Hallucination

Many mysterious phenomena can perfectly be explained through the hallucination. The hallucination is defined as the apparent percepção of some thing that is not materially present, or in the jargon technician of the American Psychiatric Association, hallucination is “a sensorial perception without the external stimulaton of the corresponding sensorial agency”.

Everything what can be perceived by the 5 felt can also be alucinado, but the auditory and visual hallucinations are most frequent. The pathological hallucinations are provoked by injuries and cerebral infections, psychotic riots of the schizophrenia, epilepsy and psiconeuroses. However - and this is the reason of this article - transitory hallucinations happen the normal, healthy people, that they do not suffer from no mental riot and they are much more frequent of what we costumamos to think. A study carried through in 1957 for famous English psychologist Peter McKellar it disclosed that 25% of the interviewed ones had had at least a hallucinatory experience. In 1988 the norteamericano Ronald K. Siegel published still more given impressive: 79% of the participants had told to have suffered hallucinations, and one terço of them so was lived that they tomararam as real events.

In our mind, the conscience area continued receives flows from external signals (proceeding from the 5 felt) and interns (proceeding from the memory and other neural circuits). The main task of the conscience is to all construct to the time a model of the world that makes sensible. The hallucinations happen when an internal element goes off an activity standard equivalent what normally it is generated when agencies of the directions answer to a public observável event. In the truth a certain competition exists enters these flows of internal and external signals, and when for some reason the flow of external signals weakens or if it spoils the internal flow if it overlaps to the external one. This explains because the hallucinations are gone off for sensorial privation, sensorial overload (especially repetitive intense stimulatons), drawn out sleeplessness, jejum drawn out, dehydration, fatigue, high fever, delirium, privation of oxygen, hyperventilation, social isolation, hipnagógicos and hipnopômpicos states, ingestion of psicodélicas drugs, hypnosis, etc.

About 4% of the people in a normal population they very possess an intense imagination and more difficulty in judging the differences between real and imaginary events. They fantasiam vividamente during a great part of its waked up lives. Despite they alucinem most of the time, this is enough controlable and it does not intervene with its security, job or familiar life. Wilson and Barker had called these people of “PPF - Inclined Personalities to the Fancy” (Fantasy-Prone-Personalities). They can alucinar of open or closed eyes and can evoke complete scenes or add to devices the real scenes. Some typical examples of PPF: great visionaries of the past compelled by voices or hallucinatory visões, such as Sócrates, Joana D' Arc, Saint Terezinha and Swedenborg; the ones that tell to multiple abduções in foreign ships; e “médiuns visual” that they see espíritos in profusion, for all the side.

The hallucinations always use to advantage filed material already previously in the memory of the individual and that it is interpreted in accordance with its system of beliefs and values. This explains as the nocturnal vision of light flashings provokes visões of complete space vehicles; a curtain balancing to the wind in the window of one dark room is seen as a threatening ghost; or the lying Xuxa in the bed in its small farm sees one duende that the sheet pulls it. This happened because flying records, ghosts and duendes already were important part of particular the cultural universe of these people.

Deepened inquiries of stories of meeting with extraterrestrial had led to the conclusion of that the great majority of these cases results of the hallucination in hipnagógico or hipnopômpico state (little before falling soon in sleep or before the wakening). These states of transistion of the vigil for sleep, and vice versa, also are responsible for the common hallucinations in infancy, known as “nocturnal terrors”. To the times, images seen during a nightmare can persist later that the child woke up.

Pilots of airplane have presented visual, auditory and kinaesthetic hallucinations due to monotony or setting of the attention for long periods. A pilot can, for example, to feel that its airplane entered in screw, is diving or upside-down, exactly that in fact the airplane perfectly is leveled. A kinaesthetic hallucination of this type can so be lived the point to take the pilot to make “a corrective” maneuver, with potentially tragic results.

The místico tries hallucinations by means of manipulation of its proper dissociativos mechanisms through auto-hypnosis and intense mental concentration. These hallucinations can be of the type where the person perceives “interior I” abandoning the body and travelling for distant places. Or to take the form of visões of místico content or sensations of union with God or the universe.

In the experimental hypnosis well the power of the hipnóticas suggestions is known and after-hipnóticas in the production of hallucinations. A hipnotizado individual can be induced if to deviate from an inexistent chair or to dance to the sound of an imaginary music. Also it is easy to perceive how much of the typical experiences of regression the last lives if must to the induced hallucination for suggestion or hypnosis.