This may or may not belong in 'Serious' rather than general, I wasn't sure - I leave it to the mods to decide. This is derived from some lazy thinking this morning about the spoon-bending scene in The Matrix. (Stop rolling your eyes and bear with me ) Anderson has the obvious benefit of his spoon not being real, of being in the matrix, whereas we don't, but it made me wonder - is it possible to convince yourself of optical/sense data so strongly, imagine it so intensely, that you actually perceive it?
Yes. It's called religion. But anyway everything we know is taken from what we percept so if we see something as real then it is real to us.
When I get really tired. Like been up for 24 hours and have been working hard during the 24 hours I can start to see things. but to convince myself that something isn't how it actually is when I am awake and mentaly alert, I dont think I have that level of control.
You're asking a different question than the title suggests. The title says: "Can you forcibly create hallucinations?" The answer to that is yes, obviously. Chemicals, sleep deprivation, strong electromagnetic fields, hypnotic suggestibility (i.e. without the subject being aware) will all do the trick. The question you ask in the post is: "Is it possible to convince yourself of an optical illusion/delusion so strongly that you actually perceive it?" The question is based in an incorrect premise. You always perceive an optical illusion --even when you realise that it is an illusion. It's just a glitch in how your brainware interprets ambiguous sensory information. Usually it interprets it correctly; occasionally it misinterprets it. Presto: illusion. Since these interpretative processes are largely automatic and subconscious, your conscious awareness is mostly unable to affect them. So you don't need to convince yourself of an illusion in order to have one. You can only be aware that you are experiencing an illusion but this does not change the perception much. This goes for all sorts of illusions: optical, auditory, tactile, balance. Delusions are by definition very strongly held beliefs which are resistant to all rational and experiential challenge. Perceptions are always interpreted in the context of one's beliefs and usually in a way that confirms them, rather than challenges them. What you are perhaps thinking of is: "Is it possible to suspend disbelief so that a virtual sensory experience is experienced as real?" Well, yes, we do that every time we see a film or play a game. But usually we still know that it is virtual reality, just like we usually know when we are having an optical illusion. That knowledge does not change the quality of the sensory experience --remember: these processes are largely automatic-- although it changes the emotional experience. Suspending disbelief allows us to sort-of-feel as if the experience is real; that's why we do it (but also keeping in the back of our head that we can safely pull back into real life when the virtual experience gets a bit too intense). A few mentally less stable people however can't keep those different mindsets separate and that is when people kill each other over virtual swords in Ultima Online, for instance. Sometimes real life is just experienced as a lot less preferable to the fantasy one. In short, we can knowingly trick the automatic parts of our brain into experiencing "fake" sensory information as "real", but that is done by how we present and shape that sensory information to our senses and our brain, not by our consciously "deciding" wheter they are real or not. Neo, in the Matrix, has the disadvantage of not knowing that his sensory experience is virtual (in the beginning, at least). The experience is totally submersive, for one, and nobody ever told him that he is plugged in. So of course he starts by assuming that he is experiencing "reality". Even getting his head around the real world vs. the Matrix is a bit of a mind **** because there is no way, in terms of the quality of the sensory experience, to tell the two apart. "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." --Morpheus Morpheus has to show Neo all the reality- and physics-defying glitches by which to tell that the Matrix is a virtual environment. Even once he is aware he still struggles because as I said before, illusions are largely unaffected by conscious awareness. He has to relearn/rewire all his subconscious/automatic sensory processing. This is why Morpheus is so full of that experiential Zen "feel the force" crap: "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." --Morpheus
I think nexxo hits the nail on the head rather well, but I'll still add my bit: For the past few years now I've been dealing with schizophrenia induced through a major head injury. One of the side-effects of this is minor visual hallucinations in the forms of small creatures or objects "appearing" just out my main field of vision. I've learned how to ignore these, and they've just about gone away now, but they're still there once in a while. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is, even though there is a part in my brain that is messing with my sensory perception in such a drastic way, I am unable to cause myself to "hallucinate" on demand. The only way I've found to circumvent this is to convince myself that something happened after the fact. Keep telling your mind that you bent the spoon, when in reality there may never have actually been a spoon. Make it real in your mind, no matter what. Realise that it happened, and that there is no other truth. A lot of professional con-artists use this technique to by-pass lie detectors, or just make themselves better lairs. In short: believe something hard enough, and it makes it real in your own mind, although it never actually happened, and you never actually saw it. Remember: truth is only in perception.
As an aside, the trouble with a diagnosis like "Schizophrenia" is that it is a dodgy construct based in an outdated understanding of the brain and cognition. In fact many fronto-temporal lobe dysfunctions, whether congenital or caused by chemicals or insults (e.g. head trauma) present with symptoms that would feel quite at home in a psychosis. Psychoses themselves can be the temporary consequence of sleep deprivation, extreme stress and/or adverse reaction to chemicals. It is all not as black-and-white as some people think. Complex conditions that currently roughly huddle under the umbrella term "Schizophrenia" blur at the edges into other forms of psychosis, schizotypical disorders, depression with psychotic features, possibly even autism. In fact, many of the most effective psychological interventions with Schizophrenia are those for frontal lobe brain damage. I guess what I am saying is that yes, you have brain damage, but don't attach too much significance to a particular label, and certainly don't share it freely with people who are likely to misinterpret it. Define your problem in functional terms, and go with what works for you. Absolutely. Memory recall is a somethat fluid phenomenon. It has holes and inaccuracies, and like with our sensory perceptions our brain tends to automatically fill in those holes with best editorial guesses based on experience and interpretation. Usually these guesses are pretty accurate, and our conscious congitive processing is self-critical enough to know when we don't remember and are just guessing, but sometimes we just think we remember. When our memory recording and recall becomes impaired and our conscious cognition becomes very unselfcritical (as in brain injury or mental illness), these holes can become big and our editorial guesses pretty wild and off-the-mark. We start to "confabulate"; make up wild stories from fragments of recall and subliminal prompts and uncritically accept them as "real".
Oh I know, I went through the whole gamut, but unfortunately the professionals I was seeing at the time were not too forward with what all was going on, and just blanketed my condition as schizophrenia. More specifically I have issues with my short-term memory, completely lost a large section of memory of my childhood (about a ten year stretch just disappeared), seriously diluted vocabulary (compared to pre-trauma), and minor visual hallucinations. My base personality also changed drastically according to family and friends. I've managed this through meditation and my own mental fitness routine (word association, thinking exercises, ect), and have thus managed to just about restore fully everything that was altered as a result of the accident (though there are still large chunks of my childhood I cannot recall at all). The problem with conveying to somebody else exactly what the after-effects of my accident are is that most people more readily understand the term "schizophrenia", rather than a shopping list of observed mental issues. Plus there is a certain allure to having a so-called "serious" mental condition, and being able to control/treat it without using any medication, or doctor intervention when discussing it with somebody else.
You hit close on what I meant, Nexxo, you're right - the title is inaccurate. I'll edit accordingly. My actual question is, can we willfully create sensory data and consciously define its form and appearance - as malfoleo succinctly terms it, hallucinating on demand? Because, y'know, it would be incredible. And kinda useful vis-a-vis traumatic, difficult or endurance-testing situations and experiences, though I know bog-standard forms of meditation can deal with those pretty well too. The type of fabrication you described, malfoleo, shaping memories, is more common and quite easy. I actually find its viability more scary than I would that of willed hallucinations - it's notoriously easy to mould your recollection of an event to fit what you want to believe.
