Hallucinations with Oliver Sacks

it was after college that the spells became both a burden and a blessing not being able to pull myself out of the paralysis one night I let go and felt myself slowly rising out of my body I had come through the terror part and felt a wonderful peaceful bliss as I rose out of my body and floated up I would feel that the surfaces of various objects were covered by a film of fuzz or the doubt in a pillow it could also be described as cotton candy or spiderwebs sometimes the webs and fuzz can get very lush as when I reach down to pick up something that has fallen underneath my desk and my hand feels as if it has become submerged in a huge pile of this stuff but when I try to scoop up that pile I feel nothing and yet I feel that I have a large amount of this stuff in my hands you I start to see what you might see on the dash of your car at night except the numbers begin spinning more and more rapidly after about 20 seconds the numbers begin to disintegrate and the odometer itself falls apart and gradually disappears once I was competing in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii I was not having a good race I was overwhelmed and dehydrated miserable three miles into the marathon portion of the race I saw my wife and mom standing on the side of the road I ran over to them to say that I would be late to the finish line but when I reached them and began telling my tale of woe to complete strangers who did not even remotely resemble my wife and my mother were looking back at me what a great house it's great to have you all here welcome to science and story I am John Hockenberry science and story they certainly do go together because what is science but the story of not boy meets girl but cause meets affect and then the story of our discoveries and learning about the reality of the world around us and then of course science is the story of what we do with those discoveries and what we do with that understanding and how that understanding changes us and tonight we're going to explore a little bit this notion of hallucinations and as a really young crowd here I hesitate to say don't try this at home but I suspect many of you have already oh well be that as it may let me tell you a little whole oosa nation story here in this hallway where we might actually get a glimpse of Abraham Lincoln if we're lucky all of New York this week is something of a hallucination my neighborhood looks like Gaza and we're experiencing a sense of perceptual distortion I think from our encounters with the natural world this week but let me tell you about a young fellow studying mathematics at the University of Chicago several decades ago who had a predisposition for psilocybin mushrooms in the course of his mathematical studies and was on a trip hitchhiking across the country and got in a car with some lovely individuals who said look we're driving straight through to Massachusetts and here we've got these amphetamines that are keeping us awake why don't you stay awake with us I got in the back seat of the car we took these strange pills alas the pills did not do what they were supposed to for the driver and at a certain point in Pennsylvania she drove off the road and went down a 200-foot embankment I was in the backseat of that car and when I came to consciousness a few moments after the car reached the bottom of the hill I realized that I was probably paralyzed for life and was staring through the shattered windshield of a Chevrolet Nova up at a beautiful blue sky bleeding from a skull fracture and a serious set of internal injuries and the blood from the injuries to my head were seeping into the area around my eyes so that my eyes were turning completely red and I was looking at the world through this strange blood filter and I could see clearly and all of a sudden as I looked through this shattered windshield I could see not the sky anymore but I could see this automobile and there was this sad young man in that car and and there were ambulance people trying to saw this car and have it I looked down and I would oh that's a terrible situation there what's going I hope that fellow's all right and I watched for a while and it's terribly noisy and I was feeling very relieved that I was far away from that mess and I stared at it for a while and all of a sudden the view began to get a little dark and everything sort of rushed like the sound of a train and all of a sudden I realized that I was the person in that car and that they had in fact managed to saw the roof off of the car and pulled me to safety I lost consciousness at that point and woke up in a recovery room in a hospital days later so what happened what was going on in my brain during this event because I remember it vividly vividly and can recall precisely what I was looking at from down in the trees down on what was happening to me something I couldn't possibly have actually seen because I was in the middle of it all was it just some spiritual kind of whoa intense experience or did it reveal something fundamental about the organization of the brain that's what we're going to explore tonight and we certainly have as you've already heard the best person on planet earth to help explore it with us he's an author a scholar a doctor clinician professor and in many ways the preeminent storyteller of the brain please welcome dr. professor friend Oliver Sacks so we want to remind you to tweet at asked Oliver hashtag ask Oliver and as Traci mentioned there are many ways for you to be involved in this conversation and we'll have some of your questions later I've got actual connection to the internet here I believe yes it's working so I will get your questions and towards the end of this session we'll hear from you directly welcome I feel welcome and while the scared yeah this this concert sold out in a couple of hours so as we were saying backstage you're sort of the Justin Bieber of neurologists that's a good position to be on so good brand I'd say let's let's start with a very basic question what do we think a hallucination is in the mind and as a