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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.
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'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.
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
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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.
It ties the whole room together!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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
Dude it's called the Bible. And if isn't in there you shouldn't even be thinking about it, sinner.
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 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.
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.
a human is also an entity and a form of energy, in addition to the body mass and the heat it generates.
No, it's not.
physically it should have been impossible for 20 of them to combine and create exponentially higher impact on their environment.
I can't even describe how incredibly wrong and stupid this statement is. By this definition termites must have some sort of "higher energy" (ever seen an African termite nest?).
therefore, philosophically, according to conservation of energy
Good Christ, man. Now you're going to try to co-opt the laws of conservation of energy, despite clearly having no idea what you're talking about? Here, let me explain it to you:
The sun beams energy, in the form of radiation, to Earth.
Plants convert that radiation into chemical energy.
I eat that chemical energy.
I then expend said chemical energy welding a girder to a skyscraper.
Hey, look at that, I'm increasing the order of my local universe by utilizing energy provided to me by the sun. No magic needed.
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.
And that tells me that you're so desperate to believe that you'll survive after you're dead that you'll make up basically anything. You know, like Jesus did.
Let me make this simple: when you die, you're dead. Your body decomposes, and the various compounds that make up your corpse enter the food chain. That's it. So make the best of this life. It's the only one you get, and once it's done, it's *done*.
Time and space is an illusion
Lunchtime doubly so
Free Martian Whores!
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.
That's a load of horseshit, and the fact that you'd make such a claim suggests to me that you have very little contact with people doing actual science. When I was a grad student hanging around the bio department, the folks in the department are some of the cleverest, most engaged individuals you're ever likely to meet, and they're all hungry to dig out new concepts and ideas. Imagine being the guy who creates an entirely new field of study--even if you died penniless and unsung, you'd be a legend. Many, many scientists would be willing to pursue long shots for such an opportunity.
The problem with 99% of the so-called supernatural is that there's not the slightest damn bit of evidence to support new fields of study. There was a lab at Duke University for at least 20-30 years for the study of psi phenomenon like ESP, telepathy, etc. Now, granted, I'm sure they weren't the most highly funded department, but in all the time they were active they never found a damn thing. If these phenomenon were real, wouldn't you expect to see SOMETHING? And if you found solid evidence of some hitherto fantastic phenomenon, wouldn't you trumpet it from the rooftops even if mainstream scientists ignored you? Yet no good evidence seems to exist.
It's a very handy position for the fringe crowd: blame mainstream science for marginalizing your ideas, and if a real scientist does produce data contradicting your claims, just keep clamoring for more money and more research, regardless of how little support you may have for your claims.
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.
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.
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.
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
Modern science may be a long way off from what was accepted 500 years ago, but the fact is that 500 years ago there was some kind of consistently observable phenomenon that somebody made note of. Somebody studied it, and thought about it, and theorized about it, and new conclusions were established. Somebody else carried the work a little farther, or maybe new technologies allowed greater insights than previously possible. But eventually, science advances.
Contrast this with what we currently consider pseudoscience, where despite the best efforts of many people, there's almost nothing to observe: no experiments you can do, no verifiable, measurable examples to provide the seed of a hypothesis, much less a basis for an entirely new branch of science. For something to be understood, first it has to be, you know, REAL.
And comparing modern science to any church just proves your stunning ignorance. There's nothing scientists love more than tearing down old theories and replacing them with something new, and there's no quicker way to get your name in the history books. It may take time for new ideas to catch on (as it should--it takes time to build evidence and persuade people) but valid concepts don't get buried just because they're inconvenient. Spend some time with any real scientists and see if you're still willing to make such an inane statement.
we have had discovered many things back in 1850. there were even scientific journals claiming 'everything that can be discovered, is discovered'.
then review the last 150 years.
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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.
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.
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
For a finite investment, you get an infinite return. You have a guaranteed return on your investment.
You don't know that. That's the whole point.
Religion still (in most cases) makes one a better person.
Arguable, in the sense that Santa Clause encourages kids to behave. I'd rather teach principles based on concern for yourself, others, and society than a the wrath of a whimsical god that certain people claim to have authority on.
Can't beat the peace and joy religion brings in times of suffering. Those without any hope for the future fare a lot worse than those with hope. Religion has a social value apart from its religious message.
Perhaps. Then again, it also encourages people to get sucked in by faith healers and the like.
For all the complaints about religion, participation is much more voluntary than participation in government.
Depends on the religion, time, and place. Many religions are dogmatic and have the concept of blasphemy.
As a believer, if I'm wrong about God's existence, I'll never know the difference. An atheist wrong about God's existence is in for a very rude awakening. In short, you risk a lot more through unbelief than belief.
This is just Pascal's Wager. Been refuted for ages. Maybe you risk eternal Hell for believing in a false god for the wrong reasons.
Could it be that believers are simply applying the same principles to their lives as a whole?
As a non-believer, I came to that position by applying my principles. Every time I looked critically at the evidence, religion came up empty. It seemed best explained as mythology.
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 logical thing would be to study philosophy -- it's like religion without the dogma.
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.