A rare disorder makes people see monsters | Hacker News Reader

A rare disorder makes people see monsters

newyorker.com

156 pointsprismatic116 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20240802181317/https://www.newyo...

Interesting that there are so many similarities between how people describe the distortions and fantasy creatures like orcs, vampires, etc. It makes me wonder how much our own fiction influences these peoples' conditions, or in reverse how people with conditions such as these have influenced our fiction.

Realistically, the simple answer is that it's probably not much of either; There's a "built-in" concept of what is scary in terms of physical features that has an evolutionary benefit in keeping us safe from certain animals that we can easily transpose onto humans, and that system is being tapped into in some form for these people in the routine processing of faces.

My son has night terrors and if I were living in the Middle Ages, I would probably have called in a priest for an exorcism by now. I can absolutely imagine that in less enlightened times, where we did not have access to the internet, peer reviewed journals and MRI machines, people with night terrors were believed to be possessed by demons.

still might work

Would be interesting to see a paper published on the efficacy of the placebo effect in exorcisms.

Many parents use monster spray to combat night visions, seems effective.

If those were my parents I would have required them to spray every little corner of my room.

The idea is that you give the monster spray to the small child, who then ceases to be scared of monsters.

This didn't work one notable time when the monster turned out to be 50,000 bees, nesting behind the closet wall.

I think this is a John Dies at the End reference! If not, John Dies at the End references this. A salute to you either way! Great book series.

That may help for bad dreams, but not for night terrors (which are medically a different thing, where you are not consciously awake).

This presumes that some exorcisms are not placebos.

Prove they aren't. (only semiserious)

people still believe they have a self-consistent world view when they dismiss the extra-natural world just because it is not accessible by natural means. it's like "there are no forests because you can't drive in them because there are no motorways in them"

What other 'means' are there besides 'natural' ones?

If a world can only be accessed through very specific patterns in neuron activity, but not through “natural” physical measurements, this world is imaginary by definition.

Millions of dollars are awaiting those who can confidently sync their imagination at a distance, but all these people who claim these objective worlds real are traditionally “above money”, keeping us in the dark.

I had night terrors for years as a 30 year old and I finally fixed them.

* Removed all blinking lights from my room. Cover up smoke detector LED or turn it off. This seems to trigger my night terrors.

* Let the brain rest before bed. No phone, screen, book, anything about 20-30 minutes before bed. Hop in the shower, hop in bed. Don't think.

We need more movies where the bad looking people/creatures are the good guys and the good looking people are the bad guys.

No, please, I'm tired of what Amazon-Netflix are doing. Don't make it worse!

Yeah, well I'm tired of the good guys always being better looking than the bad guys. Maybe I should try a Netflix subscription.

It’s not that sort of a spectrum though. Netflix has very specific goals in mind, it doesn’t represent reality either.

Reminds me of Clarke's Childhood's End, where the good guys have to wait decades before revealing their physical appearance, because they happen to look like the bad guys from a certain religion.

It wasn't happenstance, though. There is a specific reason as to why humanity's depictions of demons look the same as those aliens, and it's a critical plot point. (Can't say more or I'll spoil one of the best sci-fi books of all time for those who haven't read it).

Edit: it's also highly debatable whether the Overlords are in fact the good guys.

Don’t want to spoil it either, so only can reply that literature and movies are good at masking the real horrors of the world that most of the world has to live in. Can’t remember how well society was in the book though.

Hey I wanted you guys to know I picked up and read the book just from the curiosity you guys sparked in me from the descriptions in this thread!

I just finished reading it. The book was excellent! Definitely glad I read it!

Also I’m glad you guys were careful not to spoil what happens. It was very memorable!

Please no. An inversion of a trope is still just a trope.

Nothing wrong with tropes, they're the building blocks of stories.

It's an overused trope that people think is far more clever and subversive than it is.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvertedTrope

just as much as we need stinky drinking water and deliciously tasting poison.

Maybe Nightbreed (1990) is a bit like this.

