Hallucinations, Déjà vu and Instincts

REASONS BEHIND HALLUCINATION, DEJA VU AND INSTINCTS

Abstract:

The issue chosen is hallucination, déjà vu and instinct. This issue is significant to be
addressed because, these are very common in our daily lives and all of us experience it a lot.
The main focus of our project is to find, the reasons are unknown to us. They have medical,
psychological and philosophical association. Yet another reason for choosing this topic is, the
common perception that exists among us regarding the reasons, behind them which is wrong.
This project will analyse the actual reasons behind them and compare it with the perception
of people which was known by conducting a survey by setting a questionnaire. The report
will also convey the impacts of each of them. There is also philosophical association is dealt
with in brief to bring in the essence to make it more appealing and relevant to the current
scenario.

Keywords:

Perception, Depression, Emotion, Medical terms, Psychology, Innate ideas

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Certified/Possible reasons from research or study 2

Philosophical significance/association 4

Conclusion derived from the survey and comparison drawn 6

Impacts 7

Case Studies/Research Articles 8

Conclusion 10

References 11

Appendix

Questionnaire 12
 INTRODUCTION
Generally people think that, hallucinations have to do with only seeing things that
aren’t really there. But hallucinations are also, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching thinks
that are not there. There are many different causes for it.
Sometimes, we have a kind of a familiarity while in completely new place, or kind of a
feeling that had the same kind of conversation before, which we call a déjà vu, which literally
means in French, already seen. It is reported to occur to a on an occasional basis for 60%-
80% people. It is something deep beneath in our hearts, our minds, souls, there are facts
which are unrevealed. The facts are to be experimented with, to be discussed in detail so that
the philosophical aspect can be brought about.
Everyday people are confronted with decisions that are to be made. All these inputs are
obtained from instincts and they cannot be ignored. These are the three main topics that are
dealt with in the project. Also, the philosophical association is being talked about in a very
basic sense to know the importance of the issue.
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CERTIFIED/POSSIBLE REASONS

Hallucinations:
The reasons behind hallucinations can be broadly classified into three:

1. Medical 2. Psychological 3. Drug use

Medical Reasons:

1. Migraine with aura: It is a brain disorder wherein the head starts throbbing with a
severe headache that may lost from about three to four hours or few days.
2. Alzheimer’s Disease: This is a form of dementia, which is a term used to describe
memory loss and loss of reasoning abilities. Due to this, they start to face mood
swings, find it difficult to organize things and hence hallucinate.
3. Parkinson’s disease: They start to see things that are not there, i.e. visual
hallucination and few more.
Psychological Disorders:
1.Schizophrenia: This is a serious brain disorder, due to which they start losing
contact with the real world and start thinking and talking in an unorganised way. They
also exhibit a strange behaviour, start feeling isolated, lose interest in life, etc.
2.Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: This is a disorder or a psychological reaction that a
person has after a very stressful event. After such an event they start recollecting
memories of the past constantly and get scared of things that are not dangerous as
well.
Drug Use:

1.Overdose of Caffeine: The maximum level of caffeine that an average healthy adult
can take is 400 mg/day. But, sometimes people tend to take overdose and they start
hallucinating.
2.Marijuana: It is one of the most used illicit drugs. The mind disturbing ingredient in
marijuana is delta-9 tetracannahydrabinol.

Déjà vu:
Medical Reasons: Related to temporal lobe epilepsy, i.e. people have seizures in the lobe.

Philosophical Reasons:

One explanation for this is split perception. This theory puts forth that a déjà vu is
caused by a brief glance at an object or scene just before a fully aware look. A second
explanation is an implicit memory - a prior setting has been experienced before by the person
but stored in such an indistinct manner that only the sense of familiarity is resurrected but not
the incident as a whole. A third explanation is dreams. Survey data show that one in five
college students agree with this dream-origin interpretation. When random links are made
between thoughts and ideas deep down in our minds, dreams originate. There are a few
reasons related to ageing as well.
2

