Hallucinations (book)
 | |
| Author | Oliver Sacks |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Neurology, psychology |
| Publisher | Knopf/Picador, a division of Random House |
Publication date | 6 November 2012 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 352 (First edition) |
| ISBN | 978-0-307-95724-5 |
| OCLC | 769425353 |
| Preceded by | The Mind's Eye (2010) |
Hallucinations is a 2012 book written by the neurologist In Hallucinations, Sacks recounts stories of hallucinations and other mind-altering episodes of both his patients and himself and uses them in an attempt to elucidate certain features and structures of the brain[1] including his own migraine headaches.[2]
Summary
Hallucinations was written with the intention to remove the stigma of hallucinations in the eyes of society and the medical world.[3] The book is separated into fifteen chapters; each chapter pertains to a different observation of hallucinations made by Sacks. The hallucinations mentioned in this book come from the everyday citizen and his own experiences, which are used to connect the structure and function of the brain of a healthy person to the symptom of hallucination. Sacks also mentions the positive effects of hallucinations in culture and art.[4]
Sacks notes that the symptom of hallucinations have a negative connotation that was created by society. The purpose of Hallucinations was to take away the public fear of symptoms relating to mental illness by showcasing many instances where healthy individuals experienced hallucinations.[5] Sacks also uses this book to educate society on the different types of hallucinations and the neurological basis behind hallucinations.
Awards and honors
- 2014 Wellcome Book Prize shortlist[6][7]
References
- The Week – Review of reviews: Books, pp. 19[date missing]
- "More about Hallucinations", oliversacks.com. Retrieved 2016-11-23.
- O'Callaghan, Tiffany (2012-11-11). "Oliver Sacks on Drugs, Hallucinations, Joan of Arc, and Arguing With God". Slate. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
- Kakutani, Michiko (2012-11-26). "Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
- "Oliver Sacks: Hallucinations". NPR. NPR. 9 November 2012. Retrieved 2019-04-29.
- "Andrew Motion announces shortlist for the Wellcome Book Prize 2014". Wellcome Trust. 25 February 2014. Archived from the original on 14 March 2016. Retrieved February 26, 2014.
- GrrlScientist (26 February 2014). "Wellcome Trust's Book Prize 2014 shortlist announced". The Guardian. Retrieved February 26, 2014.
Hallucinations Kindle Edition
by Oliver Sacks (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,503)
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Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing?
Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one's own body. Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them.
In this book, with his usual elegance, curiosity and compassion, Dr Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.
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Books of The Times
When You Can’t Believe Your Eyes
By Michiko Kakutani
Nov. 26, 2012
“Why Kermit?” This was the question asked by a woman who started to have hallucinations of the “Sesame Street” frog many times a day, several weeks after brain surgery. Kermit meant nothing to her, she said, and his shifting moods — sometimes he looked sad, sometimes happy, occasionally angry — had nothing to do with her own feelings. In the beginning, he occupied most of the left half of her visual field, but he gradually began getting smaller.
Her doctor, Oliver Sacks, told her he thought the images’ diminution was a good sign: “perhaps one day Kermit would be too small to see at all.” Such curious apparitions are the subject of Dr. Sacks’s absorbing new book, “Hallucinations.” In these pages Dr. Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, provides what he calls a kind of “natural history or anthology of hallucinations” drawn from his patients’ experiences, his own observations and from literature on the subject.
He describes visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, olfactory hallucinations and hallucinations produced by illness, fevers, sleep deprivation, drugs, grief, trauma and exhaustion.
There are Rothkoesque hallucinations with bright, glowing clouds of color; Magritte-like hallucinations featuring surreal conflations of people’s heads and objects; and Picasso-esque hallucinations in which faces are grossly distorted or composed of fragments — “a nose, part of a mouth, an eye, a huge head of hair, all juxtaposed in a seemingly haphazard way.”
There are hallucinations in which images duplicate or multiply, much like a Warhol print sequence, and hallucinations in which people are haunted — as in a Poe or a Henry James story — by their doppelgängers.
Dr. Sacks conjures these apparitions in language that has an easy, tactile magic. As he’s done in so many of his earlier books, like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “An Anthropologist on Mars,” he uses his medical knowledge to illuminate the complexities of the human brain and the mysteries of the human mind.
At the same time, his compassion for his patients and his own philosophical outlook turn what might have been clinical case studies into humanely written short stories, animated as much by an intuitive appreciation of the human condition as by scientific understanding.
Some of the hallucinations chronicled in these pages are the author’s own. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Dr. Sacks experimented with psychedelics, and he recalls on one occasion combining amphetamines and LSD with “a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium).” About 20 minutes after taking this elixir, he faced a white wall and exclaimed: “I want to see indigo now — now!”
