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.
Latest Answers