When I say hallucination you probably think of one or two things, psychotropic experimentation like a dude in a hemp shirt tripping at a fish show watching rainbows melt into puddles, or mental illness, like someone doing things because the voices in their head told them to and ending up in the hospital …or in jail. A few centuries ago most
people would have described hallucinations through the influences of ghosts, gods or witches. Today we understand them as the result
of neurological disturbances and the truth is hallucinations aren’t necessarily a sign
of mental illness, drug use or spirit vengeance, rather they can be
caused by lots of different things. So while not everyone has experienced
hallucinations, it’s important to understand that everyone is capable of
hallucinating under the right circumstances. In fact, a good number of us will
experience some type of hallucination in our lifetime. I know I have. Like if you’ve lost the
use of one of your senses like your sight or smell, but still smell things
from time to time, then you’ve hallucinated. If you’ve been under
a ton of stress and heard someone tell you what to do only to find that there’s no
one there… Then you’ve hallucinated. If you’ve driven
by a bus stop and for a split second saw your deceased father sitting on the
bench reading a newspaper, then you’ve hallucinated. It’s weird, I know.
But the one thing I can assure you is that the science behind these
phenomena, is very real. [Intro music] Whether they’re fun, enlightening,
confusing, or terrifying, all hallucinations involve sensing
things that appear to be real, but actually are a product of the mind.
They’re not dreams, you have to be awake to truly hallucinate – instead they’re sensory disturbances, coming in a variety of flavors. You can
see light patterns and objects that aren’t there, smell imaginary odours, hear voices and
other sounds, or feel physical sensations like crawling skin or your
own organs moving. Even out-of-body, near-death, and sleep paralysis experiences are types of hallucinations. But to understand what’s not real, you first
have to understand how your brain judges something to be real in the first place. This involves the sister processes of
sensation and perception – two different things. Your sensory organs
receive visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile clues pulled from the outside
world in a process called sensation. That raw data is then sent to the brain
where it’s processed, giving it meaning, putting it into
context in the process of perception. So, basically the brain turns sensory input into meaningful information to create
your own model understanding of the world. The more sensory data you collect, the more they inform that model of how
you perceive the world to work, and most people’s models more or less agree on the big stuff – the sky is blue, the dogs bark, kittens
cannot fly, and snow is cold. But if that normal copacetic brain
activity gets disturbed by say a dose of LSD, a seizure, a disease or a
mega blow to the head, this model can get shaky, eventually
diverging from its normal representation of the world then suddenly a flock of kittens fly by in
a fiery rose scented rain while calling your name. Depending on the type of brain tweak these hallucinations may take different forms interesting, random, or scary – the good
news is they all give us potential to learn about what the heck is going on up here.
Obviously outside substances can spur some wacky activity in your mind, and most ancient cultures have some
tradition of vision questing aided by some psychotropic substance. I’m not gonna get too into drugs today
but you should understand the different compounds whether found in plants,
animals, fungus, or synthetically made concoctions affect the brain very differently,
meaning that even if they all cause hallucinations, they may be using very
different pathways – for example, most researchers agree that LSD garbles the
senses in a psycho-biochemical way, by affecting specific feel-good serotonin
receptors found in the brain’s cerebral cortex and thalamus regions responsible for
sensory perception. Caffeine on the other hand works in an entirely
different way. Australian researchers have linked consuming excessive amounts
of coffee with increased risk of auditory hallucinations. Caffeine sorta gooses
the physiological effects of stress including the increased production of the
bodies naturally occurring stress hormone cortisol, which can lead you to hear things that
are not actually there. But there are many reports of healthy, non-caffeinated people experiencing vivid auditory hallucinations, often when under extreme stress. There
have been recorded cases of, for example, someone breaking their leg while alone
in the woods and just wanting and curl up and die, but a strong voice, not just a thought,
but something that seemed actually audible, telling them they need
to get up and move to survive. Grief is its own
kind of stress of course, and hallucinations have been known to occur in otherwise
healthy people during periods of extreme grief – in fact, people seeing a departed loved one
or hearing their voice can be a common part of the grieving
process. But hearing voices is the symptom we typically associate with mental
illness, and while it’s true that seventy percent