Then, he remembers, “as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved.”
On another occasion, Dr. Sacks says, he injected himself with morphine and spent more than 12 hours staring at the sleeve of his dressing gown, which was hanging on a door. The fabric became alive with a “miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene,” complete with silken tents of different colors, “gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows.”
He had just been reading Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” and he says he realized that he was looking at the Battle of Agincourt, with hundreds, thousands of soldiers — the armies of England and France — preparing to go to war.
While he does not delve into the science of how the brain that can produce such amazing images, Dr. Sacks deftly conveys what it feels like to have such hallucinations — and the place these visions can assume in a person’s emotional and spiritual life.
One woman has epileptic seizures that transport her back to Chicago, where she had lived as a teenager, conjuring familiar landmarks, while strangely transforming the topography into a dreamscape.
A migraine patient has the same oddly specific vision in every attack: “a hallucination of a worker emerging from a manhole in the street, wearing a white hard hat with an American flag painted on it.”
One of Dr. Sacks’s patients, Rosalie, a blind woman in her 90s, who has Charles Bonnet syndrome (which can afflict the visually impaired), sees children in brightly colored Eastern clothes walking up and down stairs, women dolled up in hats and gold-trimmed furs, and, later, little people, a few inches high, “like elves or fairies, with little green caps, climbing up the sides of her wheelchair.”
Bonnet syndrome images, Dr. Sacks writes, tend to be “more stereotyped than those of dreams and at the same time less intelligible, less meaningful” — they rarely yield “insights into the unconscious wishes, needs or conflicts of the person” but are instead the brain reacting to the loss of eyesight. The brain, he adds, “needs not only perceptual input but perceptual change,” and when a person with sight is subjected to darkness and solitude (say in prison) the “deprivation of normal visual input can stimulate the inner eye” to produce dreams or hallucinations.
Monotony of landscape can have a similar effect — as in the case of sailors spending days gazing at a becalmed sea; polar explorers caught in a vast white icescape; or pilots flying for hours in an empty sky.
Although modern Western cultures have tended to regard hallucinations as a sign of “madness or something dire happening to the brain,” Dr. Sacks observes, other cultures regard them, like dreams, “as a special, privileged state of consciousness — one that is actively sought through spiritual practices, meditation, drugs or solitude.”
“Do the geometric patterns seen in migraine and other conditions prefigure the motifs of Aboriginal art?” he asks. “Did Lilliputian hallucinations (which are not uncommon) give rise to the elves, imps, leprechauns and fairies in our folklore? Do the terrifying hallucinations of the nightmare, being ridden and suffocated by a malign presence, play a part in generating our concepts of demons and witches or malignant aliens? Do ‘ecstatic’ seizures, such as Dostoyevsky had, play a part in generating our sense of the divine?”
Many psychical or paranormal experiences, Dr. Sacks suggests, may in fact be hallucinations stemming from bereavement, isolation, sensory deprivation or “drowsy or trancelike states.” Whatever their cause, he says, hallucinatory experiences “generate a world of imaginary beings and abodes — heaven, hell, fairyland.”
In response to physiologically based visions, we create narratives to explain what we’ve seen, and when old-fashioned figures like devils and witches “are no longer believed in, new ones — aliens, visitations from ‘a previous life’ — take their place.”
For that matter, many famous images in literature and art could well have been inspired by hallucinations. Dr. Sacks points out that Lewis Carroll suffered from migraines and notes that some experts believe that migraine auras might have inspired the weird fluctuations in size that occur in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”
He adds that Piranesi’s remarkably detailed and labyrinthine etchings of imaginary prisons — 18th-century precursors of Escher’s surreal architectural fantasies — are said to have been conceived while the artist was delirious with malaria and possibly hallucinating on opium (at the time, used as a remedy for high fevers).
The creation of art from illness-induced hallucinations is yet another illustration of a theme that runs throughout Dr. Sacks’s books: the ability of people not only to adapt to anomalous conditions, but, in some cases, also to transform their neurological irregularities into a source of identity or aesthetic pleasure.
The scholar Virginia Hamilton Adair, Dr. Sacks notes, published her first book of poetry when she was 83; she was blind from glaucoma and visited by the Charles Bonnet “angel of hallucinations.”
In a dictated journal of those visions, she described “a small flock of fowl” — including a bird with four feet, and some wearing shoes — turning “into little men and women in medieval attire.” Opening her eyes on “the smoke screen” of her room, she said she was “treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit,” and a milkman who’d stepped out of “some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box.”
Then, abruptly, the “magic lantern show of colored oddities” fades, and she finds herself back in a “black-wall country without form or substance,” the place where she landed “as the lights went out.”
