Unravel the intricate relationship between ecology and hallucinations. Explore how our environment influences our perception and delve into the fascinating world where nature and mind intertwine, creating a unique perspective on hallucinatory experiences.
The goal is to lay out an ecological analysis and see where we end up.
Taking an ecological approach to a topic that has already been framed representationally means starting from the beginning and reframing the topic.
- The first step is to verb your nouns, because we study verbs
- People hallucinate, and we study hallucinating
- How does hallucinating play out?
- What sustains it on? What disrupts it? What ends it?
Predictions
Auditory hallucinating is the most common form of hallucinating due to the fact auditory information is primarily only used for action selection, vs action control.
- We would also expect auditory hallucinating to be more coherent and robust that visual hallucinating for the same reason.
Questions
Is hallucinating precipitated by anything? Is it instead abnormal attention directed to default mode style neural activity?
- How does hallucinating vary across the various’modalities’?
- What can and can’t you do with respect to various kinds of hallucinations? At what point does the ambiguity that is a hallucination get revealed by it’s relationship to the rest of the perceptual array?
Get Your Information Story Right
All information is specific to the dynamical property that is being lawfully projected into an ambient energy array.
- However, organisms are not always constrained to use that information as information for that property.
- Sometimes, organisms learn to use information for something defined by a sufficiently stable convention, rather than a law.
Get the Neural Story Right
The law-based use of information to control actions requires the nervous system to designate the information to the action systems, and so it should preserve the spatiotemporal structure of the information.
- This kind of activity is stable and robust for as long as the information is present and detected (+/- some calibration), but we predict it cannot be generated to this quality in the absence of information.
- Convention-based information, in contrast, will not create nor require activity of this kind.
