11 ms·

A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices (1997)

109 points by booleandilemma 6y ago

nabla9 6y ago
Imagine event that could happen once in a million days (once 2700 years) , once in in 10 million days (once in 27,000 years) and so on. When you have hundreds of millions of people, these events happen several times per day. The patient had tumor in her head causing voices. The voices made right call. Voices are not random. They come from the same brain that is worried about being crazy or sick.
carapace 6y ago
Needs a "(1997)" in the title. This sort of thing happens all the time, the unusual thing here is that someone wrote it down and got it published.
- leoh 6y ago
  Fascinating — have any references?
  - carapace 6y ago
    I don't, really, but here's another well-known anecdote: > On one occasion, Dick was startled by a separate recurrence of the pink beam. It imparted the information to him that his infant son was ill. The Dicks rushed the child to the hospital, where his suspicion was confirmed by professional diagnosis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_experiences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_expe... FWIW, I once attended a thing that was sponsored by invisible purple telepathic space dolphins, so... yeah. Just a group hallucination?
marcan_42 6y ago
As I was reading this I immediately went for the third explanation given, or a similar variant. One possible take on it is that the tumour made her plural/multiple. Then her new members wondered where they came from and came up with the tumour explanation, researched treatment, and communicated it back to her main self. Read this if you haven't heard about plurality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psychology)
- caymanjim 6y ago
  This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensive, and while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't. There's no evidence of any of it being anything more than an act. It's all crackpot nonsense.
  - bulgagoo 6y ago
    calling something crackpot nonsense is unwarrantedly cruel, violates the site's guidelines, shows lack of empathy with people who might believe that and you should stop doing it. thank you are you unacquainted with the concept of expressing your disagreement without pretending you're better than someone else? if you do that it'll make your point stronger, and should come across as less insecure , less compensating, and less triggered. you can be right from your point of view and so can someone else, and that's okay. no need to try to trash someone else in the process is there?
  - marcan_42 6y ago
    "It's all crackpot nonsense" isn't a very good argument when it comes to the human brain, now is it? That sounds like the same class of garbage argument that transphobes use to claim trans people aren't real. You can call it whatever you want, but DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story, and the disorder vs neurodiversity argument is largely tangential to the question of whether the condition exists at all, which it clearly does. "Science" in general has a terrible track record when it comes to the human brain, because we still have no idea how most of it works and you can't exactly attach a JTAG debugger to someone's head. So saying psychological conditions "aren't science" is unscientific, because a proper scientist in the field would accept the limitations of the field, and be open to consistent phenomena (which telepathy isn't with the hard sciences, but multiplicity is).
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      > DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story I'm not sure that it fits the OP story, though, at least at is told. As far as I understand, DID would be recognizable to others, it would not be purely perceived as a hallucination by the patient. Even if she were not aware of this, her husband or others around her would have reported behavioral changes, presumably. Otherwise, I tend to agree with what you are saying.
caymanjim 6y ago
I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices. In the absense of any evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the "100% BS" option. If you click through to the actual PDF, it's not a medical paper. It's a collection of anecdotes without evidence, of lower quality than the light medical anecdotes in Discover magazine. This is neither science nor medicine.
- bulgagoo 6y ago
  you successfully restore your worldview and advance to the next stage. achievement unlocked. 10 points
- badrabbit 6y ago
  That's not the easiest explanation, it's just more convenient for you. Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you. If they learned new information with no prior visits to any one capable of diagnosing them then the easiest explanation is their experience was real, especially give that this phenomena has been observed in other historical cases. Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    This is the exact opposite of how burden of proof works. An extraordinary claim is being made. The burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim. The claim is not only extraordinary, but the anecdote does not include any information indicating research into the origin of the "voices". I don't have to prove anything. I'm saying I don't believe it. The full article contains zero citations, zero clinical records, zero anything. It's a story. Maybe it's entertaining, but again, it's not science or medicine.