HALLUCINATIONS
By Oliver Sacks
326 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
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482 customer reviews
From Australia
Klaus Fuhrmann
5.0 out of 5 stars a true mythbuster
Reviewed in Australia on 6 August 2014
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
as all the other books of Oliver Sacks I've read so far this one is also very informative and at the same time written in a way that I can't stop reading
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Rosemary
4.0 out of 5 stars Read it if you are fascinated by people's neurological problems
Reviewed in Australia on 22 October 2015
Format: KindleVerified Purchase
Another of Oliver Sacks' intriguing and fascinating and very readable collection of observations of patients with neurological problems.
I love nearly all his books.
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Frog and Shrek
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on 26 April 2017
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Haven't finished yet but so far enjoying a good read.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, useful for migraine sufferers
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 August 2025
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Excellent book containing the implications for migraines of hallucinations. The author and world class neurologist Oliver Sacks, now deceased, also suffered migraines giving him a unique insight. Don't hesitate buy this book!
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Sandhya J.
5.0 out of 5 stars WORTH IT.
Reviewed in India on 3 September 2020
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Biological perspective- showcases a variety of patient history and experiences which astounds the reader! The description and detail of every situation is as precise as it can get.
WORTH THE MONEY!
I recommend it to everyone! (:
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2 people found this helpful
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Allison Hazy
5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing Shouldn't Always Be Believing
Reviewed in the United States on 11 December 2013
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In Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks uses both personal experience and plenty of anecdotal evidence to illuminate the idea that hallucinations can occur in individuals as a result of any number of seemingly harmless conditions. Sacks uses a case study approach to delineate the different causes of hallucinations, shedding light on the idea that they are not symptoms of being "crazy". From Charles Bonnet Syndrome and Parkinson's disease to drug and exhaustion-induced hallucinations, Sacks examines the neural pathways involved in creating these perceptual phenomena. His vast clinical experience and background in hallucination-related conditions guides the journey through the fascinating world of altered cognition - something that I think makes his narrative particularly convincing. The message that Sacks wants you to take away from this book is that hallucinations are not indicative of a debilitating neurological illness; instead, they are simply "unwarranted" signals between synapses that break the threshold into consciousness. Every hallucination that is perceived by patients can be traced to transient synaptic signaling by numerous brain-imaging methods. There are real neurons that are conducting action potentials causes by neurotransmitter signaling, even if there isn't a sensory stimulus to cause these signals. It's as if the brain makes up its own stimuli and then it functions according to normal synaptic signaling.
Because of his previous personal experience with hallucinations (described in detail throughout the book), Sacks is able to expose the truth about hallucinations. I think it is his personal observations and experiences, which he continuously elaborates on, that give readers the most insight into the misunderstood world of patients that experience hallucinations. He talks about how there are plenty of populations that experience hallucinations as a secondary effect of a medication that they are on or as a result of an otherwise "non-psychotic" disease. These include patients of Parkinson's disease and Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Sacks dedicates plenty of discussion to the idea that hallucinations are helpful in some peoples lives, having a much more beneficial effect than is popularly believed. Much of his work on the beneficial effects of hallucinations stems from his belief that hallucinations may have been a result of evolutionary pressures early in the development of consciousness. All of this is done to add to the notion that hallucinations should not be directly correlated with some type of psychosis.
Sacks seems to believe that the best way to understand each of the broad categories of hallucinations he describes is to use first-hand accounts of patients he has been in contact with or treated. As a result of this belief, the book is made up entirely of anecdotal evidence about different patients experiences with hallucinations with his own commentary interspersed throughout the book. Although the different causes of hallucinations leads to different perceptual patterns, there is a lot of overlap in the discussion of the actual experiences associated with these patients' personal accounts. Because Sacks chooses to use only personal accounts, his discussion eventually becomes tedious and repetitive. It becomes difficult to try to conceptualize the differences between hallucinations and his descriptions seem to become contrived. If you were to read only one chapter of the book, the immense amount of detail given by Sacks could be seen as necessary to fully comprehend what is going on during hallucinations. However, my opinion is that trying to conceptualize every bit of information presented by Sacks can take away from the bigger picture that he is trying to create.
In all, this book was as thorough a discussion of hallucinations as could be expected. I don't think I've ever read as detailed of a description of hallucinations as the ones that I found in this book. It illuminates the idea that hallucinations are a far more universal experience than normally believed. Although the analysis is thorough, more time could have been devoted to the underlying theory of hallucinations as well as clinical research done toward treating the negative effects of hallucinations. I think this book is good for the everyday reader and for the aspiring neuroscientist. There was no point in the book when I felt overwhelmed with scientific dialogue, nor did I find myself bored by redundancies or over-simplifications. I would give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars, being left with a greater understanding of hallucinations and consciousness as a whole.
