SIO498: The Science of Hallucinations, Ear-worms, and Phantom Limbs

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 498. I'm your host Thomas Smith and got a fun brain one for you again, I guess, today. Learning about the brain. So interesting. Perhaps the most interesting object in the entire universe. It's not impossible. The very least, it's among the most interesting things in the entire universe, our brains. I feel like most people have not the slightest idea of everything that goes on in our brains. Well, I guess our bodies as well. I mean, there's so many processes and biologically, chemically, everything. I never get tired of learning about it. Dr. Jenessa Seymour, inspired by recent episodes of the show, wanted to tell us about hallucinations and I mean, you might immediately think about visual hallucinations, but what about auditory hallucinations? What about sensory hallucinations what's going on there? What happens when our senses go amok, when something changes, maybe in our body, in our brain, and our brain doesn't know it? That happens, crazy things can happened. We can perceive things that aren't there. How is that different from all of that interesting brain stuff? Stuff. And finally, is AI hallucination a good term for what goes on when we talk about AI hallucinations? I This episode is not much about AI, but in the process of learning about our brains and what goes on, Jenessa's way of teaching us that the term hallucination may not be great when talking about AI, it may not make much sense. There's a much better analogy for what goes on there. So, you love learning about our brains as much as I do, at patreon.com/seriouspod. we'll be on with Dr. Jenessa Seymour.

0:02:06 Thomas: Jenessa Seymour, how are you doing?

0:02:07 Jenessa: I'm doing pretty good. Things are good right now. I coming off the high of the election going well and nobody calling me to complain. So that's nice.

0:02:18 Thomas: Yeah, that's true. I was going to say, we should make sure to signpost where in time we are. Cause like, I'm sure it'll be five seconds until like, if you say things are good, people are going to be like, my God, what, how could you say things are good, right? This is in the brief 10 minute window where after the elections were awesome that one day, just letting everyone know who's listening to us from a Mad Max scenario. Yeah.

0:02:31 Jenessa: Perhaps I should give less time. Yeah. Or I'm just a monster. Whatever.

0:02:46 Thomas: Yeah, So this were listening to the last episode with Stormy and we were talking about AI chatbots and we're talking about them, you people delusional kind of thing. And then also wanted to tell us about hallucinations. And first off, when they say AI hallucinates, I don't know if they're being literal or not, or you can tell me if that's a good word for it. But secondly, you surprising brain thing, which I thought was so interesting about the Stormy episode.

0:03:09 Jenessa: You know, it really inspired me about a topic I'm, I'm done a lot of research on and I'm that I'm really excited about with hallucinations. It did come up in the episode that lots of people with psychosis disorders, they may not all experience hallucinations as a symptom. Often the portrayal that you'll see on TV. When you think about a person hallucinating, you probably think about somebody with a psychosis disorder. You probably think about somebody on drugs where they're also in an altered state of mind. A of the research on hallucinations is focused on people with no delusions at all. So they're very separable as topics and yes

0:03:50 Thomas: They focus on how the hallucinations always serve the plot? Like almost every time it's usually a key character you need to hear from or a message that your character needed to hear. You also talk about mirages around desert oasis, you know, like, is that, is that the same or is that scientifically, a different speaking, how do you guys deal with the, in the desert thirsty, then there's a mirage of like a drinking fountain thing. Like, where's that go in the categories?

0:03:58 Jenessa: Obviously well that's a great example because that would not be a hallucination that would be a misperception so um the mirage is coming from um you have that that heat radiating in the desert um you've probably seen this on like hot pavement before, you know, you see, right. Yeah. California.

0:04:33 Thomas: It's every single day here. Yeah. It's all the time.

0:04:36 Jenessa: I forgot that, um, the road is curved to just right, you See what almost looks like a pool of water. And it's just a heat mirage. I'm sure there's a name for it exactly of the visual illusion it's creating. You are seeing something real and you are misperceiving what it is you're seeing. It's It's sort of like a trick being played on your brain.

0:05:00 Thomas: Well we we can crack open the science book but I think there's also a variety of desert fountain oasis mirage where it really is just out of nowhere, you know.

0:05:11 Jenessa: Yeah. In the movies, yeah, it's often portrayed as, I don't know. I think it's based in that idea that you would see what looked like that watery mirage and then fall into a sort of hallucinatory state, maybe, or that it's sort of wishful thinking leads the person to chase the mirage, right? They're going to portray it like you saw palm trees, which is a little more extreme than just a visual.

0:05:40 Thomas: That's a really hot california day I don't know that doesn't make any sense

0:05:45 Jenessa: I don't have an explanation for that one. There with the definitions of it, because I think Dr. Smirbeck did a really good job with separating out what is a delusion versus just like being wrong, believing incorrect things. Very similarly here, what is hallucination versus just being wrong about what you saw or what you heard or what felt? Does it even mean to see or hear something at all? Physical stimuli eye out there in the world, right? That's physics. There's your perception of it. So this is where my exact field of study is psychophysics, which sounds like a very spooky term, but it's actually a real field. It's probably the oldest field of psychology in terms of behaving as a science. It was one of the first that was like, we're going to sit down in a lab and turn a light bulb on really really dim and I'll go until you tell me you can see it and that is your threshold and then we'll say I'm gonna turn it brighter tell me when you notice that it got brighter and that's a just noticeable difference and um got up to all kinds of wacky stuff like hey can your eye sense weight hold still I'm going to drop tiny little weights on your eyeball. Tell me if you can feel it. Like some

0:07:04 Jenessa: Wacky stuff. Figured out pain thresholds by being like, hey, military, you guys tolerate some nonsense. Come on, send some people over here. Was before my time. Psychophysics is this study of we've got physics out there in the world. We've got psychology in your brain, your perception. Do the two meet up? How how does this happen? Essentially, a typical perception, a perception where everything's going right, is going to be that stimulus hits a sensory receptor, and it gets transduced into a electrical signal that your brain is capable of reading. So your brain does not read photons and vibrations and chemicals. It reads electrical signals. It needs electricity to understand. So um hits a cone or a rod in the back of your eye that's going to create an electrical signal and now you can see something so normal perception that would be photon hits your eye and you see something hooray uh um regular old misperception you know you were it's real dark you're walking through the house and you see something you know what is that you turn the lights on and it's oh I left a coat hanging over a chair and I thought there was a person that's not hallucinating right you just

0:08:27 Jenessa: Misperceive you got ambiguous signals and your brain tried to make sense out of ambiguities

0:08:33 Thomas: And it's really interesting and maybe comforting to anybody who gets scared by stuff that like evolutionarily we're gonna want To always think it's like the monster or, you know, the wild animal or whatever it is like it's our brain is going to be biased toward like that shape. What is it? Must be something dangerous because, you very scared humans ancestors would have survived better if they were more spooked by stuff like that than less.

