Get Inside Your Head and Hallucinate
The visions are in your head man.
It’s all there, the swirling patterns – coursing with color and texture, yes the rainbow serpent too. It’s all there man, in your head – the devilish presence creeping up out of the darkness, paranoia and confusion, a complete loss of identity and reality, rage – get me off this crazy thing.
One does not need to take drugs to have hallucinations, to see things that “aren’t there” as the skeptics say. And this has been known for a long time, but sensory deprivation is back and it’s never a bad time to remind us of what really lies deep within the mind. Without the world of objects and our senses to interpret it we are left with something not all people are ready to face.
Psychologist Oliver Mason of the University College London and his colleagues published their study on the effects of sensory deprivation on a carefully selected crop of volunteers in October in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
So why all the madness in our head? There is no consensus but what is of the most interest is that according to Mason people with schizophrenia often report that the voices go away when they go into the tank, while “normal” people start hearing them. Who’s crazy.
[Wired]
