Hallucination, or Reality?
Understanding of our everyday perceptions requires objectivity and thoughtful openness. More often than not, unfortunately, this topic of Perception is steeped in enigmatic traditions of opinion and generational folklore that misnomer honest efforts to unravel its inner workings as being moot or ego-pinching. Most people today sternly believe that our perceptions are our own; case closed and end of story. Several layman considerations about our perceptions of Reality, conversely Hallucinations, are among a slew of alternatively inaccurate yet widely held philosophies about our observable world; some are starkly contrasting or even thought of as being polar opposites of each other.
The discussion of this scholarly writing is to acknowledge such misconceptions, while also meeting them with empirical evidence that supports the fact that we hallucinate a shockingly larger part of our perceived Reality than we had thought previously.
Spiders & Perception
Spiders are equipped with several awesome powers, starting with their ability to get around. All spiders, given breed and circumstance, can leap up to 50 times their own body length. For the benefit and fun of this illustration, we’ll affectionately call our spider Stryker, and for ease of identifying who’s who, we’ll say Stryker is a female. With superpowers like Stryker’s tucked in your helix, ‘nowhere’ does not seem beyond one’s reach.
The second amazing power of spiders is their superb eyesight. This sense is essential if Stryker is to distinguish prey, especially in the traditionally tropical indigenous environments that surround and fill her everyday habitats with clutter. Why? Because a spider’s prey won’t often stray once it’s settled and doesn’t know it’s being pursued. Stryker is also a spider-eating spider. This habit can raise several problems because a spider’s lunch of another spider may be three times its own size and thus more difficult to guzzle in one big gulp. Packed with venom yet surrounded by a sticky trap, the hunted lies in plain sight.
A spider’s third phenomenal power is its ability to read and assess the situation. Spiders can map their world in four dimensions and easily formulate an idea for a suitable plan of attack. While being hunted, the prey sits comfortably in the center of Stryker’s sticky home and is blinded to the oncoming attack that has already begun to unfold. Without a clue, Stryker is coming, fangs ready. Stryker re-evaluates the distance and decides to retract her fangs because she sees no place to anchor her web on the abseil in order to swing over and strike. Instead of rushing to the unsuspecting spider, Stryker plucks the peripheral web strands spun earlier to imitate struggle and thus lure to the intruded spider to herself. Indeed, these meals are filled with dietary essentials while also serving as a great source of brain food for a hungry jumping spider like Stryker (Seinfeld et al., 2018).
Perceived Reality vs. Perception
Perceived Reality is based largely on the comparative appraisal of our own Perception as it is relatedly observed by our friends and family, our coworkers and schoolmates, and other social beings who are endemic to our shared social environment (Hohwy, 2017). It is indeed marvelous to muse over the kaleidoscopically mutable ways in which our minds constantly take in external information, evaluate it, and make inferences from it about our present and prospective social landscapes (Clark, 2018).
Likewise, with the many self-beneficent aspects of the human conscience, the mind—forever burning fuses of thought—configures, determines, and suggests to us (i.e., like browser window pop-ups) how to feel next about where we might best fit in our Reality. Only after the mind has already perceived (e.g., Schrödinger’s Cat) Reality, it renders Reality to us, even when we are not conscious of this. At this point, it is furthermore intriguing to ponder what must be infinitesimal snippets of Perception-based landscapes that are panoramically strung together in the mind like quilted multiverses of spider web-like connections (Hohwy, 2017). Now, the trick is to restructure the web right before it is rendered directly to our visual field of consciousness, or even pairwise from our recollection, and to find the spider. In order to find the spider, we must let go of what we think we know and of what we have believed to be real about our perceptions of Reality.
One At A Time
For the time being, please try to forget about Reality as you know it; no easy task. The external world around us—from the water cycle to the different states of grieving—happens one molecule, one state, one moment, and thus one step at a time. The human mind is forever attached to a world that exists in steps. Complexly learned to inherited functionalities of our minds, in this way, then, proceed one step at a time. You probably have guessed by now that despite such prowess, the human mind can perceive only one thing, process only one snapshot of an occurrence, spawn only one thought of the eventual feeling(s), activate one thought-feeling path to associated memory-emotion path, and create only one action/reaction to the ensuing affective response—each one at a time (Molina et al., 2021).
