Little people a few inches high, like elves or fairies, with little green caps, climbing up the sides of her wheelchair’. Similar characters are just as commonly witnessed by sufferers from migraine, epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease, those on mind-altering drugs such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine) or magic mushrooms, or in withdrawal from alcohol or sedatives. In all these cases the hallucinated figures tend to share further curious but consistent qualities: a tendency to appear in groups, for example, or arrayed in phalanxes (‘numerosity’), to wear headgear or exotic dress, and to go about their business autonomously, paying no attention to the subject’s attempts to interact with them.
appearance is taken as evidence not of their neurological basis but of their independent existence in a transpersonal or spirit world. Their cultural and literary resonances are immediately familiar, and indeed adopted as clinical labels. One of the many terms for seeing miniature people is ‘Lilliput sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The phenomenon appears to be consistent through history – the oldest example typically cited in the literature is the ‘little strangers’ who appeared to St Macarius the Elder in his desert solitude around 350 CE –
but susceptible to varied cultural interpretations: in Ireland such figures might be described as leprechauns, in Norway as trolls and so on
Interpreting a fleeting shadow as a person or hearing a voice in a babbling stream are illusions; but ‘if a man has the intimate conviction of actually perceiving a sensation for which there is no external object, he is in a hallucinatory state; he is a visionary’ (visionnaire). Hallucinations, like dreams, are independent of the senses: those who experience them might be said to be ‘dreaming while awake’.
oracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God.
oracles, messages fromoracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God. ancestors or the voice of God. The word that Esquirol repurposed, alucinari, had signified a wandering in mind, a soul adrift: Dante, most famously, used it to describe the effects of the siren song on Odysseus. oracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God. .
Was it possible for them to co-exist with reason? Should all mystic states be regarded as hallucinations
Was it possible for them to co-exist with reason? Should all mystic states be regarded as hallucinations? Such questions were put to the test by Esquirol’s protégé Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, who experimented with large doses of hashish in the company of a literary demi-monde that included Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire
coined in 1869 by the physician and positivist philosopher Emile Littré, set about diagnosing Moses, Socrates and Muhammad as epileptics, hysterics or paranoiacs. Anomalous private experiences, now that they carried the taint of insanity, were less commonly shared. As Sacks reminds us, the mysterious phenomenon of pain from amputated limbs had been anecdotally familiar at least since it was described in Descartes’s Meditations; but before the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell could offer the first full account of ‘phantom limb syndrome’ in 1872, he had been obliged to spend many years delicately eliciting case histories from invalid soldiers who had kept their strange sensations to themselves for fear of being transferred to an asylum.
Henry Maudsley, in ‘Hallucinations of the Senses’ (1878), diagnoses Joan of Arc with religious mania, characterises such visionary episodes as ‘discordant notes in the grand harmony’ of human nature, and cautions the reader to ‘guard against’ them by ‘prudent
vivid impressions’ are almost all of people or obliquely human forms, typically departed relatives or mysterious figures in black, materialising and vanishing in the manner of the ghost stories of the time. If nothing else, the census reveals that the private world of hallucinations can be dated as easily as fashion or literature.
Lilliputian sight may be related to disturbance of the ‘size constancy’ function in the visual association cortex, which allows us to recognise automatically that an object is not actually shrinking as it recedes from view
disease and senility, but now it seems to be splitting into two or more quite separate conditions. Is ‘hallucination’ a meaningful category at all, or simply a ragbag of poorly understood symptoms with causes as disparate as macular degeneration, the prelude to an epileptic seizure, the effects of withdrawal from alcohol, or voices heard while drifting off to sleep
(‘Don’t give in to astonishment! Pay attention to what we’re doing!’) bu
Sacks’s own drug experiences, the element of his book that has drawn the most publicity, make no such claims to objective veracity, but they also resist easy reduction to symptoms of neurological impairment. They are related candidly, as lucid and plausible as reality itself: when, after a massive deliriant dose of the Parkinson’s medication Artane, he sees and hears his parents descending into his garden from a helicopter, he feels nothing but surprise and delight; when they abruptly vanish, ‘the silence and emptiness, the disappointment, reduced me to tears.’ Such experiences may amount to no more than neurological flotsam, but they cannot be willed away: they must be dealt with as if real, just as Charles Bonnet or Parkinson’s sufferers must learn to cope with the persistent and ultimately banal presence of their tiny companions. They are evidence neither
Charles Bonnet or Parkinson’s sufferers must learn to cope with the persistent and ultimately banal presence of their tiny companions. They are evidence neither of insanity nor of the spirit world: the challenge is to assimilate them into the rest of our mental life. What hallucinations have to tell us might be that the inner workings of our senses are a riotous carnival, driven by an engine of unimaginable processing power whose most spectacular illusion is reality itself.