researcher and scientist what are we discovering is going on in the brain when a hallucination happens well a hallucination usually comes as a sudden apparition visual a sight a sound a smell is out there it seems absolutely real when it's very startled because one hasn't willed this thing well hasn't imagined the vision one has no control over it and you think it's real and but other people don't agree with you and then perhaps at that point you realize it must be a hallucination and that part of your brain has gone on automatic and and us out of your hands but the the first real hallucination is as very startling and real fighting and often wonderful and we'll explore that full range from frightening to wonderful in our conversation this evening the idea of hallucinations goes back a long way in human history and in medical history describe a little bit of the change in approach to what we think hallucinations are down through medical history um well up to about 1800 there were any one was allowed to have visions or to hear voices they were assumed to have some external spiritual origin gods demons the muses ancestors the dead and around two centuries ago the business became medicalised and hallucinations were seen as a disorder of the brain probably associated with madness but then that connection was immediately contested although I think is still a strong one in the public mind and the medical mind that hallucinations are a portent of something bad or mad cackling you mentioned a moment ago that the experience of a hallucination originates in in the part of the brain that is associated with actual real events it's not an imagined experience it's more like a real experience what what do you mean exactly I'm will the parts of the brain use and perception and recognition are hijacked by the hallucinatory process and what goes on in your visual cortex or your auditory brain is is physiologically almost indistinguishable from actually seeing or hearing something you don't get that sort of activation with imagining I only get it with hallucination so hallucination is a form of perception and light perception what you hallucinate is is out there it startles you you you look around you it's Emmet's it often has a detail which which has far greater than that of any imagery and and you don't know where it comes from and what we're looking at here are some fMRI images where we've just in the last half decade or so been able to test and show the state of the mind imagining something having a hallucination and actually seeing something and they are three distinct states I can't see the images behind me but but they are indeed distinct and the you're not hallucinating I and when we're almost to a sort of mind-reading perhaps when someone is in an fMRI functional training machine you might say to the mum are you hallucinating faces they say yeah yep how did you know you say you know books a particular area so called fusiform face area is become hyperactive at the back at the back of the brain on one side and if they say they're seeing letters or texts or musical notation you can you can also guess that so so so hallucinations are an immediate expression of brain activity from very simple levels like um geometrical patterns to see in heaven and we'll talk about some specific clinical examples of hallucinations in just a moment to both you've observed directly and through individuals and cases that you're familiar with but part of what you described in this book is a brain that functions like a reality synthesizer that what's happening in a in a hallucination is so close to reality it's not a dream state at all can can this be called dysfunctional in other words this is what the brain is supposed to do yet we associate hallucinations with dysfunction I think that's too narrower term and there are for example bereavement hallucinations these especially occur if people have been happily married for half a century or whatever and as a husband or wife dies there's a 50% chance that the remaining spouse will see them or hear them and this sort of hallucination is not frightening it's often very comforting it's it seems to be part of the mourning process and it really you know sudden hole has been left in one's life and this helps helps to heal over so there I would say the hallucination is highly adaptive and not dysfunctional in the case of a bereavement hallucination how does the brain cross over from very powerful memory an almost nostalgic experience of a lost loved one to literally experiencing their presence in a hallucinatory way well there's certainly a leap because the most vivid imagination can't match the faintest hallucination we one can see the leap if someone is in functional functional brain imager and but why it occurs and why it's more likely to occur in some people but one knows for example that it can be induced by hypnosis and if you if you ask someone to imagine a scene or for example to imagine a drum with vertical stripes going around they say yes I'm imagining it but their eyes will move but if you can hypnotize them and they hallucinate it then the eyes keep jerking as they wouldn't reality and and the two things are quite separate and yet one can leap from one to the other that's amazing let's talk about some of the classical cases where hallucinations are associated with particular syndromes we could begin I suppose with epilepsy which has a long long history it was originally viewed as the sacred disorder part of connection with God you sort of alluded to that before what happens in epilepsy and what are the hallucinatory consequences that you're familiar with well Hippocrates wrote about it he accepted the the term sacred disease but immediately said there's nothing sacred about it it has a natural cause although he conceded that the visions and voices which one might have the seizure might seem to have a divine or a demonic origin an epilepsy is a sudden explosive fouling of part of the brain of a not of cells and what happens depends on where the knot is sometimes it may cause a sudden jerk sometimes