Past vs. Present
It logically follows to rethink the origins of our panoramic perceptions, which to us are very real. Once we realize that our perceptions are lumped together from the past, we can disassemble our perceptive beliefs more easily. We can do so even as we’re now seeing, reading, and considering one word, thought, idea, molecule, and strand of webbing at a time in this sentence, paragraph, and introspective discussion (Dudai, 2020; Sporer, 2019).
Differentiation Via A Ping-Pong Ball
Remember, for example, that when we regard a Ping-Pong ball that is dropped from an elevated initial distance, we see it fall until the moment that it hits and is stopped by a final opposing force, likely the floor. In both instances, when considering the commonalities of the initial and the final positions of that ball, our powers of observation of the occurrence allow the idea and the eventual perception of the ball’s stagnancy to align with our own and others’ perceptions of Reality, both presently and in the moments to come. Pragmatically speaking, this is not the primary issue. However, following the useful rationale for arriving at such matched realizations can at times be counterintuitive. One baby step at a time, then (Clark, 2018).
The moments just before the Ping-Pong ball is dropped and before the opposing force acts on the ball are complex to analyze. We need to carefully capture and identify which moments looked and behaved similarly. This detective work can be challenging, but it's essential to our discussion. We understand that the ball's distinctiveness comes from the difference between its starting and ending points in its path, which is determined by its changed displacement and the time it takes to travel from one point to the other (Sporer, 2019).
As previously discussed, our minds are constantly engaged in comparisons. The passage of time allows the mind to contextualize stimuli in a before-versus-after fashion, highlighting changes in what we consciously perceive. Different contextual backgrounds are also crucial for a spider to distinguish between cross-strands and the main strands it has spun. However, a mere change in timing wouldn't enable the spider to differentiate between singly-coated strands and those previously coated and reinforced. This raises a crucial question: How different or stimulating must the detectable aspects of our visual stimuli be for our minds to interpret and piece them together into our everyday perceptions, such as a car about to t-bone us versus a fly resting on a nearby wall?
Space and Time
By now, we likely see that our perceptions are playfully fragmented, no matter how devout our deepest beliefs about reality are to our emotions (i.e. memory); but, at least to our implicit streams of consciousness, our perceptions also can be dissemblingly camouflaged to us. Space and time are the two most-necessary phenomena, either dynamically arrested or fluid, within our mental field of vision and/or cognitive representations of Perception. Also known as what we’ll refer to as our Visuo-Spatial Field of Imagery (VSF-I), they breathe limitless dimensions of life (e.g., colors, shapes, feelings, memories) into the contextually fluid perceptions that we [even in unbeknownst ways] experience. Truly boundless, like the clairvoyant jumping of a spider, are the mind’s flexible know-hows for manufacturing Perception; they seamlessly and heterogeneously distort, amplify, and even multi-dimensionalize our essential space and time (Clark, 2018).
Internal vs. External Influences
Traditionally speaking, though, a stale acceptability is present. It is hidden within approximative beliefs that all internally brewed stimuli cannot be changed before being perceived and that they cannot change VSF-I manifestations of what is internally construed to exist externally of our minds and about our environments; this applies even to those that are resultantly reactionary from the reception of externally inputted stimuli. In this way and in an ‘all-or-none’ fashion, the layman cursorily ‘tags and bags’ all internally sourced yet external materializations as being Reality (Molina et al., 2021).
Analogously, it is relationally acceptable to construe that if an internally sourced stimulus is to alter the external world, that occurrence is, by way of binary scales, either telekinetic or waywardly mystical. Interestingly contrariwise, however, when internal-source stimuli are changed by, and/or change, the material manifestation of what is construed to exist externally, this alternately formed Reality then must also be uniquely individual and unshared; as such, it is categorized ambiguously, instead of dimensionalized, as being a Hallucination. The subtopic of Hallucination will be further unknotted later; for now, it is poignantly responsible to introduce such communally elevated and perpetuated levels of ignorance that herein are noticeably thick and deleteriously followed in lockstep (Clark, 2018).
So, we may still perceive the roundness aspects of a tennis ball that is likewise captured by others with like exposure to the sport-culture. At the same time, though, the outer furry texture and/or other like dimensional characterizations may not unequivocally, by our VSF-I, be symbolized mentally (e.g., electrochemically) as being a tennis ball. In this way, it’s important to speculate that while our perceptions are as influenced actively by internal environments of space-time as they are externally, they are not purely our own (Hohwy, 2017; Clark, 2018; Seinfeld et al., 2018; Molina et al., 2021).
