Mind Games

[snopes]

New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011001399.html

[Marie19]

Hm. Now voices in your head are being blamed on the government? And I always thought I was just a mental case. (only half joking)

they need the aluminum foil deflector beanie

[Silas Sparkhammer]

I've never quite known why this is so common a delusion. A friend who was a prison guard at Angola in Louisiana, and who worked in the "special" ward, where they kept prisoners with serious mental issues, said that this was very, very common. Bad Guys -- the government, the CIA, the mafia, doctors, aliens, etc. -- were beaming thoughts into their heads by radio.

Here in San Diego, there is a public loony who claims that doctors implanted a device in her head to receive the voices.

(Well, from a technological/scientific point of view, that makes more sense! That, at least, would be feasible!)

Silas

In the old days, it was the voice of God or the devil. Now it is the next BIG POWER, i.e., the government.

[Pseudo_Croat]

Is it even physically or scientifically possible to beam voices directly into a person's head?

- Pseudo_Croat

[geminilee]

Yeah. They make a speaker (well, not a speaker) that works the same way. It is a beam of sound that only sounds in your head when you are in the path of the beam.

[Floater]

Will some sort of protective headgear, for instance made out of tin foil, be able to deflect that beam? Inquiring minds want to know.

Just had an incident here on Memorial Day. Seems the people at one of the local radio station complexes became aware of some activity in the employee parking lot, and found that someone had slashed the tires on all the vehicles, had knocked over the motorcycles and jumped up and down on them. Seems the upset individual attacking the vehicles believed the station was beaming commands into his head, and he wanted the employees to stop, so first he had to get their attention...
Very, very unhappy DJs at the station. Of course, he could be right. He wouldn't have caused all that damage if the voices hadn't told him to do it.

[Ali Infree]

I've never quite known why this is so common a delusion. A friend who was a prison guard at Angola in Louisiana, and who worked in the "special" ward, where they kept prisoners with serious mental issues, said that this was very, very common. Bad Guys -- the government, the CIA, the mafia, doctors, aliens, etc. -- were beaming thoughts into their heads by radio.

Here in San Diego, there is a public loony who claims that doctors implanted a device in her head to receive the voices.

I don't have a copy nearby, but I think this belief is listed in the DSM 4TR as a specific disorder. I have met a number of people with that belief, some more functional than others.

Ali "Happy Sgt. Pepper's release day" Infree

The belief that others are putting thoughts into your mind is a distinctive symptom of schizophrenia. It's described in Victor Tausk's "On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia". A classic case is James Tilly Matthews's air loom. For the more science-fiction oriented (as opposed to paranoid hallucinatory steampunk), there's Philip K. Dick's "Exegesis" and VALIS.

[Kutter]

It actually makes a kind of sense.

Hearing voices isn't like have a nagging thought. It is an actual auditory sensation of having someone talking to you, saying things you have no control over and often in a voice you don't recognize. The things these voices say are quite often very dark in tone and can have a real impact on the person hearing them.

Even without a tendancy for delusions I'd imagine it would be hard to accept that these voices are simply products of your own brain malfunctioning. They feel like they are coming from an outside source, and it doesn't take much to rationalize that they are.

We live in a time where perfectly reasonable people believe in all kinds of paranoid fantasies about the government. It's no surprise that schizophrenics would to.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by Kutter

Hearing voices isn't like have a nagging thought. It is an actual auditory sensation of having someone talking to you, saying things you have no control over and often in a voice you don't recognize. The things these voices say are quite often very dark in tone and can have a real impact on the person hearing them.

I've always wondered about that: are the voices actual hallucinatory sounds or merely the suggestions of sounds?

Of course, the next question is: how can we know? None of us can ever really know what "the color green looks like to another person."

The only hallucination I have any experience with is olfactory; after discovering the body of someone who had shot herself, I smelled burnt gunpowder for an entire week. Only after the third day was I able to comprehend that it wasn't a real smell; no gunpowder smoke had gotten into my hair. It was an hallucination, but it was exactly as "real" as if smoke had saturated my hair. When the effect persisted after four long, hot, sudsy showers, then I knew that it was in my brain, not in my nose.

If the voices heard by these sufferers are as real as that smell, then the experience must be truly and signally unpleasant, especially when the voices are saying nasty things.

Even without a tendancy for delusions I'd imagine it would be hard to accept that these voices are simply products of your own brain malfunctioning. They feel like they are coming from an outside source, and it doesn't take much to rationalize that they are.

And, of course, the victims are also likely to be of "diminished capacity" in other ways. Again, it took me some time to reason out that my experience was hallucinogenic, but I was able to work through to that inescapable conclusion. If I (putatively mentally healthy) started hearing voices, I might try to explain it via hidden radios, etc., for a few days, but after a while, when that explanation failed, I'd have to accept the ugly truth.

But the fully delusional mind is not always capable of accepting contrary truths. (Just as the suicidally depressed person can't "Just cheer up" and the obsessive-compulsive patient can't "Just stop fretting about it!")

We live in a time where perfectly reasonable people believe in all kinds of paranoid fantasies about the government. It's no surprise that schizophrenics would to.

There is something really disturbing about the way you phrased that. I don't exactly disagree with it, but there is a kind of Lewis Caroll touch of inside-out logic to it!

