Comments on: Hallucinating the void

By: RZ

RZ — Tue, 25 May 2010 17:11:19 +0000

My understanding is that through hypnosis, and by other methods, one can suppress activity in certain areas of the brain. For example if the suggestion is made that the subject cannot read then the part of their brain that processes written letters is some how made inactive. There are a few hypnosis studies that had subjects turn synthesia on and off.

By: Matthew Joseph

Matthew Joseph — Tue, 25 May 2010 06:58:32 +0000

This is interesting. I had never heard of inattentional blindness. Any idea why such a thing would be used, other than for fun?
Hypnosis has some good uses per personal improvement, I have to wonder if there is something to this.

By: Daniel J. Simons

Daniel J. Simons — Tue, 25 May 2010 02:41:40 +0000

Always fun when parodies become reality. That’s similar in some respects to the Onion piece on gorillas becoming aware of their own mortality followed a week later by actual research on chimps acting as if they understood the death of other chimps.
I think you have slightly mischaracterized inattentional blindness in your description, though. In cases of inattentional blindness, people are missing the proverbial barn door right where they are looking. In fact, Daniel Memmert has shown that people can miss the “gorilla” even when looking right at it. The key difference between inattentional blindness and the sort of negative hallucination you describe (that I had never heard of before) is that in inattentional blindness, your not looking for the barn door. Instead, attention is focused on something else in the same part of the display. In fact, Neisser’s earlier work was designed to show that people would miss something right where they were looking.
Maybe negative hallucinations are like an induced or suggested form of inattentional blindness in which attention is diverted by suggestion rather than due to the need to focus on some other task.