themodelplumber 6y ago
This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_ma_postit_notes_left_in_apartment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_... So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the degree that she perceived her own past experiences forming into intuitions that were so foreign that she interpreted them as others' voices?
- treeman79 6y ago
  I Suffered CO2 poisoning for months. This explanation is believable. My sense of time was screwed up. It got to the point I would often joke about being casualty challenged. (When more lucid) Hallucinations started up from this. A constant sense of doom became the norm. So yea, confused timeline, hallucinations and, and a sense of going to die can make some interesting and unpleasant mental games.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - quietbritishjim 6y ago
    FYI, and sorry for the pedantry, but it's CO (carbon monoxide) poisoning. CO2 (carbdon dioxide) poisoning is also a thing but very hard to do in a domestic scenario, and especially hard to do without noticing because you'd feel very out of breath (too much CO2 in your lungs is exactly what makes you want to take breaths in regular breathing).
    - PaulHoule 6y ago
      I attended a seminar on geoengineering and carbon capture and storage this semester. At some cost we could capture the CO2 that comes out of a power plant, clean it, compress it to 1500 psi or so, then inject into the ground somewhere. Engineers get bonus points when they use the CO2 to flush out extra oil, since CO2 mixes so well with oil. (Roughnecks have been pumping CO2 out of the ground in Texas and using it for oil recovery since the 1970s.) Turns out a CO2 pipeline is more dangerous than a methane pipeline. Methane can burn, but it rises, so the danger is in a limited area. CO2 on the otherhand will sink downhill and accumulate in places and quickly suffocate people.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
baxtr 6y ago
This reminds me of a quote from Mark Cuban: “Unless you have a reliable, duplicatable, scalable and consistent way to bring potential customers in, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby!” I think it’s very similar in science. It’s difficult to argue that this is science because it seems impossible to design a repeatable experiment which yields the same outcome every time.
- marcan_42 6y ago
  Welcome to psychology. Turns out, it's unethical to design "repeatable experiments" when it comes to the human existence, which is why we have to make do with less rigorous forms of science. That doesn't mean it isn't science, it just means it's harder to draw solid conclusions than "just run a repeatable experiment".
  - akimball 6y ago
    It actually requires more rigor. Methodological laxity is particularly deadly in such challenging domains.
  - dash2 6y ago
    This sounds as if you are saying that all psychology experiments are unethical. I'm sure that's not what you meant - expand?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If you were right, science would be limited to designed experiments. The scope of science is broader, and collecting information about rare cases and studying them, even when they can't be predicted ahead of time or artificially induced, is absolutely a part of science. By the logic you stated, seismology or volcanology would not be real sciences either, as earthquakes and volcanic erruptions can't be repeated with the same outcome each time. Now, the article does seem to light on clinical details, and has a few personal flourishes that detract a lot from its use as a basis for a future study of similar cases, so I don't disagree that it's not really a scientific article, but the reasons are more nuanced. Well-written case studies are absolutely a valid scientific tool. This one reads more like an anecdote than a case study, though.
jyriand 6y ago
Simplest explanation is usually the correct one(Occam’s razor). In this case i would agree with the second or third explanations. She probably made it up. Similar thing is going on with resignation syndrome in Sweden, where refugee children are pretending to be be in coma/sleeping because this prevents Sweden to send them out of the country. In this case the woman wanted to get free treatment from NHS. Or maybe this whole story is made up.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > She probably made it up. [...] In this case the woman wanted to get free treatment from NHS. Or maybe this whole story is made up. Per the article, that is a pretty unlikely explanation, given the vacation and her entitlement to free treatment regardless or the psychiatric eval. The more likely explanations are either that the story is made up by the doctor, in whole or in part; or the 3rd explanation of the article, that prior knowledge for the woman, along with the tumor itself and different kinds of unpleasant sensations, led to the psychiatric symptoms focusing on the idea of a brain tumor. EDIT: > Similar thing is going on with resignation syndrome in Sweden, where refugee children are pretending to be be in coma/sleeping because this prevents Sweden to send them out of the country. Reading a bit about this, it seems that the Swedish health authorities who actually investigated these children believe that this is a real condition (whether a novel condition or some form of psychosis or depression), so I'm not sure why you are so confident in asserting that it is an obvious ploy.
