“Buy insurance. Buy insurance. Buy insurance.” That might be the message heard before Dr. Tu Bo removed a gecko from the ear of a guy from Guangzhou, China.* Oh! Sorry. I was thinking Geico.
Certainly, we can understand the man’s showing up at the hospital. Can’t imagine his ear pain. Also, I can’t imagine what he thought he was hearing. And that brings me to wondering whether we might not learn something about our connection to reality from the results of a recent experiment on hearing sounds that “aren’t there.”
Emily Underwood, reporting for Science on August 10, 2017, tells of a study by Philip Corlett and Albert Powers that mimics an 1890 experiment on auditory hallucinations. The original study was conducted on schizophrenics, mentally healthy people who hear voices (psychics), and on mentally healthy people who don’t “hear voices.” In brief, the original experiment paired a tone with an image. After a while, experimenters removed the tone, but the subjects still “heard it” when they saw the image once associated with it. The recent study showed that “both schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls.”
There are multiple layers of conclusions in this experiment, but one important one was “that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses.” Another conclusion is that “the cerebellum is a key checkpoint against this distortion.” Basically, if the Guangzhou gecko guy wanted to hear a gecko advertise Geico, then that’s what he would hear.
All of us daily face the problem of interpreting our world. With an indefinite number of stimuli our senses send to our brains, it’s easy to misinterpret. Here’s a minor example. As a bulldozer’s metal tracks ran over and through rocks nearby, I once thought I heard someone call my name. No one called me. My brain simply interpreted a random set of sounds as “Don.” Was there a temporary glitch in my cerebellum? Of course, but my brain realized in a millisecond that the sound was, in fact, random and that I had a brief auditory hallucination.
But what of the more insidious connections between “our ideas and beliefs” that “can easily overpower our senses”? It seems quite evident that we predispose ourselves, and that our predispositions engender not only “voices,” but also responses. Predisposition’s dark side occurs when circumstances turn places into perceived danger zones, opening the “fight or flight” gate of panic. Think Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970. Against the backdrop of anti-war protests, a gathering of students and armed soldiers led to a deadly response. Though still debated and unsubstantiated, an auditory hallucination might have been the stimulus for the shooting by the Ohio National Guard. Was the incident initiated by a sniper’s gun firing on the guardsmen? Did the first guardsman to fire hear a threatening sound? Did the soldiers respond to a misinterpreted noise that sounded like “Fire!”? The result was, regardless of the reality, the deaths of four Kent State University students.
Think crowd responses to loud sounds in an era of terrorists wearing bomb belts. Many of us are now predisposed to hearing the sounds of danger, making us predisposed to panic responses to hallucinatory threats. And on a level less threatening but still emotionally charged are those little arguments among bickering acquaintances and family members derived from misinterpreted sounds: “WHAT did you say?”
We all need some insurance, something that protects us from faulty interpretations of hallucinations. We need a voice in our ears that says, “No, that wasn’t the sound you think you heard. In fact, you merely thought you heard a sound. No need to panic. No need for conflict. No need to assume the worst is happening. Just some random noise that your cerebellum failed to reconcile with the realities of place and circumstance. Just an auditory hallucination stuck in your ear, appealing to the reptilian part of your brain.”
*Deccan Chronicle, Aug. 19, 2017, “Squirming lizard removed from man’s ear in China,” online at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/lifestyle/viral-and-trending/190817/squirming-lizard-removed-from-mans-ears-in-china.html
**Underwood, Emily. “How your mind protects you against hallucinations,” Science AAAS, online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/how-your-mind-protects-you-against-hallucinations
Certainly, we can understand the man’s showing up at the hospital. Can’t imagine his ear pain. Also, I can’t imagine what he thought he was hearing. And that brings me to wondering whether we might not learn something about our connection to reality from the results of a recent experiment on hearing sounds that “aren’t there.”
Emily Underwood, reporting for Science on August 10, 2017, tells of a study by Philip Corlett and Albert Powers that mimics an 1890 experiment on auditory hallucinations. The original study was conducted on schizophrenics, mentally healthy people who hear voices (psychics), and on mentally healthy people who don’t “hear voices.” In brief, the original experiment paired a tone with an image. After a while, experimenters removed the tone, but the subjects still “heard it” when they saw the image once associated with it. The recent study showed that “both schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls.”
There are multiple layers of conclusions in this experiment, but one important one was “that, when it comes to how we perceive the world, our ideas and beliefs can easily overpower our senses.” Another conclusion is that “the cerebellum is a key checkpoint against this distortion.” Basically, if the Guangzhou gecko guy wanted to hear a gecko advertise Geico, then that’s what he would hear.
All of us daily face the problem of interpreting our world. With an indefinite number of stimuli our senses send to our brains, it’s easy to misinterpret. Here’s a minor example. As a bulldozer’s metal tracks ran over and through rocks nearby, I once thought I heard someone call my name. No one called me. My brain simply interpreted a random set of sounds as “Don.” Was there a temporary glitch in my cerebellum? Of course, but my brain realized in a millisecond that the sound was, in fact, random and that I had a brief auditory hallucination.
But what of the more insidious connections between “our ideas and beliefs” that “can easily overpower our senses”? It seems quite evident that we predispose ourselves, and that our predispositions engender not only “voices,” but also responses. Predisposition’s dark side occurs when circumstances turn places into perceived danger zones, opening the “fight or flight” gate of panic. Think Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970. Against the backdrop of anti-war protests, a gathering of students and armed soldiers led to a deadly response. Though still debated and unsubstantiated, an auditory hallucination might have been the stimulus for the shooting by the Ohio National Guard. Was the incident initiated by a sniper’s gun firing on the guardsmen? Did the first guardsman to fire hear a threatening sound? Did the soldiers respond to a misinterpreted noise that sounded like “Fire!”? The result was, regardless of the reality, the deaths of four Kent State University students.
Think crowd responses to loud sounds in an era of terrorists wearing bomb belts. Many of us are now predisposed to hearing the sounds of danger, making us predisposed to panic responses to hallucinatory threats. And on a level less threatening but still emotionally charged are those little arguments among bickering acquaintances and family members derived from misinterpreted sounds: “WHAT did you say?”
We all need some insurance, something that protects us from faulty interpretations of hallucinations. We need a voice in our ears that says, “No, that wasn’t the sound you think you heard. In fact, you merely thought you heard a sound. No need to panic. No need for conflict. No need to assume the worst is happening. Just some random noise that your cerebellum failed to reconcile with the realities of place and circumstance. Just an auditory hallucination stuck in your ear, appealing to the reptilian part of your brain.”
*Deccan Chronicle, Aug. 19, 2017, “Squirming lizard removed from man’s ear in China,” online at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/lifestyle/viral-and-trending/190817/squirming-lizard-removed-from-mans-ears-in-china.html
**Underwood, Emily. “How your mind protects you against hallucinations,” Science AAAS, online at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/how-your-mind-protects-you-against-hallucinations
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