Silas

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

I've always wondered about that: are the voices actual hallucinatory sounds or merely the suggestions of sounds?

A close friend of mine suffered schizophrenia. He described to me some of his experiences of hearing voices.

He said that one lunchtime he was in his family's kitchen, making a sandwich, when he heard someone talking. He thought it was someone having a conversation out on the road. It got louder, though, so he thought his sister might have left the radio on in the next room. He went into the next room and the radio was already turned off, as was the TV. He thought then it might be someone out on the front porch, so he opened the front door and went outside to have a look. No-one. He made a complete circuit of the house. He was the only person around.

So he went back inside and started paying attention to what the voice was saying. He wouldn't tell me what the voice said; he just said it was "ugly, putrid, despicable things" about himself and his family that scared him witless.

He said that's when he knew he was having another psychotic episode.

He said at times there was more than one voice, some male, some female. None that he recognised.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

That's eerie...

I'm sure you know about the (fairly ordinary) hypnopomping and hypnogogic hallucinations -- many of us here on snopes have had such dream-state illusions! The thing that is fascinating to me is that they seem to have the common feature of pure nasty malice. They simply radiate contemptuous evil.

That psychotic aural hallucinations also are so malevolent in their nature suggests at least the outside possibility of similar parts of the brain being involved.

It seems that there is, somewhere deep within our brains, a mechanism that hates, and which hates us!

(I once heard a lecture by science fiction writer -- and real scientist -- Gregory Benford, who said that the human brain is "kludged together" in a very makeshift way. The miracle is that we are ever able to behave rationally at all, not that rationality occasionally fails!)

Silas

You can count me in on the hypno(pompic)|(gogic) hallucinations. Do you find them upsetting? I've had a few I've found upsetting, but mostly I enjoy them - particularly waking voices, which I find wise and helpful.

The psychological explanation I've been offered for the sort of voices my friend heard is that the sufferer's brain fails to recognise self-talk as originating internally and attributes it to an external source. According to this explanation, what my friend heard was his own internal critic which his brain mistook for an external voice.

I guess my waking voices are the output of my unconscious problem-solving processes, which my half-asleep brain misattributes to the room.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by Ajay

You can count me in on the hypno(pompic)|(gogic) hallucinations. Do you find them upsetting? I've had a few I've found upsetting, but mostly I enjoy them - particularly waking voices, which I find wise and helpful.

I wish I were that lucky! Mine are of the "Night-Hag" variety. A figure of menace, radiating sheer vicious malice, is "in the room with me," even when this is absolutely impossible.

My favorite was when I spotted a "Ninja," a figure clad in dark, crawling on his hands and knees across the top of my bookshelves, then exiting via a trap door. All of this in a place where a Barbie Doll couldn't have gone! In another, there was a gigantic spider on my ceiling, and I leaped up and smashed it with my pillow...except that when I really awakened, I was lying on my tummy: I couldn't have even seen it, let alone made that hallucinatory leap.

(A sort of "out of body" dream!)

Actually, most of my dreams, per se, are nice ones. I've gotten lots of good story ideas from dreams (from which I have not always written good stories, alas!)

Silas

[Ali Infree]

Completely OT: I used to have nightmares of some faceless person pursuing me. Sometimes, I would have a weapon, often a make-shift one shot pistol that would fall apart or barely stay together. Under the influence of some conversations with friends about the Carlos Castaneda books [yes, I know ], one night while having this dream, I focused on my hands. I could see them and move them. I grabbed the Faceless Man and wrapped my hands around his neck. Never had the dream again.
If you have seen the Polanski film, Repulsion, the dreams were a little like Catherine Deneuve's.

On topic: I agree that some of what happens to individuals is that they cannot relate to their own self-talk or understand it as theirs. There are days when the most rational conversations I have are self-talk. However, no one is more critical of me than me.

I don't know if that experience and causation is true of many or all people with schzoid disorders.

Ali "everyone has someone" Infree

When I was younger, I use to experience hallucinations--I remember once seeing spiders all over the bathroom, and then another time a few months later seeing a man taking a shower who disappeared on closer inspection. It's been probably six or seven years now, though.

On the other hand, I still "hear voices" fairly frequently, something I'm told is related to my migraines. They don't say anything--that is, I don't know what they're talking about and they certainly don't tell me to commit acts of vandalism, but they sound like voices. I wonder, however, how much of that--and similar things in others--is pareidolic, the same thing that motivates people to subject grilled cheese sandwiches to apotheosis. And, perhaps more to the point, to find hidden messages in music played wrong way up.

-Baikal

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by Ali Infree

Completely OT: I used to have nightmares of some faceless person pursuing me. Sometimes, I would have a weapon, often a make-shift one shot pistol that would fall apart or barely stay together. Under the influence of some conversations with friends about the Carlos Castaneda books [yes, I know ], one night while having this dream, I focused on my hands. I could see them and move them. I grabbed the Faceless Man and wrapped my hands around his neck. Never had the dream again.

For a period of weeks (a few years ago) I had a series of events in which I would wake up punching. I would have a dream involving an antagonist, and, like you, I fought him. But I fought so well, that my actual sleeping body was throwing punches around.

One morning, I knocked over the bookshelves beside my bed! (And it's a darned good thing I don't sleep with anyone else; they'd have been black and blue from bruising!)

I have no idea why this cycle of events started...nor why it stopped!

Silas