies, they're gone, forever. Best thing to do is grieve and accept it, and enjoy the precious life that you still possess.
The evidence that the Bible gives for Jesus rising from the dead is that people saw him and conversed with him after his execution. This makes it sound like the people in the bible were hallucinating.
No, I will not work for your startup