0:08:56 Jenessa: And that's a perfect way to think about out, you was a very spooked, scared little child, and I probably still am as an adult if I'm admitting it to myself. But I got a lot better about that by engaging in that exact mindset of like, okay, I take a deep breath. Especially once I put my glasses on, because at night I'm walking around without my glasses, it's making it so much worse. Thing I'm looking at in the year 2025 is probably not a scary monster in my house. It's probably objects I left laying around because I am a mess. Not, you know, we live in a cave. There is not a bear. I'm okay. Absolutely, we evolved to look at ambiguous stimuli and see, it could be bad. I should probably react as if it's bad just in case, you know?

0:09:50 Thomas: And I have to imagine like our facial recognition systems and everything. We're, we're always, it's why those, uh, those illusions of like the face that's inverted, the mask that's inverted or whatever, like we'll always see the face both ways around. Cause our brain is like wanting to see a face, just like looking for faces and stuff. And know this is broadly speaking, but like those things explain so much of like paranormal bullshit, you know, claims that wish everybody was kind of familiar with those two of ours.

0:10:16 Jenessa: Yeah, I could go off on this stuff all day about regular old perception and how deceivable it is and manipulable. Um of what you're noticing is like we think about perception as like what we would call bottom up that like the bottom we get this really simplistic uh a photon and that's like light or no light yes or no and then if we put two next to each other it would be like oh a big light or a small light and that you would slowly build complexity of information in the system That is true. That's a real thing your brain does. But there's also top down, which is making probabilistic guesses about what the image is. And you send a signal down that tells the system, hey, if you're getting something ambiguous, ifyou're not so sure, I would resolve your perception in this direction instead of that direction. So that's where if think about if you heard a recording and you weren't sure what it said, once you do know what it says, you can go back and listen to it super noisy and you'll hear the signal.

0:11:21 Thomas: Or even if you know what it doesn't say, like if someone puts the wrong words in it, that's happened when you try to do those like, oh, listen to this record in reverse kind of thing. It's like if someone if you read words while if there's some I think they probably have to be somewhat close, but I don't know. I'm not sure the limits of it. Once you start hearing the wrong, it's the Yanny and Laurel thing. Once people decided, which I thought was pretty easily resolvable by the fact that Laurel is a word and Yanny isn't. So I thought that since it was a dictionary dot com like audio sound bite, I was like that that makes that pretty simple to me. But like once people kind of heard Yanny or they saw Yanny, it'S like so hard to unhear. That's really interesting. Interesting but it also as um having kids it's really interesting too because like feels very um descartes or whatever the very cartesian I suppose they would say where it's like ah we received just the whatever we see receiving our senses and you know building up from that and and all that although I guess it ultimately it was like I think therefore I am and god god and some crap so it wasn't really that useful. But it's so true when you have kids. I think a lot of like spacey they are is for one, their genetic predilection for ADHD. For me, that's one of it. But no, but like they don't know what to filter out yet. Like their whole they're seeing everything.

0:12:33 Jenessa: Yes

0:12:34 Thomas: Like imagine seeing all light that is coming into your eyes and not having a coherent way to like situate it in your brain. It's really interesting to think about like the fact that like for the room stays still when we move our heads, but we have to learn that, don't we? Like there's those things you can do where if deaden you some sort of nerve or something so that you think you're moving your eye, but you're not, then the room will move because your brain's anticipating that it will will change because your eye is moving. It's It's like really crazy how much of that stuff, obviously, you know, way more about it than I do, but I just, I think I've read a book on this or something and it's coming back to me. It'S just really interesting to think about how much of our perception is going to be those shortcuts where we're fitting it into an architecture that we're always expecting.

0:13:20 Jenessa: Do learn so much that lets us essentially use that top -down predictive system to say let's just process this more efficiently don't waste energy when I look at something thing that is, you know, I live with my partner. If vaguely my partner shape moves through my periphery, I don't need to dedicate a ton of energy to being like, what if it's another person who looks almost exactly like, like, no, stop it. Like, I know who that is. We don't, we don't need to do that. There's a cat in the house. If there's something vaguely cat shaped making cat noises, it's the cat. Like we don'T have to try to figure out if it'S another cat. I don'T think think another cat got in the house. We're fine. So it's a similar type of process that your brain is doing all the time to just say, like, that stuff isn't important right now. And I have a really good guess what it is. Don't waste energy being extra sure what it ist. Like, I already

0:13:50 Thomas: Always

0:14:21 Jenessa: Know.

0:14:21 Thomas: Like in a, in a situation, you the wild where it's like live or die by these fast reactions or something. I'm sure it needs to save time. I guess my question would be, I imagine the line's got to be a little bit blurry between a hallucination a misperception. Because I do feel like oftentimes when see something or hear something where you're not sure, brain is doing an autocomplete as we're talking about. And sometimes it can feel like like a hallucination. I wonder that line seems hard to draw. You know, one actually on the topic I was going to mention, have I a lot of auditory hallucinations. Well, I don't know. I'm not sure if that's the right word for it. Maybe I'll find out from this conversation, but just I've a very active, like imagination of sound.

0:14:59 Thomas: Like I'm always hearing music all the time in my head. And sometimes it can go a little weird, but one a feeling that I've had that I think almost every parent has had when they're in the shower and they hear something that's like, that's, is that my kid crying? Is that my kids screaming? Cause like there's enough sounds going on that you can pick out some sort of high pitch sound, you know, that it's like somewhere and like your brain is looking for like that child crying, that child screaming to the point where it's sometimes it's unsettling and it won't stop. And you gotta be like, is everything okay? You know, but it's, it's that kind of thing, right? Where you're picking it out, even though it's not there. And so what's the line between actually you're creating something that's not There in your brain in some way versus just miss hearing or miss seeing something.

0:15:41 Jenessa: So generally the definition of a hallucination would be that it is a completely false perception, where the way I would think of it is um photons hit your eye or no remotely relevant photon hit your eye and yet you are seeing something so as compared to there is a vaguely person shaped object in the corner and I thought I saw a person that is a misperception there's just a white corner this is a white room there's nothing there's not a chair in the the corner. There's not a vase in the corner, there's nothing in the corner and I am looking directly at it and I see a person that's a hallucination. Technically my eyes are open there's photons hitting my eyes but there's nothing that should possibly

0:16:33 Thomas: Okay. I wasn't sure if it would just be like a of a blurred where it's like, again, with the autocomplete sense, like if your brain is kind of making up half a person from some other stimuli, but I guess it sounds like like by the definition, that's not really a consideration.

