61–70 of 72 posts
For a few years, every time my mind was momentarily still it would repeat the word "death". It never bothered me, and I always interpreted it philosophically (eg. as a meditational aid) and put it down to reading too much Buddhist literature.
I often have intense fantasies about conversations with personal mentors, historical figures and/or deities (what would Buddha say? How about Einstein? etc). Obviously I can't reproduce their thoughts, but knowing a little about them, I can try to think like them Surely they're not as visceral or reflexive as the author's voices. But I have always found value in empathizing with fantasized mentors, which has given me…
> 124 lbs ..., alcohol units 4, cigarettes 10, calories 1876, minutes spent having imaginary conversations with Daniel 24 (excellent), minutes spent imagining rerun of conversations with mother in which I come out on top 94.
That's when I realized it's more or less a universal thing.
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No, hearing voices is a very different experience to the regular internal monologue that everyone has. People hearing voices perceive those heard voices in the same way they'd perceive an actual person talking to them. People experience different voices, but it's reasonably common to experience the voice as male and standing behind you. But the voice could be whispering (like white noise), or robotic, and it could ap…
How do you know that? Have you experienced both? Otherwise, you're at best interpreting what others have said. Or maybe just what others have written about the subject.
Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with. That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that p…
I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way…
Translated to IT terms, I always thought that I had more computing power available while my conscious brain was partially disabled...or perhaps that my conscious brain had a limited information scope (ie. bandwidth) which made it filter out too much extraneous information, making me feel as if I (as a conscious entity) could only experience and be aware of less information at a time than in semi-conscious states.
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I sometimes talk to myself or to hypothetical instances of other people I know. I try to do this quietly at times since I know it might not be perceived favorably by others. Mainly I do this to verbally externalize thoughts and force them back into my auditory memory (deliberately), hopefully reinforcing or bolstering a position I want to take or a course of action I need to take later. I hope I never lose track that…
I do the same thing. I'm actually inspired by trying to talk to hypothetical instances of other people. I never did that. I normally talk to myself and to a lesser extent to my past self (when I was younger it would be my future self, but I'm currently in 'the future'). If there's a real person around I just talk to the real person, and on non-shy days this could easily be a stranger. It could make me annoying, but I…
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I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way…
I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer trust your sense: are you certain that you actually heard a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just your perception of it? I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to…
Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.)
Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself).
So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods.
So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can
Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.
I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.
Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with. That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that p…
"If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns"." If you feel like sharing, I'd love to hear more about your experience with this.
But that initial "boom" when you go from "i am me and i am here in my head" to "oh hey, i have an invisible counterplayer in here that is capable of manifesting itself as realistically behaving, voice-pitch-perfect impressions of all my friends and family, who proceed to harass/cajole/support me in a theatrical landscape choreographed with split-second focus on whatever it is my "i" express." Granted, this is also dream, but dream is too fragmented, and too prone to halt|flush|restart compared to four/six hour long internal conversations (with the occasional external auditory hallucination when fitting).
And then you get to live that for a few years, and its a mixture of exhilarating and scary as fuck. And you're forever left with a brain that you sometimes think of with the premonition "well, if you could do that, what other tricks do you have up yor sleeve".
Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with. That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that p…
Please don't apologise - yours is a fantastic comment. You may like this article that talks about people who hear voices but who don't have a psychotic illness. http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voi... They too prefer to manage with meds.
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How do you know that? Have you experienced both? Otherwise, you're at best interpreting what others have said. Or maybe just what others have written about the subject.
I've spoken to people who hear voices and they decribe the differences very clearly, and there's plenty of research about this.
When people seek help about such matters, they often find themselves working with therapists who have this or that conceptual framework. And so patients learn to frame their experience accordingly. Explanations are comforting.
So anyway, I'm dubious about the distinction. I think that it's an artifact of social norms and therapeutic bullshit.
Sound different from the life experience of a woman I met recently who also had to withdraw from uni through overwork. That was over fifteen years ago. Unfortunately she was sectioned by her family (who all then skipped off to America). She's been prescribed a cocktail of psychotropic pharmaceuticals ever since. She has developed type two diabetes, disruption of thyroid activity, kidney damage, fluid retention and da…