Understanding why people born blind never develop schizophrenia could transform how we think about and treat one of medicine’s most baffling conditions.
…no, they’re never really visual images; they’re more akin to the ideas which images represent when i parse visual stimulus, but that’s a pretty muddled distinction to distinguish in the heat of the moment, ceci n’est pas une pipe and all that…
…kind of like when you struggle to parse sounds into phonemes and then phonemes into words and then words into coherent language, but you’re never really hearing language directly…
…ideas, not words: written language is weird one (and kind of oblique to my point), but in that instance visual stimulus -> letters -> wordforms -> sounds -> words -> ideas; hallucinations skip all those earlier steps and go straight to the idea end of the perception chain but it’s not obvious that the earlier steps are missing…
(i don’t think i’ve ever hallucinated written language, though, just the ideas of hearing sounds; or of seeing creatures or objects; or of inhabiting spaces, environments, or situations; similar to how one experiences dreams)
…no, they’re never really visual images; they’re more akin to the ideas which images represent when i parse visual stimulus, but that’s a pretty muddled distinction to distinguish in the heat of the moment, ceci n’est pas une pipe and all that…
…kind of like when you struggle to parse sounds into phonemes and then phonemes into words and then words into coherent language, but you’re never really hearing language directly…
Yeah you lost me
Like you get words popping up in your head when you look at a visual stimulus and you can’t tell if the word are actually written there?
…ideas, not words: written language is weird one (and kind of oblique to my point), but in that instance visual stimulus -> letters -> wordforms -> sounds -> words -> ideas; hallucinations skip all those earlier steps and go straight to the idea end of the perception chain but it’s not obvious that the earlier steps are missing…
(i don’t think i’ve ever hallucinated written language, though, just the ideas of hearing sounds; or of seeing creatures or objects; or of inhabiting spaces, environments, or situations; similar to how one experiences dreams)