Instincts:
A 2011 study published in the journal Psychological Science revealed how the body is
able to speak intuitively to the mind by dealing out a card game. Researchers designed a
game based on no obvious strategy but forced participants to rely upon their hunches. Each
participant was hooked up to a heart monitor and a finger sensor to measure sweat secretion.
Most players figured out how to improve and eventually win the game, and researchers
realized the winners were those who listened to their heart rate. It would speed up before they
made a certain choice, but people mistook the subtle bodily changes for intuition.
“We often talk about intuition coming from the body — following our gut instincts and
trusting our hearts,” the study’s co-author Barnaby D. Dunn, of the Medical Research
Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, said in a press release. “What
happens in our bodies really does appear to influence what goes in our minds. We should be
careful about following these gut instincts, however, as sometimes they help and sometimes
they hinder our decision making.”
(Barnaby D. Dunn)
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PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION/SIGNIFICANCE

Hallucination:
Hallucinations are a curse for the people who are facing it and a really nice topic to be dealt
with for the philosophers. Hallucinations where perception and hallucination are
indistinguishable are called as “philosophical hallucinations”.
If philosophical hallucinations occurred in world then it doubts the testimony of perception
and we start thinking of the various perspectives oriented to it. . In such a world, perception
would bear a striking analogy to testimony. We can’t distinguish between most cases of false
testimony and cases of true testimony. The same would be true for perception.
It would lead to many problems as perception is regarded as the basic source of knowledge,
and if we can’t trust what we see or hear to be true we’d disbelieve a lot of real but
improbable things we saw.
One related term is veridical perception. The slot is filed by the object perceived, and in the
case of hallucinations, the slot is empty and hence the content is gappy. 'Veridical' means
coinciding with the future events or apparently unknowable present realities.

Déjà vu:
The mysterious feeling , when we associate a situation with any past experience is called
"Déjà Vu". The questions that come to our mind at this point of time can be ,"Have I been
here before?","Has this happened to me before?"
This seems to be associated to our psychology and state of mind but let's give it a thought,
does it have any philosophical significance. The first aspect of philosophy with which we can
link this whole situation is on the branches of philosophy "METAPHYSICS." This branch
deals with existence and reality, whether what we experience or see really exists or is there a
different aspect of all these experience.
The tuning fork experiment clearly depicts the philosophical association of déjà vu. The
experiment says. Every living and non-living object emits frequencies that contributes to the
aura surrounding it. In the case of humans, frequencies are emitted from all of the comprising
bodies, i.e. the gross , mental , intellectual or causal and subtle-ego. The emission and
receiving of these frequencies becomes even more pronounced when a person is meditating
and thoughts are focused.
The tuning fork phenomenon relates to when the frequencies of a person's mind temporarily
match the frequencies of minds of other living people or subtle-bodies in the afterlife.
The frequencies of our mind don't match with everyone and, as a rule of thumb; they would
match with 1 out of every 100 million people. In other words, frequencies of our mind would
match with some 65 people out of the 6.5 billion people on Earth. The number would be
higher for the subtle-bodies in the afterlife because of the larger number of them present in
the subtle-regions. These people are not soul mates in any way; it is just that in that particular
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experience their frequencies of mind matched. They then have déjà vu or a notion that they
have witnessed or experienced a new situation previously when in actuality it is someone
else's experience.
The few other philosophical reasons also talk about the philosophical association.

Instincts:
Instincts can be described as our mind telling our mind to perform a particular task. There are
many real life situations we can relate to, which depict philosophical relevance of instincts.
For e.g.:-
A baby suckling milk from mother's breast is an instinct. This can be linked to the innate
ideas which we have imprinted on our minds at the time of our birth. This activity of suckling
milk is not taught to us by any source. The urge to perform the activity comes within us
naturally.
The phenomenon of instincts not only implies to humans but is or also evident among
animals. For instance we take up the case of a newly born turtle. After hatching of the eggs,
the baby turtles get into the water, this is a natural instinct which can also be associated to
innate ideas. It is known that instincts have a strong relationship with innate ideas whose
theory was given by Rene Descartes and is a mainly discussed concept of philosophy.
They are present within us but we are not aware of it. But at times it comes automatically in
our minds and our body is compelled to perform that action involuntarily. Thus, it is clear
that one of the reasons for instincts itself is serving as the association and this issue is
significant enough.
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CONCLUSION DERIVED FROM THE SURVEY AND COMPARISON

