3 ms·
The bah-humbug skeptic would have a number of points to question even without questioning the woman's veracity: 1. "As she arrived there, the voices told her
by saalweachter 5y ago
The bah-humbug skeptic would have a number of points to question even without questioning the woman's veracity:
1. "As she arrived there, the voices told her to go in and ask to have a brain scan for two reasons—she had a tumour in her brain and her brain stem was inflamed." The article says they found a tumor; did they also find inflammation in the brain stem?
2. What was the media culture like during this era? Hallucinations are highly culturally informed; was there a pre-existing reason someone who was hallucinating would be disposed to hearing medical diagnoses?
3. How often does this happen? If only one person has ever hallucinated -- or otherwise predicted or pulled from thin air -- a medical diagnosis and that one instance was correct, that is one thing, but if thousands and thousands of people have heard a voice conveying a diagnosis, or cast the bones, or read the cards, and most of them are wrong, it makes it far more likely that one or two people would get it right by chance.
- tediousdemise 5y agoThe tumor could have bootstrapped the thought that she had the tumor, which led to the actual discovery of the tumor. It's biophysical recursion!
- retrac 5y agoRegarding 3: "helpful" hallucinations are not that unusual. While most who hallucinate are tormented by demons, some hallucinate neutral observers and a few get a "guardian angel" who sometimes gives useful advice. The subconscious can definitely channel "you left the stove on" into a hallucination that commands the person to go turn off the stove. So transformation of awareness of ill-health into that sort of experience doesn't seem too preposterous.