A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is incorrect is a judgment based upon it.
We know that human brains are the most complex structure found with a hundred billion neurons crammed in there. And there is a price for all that entanglement which means that there are a lot of ways for things to go erroneous like a hallucination.
By choice, our brain attains information from the sensory organs to complete the picture, but sometimes our brain skips all this and initiates to play stratagem on us.
Have you ever felt like your name is being called out when you’re alone? That’s a hallucination y’all. But common for people with schizophrenia which is thought to be partially caused by chemical imbalances in the thalamus which is obnoxious.
Some common hallucinations are
- Feeling sensation in the body,
- The feel of something crawling in the body or movements of internal organs,
- Hearing random sounds even when no one is there.
Causes?
Did you know hallucination can last mere minutes or recur for years? Our brain malfunctions can cause us to see things that aren’t there like monsters. fMRI studies predict that hallucinations activate the same brain area as a sight that is not activated by fantasy.
If a certain part of the fusiform gyrus is hyperactive, then Epilepsy, tumors, or migraine can cause this Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, but we still don’t completely comprehend what causes hallucination.
- Migraines can also cause simpler hallucination like patterns
- When senses arent working properly like blind people experiencing Charles Bonnet syndrome where they can see whole scenarios play in front of them, or suddenly hallucinate whole scenes in vivid color.
- Elderly people who cannot hear clearly can sometimes hear music or noises so vividly, sometimes elaborated as the cacophony
- If you’re not feeling well from lack of sleep, hunger, or fever
- People in agony feel the presence of their loved ones.
- And some people choose to modify their brain chemistry intentionally with drugs like LSD, psilocybin, etc that can cause hallucinations. Because some drugs can activate the receptors in a broad range of brain areas incorporating the cortical regions for all the senses.
- In some cases where people with completely unimpaired senses, our brain constructs a world from incomplete information, for example, glitch.
All this information sounds so amazing that it makes us wonder how our brain can construct the world we perceive.