of schizophrenics report hearing voices regularly, it’s not necessarily a scary thing. In fact,
one Dutch study found that a good number of mentally stable people enjoyed
hearing pleasant, supportive voices in their heads. Exactly how a person
experiences auditory hallucinations is still fuzzy, but some neuroimaging studies suggest
that it may have to do with the failure of the brain’s frontal speech area. This is the part that usually lets your
sensory areas know that the sound they’re hearing is self-generated, like something you’re
just thinking to yourself, but if that signal doesn’t get sent, then the brain gets confused as to where
that voice it’s hearing is coming from. Brain scans have also shown that people
with schizophrenia have abnormalities in the areas associated with memory. That might exacerbate this failure to
identify the words that show up in their mind is being part of their own inner
monologue. Here’s something interesting though – in the total absence of sensation the brain still leaps to perception,
wanting to maintain that connection. For example, some people who suddenly lose
their ability to smell often experienced phantosmia a
a type of olfactory hallucination. And yeah, if you smelled wildflowers and baking
cookies it might not be so bad, but unfortunately the most common odours are the bad ones like puke, poop, and
rotting stuff. In these cases your brain is
overcompensating for its lack of olfactory input by pulling from the
memories of old scents and making it seem like you’re smelling
them for real. It’s possible that the brain’s offering up these disagreeable odors
because those very smells had just been suppressed by certain
neurons that had since turned off. And it doesn’t stop with
smells, in fact one of the most fascinating ways to see visual hallucinations is to go blind. Charles Bonnet Syndrome, or CBS is a condition that can cause otherwise
healthy people with macular degeneration or loss of vision to experience complex visual
hallucinations. The condition was first described by Swiss naturalist Charles
Bonnet in 1760 after watching his nearly blind
grandfather describe seeing visions of birds, buildings, and ladies, among other things.
Patients with CBS report seeing images ranging from simple geometric shapes and colors to vivid detailed scenes, often involving
faces and for some reason lots of little people. But these images are not
interactive, the experience is more like watching a movie with the sound off, and what patients see is unrelated to
anything they’re thinking, feeling, or doing at the time, and none of the faces are familiar. Some are
pleasing but others are deformed, and they often have big misshapen teeth.
These types of hallucinations are very different from psychotic hallucinations, which tend to be interactive and actively
address the patient, whether to support, berate, threaten, or jeer at them. Instead CBS hallucinations are more like those
people with olfactory damage who start to hallucinate smells. When a person’s vision no longer
functions, the visual part of their brain can become hyperactive in the absence of stimuli that it was
used to. So, it starts firing off images trying to sort of keep the
story going, guessing what it might be seeing if it
could still see. Interestingly the same phenomenon can be achieved under visual
sensory deprivation. One study blindfolded volunteers for four days and in
the end ten of the thirteen subjects reported seeing various
levels of hallucinations. Different localized parts of the brain are often
involved in specific hallucinations too, like there’s an area for seeing
buildings and landscapes, and one just for cartoons. There’s also a
region in the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus, which is where we process the images
of people’s faces, so damage to this area can cause prosopagnosia, or face blindness – the inability to
recognize faces, sometimes even your own. But over activity in this sliver of the
brain can cause a person to hallucinate and start seeing, you guessed it, faces.
Not only that but the front part of this region specializes in registering teeth and eyes specifically, so it may be
involved in the phenomenon of hallucinators seeing faces with crazy big teeth. So even
though you and your brain may sometimes see things a little differently – sometimes a lot differently – you can think of hallucinations as particularly vivid reminders of just how delicate,
complicated, and freaking amazing your brain is. Take care of it, and it will likely do
its best to take care of you. Thanks for watching this SciShow infusion,
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I hear music sometimes when I'm trying to go to sleep. it's weird.
So the voice telling me I'm not ok is a houlaion
I'm hallucinating while watching this
here's the only hallucination i ever remember having: sometime late at night after a long, stressful day i went to bed. soon after, my phone which was out of power went "hey hey hey" in a text-to-speech voice. it was more scary than it sounds.
Omg, no flying kitties while tripping. Trails are the most I've seen. Psychotropics pump out all of your serotonin at once, from what I understand. I have never heard people talking to me. I have never seen people or objects that we're not really there. I think I'm to grounded for that.
