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Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with. That feeling is really really odd thoug

Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with. That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that puzzle, and at the end of the day i settled for a mix of "currently unknown exactly how that is done" (sort of like consciousness itself, i guess) to "wow, reality sure does have some extra layers of "fun" i hadn't really been informed about. If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns". Now, i was lucky enough to have a very supportive and patient family that viewed it as something that could be managed outside of the realm of antipsychotic therapy. I'm not saying that handling it with prescribed drugs is necessarily a bad idea, if it works for you then i hope it continues to do so. Sorry for the rant, but i was just reminded of how weird all of that stuff was to go through. Its been a while since i thought about it.

namenumber 11y ago
I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my normal waking time). It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake. I guess i'll never know.
- archagon 11y ago
  I've always been jealous of people who could do stuff like talk to "other" people or listen to symphonies in their head. But I just realized: I do all that stuff too, but only when I'm dreaming. The incredible environments, landscapes, and people that come to me in my dreams seem to exist outside my head entirely, because there's simply no way for me to conjure them when I'm awake. It's as if my brain doles out my consciousness only as a tiny, fractional part of its full capabilities. In other words, I am maybe not as much its master as I thought. I wonder if there's a way to unlock that ability in my everyday life. Sidenote: I can sometimes sort of do it when I'm awake, but only when I'm really, really tired.
- Leszek 11y ago
  I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer trust your sense: are you certain that you actually heard a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just your perception of it? I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce it.
  - namenumber 11y ago
    You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit. Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.) Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself). So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods. So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to. I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.
- animal531 11y ago
  Partial tangent, I used to lucid dream a bit when younger. While doing so I felt that the imagery was a lot more colourful and fleshed out than when I would consciously daydream. Translated to IT terms, I always thought that I had more computing power available while my conscious brain was partially disabled...or perhaps that my conscious brain had a limited information scope (ie. bandwidth) which made it filter out too much extraneous information, making me feel as if I (as a conscious entity) could only experience and be aware of less information at a time than in semi-conscious states.
thomyorkie 11y ago
"If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns"." If you feel like sharing, I'd love to hear more about your experience with this.
- namenumber 11y ago
  I'm worried i might have overmade that statement a bit. One thing is what i can string myself along in believing in, and memories of the period is growing evermore hazy from year to year. Let me restate it as "the world becomes a weird place when they -seem- to go outside your acknowledged "knowns". Saying they did becomes, based on the manner in which i interpreted things/cues/input at the time, something i can't really say with any degree of certainty. Sorry about perhaps leading you on with my choice of words. But that initial "boom" when you go from "i am me and i am here in my head" to "oh hey, i have an invisible counterplayer in here that is capable of manifesting itself as realistically behaving, voice-pitch-perfect impressions of all my friends and family, who proceed to harass/cajole/support me in a theatrical landscape choreographed with split-second focus on whatever it is my "i" express." Granted, this is also dream, but dream is too fragmented, and too prone to halt|flush|restart compared to four/six hour long internal conversations (with the occasional external auditory hallucination when fitting). And then you get to live that for a few years, and its a mixture of exhilarating and scary as fuck. And you're forever left with a brain that you sometimes think of with the premonition "well, if you could do that, what other tricks do you have up yor sleeve".
DanBC 11y ago
Please don't apologise - yours is a fantastic comment. You may like this article that talks about people who hear voices but who don't have a psychotic illness. http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voices-auditory-verbal-hallucinations http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voi... They too prefer to manage with meds.
- namenumber 11y ago
  Thanks for both starting this thread here on hn, and this extra link. Its interesting to see how this functions as a field of study within academia, and its been ages since i last looked at what happens there.

namenumber 11y ago

I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my normal waking time). It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake. I guess i'll never know.

archagon 11y ago
I've always been jealous of people who could do stuff like talk to "other" people or listen to symphonies in their head. But I just realized: I do all that stuff too, but only when I'm dreaming. The incredible environments, landscapes, and people that come to me in my dreams seem to exist outside my head entirely, because there's simply no way for me to conjure them when I'm awake. It's as if my brain doles out my consciousness only as a tiny, fractional part of its full capabilities. In other words, I am maybe not as much its master as I thought. I wonder if there's a way to unlock that ability in my everyday life. Sidenote: I can sometimes sort of do it when I'm awake, but only when I'm really, really tired.
Leszek 11y ago
I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer trust your sense: are you certain that you actually heard a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just your perception of it? I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce it.
- namenumber 11y ago
  You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit. Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.) Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself). So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods. So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to. I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.
animal531 11y ago
Partial tangent, I used to lucid dream a bit when younger. While doing so I felt that the imagery was a lot more colourful and fleshed out than when I would consciously daydream. Translated to IT terms, I always thought that I had more computing power available while my conscious brain was partially disabled...or perhaps that my conscious brain had a limited information scope (ie. bandwidth) which made it filter out too much extraneous information, making me feel as if I (as a conscious entity) could only experience and be aware of less information at a time than in semi-conscious states.

thomyorkie 11y ago

"If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns"." If you feel like sharing, I'd love to hear more about your experience with this.

namenumber 11y ago
I'm worried i might have overmade that statement a bit. One thing is what i can string myself along in believing in, and memories of the period is growing evermore hazy from year to year. Let me restate it as "the world becomes a weird place when they -seem- to go outside your acknowledged "knowns". Saying they did becomes, based on the manner in which i interpreted things/cues/input at the time, something i can't really say with any degree of certainty. Sorry about perhaps leading you on with my choice of words. But that initial "boom" when you go from "i am me and i am here in my head" to "oh hey, i have an invisible counterplayer in here that is capable of manifesting itself as realistically behaving, voice-pitch-perfect impressions of all my friends and family, who proceed to harass/cajole/support me in a theatrical landscape choreographed with split-second focus on whatever it is my "i" express." Granted, this is also dream, but dream is too fragmented, and too prone to halt|flush|restart compared to four/six hour long internal conversations (with the occasional external auditory hallucination when fitting). And then you get to live that for a few years, and its a mixture of exhilarating and scary as fuck. And you're forever left with a brain that you sometimes think of with the premonition "well, if you could do that, what other tricks do you have up yor sleeve".

DanBC 11y ago

Please don't apologise - yours is a fantastic comment. You may like this article that talks about people who hear voices but who don't have a psychotic illness. http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voices-auditory-verbal-hallucinations http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voi... They too prefer to manage with meds.

namenumber 11y ago
Thanks for both starting this thread here on hn, and this extra link. Its interesting to see how this functions as a field of study within academia, and its been ages since i last looked at what happens there.