Title.
For example, if someone hallucinates a person standing in front of them, can they reach out and make contact? Does the hallucination somehow prevent contact?
Is this stupid??
In: Biology
Well they can’t make *physical* contact with something that’s not real, but I know that’s not what you meant 🙂
Most hallucinations only involve one sense at a time. You hear a voice, see a figure, feel bugs on your skin. If more than one happens at the same time, but they’re not related, that’s called multi-sensory, and it’s more rare. The rarest is called multi-modal – hallucinations involving more than one sense, perceived to be part of the same hallucination (e.g. seeing someone and hearing them talk).
Sometimes multi-modal hallucinations involve touch. [A study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178122005790#bbib0006) of patients experiencing hallucinations found that around half of them experienced multi-modal hallucinations involving touch. These seem to be mostly *hearing* something and *feeling* it but not *seeing* it, but doing all three at once does occur as well.
However, hallucinations are complex things and not *just* a cognitive effect. They’re heavily filtered and affected by your personality and cultural experience. [A study](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.728397/full) of schizophrenic Muslims who hold a belief in jinn (djinn or genies) found much more common multi-modal hallucination, including *seeing* a jinn and getting *pushed* or *grabbed* by it – and feeling the contact. Their pre-formed cultural belief in jinn may have made them more predisposed to these multi-modal hallucinations.
Generally speaking, the incidence of multi-modal hallucinations increases with stress and trauma. They are more severe and intrusive than single-sense hallucinations.
Schizophrenia, for reasons unknown to myself, tends to manifest in visual and aural hallucinations. As a public defender, I work with many schizophrenic people, and anecdotally I’ve never heard of one having tactile hallucinations. (Edit: except bugs or worms on/under the skin, that’s pretty common, I just wasn’t thinking of that as a hallucination per se, but I guess it is) But the hallucinations themselves aren’t usually something you could feel – it’s the TV telling you your mom is going to kill you, or the wall socket connecting via UV light to your smartphone so that your apps can track you, or people in the next room shouting about how they’re going to get you, stuff like that. It’s (almost) never a thing in the room which isn’t actually there, it’s usually the thing that is there doing something it definitely isn’t doing, or hearing something you can’t see.
And when it is something that isn’t there, like subdermal microphones so that the garbage company knows what you’re throwing out, there’s always some extra layer od delusion that prevents them from touching them, like they retract into your muscles when you cut your skin open to get them, or a team of technicians came.and removed them while you slept, or something. Delusions protect themselves from confrontation by inventing more delusion.
I’m not a psychiatric doctor, I’m just a criminal defense lawyer who deals with a lot of schizophrenic people, but this is what my experience has been over the years.
It’s possible, but it usually won’t be internally consistent. Like there won’t be a rabbit that you can pick up and pet, but you could see a rabbit, near a voice, smell perfume, taste soap, or feel a tap on the shoulder. None of them will be connected to each other, though
If you’ve ever felt a phantom vibration (feeling your phone buzz in your pocket despite it being on your desk) that’s a tactile hallucination
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