Hallucinations Part 3

Adair and, later, her editor sent me extracts from the journal she kept in the last years of her life. They were full of descriptions she dictated of her hallucinations as they occurred, including this:

I am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night ... the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peac.o.c.k, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a sh.o.r.e bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind.... The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs.... Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box.... But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance ... where I landed as the lights went out.

1. Draaisma's book provides not only a vivid account of Bonnet's life and work, but fascinating reconstructions of the lives of a dozen other major figures in neurology whose names are now remembered mostly for the syndromes named after them: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, James Parkinson, Alois Alzheimer, Joseph Capgras, and others.

2. Or so it would seem. Recently I came across a marvelous 1845 report by Truman Abell, a physician who started to lose his sight in his fifty-ninth year and had become totally blind by 1842, four years later. He described this in an article for the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

"In this situation," he wrote, "I often dreamed of having my sight restored, and of seeing the most beautiful landscapes. At length these landscapes began to appear in miniature when awake: small fields, a few feet square, would appear, clothed with green gra.s.s, and other vegetables, some in bloom. These would continue two or three minutes, and then disappear." The landscapes were followed by an immense variety of other "illusions"-Abell did not use the word "hallucinations"-provided by "an internal sight."

Over the course of several months, his visions increased in complexity. His "silent, but impudent visitors" were sometimes intrusive, with three or four people who would sit on his bed or "come to my bed-side, stoop down over me, and look directly into my eyes." (Often his hallucinatory people seemed to acknowledge him, although CBS hallucinations typically do not interact with their hallucinators.) One night, he reported, "I was threatened to be run over about 10 o'clock by a drove of oxen; but having my presence of mind, I sat quiet, and with much crowding they all pa.s.sed without touching me."

Sometimes he saw ranks of thousands of people, splendidly dressed, forming columns that disappeared into the distance. At one point he saw "a column at least half a mile wide" of "men on horseback riding towards the west.... They continued to pa.s.s for several hours."

"What I have here stated," Abell wrote at the end of his detailed account, "must appear incredible to those unacquainted with the history of illusive visions.... How far my blindness contributed to produce such a result, I am not able to say. Never before have I been able to realize the ancient comparison of the human mind to a microcosm, or universe in miniature ... [yet] the whole was confined within the organ of mental vision, and occupied, perhaps, a s.p.a.ce of less than the tenth part of an inch square."

3. A particularly good description of hallucinations in CBS ("I See Purple Flowers Everywhere") is provided by Lylas and Marja Mogk in their excellent book Macular Degeneration, written for patients with this condition.

4. The reverse may also occur. Robert Teunisse told me how one of his patients, seeing a man hovering outside his nineteenth-floor apartment, a.s.sumed this was another one of his hallucinations. When the man waved at him, he did not wave back. The "hallucination" turned out to be his window washer, considerably miffed at not having his friendly wave returned.

5. I have heard from at least a dozen people who, like Arthur and Marjorie, hallucinate musical notation; some of them have eye problems, some parkinsonism, some see music when they have a fever or delirium, some see it hypnopompically when they awaken. All but one are amateur musicians who often spend many hours a day studying scores. This very specialized and repet.i.tive sort of visual study is peculiar to musicians. One may read books for hours a day, but one does not usually study print itself in such an intensive way (unless one is a type designer or proofreader, perhaps).

A page of music is far more complex visually than a page of print. With musical notation, one has not just the notes themselves but a very dense set of information contained in symbols for key signatures, clefs, turns, mordents, accents, rests, holds, trills, etc. It seems likely that intensive study and practice of this complex code somehow imprints it in the brain, and should any tendency to hallucination later develop, these "neural imprints" may predispose to hallucinations of musical notation.

And yet people with no particular training or even interest in music may also have hallucinations of musical notation, as Dominic ffytche has pointed out. In a letter to me, he wrote, "although prolonged exposure to music increases the likelihood of musical eyes, it is not a prerequisite."

6. I was reminded, when she said this, of a case I had heard of in which as a patient ate cherries from a bowl, they were replaced by hallucinatory cherries, a seemingly endless cornucopia of cherries, until, suddenly, the bowl was totally empty. And of another case, of a man with CBS who was picking blackberries. He picked every one he could see; then, to his delight, he saw four more he had missed-but these turned out to be hallucinations.

