Sacks quotes the historian of science Michael Shermer, who has written that mushers who go for days alone with their dogs in a flat icescape hallucinate horses, trains, UFOs, invisible airplanes, orchestras, strange animals, voices without people, and occasionally phantom people on the side of the trail or imaginary friends…. A musher named Joe Garnie became convinced that a man was riding in his sled bag, so he politely asked the man to leave, but when he […]
I instantly realized I had made a remark that apparently connected with a view he had, or was developing, concerning these two Russian writers. At that point, I should have left the office, making some excuse about needing to give the question more thought. Instead, I said pathetically, “They are both Russian.” via An A from Nabokov by Edward Jay Epstein | The New York Review of Books.
Brain scans show that these geometric hallucinations originate lower down in the visual cortex where “a categorical dictionary of images” seems to reside—“proto-images,” as some neuroscientists call them. What is fascinating about them is their universality—they appear to exist in everyone, regardless of culture or personal history. Like the divine proportion of Fibonacci’s spiral in nature, geometric images seem to be built in to the architecture of our visual system in a pre-organized way. “Such activity operates […]