Running head: Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research

A Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research Jeremy Doll 000271158 PSYC369 Jamie Prowse Turner April 4 / 2012

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research In the field of psychology one of the most interesting concepts is the concept of hallucination, hallucination has intrigued people across the world for generations and just now we as a society are starting to offer satisfactory explanations for why individuals hallucinate, where the hallucinations occur in ones brain and the replicable tests to prove our knowledge of this frontier. The research in the area of hallucination is quite diverse and therefore one must be

quite critical about the articles presented in the field of hallucination. The main article this paper will be dealing with is Elementary Visual Hallucinations and Their Relationships to Neural Pattern-Forming Mechanisms, authored by Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, this article will be compared with two other articles, the first being Charles Bonnet Syndrome in AgeRelated Macular Degeneration: The Nature and Frequency of Images in Subjects with EndStage Disease, authored by Jane C. Khan, Humma Shahid, Deborah A. Thurlby, John R.W. Yates, and Anthony T. Moore. The final paper that will be used in this comparison is The anatomy of conscious vision: an fMRI study of visual hallucinations, which was authored by D.H. ffytche, R.J. Howard, M.J. Brammer, A. David, P. Woodruff, and S. Williams. These articles all contribute to the field of hallucination but with a focus on Charles Bonnet Syndrome. To begin we will deal with Elementary Visual Hallucinations and Their Relationships to Neural Pattern-Forming Mechanisms. This article is the main focus of this paper because of how well designed and strong the article is. This work goes into fantastic detail, analyzing seemingly all sources that could produce hallucinations in humans such as migraines, epilepsy, hypoglycemia, ocular pressure, retinal and cortical electrical stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation and even photopic stimulation (Billock, et al 2). Furthermore the researchers of this work had their operational definitions clearly worked out, describing the differences between phosphenes which are the spots of light one sees, fortification pressure which is the lines one

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research

sees often post-migraine, and geometric patterns which is often either how the hallucinations are organized or are actual geometric pattern such as hexagons, fans and spirals. (Billock et al 2). This work also outlines disorders later in life that can cause the individual to hallucinate such as Charles Bonnet Syndrome. There are many strengths in the work by Billock and Tsou such as their large samples of respondents, their success rate in inducing hallucinations in almost all of their participants, and the easily replicable tests they used, for example W.G. Walter was able to consistently induce hallucinations in literally thousands of respondents though the use of a ganzfeld, or the stroboscopic illumination of a uniform surface, and all of his participants reported illusory colors, movements, and patterns (Billock et al 6). In another one of the tests reported in this article the researchers used 59 patients with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, 63% of which experienced elementary hallucinations (phosphenes, geometric patterns and fortification patterns), and 27% of which reported both elementary and complex hallucinations (Billock et al 8). Although this is a very well written, in-depth, and broadly applicable article there were some obvious weaknesses. For instance, throughout the paper it is hard to really find the number of participants used in the different types of research, only citing the number of participants for research conducted by outside researchers and even then only for the more popular experiments. Another weakness that is easily visible in this article is that they do not address confounding variables, this leads the reader to either assume that because the tests seemed to be significant in all respondents and so there are no confounding variables or they just failed to account for confounding variables. However all-in-all this article was well written and generally very strong in almost all regards, the researchers clearly identified their operational definitions early on in the article, they provide multiple examples of the different ways that an individual can hallucinate and the different types of hallucinations an individual can have.

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research Upon looking at the second article, Charles Bonnet Syndrome in Age-Related Macular Degeneration: The Nature and Frequency of Images in Subjects with End-Stage Disease, which was written by Jane C. Khan, Humma Shahid, Deborah A. Thurlby, John R.W. Yates, and

Anthony T. Moore, the individual would clearly see the different ways this article improves upon the first. To begin, one can clearly see that the researchers have clearly portrayed the participants in their tests and control groups. The researchers used 360 participants that all had Age-related macular degeneration, in an effort to determine the prevalence of Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Of the respondents 27% of the sample had Charles Bonnet Syndrome, of those with Charles Bonnet Syndrome 84.5% saw images straight ahead of them, 72.2% saw colored images, 62.9% saw images with moving parts, 34% experienced visions on average of once a day (Khan et al 202). Of those hallucinations the majority (19.6%) of respondents saw people who were not there, 15.8% saw geometric patterns (Khan et al 202). The researchers used a clearly defined operational definition of Charles Bonnet Syndrome which was modified from the definition provided by Teunisse et al. describing Charles Bonnet Syndrome as the presence of formed and complex, persistent, or repetitive visual hallucinations, full or partial retention of insight, the absence of delusions and the absence of hallucinations in other modalities (Khan et al. 293). Furthermore, in contrast to the article written by Billock and Tsou, the researchers were able to properly address the variables that could affect their results, such as whether the hallucinations were simple or complex, the age of the respondent and the age the respondent developed Agerelated macular degeneration, education dichotomized as either attaining a school leaving certificate or further education, the quality of participants life, and a cardiac profile based on a history of disease (Khan et al. 203). Another strength observed in the article by Khan et al is that

