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… .” * * * I N PSYCHOSIS RESEARCH , there is an idea that is sometimes referred to as the “continuum.” 1 The claim is this: For experiences of seeing or hearing things, or having unusual thoughts, we shouldn’t think of them as being exclusive to mental health conditions like schizophrenia. Instead, these things are tendencies that we all have, and they cascade out in degrees across the general population. They happen to some people less often, to others a bit more often, and to a certain group they happen all the time. Imagine
It’s a sunny spring day when I get the email from George. You often hear from lots of different people when you do research on a topic like hallucinations. Sometimes they ask for second opinions on medication; sometimes they have grand new theories or insights to offer. The most common email, sadly, is from parents—people getting in touch because they are concerned about their son or daughter. Their child might be hearing voices or acting strangely, they might have seen their GP or another clinician and not
is applied to presence when it comes to virtual reality (VR): the sense of “being there” in a computer-based environment. 2 Closely related to the concept of immersion, it refers to people actually feeling like they are located in the virtual realm rather than simply viewing it onscreen. 3 Mel Slater is a researcher who has used VR to explore racial bias, paranoia, embodiment, and even the notorious experiments on obedience to authority that were originally run by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. 4 Slater has
… creepy .” This is the third time I have interviewed Alex. He is taking part in a research study that we are running with the National Health Service (NHS), trying to understand more about “voices” and how they might change over time, for the people who hear them. By voices , I mean auditory verbal hallucinations—hearing things that no one else can hear, an experience that most people would usually associate with schizophrenia. Roughly 75 percent of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia report auditory
talking to Leven and Paul, I realized that I had been neglecting sleep, even though it is potentially one of the most powerful sources of presence. We have already seen just how easily sleep deprivation can conjure phantom phenomena, but most research on hallucinations and sleep doesn’t involve keeping people up for days on end. Instead, it has focused on experiences that occur during normal sleep patterns. Typically, these involve the boundaries of sleep. Hypnagogic phenomena refer to experiences that occur when one is
and basic to be understood. Until recently, there was very little research available on presences in conditions like Parkinson’s. A small handful of studies had documented such experiences, and fewer still had sought to systematically explore them. In 2000, a study by Gilles Fénelon and colleagues in France had surveyed 216 patients with Parkinson’s. Thirty-five had experienced presences, “commonly as vivid as a hallucinated scene and … described as a ‘perception.’” 2 The language the patients used for the
doesn’t seem all that extraordinary. This kind of ingrained process, this procedural learning, goes beyond the effortful and becomes second nature. Veissière likens this to the kind of muscle memory we get from a well-practiced skill—one that never leaves us: “Getting rid of a tulpa, for a seasoned tulpamancer, could be analogically situated somewhere between unlearning the piano or correcting one’s posture.” 16 What Veissière describes is similar to something our Durham group found in research we did on
It was the summer of 2020, and I was standing in a garden in Edinburgh, looking out over the Braids and Blackford Hill. In a strange year, we’d taken the opportunity to come up to Scotland and catch up with friends while we still could, amid lockdowns, support bubbles, and alert levels. Our hosts, Luke and Hazel, were asking about my research—was I still working on hallucinations, stuff like that. I told them I was. We got talking about Third Man experiences. They are both avid adventurers, and had
. And while some remain essentially static in this process, others use movement to bring about the necessary states of meaning and enlightenment: the Japanese monks of Mount Hiei, for instance, complete eighteen- to twenty-five-mile runs every day for one hundred days as part of their training. Some then graduating to a thousand-day challenge, and forty-six monks have completed the full course of runs and prayer since 1885. 1 Few research studies have explored the experiences of monks during their marathon runs, but a