Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Soupie]

@maxman: "all this talk of hallucinations in 'sane people yada yada, how many people here have ever hallucinated, how here know someone who has hallucinated, nil and nil, ffs get a grip people."

1) People may not be aware they've had an externally induced, temporary, vivid hallucination, and 2) they may be too embarrassed to tell friends/family about the naked man in their closet, and 3) these events are rare, both hallucinatory experiences and reported paranatural experiences.

@smcder: "I worked about seven years in the mental health field and persons who do have severe mental illness and have hallucinations on a relatively regular basis do seem to become aware - sometimes after the episode but quite often during the episode."

In this case, I believe the focus is temporary, potentially environmentally induced hallucinations. Theoretically, these experiences could be one-of-a-kind events in an individual's life. Re: Sacks: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This phenomena may be real (is real, actually) inspite of any tragic flaws Sacks may have.

(Finally, this phenomena may account for some, but not all, paranatural experiences.)

 

[manxman]

In this case, I believe the focus is temporary, potentially environmentally induced hallucinations. Theoretically, these experiences could be one-of-a-kind events in an individual's life. Re: Sacks: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This phenomena may be real (is real, actually) inspite of any tragic flaws Sacks may have.


...........................


there is no case soupie, show me a case where enviromentally induced hallucinations have affected 2 or more people in exactly the same way.
i will make it easier than that, show me a case where the enviroment has made anyone with no previous record of hallucination, hallucinate.

all i see is may or maybe, thats not fact, thats guessing as below..

you may win the lottery, or maybe your wife will.

i know people halucinate just prior to death in extreme enviroments, as in freezing to death, you are not talking about kind of situation.

 

[smcder]

@maxman: "all this talk of hallucinations in 'sane people yada yada, how many people here have ever hallucinated, how here know someone who has hallucinated, nil and nil, ffs get a grip people."

1) People may not be aware they've had an externally induced, temporary, vivid hallucination, and 2) they may be too embarrassed to tell friends/family about the naked man in their closet, and 3) these events are rare, both hallucinatory experiences and reported paranatural experiences.

@smcder: "I worked about seven years in the mental health field and persons who do have severe mental illness and have hallucinations on a relatively regular basis do seem to become aware - sometimes after the episode but quite often during the episode."

In this case, I believe the focus is temporary, potentially environmentally induced hallucinations. Theoretically, these experiences could be one-of-a-kind events in an individual's life. Re: Sacks: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This phenomena may be real (is real, actually) inspite of any tragic flaws Sacks may have.

(Finally, this phenomena may account for some, but not all, paranatural experiences.)

I agree and I should have taken the time to round my comments out.

A one time event/ a sighting or experience cuts both ways - if there is no history of mental illness or hallucination it means its time to look for evidence of what was seen and to look for what might have caused a hallucination in an otherwise apparently health person. Both are interesting. If John Mack did find (and I found some links on this) that abductees don't show psychological aberration - you can also make the argument that we just don't know what to look for yet - but then that can lead to the question of whether the abnormality gives the person a sensitivity to the phenomena . . . and so on.

I was noting in response to Manxman's comment (that I think goes to your point that this probably only accounts for some of the experiences) that often persons with mental illness are aware that what they are seeing or experiencing isn't real but it's still compelling and I think that made this comment on Sacks' work notable to me:

What is quite remarkable, though, is that many of those he studies barely realise that there is anything abnormal about them: for instance, people with memory problems soon forget them. The man who mistakes his wife for a hat would continue to do so if she did not complain, and our imperialist clinician often has to go to great lengths to demonstrate that he actually has a problem other than bad eyesight (his eyesight is actually fine).

Along with other comments on his work - it seems this might be questionable or at least exaggerated for literary interest. The main point I had with Sacks were questions by his colleagues over his methods - Sacks is a good writer and brings attention to some very strange things but it looks like his descriptions are idiosyncratic and have at least some concern for literary as well as scientific merit and in this he is in league with Freud and I'm sure many others.

So yes, I do agree - some of the strange experiences probably are chalkable up to strange goings on in the brain itself. Very generally speaking I am going to always try to be a "both/and" kind of guy.

 

[smcder]

In this case, I believe the focus is temporary, potentially environmentally induced hallucinations. Theoretically, these experiences could be one-of-a-kind events in an individual's life. Re: Sacks: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. This phenomena may be real (is real, actually) inspite of any tragic flaws Sacks may have.