DRAWN
The survey done on random people,got us varied and unbiased data.It contained various open
ended questions rightfully capturing the essence of our topic.Our aim is to compare the
results of the survey with previously established facts and the case studies,so that we come
around a conclusion of the validity of every stance.
Hallucinations: The average populace believe visual and auditory hallucination to be the most
common which is in agreement with medical data but not many responses about the other
types. It has been found that people with vivid imagination experience hallucination more.
Psychological reasons like schizophrenia, P.T.S.D, form the major reasons both according to
the survey and research but the medical reasons were not known to many.
Deja vu:Most people think that déjà vu are most experienced in the 12-17 age bracket.Also,
older adults are less attentive to details of their surroundings that could possibly trigger a déjà
vu and they may also visit fewer places on a regular basis (and thus experience fewer possible
triggers). Many could relate to dreams, being the reason behind déjà vu.
Instincts:We focused on the most primal instinct of animal i.e saving “dear life”.Asked if a
natural calamity occurs what would they do first -save others or save themselves;most
answered they would save others.In contrast,from our case study we found that self-
preservation reigns supreme.In a social experiment an elephant with her kid were housed in a
glass vessel,slowly water was drained into the vessel.The mother elephant sensing
danger,immediately started lifting the baby elephant away from water but as water level
rose,the mother started struggling for breath and kicked her baby down to survive.From an
experiment it was found that, instincts traverses all emotions and bonds,rationality and
conscience.From the survey it can be said that people apparently have a objective view of
intuition. We also figured out that many could tell about innate ideas being the reason behind
it.
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IMPACTS
Impacts of hallucination, differs on the basis of their cause. But some of the major impacts of
hallucinations, déjà vu and instincts are, fear of being though crazy or mentally illness.
Researchers found that people have undergone sleep deprivation after experiencing
hallucinations, déjà vu and instincts. Mood disorders and depressions, people after exercising
these events tend to get diagnosed with depression.
Due to Hallucination a feeling of fear is created in the mind of person who is experiencing it.
Hallucinating constantly, makes the person feel much stressed out at times and really cannot
figure out what happened for the lapse of time duration that he had it. They feel like what’s
going on with me, they start questioning themselves that why all this is happening to me.
People start questioning as to why they are exercising things that aren’t real actually and
there aren’t answers to this unless they approach a psychologist or someone. All these
confusion creates fear and frightens them.
Similar is the case with déjà vu. Déjà vu are mainly related to dreams and stuff, so these
events create confusion in the mind of the person.Thus, encountering something that evokes
the implicit associations of an experience or sensation that cannot be remembered may lead to
déjà vu. Sometimes they also start doubting reality due to this reason.
On the other hand, instincts lead to a feeling of over-confidence, assuming that my instinct
always says right things and people start thinking twice before acting. The sense of intuition
they develop due to their belief on instincts sometimes may lead them to the wrong path.
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CASE STUDY/RESEARCH ARTICLES

Hallucination:
After having observed the impacts of hallucination, the first question that arises in our
mind is, “is there a solution to this?”, and the answer is yes. Also, there is a case study to
prove it right.
Cindy’s Case Study on Hallucinations(Name changed for confidentiality)
It all started off when Cindy was around 20 years of age when she was taking therapy for
anxiety and depression. But later on it was figured out that she was also experiencing visual,
tactile and auditory hallucination and started feeling very insecure once it reached a very high
level.
She was initially given a therapy for her to get rid of her anxiety and depression which was
thought to be the main reason behind her hallucination and she was advised by the therapist
to maintain a diary to note down when she hallucinated and her feelings at that time. That
helped her a lot since she started thinking of that as a partner and no more felt insecure and
lonely, which did not make her depressed.
After intense therapies for close to six months, she was in a state wherein she was
hallucinating only once in a month ad was able to struggle with the emotional troubles that
she was facing. She was ready to take up the experiment that her therapist usually does for
people who hallucinate due to child hood trauma.
After 6 months of therapy that involved talking in-depth about the issues, the therapist
conducted sessions that involved hypnotism. She was asked questions in her hypnotic state
only when she was in her sense and at the same time able to answer the questions. After that,
Cindy stated an improvement in the state of mind after having relieved from anxiety, and
depression and also was able to handle hallucinations herself and in-fact that occurred on an
average of once in 4-5 months.