Collective Consciousness
Theories of collective consciousness (i.e., Ecological psychology)talk a lot about the idea that ecologies of large groups, even entire civilizations of people, contribute on an individualistic basis to one another’s perceptions and possibly to a widespread consciousness (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020; Lee et al., 2021). Case studies from the late 1980s, ones that later were ‘Hollywoodized’ in the early 2000s, examined dominions of coterie acceptability associated with the influence of individual perception (Miller & Thompson, 2018). Interestingly, as social norms recalibrate and acceptance changes subtly across a populace, so, too, do indelibly instilled psychological characteristics—ones that are distorted clinically while also hallmarking the psychological-diagnostic presentation (Johnson & Wallace, 2020). Challenging ironclad tenets of genetics and heritability that coincide with the mental illnesses of Perception was never the aim; nevertheless, in circumstances of survival, we’ve certainly learned that the mind is capable of anything when it is pushed to do so (e.g., John Nash) (Harris et al., 2020).
Along these lines, our observational Perception of Reality is shared. Our powers of Perception are indeed our own only if every sensory input of our lives, not to mention every interaction outside of our bodies, is confined to the barracks of a missile silo (Lee et al., 2021). If no one lives in a missile silo, we can safely say that our perceptions from and of the world are influenced observationally and comparatively, if not also borrowed in part, not just from those within our ideological circles but also from our ecologic collective (Smith, 2019). This may be a lot to take in at first, but consideration brings common sense.
Compartmentalization: External vs. Internal Perception of Reality
Psychiatric hospital workers quickly learn a great deal while roomed, sitting, conversing, or conducting individual psychotherapy sessions with the homeless, the disabled, or the adversely psychotic; that although we’re disguisedly quiescent, our heart rates are jacked but our hands are steady (Miller & Thompson, 2018). Similar psychological compartmentalization capabilities are as advantageously adaptive as they are instrumental in helping to push through difficult therapeutic situations (Brown & Jones, 2020). Also, the ‘colors and shapes’ that they come in vary individually across each population. Obviously, populations today are influenced largely by anomalous yet distinguishable socio-cultural-normative perceptions of ‘goodness.’ No matter how subjective those perceptions are, they are imbued by the topographical region of peoples’ societal idiosyncratic predilections (Smith, 2019). Those predilections are purposed to guide and maintain a conducive psychological ecology that is likely engendered by the multitudes (Johnson & Wallace, 2020).
When it comes to specifically situational and acute scenarios, some pull at our clinically professional ‘heartstrings’ and go so far as to trigger retrospectively transient yet personally traumatic memories, just as in the opening anecdote (Harris et al., 2020). As such, behavioral neuroscience and neuropsychological research pairs our compartmentalization as being a byproduct of our neuro-typical resilience (Miller & Thompson, 2018). The psychological underpinnings of compartmentalization are as theoretically vast as they are empirically interesting. However, the focus of this writing will instead center on the VSF-I elements that prelude the byproduct of resilience; namely, the external versus internal Perception of Reality (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020).
Compartmentalization is typically the term that we use to describe the ways in which individuals choose to be selective in what we allow our brains or ‘minds’ eyes’ to attend to (Lee et al., 2021). While performing a blood draw at our job, for example, we may be allowed and able to draw blood from a wound into limitless numbers of vials, seemingly without skipping a beat. Strangely, though, when walking past a stranger on a street corner at night and seeing that person’s open facial frostbite-burn ooze with blood, we gulp, gasp, and squeal internally in disgust (Smith, 2019). But blood is blood, right? Yes, and no. Then, is the elicitation of each experienced compartmentalization solely related to our own internalization of readiness? Or, is it for anticipatory confidences and/or insecurities of unexpected forms of Reality that we may focus on (Brown & Jones, 2020)? Perhaps, but probably, too, then, almost any unpredictable visual and/or paired auditory nuance in everyday life would be hyper-excitatory and would induce panic. This cannot be so (Harris et al., 2020).