Nightmare stems from when a mare comes at night and sits on your chest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_(folklore) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nightmare

TIL: in French, "nightmare" is "cauchemar" and has the same etymology (the second part, at least).

And this is induced by sleep paralysis : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Nightmares differ from night terrors though. To quote Wikipedia:

Night terrors are distinct from nightmares.[31] In fact, in nightmares there are almost never vocalization or agitation, and if there are any, they are less strong in comparison to night terrors.[31] In addition, nightmares appear ordinarily during REM sleep in contrast to night terrors, which occur in NREM sleep.[2] Finally, individuals with nightmares can wake up completely and easily and have clear and detailed memories of their dreams.[2][31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror

For a good description of what they are like, read the "Signs and Symptoms" section of that article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror#Signs_and_symptom...).

in other words the same monsters living in everyone's heads

> There's a "built-in" concept of what is scary in terms of physical features that has an evolutionary benefit in keeping us safe from certain animals that we can easily transpose onto humans, and that system is being tapped into in some form for these people in the routine processing of faces.

I can see this with spiders and snakes, but vampires? I don't see it. They don't even generally resemble the bats they're associated with.

It's worth noting those who hear audio hallucinations, literal voices speaking to them, appear to hear different attitudes depending on the culture they come from. This wouldn't be the first time we've noted that qualia is culturally relative.

Vampires are predators. They have prominent canines. What’s more, they’re nocturnal predators, probably one of the scariest and most dangerous things that a protohuman on an African savanna could imagine.

That said, vampire myths are actually extremely diverse, and it’s not clear at all that they share an origin in some primordial fear of predators.

Peter Watts, in Blindsight, of course presents an interesting hypothesis: vampire myths exist because vampires used to exist. Or more precisely, there used to exist a hominid species or subspecies that predated on us.

Right, but we don't seem to fear predators the same way we fear snakes and spiders. I don't see fangs when I look at noise, for instance, even though I do see snakes and spiders. If you take hallucinogens this strong fear of specifically spiders and snakes is even more apparent.

That said, I think vampires can be traced back to burial practices in medieval Eastern Europe. They aren't exactly an ancient myth, nor are they cross-cultural.

An interesting thing to note is that we don't really have an evolutionary fear of seeing snakes and spiders. Studies on infants have been unable to back up that claim ever since we got the ability to process brain activity and more than just "what we see".

So in the past a study on infants might claim that with seeing spiders they show fear, but modern studies only demonstrate infants show increased alertness. Contrasted with adults/older kids where this fear shows up as we expect in brain scans and behaviors. Basically, it's a learned fear, and is also why we don't see other animals in the same way when logically we should.

The fundamental fear of the unknown makes more sense as a source, in which the fear of demons or vampires becomes understandable when they were created to creatively prey on the unknown. Eg. vampires lurking in the shadows/night. This fear of the unknown can also explain why exposure therapy can be so effective, you're filling that void with knowledge.

This fear of the unknown would also explain why new modern creature creations can be scary, despite quite literally knowing they cannot physically exist, we still have that little bit of our amygdala going "but what if we don't know..."

> Basically, it's a learned fear, and is also why we don't see other animals in the same way when logically we should.

This is not demonstrated by the evidence you offered, and this doesn't address the strong evidence we have at perceiving snakes and spiders in low lighting. Nobody was claiming this is true for infants or small children, too, and I am a mature adult.

> The fundamental fear of the unknown makes more sense as a source

This makes no sense. What does this even mean to fear the unknown? I get experiencing fear in low-lighting circumstances but this in no way implies a fear of monsters. I absolutely cannot imagine fearing a vampire when looking down a dark alleyway—but snakes and spiders are very real and easy to be scared of.

None of the children I grew up with had any innate fear of either snakes or spiders. Most of us knew which ones could kill and which ones wouldn't, snakes and spiders were watched, and if they moved onto you we let them run across and off again - over reacting was a way to get bitten.