filoeleven 6y ago
This reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s experience, somewhat detailed in VALIS, of receiving information via a pink laser aimed at his forehead. One of the things he learned was that his son had a tumor that needed to be removed immediately. Similar to this event, doctors didn’t believe him (there were no signs of a tumor, so they had no reason to) but had a scan done anyway to make him go away, and his son had a tumor exactly as described.
- Trasmatta 6y ago
  Small correction, it was a hernia, not a tumor.
hprotagonist 6y ago
But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared. I love medical reports.
- api 6y ago
  It was a long time ago, but I recall reading once that in some cultures the voices and delusions of schizophrenics tend to be of a more positive nature. In our culture they tend to be almost entirely menacing, paranoid, accusatory, etc. Makes me think about set and setting with psychedelics. Maybe our schizophrenics have menacing delusions because our culture is full of hostility and negativity. There are counterexamples in our culture though. You find them in the new age, occult, and some religious communities. I think some channelers, alien contactees, prophets, etc. probably are schizophrenic but some of them relate positive experiences and messages. Maybe high functioning schizophrenia is just a very non-neurotypical edge case. I'm not downplaying the other aspects of this case though. In this case actual novel and objectively verifiable information seems to have been learned. It's a particularly compelling one because it happened under the loose observation of medical professionals, but if you talk to people you hear less extreme anecdotal experiences like this all the time. I've heard tons of parents tell me stories about spooky parental intuition, things like "knowing" that a child is in danger and going and saving the child just in time. I'm an open minded skeptic on this stuff. I tend toward the skeptical but don't completely dismiss it. Speaking of delusions, the idea that after methodically doing science for only ~200 years we know everything is a peculiar delusion of our culture. Always makes me think of this: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/
  - banads 6y ago
    >It was a long time ago, but I recall reading once that in some cultures the voices and delusions of schizophrenics tend to be of a more positive nature. In our culture they tend to be almost entirely menacing, paranoid, accusatory, etc. In many tribal cultures, what western psychiatry castigates as schizophrenia, they honor as shamanism.
Hitton 6y ago
There is one more alternative explanation. There are so many different people with many different delusions without any substantiation that it's statistically inevitable that in few extremely rare cases the delusion turns out to be true.
- akimball 6y ago
  The likelihood of stopping in an infinite search space depends on the distribution of stop regions. The hypothesis makes an implicit assertion about that distribution. I'd love to see that assertion made explicit, and support provided, if you will.
scottlocklin 6y ago
One of the fun (and a little scary) things about HN is seeing what google trails led people to find the articool in question. In this case, it was almost certainly dexamethasone, which was used in the treatment of this poor lady's tumor, and which was recently revealed, rather unsurprisingly, to be a marginally effective treatment for severe Covid19. I say it's a little scary because it's the sort of thing that one could probably model, and considering the payoff, I'm sure someone has at least tried. In fact, I pitched an idea to DARPA about 12 years ago... Anyway cool story.
- motoboi 6y ago
  I could not completely understand what you said. But found it interesting anyway. Care to explain?
  - scoopertrooper 6y ago
    That's a relief, I thought I was the one having a stroke for a minute there.
- pavel_lishin 6y ago
  Why is it scary? And what's the payoff?
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    A potentially very effective propaganda tool.
    - polytely 6y ago
      You mean like planting an article into the results for a certain search query, then manufacturing a (news)event that causes someone to want to research that particular subject?
      - booleandilemma 6y ago
bondarchuk 6y ago
A woman who had a brain tumour suspected she had a brain tumour and sought diagnosis for it. Sure, the thought was of an unconventional nature, but it was still a thought she was having, despite her feeling that it was foreign in a way. Atavism of the bicameral mind?