Is it normal that i can visualize anything i want in my head whenever i want? kinda like how you described cbs hallucinations and visual senspry deprivation, except i can do it with my eyes open aswell.
I saw severus sname at the end of a long hall in my school. I was so excited.
Once I was dreaming, when I heard someone whispering "Wake up" right into my ear.
Before I sleep, I sometimes feel as if I'm moving on a merry go round
The voices in my head told me to like this video.
What is DMT? Hallucinations?
I'm familiar with visual, auditory, and sometimes sensations on/in my body. Mine stem from schizophrenia.
Can you hallucinate when you have a migraine attack?
My hands are swollen and I keep seeing cans on on my chest help I’ve also got a really dad sore throat
yeah I get audio hallucinations sometimes like where It sounds like someone just said something but they really did not, often Its mundane, but on a few occasions I have hallucinated very loudly and clearly when there is no one around, notably times where I have been woken up by loud yelling and stuff, often being so shocking that I wand up and stand up so quick I am already standing when I come to, and are fully awake. also I do have the one issue mentioned here where I dissociate from my internal monologues as if I have others speaking in my head, however I still know that that personality speaking in my head is part of me, as such if having multiple voices with seeming separate personalities speaking in your head is hallucinating I am always hallucinating, as my internal monologue is actually more like a dialogue with many distinct personalities speaking in my head at once.
I’ve hallucinated on a few occasions, the most memorable being the one time I hallucinated during sleep paralysis and hearing voices for a week after major surgery. I really thought I was going crazy with the voices
Lol one time I had sleep paralysis and I was like no I'm not dealing with this right now and I made myself move. It was really hard to do, and I was like panting afterward, but it was really cool because i legit was like no brain I'm not dealing with ur crap right now.
Ha, I just hear my name called every once in a while when I'm alone, usually by a parent. Hearing that caffeine can cause that kind of stuff definitively makes a lot of sense. I drink too much soda and coffee.
What's the point!
PLEASE GO TO MY CHANNEL AND WATCH THE 40 MIN VIDEO…LET ME NOW IF THAT'S HALLUCINATING? BUT PLAY FAST FORWARD N SEE FOR YOURSELVES
Is hank muscle hanks hallucination?
Is Deja Vu a hallucination?
That nose hair tho
Rip mac
3 days up and the bugs under my skin are whispering to me
Oh my GOD I’ve always found it weird how I had chronic swelling in my nose but could still smell so well!! And smell nasty things!! I’ve just been hallucinating smells this whole darn time. ANYWAY I’m getting my nose operated on in a month to remove or at least reduce the chronic swelling, can’t wait.
Here because of alcoholic hallucinosis, anyone got any good stories?;)
I hallucinate and when it happens i either heat my name or see figures staring at me or chasing me
About 8 months ago when i feel off my bike going 40mph the second i left the seat time slowed i can see better ( as in I remember vivid details about it ) and i felt out of body
Welp thats my most interesting day what is yours?
…
The science is no where near conclusive. You are citing some studies and opinions not scientific consensus.
Everything is a hallucination life is a trip psychedelics will show you this
Choms choms
end up not in hospital but in asylum take a tour on ur own
after 3 days without sleep I started to
Who needs straight lines when you can have squiggly ones?
ummm… it was at night and there was a fake plant leaf going back and forth and I saw a cats head and I told it to stop
I get about 4 hallucinations a day, well sometimes is that normal
My friend had a really high fever that cause her to have hallucinations like the couch floating upside down
"Please someone help me, this is not a video!"
what happens if u hillucinate a text message
Is the sky blue? There is much debate here I think.
I work in the comic industry selling comics, and one night before a show my boss and I set up at, I got maybe 3 hours of sleep and thought I was hearing things for around 20 minutes. Turns out the 'music' I was hearing was the wheels on the carts other dealers were using to load their boxes into their cars.
Extreme diabetic events (blood sugar of 1,000 or more) can make you see & hear stuff that is really strange😑
i've had a lot of auditorial hallucinations lately i don't know what caused it, what should i do?
I keep seeing things it’s gotten they’ve now learned to speak and sometimes they open doors slamming it after they go threw everyday the voices get louder and louder
drinking a bottle of delsym does a pretty good job at making people hallucinate lol
i hallucinated about 5 or 6 times and sleep paralisys 3 to 4 times!
