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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.
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.
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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Of course it's happening in your head, but why on earth should that mean it's not real?
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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.
who you gonna call?
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
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'.
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, for one, welcome our dead, elderly, overlords)
You voted for McCain, right?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
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.
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
'e's not dead. 'e's pinin' for the fjords!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ooohh! Oohh! I know this one!
Batman! It's Batman, right? It's gotta be.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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 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" ;-)
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