By: Nigel Thomas

Nigel Thomas — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:50:02 +0000

Well, I am sorry if the above comes out as huge, unreadable block of text. On preview, at least, there seemed to be no facilities here for formatting the text, or even inserting line breaks. Neither HTML nor BBCode seemed to work.
Also, what gives with the insistence at sign-on that I allow my email to be revealed? I do not want to expose it to spammers.

By: Nigel Thomas

Nigel Thomas — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:42:37 +0000

Claims like this, about other people’s subjective experiences, need to be treated with an ENORMOUS amount of caution. (To be fair, the Atkinson et al paper is a good deal more tentative in its conclusions than this blog post might suggest.) Even unimpaired, sane and well educated people who speak the same language have profound difficulties in communicating about the nature of their subjective experiences.
See Perplexities of Consciousness (and other material) here:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/
The problem is multiplied when we are dealing with purely subjective experiences, that are not caused by any obvious and measurable stimulus, such as hallucinations and mental images:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm
http://www.imagery-imagination.com/viac.htm
http://www.imagery-imagination.com/non-im.htm
People have been wrestling with these problems since the earliest days of psychology, but they really have not been solved. Indeed, experts still cannot agree even on basic definitions for terms such as “mental image” and “hallucination”:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/#MeaConMenIma
Aleman, A. & Lar√∏i, F. (2008). Hallucinations: The Science of Idiosyncratic Perception. Washington DC: American Psychological Association. (Chapter 1: Definition and Conceptual Issues.) [Sorry, I do not know of a good online, open access source dealing with problems of defining of "hallucination".]
When you are dealing with people who are sensorially impaired, who may not truly understand concepts like “hearing” or “voice” (because they have no experience of them), who communicate using a profoundly different language to yours (sign language versus English), and who, on top of all that, may be mentally ill, then you are really in an area where you cannot be sure of anything. I applaud Atkinson et al for their efforts, but no way have they come close to solving the huge problems endemic to this sort of research.

Comments on: More on hallucinated voices in deaf people

By: Nigel Thomas

By: Nigel Thomas