Hi Sue Alec 'n NI
Reading these links took me back to my last BSc psy course, and possibly one of the most interesting of all the OU psychology suite. It was on Brain Biology, and it answered many questions that had puzzled me for years.
I hate to say how many years but at least 40 for the one that concerned a particular visual hallucination. I have never experienced any real visual hallucinations, even with LSD, I only experienced the timing effects and heightened colours and patterns when i close my eyes; my trips were more cerebral than visual. However, I was a witness when somebody else claimed to have
had one.
It was a Friday and New Year's Eve, 1969, in an Olde Worlde coaching inn
in Andover. Our little jazz band had done 1200 miles since we left London on Christmas Eve and we still had Saturday night to play. I played keyboards and sang [not very well] my husband Andy was drummer, Tommy was the bass player; there was also a trumpeter and a saxaphone player. It was just after midnight and we were into Auld Lang Syne when Tommy just stopped playing, I could see him clinging onto his bass as if it was life-support as he gazed intently into the front row of the audience. I thought he was going to fall, so I discretely led him off-stage when the spotlights were all on Andy who was doing a long drum solo.
When he calmed down enough to talk, he said that he had seen someone who looked like the Grim Reaper, complete with full accessories, scythe, hourglass. He said this apparition had pointed to him with one hand then held up three boney fingers. Then still white and shaking he
said:
"He was standing right in front of me; didn't any of you see him? I thought he was just a guy in fancy dress at first but when it struck mid-night and the lights shone on the audience - I looked right at him - I could see right inside his hood! He had no face! Andy I have seen the Grim Reaper" He kept repeating this and babbled about how seeing the face of the GR meant he was going to die! I pointed out that if GR didn't have a face then technically Tommy couldn't have seen it so he was probably alright, and he couldn't really argue.
Tommy had been taking anti-biotics for an abcess on his upper thigh just before and during the tour. I suspected that blood poisoning from this might have caused his temperature to shoot up causing delirium. He dismissed this suggestion, he said he didn't feel feverish and I had no thermometer to get an accurate reading. We spent the whole of Saturday
morning trying to persuade him to go to Casualty [as it was called then]. He wouldn't hear of it, and said he was fine adding that his leg was healing well. We didn't have time for a detour if we were going to get to the next booking on time, which was in a castle somewhere near Yeovil.
Throughout the weekend we just tried to help him [and ourselves] to make sense of the event as well as reassure him that whatever he saw, it was definitely not a supernatural-being providing information about future events. I was sure he believed he had seen something. His shock, distress and terror were quite genuine, I wondered if the lights coming on had dazzled him and distorted the images. He had never experienced anything like this before; he had no psychiatric condition, and he had not drunk any alcohol. Although like many jazz musicians, Tommy was a heroin addict he was supplied diamorphine legally but this could not account
for the vision.
It was not very hard to convince this intelligent twenty-seven year old,
twentieth century man that he couldn't really believe or think that
there could be a GR, going round warning people when they were going to
die. The idea was so ludicrous that by the time we were driving back to London late on Sunday night he was actually laughing about it. He still seemed very relieved when we offered to let him stay at our place until Monday morning when he could get a tube home. We arranged to meet up later at the Mandrake Club. He was already there when we arrived and was looking much better, and was on top form when he jammed with the resident trio. After the set Andy went to look for him, and found him passed out on the floor in the Gents. He was pronounced dead on arrival - TOD = 12.01
The postmortem could find no definite cause of death, there were various drugs in his system but even combined this was not enough to have caused death and there was no sign of blood poisoning.
Forty years later [and still puzzled] I learned about the hyperthalamous and the amygdala, which possibly explains how Tommy's
hallucination was created. I learned that we often know things we do not always know that we know. It is even possible for the unconscious brain to have important knowledge that is unavailable to the conscious mind. If the brain knows something crucial to survival it is concievable that the unconscious could try to create a way to make the conscious mind aware that something needs to change.
this website and wiki was a very useful preparation for someone with no biology. The best was by Rhawn Joseph but he has started charging for subscribing to his brain biology website and has turned into a complete [a*****] egomaniac since he stopped giving his lectures out for free. I did find lots of Kindle copies of RJ's books in Amazon USA but only one in UK. I had to scroll through 50 pages of isn't RJ wonderful before I got to this [If I ever get like this
http://brainmind.com/publications.html will somebody please give me a slap]:
http://brainmind.com/Case5.html
http://brainmind.com/ConservationChildren.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/index1.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/schiz.html
Perhaps I should have saved this for saturday but I have plenty more.
