Tag Archives | Hallucinations

Hallucinated Sheet Music

By on April 4, 2013 in News 0

Vaughan Bell writes at Mind Hacks:

Oliver Sacks has just published an article on ‘Hallucinations of musical notation’ in the neurology journal Brain that recounts eight cases of illusory sheet music escaping into the world.

The article makes the interesting point that the hallucinated musical notation is almost always nonsensical – either unreadable or not describing any listenable music – as described in this case study.

Arthur S., a surgeon and amateur pianist, was losing vision from macular degeneration. In 2007, he started ‘seeing’ musical notation for the first time. Its appearance was extremely realistic, the staves and clefs boldly printed on a white background ‘just like a sheet of real music’, and Dr. S. wondered for a moment whether some part of his brain was now generating his own original music. But when he looked more closely, he realized that the score was unreadable and unplayable. It was inordinately complicated, with four or six staves, impossibly complex chords with six or more notes on a single stem, and horizontal rows of multiple flats and sharps.

… Read the rest

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Descendants Sue CIA Over Cold War Scientist’s Mysterious Death Following LSD Experiments

By on December 1, 2012 in News 0

Bioweapons expert Frank Olson unwittingly served as a guinea pig in clandestine CIA mind-control experiments involving LSD. But was the purpose all along to assassinate him? Via the Huffington Post:

The sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment sued the government Wednesday. They claimed the CIA murdered their father, Frank Olson, by pushing him from a 13th-story window of a hotel – not, as the CIA says, that he jumped to his death.

Olson was a bioweapons expert at Fort Detrick, the Army’s biological weapons research center in Maryland. The lawsuit claims the CIA killed Olson when he developed misgivings after witnessing extreme interrogations in which they allege the CIA committed murder using biological agents Olson had developed.

Olson consumed a drink laced with LSD by CIA agents on Nov. 19, 1953, the suit says.

… Read the rest

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We’re All Tripping, All The Time…

By on November 20, 2012 in News 0

Beau Lotto explains in his Ted Talk…

…and Ben Thomas interprets for Huffington Post:

The year was 1943, and the Pentagon had a problem. They’d poured millions of dollars into a new voice encryption system — dubbed the “X System” — but no one was certain how secure it was. So the top brass called in Claude Shannon to analyze their code and — if all went well — to prove that it was mathematically unbreakable.

Shannon was a new breed of mathematician: A specialist in what’s known today as information theory. To Shannon and his fellow theorists, information was something separate from the letters, numbers and facts it represented. Instead, it was something more abstract; more mathematical: in a word, it was non-redundancy…

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Oliver Sacks On Hallucinations

By on November 5, 2012 in News 9

NYU Professor of Neurology Oliver Sacks spills the beans on hallucinations in the New York Times:

Hallucinations are very startling and frightening: you suddenly see, or hear or smell something — something that is not there. Your immediate, bewildered feeling is, what is going on? Where is this coming from? The hallucination is convincingly real, produced by the same neural pathways as actual perception, and yet no one else seems to see it. And then you are forced to the conclusion that something — something unprecedented — is happening in your own brain or mind. Are you going insane, getting dementia, having a stroke?

In other cultures, hallucinations have been regarded as gifts from the gods or the Muses, but in modern times they seem to carry an ominous significance in the public (and also the medical) mind, as portents of severe mental or neurological disorders. Having hallucinations is a fearful secret for many people — millions of people — never to be mentioned, hardly to be acknowledged to oneself, and yet far from uncommon.

… Read the rest

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Hallucinations Caused By Lightning

By on September 20, 2012 in News 10

A trope of pulp fantasy is the lightning bolt strike that grants its target strange powers. Mind Hacks discusses how this occurred, in a sense, when a healthy 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by lightning and suffered impact to her visual cortex. After rescue and three days spent in a drug induced coma, she awoke to a strange world, thus described by the British Medical Journal:

These exclusively visual sensations consisted of unknown people, animals and objects acting in different scenes, as if in a movie. For example, an old lady was sitting on a ribbed radiator, who then became thinner and thinner, finally vanishing through the slots of the radiator. Later, on her left side a cowboy riding on a horse came from the distance. As he approached her, he tried to shoot her, making her feel defenceless because she could not move or shout for help.

In another scene, two male doctors, one fair and one dark haired, and a woman, all with strange metal glasses and unnatural brownish-red faces, were tanning in front of a sunbed, then having sexual intercourse and afterwards trying to draw blood from her.

… Read the rest

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Ketamine Can Induce A Near-Death Experience

By on August 9, 2012 in News 12

Looking down at one’s own body as the soul floats upwards…a feeling of immense calm as one moves towards the light…such reports by those who have come perilously close to death are often cited as proof of an afterlife or spiritual realm. However psychiatrist Dr. Karl Jansen explains that these near-death experiences are identical to a ketamine trip:

The near-death experience (NDE) is a phenomenon of considerable importance to medicine, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, philosophy and religon. Unfortunately, some scientists have been deterred from conducting research upon the NDE by claims that NDE’s are evidence for life after death, and sensationalist media reports which impart the air of a pseudoscience to NDE studies.

All features of a classic NDE can be reproduced by the intravenous administration of 50-100 mg of ketamine…including travel through a dark tunnel into light, the conviction that one is dead, ‘telepathic communion with God’, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences and mystical states…becoming a disembodied mind or soul, dying and going to another world.

… Read the rest

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The Pentagon’s LSD Bombs

By on July 12, 2011 in News 33

I never knew there was such a thing as “psychedelic warfare”. From a vintage Popular Science article, via Parapolitical:

Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.

LSDbomb

… Read the rest

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U.S. Loosens Rules On Experimenting With Psychedelics

By on April 12, 2010 in News 3

For many years the United States government has classified more or less all psychoactive drugs, many of them plants sacred to indigenous peoples around the world, with so-called “hard” drugs, making it extremely difficult for researchers to study their mental health benefits. Graham Hancock has written on this topic extensively, including in his essay “The War on Consciousness” included in the disinformation® anthology You Are STILL Being Lied To, and that issue will be at the heart of his first novel, Entangled, which will be published in the fall. Now the New York Times is reporting that policy may be changing:

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

Scientists are taking a new look at hallucinogens, which became taboo among regulators after enthusiasts like Timothy Leary promoted them in the 1960s with the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now, using rigorous protocols and safeguards, scientists have won permission to study once again the drugs’ potential for treating mental problems and illuminating the nature of consciousness…

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The Math Behind Geometric Hallucinations

By on March 3, 2010 in News 5

An interesting article from Plus Magazine on the mathematics of geometric hallucinations (think swirling patterns) and what it says about the brain:

Think drug-induced hallucinations, and the whirly, spirally, tunnel-vision-like patterns of psychedelic imagery immediately spring to mind. But it’s not just hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, cannabis or mescaline that conjure up these geometric structures. People have reported seeing them in near-death experiences, as a result of disorders like epilepsy and schizophrenia, following sensory deprivation, or even just after applying pressure to the eyeballs. So common are these geometric hallucinations, that in the last century scientists began asking themselves if they couldn’t tell us something fundamental about how our brains are wired up.

… Read the rest

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