Imagine event that could happen once in a million days (once 2700 years) , once in in 10 million days (once in 27,000 years) and so on. When you have hundreds of millions of people, these events happen several times per day. The patient had tumor in her head causing voices. The voices made right call. Voices are not random. They come from the same brain that is worried about being crazy or sick.

carapace 6y ago

Needs a "(1997)" in the title. This sort of thing happens all the time, the unusual thing here is that someone wrote it down and got it published.

leoh 6y ago
Fascinating — have any references?
- carapace 6y ago
  I don't, really, but here's another well-known anecdote: > On one occasion, Dick was startled by a separate recurrence of the pink beam. It imparted the information to him that his infant son was ill. The Dicks rushed the child to the hospital, where his suspicion was confirmed by professional diagnosis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_experiences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_expe... FWIW, I once attended a thing that was sponsored by invisible purple telepathic space dolphins, so... yeah. Just a group hallucination?

marcan_42 6y ago

As I was reading this I immediately went for the third explanation given, or a similar variant. One possible take on it is that the tumour made her plural/multiple. Then her new members wondered where they came from and came up with the tumour explanation, researched treatment, and communicated it back to her main self. Read this if you haven't heard about plurality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicity_(psychology)

caymanjim 6y ago
This isn't science. "Multiplicity" isn't real. The Wikipedia article on disassociative identity disorder ("multiple personality disorder") is much more extensive, and while some psychiatrists consider that to be clinically real, the majority don't. There's no evidence of any of it being anything more than an act. It's all crackpot nonsense.
- bulgagoo 6y ago
  calling something crackpot nonsense is unwarrantedly cruel, violates the site's guidelines, shows lack of empathy with people who might believe that and you should stop doing it. thank you are you unacquainted with the concept of expressing your disagreement without pretending you're better than someone else? if you do that it'll make your point stronger, and should come across as less insecure , less compensating, and less triggered. you can be right from your point of view and so can someone else, and that's okay. no need to try to trash someone else in the process is there?
- marcan_42 6y ago
  "It's all crackpot nonsense" isn't a very good argument when it comes to the human brain, now is it? That sounds like the same class of garbage argument that transphobes use to claim trans people aren't real. You can call it whatever you want, but DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story, and the disorder vs neurodiversity argument is largely tangential to the question of whether the condition exists at all, which it clearly does. "Science" in general has a terrible track record when it comes to the human brain, because we still have no idea how most of it works and you can't exactly attach a JTAG debugger to someone's head. So saying psychological conditions "aren't science" is unscientific, because a proper scientist in the field would accept the limitations of the field, and be open to consistent phenomena (which telepathy isn't with the hard sciences, but multiplicity is).
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > DID is indeed recognized in the DSM-5 and fits the OP story I'm not sure that it fits the OP story, though, at least at is told. As far as I understand, DID would be recognizable to others, it would not be purely perceived as a hallucination by the patient. Even if she were not aware of this, her husband or others around her would have reported behavioral changes, presumably. Otherwise, I tend to agree with what you are saying.

caymanjim 6y ago

I simply don't believe this. The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient. There's no way to prove what really happened, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the easiest explanations are that the entire anecdote is fabricated; that someone was communicating with the patient through normal means and due to illness she interpreted it as a hallucinatory voice; or that the patient had acquired information about the hospital facilities through normal means and due to illness the memories manifested as hallucinatory voices. In the absense of any evidence to the contrary, I'm going with the "100% BS" option. If you click through to the actual PDF, it's not a medical paper. It's a collection of anecdotes without evidence, of lower quality than the light medical anecdotes in Discover magazine. This is neither science nor medicine.

bulgagoo 6y ago
you successfully restore your worldview and advance to the next stage. achievement unlocked. 10 points
badrabbit 6y ago
That's not the easiest explanation, it's just more convenient for you. Burde of proof is on the accuser, you can't prove they fabricated or hallucinated and no one can prove their experience to you. If they learned new information with no prior visits to any one capable of diagnosing them then the easiest explanation is their experience was real, especially give that this phenomena has been observed in other historical cases. Fear of the unknown is also a bias we should be aware of.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  This is the exact opposite of how burden of proof works. An extraordinary claim is being made. The burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim. The claim is not only extraordinary, but the anecdote does not include any information indicating research into the origin of the "voices". I don't have to prove anything. I'm saying I don't believe it. The full article contains zero citations, zero clinical records, zero anything. It's a story. Maybe it's entertaining, but again, it's not science or medicine.