8 people found this helpful
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Cliente Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing
Reviewed in Italy on 13 January 2016
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To be read! it is interesting in order to understand us, our brain and science, which is not always easy to be understood.
One person found this helpful
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Cliente Amazon
3.0 out of 5 stars Nice book
Reviewed in Spain on 15 June 2016
The book is mostly a collection of anecdotes ordered by different causes of hallucinations.
Oliver Sacks obviously had a lot of empathy for his patients and fellow human beings, and he wrote well.
It can at times be a bit repetitive, but it's an easy read and overall a nice book.
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
Reviewed in Japan on 14 June 2019
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Really good book. Just mentions several different kinds of hallucination types.
A really good introductory book to understand all types of hallucinations.
But it is not deep about the real brain mechanisms involved in that phenomena.
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A. Effting
5.0 out of 5 stars Mindblowing
Reviewed in Germany on 20 April 2017
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Oliver Sacks was a master at being marveled by the ability of our brains to build realities and beliefs and writing his awe and astonishment with well constructed thoughts.In this book he describes many encounters he had with mentally ill people along his life and explores the inner workings of the human brain.
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Stephen Bridge
5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining but also important book on brain misunderstandings
Reviewed in the United States on 29 January 2024
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The works of Oliver Sacks are standard works for anyone interested in the workings of the human brain. But they are entertaining and enlightening for most of us. The most interesting aspect of his writing is the way he uses odd brain states to speculate on what they tell us about the workings of the normal brain – if there is any meaning to the word “normal.”
“Hallucinations” are things we sense (see, hear, feel, smell, etc.) while we are awake that no one else perceives to be there. If you asked most people what they think “hallucination” means, they assume that it refers to someone who is schizophrenic or on illegal drugs. But Sacks points out that there are many other conditions which cause hallucinations. Nearly all of us may have some experience in our life which qualifies for that definition. Epilepsy, migraine headaches, brain tumors, concussions, strokes, or other forms of brain injury typically cause visions and distortions of reality, from flashing lights to visions of people appearing before us. Even more common are the brief aural or visual hallucinations that most of us have one time or another just as we are falling asleep or waking up. This might include hearing someone call your name or someone seeming to be beside you in the bed, when the house is actually empty.
Sacks’s book should be read not just by medical professionals but by anyone who works with patients -- in nursing homes, medical offices, rehab centers, or with your own relatives – and by anyone who anticipates BECOMING a patient. Many of the people reading this review will have hallucinations of different kinds as they get older.
Sacks also writes from personal experience. He is subject to migraines himself (the subject of his first book) and has had many hallucinations related to that condition. He also experimented with drugs in college and has tales to tell about that. And he briefly discusses an experience where after a severe leg injury and surgery, he felt like his leg had disappeared completely and some alien thing put in its place (written about at length in the book *A Leg to Stand On*).
Not only is this book fascinating, it might save your life or a relative’s life someday. And just maybe the next time you or I see a person talking to an invisible friend or telling you about the music they hear playing, we might give consideration to the thought that “that person is ill” rather than “that person is crazy.”
2 people found this helpful
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Carmen
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
Reviewed in Spain on 31 January 2016
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Based on own experiences and those of their patients, the author offers a description of the type of hallucinations a person can suffer. I expected to find scientific explanations and not just a description of cases. Still, it is an interesting and readable book.
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Martin
4.0 out of 5 stars Book for the visually impaired
Reviewed in France on 5 April 2019
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I gave it 3 stars because the book is for the visually impaired, so everything is very big. It should be clearly written on the description, or on the title of the article. But in the end, it is a book and that does not prevent it from being read, so it is only an aesthetic criticism.
In any case, Oliver Sacks is always great and I would recommend him.
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Cliente Kindle
3.0 out of 5 stars Allucinante...
Reviewed in Italy on 14 February 2013
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Molti episodi interessanti, ben raccontati. Le allucinazioni non sono così male ...
Se sentite le vocine che vi parlano non siete per forza matti.
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Mark
4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Read For Oliver Sacks Fans
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 February 2013
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A bit heavy on the medical terminology for "a lay book" I say this because he spends a lot more time describing how his patients view the world, than describing and going into the reasons why. But you can get the gist of it by the context of the situations. But the case study's are fascinating all the same, and a must for us who are interested in how the brain generates consciousness.
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Felix Richter
4.0 out of 5 stars Realities of the unreal
Reviewed in Germany on 29 March 2013
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Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who, in the form of Robin Williams, raised the pitiful Robert de Niro from his Parkinson's rigidity, and to whom we also have the knowledge that one can confuse his wife with a hat, has not yet retired to the old part. Thank God, he is one of the very laudatory species of scientists who are not exalted to express themselves in general. Here are still a few smears to be made, but also the same.
