A General Model of Hallucinations and Its Implications

Abstract

Hallucinations are the essential symptom of schizophrenia and the most common phenomena in altered states of consciousness (ASC). However, due to the difficulty in approaching subjective experiences through positive research, the researches on hallucinations are superficial and haphazard. Different from most research focusing on the generation mechanism of hallucinations from the perspective of neurophysiology, this paper attempts to propose an elegant model for hallucinations to reveal the formation mechanism of different states of hallucinations from a unique perspective. Our starting point is that there are two pathways through which to affect perception: When false internal stimulations and external objective stimulations affect perception together, the changes in their relative strength will result in the consistence, breakdown and re-consistence of the five senses, leading to three basic states of hallucinations (one can distinguish reality from fantasy, one cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, and reality and fantasy are totally reversed). The shift from the first state to the second state of hallucinations occurs because false internal stimulations become strong enough to break the consistence of the five senses originating externally, making it impossible to determine which is real. Moreover, the inconsistence of the five senses, on one hand can also explain the generation mechanisms of out-of-body experiences (resulting from the inconsistence of vision and touching) and synesthesia (resulting from the mismatch of the two pairs of five senses); on the other hand, makes it possible to integrate internal and external stimulations together, thus bringing about various marvelous psychedelic phenomena in ASC, combined with the amplifying function of enhanced awareness caused by the weakening of the perception-filtering function which always occurs along with hallucinations. The shift from the second state into the third state happens because false internal stimulations become further stronger to form a new consistence of the five senses originating internally. This state of hallucinations is so fancy and nobody has studied it before. It suggests a novel hypothesis which is totally different from multidimensional space-time and quantum entanglement to interpret extrasensory perception (ESP): the essence of ESP is that false internal stimulations are mistaken as external objective stimulations which enter through sensory organs, while real external objective stimulations are mistaken as perceptions which do not result from sensory organs when one is in deep hallucinations. In this situation, one would naturally treat the inconsistent and “unexplainable” external stimulation as information acquired through psychic abilities such as clairaudience, clairvoyance or telepathy since he cannot find the counterpart in the imaginary world. Although there is no experimental evidence to demonstrate this hypothesis yet, the time point that ESP occurs in ASC completely accords with the logic of our hypothesis and our model. Finally, we arrive at a conclusion that paranormal phenomena are simply illusions that happens along with deep hallucinations and drop some helpful hints for the clinical treatment of schizophrenia.