0:16:47 Jenessa: Typically we would not consider it that way and in a lot of ways that's because of what we're looking for in brain activity as well that when you are mis - perceiving, we would expect that, you your brain activity looks as if you are looking at whatever you're looking at, hearing whatever it is you're hearing, and you're doing difficult attentional work trying to, oh, there's a lot of noises. Yeah, that the white noise of a shower is something that if listen hard to white noise because we are listening for something, thing, we start hearing things. That's completely normal for your brain to go through noise and look for a signal because you were trying to. It was dead silent in the room and I'm sitting next to you and you're like, do you hear that music? And I'm like, no.

0:17:23 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:17:37 Jenessa: That's kind of the distinction we would make.

0:17:38 Thomas: That's you gaslighting me because you definitely also hear it. Gotcha, gotcha.

0:17:42 Jenessa: There's your delusion. So that's how they interact, actually. And I think music is a great place to start. There's a really cool paper on this that said, okay, wait a minute. All have, most of us have internal monologues, not everybody. All, or most of us, have internal musical imagery. You know? How would you know you're musically hallucinating versus I just, you know, I have a song stuck, I got a song song stuck in my head right now. So is it that? And the people who have musical hallucinations will tell you, no, nope. I can tell you the difference right now because I spent my whole life getting songs stuck in My Head just like everybody else. And this is different.

0:18:03 Thomas: Gotcha, yeah.

0:18:26 Jenessa: A really cool paper on it that primarily what it did, it was just survey type data, but they got a huge sample, and they pulled people in who do and don't get musical hallucinations, self -reports, and they said, all right, going on? And they said okay, first of all, tell me about a song stuck in your head, which the science -y word for this is an earworm. Would you do this to me I that's

0:18:51 Thomas: Don't know. I feel like it's from the German or some crap, maybe French. I Don't Know. I Feel Like It's a Translation of Something.

0:18:53 Jenessa: So it be look so visceral I just don't even want to think about that but um the

0:19:02 Thomas: Not like worms get stuck in a lot of things in other contexts, you know, it doesn't really doesn't really fit. Swear when I first heard that it was presented to me as it was a translation of something. Now I have to look it up.

0:19:09 Jenessa: They're slippery they move about huh I wonder that yeah like maybe Maybe it's, um, an idiom in some other language.

0:19:21 Thomas: German. Knew it. I even said German. So it's a direct translation of the German word Arwurm, which means catchy tune or earwig. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah.

0:19:31 Jenessa: Even worse, blech, bleh.

0:19:33 Thomas: So, okay. That doesn't help much, I guess. I was, I was hoping that the German, you know, like it would be an idiom that would make more sense in another language where like worm, you know, but it sounds like for them, it's like, yeah, it'S from, you know, when a worm crawls into, but it's just the German version of it, but it's from, it dates back to not long enough ago, I I guess that, there was like, yeah, centuries old, you inside. I don't know. Oh wait, this is AI. Nevermind. This could be itself a hallucination. Let's see here.

0:19:36 Jenessa: It's still gross. Mm -hmm. Ugh. Goddammit.

0:20:03 Thomas: I'll go to actual Wikipedia.

0:20:04 Jenessa: Goddammit, yes, do not read me, fucking Google.

0:20:07 Thomas: I always, I always not thinking unthinkingly start reading the AI thing. And they're like, wait a minute.

0:20:12 Jenessa: I hate it.

0:20:13 Thomas: It's, it's probably 50 % true, but you don't know which part of it is. So it's useless. Of course.

0:20:19 Jenessa: You just never, oh my god, The other day, I was trying to Google to double check my city, elected our first ever Black woman mayor. I think our first -ever Black mayor, period, which is weird for a very Black city. Tried to Google. I was, like, double -checking. This is our first Black mayor. Right? And Google very confidently told me, yup, you're right. This is your first Black mare, and her name is Valerie. And I was like, that's super not her name. That's not even close. It just made up a name. And I was like, why would you do this? Just say you don't know. So dumb.

0:20:55 Thomas: Is, it's an earworm and it is gross. And I agree, but it is based on German and German is gross, so that's why.

0:20:57 Jenessa: It's gross. Yeah. A people, people who don't mind saying things that horrify me. So, uh, okay. Concept of a song stuck in your head, it pretty much universal humans experience this and what characterized it when they did this really detailed survey of just you know trying every which way to get at this internal experience so at the end of the day you have to like tell me about it right okay what jumps out uh to we're gonna look at the song stuck in your head musical imagery imagery, and musical hallucinations. The song Stuck in Your Head, it's the least voluntary, which is kind of exactly in the name, right? I can't make it stop. It's just, God, it'S driving me nuts. Repetitive, so it tended to be a couple of bars.

0:22:07 Thomas: A good point. Yeah because everything stuck in my head does pretty short parts of it unless I start thinking about it. And I'm like, I would like that to go in other places.

0:22:17 Jenessa: Kind of have to, right? And the thing, in some ways, what's getting it stuck in your head almost seems to be the fact that you're stuck on a couple of bars. Like sometimes listening to it can kind of get it out of your head, figuring out the words, figuring figuring out, like, what's the next part of the song? You can almost get your brain to, like finish it and yourself of this thing. Study is 2018, so with that context, most common genre is pop music, is what's getting stuck in people's heads. I had to speculate, I think what might be happening is pop Top music has less diversity of chord progressions, and I think it's just it resolves less often. It's easier to accidentally, instead of like almost finishing the sentence, go back to the chorus, go back to The First Verse. It doesn't have as obvious of an ending, and so it might get stuck in a loop, I think is what's going on.

0:23:14 Thomas: That's that's one way to think about it also. That's just the music people listen to. So it's like the most it's Like if people are asking or answering what songs are stuck in their head, it would make sense that statistically the most would be the songs people listen to?

0:23:20 Jenessa: Possibility. Put a pin in that because that's going to come back when we get to the hallucinations. Musical imagery. This is the most voluntary and that's when you are trying to listen to music in your head. Most commonly reported by musicians. Doing this for the purpose of rehearsal and reproduction of a previously heard piece yeah

0:23:51 Thomas: I'm just listening to tunes in my head, but yeah, sure. I, that too.

0:23:54 Jenessa: This is the intentional almost like a musical version of an internal monologue that you are purposely reproducing music in your head um the most commonly reported genre was rock music in this sample in 2018 um less likely to be pop in in that case. Musicians were more likely to report musical imagery and having a song stuck in their head. They were less likely to support the hallucinations. Proposal from the authors, it might just be musicians had more voluntary cognitive control over their inner music.

0:24:10 Thomas: That is interesting.

0:24:39 Jenessa: So but the song stuck in your head is the most involuntary kind of experience. So it's to say exactly what's going on there.

0:24:49 Thomas: Know. Like I said, if I I, need to get rid of the song in my head, I can do it. I just can focus on another song or I can move it. Like you said, finish the song, move on to something else. So I don'T know. Yeah. Maybe that's part of it. I DON'T KNOW.