7. Something about visual movement or "optic flow" seems to be especially provocative of visual hallucinations in people with CBS or other disorders. I met one elderly psychiatrist with macular degeneration who had experienced only a single episode of CBS hallucinations: he was being driven in a car and began to see, on the edges of the parkway, elaborate eighteenth-century gardens which reminded him of Versailles. He enjoyed the experience and found it much more interesting than the ordinary view of the roadside.

Ivy L., who also has macular degeneration, wrote:

As a pa.s.senger in cars, I began riding with my eyes closed. Now I often "see" a small, moving travel scene in front of me when my eyes are shut. I "see" open roads and sky, houses, and gardens. I do not "see" any people or vehicles. The scene constantly changes, showing unidentifiable houses in great detail sliding by when the car is in motion. These hallucinations never appear except when I am in a moving car.

(Mrs. L. also reported text hallucinations as part of her CBS, "brief periods when I would 'see' handwriting in huge letters across a large white wall, or the income tax figures imprinted on the drapes. These lasted several years, at intervals.")

8. Such correlations involve sizable regions of the brain; they are at a macro level. Correlations on a micro level, at least for elementary geometric hallucinations, have been proposed by William Burke, a neuro-physiologist who has experienced such hallucinations himself, due to macular "holes" in both eyes. He has been able to estimate the visual angles subtended by specific hallucinations and to extrapolate these into cortical distances. He concludes that the separation of his brickwork hallucinations corresponds to the separation of the physiologically active "stripes" in the V2 part of the visual cortex, while the separation of the dots he hallucinates corresponds to that of the "blobs" in the primary visual cortex. Burke hypothesizes that with diminished input from his damaged maculas, there is diminished activity in the macular cortex, releasing spontaneous activity in the cortical stripes and blobs that give rise to hallucinations.

9. I have heard similar descriptions from other people who have both CBS and some dementia. Janet B. likes to listen to audiobooks and sometimes finds herself joined by a hallucinatory group of fellow listeners. They listen intently but never speak, do not respond to her questions, and seem unaware of her presence. At first, Janet realized that they were hallucinatory, but later, as her dementia advanced, she insisted that they were real. Once when her daughter was visiting and said, "Mom, there's no one here," she got angry and chased her daughter out.

A more complex delusional overlay occurred while she was listening to a favorite show on television. It seemed to Janet that the television crew had decided to use her apartment, and that it was set up with cables and cameras, that the show was actually being filmed at that moment in front of her. Her daughter happened to telephone her during the show, and Janet whispered, "I have to be quiet-they're filming." When her daughter arrived an hour later, Janet insisted that there were still cables all over the floor, adding, "Don't you see that woman?"

Even though Janet was convinced of the reality of these hallucinations, they were entirely visual. People pointed, gestured, mouthed, but made no sound. Nor did she have any sense of personal involvement; she found herself in the midst of strange happenings, yet they seemed to have nothing to do with her. In this way they retained the typical character of CBS hallucinations, even though she insisted that they were real.

2

The Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation

The brain needs not only perceptual input but perceptual change, and the absence of change may cause not only lapses of arousal and attention but perceptual aberrations as well. Whether darkness and solitude is sought out by holy men in caves or forced upon prisoners in lightless dungeons, the deprivation of normal visual input can stimulate the inner eye instead, producing dreams, vivid imaginings, or hallucinations. There is even a special term for the trains of brilliantly colored and varied hallucinations which come to console or torment those kept in isolation or darkness: "the prisoner's cinema."

Total visual deprivation is not necessary to produce hallucinations-visual monotony can have much the same effect. Thus sailors have long reported seeing things (and perhaps hearing them, too) when they spent days gazing at a becalmed sea. It is similar for travelers riding across a featureless desert or polar explorers in a vast, unvarying icescape. Soon after World War II, such visions were recognized as a special hazard for high-alt.i.tude pilots flying for hours in an empty sky, and it is a danger for long-distance truckers focused for hours on an endless road. Pilots and truckers, those who monitor radar screens for hours on end-anyone with a visually monotonous task is susceptible to hallucinations. (Similarly, auditory monotony may lead to auditory hallucinations.)