...........................


there is no case soupie, show me a case where enviromentally induced hallucinations have affected 2 or more people in exactly the same way.
i will make it easier than that, show me a case where the enviroment has made anyone with no previous record of hallucination, hallucinate.

all i see is may or maybe, thats not fact, thats guessing as below..

you may win the lottery, or maybe your wife will.

i know people halucinate just prior to death in extreme enviroments, as in freezing to death, you are not talking about kind of situation.

Fight! Fight! Fight! (. . . sorry, the Irish in me came out for a moment)

what about gas leaks or magnetic fields? I think in the Paracast interview with Dr Barry Taff the latter was discussed.

Now, this one:

there is no case soupie, show me a case where enviromentally induced hallucinations have affected 2 or more people in exactly the same way.

. . . that's tricky!!

 

[Burnt State]

I don't deny the claim that popularist authors in scientific fields may be easily critiqued for a number of reasons including the pursuit of literary fame as Sacks has. However, taking time to read the UFO iconoclast article and commentary posted above does provide the possibility of environmentally induced hallucinations as a more likely scenario than people experiencing legitimate time slips together.

What's more likely, that people travelling in a car together suddenly travel backwards in time by 100 years, or that they both are experiencing an environmentally induced, shared hallucination? The madness of crowds theory tells us how easily it is for large groups of people to cry "Witch!" because look, there above their head flies the Evil one. Yes, I see it too, says another and another etc.. Self-induced illusions are part of our cultural history of life on earth. Social conditioning plays an enormous role in what we do and how we see. Some men see pure evil when a woman is not wearing appropriate coverings and she is beaten in public immediately while onlookers cheer this unspeakable act on as 'normal.' Our brain chemistry is complicated and intersects with our thoughts, visions and actions in ways not fully comprehended yet.

It's really not that tricky at all. Virgin Mary hallucinations by crowds anyone?

 

[manxman]

show me a case where a gas leak has induced a ghost sighting or a ufo sighting or even as soupie claims a dog headed human leaning against a lamp-post, or pissing up it leg cocked doggy style.

and apologies to soupie if i have come over all shirty, i feel no ill-will towards you or anyone here not even lancylad, altho my choice of expressing myself may sometimes convey a different slant, its all good lads.

 

[Soupie]

show me a case where enviromentally induced hallucinations have affected 2 or more people in exactly the same way.

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

I'm sure there are more examples. I'll be sure to post them here as I encounter them. But you're right, manxman, there aren't, that I'm aware of, specific cases in which it was proved that two people who saw, say, Mothman, had experienced simultaneous, temporary, identical hallucinations. However, I still content that it is a viable possible explanation for some apparent paranatural experiences.

@smcder

Also, not to belabor the point, but there was an account I read recently of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia (whatever that actually is). He had been experiencing either consistent sleep paralysis and/or OBEs. Having no knowledge of the workings of the brain and/or mental illness he, wait for it, attributed his experiences to the supernatural (as I think many, many people do). When he finally received "treatment" for his illness, his mental health improved, if only because he no longer thought himself evil and beset with demons. He still had the mental illness of course. (I tried to find this case via a Google search but no luck.)

 

[smcder]

I don't deny the claim that popularist authors in scientific fields may be easily critiqued for a number of reasons including the pursuit of literary fame as Sacks has. However, taking time to read the UFO iconoclast article and commentary posted above does provide the possibility of environmentally induced hallucinations as a more likely scenario than people experiencing legitimate time slips together.

What's more likely, that people travelling in a car together suddenly travel backwards in time by 100 years, or that they both are experiencing an environmentally induced, shared hallucination? The madness of crowds theory tells us how easily it is for large groups of people to cry "Witch!" because look, there above their head flies the Evil one. Yes, I see it too, says another and another etc.. Self-induced illusions are part of our cultural history of life on earth. Social conditioning plays an enormous role in what we do and how we see. Some men see pure evil when a woman is not wearing appropriate coverings and she is beaten in public immediately while onlookers cheer this unspeakable act on as 'normal.' Our brain chemistry is complicated and intersects with our thoughts, visions and actions in ways not fully comprehended yet.

It's really not that tricky at all. Virgin Mary hallucinations by crowds anyone?

Again - I do not disagree.

As for Sacks there does seem to be legitimate criticism of his methods.

What's more likely, that people travelling in a car together suddenly travel backwards in time by 100 years, or that they both are experiencing an environmentally induced, shared hallucination?

I don't know - do you have the odds for both events? From what I know now I would go with a hallucination - but an environmentally induced, shared hallucination may also be extremely rare - so maybe we need to look for another explanation.