it may cause a sensation epilepsy in primitive parts of the visual brain would just and give one patterns or the auditory parts are hiss but as you go up to higher and higher levels you can have so-called ecstatic seizures where because it don't look so eager these are pretty rare and it's cause you've sold out in a few hours okay and that and I can't tell you how but in so-called ecstatic seizures Dostoevsky had these and described them beautifully and gave them to many of his characters but there will be a sudden sense of um of bliss of rapture and a feeling perhaps that one has been transported to heaven or that one is um there is nearly always a sum either a mystical a religious or a sexual vint - ecstatic hallucinations and if they have a were and even people who have had no disposition to mystical or religious thinking apparently before maybe converted by these experiences and converted repeatedly there was one neurologist Geschwind who was very interested in this and he spoke of one of his patients as a girl in her 20s now on her fifth religion but I mean there are many many paths to elution including purely intellectual paths but to have a sense of overwhelming reality celestial reality a supernatural reality and seizure demands quite a tough skepticism to resist so you can study to be a priest or you can take the hallucinatory shortcut to go right yeah right let's talk about what happens at the onset of the seizure and some of the states in the brain that precede the actual seizure which also relates to some of the work that you've done on migraines where you'll have an aura or a very particular sense of visual hallucinations that then precede a state that in the case of a seizure really sort of shuts the person down often causing them to lose consciousness in the case of migraines then a prolonged period of dysfunctional pain occurs but this or a period is fascinating to me yeah well the the the aura is is the most interesting and it's not necessarily followed by a headache or a convulsion I could have isolated ORS and really these are the best things to have for example I I've had visual migraines since I was 3 or 4 years old but I've almost never had a headache in the visual migraine there's a sudden explosion of light near what I'm looking at and this expands as a zigzag border and a scintillates and and it takes a rather constant for me a while a constant 17 or 18 minutes to go from the center to the side you can have more complex things with my green silly host at the novelist has written about this and how she herself on one occasion saw a little pink man and his ox about six inches high and she describes how she looked at them tenderly they weren't frightening and then they disappeared after a few minutes I mean there's a so-called lilliputian hallucination that they're quite common and one wonders know whether some of our notions of imbecile elves and sprites and little little green men know may-maybe suggested by this but there's a clinical pattern of little little dudes mmm there is lilliputian vision has a specific physiological basis but the sort of little people one sees is going to depend on ones one's own interest in one's culture so that maybe if you're Irish you will see leprechauns if you're Norwegian you will see trolls some troll seers out there apparently you know one of the things that you get from reading this book and really from the whole body of your work it's just what the brain is capable of you know it makes you feel that there's just a whole lot going on in the brain that we don't unless we have some of these syndromes that you describe we don't really experience one of the most amazing stories in this book is about I believe it's something called Anton syndrome it was described anyway in the 1800s a person who is blind insists that they can see and that their brain is creating an experience that is so powerfully visual to them that they argue with people who know that they're blind and insist that the blindness it doesn't exist at all how does that work well this is a sort of situation which I've encountered a lot working in old-age homes where I may see elderly people who who are completely intact mentally but who have impaired vision or hearing a good proportion something like 15 percent of those with visual impairment may get elaborate hallucinations of animals and people and landscapes and probably 80% of them get simple hallucinations of geometric patterns incidentally I'm one of those 80% myself or the geometric patterns only geometric patterns I see this enough I I see them all the time they're all over the ceiling and and I ignore them as I ignore the tinnitus the hissing in my ear which has sort of partly am a certain order to equivalent though the commonest hallucination for people as they become deaf are is hearing music um the now I think you you've mentioned something rather where which was not quite well let me distinguish two things the I start the book by describing how I was called to a nursing home they said they had an old lady in her 90s and she suddenly started seeing things and they didn't know if she was going crazy or had a stroke could I come along and I saw the old lady she was a very vigorous old lady very sane very intelligent and very puzzled and somewhat frightened she said she'd been blind for five years but now she's seeing things I said but what sort of things and she said people in Eastern dresses walking in rows and she described she saw animals she saw horses she saw so storm she saw a horrible face horrible because the face was distorted and partly dismembered and she was afraid that she was going mad or had some neurological catastrophe I examined her I couldn't find anything the matter with her nervous system she wasn't on any medications which could produce things so I said I know I think I know what you have and I said I think this is the brain reacting to your blindness to loss of visual input and the brain is always at work 24 hours a day and it's always processing things and if I can't process information from your eyes it will go