I recall my sister bringing around a girl from a TI family new to the area, walking into our house she saw the first cat she had ever seen her life .. I've never heard anyone scream that loud nor get to the top of a couch that fast.

Timeframe: 1960s | early 1970s

TI -> Torres Strait Islands.

Location: Nor'eastern Kimberley region.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/snake-sense-wisdom-of-lesser...

    Aborigines lived close to nature and hence to the various creatures who inhabit it; they knew, of course, that snakes can be dangerous, but they also ate them.

    It was not my experience, however, that snakes were of any special concern to Aboriginals.

~ Snakes in an Aboriginal world-view, Herpetology in Australia, 1993

Snakes and spiders here are not unknowns, they're everyday creatures, unlike (at that time and place) cats.

Fear is probably not the right term; it's more like a heuristic built into our vision that allows us to react faster (even if it sometimes gives false positives).

>Nobody was claiming this is true for infants or small children, too, and I am a mature adult.

I was providing evidence that because this fear does not exist in infants, it is not innate. It is learned. If it was innate, infants would also be scared.

>I absolutely cannot imagine fearing a vampire when looking down a dark alleyway

I find it extremely funny how literal you took this. The fear of the unknown is that feeling we get when we don't know. For example being in the middle of a forest at night, not knowing what those sounds are or if people are around. Alternatively, that terror we feel when we see images of the deep dark ocean. This fear of the unknown is what fuels our other fears. Such as social anxiety, we fear the social interaction because we do not know what is going to happen, only that our mind starts racing to worst potentials.

Hope that explains it in a way you can understand. Avoiding mention of vampires because I don't think the fictional creatures helps grasp the concept of the unknown.

> I was providing evidence that because this fear does not exist in infants, it is not innate

Not all innate behaviors are present in infants. They are rather well-known to be partially developed humans. This just strikes me as very, very weak evidence.

Plus, children may not have the self awareness and ability to articulate mental phenomena and qualia (some) adults possess that would be required for a reasonable study.

There’s fear and there’s revulsion. I have a visceral revulsion to cockroaches but I’m not afraid of them in the sense that they could do me any harm, but colloquially we say I’m afraid of cockroaches.

I don't see much distinction. Whatever distinction exists is rather immaterial when the resultant instinct is identical–to either destroy them or remove yourself from them.

The modern pop cultural archetype of the vampire comes almost entirely from Bram Stoker and Universal Studios. But the folklore that informed Eastern European belief was far more varied and nebulous, rarely following the template precisely, and resembled beliefs that were certainly cross-cultural[0].

One interesting potential source for vampire beliefs is misinterpreting diseases like tuberculosis or cholera, or even rabies.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_folklore_by_region

Interesting. Color me convinced.

There is still a variety of hominid that, if not strictly nocturnal, is often enough up at odd hours of the night that you aren't and will suck the life out of you. They tend to grow as they do until at adulthood they are indistinguishable from an ordinary human. Over 30% of adult human beings are believed to have been born as babies.

Real talk though, it's a huge stretch because to label the range of "vampire myths" with the same word elides a huge diversity of beliefs in which none of being hominid, nocturnal, or particularly toothy are a given.

Vampire bats were named ex post facto. They are a New World species, and vampires as an idea predated discovery of the bat.

Reminds me of the DMT "machine elves" that appear in hallucinations to westerners that have been exposed to those ideas, whereas indigenous ayahuasca experiences tended to materialize more naturalistic visions like animal spirits, etc.

I've experienced something similar that I assume anyone can replicate:

Many years ago I was exhausted from a long week of training and had a bath. There was a mirror at the end of the bath and I slumped in the water. I was really relaxed and just stared into the mirror. Perhaps the humidity in the air helped me not need to blink for an incredibly long time, but after a while my peripheral vision started to burn away, and then what I could actually see began to pixelate in places, I noticed my face distorting slowly and just kept staring, my face went very dark as described in the article, and then I began picking out details, and I eventually realised I was looking at some sort of devil. Sort of like the one from the Tekken games but much darker flesh and longer ears and witchy nose. I was surprised and moved my eyes a little and it all faded away gently in a second.