His latest work “Hallucinations” may not be as funny and amusing as the man in the hat, but still offers some amazing insights into the colorful world of visions, mahre and phantom pains. These, contrary to the still widespread public perception, are rarely triggered by mental illness in the common sense, and so many findings are relatively new because patients in the past reluctant to report their hallucinations in order to avoid stigma. It is certainly a merit of Oliver Sacks to have contributed significantly to the rethinking here.
I'm not quite sure how he imagined the medical education of his readers. Since he repeatedly addresses the stage of “image processing” hallucinations, one should be familiar with the functional topology of the human brain in general, otherwise it will be through repeated googling. Also, other medical terms are explained rather rarely, and if, then not always in the place where they are used for the first time. Sacks may assume that the readers of “Hallucinations” have read all the others of his books; those to whom this does not apply are more difficult here, and with a book that is rather not written for the professional world, this is
a little hindrance.by the way hallucinogenic drugs, especially his own experiences from the wild 60s, which read like the confession of a rock musician, and one suspects that he only survived this time healthy and in one piece with good luck. However, the fact that he is affected by various kinds of hallucinations himself feeds the suspicion that his excessive drug history is not entirely innocent.
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*) The same applies to the numerous footnotes, which sometimes span multiple pages, and which are mostly information that might interfere with the body text. I think footnotes should only be used to indicate the source. For all other comments the following applies: Either you read them the same, and then they are better off in the body text, or you read them, perhaps because you have missed the superscript digit, only when you have reached the bottom, and then they even interfere with the reading flow, or you don't read them at all, because they are but only small print, but that is certainly not in the spirit of the author. I have already caught myself in the face of an imminent footnote that I first scanned the page for the number, so as not to miss it, and that's a funny way to read. In short: in a book for the interested layman one should deal with such scientific insignia extremely sparingly; Q.E.D.
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Lauren Martinolich
4.0 out of 5 stars Came dirty
Reviewed in Canada on 5 May 2023
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I love Oliver sacks and was excited to read this book. The only issue was the book came damaged on the front cover and there is a sticky substance on the book (front, spine and back of the book). The book looks nice though despite the sticky dirt on it
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Dr.Padmakumar G
5.0 out of 5 stars Various types of hallucinations and possible scientific explanations with medical anecdotes.
Reviewed in India on 30 March 2023
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The book analyses different causes of hallucinations and illustrates different experiments conducted in this context.Contents are mainly used to discuss in the classes of PG programmes and Philosophical Counselling course.
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From other countries
Damaskcat
5.0 out of 5 stars Hallucinations
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 March 2013
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The human brain works in ways we are only just beginning to understand. We tend to trust what we see as being what is actually happening but this book shows how the brain can be fooled into thinking something is there when it's actually happening inside itself. Hallucinations can happen when we're tired, half asleep or just waking up. They can happen when our eyesight has gone and when it is in some way defective. If we have a limb amputated we are still convinced the limb is there.
But hallucinations can be auditory as well as visual. People can hear music all the time or hear voices speaking to them or talking in the background. There's a tendency to think it is only schizophrenics who hear voices telling them to do things but the majority of people who hear voices are not schizophrenic. The author quotes many examples from his own patients and the case histories make fascinating reading. He also tells of his own experiences with licit and illicit drugs.
I enjoyed reading this well written and interesting book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand themselves and the way their brain works. There are notes on each chapter, a bibliography which gives the reader an opportunity to read more on the subject and an index.
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Karoline E.
5.0 out of 5 stars Also good to read in English
Reviewed in Germany on 3 March 2014
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This was the first book by Oliver Sacks I read in English. Like most of his books, it contains case stories of people with neurollogical diseases. Here it is hallucinations, not only visual but also other sensory impressions can be experienced in hallucinations. The English is good to understand, the stories are interesting and, as always, I learned a lot at Olver Sacks.
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Ruby Twos
5.0 out of 5 stars fantastic
Reviewed in Canada on 6 March 2015
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The brain is an amazing thing, and this book is one of the most interesting and absorbing I've read on the topic
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Michka
3.0 out of 5 stars Body 16?
Reviewed in France on 18 February 2014
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I didn't know that the book was in body for the visually impaired. This makes for a pretty ugly edition and you can't take notes in the margins, since there aren't any. But thanks for the efforts made by the sender.
