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Cover of Hallucinations

Hallucinations

by Oliver Sacks

2 highlights Last annotated: September 1, 2020

Highlights

Some people hallucinate text or music. But by far the commonest hallucinations are the geometrical ones: squares, checkerboards, rhomboids, quadrangles, hexagons, bricks, walls, tiles, tessellations, honeycombs, mosaics. ^ref-13303

In the last decade or two, Dominic ffytche and his colleagues in London have done pioneering research on the neural basis of visual hallucinations. Based on the detailed reports of dozens of subjects, they developed a taxonomy of hallucinations, including categories like figures with hats, children or small people, landscapes, vehicles, grotesque faces, text, and cartoonlike faces. (This taxonomy is described in a 2000 paper by Santhouse et al.) ^ref-57663

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