In the early 1950s, researchers in Donald Hebb's laboratory at McGill University designed the first experimental study of prolonged perceptual isolation, as they called it (the term "sensory deprivation" became popular later). William Bexton and his colleagues investigated this with fourteen college students immured in soundproof cubicles for several days (except for brief time out for eating and going to the toilet), wearing gloves and cardboard cuffs to reduce tactile sensation and translucent goggles which allowed only a perception of light and dark.

At first the test subjects tended to fall asleep, but then, on awakening, they became bored and craved stimulation-stimulation not available from the impoverished and monotonous environment they were in. And at this point, self-stimulation of various sorts began: mental games, counting, fantasies, and, sooner or later, visual hallucinations-usually a "march" of hallucinations from simple to complex, as Bexton et al. described:

In the simplest form the visual field, with the eyes closed, changed from dark to light colour; next in complexity were dots of light, lines, or simple geometrical patterns. All 14 subjects reported such imagery, and said it was a new experience to them. Still more complex forms consisted in "wall-paper patterns," reported by 11 subjects, and isolated figures or objects, without background (e.g., a row of little yellow men with black caps on and their mouths open; a German helmet), reported by seven subjects. Finally, there were integrated scenes (e.g., a procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders marching "purposefully" across a snow field and out of the field of "vision"; prehistoric animals walking about in the jungle). Three of the 14 subjects reported such scenes, frequently including dreamlike distortions, with the figures often being described as "like cartoons."

While these images first appeared as if projected onto a flat screen, after a time they became "compellingly three-dimensional" for some of the subjects, and parts of a scene might become inverted or pivot from side to side.

After being initially startled, the subjects tended to find their hallucinations amusing, interesting, or sometimes irritating ("their vividness interfered with sleep") but without any "meaning." The hallucinations seemed external, proceeding autonomously, with little relevance or reference to the individual or situation. The hallucinations usually disappeared when the subjects were asked to do complex tasks like multiplying three-figure numbers, but not if they were merely exercising or talking to the researchers. The McGill researchers reported, as many others have, auditory and kinesthetic hallucinations as well as visual ones.

This and subsequent studies aroused enormous interest in the scientific community, and both scientific and popular efforts were made to duplicate the results. In a 1961 paper, John Zubek and his colleagues reported, in addition to hallucination, a change in visual imagery in many of their subjects:

At various intervals ... the subjects were asked to imagine or visualize certain familiar scenes, for example, lakes, countryside, the inside of their homes, and so forth. The majority of the subjects reported that the images which they conjured up were of unusual vividness, were usually characterized by bright colours, and had considerable detail. All these subjects were unanimous in their opinion that their images were more vivid than anything they had previously experienced. Several subjects who normally had great difficulty visualizing scenes could now visualize them almost instantly with great vividness.... One subject ... could visualize faces of former a.s.sociates of a few years back with almost picture-like clarity, a thing which he was never able to do previously. This phenomenon usually appeared during the second or third day and, in general, became more p.r.o.nounced with time.

Such visual heightenings-whether due to disease, deprivation, or drugs-can take the form of enhanced visual imagery or hallucination or both.

In the early 1960s, sensory deprivation tanks were designed to intensify the effect of isolation by floating the body in a darkened tank of warm water, which removed not only any sense of bodily contact with the environment but also the proprioceptive sense of the body's position and even its existence. Such immersion chambers could produce "altered states" much more profound than those described in the original experiments. At the time, such sensory deprivation tanks were sought out as avidly as (and sometimes combined with) "consciousness-expanding" drugs, which were more widely available then.1

There was a great deal of research on sensory deprivation in the 1950s and 1960s (a 1969 book edited by Zubek ent.i.tled Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research listed thirteen hundred references)-but then scientific interest, like popular interest, started to peter out, and there was relatively little research until the recent work of Alvaro Pascual-Leone and his colleagues (Merabet et al.), who designed a study to isolate the effects of pure visual deprivation. Their subjects, though blindfolded, were able to move around freely and "watch" TV, listen to music, walk outside, and talk to others. They experienced none of the somnolence, boredom, or restlessness the earlier test subjects had shown. They were alert and active during the daytime, when they carried tape recorders so they could take immediate note of any hallucinations. They enjoyed calm, restful sleep at night, and each morning they dictated what they could remember of their dreams-dreams that did not seem significantly altered by their being blindfolded.