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Angela M. Thomas
4.0 out of 5 stars A Compendium of the Visual, Auditory, Olfactory and Tactile Hallucinations as related to the False Perception of the Mind
Reviewed in the United States on 29 September 2013
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Objective
Dr. Oliver Sacks emphasizes the importance of categorizing hallucinations as symptoms of a puzzled or damaged brain that is trying to compensate the absence of a specific sensory input. This review aims to provide a detailed analysis of Oliver Sacks', "Hallucinations" which is a compendium of hallucinatory experiences faced by his patients.
Overall Opinion
As an undergraduate student studying neuroscience, I chose this book to understand the complexity and pathophysiology of hallucinations, especially Tactile Hallucinations, and how it relates to the conscious mind. As a physician and a professor of Neurology at New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Sacks recounts the stories of his patients with great empathy and comprehension. I found the book very fascinating to read as it immerses the reader in the hallucinatory experiences of Dr. Sack's patients and it encourages the reader to think critically about the reason behind such tricks of the brains. This book not only narrates these hallucinatory experiences but also associates these manifestations to specific regions of the brain. Through this review, I wish to encourage everyone to read this book and acknowledge hallucinations as a problem of the brain rather than just a psychotic behavior of an individual.
Synopsis of the Book
In chapter one, Dr. Sacks recalls the incident of an old woman named Rosalie who started seeing things when she was at her nursing home. Rosalie was blind and she had been hallucinating images of people with distorted faces and animals. She explaines that the images were not a dream but rather "like a movie". Dr. Sacks then attributed these symptoms to a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. He emphasizes that her symptoms were not "psychiatric" rather a "reaction of the brain to the loss of eyesight". He explains that Charles Bonnet Syndrome is a very common condition and goes on to recount other patient's experiences of mild forms and severe forms of hallucinations in completely visually impaired or slightly visually impaired individuals. In chapter two and chapter nine, Dr. Sacks depicts the importance of the brain in visual hallucinations. He describes an experiment done by William Bexton in order to understand the effects of total sensory deprivation in fourteen college students. The results of the experiment showed that these students started experiencing heightened visual, auditory and kinesthetic hallucinations. With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researches were able to attribute visual hallucinations to the activity in the primary visual cortex of the occipital lobe and fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe. Even damage to one half of the occipital lobe can result in visual impairment of one eye leading to hallucinations. In chapter seven, Dr. Sacks explains his own experience of his migraines that caused visual hallucinations of geometric shapes and bright colors.
Anosmic patients, people who have lost their sense of smell, can have olfactory hallucinations as reiterated by Dr. Oliver Sacks in chapter three. He recounts the experience of several patients who have lost their sense of smell due to a damage of their olfactory tracts. One particular instance includes the experience of a Canadian woman, Mary B, who suffered from unpleasant smells after operation under general anesthesia. Tomatoes started smelling metallic and cottage cheese like sour milk. She had to pick and choose specific food to eat during all her meals. Auditory Hallucinations (Chapter 4) are particularly related to psychiatric patients especially schizophrenic patients and have been associated with the abnormal activation of the primary auditory cortex. Dr. Sacks suggest that auditory hallucinations are the result of "failure to recognize internally generated speech as one's own." Additionally, phantom limbs are a type of tactile hallucinations as Dr. Sack explains in chapter fifteen. He explains phantoms limbs as a voluntary type of hallucination in patients with an amputated part of their body. Epilepsy and drug induced (Chapter 6, 8, 10 and 13) hallucination is caused by high activation of specific regions of the brain that can excite stored memories and emotions. Hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and Parkinson's disease are emphasized by Dr. Sacks in chapters 5, 11 and 12. These diseases encounter a combination of visual, auditory, olfaction and tactile hallucination and it is difficult to pinpoint these hallucinations to one part of the brain.
Style and Structure of the Book
The book was divided into fifteen chapters each of which emphasized on one particular cause of hallucinations in patients. The book was easy to read from beginning to end as the use of imagery in the book immersed the reader into the patient's hallucinatory experience. In each chapter, Dr. Sacks narrated several experiences, introduced the history of the particular cause of that hallucination, associated these causes with specific regions in the brain and asserted his own interpretation of these hallucinations. Moreover, the portrayal of real world patients and Dr. Sacks' empathy and comprehension towards their condition gives the book a certain kind of credibility in holding the attention of the reader.
Opinion on Specific Parts
I was intrigued by most of the hallucinatory experiences that were explained in the book. However, there were a few specific parts of the book that I was enthralled in. The clinical case study of phantom limbs was of great significance as almost all patients with an amputated part of their body suffered from the pain of a phantom limb. These hallucinations are different from all other hallucinations because they can be controlled voluntarily. Dr. Sacks reiterated V.S. Ramachandran's concept that these tactile hallucinations were due to "learned" paralysis in which the brain is in conflict of making decisions and thus, abandons the motor commands sent to the phantom limbs.
