What causes hallucinations in mental illness?
In: Biology
Our brains contain all the “machinery” needed to produce the subjective experience of, for example, seeing a cat
The cat you see in your mind *is not the cat that actually exists*. What you see is a construct, something your mind has made up, albeit based on things like the light hitting your eyes. The cat might be accurately represented, but it is still a representation, not the cat itself
The inappropriate activation of this same machinery can lead one to “see” a cat even when no cat is present. Maybe someone hears a cat, sees some leaves blown in the wind, and their mind fills in the gaps as best it can and produces the illusion of seeing a cat. Maybe the person is simply obsessing about cats, and this bleeds through into the machinery of perception. In many cases it is not anything so obvious, and the factors that lead to a particular hallucination are in no way clear, but in all cases it comes back to the unintended/inappropriate activation of the same perceptual systems used in normal sensory perception
These same systems, used somewhat differently, are also what enable you to have a dream about a cat, or picture a cat sitting in front of you when there is in fact not one there
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