down at a memory or imagination take whatever and then scramble it all up and and give you people and Eastern to us or horses or slow storms or whatever and I said this was described right back in the 18th century this is Charles bonnet syndrome by a shawls bunny yeah a Swiss historian and and she was greatly relieved and actually rather pleased that her condition had a name she said she said tell the nurses but that I have a Charles bonnet syndrome and then she said who was the shah's Bonnie did he have it himself actually he didn't at the time he wrote about it his grandfather did he did have it later and but that's the common situation there is another very rare situation which I only touch on in the book where usually from a slope people can become suddenly totally blind and yet they don't know it they insist that they can see and they will blunder into things and find other explanations and that is that is a very mysterious sort of weather one could even call that hallucination or whether it's a sort of delusion or confabulation but on the whole I'm sticking more to the the old lady who sees people in Eastern dress and and thank you for for sticking with that that's for sure because those are the most entertaining of the hallucinations and really sort of caused us to think more about just the potential and the complexity of the brain itself let's talk just briefly about there are lots of hallucinations you sort of alluded to them that aren't visual at all that conjure up other sensations tactile hallucinations smell hallucinations these sorts of things what do you study yeah smell hallucinations are often the often from the or to certain epileptic seizures but smell hallucinations are quite common because something like 5% of the population lose their sense of smell partly or wholly either following an infection sometimes a head injury and they then tend to hallucinate smells as the blind hallucinate visions and the it may be impossible for the person to describe the smell but the smell be maybe unlike anything in their experience or anything they could imagine and similarly if people may hallucinate a colour they've never seen and they can't imagine and one realizes that the repertoire of what the brain can do is much larger than than what one actually has in the world people who hallucinate colors they've never seen sometimes called them Martian colors since you mentioned a color dr. sacks would you care to share your story of discovering the color indigo in your own research into inducing hallucinations oh I surely as eyeballs for that have a matter of study I know um but you you come by this rightly I mean you you have had many hallucinatory experiences some of which were an accidental consequence of substances that you were working with and others more deliberate yeah well the woman there were many different motives and was all it was all a long time ago wherever which as I was all between 63 and 67 buts but certainly I'm one of them I had been puzzling about indigo indigo was inserted into the spectrum by Newton so was orange he felt there should be seven colors as there seven notes in the musical scale but it seemed to me that no two people agreed as to what indigo was like and it was in fact felt that the pigment derive from the indigo plant was was not really integral and I decide as I wanted to see indigo I couldn't imagine it but I thought I might be able to hallucinate it so I built a sort of pharmacological launchpad sort of a now that that's different from controlled substance okay pharmacological launchpad I love that that's this is a writer here this is where we go so we're also a base of amphetamine and then some LSD and a little little cannabis on top so I'll I'll take a shot of amphetamine with a LSD chaser and a spot of cannabis and that gets you well it is some got me fairly pickled I think stoned is the right word anyhow when when I felt ready I said I want to see indigo now and as if thrown by a paintbrush a trembling pear-shaped blob of the most wonderful color appeared on the wall indigo and it not only seemed been a wonderfully luminous but it filled me with a sort of mystical or almost religious joy I felt it was numinous as well as luminous and although I'm an old Jewish atheist I thought this is the color of heaven I thought this is the color which Giotto try to get but never could and maybe this is a color which no longer exists on the earth and I Lind forward all sort of ecstasy and a vanished and I felt very heartbroken and in fact four months afterwards I I would turn over little stones and things I was looking for indigo I did experience at once again and that was when I came to New York in 65 and I went to a concert in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Egyptology gallery and at the first half of the concert there was some Monteverdi which which transported me and and in a sort of rapture in the interval I wandered into the Egyptology gallery and saw there was some lapis lazuli amulets and so forth and some of them were indigo I thought thank God it exists in the world but in the second half of the concert I I didn't like the music much I became before bored and irritable I thought I can I can go and get a sip of indigo but when I went back the lapis lazuli was just blue and move and pure sand and I've never seen indigo again but that shown cry I know well I did looking looking for indigo could have been the title of this book I suppose yeah in a pharmacological Launchpad induced hallucination is there some connection between the imagination and the hallucination itself in the sense that you're describing where you've actually conjured something which is more like imagination than hallucination well I I knew it would have to be a blue of some sort and so I predetermined it I didn't say I want to see indigo and then see a splash of orange and so I played a part but then it took this leap helped by the launch pad from from imagination to hallucination incidentally I'm I'm not recommending the experience although if you can get it from music or from falling in