The blindfolds, which allowed the subjects to close or move their eyes, were worn continuously for ninety-six hours. Ten of the thirteen subjects experienced hallucinations, sometimes during the first hours of blindfolding, but always by the second day, whether their eyes were open or not.

Typically the hallucinations would appear suddenly and spontaneously, then disappear just as suddenly after seconds or minutes-although in one subject, hallucination became almost continuous by the third day. The subjects reported a range from simple hallucinations (flashing lights, phosphenes, geometrical patterns) to complex ones (figures, faces, hands, animals, buildings, and landscapes). In general, the hallucinations appeared full-fledged, without warning-they never seemed to be built up slowly, piecemeal, like voluntary imagery or recall. For the most part, the hallucinations aroused little emotion and were regarded as "amusing." Two subjects had hallucinations which correlated with their own movements and actions: "I have the sensation that I can see my hands and my arms moving when I move them and leaving an illuminated trail," said one subject. "I felt like I was seeing the pitcher while I was pouring the water," said another.

Several subjects spoke of the brilliance and colors of their hallucinations; one described "resplendent peac.o.c.k feathers and buildings." Another saw sunsets almost too bright to bear and luminous landscapes of extraordinary beauty, "much prettier, I think, than anything I have ever seen. I really wish I could paint."

Several mentioned spontaneous changes in their hallucinations; for one subject, a b.u.t.terfly became a sunset, which changed to an otter and, finally, a flower. None of the subjects had any voluntary control over their hallucinations, which seemed to have "a mind" or "a will" of their own.

No hallucinations were experienced when subjects were engaged in challenging sensory activity of another mode, such as listening to television or music, talking, or even attempting to learn Braille. (The study was concerned not only with hallucinations but with the power of blindfolding to improve and heighten tactile skills and the ability to conceive of s.p.a.ce and the world around one in nonvisual terms.)

Merabet et al. felt that the hallucinations reported by their subjects were entirely comparable with those experienced by patients with Charles Bonnet syndrome, and their results suggested to them that visual deprivation alone could be a sufficient cause for CBS.2

But what exactly is going on in the brains of such experimental subjects-or in the brains of pilots who crash in cloudless blue skies, or truckers who see phantoms on an empty road, or prisoners watching their enforced "cinema" in darkness?

With the advent of functional brain imaging in the 1990s it became possible to visualize, at least in gross terms, how the brain might respond to sensory deprivation-and, if one was lucky (hallucinations are notoriously fickle, and the inside of an fMRI machine is not an ideal place for delicate sensory experiences), one might even catch the neural correlates of a fugitive hallucination. One such study, by Babak Boroojerdi and his colleagues, showed an increase in the excitability of the visual cortex when subjects were visually deprived, a change that occurred within minutes. Another group of researchers, in the neuroscience lab led by Wolf Singer, studied a single subject, a visual artist with excellent powers of visual imagery (an article on this by Sireteanu et al. was published in 2008). The subject was blindfolded for twenty-two days and spent several sessions in an fMRI machine, where she was able to indicate the exact times her hallucinations appeared and disappeared. The fMRI showed activations in her visual system, both in the occipital cortex and in the inferotemporal cortex, in precise coincidence with her hallucinations. (When, by contrast, she was asked to recall or imagine the hallucinations using her powers of visual imagery, there was, additionally, a good deal of activation in the executive areas of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex-areas that had been relatively inactive when she was merely hallucinating.) This made it clear that, at a physiological level, visual imagery differs radically from visual hallucination. Unlike the top-down process of voluntary visual imagery, hallucination is the result of a direct, bottom-up activation of regions in the ventral visual pathway, regions rendered hyperexcitable by a lack of normal sensory input.