0:25:01 Jenessa: Tough to say from this study. I think all of these are reasonable answers for sure.

0:25:07 Thomas: MEAN, JUST IN CASE IT WASN'T CLEAR. I'M ANSWERING BECAUSE I'M I'm a musician. I was putting myself in that category. I wasn't sure of that.

0:25:11 Jenessa: No I understand that I also I don't know if I ever told you this I went to college thinking I was going to be a choir teacher that was like my intended career path at the time I've I've been I was playing piano and singing in choir for years I totally thought that's what I was going and then I got to college and things changed and then I studied deaf people for a a living. So I couldn't have more changed my career path if I tried. Yeah, I have some background in that kind of thing. So resonate some of this. We turn to our people who have experienced musical hallucinations and we say, OK, questions. What's going on here? They are perceiving music with no external stimuli. How is it different? Because I mean, I can also sit in a quiet room and have a song stuck in my head or sit in a quietroom and choose to experience music. So what is this? The least voluntary. That's almost by definition. If you're hallucinating, you didn't like try to do that, right? Was the least repetitive. The most commonly reported genre is classical music. Specifically, church hymns are coming up a lot. It seems like it might be based on this is 2018. It's older adults who are most likely to experience this. Think it might just be what you heard when you were a kid is

0:25:20 Thomas: Don't think you told me that. Neat. Interesting.

0:26:31 Jenessa: Like that just wormed its way so deep into your brain. So when your brain is kind of malfunctioning, that's like, yeah,

0:26:37 Thomas: My thought was, because it comes to hallucinations, people do hallucinate religious stuff a lot. And it's, you know, some people think that's because like God is real. I think it's more like, no, it's because those are the things like your our brain thinks that that's the like important, important, you of the universe, like it would make sense that it's going to it's Going to offer those hallucinations. Don't I know if there's anything to that in terms of the music. I Don't know. Like it's important in a way or something.

0:27:02 Jenessa: See that in my head. I always thought like okay so like I was raised Catholic so there are songs that if you know I went to church every Sunday and like when I was going to Catholic school we went to Church every day if you played that song right now you play like the opening couple of chords I could sing that whole thing right now and I haven't heard it in a decade and like I think that would still be true when I'm 90 and I kind of wonder if like when we're all old in the nursing home are we going to just be hearing Biggie hallucinated instead of...

0:27:36 Jenessa: Yeah, is that what's going to... Oh, God, let that not be the hallucination I can't get away from.

0:27:34 Thomas: Somebody wants to know it is too late. Sorry, it is. Well, we'll have to see when we're 90 and we'll we'll lock eyes in the old folks home and I'll be like, and you'll be doing you're like, and I'd be like no, it's somebody. Body we'll see who's right yeah

0:27:49 Jenessa: You're so right. Good. Oh god, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Oh my god. Oh God, you probably are right. Jeez. Oh that's one possibility, right? Is it's just what you heard the most when you were a kid will it transition away from church hymns for that reason or maybe what you're saying is it possible that that is something that was just so deeply emotionally meaningful and so when their brain starts to get an ambiguous uh signal that it's sort of misprocessing it and going for something deep in there that's like emotionally important maybe that could be what's happening.

0:28:35 Thomas: Well I guess I guess it depends on what you're going to tell me is going on in our brains and why why people are hallucinating music I don't know oh

0:28:42 Jenessa: So it's strange. So sticking with, I'm going to leave voices off for a second. For auditory, we're going to stick to music or tinnitus is just like ringing in the ears. That's a much more simple sound. Visual hallucinations, that can happen in many contexts. The ones that I've most often studied are people losing their vision. For tinnitus, it happens often to people who are losing their hearing, and it can progress to these musical hallucinations. People who lose a limb, it's nearly universal. They will get phantom limb.

0:29:20 Jenessa: So there's something going on. When you lose a sense, you tend to hallucinate in that sense. The visuals, visuals uh it's called charles bonet syndrome because it's named after a man who charles bonet I think was french and he was the first to document it a long time yeah from that name probably a good guess um was quite a longtime ago he documented it in I want to say it was his grandfather and then it happened to him as well as he got older um somebody is losing their vision, it's largely a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning the person has started to visually hallucinate. They're reporting to you, I'm seeing things that are not there. And you look and there is no brain tumor and there is no new medication and there ist no disorder you can blame it on. And you check them and everything's healthy except they're going blind. Bonet syndrome, There you go. That's what it is. Depending on how you ask the question, the prevalence is somewhere between less than 1 % of people going blind or about 60 % of of people going blind.

0:29:36 Thomas: A good guess that's a big discrepancy yeah

0:30:36 Jenessa: So what they did in one study was they asked the question this way, hey, so this is a thing that happens to people sometimes when they're losing their vision, and it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't means they have a mental health disorder. It doesn'T mean there's anything wrong with their physical health. Just happens sometimes. It's it's no big deal. Has that ever happened to you? All of a sudden, everybody says yes. Don't know know what's normal or not until you sort of tell about other people's experiences. So that's Charles Bonet. Is near universal in people losing their hearing. The musical ear, again, I bet you it's underreported for people who are losing their hearing. So, okay, something must be happening. Happening, how can it be that you lose a sense and then you hallucinate in that sense? Why? What is going on? Did a really cool study here where they took people who self -report Charles Bonet syndrome. Yeah, I'm just seeing things. The MRI. I'm going to give you a little button. What you're going to do is as soon as you start to see something, press and hold. And when it goes away, you can let go. Now I have a marker. You're just sitting in there and we're just taking a constant recording of blood blood flow IN the brain and then you press a button and we have a recording while you're hallucinating. You let go, we have the recording afterwards. Then I ask you, well, you know, I give it a little bit for everything to wash out sort of, and then I say, say, hey, what'd you say? And you tell me and I write it down. Do we see? First thing that will probably seem obvious, but it was important to document this, the activity in the visual brain areas matched what they saw. So if they say I saw a face, the fusiform face processing area was active. They said it was really colorful, the area V4, which is involved in color processing, was very active. So their brain looks like they saw something. It would be almost indistinguishable from if... I don't know that I could look at this MRI and tell you the difference between they hallucinated it or they really saw it. Just looks the same.

0:32:56 Jenessa: 10 seconds prior to them pressing the button, so prior to them having a conscious experience of it, which is the first area where visual processing starts, like really basic visual processing, this build up an activity. There's always activity in your brain, right? It's never doing nothing. Be dead. Are always firing a little bit and fMRI is measuring blood flow. So there is always blood feeding these neurons. When they fire, that consumes energy. So they need some blood flow to them. When they fire a lot, they need more blood because they need to pull oxygen and nutrients to stay alive. Looks like these cells in V1 start to fire like crazy and then it hits some threshold where the activity waves out to the rest of the system almost the same way regular vision would work. You know, if I shined a light in your eye that it was just super duper dim. It might activate a few rods and cones in your eye, but like by the time that activity tries to make its way all the way to your, uh, cortex through all these other streams of processing, it just kind of dies out. Like it wasn't strong enough.