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research their study presents the largest reported group with Charles Bonnet Syndrome occurring secondary to Age-related macular degeneration (Khan et al. 207).

A final contrasting article that will be introduced is the article is the article, The anatomy of conscious vision: an fMRI study of visual hallucinations, written by D.H. ffytche, R.J. Howard, M.J. Brammer, A. David, P. Woodruff, and S. Williams. This article highlights the strengths that were presented in the main article written by Billock and Tsou. For example, this article clearly shows the amount of participants that were used in the study, this study used 8 individuals with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, one of which was female and the rest were male, and a matched control group with a 5 participants all of which were male (ffytche et al. 738). The researchers used two different strategies to try and understand visual hallucination better, the first method entailed asking patients to signal onset and offset of each hallucination during a five minute fMRI scan, they were then made to correlate the timing of each hallucination with the time-course fMRI signal (ffytche et al. 738). The second method entailed identifying the functionally abnormal brain regions by scanning the patients in an fMRI while they viewed a nonspecific visual stimulus and comparing those results to those of the matched control group which had never experienced hallucination (ffytche et al. 738). The strong points of this article relative to the first article are the easily found sample sizes and methodology, which were lacking in the article by Billock and Tsou. However, there were a great deal of weaknesses that were visible in this article which were not a problem in the article by Billock and Tsou. For example, the sample sizes employed by ffytche were all small, which is probably due to the expenses of the fMRI scan. Another weakness is that the samples were almost entirely male, with just a single female, which will probably end up confounding the results. The fact that ffytche et al. were unable to replicate the results with all of the original participants is yet another

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research weakness that is not seen in the article by Billock and Tsou, who were able to replicate all of their results. In conclusion, the article Elementary Visual Hallucinations and Their Relationships to Neural Pattern-Forming Mechanisms, authored by Vincent A. Billock and Brian H. Tsou, is a very strong, well rounded, highly descriptive and analytical article which goes into great depth when it comes to summarizing their own results and similar results found by other researchers. However the article lacks some of the most important aspects such as a clearly depicted sample size, a clear methodology and a lack of possible confounding variables. The article, Charles Bonnet Syndrome in Age-Related Macular Degeneration: The Nature and Frequency of Images in Subjects with End-Stage Disease, authored by Jane C. Khan, Humma Shahid, Deborah A. Thurlby, John R.W. Yates, and Anthony T. Moore., is used to emphasize the aspects that were

lacking from the article written by Billock and Tsou, such as the clear sample size, a very clearly defined methodology and a list of possibly confounding variables. These aspects are also clearly visible in the article The anatomy of conscious vision: an fMRI study of visual hallucinations, which was authored by D.H. ffytche, R.J. Howard, M.J. Brammer, A. David, P. Woodruff, and S. Williams, which presents a clear and visible sample size and a clear and easily understandable methodology. However, this article lacks replication and has a very small sample size, which can easily be attributed to a type II error. This all shows the individual that the article written by Billock and Tsou is clearly a strong and supported article with very few problems aside from the lack of clearly identifiable sample sizes and methodology.

Critical Analysis of Hallucination Research Works Cited

Billock, V. A., & Tsou, B. H. (2012). Elementary Visual Hallucinations and Their Relationships to Neural Pattern-Forming Mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin, doi:10.1037/a0027580 ffytche, D. H., Howard, R. J., Brammer, M. J., David, A. A., Woodruff, P. P., & Williams, S. S. (1998). The anatomy of conscious vision: an fMRI study of visual hallucinations. Nature Neuroscience, 1(8), 738. Khan, J. C., Shahid, H., Thurlby, D. A., Yates, J. W., & Moore, A. T. (2008). Charles Bonnet Syndrome in Age-Related Macular Degeneration: The Nature and Frequency of Images in Subjects with EndStage Disease. Ophthalmic Epidemiology, 15(3), 202-208. doi:10.1080/09286580801939320