hallucination

The concept of hallucination has its origin in the Latin term hallucination. It's about the action of being hallucinated or becoming hallucinated, that is, to get confused or delirious. This verb can also refer to surprise, amaze or dazzle.

The first who knew how to define it was the psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol in 1837, who determined that they were objectless perceptions, this means that there are no elements in the outside world that can really cause them.

In other words, a hallucination consists of a subjective feeling that is not anticipated by an impression that influences the senses. In other words, it is a false perception because it does not refer to any specific external physical stimulus but, nevertheless, the person claims to feel.

Specialists consider hallucination to be a pseudo-perception. It is not the same as a delusion, since this consists of perceiving stimuli in a distorted way. Hallucinations, experts indicate, can take place under multiple sensory modalities: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, taste, etc.

As an experience, hallucination is studied by various Sciences, as the psychology, the psychiatry and the neurology. The concept is often mentioned in diseases as the schizophrenia and the epilepsy, in the consumption of narcotics, in mystical and religious experiences, and even in sleep disorders.

In the book "Don Quixote de la Mancha" you can find several moments in which the protagonist is the victim of hallucinations and offers him fantastic elements to reality, which he had drawn from chivalric novels that he had previously voraciously read. For him, all this happened as he saw it, although the giants were nothing more than windmills and his precious Rocinante was an old and bony horse.

Hallucination and schizophrenia

In schizophrenia, the most common way in which hallucinations occur is through voices who refer to the patient by giving him orders, many times listen to his own thought that escapes them and rings out, so that everyone can hear them.

There are several types of hallucinations, according to how they affect the person they can be. For most of them there are scientific explanations, however those that lack one are usually explained as paranormal phenomena:

Visuals: More or less clear images, can be flashes, clear scenes or flash or organized appearances. They are the most frequent together with the auditory and often follow the clouding of consciousness.

Auditory: stimuli that are perceived through hearing, can be whistles, blows, words without apparent meaning or direct phrases with instructions. One of the peculiarities of this type of hallucinations is that the person who suffers them can say exactly in which physical place the person who speaks to them is. It usually occurs in patients with schizophrenia or other chronic condition and the consequences may be that the affected person performs all kinds of harmful actions caused by that state.

Olfactory: they are perceived through smell and are usually a cause of fear, in the case of schizophrenics for example, they can notice the smell poisonous gases that someone has given off wanting to kill him. Other cases in which they usually appear is in patients with epilepsy or chronic depression.

Touch: Sensations that are perceived through the skin. It occurs for example in patients addicted to cocaine during periods of abstinence, they perceive as if an insect was moving over and under their skin. They can be presented as vibrations, electric shocks, sexual sensations or cold or warm winds that brush against the body and occur especially in patients with schizophrenia with a chronic state of the disease.

Gustatory: they add a different flavor to food than it has. In schizophrenia patients, it is often the case that, in fear of being poisoned, they feel a strange taste in what they eat. It also usually occurs in epilepsy sufferers.

Somatic: It occurs in individuals with a severe schizophrenia condition and consists of proprioceptive sensations, with pain in the head or body that do not physically exist. From this type of hallucination the zoopathic delirium, which implies the sensation of having an animal inside the body, patients claim to feel it and know it.

The consequences of a hallucination can be: insecurity and fear, aggression towards oneself, other people or objects, inability to differentiate between what is real and what is the product of the imagination, guilt and shame recognizing hallucinatory experiences, manipulation (avoiding responsibility due to "hallucinations"), delusional ideas, among other. It is essential that those who suffer from them are efficiently treated in order to provide them with security in themselves and in their environment, interrupt the cycle of hallucinations, bringing them to rational terms so that the patient can recognize them and decrease anxiety that they generate.

Finally, it should be mentioned that among the theories about the cause of hallucinations, the most widespread are those that indicate deficits in normal brain work and of the synaptic links between hair cells and those found in the brain stem and in the occipital-temporal lobes. However, beyond this, various studies have shown that hallucinatory-type situations are frequent a general level. About 10% of individuals experience subtle or mild hallucinations. Even 39% of people have ever experienced a severe hallucination.