Actually, the latter more accurately depicts the symptomology that relates closely with what it would be like to live without internal faculties permissive of voluntary planning and attention (e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder [ASD], ASD with Asperger’s Syndrome [ASD-AS], Attention Deficit Disorder–Type: Inattention [ADD-I], and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder [ADHD]) or, conversely, mindfulness-related abilities that reaffirm the appropriate appraisal of input stimuli (a.k.a., Reality) (Johnson & Wallace, 2020). Without going into the bottomless phenomenology of Reality and our perceptions to proclivities within it, let’s first discuss aspects of Reality, both internal and external.
Aspects of Reality: Internal & External
When what we see matches what we hear, taste, smell, and so forth, these gathered sensations accrue to help in forming the VSF-I in our minds, as well as to conceptualize and acknowledge the fit and form (fit + form = Form Quality) of the world with what has just been processed internally (Miller & Thompson, 2018). (For example, when you’re asked what the color of a stop-sign is, a full image of a stop-sign, if not splotches of the color red, appears in your VSF-I.)
Along the way, a process of checks and balances is performed by specific areas of the brain that are responsible for more than Perception, not just by the primary sensory organ that initially detects the input stimuli but also cross-functionally by other sensory centers (e.g., proprioception) (Smith, 2019). In this way, our internal processing and understanding of the accrued feelings, from the gathered sensations, acknowledges by pairing and mirroring internally with the existent stimuli by comparing them with other environmentally reigning stimuli (Harris et al., 2020).
Also very important, the last test that the brain goes through to delineate Reality from fiction is to compare internally self-observable occurrences with what can be assumed and deduced that others observe environmentally (Lee et al., 2021).
Synchronous Agreeance
Remember the web-building spider that Stryker is hunting? Pretending that you’re the hunted spider allows you to detect, perceive, and re-check the alignment of your outgoing mimicry vibrations (you tugging on your prey’s web) with your visually observable behavior as the pair of these stimuli become shared by both you and your prey (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020). This ingenious third superpower betrays your prey’s perception of what it sees and re-checks what it feels to have been your initial perception, which originally also became its own perception (Lee et al., 2021; Harris et al., 2020); as a result, the prey still feels comfortable and safe to sit in the center of its web. In this case, the outgoing cues that are perceivable visually and vibrationally are out in the open for you and your prey to take in (Seinfeld et al., 2018). Over time, increased ability to accurately perceive and predict increases with experience; this, in turn, increases the comfort level of the hunter as being the once-foreign stimulus and vicariously makes the unfamiliar (the hunter) more familiar to the prey (Clark, 2018; Molina et al., 2021). Feelings of conformability about Perception distort true sight and true understanding of Perception, which makes the difference between life and death for the hunted (Johnson & Wallace, 2020).
Then, finally, this synchronous agreeance from and among our senses cognitively translates actively to our brains as being a realistic Perception that also matches the Perception of others—that is, Reality (Brown & Jones, 2020). Interestingly, likewise empirically, oscillatory feed-forward activations of prefrontal-entorhinal networks (that is, in this order of ‘wiring and firing’: prefrontal cortex [PFC], peri-rhinal cortex [PRC], and hippocampus) facilitate such temporally distinct representations of real-time VSF-I perception-checks and undergird multimodal-multidimensional models of memory that are also associated ‘feelings’ of familiarity, which are hierarchically distributed throughout the brain (Smith, 2019). In this way, we can say that such Reality can bring emotional comfort (Miller & Thompson, 2018). Of course, that the prey-spider sitting in its web still feels comfortable is a good thing for Stryker.
Conceptualizations & Communications
Thoughtfulness is important to our everyday interpersonal communications (Harris et al., 2020). Without a doubt, then, the age-old advice to think before speaking is certainly vital (Lee et al., 2021). The pragmatically thoughtful qualities of what we say can, in turn, expand and/or alternatively demarcate the boundaries of our social landscape (Smith, 2019). Upholding universally related and vicariously reigning perceptual tasks is ‘easier said than done,’ first by inner conceptualizations that are inherent to our outer expressions, more so in practice than purely by naive idealizations (Brown & Jones, 2020). Strong compulsory mechanisms underlie the basic conceptualizations of our responsive internalizations, often preceding the voicing of our thoughts (Johnson & Wallace, 2020). We know and won’t debate it.
