How does the brain create hallucinations?
In: Biology
When you’re awake – Mental Health issues, Insomnia, Medication, Substance use
When you’re asleep – Your pineal gland produces melatonin and trace amounts of a very powerful hallucinogenic (DMT)
It’s almost the opposite, normally your brain works hard not to make patterns where they don’t exist. Do enough to disrupt those systems and the filters are weakened
I’m not sure what exactly you are asking about, but consider this:
Everything we perceive is only created in our brain. Yes, there are primary sensory inputs, like information arriving from the eyes, skin, nose, etc., but the interpretation and creation of a reality is only happening inside the brain.
So hallucinations are those results of the brain’s daily work which do not correspond to a valid sensory input. Those could still be sensory inputs, i.e. the nerves sending the exact impulses they normally send, just without the usual cause – see phantom pain in amputees for instance, or it could be malfunctions or side effects in the sensory organs, like the shadows of our own blood vessels in our eyes being interpreted as moving objects in the sky. Or it could originate directly in the brain without any sensory input, like when we are dreaming.
The big problem is that we are only ever able to observe the end result, and there’s simply no way to know what exactly led to the perception other than technically measuring each part of the sensory chain individually and chalking up the remainder to hallucinations.
Hallucinations can arise when the brain misinterprets sensory input or generates perceptions without external stimulus
Your entire reality is within your head. Your eyes, your ears, your touch and taste and smell, they are only sending signals to the brain. The brain manually receives, processes, and interprets those signals, and it then creates the “reality” that you are experiencing.
Because of that, its very easy to cause the brain to distort or misinterpret those signals, or create false signals that never existed, thus creating hallucinations, its as real inside your brain as actual reality is.
An example that is somewhat related that shows how easy it is for a disconnect to happen between your senses and what your brain creates as a reality. Every waking moment of your life, you can see your nose. Your nose is in clear view of your eyes, your eyes are sending that information to your brain every waking moment of your life. But i’m betting you didn’t realize this until i said something right? Thats because your brain decided that processing the constant signals from your eyes that say “hey there is a nose here” were unnecessary, and it just doesn’t process those and effectively erases the existence of the nose from the final picture you see in your head, until i brought attention to it and because seeing the nose is now important to the brain, its not ignoring those signals and now you can see your nose.
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