Understanding why people born blind never develop schizophrenia could transform how we think about and treat one of medicine’s most baffling conditions.
…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)
…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)