In that same breath, it is not widely known or accepted that to an extent we subconsciously prearrange and internally judge the words, in an example centered on language, that we think, before we speak them (Miller & Thompson, 2018). How else, then, one might rationalize, would it be possible to mentally recognize the novel to extant thoughts that precede varyingly productive forms of social communication (Clark, 2018)? The short answer to this is dual fold: It’s not that simple (Seinfeld et al., 2018). Second, our perceptions are not what they seem (Molina et al., 2021). Deeper than this, though, we can also say that our own and others’ ideas about the content of our communications are facilitated retrospectively by the inductive/deductive decisions of understandings and by similar cognitive processes that our minds draw upon, according to our observable perceptions of Reality (Hohwy, 2017; Lee et al., 2021).
In the marginalia at the fore of this piece, proceeding referenced perceptions of Reality initially will be conveyed herein to align with perspectives of neuro-traditionalists (Smith, 2019). Traditionalists of neurology, psychology, and neuropsychology alike broadly define representative allegories of perceived Reality (Brown & Jones, 2020). Those allegories are accepted by and for the ecological majority as being neuro-typical external constructs of a matter-time process that exists midpoint in the Hallucination-delusion spectral continuum (Harris et al., 2020).
Jumping to Conclusions
For a moment, let’s focus on the cognitively implicit, as opposed to voluntary, processes that guide and likewise pave tendentiously alternative perceptions that are created prospectively, even those that are hastily prone to delusion (Miller & Thompson, 2018). Currently conflicting research findings point to evidence suggestive of the idea that jumping to conclusions (JTC) is invariably present in patients who are diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and that the as-yet undiagnosed are commensurately categorized with not-otherwise-specified forms of delusion (NOS-D) (Smith, 2019). Of course, each of us jumps to conclusions at one time or another; the difference between what’s normal and what’s subnormal lies in frequencies and degrees of occurrence (Lee et al., 2021).
Furthermore, related research also shows that both the Schizophrenic and the as-yet undiagnosed ‘suspiciously’ jump to conclusions irrespective of confirmed perceptions and judgments of external Reality (Harris et al., 2020). Related findings supplement reasoning inherent to empirical adjudication that delineates delusions from Hallucinations; the former is primarily responsible for facilitating nonfictional differentiations of our everyday perceptions (Seinfeld et al., 2018). Byproducts of internally to externally based stimuli are thus, by this and associated research, ‘squeezed out’ from our perceptive faculties that are internally rendered to our visuo-spatial fields/cortices of imagery (that is, VSF-I) (Molina et al., 2021).
When rendered in our VSF-I, introspectively comparative categorizations of our visual perceptions are subject to being associatively appraised/stored/retrieved by the ways in which their self-assigned grades of character and meaningfulness pander and reiteratively bolster positive perceptions of self and being (Smith, 2019). Our Perception-based streams of consciousness are automatically fed into the contextual fabrics that make up the snapshots of internal imagery (VSF-I) that operate and ultimately ‘add color’ to our perceptions of observed Reality (Brown & Jones, 2020).
Jumping to conclusions is partly related to the cognitive ‘marrying,’ that of electrochemically afferent/efferent signaling/detection with our moments of ‘beliefs of realness,’ irrespective of consciousness; that is, internally emotional pairings of beneficence with externally established/fulfilled criteria of Reality (Clark, 2018). Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s Stereotype Threat might also give us clues to related undergirding forces. Interestingly, the ‘safeness’ of an externally internal moment of Reality, one that matches what’s externally established as being ‘real,’ dictates not only the levels of JTC-based rationale of occurrence but also diagnostically (DSM) identifies and differentiates varying levels of Reality as they show spectrally on the Hallucination-delusion continuum (Seinfeld et al., 2018).
Weighted Perception
As percepts, then, each is tied to a weighted perception correlating to its own differentiated estimation of observed Reality; each is then measured, with each varyingly accurate snippet of Perception analogously being categorized in like-varying fashion (Hohwy, 2017; Smith, 2019). If the weight assigned to a percept aligns with others that were assigned similarly and previously to it, then the perception will be categorized and grouped accordingly, regardless, at least initially, of where exactly it is supposed to show along the Hallucination-delusion continuum (Brown & Jones, 2020). This means, for example, that when all hope is lost and a person gives up, the internal acceptability of one’s self-defeatist perception, to both one’s self and society, impinges like a light-bulb realization on the initially perceived appraisal that the act and/or the idea of achieving the regaled end-goal was likely out of reach from the beginning (Clark, 2018). To plan for the material manifestation of such an unreachable end-goal and to confuse its occurrence and happening as being ‘real’ is regarded to be delusional (Lee et al., 2021).