love or for meditation or from scenery that's that's really a much better way I am glad I survived my drug period many of my friends didn't let's talk a little bit about what questions about and observations of hallucinations have taught you about the brain and how it actually works what have they revealed there they're a bit of a window into the larger organization of the brain well the very fact that hallucinations exist shows that there can be a mode of consciousness and a mode of perception quite unlike dream or fantasy or imagination and and it's may make certain things available which which imagination can't can't do this has been felt by some writers and poets certainly in the early 19th century coal origin Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe and you know they were they were all taking something I always raised as a child his mother gave him gin-soaked bread to keep him from crying so I think he started very early Oh yeah which isn't necessarily a hallucinogen but all right you know I ain't miss something what foot was who was given won't Edgar Allan Poe Oh as a baby by his mother was given gin-soaked breadless Oh calm him down free tylenol I guess it's like in Pygmalion Jinjin was mother's milk to her ya know in the 19th century babies were often calm very effectively by gin bathtub but when he grew up he and his and others tended to take opium of one sort or another there's a wonderful book called opium and the romantic imagination although this is really opium and romantic hallucination the but one realizes in a way how narrow ordinary consciousness is and unnecessarily so if one is going to function in the world if there's a huge enhancement of perception or or things which are not there you can't function all that well in fact civilization requires a narrowness of consciousness so that we can all be on the same page enough to function in society as it seems to me um William James talks about this and the varieties of religious experience he he took nitrous oxide laughing gas so-called except it didn't make him laugh that transported him into other forms of consciousness and he insisted that there are many other forms of consciousness outside the rational consciousness and and that they all have their value you believe that yes and on that note but um but um but the but it really depends how one integrates or how one employ is another form of consciousness it but certainly I think another form of consciousness is involved in in creating art and in scientific discovery and sometimes there are the are patent hallucinations Wallace conceived his theory of natural selection in a high fever for malaria and some some painters have had visions and fever and so forth which are hidden AZ was said to have visualized his extraordinary prisons and fortresses also an attack of an attack of malaria but the the great chemists calculate when he was on a bus a London bus in the 1850s who fell into a state which I think many of us know is just before sleep when you can start seeing things and Carroll a saw snakes devouring their own tails but for him this was a symbol of the hexagonal structure of benzene and allowed him to found any organic structural chemistry I'm standing in line for gasoline here in New York because of some clown on a London bus hallucinating snakes and all right so questions from you and there are microphones and people who will help you to deliver your question to us and for you watching the live stream I have questions here to ask my last question to you is how different is this book from what Timothy Leary and Alan Watts wrote about in the 1960s and 70s about the hallucinatory experience well I think they were somewhat evangelical which are not it's some I mean my purposes is is to describe all the varieties I can think of with with one exception I hardly touch schizophrenic hallucinations I think that needs a different sort of book and whether I will ever like that I don't know but I think I'm hallucinating as is feared is misrepresented people can agonize for years never mentioning that they hallucinate I want to open the subject up and so that so that people don't have to have burning secrets and on the whole they they'll be reassured books hallucinations tend to be benign there are hundred times more benign hallucinations than malignant ones so share your hallucinations you're among friends here at the Cooper Union here's a question from one of our online viewers is there an evolutionary advantage to being able to hallucinate or is it just a byproduct of having a brain that's a very good question well it certainly is a by-product or can be considered as a by-product and and but whether butter can also be considered I think sometimes as having adaptive use for example um well one blind man who wrote to me about his hallucinations he imagines his eyes saying to him we know blindness is no fun so we've invented this small syndrome as a coder to your sighted life it's not much but it's the best we could do and they're quite a lot of well whether nature thoughtless or whether this is just a human use but I think I think bereavement hallucinations are are adaptive and after very terrifying situations can cause flashbacks and this can happen in animals as well when Pavlov Pavlov's laboratory full of dogs and had a flood in 1924 the dogs watched as the water rose and escaped at the last moment and after that most of those dogs were haunted by by water they had sort of post stress traumatic syndromes and however this would teach them to avoid anything dangerous with regard to water I so sometimes as a by-product and I mean certainly the brain is able to produce hallucinations of every sort and maybe it depends what use is made of it I love this idea that the brain developed its own mental prosthetics to deal with things like blindness and deafness question out here hello dr. Sachs hello thank you very much for coming in today I was wondering as we continue to map different sensations and percepts different parts of the brain like face recognition being mapped to the fusiform gyrus do