themodelplumber 6y ago

This reminded me of the guy who thought a third party was interfering with his life, and then realized he had CO poisoning thanks to a good person on the internet. And the third party in question was his past self. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_ma_postit_notes_left_in_apartment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34m92h/update_... So I wonder...is it possible that this person's memory (of e.g. personal health research) or consciousness was affected by the malady to the degree that she perceived her own past experiences forming into intuitions that were so foreign that she interpreted them as others' voices?

treeman79 6y ago
I Suffered CO2 poisoning for months. This explanation is believable. My sense of time was screwed up. It got to the point I would often joke about being casualty challenged. (When more lucid) Hallucinations started up from this. A constant sense of doom became the norm. So yea, confused timeline, hallucinations and, and a sense of going to die can make some interesting and unpleasant mental games.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  FYI, and sorry for the pedantry, but it's CO (carbon monoxide) poisoning. CO2 (carbdon dioxide) poisoning is also a thing but very hard to do in a domestic scenario, and especially hard to do without noticing because you'd feel very out of breath (too much CO2 in your lungs is exactly what makes you want to take breaths in regular breathing).
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    I attended a seminar on geoengineering and carbon capture and storage this semester. At some cost we could capture the CO2 that comes out of a power plant, clean it, compress it to 1500 psi or so, then inject into the ground somewhere. Engineers get bonus points when they use the CO2 to flush out extra oil, since CO2 mixes so well with oil. (Roughnecks have been pumping CO2 out of the ground in Texas and using it for oil recovery since the 1970s.) Turns out a CO2 pipeline is more dangerous than a methane pipeline. Methane can burn, but it rises, so the danger is in a limited area. CO2 on the otherhand will sink downhill and accumulate in places and quickly suffocate people.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

baxtr 6y ago

This reminds me of a quote from Mark Cuban: “Unless you have a reliable, duplicatable, scalable and consistent way to bring potential customers in, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby!” I think it’s very similar in science. It’s difficult to argue that this is science because it seems impossible to design a repeatable experiment which yields the same outcome every time.

marcan_42 6y ago
Welcome to psychology. Turns out, it's unethical to design "repeatable experiments" when it comes to the human existence, which is why we have to make do with less rigorous forms of science. That doesn't mean it isn't science, it just means it's harder to draw solid conclusions than "just run a repeatable experiment".
- akimball 6y ago
  It actually requires more rigor. Methodological laxity is particularly deadly in such challenging domains.
- dash2 6y ago
  This sounds as if you are saying that all psychology experiments are unethical. I'm sure that's not what you meant - expand?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
tsimionescu 6y ago
If you were right, science would be limited to designed experiments. The scope of science is broader, and collecting information about rare cases and studying them, even when they can't be predicted ahead of time or artificially induced, is absolutely a part of science. By the logic you stated, seismology or volcanology would not be real sciences either, as earthquakes and volcanic erruptions can't be repeated with the same outcome each time. Now, the article does seem to light on clinical details, and has a few personal flourishes that detract a lot from its use as a basis for a future study of similar cases, so I don't disagree that it's not really a scientific article, but the reasons are more nuanced. Well-written case studies are absolutely a valid scientific tool. This one reads more like an anecdote than a case study, though.

jyriand 6y ago

Simplest explanation is usually the correct one(Occam’s razor). In this case i would agree with the second or third explanations. She probably made it up. Similar thing is going on with resignation syndrome in Sweden, where refugee children are pretending to be be in coma/sleeping because this prevents Sweden to send them out of the country. In this case the woman wanted to get free treatment from NHS. Or maybe this whole story is made up.

tsimionescu 6y ago
> She probably made it up. [...] In this case the woman wanted to get free treatment from NHS. Or maybe this whole story is made up. Per the article, that is a pretty unlikely explanation, given the vacation and her entitlement to free treatment regardless or the psychiatric eval. The more likely explanations are either that the story is made up by the doctor, in whole or in part; or the 3rd explanation of the article, that prior knowledge for the woman, along with the tumor itself and different kinds of unpleasant sensations, led to the psychiatric symptoms focusing on the idea of a brain tumor. EDIT: > Similar thing is going on with resignation syndrome in Sweden, where refugee children are pretending to be be in coma/sleeping because this prevents Sweden to send them out of the country. Reading a bit about this, it seems that the Swedish health authorities who actually investigated these children believe that this is a real condition (whether a novel condition or some form of psychosis or depression), so I'm not sure why you are so confident in asserting that it is an obvious ploy.