0:32:55 Thomas: Gotcha like a noise gate yeah

0:34:17 Jenessa: Yeah. Kinda like, um. It just one little photon is not enough.

0:34:22 Thomas: It's got to go through all those circuits to recognize stuff and to yeah wow really interesting now

0:34:28 Jenessa: One rod gets activated, that could be a fluke, but many or the same rod getting activated over and over and that means something. Because remember, it's always firing. It's always hiring a little bit. We need it to be firing above baseline for it to mean something. It's essentially, V1 always has its random baseline activity. It starts to have still random nonsense but this really heightened random activity it's almost like a seizure and then once it hits some threshold it's like your brain decides I must be seeing something and it floods out through the network and says send this signal somewhere is that a face is that a texture? Is it a car? Is it a statue? I don't know. Send it somewhere and it washes out into the system and if it washed out into the face area, you saw a face. If it went over to the color area

0:35:26 Thomas: What if I had a musical hallucination of I've just seen a face by the beatles would that throw it off it's gonna be be a real hallucination on first situation. No, that's so bad. I don't know what I'm doing. Go on.

0:35:41 Jenessa: Well, yeah, I mean think about, you you would expect if somebody was on a hallucinogenic drug is that all of these pathways have just been blown open. So everything's kind of cross -activating everything in the thresholds for one area to activate another area.

0:35:57 Thomas: The noise gate. Anything goes.

0:36:00 Jenessa: Exactly. That is precisely what is happening, literally. It's just too damn easy to activate anything. So it's all cross -blending and it's synesthetic. The most commonly reported experience is synesthesia On hallucinogenic drugs. So essentially, what we think is going on and what we've observed in all of these types of hallucinations is that the random baseline firing rate has just gone way up in these brain areas. That seems to happen after the sensory loss in relatively predictable way. Anyway, this is starting to get into the realm of stuff I noticed in my research that I needed to have published it. Honestly, I need to just make this like a blog post and be like, yeah, it's not peer reviewed, whatever. Somebody steal it. I don't care. Are a ton of case studies where what we're seeing is if you were to lose your vision slowly, which is if you live long enough, you of people will get, pretty much everybody is going to need reading glasses. You get into your 40s and 50s, you're going to, all watched our parents grab the menu at the restaurant.

0:37:12 Thomas: Slightly different thing. Yeah. That's the lenses aren't plastic enough.

0:37:17 Jenessa: And you get older, that happens, right? That's separate. Like cataracts, relatively common, but we have a pretty be a a big deal kind of surgery for it. That's not available in other places. So you do see people with pretty severe blindness from cataracts in countries that don't have access to that kind of medical care. But in the U .S., cataract -caused blindness is Cataracts are extremely common. If you have access to medical care, it's not really going to be a permanent cause of blindness. Degeneration glaucoma diabetes retinopathy all of these things can start to slowly affect your vision so over time you're losing your vision in those case studies case I looked at and I mean I was looking at this for a long time pulling every case I could where somebody lost their vision and started to hallucinate is in the range of two to three years years after the diagnosis, they started to hallucinate. They lost their vision in a very immediate way, some sort of trauma to the eye or a surgery or even just a surgery where they had to wear an eye patch, so they're going to get their vision back eventually, but for now, they're blind in both eyes because they've got a blindfold on. Hallucinations start within two days, 48 hours, sometimes as early as two hours. Are having extreme vivid hallucinations. It seems like there's something going on uh is consistent across these different types you lose your vision quickly you hallucinate quickly you lose you're hearing quickly you get tinnitus very quickly um a limb is almost always immediate um phantom limb I'm sure people have heard about that one I feel like we just have less of a reporting problem because Because partly, I think it's just, it's so hard to ignore. It's

0:39:05 Jenessa: So obvious. And maybe because it's veterans, like, I don't know, maybe culturally, we're just, yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

0:39:05 Thomas: There's probably not much stigma too it's probably like oh yeah yeah yeah

0:39:15 Jenessa: Somehow, it'S just not perceived as, like a thing that's crazy. Because there's something about hearing things and seeing things that people just assume it's associated with schizophrenia and other psychosis disorders. And we just don't associate phantom limb that same way. So people are just more comfortable talking about it. And sure enough, 100 % of amputees are like, yes, I feel the limb and it is very confusing and upsetting. Setting um what is that about um weird what we think is going on you look at this is a little tough to explain without the visual of a brain but um you were to imagine it

0:39:42 Thomas: Everyone at your own brain real quick take out your brain

0:39:59 Jenessa: If you were to imagine there's an of the brain that's a map of your body, not like lined up exactly right. Like your face is in a different spot because your face is so important to map differently. We've But talked about before how like your gets way more representation. Everybody's hand does because your hand is just so much more important. I don't need really great like fine point discrimination of my back. Like who cares where exactly something's poking my back? We've talking about violinists, like the two fingers that they use the most get it way more representation compared to I do not play violin I don't use that

0:40:40 Thomas: And I imagine so that's something that can change that's like a plasticity you yeah

0:40:45 Jenessa: Exactly that's my uh thing is like how changeable is all of this um it is changeable and happens when something really dramatic happens like your whole arm is gone on so that area that should represent your arm if your face were to be you know okay like here's the part of your brain that represents your arm and if to the left of it was the part of your body and to the right of it now we've got this part that used to represent your hand is just empty it's not doing anything except it is doing something it's firing it's firing above baseline and it just starts to fire fire fire like crazy you feel something that it used to mean when that fired something was touching my hand I guess something's touching my hand eventually what we think is going to happen is that the face will move in there We like to have lots of representation of our face to be able to feel those touches, to have feedback when we move our lips, when we remove our eyes, to have sensory feedback of that. So as it moves in there, eventually we would hope that you would stop having those phantom feelings. They can be especially if there's pain involved. It's extremely uncomfortable.

0:42:06 Thomas: Why is it so painful? Why isn't it just like, you know, oh, feeling sensations because F nature and it hates us.