On the other side of the continuum, to mentally play out the expectation of reaching the much-desired end-goal, or on a lesser degree to daydream about it, would fall closely in line with currently-held parameters that describe a Hallucination (Molina et al., 2021). Conversely, however, when the physical manifestation of an unlikely event such as this materializes, then initial categorizations or weighted percepts of Perception are coaxed and forcibly persuaded to change the weight-scale of the weights (Seinfeld et al., 2018)
The Double-Take, Multi-Tasking
Contextual mismatchings of the heterogeneous afferent/efferent ‘dance’ that pervades intercostal internal and internally external perceptions, weights, and ‘safeness’ of Reality are readily experienced and commonly known as ‘the double-take’ (Smith, 2019; Lee et al., 2020). In simple terms, similar to how this primarily physical and reactionary behavior works, our minds continuously check, recheck, and verify information again. University Physics textbooks calculate that each cycle takes no more than 200 milliseconds, or roughly 670 miles per hour, which is almost one-millionth the speed of light—I bet that’s still faster than your Tesla and SpaceX rocket! Along the way, the mind’s perception of its attachment to Reality is, also for ‘safeness’ purposes, ready to ‘double take’ and to jump from one stream of conscious Reality to another (Miller & Thompson, 2018; Clark, 2018). Until the safest stream is chosen, the ‘Record’ and ‘Play’ buttons of the mind will ‘double-take’ and continue to jump, all unbeknownst to us (Molina et al., 2021). It’s no wonder, then, that the subtopic of multi-tasking must be broached.
Multi-tasking
We maintain that our minds can do only one thing at a time (Seinfeld et al., 2018; Johnson & Wallace, 2020). However, like the spider that jumps between webbings, this jumping of conscious streams, each of which is tied to perceivably-observable representations of Reality, is what allows us to do the remarkable (Hohwy, 2017). While talking with people who have relatable distress, we can ‘travel’ with them while still in our own bodies (i.e., Stream 1); as such, we subsume their frame of mind (i.e., Stream 2) while perhaps in the frame of mind of the younger part of ourselves that relatively recollects (i.e., Stream 3) similar distresses (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020).
Time Travel: Past vs. Present
Now, let’s get back to the crux of this discussion regarding Hallucination or Reality (Miller & Thompson, 2018). Due to so many speedy overlappings of Perception, we must, then, see that the velocity of these processes has already slowed time in our mental space (Clark, 2018; Harris et al., 2021). Time-travel requires that we move really fast and, we hope, fast enough not only to slow and arrest time, but also to make time recede and progress backwards (Seinfeld et al., 2018). The trick to time-travel is to acquire enough energy not to move time but instead to move the fabric of space through time fast enough that we can see all of the different streams from which to choose (Molina et al., 2021; Smith, 2019).
Reality overlaps with Hallucination faster than the light from this page reaches your eyes (Lee et al., 2020). As was stated previously, our minds make sense of Reality only after Reality has acted alone and without our approval to make sense to and of itself (Johnson & Wallace, 2020; Brown & Jones, 2020). By the time that we observe Reality, it is gone. We act on the past; besides, the future is at least a couple of mind-light-years away from perceiving the current (Hohwy, 2017). Our observable perception of Reality is not our own; it belongs to the past (Smith, 2019). We may think thoughtfully and speak in like manner. But would we still choose to speak if the thoughts that are provided for our speech were already thought out and formed (Harris et al., 2021; Clark, 2018)?
A spider’s superpower of true sight, like ours, must then come from true Perception (Miller & Thompson, 2018). If our perceptions are presented or recommended to us only by our subconscious states of Perception, then these perceptions must be from the past; thus, they are not our own (Johnson & Wallace, 2020). This means that the thoughts that accompany our recommended perceptions, too, are similarly recommended in pre-paired and pre-arranged fashion (Seinfeld et al., 2018). In this way, our thoughts are not our own (Lee et al., 2020). Therefore, given all of this, Hallucinations and Reality are undifferentiated from one another because their streams overlap and run parallel to each other (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020).