filoeleven 6y ago

This reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s experience, somewhat detailed in VALIS, of receiving information via a pink laser aimed at his forehead. One of the things he learned was that his son had a tumor that needed to be removed immediately. Similar to this event, doctors didn’t believe him (there were no signs of a tumor, so they had no reason to) but had a scan done anyway to make him go away, and his son had a tumor exactly as described.

Trasmatta 6y ago
Small correction, it was a hernia, not a tumor.

hprotagonist 6y ago

But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared. I love medical reports.

api 6y ago
It was a long time ago, but I recall reading once that in some cultures the voices and delusions of schizophrenics tend to be of a more positive nature. In our culture they tend to be almost entirely menacing, paranoid, accusatory, etc. Makes me think about set and setting with psychedelics. Maybe our schizophrenics have menacing delusions because our culture is full of hostility and negativity. There are counterexamples in our culture though. You find them in the new age, occult, and some religious communities. I think some channelers, alien contactees, prophets, etc. probably are schizophrenic but some of them relate positive experiences and messages. Maybe high functioning schizophrenia is just a very non-neurotypical edge case. I'm not downplaying the other aspects of this case though. In this case actual novel and objectively verifiable information seems to have been learned. It's a particularly compelling one because it happened under the loose observation of medical professionals, but if you talk to people you hear less extreme anecdotal experiences like this all the time. I've heard tons of parents tell me stories about spooky parental intuition, things like "knowing" that a child is in danger and going and saving the child just in time. I'm an open minded skeptic on this stuff. I tend toward the skeptical but don't completely dismiss it. Speaking of delusions, the idea that after methodically doing science for only ~200 years we know everything is a peculiar delusion of our culture. Always makes me think of this: https://xkcd.com/638/ https://xkcd.com/638/
- banads 6y ago
  >It was a long time ago, but I recall reading once that in some cultures the voices and delusions of schizophrenics tend to be of a more positive nature. In our culture they tend to be almost entirely menacing, paranoid, accusatory, etc. In many tribal cultures, what western psychiatry castigates as schizophrenia, they honor as shamanism.

Hitton 6y ago

There is one more alternative explanation. There are so many different people with many different delusions without any substantiation that it's statistically inevitable that in few extremely rare cases the delusion turns out to be true.

akimball 6y ago
The likelihood of stopping in an infinite search space depends on the distribution of stop regions. The hypothesis makes an implicit assertion about that distribution. I'd love to see that assertion made explicit, and support provided, if you will.

scottlocklin 6y ago

One of the fun (and a little scary) things about HN is seeing what google trails led people to find the articool in question. In this case, it was almost certainly dexamethasone, which was used in the treatment of this poor lady's tumor, and which was recently revealed, rather unsurprisingly, to be a marginally effective treatment for severe Covid19. I say it's a little scary because it's the sort of thing that one could probably model, and considering the payoff, I'm sure someone has at least tried. In fact, I pitched an idea to DARPA about 12 years ago... Anyway cool story.

motoboi 6y ago
I could not completely understand what you said. But found it interesting anyway. Care to explain?
- scoopertrooper 6y ago
  That's a relief, I thought I was the one having a stroke for a minute there.
pavel_lishin 6y ago
Why is it scary? And what's the payoff?
- scottlocklin 6y ago
  A potentially very effective propaganda tool.
  - polytely 6y ago
    You mean like planting an article into the results for a certain search query, then manufacturing a (news)event that causes someone to want to research that particular subject?
    - booleandilemma 6y ago

bondarchuk 6y ago

A woman who had a brain tumour suspected she had a brain tumour and sought diagnosis for it. Sure, the thought was of an unconventional nature, but it was still a thought she was having, despite her feeling that it was foreign in a way. Atavism of the bicameral mind?