Hallucinations in the sane
Last updated 11/06/2007
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An hallucination may occur to a normal person in state of good mental and physical health, even in the apparent absence of a transient trigger factor such as fatigue, intoxication or sensory deprivation.
It is not yet widely recognised that hallucinatory experiences are not merely the prerogative of the insane, or normal people in abnormal states such as sensory deprivation, fever or drug intoxication, but that they occur spontaneously in a significant proportion of the normal population, when in good health and not undergoing particular stress or other abnormal circumstance.
The evidence for this statement has been accumulating for more than a century. Studies of hallucinatory experience in the sane go back to 1886 and the early work of the Society for Psychical Research (Gurney et al, 1886; Sidgwick et al, 1894), which suggested approximately 10% of the population had experienced at least one hallucinatory episode in the course of their life. More recent studies have validated these findings; the precise incidence found varies with the nature of the episode and the criteria of ‘hallucination’ adopted, but the basic finding is now well-supported (see Slade and Bentall, 1988, pp.68-76 for a review).
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