MetaFilter posts tagged with hallucination

Oliver Sacks on Drugs

stonepharisee — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:18:48 -0800

Oliver Sacks on drugs. (New Yorker podcast interview). [previously][via]

Living With Voices

Joe in Australia — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 05:19:06 -0800

A new way to deal with disturbing voices offers hope for those with other forms of psychosis.
Hans used to be overwhelmed by the voices. He heard them for hours, yelling at him, cursing him, telling him he should be dragged off into the forest and tortured and left to die. The most difficult things to grasp about the voices people with psychotic illness hear are how loud and insistent they are, and how hard it is to function in a world where no one else can hear them. It’s not like wearing an iPod. It’s like being surrounded by a gang of bullies. You feel horrible, crazy, because the voices are real to no one else, yet also strangely special, and they wrap you like a cocoon. Hans found it impossible to concentrate on everyday things. He sat in his room and hid. But then the voices went away for good.

How the cortex got its stripes

kaspen — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:07:45 -0800

Uncoiling the spiral: Maths and hallucinations So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn't tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up. And it seems that they can. (via MAPS)

What will the parents think of this...

tybeet — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:22:32 -0800

Then, all of sudden, I saw a hand holding a piece of chalk and writing on a black-board something like a mathematical formula. The vision was very clear, but it stayed only for few seconds and disappeared again. The Internet is abound with a new, simple technique for at-home DIY multimodal (vision, sound) Ganzfeld Hallucinations (previously). The Ganzfeld procedure is similar to sensory deprivation, whereby you submit your senses to white-noise stimuli, and as a result these senses start to hallucinate for lack of anything meaningful to attend to. The technique, in a nutshell: You can simulate the Ganzfeld procedure in your own home by taping two half ping-pong balls over your eyes and listing to the radio tuned to static [(or a white noise generator)] in an evenly lighted room. Anecdotes: (via) “A friend of mine and I, we were inside a cave. We made a fire. There was a creek flowing under our feet, and we were on a stone. She had fallen into the creek, and she had to wait to have her things dried. Then she said to me: ‘Hey, move on, we should go now’.” “In the right side of the visual field, a [mannequin] suddenly appeared. He was all in black, had a long narrow head, fairly broad shoulders, very long arms and a relatively small trunk…. He approached me, stretching out his hands, very long, very big, like a bowl, and he stayed so for a while, and then he went back to where he came from, slowly.”

GLOR XVII

moonbird — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 12:04:58 -0800

The Codex Seraphinianus, a Hallucinatory Encyclopedia, details fantastical beings and impossible places. It's one of the highlights of issue 17 of the Grey Lodge Occult Review, which also includes Maya Deren's very rare film on Haitian Voudoun "Divine Horsemen" [torrent] and William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's "The Cut-Ups" [torrent].