Also, it was interesting to learn that visual hallucinations are very common in the world and we do not know about its prevalence because individuals who experience hallucinations are scared to be labeled by the society as delusional. Therefore, the book provides detailed history and case studies to associate hallucination to a particular brain region.
It was interesting to note that hallucinations can be caused by migraines, emotions, beliefs, complete sensory deprivation and lack of sleep through the activation of the regions of the brain involved in the functioning of various sensory inputs. People with severe migraines tend to hallucinate geometric shapes and colors due to heightened activity of their primary visual cortex. In Charles Bonnet syndrome, complete deprivation of the visual senses leads to hallucination of faces and this is recognized by the activity of the brain region called the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe. Moreover, patients who suffer from Parkinson's disease have hallucination caused by their medication. Dr. Sacks' experiences of hallucination from drug intake and migraines provide a credible source of such incidents.
Useful/Interesting Quotes
"...hallucinations are percepts arising in the absence of external reality- seeing things or hearing things that are not there."
"Do the geometric patterns seen in migraine and other conditions prefigure the motifs of Aboriginal art? Did Lilliputian hallucinations (which are not uncommon) give rise to the elves, imps, leprechauns and fairies in our folklore? Do the terrifying hallucinations of the nightmare, being ridden and suffocated by a malign presence, play a part in generating our concepts of demons and witches or malignant aliens? Do `ecstatic' seizures, such as Dostoyevsky had, play a part in generating our sense of the divine?"
Summary of review
Altogether, this book is an easy read with its elaborate yet captivating narratives of Dr. Oliver Sacks' patients who experienced hallucinations. It was entertaining and at the same time it was plausible. I like the way Dr. Sacks categorized the book based on different causes of hallucinations and the title of each chapter added to the mystery of the characteristics of the hallucination he was emphasizing in the same chapter. Although the book emphasized a lot on specific types of hallucination, it failed to give a more detailed description of the pathophysiology of the hallucination especially with respect to different brain regions. Moreover, this book is a great stepping-stone towards new findings in clinical medicine regarding hallucination, which was once thought to be purely under psychiatry. It emphasizes hallucinations as being very common in most people's lives today.
Recommendation
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about mind perceptions in patients who experience hallucinations. Dr. Oliver Sacks has quoted as well as cited several experts in Neuroscience who has analyzed the sensation and perception of the brain as it relates to hallucinations making it a credible source for future analysis of hallucinatory experiences. Although the book does not give a lot of detail on the pathophysiology of hallucinations, it can be used to delve deep into the different types and subtypes of hallucination in patients who have some kind of neurological condition.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Along came a spider... which discussed Russell's Set Paradox
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 April 2014
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It’s a very scary thought that you might start ‘seeing things’. What clearer indication could there be that something is wrong with your brain – the onset of madness, maybe, if not some horrible, and probably fatal neurological disorder? Worse, it could happen at any moment. The very next scene you turn to look at in your life – your living room, your front garden – could contain a hallucination, some sure-fire sign that sanity is departing.
Being set straight on this is reason enough to have bought Oliver Sach’s typically entertaining casebook on the topic. ‘Seeing things’ – and indeed hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling things – is much commoner than conventional wisdom admits. Far from being an invariable omen of mental illness, hallucinations can be benign, even useful. They are a feature of mental life for many healthy, happy people at some time or another, as well as for those coping with a range of neurological and psychiatric conditions. Crucially, they are not necessarily delusions: the subject can, and often does, realise they come from the mind and not the outside world. What’s more, they have much to tell us about the fundamental workings of the brain.
Sachs, as usual, introduces us to his various patients with fascination and empathy, and, as you would expect from him, presents insights from their predicament which makes the organ of thought throb with self-knowledge as it reads.
The most remarkable case study of all, though, is perhaps Sachs himself. With great candour, he describes the results of his own consumption of psychoactive drugs in the 1960s, and you’ll either be shocked, or delighted, to discover how great the mild-mannered doctor’s penchant for tripping out became. One memorable passage recounts a conversation he calmly had with a spider in his kitchen, which spoke with the voice of Bertrand Russell and sought his opinion on some points of weighty philosophy. He doesn’t say who won the debate.
Talking spiders I can pass on, but I won’t now be so terrified of my brain’s potential to project as well as passively absorb. There is often with Sachs that quality found in all worthwhile science writing: experiencing the inrush of the exotic and the unsuspected into the everyday: and all of it hard fact, not superstition. There isn’t quite as much of that here as in, say, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, but it’s still a delightfully packed with revelation. Buy it if only for the talking spider.
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ernest reinhart
5.0 out of 5 stars Oliver Sacks is one of those gifted writers who satifies ...