you think that eventually we'll develop technology that will be able to trigger certain perceptions or sensations on command you try to improve on your pharmacological launchpad I suspect we will and this will raise all sorts of problems ethical and otherwise we're getting rather close to the verge of this even now but um in a simple way right back in the 1960s it was possible to insert electrodes into the so-called reward centers in lats brains and if they pressed a lever this would give them a little shock which was probably a bit like an orgasm and anyhow though that's who did this would keep pressing the lever they would not eat they would not sleep they would press the lever till they died and that was basically you're describing an early form of Twitter here's a question from from Twitter IIIi want to go back to to an earlier thing I'm like that that's why I have footnotes and whatnot um I was very struck with my awakenings patience but I only learned this after I had got to know them well that most of them had been hallucinatin for decades before they had l-dopa and their hallucinations were entirely pleasant friendly sociable I think they loosen ated the world which was denied them and that was the experience of awakenings of course the movie were familiar with and that that was the treatment of l-dopa and that was Parkinson's like yes yeah a Parkinson's plus I mean I mean many of them were absolutely frozen but there and many of them had been abandoned by relatives and family and were wearing back wards of hospitals but they and I think they their brains fed them visions and feelings and emotions which really kept them going and which were a substitute for life one might say one shouldn't have substitutes but these people had had no choice the brain finds an adaptive quality to creating these visual substitutions and alternative realities and that that seems to be some structural feature of how the brain is organ saying we've got questions out Oh Neil mr. dr. Tyson okay / sorry yeah the stars are out tonight uh Oliver I'm curious and um we could imagine a future of neuroscience which we all know is advancing rapidly I can imagine a day perhaps where they can go into your brain and snip a neuro synaptic connection that would end all hallucinations let's imagine that for the moment if we could do that should we and if you had that option would you and if it were available do you imagine and sort of an ethical line beyond which we should not alter people's behavior because it is a product of the mores of the day that could change over the decades deep deep question and and a question which is becoming technologically possible it's no longer just a fantasy a particular form of this relates to unpleasant traumatic memories that may be chemical ways of reducing these which has been especially suggested for people with post-traumatic stress syndrome and would this be a benefit or are we are we meddling or to take a much cruder example when there was a great fashion for lobotomies and leucotomy x' in the 1950s was it ethical no people were often an intolerable tormenting obsession and anxiety and they might be released on this but but should they be released I am specifically I think hallucinations are you know an unusual rich-rich expression of the brains activity and we'd be poor without them you described in the book some of these precise and dilemmas in the way epileptics were treated in the sense that lesions were so localized that a snip was merely possible in some cases was there an ethical consideration in those cases yes some specifically actually people with ecstatic hallucination ecstatic seizures would not take their medication and they would also low they would also learn ways of stimulating these but um I I I can't answer your question Neil but but but the next the next 50 years will quickly from an email that we just received could you comment on the alteration of time perception during hallucinations yes this may occur and in the first book written about hashish in in the 1840s funny you know there were a lot of books written about hashish I guess all right yeah this was written by a physician who was some possibly something of an advocate for it but he spoke of the immense extension of time the subject of extension so so it might seem to take forever to walk to the end of a block in in a more recent book on the subject the story is told of two potheads in San Francisco lying lying in the Golden Gate Park and a jet planes going overhead and one of them says man that that plane took forever the so so so time sensations can certainly change a lot whether there is any actual acceleration of thought but one might ask this with a with a dream I know I I have an alarm at five o'clock with a second alarm at five past five I may fall asleep after the first alarm and dream a lifetime until I'm woken by the second alarm and I think it's similar with with hallucinations there they're also hallucinations in the other direction I I described a deplorable though enjoyable one which I had myself um with with opium actually morphine and in which I appeared a little spot on my my robe my dressing gown was on the door as I watched a little area came to life and then I saw millions of people apparently two armies assembling for battle and I realized and read affair that's the holidays yeah hallucination I realized I was seeing Asian core and I somehow I I no longer felt that I was some in London lying and bared stoned having shot up some morphine I just felt like like a a bodyless observer of this and then it faded my I thought well you know that was an interesting quote for an hour but actually it was 13 hours and that scared me and I never never tried that again but um but you can certainly there can be prodigiously cellar asians and oddly and retardation of time subjectively question over here good evening dr. Sachs thanks for your insight and such an interesting topic my question is with with all this proof the double helix discovered and the psychedelic experience Steve Jobs Apple computers thousands hundreds