You May Be Hallucinating Right Now

We usually associate hallucinations with mental illness or recreational drugs, but many mentally healthy people hallucinate with no help from psychedelics — maybe as many as 1 in 20 of us, according to at least one. You’ve probably had them yourself. If you’ve ever heard a text alert only to find there was no message, or felt a phantom vibration in your pocket when you heard your cell phone ring from the table across the room, you’ve had a kind of hallucination.

To understand hallucinations, we first have to take a look at how vision works. And it doesn’t work quite the way you may think it does.In its simplest terms, vision is essentially a collaboration between the eyes and the brain. Photons hit the retina and are then translated into neural signals.

But there’s something else going on, too. “We have a lot of expectations about what’s out there,” says Niell. The brain matches these “pixels” to a pattern it expects to see. For example, let’s say there’s a shadow on the table, says Niell. Photons reveal only a dark area against the background of the table. But your brain knows that your hand is above the table, and it also knows that hands hovering over tables can cause shadows. So the brain interprets the dark area as the shadow of your hand.

Dreams are another kind of hallucination that occurs when you have too little sensory input. “When you're dreaming,” says Niell, “there’s no sensory information coming in; your eyes are closed. Your brain is making up the whole thing.” The same thing, he says, happens when you’re walking in the dark. You don’t have good visual information, so your brain fills in the details.

The irony of sarcasm. The perception of truth.

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