Cognitive Load & Memory
Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric disorder that is steeped multifariously in both genetics and neuropsychology (Hohwy, 2017; Smith, 2019). Schizophrenia is influential phenotypically in early brain development, which is readily characterized and recognized by hallmark features (e.g., Hallucinations, delusions, and motivational disorganization) (Miller & Thompson, 2018; Lee et al., 2020). When related to Schizophrenia, neuro-a-typicality, then, can best describe a disorder that involves subtle cognitive and pathological changes in the ways in which neural cells and their populations are structured to cross-talk (Johnson & Wallace, 2020; Harris et al., 2021). The main issue with Schizophrenia, from a neuropsychological basis and even behaviorally, stems from how the brain is able to process information (Seinfeld et al., 2018). Because every action of the day requires some level of thought, and every bit of thought requires limited levels of energy, it is no wonder that there must also be only finite levels of thought to ‘go around’ (Clark, 2018; Molina et al., 2021).
It follows, then, that basic processing skills are limited by innate attentional capacities (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020). Primary literature points to this fundamental capacity of thought as being the cognitive load (CL) (Lee et al., 2020; Harris et al., 2021). A large part of each person’s CL is invested in the mind’s ability to accept and process information wherein the highest ‘return on investment’ is centered on the beneficial usefulness of that information (Johnson & Wallace, 2020; Seinfeld et al., 2018). Indeed, fluctuations of information, particularly incoming ones, would not benefit us if they’re not able to be recalled and utilized further (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020). What we’ve come to know as personal Reality—that is, the externally internal perception of the world around us—is dependent largely upon personal memory (Hohwy, 2017; Miller & Thompson, 2018).
The costs of memory are weighty on the mind, whether those memories are instinctually attuned or explicitly in use, and even more so than that of attentional focus (Clark, 2018; Harris et al., 2021). Recollective properties of memory, which will be discussed further in the following blog writing, start with one’s attentional focus on what we most desire to recollect; then previously encoded information is reprocessed, replayed, and visualized (Smith, 2019; Lee et al., 2020). Patients who are diagnosed with Schizophrenia experience variability when trying to encode their perceptions; in a closed loop, that variability feeds forward and back within the vicinity of stored memory (Miller & Thompson, 2018; Brown & Jones, 2020). Analogously, there is much difficulty with encoding and then re-arranging information; this can cause further difficulty for schizophrenic patients to handle social and interpersonal situations that require jumping among multiple streams of attentional information that are structured socially and desired personally (Seinfeld et al., 2018; Molina et al., 2021).
We previously touched on Hallucination and Reality, and on the flawed perceptions that are engendered by the collective of our social ecologies (Smith, 2019; Brown & Jones, 2020). Similarly, we all too often hear the ‘loose’ usage of grave psychological disorders (e.g., Bipolar Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Schizophrenia) within the same sentence as being psychosis (e.g., “This person is/going psycho,” etc.) (Clark, 2018; Lee et al., 2020). Actually, a chasm of difference separates a mental-‘state’ mind from the central tenets of a disorder (Hohwy, 2017). Schizophrenia, for example, is not psychosis, because the reverse is also false (Miller & Thompson, 2018; Johnson & Wallace, 2020). Psychosis is a mental state in which a patient’s experience of Reality is distorted by delusions (e.g., fixed, false idiosyncratic belief) and/or Hallucinations (e.g., false auditory, visual, tactile, or taste/smell perception) (Smith et al., 2019; Jones & Brown, 2020). Delusions take on a variety of forms including somatic, bizarre, persecutory, and many others (Clark et al., 2021). In addition to delusions, disorganized speech and behavior are often seen in psychosis, regardless of etiology (Johnson et al., 2018; Lee & Miller, 2020).
Psychosis is a key aspect that is often found in many mental illnesses, such as brief psychotic, schizoaffective, schizophreniform, or shared/blended psychotic disorders (Harris et al., 2020; Smith & White, 2021). Psychosis can also present as being part of the evolution of a mood disorder (e.g., Depression and Bipolar Disorder), as a disturbed personality or trauma disorder, as an indication of an underlying general neurologic condition, or even as the result of drug-related intoxication and/or withdrawal from it (Miller & Thompson, 2018; Brown & Johnson, 2019). Indeed, then, those who are diagnosed with Schizophrenia are a heterogeneous group of individuals with a wide range of disabilities and strengths; so, recommendations should be adapted to an individual’s needs (Smith et al., 2019; Lee & Miller, 2020).