I have this little room with my wardrobe in it in my room and sometimes (i think I wake up in the night)I see things inside and its really scary.Im under 13 btw
And there was another time where i was seeing things but not in the other room because in my dream there were men who wanted us(there was more kids)to throw cats and dogs in the water to see them die(it doesnt make sense rlly bc its a dream)then I said no (in the dream and in real life)and all the people who were in my dream were staring at me.then I woke up and I was seeing a head looking at me and at the wall.This time it wasnt in the other room. Sometimes if I dont forget I close the door to the other room abd I avoid looking there.
"I'm not gonna get too into drugs today." Great start, my friend. As ever. 😉
You'll earn that NA coin! Though my alcoholic friend got one of those special 12-step coins after his one and only AA meeting. He didn't even fully accept step 1! (That's "admit you have a problem", right?) So come on, are we still doing the "everyone wins"/participation awards? But I digress.
Speaking of digression, I'm holding out for your shout-out to Dr. Oliver Sachs and his extensive, groundbreaking discoveries and intensive studies, all thanks to his "maybe the patient isn't just some nutty old bitty like the nursing home calling me at 2am seems to think. She's blind and talking of sitting in a very detailed 50s diner, check board floor and all. She's old, so who cares? I DO!" True story, by the way. Sachs broke new ground for migraine etiology, hallucination in people who are losing their sight, and what turned out not to be just crazies and whiners!
So I'm a bit sad that you didn't mention the great neurologist. Great video, but while I'm glad you left out Timothy Leary and the other LSD hippie (yawn), you have to acknowledge, even if with a mere mention of his name, the late, great Dr. Sachs. I guess it would be pretty tangential, though, in a Pandora's Box (or clown car) sort of way.
Love the video!
Why is this lego movie advertisement 5 hours long
he talks too dang fast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sleep deprivation caused sounds to echo in my brain
Patients with CBS also have reported seeing Stephen Colbert every weeknight.
Once about a year ago I was extremely over tired and thought I saw someone in the corner of the room with ever expanding eyes and teeth…needless to say I sat on my parent’s bed until sunrise because I was terrified. I knew it was a hallucination at the time but it was so unsettling that I didn’t want to go anywhere near my room until I could see it all in daylight.
Every time I've ever been under anesthesia, especially laughing gas, I become a pretty pretty butterfly and flap my wings to make sure you know how pretty they are. It was cute as a kid getting teeth pulled from my too small mouth, I guess, funny as a teen when I first started getting kidney stones, but at 34 when trying to get a cyst removed from my wrist, not as funny….
I am 12 and I have been seeing things that weren't there I have had troubles in the past but it's happening as I speak it's kinda scary I have a knife next to me is this what acid is xD
I'm kinda scarred
I keep hearing my mom call me.
2:24 there are more senses
I fell like everything is speed up and if i don't speed up i feel like something will come get me is it because my fever was 102.5
REALLY?!?how about you mention trauma and abuse amoung those cause since theyve been clinically proven?
I frequently tell people that I don't control what my brain does, I just rent space up here.
People believe it is mental illness, is not more logical to believe it is black magic. People can talk and influence victims thoughts, when they possess bodies with spirit.
I was having a massage once, and I looked down at the carpet and I could swear I saw Kermit the frog’s face drifting across the floor. I’m not even joking.
Unfortunately some medications can make you hallucinate.
5:00
That happens to me when I am sleepy and someone is talking to me, I just get lost looking at the distance/nothingness….
I have stress-induced olfactory hallucinations. My sense of smell isn't damaged, but when I'm stressed or overtired, I smell fabric softener. Took me a long time to realize it wasn't real; I only knew for sure when I was in a car with my mom and the smell was overwhelming but she didn't smell it. And yeah, I know I'm pretty fortunate as far as it goes, because while occasionally the smell shades toward cat litter or onions, it's overall a pretty bearable scent to experience for days at a time. I've read accounts of people who nearly starved to death because the smell was so vile it put them off food.
This happened maybe a year ago 2 years max
Early in the day I had drank a energy drink before work later in the day I took some melatonin to help me get to sleep after maybe 30 minutes started having some mild hallucinations I thought it was odd but it got me curious so I looked up caffeine and melatonin interactions and some people said it could cause hallucinations
Anyone else experience this?
