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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...
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.
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
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Of course it's happening in your head, but why on earth should that mean it's not real?
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Do you have any proof for such assertions? The most simple explanation is: we each have one life, it stops when your brain dies. End of story.
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
If I had a cosy delusion like that, I'd not want to believe in hallucinations either.
and couldnt be anything else.
because, as mankind, we have discovered all secrets of existence up to this point.
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It's possible. So are flying spaghetti monsters, Santa Claus, and God. I can haz evidence, plz?
You can believe anything you want (and anyone will have a hard time proving you're wrong, even if you really are). It's just a matter of choice. But if you want your claims to be heard (by me at least, a very skeptic person) you have to follow some more criteria. But that's just me.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
On the human brain: Large enough to support a vast, fertile imagination, yet still too small to often recognize imagination for what it is.
Or, they're ghosts.
--
make install -not war
I suffer from bad insomnia which I had thought was even worse until my wife proved to me that a lot of my sleeplessness was caused by my habit of dreaming that I was awake. I'd be lying in bed fretful because I couldn't sleep while my wife was trying to rouse me because I was snoring so loud.
The illusion of being awake was so strong -- the cliche that we can tell the difference between reality and dreams is a crock -- that I refused to believe her until I had to rouse her for doing the same thing.
To be honest, this just sounds like a 'no true Scotsman' argument. 'Love' is defined as only those parts of love which are positive, uplifting, and nuturative, and the potentially nasty baggage (possessiveness, obsession, etc) are wtritten off as something separate.
Nor would I necessarily agree that love is the basis of all human society. I live in a big city where there are fairly consistent patterns of behavior which you'd consider polite and civil (folks hold doors for each other, say excuse me when they bump into someone, offer subway seats to the elderly or infirm, etc). I don't think this is due so much to some hidden wellspring of love for our common man as much as a desire to keep things running smoothly--I treat you with a certain amount of respect and politeness, and you do likewise. For all I care you might be thinking about how nice it would be to strangle me, but as long as you keep your behavior civil we can get along. It's more 'social contract' than 'love'.
Someone hand this person "+1, Nerd" for working a Harry Potter reference in.
same hallucination at the same time.
I am reminded of cases where people's story for court testimony can be changed by reinforcement of those around them.
Either that or an Arwen-Liv-Tyler-Ninja really did walk past your room.
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
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.
Groups of people don't hallucinate the same thing at the same time, and certain individuals weren't grieving very much at his passing (Saul of Tarsus, Thomas, James)
Psychiatry is trying its very best to destroy peoples faith.
Demand for their pills and services goes down when they are competing with inner personal strength.
They have to make people crazy somehow. Exploiting their grief is one way.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Have fun failing to get grant money (or succeding at all, really) for basing your hypothesis on wild speculation instead of ANY basis in fact or reality. Science isn't a bunch of people going "huh I wonder". If they had any reason to believe it was "ghosts", it would be based on something other than a bunch of superstitions.
And how, exactly, would one go about detecting a "ghost"? I doubt you could even define what that is, let alone what device/spectrum/way that you could even think of detecting it (read: because it's not real). Other than just running brain scans to see that these people (almost certainly) are just hallucinating.
I wish there were ghosts too. And aliens. And psychics. It'd make the world a lot more interesting. But we're talking about reality here. Or so I assumed.