Love Jo
From: Suzanne Hacking
<[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 13:55
Subject: Re: Where Art meets the Social Sciences!
Sue.
Dr. S. Hacking
Senior Research Fellow in Mental Health | University of Central Lancashire School of Health| Room BB313|Brook Building|UCLan|Preston|PR1
2HE|| 01772 893703/07963 467 958
• RSPH Arts and Health Awardwinner 2011, 2009: Outstanding and innovative contributions to Arts & Health Research.
University of Central Lancashire, School of Health
• Awarded Outstanding for Resources & Practice Learning for NMC Annual Monitoring 2010/11
• Recognised within RAE 2008 as being within the top ten universities for Nursing & Midwifery Research
• Shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Leadership & Management Award 2011 for Knowledge
Exchange / Transfer
From: Narrative Inquiry where social science meets art [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of nigel short
Sent: 25 November 2011 13:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Where Art meets the Social Sciences!
As part of an earlier degree course in the 80's i was interested in how different disciplines managed the concept of 'hallucinations. There was very little literature form
the social sciences and the majority of texts were, perhaps understandably from the professions of psychology and neurosciences. I was however put onto a book by Anthony Claire (In the Psychiatrists Chair fame) to wonderful tome by a Dr Critchley; Hallucinations
and their impact on art. Preston; Carnegie Press. 1987. There are many pieces in their by Bosch. The Garden of Earthly Delights is a wonderful example of Boschs inventiveness, delicacy, exquisite use of colours and fantasy. I saw the original in the Museo
del Prado in Madrid a few years back; a wonderful expression of the hopes and fears of his gae.
I am mystified about the imagery in the painting, especially the funnel. I wonder if it is to fill up the jug on the surgeon's belt. Why does the woman have a book on her head and why is
she gazing so wistfully ahead? Why is the monk holding a jug when there are no cups?
Did you notice the contrasting misty outlines of ecclesiastic style buildings and even towns in the far distance? Bosch is also one of my favourite artists, but it is very hard for 21st
century eyes to understand the symbolism in his work. I expect Banksy will present similar problems in a few hundred years. Every time I look at this I see more.
By the way are we all still good for 10 am on the 03/12/11, next Saturday? It will be very nice to have a break from these psychometrics and Discourse Analysis PDFs. The more I read on
psychometrics the less convincing many aspects of it appear. Although so far I haven't had much chance to check the evidence that is presented. E.g.,
I would be more impressed with IQ type tests if they included specific tests for some of the potential deficits [and even stupidity] of which a high scoring individual might be equally
capable. Many of the personality tests are too easy for candidates to guess which answers suggest desirable qualities. Apart from attemps to decieve the tester, is the question of how well people know themselves and how honest they are to themselves.
The Cure of Folly (The Extraction of the Stone of Madness) attributed to Hieronymus Bosch.
Like this picture do you? What’s with the funnel on the surgeons head?
It does say on the title that this is a space where Art can meet the social sciences so I am guessing it is OK to post this here , because I just wanted to share this picture with you.
Please delete me if not appropriate.
There’s been a really fascinating series on Radio 4 (still available on podcasts) called The History of the Brain. One of the episodes touched on the history of art and its depiction of
Trepanation (drilling a hole in the skull, preferably without disturbing the brain). I have long been fascinated by the depiction of mental illness in art and how much information
can be conveyed in historical paintings. Bosch is one of my favourites as he is quite bizarre. Anyway this is one of his earlier pieces depicting a surgeon performing trepanation on a man with a flower (tulip) sprouting out of his head. Apparently the Dutch
referred to mad people as ‘tulip heads’. Bosch’s patient appeals to the surgeon to extract a stone from his head.
The stone in question is the "stone of folly" or "stone of madness" which, according to popular superstition, was a cause of mental illness, depression, or stupidity. Such stones could be located anywhere in the body,
such as the bowels or back, but were most commonly assigned to the head, where a surgeon would have to cut into the skull to remove them.
About this time trepanning or trepanation was
an established medical procedure. Archaeological evidence indicates that trepanning was practiced across Europe (indeed, worldwide, even in early Peruvian cultures) in prehistoric times; in medieval Europe, various medical experts recommended it for a variety
of illnesses ranging from skull fracture to epilepsy, insanity, and melancholia. Fascinating stuff !
Here endeth my art history lesson of the day on trepanation.
Flurry crinolines off the stage
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