I am not religious at all and the experience had no religious significance for me, I think devils look lame. I simply haven't repeated this because I don't like taking a bath or staring at myself in the mirror for 20 minutes. I feel the humidity of the hot bath was important for keeping ym eyes moist though, but maybe it can work just say in comfort somewhere else with a mirror.

I had interest in esoterics in my around-20s and one of the “practices” was to see the past self in a reflection, or past someone in their face (the specific term was something like moving your “build point” back in time, I believe it was from castaneda). We did it a few times with a friend and when you stare long enough at someone’s real face, pretty strange things started to happen. Sometimes the effect disappeared even because fear forced us to disfocus. Faces would distort, change skin color, eyes go “snake eyes”, etc.

I never experienced much darkening, but in the mirror I’ve seen someone relative to me like e.g. a young grand-grand-…-parent looking at me from a mirror. It felt like he even had its own emotion or ~~interest looking back. So yes, our minds may play interesting tricks when used not as intended.

Can you describe the exact procedure so I may try it? I’d like to experiment. Thank you!

Apart from self-persuasion that you’re doing something esoteric, it’s just looking at your mirror image with a relaxed gaze (as in looking far away-ish) but focused around some fixed point. You can replace a mirror with a buddy. Distance 0.3-1m face to face, depending on your comfort zone. Few minutes, but may appear sooner. Multiple phases, you can get stuck in one face but then suddenly go further. Once you see a new face, you can carefully examine it, but try not to disrupt this semi-trance by quick movements.

Esoterics-wise you should feel like you’re pulled “back” in your skull (not visually). The further you go back, the more ancient incarnation you see. The limit is your first ever appearance. Great mages have thousands of faces, some of them non-human, extinct races. If you don’t see anything, you were just born, cough loser.

Upd: just tested it with my phone screen turned off. Whew… same emotions as 20 years ago. Black tint definitely adds to the effect, and it’s quick!

So you’re supposed to do it through a reflection though? I’m confused because you say straight on also works? I thought it was through another mirror or peripheral vision? I definitely can “stare into nothingness” and what happens is usually a black pulsing blob or maybe very dark blue takes over my vision like a vortex. Weird, I know but never any faces although I’ve only ever looked at my shower wall or bathroom scenery.

Yes, you have to look straight face to face. Not at a peripheral reflection. The face you’re looking at starts changing. It happens with jumps: first it may become a blob / smeared / blurry, but then suddenly focuses and now you’re looking at a stranger or something non-human.

what did you do exactly with your phone?

Looked into it for maybe a minute or even less, the screen contained reflection of my upper head - hair, eyes, nose (held it landscape). Blackness got over it first, tossing itself around, but then, and I guess that’s where our face detection kicks in, eyes started to sharpen in and other details. Wasn’t mine and in a black reflection it’s much more eerie than in a regular mirror. Really reminds these christian horrors. If I were medieval, I’d run away and pray for a week. It was angry-featured, with a confident piercing gaze and strange old-or-weathered skin. I know from the past that if you don’t quit, it will sharpen into an ideal no-blur no-tricks face and then later happen again and again but with more pauses between new faces. And they get stranger. Last time I did it with my buddy, I was looking at a man-snake at the end.

Question : are you focusing your eyes and keeping what’s on the iPhone surface in focus and sharp or are you letting your vision blur kind of like stereoscopic images that turn 2d into 3d? I really want to pull this off lol. Thanks.

Makes you the think what the black mirrors were for back then!

Haha, what did you do exactly with your phone? How long did it take?

A visual novel that is quite related to the content of the article:

Koncolos

VNDB: https://vndb.org/v34195

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1912490/Koncolos/

Description: "At the place where Aras works, a woman makes a scene every night. Aras feels an oddness in what little information he has managed to find out and realizes that every clue points to a single fact. Monsters are real, and they live among us. Aras learns that in all those spooky stories that he has been listening to since his childhood, these creatures who have troubled people continue in their way."