Déjà vu:
Case Study: A strange case of déjà̀ vu, again and again
Case Presentation:
A 23-year-old British man started having “frightening” episodes of déjà̀ vu shortly after
starting college. What was unusual about his case was that unlike the vague, fleeting
sensation that most people experience in a déjà̀ vu, his episodes were persistent and long. He
felt like every moment he was retrieving previous experiences from his memory and reliving
his past. The episodes lasted more than just a few minutes and grew debilitating.
Three years after the experiences began; the young man could no longer even watch
television or read the paper because he would have an unsettling feeling that he had
encountered the content before. The haunting sensation was stronger than just a sense of
familiarity. What makes the case distinct is that the man did not suffer from any of the
neurological conditions previously reported in people who frequently experience déjà̀ vu.
Instead, he suffered from anxiety.
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Case Analysis:
Researchers have proposed scientific explanations to this. Says Christine Wells, a
psychologist at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom who co-authored the
report of the man’s case, that it is most probably due to some mistimed firing of neurons,
perhaps, a temporary glitch in our processing of incoming information. He adds that a key
structure within the temporal lobe is the hippocampus, which is heavily involved in memory
and that’s the area that’s involved in déjà̀ vu as well. The reason for this belief is that
although almost anyone can have an episode of déjà̀ vu every once in a while, more frequent
and more intense forms of the phenomenon are usually seen in people who have seizures in
the temporal lobe, a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy.
What makes this case even stranger though is, in this man’s case, doctors looked for signs of
seizures, but neurological examinations, including EEGs (electroencephalograms) and brain
scans, didn’t turn up anything. His brain activity, as far as doctors could measure, looked
healthy. And a set of psychological tests of his memory didn’t reveal any major problem,
either.
(Published Dec. 8 in the Journal of Medical Case Reports; Retrieved from “The Washington
Post”)

Instincts:
Case Study: First reaction in the face of a Natural Calamity
When the huge waves of the Tsunami are before you, in the adrenaline rush something directs
you to run to save your life and not to stand rooted to the spot and enjoy the beauty of the
waves, unlike in a beach. In such circumstances, rarely would you want to save the life of
anyone else in contrast to what would have been your reaction on an ordinary day. In these
cases what gives rise to your first response is what is called your “instinct."
According to Simon Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, there are three levels of consciousness.
First, the unconscious mind which exists outside one's awareness at all times. Next, the
preconscious mind which includes all the information that can be recalled but that a person is
not currently aware. Finally, the conscious mind that is one's current state of awareness.
Instincts are a part of the preconscious mind.
So, the next question which arises is: from where did this thought that we need to save our
life before others’ come into our head? This question is answered in two different ways by
two radically different theories. First is “Knowledge through Innate ideas” as proposed by
Rene Descartes. This theory explains it that this thought was originally there in our minds at
the time of our birth itself. The other “Knowledge through Sense Experience” as given by
John Locke which proposes that our mind was like a clean slate at the time of our birth, an
epistemological idea called Tabula Rasa, and that all the knowledge that we have was
acquired over time through sense-object contact.
Once this thought entered our head, it was exercised, knowingly and unknowingly,
consciously and even subconsciously, through every one of our actions since childhood
which required we make a choice between ourselves and others. So, the idea got stored in the
depths of our minds, and when we try to retrieve it, we instinctively decide to flee a Tsunami
or escape a hurricane!!
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CONCLUSION

We analyzed the root causes for déjà vu, hallucinations and instincts by means of research,
case studies, and sample surveys; and concluded that they are extensively related to the
philosophical genre, in addition to the commonly perceived medical and psychological
factors.
Our research involved studying heretofore proposed theories and explanations for these
phenomena. Even though our survey had a targeted audience, and hence, did not examine a
very random sample of the population, it gives a fair picture of what people perceive to be the
reasons for them. Our case studies critically analyzed the proposed reaction to given
circumstances to reveal the hidden, extensive philosophical association of them. All these
together gave us an idea of what people perceive to be the reasons for these phenomena.
The essence of this project is to show how the vicious cycle that pervades all these
phenomena can be overcome by analyzing the reasons behind them.
People do not know that these are common philosophical issues, but think that they are
medical illnesses. Hence, in case they suffer from any of these phenomena, they either leave
it unnoticed or consider it trivial and feel awkward to consult experts in the discipline.
Because of which extensive studies could not be carried out on the topic to justify the
philosophical roots to the common man. This leads him to continue to believe in just the
medical-disease which continues the cycle.