of years of literary works all coming from the psychedelic experience and yet it's still demonized would you say this is an extension of 60s counterculture a political issue a medical issue and how will people in society handle having something so close to them that has such a wide range of inspiration that is is clearly being closed off and demonized what's your opinion you know it's a political thing or well first I think I think it's important to say that every culture known to us has discovered plants with psychoactive chemicals and is usually incorporated these in some sort of ceremonial or ritual use but and that never seems to get out of hand or to raise severe ethical or legal dilemmas there was a lot of good research on LSD and psilocybin and similar substances in the late 50s in the early 60s but then I think when Timothy Leary 8ao sort of became so evangelistic I think as you say this arose a counterculture which had to be squashed and there was really no good work on LSD for for 40 years now the atmosphere is changing and some good and legitimate work is coming back and perhaps some good legitimate that closely supervise uses and again political atmospheres are changing a bit in Holland for example you know any cafe you're liable to be offered cash in in any cafe you go to it has never apparently led to the use of hard drugs and now apparently sort of I think Colorado and the state of Washington have decriminalized cannabis that's our crowd tonight yes indeed em although it's still a federal misdemeanor so I don't know how this will be resolved although I love that question it's the first I heard that the iPad might have been an actual hallucination I thought I thought Jobs got that from just watching old episodes of Star Trek question here yes it seems that in all areas of Medicine there have been tremendous advancements but in Neurology and the study of brain there have been comparatively not quite as many and because it is such an intricate subject where do we go from here and what's the next understanding in the brain and for these hallucinations I'm sorry I missed some of that can you relay it to me well it's a little bit of an extension on the previous question where do we go from here in in terms of the study of hallucinations and the brain and particularly given the technology that we have for studying the brain well some of those valuable information has come from electrodes implanted in individual nerve cells but one could only do this in a very exceptional situation namely if someone is being prepared for surgery and as had their brain exposed and and you want to map things out to make sure that the surgery doesn't do any harm but I think we're going to find all sorts of them less intrusive ways of studying the brain in minut detail with brain imaging you this is in a way pretty crude to see an area with a half a billion nerve cells we just looking at blood flow right I mean you're looking at this stage we're just looking at blood flow we're not actually looking at the nerve right the the thought is that the active units and the cerebral cortex probably consists of our somewhere between a hundred and a thousand nerve cells and that each of those nerve cells has a thousand to ten thousand connections to other cells and the this is a sort of hyper astronomical complexity and as yet we can't imagine any way of visualizing this let alone manipulating it in a delicate way do you think though do you think though and this follows on to this question is what do you think the hallucinatory properties of the brain may someday be accessible to literally do what whose Nations seem to be trying to do replace vision to turn the brain into a visual simulator that actually comes close to imaging reality but creating a simulation for the person well of course when I wonder has virtual reality of all sorts in a way hallucinations can be a virtual reality and I don't know whether whether you mean sort of as where the the play the the brain and aaja notion which is being stimulated no more is there a way of accessing the hallucinatory capacities within the brain for someone who is blind for instance and generating the impulses in the brain that correspond to what the eyes would produce if they could function optically that you would generate hallucination I think that should be relatively simple nice um something which is rather extraordinary for people who are born blind and who have never had any visual experience one can put a grid of a hundred electrodes on the tongue and connect it to a video camera so this so that a hundred pixels of that and go into the electrodes and the person can hold the camera and if they do that they start there's no word for it but it is at first as if they're seeing with their tongue but then later seems to become a real visual experience and things like zooming and looming and perspective and occlusion come in and you can also find that the that the visual cortex is is being stimulated so in fact these people are seeing through entirely artificial means and bypassing the eyes and a fact can be done I I would think hallucinations would be a cinch there's a tweet hallucinations would be a cinch question over here hello thank you very much dr. Sachs for coming I have a question I know that there are there are people such as yourself who experience things like migraine auras and patterns on the ceiling and in a certain who sanatory day-to-day experience and I also know that when people are having more isolated experiences they experience a sort of synesthesia of senses that one might see sounds or hear colors and I was wondering what the overlap of that might be in the brain a synesthetic experience purses a hallucination because there are people who are born into this world who seek I see sounds or hear colors for their entire lifetime and that is their reality and how so my question is how would that person's reality differ from another person's hallucination well synesthesia as you say is something one is born with it has even been suggested that everyone every infant has synesthesia