Interesting, thanks for linking - myself I thought of a classic, Saya no Uta

There is a famous experiment where faces are alternated very quickly, and after a while they all start to look grotesque until you pause the effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effe...

This phenomenon has also been known to occur on dating apps.

For a period of 8 or so years in my twenties I had an extremely pronounced experience of seeing faces everywhere (pareidolia). Not in isolation like in an electrical outlet, but often many at once and each with a distinct character that remained even when I would look again later. I would see them in things like tree canopies, textured surfaces, cut wood, and my own free form drawings. In more recent years this has diminished greatly to a point where it hardly happens at all.

Sometimes when I'd get really stoned in college I'd go through the same thing

Anecdotal but this happens to me on LSD. While the experience can be sublime in many ways, people’s faces appear much uglier and distorted. Like every imperfection gets magnified.

Much like the person in the article, I also have poor face recognition skills in general.

Sorry to anyone having this, that sounds awful.

Would we easily know if the inverse phenomenon is happening in the rest of us? We're seeing people "better looking" than "they are"?

I believe the medical term for that is "drunk". A condition I've had the misfortune to suffer from myself on occasion.

Some do, after sobering up.

Experiments have shown that we perceive our own face as more attractive than it really is. When presented with a series of morphed pictures of their own face, from less attractive to more attractive, people tend to not pick the unmodified picture as the real one, but one morphed slightly more towards attractive (where “attractive” mostly means “symmetric”, IIRC).

Sounds interesting, but I hope the study was done both with photos and photos flipped liked in the mirror.

Don't know about that - but we're incredibly sensitive to some minor changes to faces;

I saw a clip not too long ago of a face digitally transitioning between male and female, the changes themselves were incredibly subtle, and yet the result was obvious and undeniable.

There's also the uncanny valley, faces that are almost human yet very slightly off, and somehow come across as incredibly creepy.

Can’t help but think of the 2002 Ted Chiang novelette “Liking What You See” and its tech “Calliagnosia,” a medical procedure that eliminates a person’s ability to perceive beauty. Excellent read (as are almost all his stories, imho).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...

That’s what the those crazies say, the reptilians amongst us glamour all humans into seeing them as better looking humans.

Incidentally, Sean Carroll just had a podcast episode with a neurobiologist, touching on how the brain perceives faces: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-...

Tangentially related, I just watched a comedy-horror anime called Mieruko-chan about a girl who sees horrible monsters everywhere. Interesting to learn that there is in fact an analogous real-world disorder.

This is interesting. Why only faces? Presumably this has to do with "face blindless", in that our brains seem to have special processing for faces, and it's possible for that part of the brain (or whatever cross-brain process is responsible for it) to malfunction independently of the rest.

It's as if signals from a face recognizing network in the brain are misdirected into the visual cortex where they inappropriately influence perception of basic shape.

Because I think here's the kicker. Semantic info about faces has to be correlated back to their position in your visual field. If you're looking at a crowd of people, your brain can't just come up with a list of the ones you know. The correct info has to be attached to and track each respective face. There's kind of a tagging going on which has to merge into the representation. Normally the tag is not visible: it is in the semantic layer that has no color or shape, so it doesn't influence what you're seeing. But it is pinned to something you're seeing. Imagine some wires get crossed there. Information is pinned in the wrong way, corrupting the visual.

I sometimes get visual migraines and I can strangely relate to this. I don't have what is described in the article. But sometimes I have a tendency to "soldier on", push through and tune out the symptoms. One way it catches up with me and I know I'm about to have a bad time with it is when faces don't look quite right, in a way I can't describe. I guess I have trouble focusing on them when this happens. And when I do pay continuous attention, I notice I'm experiencing the visual migraine symptoms, and that I should take it easy in a dark room for a bit.

I'm reminded of that Japanese visual novel where you play a guy who sees everyone as grotesque monsters -- except there actually is a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination in the world, whom he sees as a beautiful woman.

