Hallucinations

"Yes. That’s an argument Sacks makes, and more recently people like Tanya Luhrmann, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford, have done a lot of work on comparing different cultural models of hallucination and showing how it shapes people’s experience of unusual phenomena. So, for example, if you think it’s not possible that other people’s thoughts and ideas can get into your head, then it’s going to feel all the more violating when someone speaks in your head. But Sacks in Hallucinations makes very clear that this book isn’t about schizophrenia or psychosis, it’s almost a catalogue of all the other forms of hallucination, the panoply of illusory phenomena out there, which is much broader than people appreciate. “The boundaries between fictional worlds and the real world is much more porous and malleable than we might appreciate” Most of what we know about hallucinatory experiences still comes from psychosis and schizophrenia, but in terms of the range of different ways we can perceive the world differently, it’s all there in Sacks’s book. Compared to some of his earlier work it’s less autobiographical and story based. There are just lots and lots of examples. But the sheer breadth of it is really useful for understanding the different ways in which people might have hallucinatory experiences, whether it’s in survival situations, grief, endurance sports or neurological disorders. It’s the parts where it gets more personal and he writes from his own experience. You’ve got these great stories from psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s whose interests in altered states extended to them trying out different drugs, and Sacks has got—slightly alarmingly—multiple examples of him trying out various things and becoming a bit worse for wear. At one point he ends up overdosing on chloral hydrate, which he takes to sleep, and giving himself delirium tremens . His discussion of migraine, and the visual experiences that come with that, is fascinating. Visual disturbance as a consequence of migraine is actually very common, often not very well understood, often not very well controlled, and can have a profound effect on people."