Then again, in a hundred years, maybe we routinely time travel (unless Ufology's proof is correct) . . .

Manxman has the question on the table about what in the environment could induce a hallucination in a healthy person? Magnetic fields? Gas (has been proposed as an explanation for the Delphic Oracle). You'd have to go look for more mundane examples too where someone didn't hallucinate something paranormal but simply hallucinated a house or a car or thought their car was a truck or the person with them was there brother when they weren't - how often does that happen and what in the environment causes it or does the normal human mind just glitch from time to time or is there a TIA or other physical explanation - ? I think the brain probably does - but probably most of these glitches last a very short time.

The madness of crowds theory tells us how easily it is for large groups of people to cry "Witch!" because look, there above their head flies the Evil one. Yes, I see it too, says another and another etc.. Self-induced illusions are part of our cultural history of life on earth. Social conditioning plays an enormous role in what we do and how we see. Some men see pure evil when a woman is not wearing appropriate coverings and she is beaten in public immediately while onlookers cheer this unspeakable act on as 'normal.' Our brain chemistry is complicated and intersects with our thoughts, visions and actions in ways not fully comprehended yet.

On this one what I would want to see is people separately interviewed as to what they saw and then compare the details.

Some men see pure evil when a woman is not wearing appropriate coverings and she is beaten in public immediately while onlookers cheer this unspeakable act on as 'normal.'

That's not a hallucination in the sense of seeing something (as a visual or auditory experience).

The Vigin Mary is a good example - everyone in the crowd has some idea of what it should look like, but again do they all see exactly the same thing?

 

[smcder]

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

I'm sure there are more examples. I'll be sure to post them here as I encounter them. But you're right, manxman, there aren't, that I'm aware of, specific cases in which it was proved that two people who saw, say, Mothman, had experienced simultaneous, temporary, identical hallucinations. However, I still content that it is a viable possible explanation for some apparent paranatural experiences.

@smcder

Also, not to belabor the point, but there was an account I read recently of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia (whatever that actually is). He had been experiencing either consistent sleep paralysis and/or OBEs. Having no knowledge of the workings of the brain and/or mental illness he, wait for it, attributed his experiences to the supernatural (as I think many, many people do). When he finally received "treatment" for his illness, his mental health improved, if only because he no longer thought himself evil and beset with demons. He still had the mental illness of course. (I tried to find this case via a Google search but no luck.)

I'm not sure which point you are belaboring?

What schizophrenia is and what mental illness is - that's an enormous topic - in working with persons diagnosed with mental illness (notice how I say that) and their families - I rarely encountered anyone diagnosed within the last ten years who had one consistent diagnosis. The most common by far was bi-polar, borderline and if the symptoms were severe enough - schizophrenia. And then schizo-affective disorder which is the best of both worlds. ADD was usually thrown in for good measure if it was a kid.

Brain scans allegedly show that diagnoses overlap in what areas of the brain they effect - attending NIMH seminars I got the feeling they were rather narrowly focused on neurology (per Nora Volkoff's interests) but there were other kinds of presentations too - but I did wonder if the brain mapping and other initiatives strictly served the interests of persons living with mental illness or if this was the research body tasked with gathering that information that could then be used for lots of things.

As for the above example - I've come across many cases like this - hyper-religiosity features in manic states and in schizophrenia - so I'm still not sure what point you are making? I do think this:

if only because he no longer thought himself evil and beset with demons.

Is often a significant part of the treatment - just being given some "objective" (and authorative) explanation for your experience . . . for years people were told mental illness was a "chemical imbalance" (Google "no such thing as a chemical imbalance" or something similar) . . . lies we tell children, as they say. But there is no such thing as a placebo effect in depression for example - if you feel better that's the whole thing.

On the other hand, I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in my late 20s and I've said since that time that medication has developed with the primary effect of benefiting the family and the clinicians - a drug is successful if the patient becomes more cooperative - the subjective experience of the patient isn't addressed - you still feel lousy but you show up for your appointments and that is deemed a success.

By the way, I was diagnosed with extremely low levels of Vitamin D in my late 30s and subsequently got off all psychiatric medications. That's an N of 1.

So am I saying mental illness isn't real or that meds don't work - none of that, I'm not saying anything simple at all - I'm pretty generally a both/and kind of guy.

 

[Soupie]

On this one what I would want The Vigin Mary is a good example - everyone in the crowd has some idea of what it should look like, but again do they all see exactly the same thing?

At the same time, do people reporting shared paranatural experiences report exactly the same thing?

