Comments on: Chuck Bonnet and the Hallucinations

By: juliek

juliek — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 15:09:41 +0000

My 83 year old mother has had CBS for a number of years. The lack of recognition of the syndrome within the medical profession is staggering! In January of this year she was admitted to hospital having been found in her garden (where she had fled to avoid the “people threatening her”) At hospital she was “fully assessed” by a Prof. in geriatric medicine and labelled as “psychotic”
It has taken us 10 months, sheer bl***y mindedness and, frankly, a large chunk of luck to have had her seen by a “mere” consultant who actually spent time with her, listened to what she had to say, believed that the issues are episodic, appreciated the fact that, for the vast majority of the time, she is a lucid, intelligent, educated and highly articulate lady and was willing to undertake some personal research to explore the possibility that medication may be beneficial.
She is currently on a very low dose of a very common medication and, although not entirely symptom free, the symptoms are transient ( a few minutes or so a day) and of a far less threatening degree than previously.
With the level of ignorance surrounding this condition ( we have consulted ophthalmologists, psychiatrists, general practitioners and geriatricians) coupled with the estimated number of people suffering from it, it would appear (no pun intended!) that far more needs to be done to educate those to whom the blind turn for help.
No wonder that people keep their symptoms of CBS to themselves!

By: DrFirefpx

DrFirefpx — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:10:24 +0000

Interesting. The other day I looked at a wall with a stain on it (with sunglasses on) and the stain looked like random words flashing past. From words like “Max” to “Scientific”.

By: RainDamage

RainDamage — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 12:54:36 +0000

hah, last! (at least for now). Sorry, I’m a bit late, but I just had to comment, because I’ve actuallyy had these Charles Bonnet hallucinations. I suffered a head injury a few years ago, the optic nerve of one of my eyes was damaged (luckily not both eyes). After a while I started seeing things. Like a little dog and a little fish floating in the air past me while I was walking in the street, or a well dressed (the dress was particulally clear and detailed with a hat and all) little woman smilin and pointing at me. At first I was scared to death, although the visions weren’t that threatening. I didn’t make the connection with the impairment of my eyesight and the visions, I really thought I was going mad. I had never heard about Charles Bonnet or his syndrome, I found out about that much much later (and not from a doctor, by the way.) Some of the visions were a bit scary, like a small ugly witch sitting on my tv set. Some were funny, like three hamsters in my toilet bowl while I was gonna pee. Well, I peed on them anyway and they disappeared. I don’t seem to see those things anymore, although my sight isn’t any better. The examples given in the article were on the spot, the hallucinations really were that crazy. :)

By: MacAvity

MacAvity — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:52:08 +0000

One hundred and sixteen comments and no one seems to have voluntarily played with his blind spots before. I’m surprised. Especially as I’ve read in the comments of other articles that some of you lot have read Oliver Sacks, who devotes a large portion of one of his books to this phenomenon.

I found that it was the word “Damn,” not the logo, that disappeared when I looked at the “r” in “Interesting.”

Once you (whoever may read this, although JzigsJzigs who thought no one would ever read his comment has had three people do so since last month) get the hang of vanishing the logo, or the word “Damn,” as the case may be, try visually decapitating people. It’s fun. Just find a person who is holding still a sufficient distance from you (so his head is small enough), line up your blind spot with the person’s head, and instead of having a hallucinatory substitute head, your target stands headless. Still alive, still functioning, no bloody stump or any such thing, only conspicuously without a head. Then he walks away and his head comes back. It’s a wonderful pastime for bored travellers waiting at airports or train stations or wherever.

By: merrysue

merrysue — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:14:46 +0000

I just want you to know that I truly appreciate finding this article. My mother is soon to be 85 yrs old this May and for about the past 6 to 8 weeks my brothers and I have been noticing some very strange behavior during our regular visits to the nursing home. My sister, who has medical power of attorney, made a special trip to see about this. So far Mom has not said she is seeing things, but we feel this article has helped explain a lot about what MIGHT be going on. Thank you so much.

By: Jason Bellows

Jason Bellows — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:08:05 +0000

[quote]jzigsjzigs said: “After reading through all the comments, I realized that mine was the first post in almost two years, so probably no one will ever read it. Prove me wrong.”[/quote]
No, you’re too right.