0:42:14 Jenessa: Pain. Well, first of all, pain is very poorly understood. All pain is completely subjective. Subjective. Your perception of light is subjective insofar as I have to ask you, right? Like, what color do you see? How bright is it? At the end of the day, I mean, I can get an objective measure of the number of photons coming out and I can say, well, I know it got brighter. I'm still going to ask you, like, you Know, just because four more photons came out doesn't mean you necessarily perceived it as brighter, but like I objectively know it got brighter. What would be the objective pain measure? I mean, I can tell you how much pressure is being applied to your skin. I can telling you how hot something is, but I can't tell you how much that's supposed to hurt. Do have pressure sensors in your body. You have have hot and cold sensors in your body, but you also have pain receptors. And it's, it's just, you know, we have that stupid chart with your like, oh, sad face. And like, some of us don't do that, right? Some of us are like, this hurts really bad. Oh, no, like the face is not gonna do it for us. That's also very cultural. Pain is just very difficult to understand, period but it's also um the last thing your body ever wants to do is learn to ignore a pain signal if something's putting pressure on me uh um you until just now that I was sitting with my foot my under me and I was setting on it and I didn't feel it until just now because I thought about it and like you probably didn't think about the way the chair feels on the back of your legs until I just said it. And then it's like, oh, my clothes are touching me. Like the blech about that might be more of a me thing.

0:43:36 Thomas: Unfortunately, I

0:43:59 Jenessa: I just don't want anything to touch me. But everything's itchy all the time. Yeah, even if it's a pleasant feeling, you get used to the way the chair feels under your legs and then you stop feeling it. Sound of white noise, like we it tune out. Some of us tune out noises, some of us don't. Something about pain that makes it really hard to, I think, for that brain area to learn to do something else. It just is so latched on to like, ow, my arm, ow my arm. Ow my arm danger danger danger um

0:43:59 Thomas: Was going to say. Yeah.

0:44:44 Jenessa: I um tinnitus out of nowhere I'm not losing my hearing I just had like um tmj dysfunction and that clenching was like messing with my auditory nerve um I actually had tinnitis explained to me that same way that

0:44:57 Thomas: Heard it from a British person? Because I always thought that was how British people said it. And we said tinnitus, but it could be. Yeah, no, I'm sure.

0:45:02 Jenessa: I either is fine, I but this audiologist said like um way to think of it was people get tinnitus and like it just doesn't bother them which I don't know what kind of absolute serial killer you must be to have this ringing not drive you insane um some people are just like yeah I you know the big the best predictor of how much it bothers you is not how how loud it is. And I was like, how, how can that be? That it being loud and screechy doesn't tell me how bad it's going to be. I'm baffling. It seems to be is that it onset during a period of stress. And for me, I got it, right um, at the beginning of COVID and at the beginning of law school. Great. Um and the way she explained it was, um stress model There is like so your body and your brain were looking for danger signals and like quite literally a fire alarm turned on in the other room. So your brain just latches onto it as like danger, danger, dangerous, scary, scary noise, noise. And so you pay a ton of attention to it, and that accidentally makes it worse. That trains your brain to listen for it. So you listen, and then you draw a connection, and so ignore it is like such a douchey thing to say about a thing that's driving someone insane. Sane but like a more compassionate version is like let's work on techniques we're going to use to try to give it as little attention as possible because your brain has sort of decided this is a danger signal the way that pain is a danger signal and has latched onto it and so we have to find a way to like teach your brain that it's not a bad scary signal and that's how we're gonna like come to live with this thing that's probably not going away so

0:45:18 Thomas: Agreed. Interesting. So I get tinnitus a lot. I have the loss I was born with, but I also, I think I get it in both ears, like including my good one. So, I don't know if that's it but when it comes on it like for me I always think of it as like my brain needs to reset the context you know like it's almost like I get dialed into like the wrong background if normally I'm kind of filtering stuff out, it feels like like it'll come on and then sometimes quickly I can get rid of it. Sometimes, like, it'll quickly adjust. I guess I've never even looked into this, but I can get really intense bouts of it that are short. Then there are the steady ones that are like not as severe. I don't really know why that is, but like sometimes the, short ones are crazy. Like it is almost like the flashbang grenade in the, you know, in the movies. Don't know what the reason for that is, but that'll go away kind of just as fast.

0:47:42 Jenessa: I think everybody gets that quick one sometimes that like saving private ryan like whoa what was that yeah that's happened to me my whole life I'll just like every once in a while I'm like whoa like my hearing just just dampened for a second.

0:47:55 Thomas: That's good. I've never heard anyone talk about that. So I don'T, I didn't know that. Like, it's pretty alarming.

0:48:01 Jenessa: All hallucinations, I think people think they're crazy and they don't want to talk about it.

0:48:07 Thomas: That one? I don' t know. That's just like a weird ear thing. I don''t think people think. I feel like in this day and age, everybody if was experiencing that, I feel like I would have heard about it. But could be wrong. It might just be not as many people as you think.

0:48:10 Jenessa: Weird. Yeah. I mean, it sounds super common, but it happens to me often enough. My dad, my dad has definitely said that it happens to him because when I started talking about when I got like chronic tinnitus, he was like, yeah, like this. And I'm like, no, not that. Like that happens to to me sometimes but no this is I have it 24 7 in my right ear um it's screechy and obnoxious and it sucks

0:48:41 Thomas: Have you tried the tapping thing that actually can work quite well? Okay.

0:48:45 Jenessa: I tried everything the thing that finally worked for me was I saw that audiologist and um well first of all just being validated because um she was like you are correct this is maddening you're not the only patient I've ever seen who's in misery from this um have somebody explain it to me like why is it that this is like invading my life right now um then she got me these devices well got me they were very expensive um literally all it it is. It looks like a hearing aid. It plays white noise. What she specifically had me do is you turn them up so that you can just barely still hear the ringing. So it's not to cover it up. And the idea is to train my brain that it's Not Bad and Scary. Like not, we're going to not hear the noise because the noise sucks. And so the noise is bad and scary and we cover up the bad noise. No, no, no. Make it like, so when I first got them, I had them really loud. We just whoosh in the back of my head all the time from this white noise. And I could still hear this little like kind of screeching, but I could barely hear it over the whooshing white noise. I could rarely talk to anybody because I couldn't hear anything over the two of those noises. And it slowly like taught my brain on a physiological level, but also on a psychological level, like it's okay. It's there, but it's not the worst thing in the world. It''s there, but it''s not the noisiest noise in the whole wide world. And then slowly I was able to turn them down and it almost like turned the screech down with it. It took like years and like also of therapy but

0:50:29 Jenessa: Um

0:50:29 Thomas: That's crazy. Wow. It wasn't able to, like, go away.