 

[smcder]

show me a case where a gas leak has induced a ghost sighting or a ufo sighting or even as soupie claims a dog headed human leaning against a lamp-post, or pissing up it leg cocked doggy style.

and apologies to soupie if i have come over all shirty, i feel no ill-will towards you or anyone here not even lancylad, altho my choice of expressing myself may sometimes convey a different slant, its all good lads.

show me a case where a gas leak has induced a ghost sighting or a ufo sighting or even as soupie claims a dog headed human leaning against a lamp-post, or pissing up it leg cocked doggy style.

I can't!! lol

I still wanted to see a fight . . . ;-)

 

[smcder]

At the same time, do people reporting shared paranatural experiences report exactly the same thing?

I don't think they normally do - but we'd be talking about cases where the witness reports do match, if there are such cases. Then hallucination becomes a questionable explanation.

 

[Burnt State]

What I'm trying to present here is that chemistry and culture interact with each other. And we use culture to reinforce the naming of the vision, I would suspect that interviews with the crowd at the witch burning will report all sorts of wild imagery that fall well within the norms of belief of what Satan could have provided for the day, or for why the woman had to be burned and beaten etc.. So no, they don't see the same exact thing, unless they start sharing the vision linguistically while it's happening and then you will definitely have a consolidated witness report.

As for shared hallucinations induced in the environment I will follow the chain, but in the comments on Sacks from the iconoclast article above it is Duensing who speaks to magnetic fields induced by magnesium as one of the most common components in paranormal hallucinations. If you know his website and hus writing it can be thick but fascinating.

From elsewhere:

The Interpenetration of The Mind
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an extraordinary technique pioneered by neuroscientists to explore the workings of the brain. The idea is to place a human in a rapidly changing magnetic field that is powerful enough to induce currents in neurons in the brain. Then sit back and see what happens. So what would this kind of lightning-induced transcranial stimulation look like to anybody unlucky enough to experience it? Peer and Kendl say it may well look like the type of hallucinations induced by lab-based tests, in other words luminous lines and balls that appear to float in space in front of the subject’s eyes. It turns out, of course, that there are numerous reports of these types of observations during thunder storms which also has the effects of ionizing the local atmosphere. “An observer reporting this experience is likely to classify the event under the preconceived term of “ball lightning”,” say Kendl and Peer. That’s an interesting idea: that a large class of well-reported phenomenon may be the result of hallucinations induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation. A difficult idea to test, to be sure, but no less interesting for it. And it raises an important question: in what other circumstances are ambient fields large enough to trigger hallucinations of one kind or another?

From:A TRANSIT OF CONTINGENCIES: The Machinery Of Ghosts

This article is quite fascinating regarding the current discussion but I will look specifically for Duensing's writings on this.

 

[Soupie]

@smcder The point I was belaboring, haha, was that not everyone recognizes a hallucination/distortion as a mental illness/brain issue.

Re: mental illness. I currently work in the mental health field and I agree with all you've said. (I've investigated the vitamin D/SAD angle myself and will take another look. Thanks.)

Cruel Mother Nature is no longer calling the shots on what is "good" behavior so society has taken full control for better and worse.

 

[smcder]

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment - Telegraph

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

I'm sure there are more examples. I'll be sure to post them here as I encounter them. But you're right, manxman, there aren't, that I'm aware of, specific cases in which it was proved that two people who saw, say, Mothman, had experienced simultaneous, temporary, identical hallucinations. However, I still content that it is a viable possible explanation for some apparent paranatural experiences.

@smcder

Also, not to belabor the point, but there was an account I read recently of a young man diagnosed with schizophrenia (whatever that actually is). He had been experiencing either consistent sleep paralysis and/or OBEs. Having no knowledge of the workings of the brain and/or mental illness he, wait for it, attributed his experiences to the supernatural (as I think many, many people do). When he finally received "treatment" for his illness, his mental health improved, if only because he no longer thought himself evil and beset with demons. He still had the mental illness of course. (I tried to find this case via a Google search but no luck.)

Another aspect is that persons who hallucinate as a result of mental illness, there may be some predictable aspects - hyper-religiosity, delusions of grandeur, political paranoia - and they may also be influenced by the events and people around them, drawing from and incorporating - in most cases you can look at something in their mundane lives and find correspondence.