Yeah, Saya no Uta was my first thought as well. I wonder if there was some connection

I imagine that the various scenes from the movie The Devil’s Advocate must be a good representation of what this is like:

https://youtu.be/cYcCxdUy3I8?si=B-ghZmK6qca7g8Uy

For some reason, this phenomenon is one of my greatest fears, but I don’t actually have this condition

Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.

Remember this fact before making big decisions. You only have this now for a short while, and then it's back to the pre-conception infinite void.

> Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.

Is it ...?

Is recognizing your mother's or spouse's face a spiritual/soul function? If the mind did not arise from the brain, how does one explain lesions in the fusiform face area making one unable to recognize faces? This is without blindness, you see everything and go about your day normally. It's just that the meaning of faces may as well be kanji characters in hanzi-land and all you know is English.

look before you leap my friend

Has there ever been one iota of hard evidence for the existence of a soul? I've always categorized the idea of soul the same way as the Greek gods. Fanciful nonsense with no basis in reality.

I too conclude as much. I used to be christian until I read revelatians and realized it was classic mafia racketeering. I went full bore after discovering Conway's Game of Life, that it was Turing complete (and what that means), then Stephen Wolfram and his principle of computational equivalence. I can see exactly how I am a living computational program encoded and processed in a 3D particle automaton, I can see how from a few simple rules, simple systems, you get complex behavior no less complex than the Intel sitting on your desk can produce.

When I read revelations, I felt god was an egomaniac if he actually cared for humanity at all. The perfection of the clockwork universe contrasts with the imperfection of the human spiritual and material conditions. Such a god is a bastard for punishing you for doing what you were destined to do by his very design for you. Satan is a far less cruel master. However, if no such monster exists in reality and we are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational systems, nature and the world become beautiful again. No longer is it a frail imperfect creation but instead a beautiful floral tapestry.

Computation is Life!™

> we are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational

What is beauty?

Tentative theory of beauty: it's communication across a gap. This certainly applies to flowers, and possibly also to humans, although we may be jaded by over-intimacy and arbitrary standards in assessing that objectively.

What’s something you believe in without proof?

Statistical significance, causal determinism, life goals, civil society. Why?

That’s quite a tangent there, comes off a bit as axe-grinding.

Religion or not, you will have to face the void and make peace with it eventually. It’s a primal human fear.

> it's a primal human fear

Yes. Just like monsters

Prosopometamorphopsia: face change shape vision. Isn't it reassuring when you can put a name to your condition?

His case is also idiopathic: we don’t know why.

If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see.

Encountering this article title while using a screen reader must really be something else

Or is it the sunglasses?

(ref to They Live)

It gets a reference in the article! (Eventually. Long read.)

> “My whole scenario reminds me of the reverse,” he said. He held up a pair of green glasses that Morris made for him, which he sometimes wears to alleviate distortions.

Maybe they are a demigod child of a Greek deity.

I initially read this:

“A rare disorder makes people sea monsters”

I have a disorder that makes see monsters sea monsters.

Put me in mind of this little ditty about Deep Ones of Y'ha-nthlei: https://youtu.be/3tTHn2tHhcI?si=BEkWRIqaTCj3Pw0K

(And now I'm also wondering if Lovecraft might have had something like this, or if it was "just" neophobia).

Ah yes dyslexseea

I have it the other way around. It affects my writing.

I would write (right) a phonetically similar word instead of what I intended. This happens especially when I am sleep deprived. The weird part is I can spot it easily if I just read what I wrote after I am done writing.

Its quite annoying.

s/its/it's/

Not sure if that was intentional or not.

Thanks. It's just laziness.

[flagged]

I wouldn't be so quick to blame the journalist. It's likely not shown due to copyright concerns.

(Yes, this would fall under fair use. No, that often doesn't matter since lawsuits are expensive.)

The underlined text items are links. Click on them and you can find the artwork and other content referenced by, but not duplicated in, the article.

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