How Culture Affects Hallucinations | Hacker News Reader

How Culture Affects Hallucinations

priceonomics.com

There is an internet subculture that tries to create tulpas. They are like voices in your head, but they have bodies too. So culture is already changing.

https://community.tulpa.info/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tulpamancy-internet-subcultur...

Tibetan Buddhists and other weird occult folk knew about them for ages, and required years of training before approaching them as a subject. They considered them as highly dangerous too. I shiver at the thought that this concept evolved enough so as to be picked up by reddit subculture. Let's see how many lives will get fucked.

"If your only explanation for an auditory hallucination is that you must be going crazy and you have to fight it, you’re going to develop a very different relationship to your illness"

This is really the key idea. It reminds me of the story of Eleanor Longden [1], a psychological researcher who has heard voices for years and has come to learn to live with them. "Mental illness/health" is a powerful meme that isn't always for the best.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/ted-talk-e...

I wonder about cultural patterns that might result in selection bias in the studies mentioned.

> All sixty participants were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and regularly had auditory hallucinations.

And later:

> ... the Americans’ hallucinations seemed much more aggressive and violent.

Perhaps (for example) Americans with non-violent hallucinations tend not to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There's a "hearing voices movement" that aims to change the Western interpretation of auditory hallucinations, in roughly the way this article suggests:

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

I highly recommend the book Echopraxia, sci-fi written by a marine biologist which explores voices in heads as reptile programs not unlike shell daemons communicating through audio.

http://www.amazon.com/Echopraxia-Peter-Watts/dp/076532802X

Ah, I see Priceonomics has completed its transformation into Medium. Kind of a strange pivot.

This article misses the fundamental difference between vision and hallucination.

Hallucinations are psychiatric states, characterized by confusion, loss of identity and control, and have a destructive nature.

Visions on the other hand are spiritual experiences, they come with clarity, finding of identity and control about the inner and outer world, and are very constructive and uplifting experiences.

Hallucinations are certainly not by definition destructive. If you play Guitar Hero for a few hours and then look at something stationary, it will look like it's moving. If I haven't gotten enough sleep for several days running, sometimes walls will look like they're at the wrong angles.

Tetris effect/hypnagogia is maybe what you're talking about, it happens to most everyone given the circumstances http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Guitar hero purposefully bends the score screen so that when you look away, your brain maps the bending & shifting of whatever you're looking at. Similar to those optical illusions "look at the X colored dot for 60 seconds then look away"

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