Schizophrenia - you often see delusions and hallucinations around communications and electrical equipment, one case where the son of a friend of mine destroyed some communication or electrical relays near his house that he had been fixating on for some time . . . now, it's a stretch but perhaps an analysis of the language used by the person themselves to report 1) hallucinations derived from mental illness 2) mystic experience 3) paranormal experience etc . . . would show some tell-tale differences or at least some kind of signatures to look for - what kind of analysis I have no idea . . . as I said, this is a stretch but perhaps the brain gives itself away in its words when it describes something it really really saw versus a hallucination . . . perhaps it doesn't know the difference and perhaps in some cases it does and in others, it doesn't.

 

[smcder]

@smcder The point I was belaboring, haha, was that not everyone recognizes a hallucination/distortion as a mental illness/brain issue.

Re: mental illness. I currently work in the mental health field and I agree with all you've said. (I've investigated the vitamin D/SAD angle myself and will take another look. Thanks.)

Cruel Mother Nature is no longer calling the shots on what is "good" behavior so society has taken full control for better and worse.

Cruel Mother Nature is no longer calling the shots on what is "good" behavior so society has taken full control for better and worse.

As my college philosophy prof liked to day: "Can you unpack that?"

 

[smcder]

What I'm trying to present here is that chemistry and culture interact with each other. And we use culture to reinforce the naming of the vision, I would suspect that interviews with the crowd at the witch burning will report all sorts of wild imagery that fall well within the norms of belief of what Satan could have provided for the day, or for why the woman had to be burned and beaten etc.. So no, they don't see the same exact thing, unless they start sharing the vision linguistically while it's happening and then you will definitely have a consolidated witness report.

As for shared hallucinations induced in the environment I will follow the chain, but in the comments on Sacks from the iconoclast article above it is Duensing who speaks to magnetic fields induced by magnesium as one of the most common components in paranormal hallucinations. If you know his website and hus writing it can be thick but fascinating.

From elsewhere:



This article is quite fascinating regarding the current discussion but I will look specifically for Duensing's writings on this.

What I'm trying to present here is that chemistry and culture interact with each other. And we use culture to reinforce the naming of the vision, I would suspect that interviews with the crowd at the witch burning will report all sorts of wild imagery that fall well within the norms of belief of what Satan could have provided for the day, or for why the woman had to be burned and beaten etc.. So no, they don't see the same exact thing, unless they start sharing the vision linguistically while it's happening and then you will definitely have a consolidated witness report.

Agreed.

(If you haven't read EO Wilson's Consillience you might find it interesting.)

As for shared hallucinations induced in the environment I will follow the chain, but in the comments on Sacks from the iconoclast article above it is Duensing who speaks to magnetic fields induced by magnesium as one of the most common components in paranormal hallucinations. If you know his website and hus writing it can be thick but fascinating.

Good - I was wondering when you would fall in line with the rest of the group . . . ;-)

 

[smcder]

@smcder The point I was belaboring, haha, was that not everyone recognizes a hallucination/distortion as a mental illness/brain issue.

Re: mental illness. I currently work in the mental health field and I agree with all you've said. (I've investigated the vitamin D/SAD angle myself and will take another look. Thanks.)

Cruel Mother Nature is no longer calling the shots on what is "good" behavior so society has taken full control for better and worse.

Re: mental illness. I currently work in the mental health field and I agree with all you've said.

I thought you might . . . nursing?

You've heard of the ice water in the ear trick? It works.

 

[Burnt State]

In case you hadn't noticed I'm terrible with following in line, or as the t-shirt I'm wearing right now says, "those who wander are not always lost."

So the commonly held shared hallucination, while rare, stands as fairly well documented:

Medscape: Medscape Access

And anyone who has used psychedelics or read about them knows that shared visions are common, commonly weird, but common in their own right, and speaks to the power of human mind tethering whether on DMT, LSD or Ketamine.

In the case of time slips, the best story is of the married couple in the car who are suddenly transported to a new landscape where the houses disappear. Their friends in the now invisible house see them get out of the car as they stare around, looking lost staring at trees and then drive off only to return later back at the now visible house. So the options are: time slip or shared hallucination. Given that secondary witnesses are observing them in real time I place the odds much higher on a shared hallucination than them disappearing into time.

Bruce Duensing has since closed his website to, 'by invite only,' which is too bad as many in this thread would thoroughly enjoy his writing and thinking. Here's a sampler:

Alien UFO & The Paranormal Casebook: INTANGIBLE MATERIALITY COLLECTION - WRITTEN BY BRUCE DUENSING - Part 1

 

[manxman]

soupie when people in your care hallucinate, what proportion claim to, or appear to be seeing aliens, i watched my sister and mother both die within 10 months of each other, hallucination before a natural caused death [ in their case both cancer ] is natures way of making death a pleasant experience for the dying.