Reviewed in Canada on 26 November 2014
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Oliver Sacks is one of those gifted writers who satifies your curiosities and leaves you a lot wiser after reading his books
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T.A.L.
5.0 out of 5 stars An intriguing walk into the theatre of irreal perception.
Reviewed in the United States on 4 December 2012
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Hallucinations provide a window into another world. A world where strangers visit, angels reside, and landscapes reverberate with all sorts of strange qualities. Walking alongside us through this world is Sacks and one couldn't ask for a better guide.
Starting us off, Sacks introduces the reader to Charles Bonnet Syndrome where a lack of visual stimulus leads to hallucinations. The visual area of the brain, in cases of blindness of various degrees, "overcompensates" and can produce panoply of imagery. Sufferers often see images of people totally unrelated to their lives engaged in various activities also unrelated to memories and experiences. One elderly lady would see a procession dressed in Asian garb silently glide through her visual field. Syndromes such as this, Sacks tells us, show how active our perceptual systems are when they are engaged in the act of perceiving.
Sacks guides us through many types of hallucinations, not just the visual. The phenomena of auditory, olfactory, and tactile hallucinations are also covered in engrossing detail. They are also differentiated such as between patients with neurological damage and problems and between that caused by psychotropic substances.
One case is recounted here from a man experiencing LSD hallucinations. The change in perception and how powerfully these alter our "world" is truly astounding.
A type of hallucination that I have had personal experience with is also covered in the book.
Imagine you are 10 years old and that your worst fear is werewolves. Everything about these imaginary creatures terrifies you. Then imagine that you find yourself awake in the early morning dark one day, unable to move with sleep paralysis. You watch as a werewolf enters through the doorway and leaps onto your bed, pinning you down with a bare-fanged muzzle snarling and dripping hot drool on your face. Everything about this experience screams that it is real - down to the very way that you can see the details of skin and fur in close relief inches from your nose. Needless to say, this was an extraordinary experience.
However, the werewolf was only there for about 15 seconds before I was able to shake the sleep paralysis. The creature that had been poised over me in a murderous rage fades and vanishes.
Reading this book I came to learn that this was an instance of two phenomena that often accompany one another: sleep paralysis and hypnopompic hallucinations. The aforementioned account is the only one that I have had that left a lasting impression. Sacks also tells us that these are often singular experiences.
If you want to know more about these mental and perceptual phenomena, more about how the human brain/mind works, and be pleased by good writing along the way, look no further than this book.
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5.0 out of 5 stars neu und sauber
Reviewed in Germany on 12 May 2021
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Äußerlich tipp topp,
inhaltlich wurde etwas weggelassen, was mir wichtig war: Schizophrenie.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for budding neuroscientists!
Reviewed in India on 5 August 2017
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Horrifying yet fascinating ( beyond words ) acccounts of Sacks' patients.
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cerebral function returns to normal. But if there is an ongoing dementia, like Alzheimer's or Lewy body disease, there may be less and less ability to recognize hallucinations as such-which,
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In Parkinson's disease, postencephalitic parkinsonism, and Lewy body disease, there is damage to the brain stem and associated structures, as there is in peduncular
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of the brain at autopsy in such patients may show abnormal aggregates of protein (so-called Lewy bodies) inside the nerve cells, mostly in the brain stem and basal ganglia but also in the visual
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cells, mostly in the brain stem and basal ganglia but also in the visual association cortex. The Lewy bodies, it is conjectured, may predispose patients to visual hallucinations even before they are
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are put on L-dopa. Edna B. seems to have this disease, though the diagnosis of Lewy body disease cannot be made with certainty in life without doing a brain biopsy. Mrs. B. enjoyed
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including moderately advanced Alzheimer's disease, though less often than they do in Lewy body disease. In such cases, hallucinations may give rise to delusions, or they may stem from delusions.
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whom she felt was "spying on her. Hallucinations in Alzheimer's disease, like those of Lewy body disease, are usually embedded in a complex matrix of sensory deceptions, confusion,
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AI Overview
The text discusses Lewy body disease and its connection to other conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. It highlights the presence of abnormal protein aggregates called Lewy bodies in the brain and their potential role in causing hallucinations and delusions.
Lewy body disease: A type of dementia characterized by abnormal protein aggregates called Lewy bodies in the brain.
Symptoms: Associated with hallucinations and delusions, which can also be seen in Alzheimer's disease but are more common in Lewy body disease.
Diagnosis: A definitive diagnosis of Lewy body disease cannot be made with certainty without a brain biopsy.
Connection to other diseases: Lewy bodies are found in the brain stem and other areas, similar to damage seen in Parkinson's disease.
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