By: jzigsjzigs

jzigsjzigs — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 07:33:07 +0000

After reading through all the comments, I realized that mine was the first post in almost two years, so probably no one will ever read it. Prove me wrong.

By: jzigsjzigs

jzigsjzigs — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 06:42:45 +0000

Very Damn Interesting! I’ve been a lurker here for a long time, but this article made me want to join in order to post.

After reading the article, and a few posts, I decided to perform an unscientific experiment. Here it goes:
In a dimly lit room, I forced myself to stare at a particular dark spot on the corner of the wall. (The spot had no significance I believe, but it helped to have something to focus on.) For the first several minutes, nothing special happened. But then, gradually I noticed some weird things. First, the corner itself began to shift in my perception from dark and shady, to light and very bright, and back and forth. It seemed to change due to my subtle eye movements, which I couldn’t control. I stuck with it, and I began to notice changes in colors in my peripheral sight. More specifically, above and mostly below I started to see green colors on an unpainted wood object, and in that general area. Green happens to be my favorite color, which may or may not be coincidental. At about this point I had to give up due to eye strain.

This seems to fall in line with some of the theories presented, that the brain will fill in what it doesn’t actually perceive. I’m not smart enough to draw any more conclusions from this “experiment,” but it was a cool experience, I’d suggest trying it.

I also really enjoyed the blind spot image in the article. At first I couldn’t get it to work, but finally I found the sweet spot. I had to try several times just to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself.

Damn Interesting indeed!

By: oldbogeydog

oldbogeydog — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:31:08 +0000

Nice link to the Musical Ear, Renfield. My father-in-law had it once and was hearing Silent Night very clearly. He was just about stone-deaf then, as confirmed in the article. When he was hearing it, he’d ask us if we could hear it also and be sort of amazed that we couldn’t.

By: schoschie

schoschie — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:37:15 +0000

There’s so much in here. It’s hard to control all my thoughts. I had to take notes while I was reading the article and the comments so as not to forget all the ideas that came up. Pretty damn interesting article and comments, thanks!

I am most intrigued by the ideas that came up in the latter 10 or 20 comments, namely the similar experiences of people under the influence of psychoactive substances, hinting at the possibility that hallucinations and visions might not simply be random activity of idling parts of the brain, even though it seems to be a very plausible explanation. I agree with »documented« citing Don J »… that our modern scientific view of the world is a correct one, but is only a part of the whole story & that – in order to keep us “sane” our brain filters out a lot of what is out there…«. There’s no doubt in our Western civilization’s scientific world view being correct as scientific proof is irrefutable. However, that is not to say it is complete. I’m convinced we are missing out on something.

With regard to the evidence of »8.75 megabits per second« worth of visual data input to the eye – I’m not a neurologist, but I find this figure rather questionable as well. 8.75 Mbit/s is only about 1.1 MBytes/s. That’s a ridiculously small number (an uncompressed stream of NTSC video data (TV!) is roughly 44 (!) MBytes/s [640 * 480 pixels * 3 bytes/pixel (RGB) * 50 frames per second / 1024 / 1024] – I think most people would agree that human vision is superior to TV in a way such that even the thought of comparing the two is silly). Did the scientists explicitly measure pixels in their experiments? Or, rather, nerve impulses? — I disagree strongly with the prevalent notion of comparing the brain and the nervous system with a digital computer. That is obviously a very, very crude model, but a lot of people seem to take it seriously. Not only is the nervous system analog in nature (allowing much more information to be encoded than the 0/1-absoluteness of digital), but it would appear that nervous impulses carry information (»data«) in ways that are incredibly more complex than a bunch of electrons in a wire.

misanthrope, PhilD, Silverhill, Techno-Kid: I could read and understand both the English and the French jumbled-up words, even though my native language is German (I know English fairly well and my French is so-so). I think it depends a lot on the way you read.

I was surprised to read ifeelya’s comment about hallucinations from Prozac. I was pretty sure Fluoxetine should not induce hallucinations, but a quick search seems to prove otherwise: http://www.google.de/search?q=prozac%20hallucinations

PS. I LOL’ed at all the CBS (tv station) jokes!

(BTW: I could not post this from Safari/Mac and had to do it in Firefox. The preview seems to use some JavaScript code that doesn’t work in Safari. The page just fades to dark and then nothing happens.)