Are they speeding Hank up? 'Cause if not, then this is some awesome speed of reading the prompter.
I hallucinate when I sweat when trying to go to sleep so I can go to bed hot
I see my dad all the time.. I hear his voice telling me to do things all the time I normally end up doing them things I have realised the things Im doing is getting worse it sounds like he is trying to make me kill myself Im trying not to listen to the voices but its not helping its started scaring me I sometimes see him for a split second sometimes it happens when Im not ready for it and I end up screaming it gets me in trouble at school I have only told people on here because you dont know me and my best friend my mum knows I see him and hear him but she doesnt know what actually happens he died when I was 4 i have always had hallucinating though not always my dad and its only a few times my dad sometimes its something else but still…
well this is terrifying.
25 years. 2 to 3 12 cup pots of coffee each and every day, on up until bedtime.
NOT ONE SINGLE hallucination.
If they are seeing or hearing something, their brain is either damaged, or they are taking some form of a poison commonly mistaken as "fun" and "totally cool and safe".
Explains that nations insanely large amount of flattards, that's for sure.
Sometimes i hear a lady screaming just before going to sleep
I feel like I'm spinning when I'm going to sleep
This doesn't help explain why I sometimes hear gunshots or a quick shout right in my ear at random times. It's unlikely to be EHS because it happens more than just when I'm trying to sleep. In fact, it rarely happens late at night,
I see the person that is, for bad reason, in the corner of my eye or instead other people, that is really annoying, because I really don’t want to see these people anyway. Also, I think I might be bipolar and when I am in the ”high“ phase, I smell things like vomit and blood but strangely, when I am feeling down, so in the ”low“ phase, I smell strawberry. AND I sometimes, when I am around people, I hear a voice calling me, even though nobody does.
I am hallucinating everynight! It's hard 'coz I am scared and terrified… Everywhere I looked at I saw a face which is scary…
I have hyperosmia, not a plus in some environments.
Just yesterday I hallucinated someone was running past me and probably looked insane looking behind me and today I thought I heard my parents trash talking me so it's not always insane stuff.
Can we please stop calling neurotransmitters “feel-good chemicals”? Serotonin is responsible for so many complex functions which we barely understand, so just calling it a “feel-good chemical” is way too overly simplistic.
It happening to me rn ! Help I’m scared
As a toddler EVERY NIGHT I WOULD HALLUCINATE
I see my friends dead and in blood it’s your fault
I always hallucinate when I have a fever
lol i have never found an anser to wahat i see.
i am 29 years old and started alusinating at the age of 12 i now cant get rid if it basikly i parmenantly see evary thing i thinh of in the midle of my vision just way more colourful almost like Animay
lol evn when i close my eyes its stil ther just changing thr hole time
I heard voices in my head for as long as I could remember. But recently I've been seeing things. I know it sounds fake… but I have been seeing silhouettes of people trying to grab me popping up every now and then.
I've learned SO MUCH from your channel🤟🏽❣💋 THANK YOU
I hallucinate all the time, I don't know why.
So,uh. Those 12 times I saw the Airplane 1969-1972 were a hallucination? Come out of the hallucination and they're really some weird, top 40 pop band Starship. I'm sure glad that's over.
The scariest thimg that ever happened. Im too scared to fall asleep tonight. It was painful and unreal but real at the same time.
When I was sleeping I woke up some reason and saw like an airplane flying around at night is that uhm healthy cause I swear it was early
Some things you described as mental illness and or hallucinations is used in buddhist meditation to heal one's own body and has worked for one thousand years and is something science has yet to explain. Meaning science does not explain everything and your facts are merely theories.
When I look at light/sun, or rub my eyes when closed, I see colored lights and shapes/patterns. Sometimes I feel like I am half out of my body. I didn't know it was hallucinations.
Oh last night I thought there was a bug by my ear in bed. Ehhhhh glad it wasn't real
I always hallucinate voices when I’m sick. It’s really weird
Haha dont try to hide it, hallucinating is caused by satans
CAN YOU MAKE A VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO GET NATURAL HALLUCINATIONS? Without drugs, I mean. 😀
For me it’s medically concerning. Idk what to do