in the first year of life but then that it's the possibility is pruned out in the majority of people synesthesia used to be regarded as very rare like one in 2000 is now seen as relatively common about one in 20 particularly common forms have to do with seeing colors as one hears music or when one reads letters its life long and it's always the same for a given person Nabokov in his autobiography mentions that when he was learning to read he had color letters and he thought the colors were wrong and he mentioned this to his synesthetic mother who agree that they were wrong but but the two of them couldn't agree and didn't agree as to what the colors should be and the but this some and here there is a permanent coupling say between color constructing parts of the brain and reading parts of the brain or whatever in the something like LSD hallucination that may be improvised or certain epilepsies that may be immediate improvised synesthesia the one epileptic patient spoke of the smell of green thunder there's a nice complex but um but the epileptic or hallucinatory ones are unstable and they go away and the next time you take it there may be quite different and so I really think they're different experiences incidentally I'm color blind people with color synesthesia may also see colors they've never seen in the world and Martian colors I'm sensing that you have a personal relationship with this synesthesia hallucination it what's the motivation of your question it's fascinating i it's a combination of the way I perceive things personally and an interest in people who experience it in a lot more of a in a much more dramatic fashion like there's a book called born on a blue day about a man named Daniel Tammet who has a full spectrum synesthesia so all of his senses are are combined and I was one when you were talking about indigo I was thinking these colors that you you've never seen before is he seeing colors I've never seen before how is that overlapping with a hallucinatory experience listen I have a question for you um would you like to be relieved of your synesthesia no no it's not it's not so dramatic as it has been described in other people's accounts I think it's just a helpful way of connecting the dots for me um well attitudes are very various there's some some people love their synesthesia some haters and some are are indifferent but but the question might be if it were technically possible would it be right would it be ethical if people wanted to get rid of their synesthesia or does one say God made your synesthetic and and you know you stay that way that's a great great question it gets back to Neal's point let's get a question here we're getting towards the end it's fantastic that all of you are lined up here we could probably go for a couple hours I'll rely on my mind errs here to shut us down on time but I'm anxious to hear what people have to say your next good evening dr. Sachs so you've made a distinction between hallucinations and memories or imaginations how does that distinction stem toward dreaming or even lucid dreaming because when you talked about summoning indigo you had a suggestion and it was sort of accelerated on your launching pad but what if the launching pad is endogenous it's a chemical reaction that you experience every night when you go to sleep and dream because in a lucid dream state you can make a suggestion and your brain might sort of meander along that path and provide provide you with what you sought to see um well I think there a lot of similarities between some forms of hallucination and dreaming though for the majority of people who seem incapable of lucid dreaming dreaming is all enveloping you have a dreaming consciousness and no consciousness outside it you can't say timers is 9:30 and I'm dreaming of whatever with a hallucination your critical consciousness is there there are some forms of hallucination which are very much like dreaming you especially have this with temporal lobe seizures where you are transported to a place and time or to contact with other people you you have a you go back into your past either a real past or or a fantasy past which ever M in the shuls body types of hallucination you never recognize it from see a face you don't recognize it if you see a landscape you don't recognize it it's it that that's very far from memory or imagination and the temporal lobe ones are beginning to approach fantasy and dream and I think there's there are a lot of parallels I I wish I could say more but I will say that dreaming like schizophrenic hallucination is another vast subject which I I have not yet embarked on and since I'm about to embark on my ninth decade I better get a move-on yes yeah that stop slacking off Saxons ladies and gentlemen this has been fantastic we're going to wrap here we want to leave time for the book signing out in the hall Oliver will be out there signing copies of hallucinations we want to welcome you and thank you for participating in this world science festival science and story event there will be other events and of course thanks to dr. Oliver Sacks you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 190,856

Rating: 4.9181709 out of 5

Keywords: Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks, John Hockenberry, rich cultural history, contemporary science, the movie Awakenings, Robin Williams, myriad riddles of the human mind, science of Hallucinations, New York City, NYC, world science festival, short, World, Science, Festival, 2012

Id: 8T_XimPe4xU

Length: 74min 43sec (4483 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 08 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/ScienceDick]

The personal accounts of hallucinations in Dr. Sack's writing are more descriptive and are even more woahdude. Thank you for posting that interview though. I love how pragmatic his views on drug-induced hallucinations are. It's a refreshing change from the overly "evangelical" tone of so many psychonauts.

[u/blankblank]

The first few minutes are are the woahdude part, but the lecture that follows is excellent as well.