hallucination

hallucination, the experience of perceiving objects or events that do not have an external source, such as hearing one’s name called by a voice that no one else seems to hear. A hallucination is distinguished from an illusion, which is a misinterpretation of an actual stimulus.

A historical survey of the study of hallucinations reflects the development of scientific thought in psychiatry, psychology, and neurobiology. By 1838 the significant relationship between the content of dreams and of hallucinations had been pointed out. In the 1840s the occurrence of hallucinations under a wide variety of conditions (including psychological and physical stress) as well as their genesis through the effects of such drugs as stramonium and hashish had been described.

French physician Alexandre-Jacques-François Brierre de Boismont in 1845 described many instances of hallucinations associated with intense concentration, or with musing, or simply occurring in the course of psychiatric disorder. In the last half of the 19th century, studies of hallucinations continued. Investigators in France were particularly oriented toward abnormal psychological function, and from this came descriptions of hallucinosis during sleepwalking and related reactions. In the 1880s English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson described hallucination as being released or triggered by the nervous system.

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Other definitions of the term emerged later. Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) defined hallucinations as “perceptions without corresponding stimuli from without,” while the Psychiatric Dictionary in 1940 referred to hallucination as the “apparent perception of an external object when no such object is present.” A spirited interest in hallucinations continued well into the 20th century. Sigmund Freud’s concepts of conscious and unconscious activities added new significance to the content of dreams and hallucinations. It was theorized that infants normally hallucinate the objects and processes that give them gratification. Although the notion has since been disputed, this “regression” hypothesis (i.e., that hallucinating is a regression, or return, to infantile ways) is still employed, especially by those who find it clinically useful. During the same period, others put forth theories that were more broadly biological than Freud’s but that had more points in common with Freud than with each other.

The nature of hallucinations

The general theory of hallucinations here delineated rests upon two fundamental assumptions. One assumption states that life experiences influence the brain in such a way as to leave, in the brain, enduring physical changes that have variously been called neural traces, templates, or engrams. Ideas and images are held to derive from the incorporation and activation of these engrams in complex circuits involving nerve cells. Such circuits in the cortex (outer layers) of the brain appear to subserve the neurophysiology of memory, thought, imagination, and fantasy. The emotions associated with these intellectual and perceptual functions seem to be mediated through cortex connections with the deeper parts of the brain (the limbic system or “visceral brain,” for example), thus permitting a dynamic interplay between perception and emotion through transactions that appear to take place largely at unconscious levels.

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Conscious awareness is found to be mediated by the ascending midbrain reticular activating system (a network of nerve cells in the brainstem). Analyses of hallucinations reported by sufferers of neurological disorders and by neurosurgical patients in whom the brain is stimulated electrically have shown the importance of the temporal lobes (at the sides of the brain) to auditory hallucinations, for example, and of other functionally relevant parts of the brain in this process.

A second assumption states that the total human personality is best understood in terms of the constant interplay of forces that continually emanate from inside (as internal physiological activity) and from outside the individual (as sensory stimuli). Such transactions between the environment and the individual may be said to exert an integrating and organizing influence upon memory traces stored in the nervous system and to affect the patterns in which sensory engrams are activated to produce experiences called images, fantasies, dreams, or hallucinations, as well as the emotions associated with these patterns. If such a constantly shifting balance exists between internal and external environmental forces, physiological considerations (e.g., brain function) as well as cultural and experiential factors emerge as major determinants of the content and meaning of hallucinations.

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The brain is bombarded constantly by sensory impulses, but most of these are excluded from consciousness in a dynamically shifting, selective fashion. The exclusion seems to be accomplished through the exercise of integrative inner mechanisms that focus one’s awareness on selected parts of potential experience. (The sound of a ticking clock, for example, fades in and out of awareness.) Functioning simultaneously, these mechanisms survey information that is stored within the brain, select tiny samples needed to give adaptive significance to the incoming flow of information, and bring forth only a few items for actual recall from the brain’s extensive “memory banks.”