07/07/02: Visualizations
 

A few nights ago, while I was taking a shower, I witnessed a tiny roach crawling down the shower curtain in front of me.

I mentally freaked out, and started seeing giant 6 foot cockroaches everywhere. I knew logically that they weren't really there, but my visualizations are so realistic sometimes that there's always a miniscule bit of belief. It was really, really freaky. I had an immediate and strong impulse to turn off the water and go into the bedroom with my wife (who was asleep).

But I will never let my own mind get the better of me. It's a matter of pride and self-control.

I have this mantra that I recite whenever my imagination gets the better of me. "I trust my senses. I believe in reality". I started reciting this over and over to myself. After a couple of minutes, the giant roaches went away.

Whenever that happens to me, I try to distract myself with a movie.

lol. Somehow, I don't think that would work. :)

Have you done a lot of acid in the past?

dham, have you tried the new game on that movie link above?

I was taught in college that the philosopher Sartre would occasionally have visions of crabs, after an episode with mescaline where he saw all kinds of crabs and other crustaceans. Simone de Beauvoir would ask him "How was your day?" and he'd answer back "Oh, it was okay, but there were a few crabs following us..."

In his time I'm sure that seemed enlightening... in our modern time we should think of it as a neural pathway trained the wrong way, leading to a lifelong annoyance.

Let us not neglect the possibility that Mme. de Beauvoir actually *had* crabs but blamed it on the mescaline. :-)

No, i've never done any illegal drugs. But I was heavily into witchcraft in my late teens to early twenties. Today, of course, I believe it to all be crap.

The techinques I was taught that allowed me to "see spirits" and "astrally travel" involved a <i>lot</i> of visualization. And I got really good at it. So good, in fact, that I can imagine nearly anything I want and almost see it. It's never real-real, of course. I can see things in high detail, but they're always a bit transparent. Still, it looks real enough to believe if you're stupid like I was.

You see the convenience of this method, of course. If you can convince someone that their imagination is real, you can prove nearly anything to them.

Roaches! ha! I am currently trying to shake the reoccuring freaky image of tapeworms I unfortunately found while surfing past Animal Planet. I tried not to stop and watch, but it was alluring with its interviews and staged reinactments. A outdoorsman from Canada remarked, " I knew I shouldnt eat the raw fish, but I was just so hungry...", "I kept pulling and pulling and it kept coming...", "nine feet:, " If you dont get the head, segments will regrow..." *cringe* sorry, just thought I'd share. I do like sushi.
Happy thoughts, non-parasitic thoughts, non-twilight zone thoughts...:O

Wait, what's that behind you?

Wow, I didn't know the human brain was that soft. But then I sometimes hear things, so I shouldn't be surprised. Does that ability have any practical value? I sometimes need to visualize things in my head; does it help to float them in front of your eyes?

No, not really. If I really need to visualize something, I can just imagine it in my head. There's no need to imagine things outside my head, unless I just want to freak myself out.

For some time, I thought I was suffering from acid flashbacks, until I learned that it was actually a "trick" played on you by your brain, involving the rods and cones in your eyes. :)

Yeah.. when you stare at one color for a long time and then quickly look at something white? :) That's pretty cool, but it did freak my shit out when I didn't know what it was.

It wasn't that one. Unfortunately, I don't know the scientific name for it, but it's the trick where it looks like gnats are flying in front of you, when it's really just your eyes trying to adjust or something. It may not even involve rods and cones, but I believe it does. I'm gonna have to look that one up. :)

When I am very fatigued, e.g. missed one or more nights of sleep, I'll hallucinate. It starts as an intermittant, indeterminate "motion" in my perepherial vision, then works its way towards my main field of vision and becomes more distinct subject matter. I've learned that at that point, I can willfully control the content of the hallucinations, although it was pretty freaky-scary before I figured that out. Now it's kinda cool, provided I think happy thoughts.

Anybody else like that?

Yeah, like if I look at a shag carpet or something with lots of small details in it, and block most everything else out of my field of vision, the details will kind of ebb and flow. Actually the details almost appear in different "layers", and one layer will float around on top of the stationary layer.

Kinda like my eyes are trying to lock in on one of those "magic-eye" 3D images, but they don't quite make it. In fact, seeing as how it took me a year or two to "get" those images, that's prolly what fucked up my vision in the first place. :)

...or maybe it's a side-effect of your recent Lasik surgery! ;)

No, mine is more vivid than that. Happy thoughts, I see:
http://abes-celebrities.com/Milla/milla.jpg

Bad thoughts, I see:
http://www.stomptokyo.com/otf/Asylum...ylum-satan.JPG

Literally. Told you it was freaky!

If I could "see" happy thoughts like that, I'd never leave the house!

Here's my thoughts how what i'm doing actually works.

Some people theorize that the human brain creates a copy of the outside world inside itself, based on information gleaned from our five senses. So, when we think about things, we use our internal copy of the world. Sort of like a database.

When you dream, your five senses are cut off, and you are left to swim around in a virtual world inside your head. You have complete control over your internal representation of the world (see lucid dreaming). I suspect that there is a lot of interplay between our internal representation of the world and the real world. When you're awake, you still have access to this virtual world. You're just putting more trust into your senses than what's already in your internal world. If you perceive something with one of your five senses, you change your internal representation of the world to incorporate that.

If you start to trust your internal world more than your own senses, you have what occurs to me sometimes. When this happens, you can basically invent anything you want to perceive and you'll perceive it. In this case, your internal world is actually overlaid over your real senses, and you perceive both at the same time. It all depends on the degree of trust, of course.

Anyway, the old maxim, "People believe what they want to believe" is true. If you believe in a daydream more than what your own senses are telling you, you will start to believe it enough to actually "see" it.

I have no proof for any of this, of course. So I could just be completly wrong. This is just what I suspect based on what I've seen.

I did a bit of googling, and apparently in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience they call it "Mental Modeling".

Man, those Neuroscience articles are terse reading. Where on earth do scientists learn to write? I think that they could spice their essays up a bit. Oh well. I have a feeling i'm not in their target audience. :)

YES!! I *completely* agree with the "virtual model" idea. You can never interact with the Objective Universe directly, but only through your virtual model. I dunno why that's a hard concept for people to grasp.

By extension, The Matrix or Vanilla Sky is completely feasible, once we have the processing power to generate a convincing world and the ability to interface with all five senses. This WILL HAPPEN, assuming we don't blow our collective selves up first.

Funny: "People believe what they want to believe" is WORD FOR WORD the first line of a song I wrote eight years ago, but I came up w/ it on my own -- thought I was being original! :D