0:50:33 Jenessa: It's still there like I'm because we're talking about it and I'm thinking about it I can hear it right now um I've gotten to a point where I can mostly not I don't think about it it's not like my realm of attention which is really the goal um most people I mean like literally bothersome tinnitus which you do have to distinguish from just people people who experience it and are like whatever bothersome tinnitus like the suicide rate is through the roof like it's it's um for people who have it 24 7 which was me I I'm fine I'm good nobody needs to worry about me but there was definitely a time where I was like I not going to kill myself I am worried I will wake up in the er because I like tried to dig the sound out of my head when I lost my mind. I was like, really? This happened during COVID. So I was home alone in the quiet, just locked in my house, listening to my ears screaming at me. I might lose my mind in here. This be it. This good be what's going on with pain, brain won't let it go. Regular old touch, if you're not experiencing pain, it seems that amputees are able to like kind of let that go a little easier. The pain is involved, God, god, that can just lock in. It's really hard to get it back out. But essentially, the same thing is going on, visual, auditory, that tactile, the of a limb. There's just this hyperactivity. It's random firing, but it's way above baseline. And that brain area is essentially just telling you as a sort of bottom -up signal, well, I'm firing. And the more top -down interpretation is, well, that brain area is firing, and it must mean something. And normally, when my visual cortex fired, I saw something, so I guess I'm seeing something? Let me take my best guess at what I I must be seeing, and your brain would have no way of knowing that the place this signal came from was not a photon hitting your eye, pressure hitting your skin, a pressure wave hitting your eardrum. How would it know? It only knows things came from the environment because it has eyes, and if it has lost connection with the eyes, it's not how it works, you know? So if the visual cortex fires, you're going to see something. And if it fires randomly way above baseline, your brain just starts taking its best guess at what it saw. And it takes this ambiguous nonsense signal and it starts to see some thing. Is really interesting that kind of ties this all back together, ringing in the ears, you recognize it as like, what the hell is that? We do see people sometimes, their initial perception, it's so vivid. That they almost think it's real hey do you see that no oh shit I'm unwell as opposed to the delusion the psychosis would be you're in on it you're part of the problem I see now so if we see somebody with schizophrenia who is both delusional and hallucinating there's an fbi agent in the corner you see him too right and I say no and they say all right you're gaslighting me you're part of the problem here. Our patients with Charles Bonnet, who do not have psychosis, they say, do you see that guy over there? And I say, no. And they say, please take me to the hospital. I am

0:51:20 Thomas: Mm. Point so the so the point is like your your brain is heavily involved in it's not like this objective thing um

0:54:07 Jenessa: In trouble. Things have gone terribly wrong. Or they're an older adult and they're so afraid that everyone's going to think they're crazy and they'll put me in a home. They see something and they look for clues about, does anybody else see it? And when it's obvious no one else sees it, They don't say anything. And they just live with hallucinations and they don't tell anybody because they're scared. That sucks.

0:54:32 Thomas: You see Paul Bettany and whoever that little girl was and they help you do math, possibly.

0:54:39 Jenessa: Yeah. Oh, that was, oh, I don't want to say that was a good movie because I haven't revisited it in so long.

0:54:47 Thomas: I bet it wasn't.

0:54:47 Jenessa: It might be terrible. I bet it was terrible about people with disabilities. Who knows? Something that's really weird that ties it all all back together, you can have tinnitus and be like, well, I know that sound isn't in the environment. I did catch myself occasionally if I was really focused on my work, I kept turning to my right to be like what is that obnoxious thing? And then I'd be like it's my ear. And as soon as I focused in, I would go, oh, my damn ear again. So it was this really intrusive sound. But if I I thought about it. I knew. The musical ear. Sometimes when they first hear it, they're like, is there a radio on? What is this? And then eventually they go, oh God, I'm hallucinating. Oh no. Oh no, because they don't have psychosis. So they are aware. Hear a sound. Nobody else hears a sound something has gone terribly wrong. That doesn't mean they have voluntary control over it necessarily, but they're still just like, uh -oh, oh no, oh no. They're not having a delusion around it. Whereas with a delution, you might think, oh, somebody is tricking me with a radio or the radio is a sign. I have to follow it. I have to go somewhere, just something. There's something about voices. Can find no case study of a person who who hallucinated voices, who did not have psychosis.

0:56:10 Thomas: Interesting.

0:56:11 Jenessa: Observed frequently in the literature everywhere, there seems to be a consensus on this. There is something about hearing voices. You can have musical hallucinations with humans singing, and that's just regular old musical hallucinations. When it's a voice speaking, conversational, almost always part of psychosis, delusion, schizophrenia, bipolar, psychosis. Something like that. Hypothesis that's been put out there, and see this crop back up over and over again. I think new studies keep coming out. Now, what might be happening is just like Dr. Smirbeck was talking about, that constant reality checking that we all do. Have an inner monologue. You hear your own, you know, most of us hear our own voice in our head. Imagine if you couldn't reality check, oh, that's me talking to me. That's not somebody thought projecting their voice into my head. That's me. Talking to me, thought projection delusion is one of the most common delusions in schizophrenia. What might be going on is that there's just something about your inner voice that cannot be hallucinated, that if you hear a voice and you don't correctly identify it as your own, you are going to experience that as a delusion. Um pretty

0:57:35 Thomas: So are you saying that it's not possible to hallucinate someone else's voice then? Unless you're having delusions or whatever you said.

0:57:42 Jenessa: Much yeah whether it's your own voice or someone else's if is experiencing it as I mean I can do that internal monologue wise I can hear my grandmother's voice but I have complete voluntary control over it hallucinations are definitionally involuntary so when we have somebody involuntarily experiencing a hallucination of voices It always paired with psychosis. It is always paired with delusion. A failure to realize that that is not real. Not super clear why, but it might all come back to that reality checking, that reality monitoring, that we can reality monitor. I hear music and there's no radio. Uh -oh. Once we hear a voice in our head and we don't correctly identify that I have self -generated voluntarily the voice and I can stop and start the voice in my head at will, broke.

0:58:43 Jenessa: I don't know if it's what the causal direction is, but there's something really weird going on. You can hallucinate almost anything, but you cannot hallucinate a voice without kind of losing it yeah

0:58:56 Thomas: Wow. Maybe I wasn't getting the direction you're talking about. So you're saying anyone basically, to your knowledge, who's hallucinating a voice, for some reason, when you've gotten to that point, you've also lost the ability to say, oh, I'm having a, you know, hallucination. Take me to the hospital. Like somehow it's like it's paired with in some way that level of loss of reality that people who hear voices are pretty much not capable of making that recognition wow could it have to do with like voice and vocal processing being a separate kind of center of our brains in a way like could because I do know like when it comes to faces we got it we have a certain you don't know what the proper term is, but we've got a little like circuit going for that. We've got an neural pathway. That's some sort of thing that's for that. Have anything to do with that?