Consciousness: Perception of Reality
One of the greatest remaining mysteries in Science and Philosophy is “How does consciousness happen?” Within the human brain, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each a tiny biological machine, generates a conscious experience (Clark et al., 2021; Johnson et al., 2018). Not just any conscious experience, though; rather, your conscious experience; yes, zooming in more closely, it is your Perception of Reality (Harris et al., 2020). Consciousness for each of us is the essence of everything that follows and is all that we are (Jones & Brown, 2020; Smith et al., 2019). Unfortunately, however, Science and Philosophy are not ready to agree with one another enough to unify corroborative rationales down paths designed to answer this question succinctly (Lee & Miller, 2020). Explaining and understanding the mysteries of life, as with consciousness and its discussed properties (e.g., Hallucination and Reality), will indeed take all of us (Johnson et al., 2018).
The brain cannot see light nor hear sound directly (Miller & Thompson, 2018). But, as we discussed previously, the brain perceives through its multisensory, panoramic, 3-D fully-immersive inner movie (VSF-1) (Brown & Johnson, 2019). Delving into novel-like hypotheses and alternatively meaningful ideas related to Perception, even ones still considered ‘taboo,’ is important for current understandings—not in and of themselves but also so that conceptualizations might be further confirmed, refined, and extended to future discovery and associated discussion; those ideas resultantly may ‘fly in the face’ of social culturally established propriety (Smith et al., 2019; Harris et al., 2020).
Dually relevant is the need to articulate akin neuropsychological phenomenology of Perception as it is related to our observably traditional and untraditional formed Reality (Clark et al., 2021). The differing streams of Perception (thoughts) that exist in our everyday social/therapeutic settings create new and alternative streams of Perception while being interconnected with Reality (Jones & Brown, 2020). By now, as a result of this discussion, we likely have more appropriately recoiled and adjusted to what current opinion and corollary research say about our perceptions of Reality while some specific and viewpoint-invariant perceptions of our VSF-1 reveal cognitive conjunctions with recollection tasks of each person’s memory (Smith et al., 2019).
Finally, by way of the Fifth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), we covered neuro-typical and a-typical symptomologies that are characteristic of Schizophrenia; these symptomologies also bolster aforementioned understandings of different shapes and forms that alternative perceivable streams of Reality (e.g., Hallucination and delusion) come in (Lee & Miller, 2020; Clark et al., 2021).
Summary
The marvelously designed human brain not only uses predictions to figure out what’s there, beyond the inch of metal-like bone encasement (skull); it also controls, regulates, and architects physiological and psychological variables internally that are influenced from external sources, and vice versa. Varying gradations of Perception stem from the brain’s best guess at what it ‘sees’ and feels. These gradations also are fed by memory stores of information that are connected by electrical webbings of recollection that underlie the mind’s basis for present awareness on the basis of past attributions. Recollective properties of memory will be discussed further in follow-on scholarly posts. Meanwhile, maybe you'll find moments of wondering about certain of your perceptions and whether they're influenced more often by memories or by external sources; such a developing awareness could help to advance both your understanding of yourself and your relationships with others.
© 2022 Christopher Schroeder of New World Psychology, LLC.
Past Comments:
“Eye opening to those who only see one color. There are many points where it make you truly sit and wonder what else are moments/things we’ve been molded to perceive it as. It was visually pleasing as i read along and would love to see more!”
—Fabian (March 2023)
“The article and author give such an amazing insight on reality vs hallucinations! Once you really start thinking about how “our reality” is way different than other people’s reality it makes you question what is real and what isn’t. It’s like opening Pandora’s box and finding things you have never known before. Amazing article!”
—Milly G. (February 2023)
“Each post in this blog is fascinating and thought provoking, to say the least. The author always includes information that I probably never would have thought of and impresses me at every turn. I think that the earlier topics lent themselves to the application of the best-possible, most eye-catching visuals that made me say WOW. In this particular post, I especially loved the spider analogy; the text really makes me wonder about reality, and the visuals are good. Please keep bringing the fabulous articles!”
—Vickie W. (February 2023)
“This is so interesting! It’s definitely a perspective I haven’t looked at before.”
—Becky S. (December 2022)
“This article helped me question my reality - Am I conforming or am i following my beliefs? Have I been programmed by the populace, the media or the societal norms.? A big undertaking to ponder. Keep up the analysis!”
—Robert D. (October 2022)
“I love the analogy of a spider. Understanding our reality is such a deep topic. The question really is, as you posed, reality or a hallucination?”
—Sanders (July 2022)
