Search results
, being high and hallucination, are clearly breaches or disturbances of normal consciousness, clear thought and common sense. Modern philosophy has tended to see itself as a sort of ‘science’ as opposed to an artistic, creative practice licensed to give free reign to the imagination and irrationality. And whereas modern artists and literary writers often have a celebrated history and reputation for indulgence or experimentation with drugs of one sort or another, and such habits are associated with the fuelling of their creative energies and productive imaginations, the
This book follows a psychologist's quest to understand one of the most curious experiences known to humankind: the universal, disturbing feeling that someone or something is there when we are alone. What does this feeling mean and where does it come from? When and why do presences emerge? And how can we begin to understand a phenomenon that can be transformative for those who experience it and yet almost impossible to put into words? The answers to these questions lie in this tour-de-force through contemporary psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and philosophy. Presence follows Ben Alderson-Day's attempts to understand how this experience is possible. The journey takes us to meet explorers, mediums and robots, and step through real, imagined and virtual worlds. Presence is the story of whom we carry with us, at all times, as parts of ourselves.
become, apparently, mentally ill while serving in a Northern Irish frontier town during the early 1920s. The USC Sergeant, identified only as ‘J. M.’ or ‘John’, experienced a rather remarkable sequence of hallucinations and was subsequently committed to Down Mental Hospital under Nolan's care. Shortly after he recovered, J. M. wrote an account of his ordeal. This narrative
—but whereas the course of Parkinson’s can be slow, developing sometimes over twenty years or more, DLB moves fast, with its major symptoms appearing within two years. This is because of Lewy bodies—bundles of a protein called alpha-synuclein—that appear in brain cells. These Lewy bodies cluster in disparate parts of the midbrain and cortex, disrupting ordinary signaling and changing the way people think and feel. Visual hallucinations are known to occur in both conditions. This is particularly the case for DLB, but
, materializing out of blizzards, hillsides, and glaciers, only to dissolve once more. In cases of climbing, the occurrence of hallucinations is often attributed to the effects of altitude. A lack of oxygen in the brain—hypoxia—can quickly induce effects akin to brain injury, alongside panic, disorientation, and confusion. One study of highaltitude climbers found that those climbing over six thousand meters had a disproportionately large number of hallucinatory experiences. For all but one, these happened along with distortions in
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
role of hallucination in constructing Voice ’s haunted chronology and relates this to the Gothic questioning of perception and authenticity, arguing that Moore makes exceptional use of the prose medium in this way to quite literally embody the spirit(s) of Northampton. Haunted bodies Annalisa De Liddo quotes Jay Babcock’s definition of
Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations and daydreams have long been an inherent part of literature, French literature being no exception. Dreams feature in medieval texts such as the Chanson de Roland and the Roman de la Rose , in the works of nineteenth-century writers, both Romantic (Hugo, Nerval, Baudelaire) and Realist (Balzac, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant), and in twentieth- and twenty
characters that we come to know, it could be said that we are losing a connection with reality, engaging in some kind of simulation, cut off from the world around us. The comparison can be a little overblown, but I was nevertheless intrigued by some of the parallels between imagination and hallucination. Would people who “hear” characters’ voices in books also hear unusual things in everyday life? Can they picture the hills looming around Thornfield Hall in their mind’s eye, 2 or see Banquo’s ghost at the
comes from the developing field of Trauma Studies. Chapter 1 critically traces a particular, ‘performative’ genealogy of trauma theory through Charcot and Freud to Cathy Caruth and other contemporary theorists. The chapter also addresses current critical engagements with trauma and the performing arts in order to position this project within the wider critical field. I will propose a (localized) triangulation of tensions between the desire to forget trauma, the necessity to deliberately relive it to effect a cure and the uninvited intrusive hallucinations of trauma