0:59:27 Jenessa: Pretty much like you're absolutely right so like the place where we process faces um suppose if I if I picture my own face I would activate that part of my brain but generally I use it to look at your face or someone else's face and the same thing would happen if I looked at your case or if I pictured your face or if I hallucinated your face it would activate the same area of the brain the part of the brain that is involved in identity understanding of one's self um processing of um the like where are my own where is my body in space and who am I uh seems like that that would just be separate things, but it's kind of all kept in a very similar brain area. And that also kind of is also where you do speech processing and it's all kind of coming together. Might be that the part of your brain that is like the intersection of everything that is the who am I part is way too close to the hear myself talk part. And that might be it. That if I if can't identify that I hear me talking that's me like I am me I I know I know it starts to get very weird this

1:00:49 Thomas: That is really fascinating. It is happening right now. You are, am I you? Who is, listener, am Am I you? Are you me? I am he and we are all together.

1:01:06 Jenessa: Is the part of the trippy movie from the 60s where you dissociate and float away in colored clouds it's

1:01:14 Thomas: That's really interesting, though. I wonder if it has anything to do with like, you consciousness itself is so mysterious in terms of what causes it. And I there's theories that like certain level of like self -monitoring kind of thing. You know, I wonder it has anything to deal with that. Like it's so fundamental to our perceptions of anything that it's like, you can't lose that and then maintain other, you know, for lack of a better word, sanity.

1:01:30 Jenessa: I that's exactly what it's coming down to is there's just I I don't want this to be shitting on the people with no internal monologue you are having a different experience of the world but there's

1:01:47 Thomas: You can listen to Dear Old Dads for that because Eli believes there's no, that doesn't exist.

1:01:53 Jenessa: Go off on that sometime. There is a qualitatively different experience going on, but it's also quantitative. It is a spectrum and there's no evidence that that's like psychosis or anything. Thing. But as a separate issue, myself talking to myself, there's no confusion whatsoever about who I'm hearing, even if in my own head I put it in someone else's voice. Sometimes I talk things out with other people and I'm not losing my mind. I might look like I'm losing my mind if you watch me pacing around. Yeah, there is something about that inner voice that it like kind of, it's how we sort of project ourselves. And there's the insula is the part of the brain where a lot of this kind of thing goes on, both language processing and self processing. So I think you're exactly right that there's something about monitoring of the self, knowing yourself thinking about yourself that is critical to not just having consciousness but also reality monitoring reality checking anchoring your consciousness to a place and a time and when that circuit disrupts things get really bad in every direction so if any circuit were to to disrupt in such a way that you could hear a voice involuntarily, that you would lose control of that internal monologue. It would be really hard to not disrupt everything. Whereas for some reason, we can upset that little music circuit and you're like, la la la, music. Oh no, music I didn't ask for. Music that's coming from a location in my house. How can this be? I need to go to the hospital and still have maintained I. The radio is not me and kept that separate. So yeah,

1:03:49 Thomas: Interesting.

1:03:49 Jenessa: There's, that's really the part that kind of brought it all together to me is that there's something about voices, man. We aren't, we are just like not allowed to to hallucinate them.

1:03:59 Thomas: Wow, that's so interesting. So, well, I don't have time, but do you have anything to say about the AI hallucinations and why they're not hallucinations? I don'T know if that might require a level of knowledge about what's going on in the the ai machine okay

1:04:13 Jenessa: Takes me like 12 seconds. Hallucination is a false perception. Making up bullshit has nothing to, I don't know who decided on this word. The best human analogy would be what's called confabulation. It's a thing that humans do when And we are asked to explain our behavior and don't know that we're lying or making shit up, but this happens a lot in a brain injury where like, hey, why'd you walk so slow? And you're like, oh, I'm really tired. And like, I know it's because like your leg is broken, but your brain likes to come up with reasons for things. You don't like to like, I don't why I did that thing, oh god, who am I, why am I? So you just kind of invent reasons why you've done stuff. And they're logical reasons. And you don't know that you invented a reason, much less that it's wrong. Confabulation. We see it in brain injury. We See it in well, it can kind of happen to everybody really, depending on the circumstances. Is probably the closest analog. I'm not ascribing any sort of agency or brain to an AI. But that, if we wanted to use an analogous human behavior, it would be that. It doesn't have sensory receptors. It

1:05:35 Jenessa: Can't have a false sensory perception. And regardless, my false sensory reception is not the same as giving you false information. It's just a complete misuse of the word.

1:05:46 Thomas: It be what if you ask me is there an fbi agent over there I'm like yep there is and you're like good to know yeah no it's that's interesting I'm trying to think how like much of a stickler to be because obviously it's a it's not meant literally but it's yeah no I don't know I'm I'm that's interested I'm seeing like a lot of people have the same concern and uh you know and confabulation yeah that seems like a good alternative but I guess the only thing I would think of uh just off the cuff is like if if we are using it as a metaphor or analogy for this ai the only think it does is this so like it's not like it has other perceptions and it sees and

1:05:54 Jenessa: It's it's another field yeah oh yeah right it makes no

1:06:25 Thomas: It hears yeah I'm just saying like maybe relative Relative to the chat GPT, it misperceived that something in the fact universe that it has. It's like, okay, I could kind of maybe see loosely speaking. It just like saw something that wasn't there in that, but it's, it's also, yeah, there's also a lot of problems with it. Cause it's not consistent at all. And it's like it, quickly you can talk it out of it right away or you

1:06:25 Jenessa: Sense if which would also not be how a hallucination works like have a hallucination without delusion I understand completely that it's not there I'm I'm just telling you what I'm observing, to have a hallucination with delusion, you would never talk me out of it. So it's neither of these things, right? So like, yeah, to the extent if we were talking about a discipline that was perfectly comfortable saying this is a machine learning device, it uses a slightly different method than other earlier machine learning devices, but I don't care that it's not like a human brain or psychology. I'm like, fine, you use whatever words you want. To extent that we are going to try to analogize it to human brains and human experience um I could talk for the next three hours about why every term is being used incorrectly all the time and it drives me up a wall um there's just so many papers that come out that are like look it's like a six -year -old and I'm like I'm going to kill you I can't hand my brain is gonna just explode on its own and turn into a six year old I can'T deal with this um yeah it's no confabulation

1:07:51 Thomas: All right. Well, fair enough.

1:07:54 Jenessa: Is so much better of a term for what it's doing

1:07:57 Thomas: Yeah. No, that does seem to fit. I agree. This was very interesting. Lot A of fun. Thanks for suggesting this because it's endlessly learning about the brain and how much is going on. To even consider how much is going On in our brains. I think it's actually not possible. And this is all a hallucination hallucination holding up the world. I don't know whose hallucination it is. But anyway, Dr. Jenessa Seymour, thanks so much and forward to doing this again sometime.

1:08:15 Jenessa: Good talking to you as always yeah, it's not peer reviewed, whatever. Somebody steal it. I don't care. Itchy all the time. Danger, danger, dangerous, scary, scary noise, noise. And la la la, music. Oh

1:09:01 Thomas: Somebody wants to know