appearance is taken as evidence not of their neurological basis but of their independent existence in a transpersonal or spirit world. Their cultural and literary resonances are immediately familiar, and indeed adopted as clinical labels. One of the many terms for seeing miniature people is ‘Lilliput sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The phenomenon appears to be consistent through history – the oldest example typically cited in the literature is the ‘little strangers’ who appeared to St Macarius the Elder in his desert solitude around 350 CE –
but susceptible to varied cultural interpretations: in Ireland such figures might be described as leprechauns, in Norway as trolls and so on
Interpreting a fleeting shadow as a person or hearing a voice in a babbling stream are illusions; but ‘if a man has the intimate conviction of actually perceiving a sensation for which there is no external object, he is in a hallucinatory state; he is a visionary’ (visionnaire). Hallucinations, like dreams, are independent of the senses: those who experience them might be said to be ‘dreaming while awake’.
oracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God.
oracles, messages fromoracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God. ancestors or the voice of God. The word that Esquirol repurposed, alucinari, had signified a wandering in mind, a soul adrift: Dante, most famously, used it to describe the effects of the siren song on Odysseus. oracles, messages from ancestors or the voice of God. .
Was it possible for them to co-exist with reason? Should all mystic states be regarded as hallucinations
Was it possible for them to co-exist with reason? Should all mystic states be regarded as hallucinations? Such questions were put to the test by Esquirol’s protégé Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, who experimented with large doses of hashish in the company of a literary demi-monde that included Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval and Baudelaire
coined in 1869 by the physician and positivist philosopher Emile Littré, set about diagnosing Moses, Socrates and Muhammad as epileptics, hysterics or paranoiacs. Anomalous private experiences, now that they carried the taint of insanity, were less commonly shared. As Sacks reminds us, the mysterious phenomenon of pain from amputated limbs had been anecdotally familiar at least since it was described in Descartes’s Meditations; but before the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell could offer the first full account of ‘phantom limb syndrome’ in 1872, he had been obliged to spend many years delicately eliciting case histories from invalid soldiers who had kept their strange sensations to themselves for fear of being transferred to an asylum.
Henry Maudsley, in ‘Hallucinations of the Senses’ (1878), diagnoses Joan of Arc with religious mania, characterises such visionary episodes as ‘discordant notes in the grand harmony’ of human nature, and cautions the reader to ‘guard against’ them by ‘prudent
vivid impressions’ are almost all of people or obliquely human forms, typically departed relatives or mysterious figures in black, materialising and vanishing in the manner of the ghost stories of the time. If nothing else, the census reveals that the private world of hallucinations can be dated as easily as fashion or literature.
Lilliputian sight may be related to disturbance of the ‘size constancy’ function in the visual association cortex, which allows us to recognise automatically that an object is not actually shrinking as it recedes from view
disease and senility, but now it seems to be splitting into two or more quite separate conditions. Is ‘hallucination’ a meaningful category at all, or simply a ragbag of poorly understood symptoms with causes as disparate as macular degeneration, the prelude to an epileptic seizure, the effects of withdrawal from alcohol, or voices heard while drifting off to sleep
(‘Don’t give in to astonishment! Pay attention to what we’re doing!’) bu
Sacks’s own drug experiences, the element of his book that has drawn the most publicity, make no such claims to objective veracity, but they also resist easy reduction to symptoms of neurological impairment. They are related candidly, as lucid and plausible as reality itself: when, after a massive deliriant dose of the Parkinson’s medication Artane, he sees and hears his parents descending into his garden from a helicopter, he feels nothing but surprise and delight; when they abruptly vanish, ‘the silence and emptiness, the disappointment, reduced me to tears.’ Such experiences may amount to no more than neurological flotsam, but they cannot be willed away: they must be dealt with as if real, just as Charles Bonnet or Parkinson’s sufferers must learn to cope with the persistent and ultimately banal presence of their tiny companions. They are evidence neither
Charles Bonnet or Parkinson’s sufferers must learn to cope with the persistent and ultimately banal presence of their tiny companions. They are evidence neither of insanity nor of the spirit world: the challenge is to assimilate them into the rest of our mental life. What hallucinations have to tell us might be that the inner workings of our senses are a riotous carnival, driven by an engine of unimaginable processing power whose most spectacular illusion is reality itself.
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