The Second Hallucination

Artifact

For this week's artifact I was really intrigued by the hallucinative scenarios that the interviewees and patients had described in the chapters from Hallucinations¹. So I used these passages of the descriptions of patients as the prompt for a generative image model in ComfyUI called Z-Image Turbo. Before the descriptions of each passage, I also added a global prompt:

Generate a hallucinative artwork in the style of a surrealist Dali drawing:

For the workflow I just used the Z-Image Turbo text-to-image template in ComfyUI and kept most of the defaults. These are the settings I ran every image with, and the seed for each one is at the bottom of its prompt:

Below are the images generated from each of the individual hallucination accounts along with the texts that were used in the generation:

Ch. 1 · Silent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome

Ch. 3 · A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells

Ch. 4 · Hearing Things

Ch. 5 · The Illusions of Parkinsonism

Notes from reading

Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By²

• Abstract concepts (time, emotion, power, ideas) are not directly tangible, so human cognition maps them onto familiar physical, spatial and sensorimotor experience.
• Because the metaphorical concept is systematic, the language we use to talk about that aspect of the concept is systematic too.
• The conduit metaphor:
  • Ideas (or meanings) are objects.
  • Linguistic expressions are containers.
  • Communication is sending.

Gibson, "The Theory of Affordances"³

• It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial as if there were two environments; artifacts have to be manufactured from natural substances.
• Perception is economical.
• Note that it involves social perception and raises questions of epistemology. The concealing of oneself from other observers and the hiding of a detached object from other observers have different kinds of motivation.
• One of the laws of the ambient optic array (Chapter 5) is that at any fixed point of observation some parts of the environment are revealed and the remaining parts are concealed.
• An observer can perceive not only that other observers are unhidden or hidden from him but also that he is hidden or unhidden from other observers.
• To quote from the Principles of Gestalt Psychology (Koffka, 1935), "Each thing says what it is. ... a fruit says 'Eat me'; water says 'Drink me'; thunder says 'Fear me'; and woman says 'Love me' "
• The valence of an object was bestowed upon it in experience, and bestowed by a need of the observer.
• An affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is.
• The environment constrains what the animal can do, and the concept of a niche in ecology reflects this fact. Within limits, the human animal can alter the affordances of the environment but is still the creature of his or her situation.
• Affordances are properties taken with reference to the observer. They are neither physical nor phenomenal.

Sacks, Hallucinations, ch. 1, 3–5¹

• Ch. 1, Charles Bonnet syndrome
  • The eye stops sending enough visual data to the brain due to vision loss.
  • The brain tries to fill the empty space by making up images or recalling old memories.
  • Hallucinations make use of the same visual areas and pathways as perception itself.
  • Brain-imaging research by Dominic ffytche shows that CBS hallucinations activate the same specialized regions of the visual cortex (such as the fusiform face area or the visual word form area) that fire during actual visual perception.
  • People with CBS remain sane and lucid.
• Ch. 3, smell
  • Losing the sense of smell (anosmia, often through head trauma or sinus infection) can prompt the brain to generate "phantom" smells.
  • The brain's olfactory pathways can combine stimulation across hundreds of receptor types to synthesize novel or intrusive phantom odors.
• Ch. 4, hearing
  • The societal stigma that hearing voices automatically implies schizophrenia.
  • Musical hallucinations: intrusive, highly detailed music (old hymns, classical pieces, nursery rhymes) repeating like a broken record or an "intracranial jukebox".
  • "Complex visual hallucinations entail the putting together of such elements, an act of assemblage, and these assemblages are continually permuted, disassembled, and reassembled."
• Ch. 5, Parkinsonism
  • Hallucinations in Parkinson's can be triggered by dopamine-enhancing medications (like L-dopa) or by underlying degenerative changes in brainstem cholinergic systems and Lewy body pathology.