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You're sitting in a darkened room, or perhaps lying in bed. Suddenly, you hear your name being spoken. Perhaps it's a familiar voice. You start, you may even get up- but more likely you just realize there's no one there. You must have imagined it.
Has this ever happened to you? It would be odd if it hadn't. Most people have had this experience, and experiences like it. If and when it happened to you, your first thought was probably "I must have imagined it." You might also have thought about telling someone else about it- but then thought better of it. Normal people don't have hallucinations, right? That's something that happens to crazy people.
But hallucinations are a near-universal phenomenon, and they're not limited only to those people suffering from mental disorders. In fact, the hallucinations of schizophrenics, which are usually auditory in nature, make up a very small subset of the range of hallucinations that people experience. There are a great many conditions, both internal and external, that can result in hallucinations in all modalities- sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. There are kinesthetic hallucinations that affect a person's perception of the position of their body, or pain, or the passage of time. For every perception, there are hallucinations.
Many, if not most, people don't report hallucination for fear of being labeled crazy. There's a very common, yet underreported condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, or CBS for short, that commonly afflicts older people who suffer from some visual impairment. The impairment can be peripheral in nature, like macular degeneration, or central, as in a stroke affecting visual cortex or thalamus; the important thing is that all or part of the visual field is damaged, or missing.Read more ›
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"Hallucinations" is a fascinating book of what Dr. Sacks considers a natural history of anthology of hallucinations. It covers a wide variety of hallucinations through the eyes of those who have them and the impact it has on their lives. Dr. Sacks shares those vivid experiences with the readers but at times it can be overwhelming and hard to follow. This psychedelic 354-page includes the following fifteen chapters: 1. Silent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome, 2. The Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation, 3. A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells, 4. Hearing Things, 5. The Illusions of Parkinsonism, 6. Altered States, 7. Patterns: Visual Migraines, 8. The "Sacred" Disease, 9. Bisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field, 10. Delirious, 11. On the Threshold of Sleep, 12. Narcolepsy of Night Hags, 13. The Haunted Mind, 14. Dopplegangers: Hallucinating Oneself, and 15. Phantoms, Shadows, and Sensory Ghosts.
Positives: 1. Engaging prose, well-researched book on a variety of hallucinations. 2. Dr. Sacks is a master of his profession and a very accomplished author. 3. A very good format. Each chapter covers a category of hallucination. 4. A good introductory chapter that covers the essence of the book. "Hallucination is a unique and special category of consciousness and mental life". 5. Full of first-hand accounts and historical accounts of hallucinations. The accounts vary from the common to the bizarre. 6. Hallucinations among the blind. The Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS). "CBS hallucinations are often described as having dazzling, intense color or a fineness and richness of detail far beyond anything one sees with the eyes." 7. The effects of sensory deprivation.Read more ›
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128 of 133 people found the following review helpful
"Hallucinations" is a fascinating and eminently readable neurological parade covering all varieties of hallucinations. Dr. Sacks calls it a "natural history or anthology of hallucinations," a perfectly apt description.
It turns out that hallucinations are not that uncommon. In fact, I'd guess that most readers drawn to these pages will find themselves exclaiming at one point or another, "Yeah, that's happened to me, too!" But don't get me wrong; this book is not filled with the commonplace. On the contrary, anyone who loves reading Oliver Sacks knows that his books are filled with extraordinary and totally off-the-wall case histories. This book does not disappoint...at times it is jaw-dropping surreal.
The work is divided into an introduction and fifteen chapters. Each chapter covers a different broad category of hallucination and each category is based on a specific neurological disorder or cognitive deficit. Sacks believes that the only way to understand hallucinations is to read about the first-hand experiences of those that suffer from them. Thus, the book is made up almost entirely of first-hand accounts. Whenever possible, Dr. Sacks follows each individual case description with information about the impact these hallucinations have had on that person's life. Perhaps one third of these first hand examples come from Sacks' professional clinical case studies. Another approximate fifteen percent or more comes from Dr. Sacks' own unique personal experience (i.e., his experiences having hallucinations due to his migraine disorder or from experimenting with a large variety of hallucinogenic drugs and other substances when he was a young man). The balance comes from general historical or medical primary source materials.Read more ›
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