I’ve read that quiet rooms and pitch black apparently cause hallucinations and whatnot because the brain is always looking for stimulus. Why is a break in stimulus not good? Can’t the brain just be like “aw yeah, silence let’s chill”?
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Humans evolved in an environment that was never entirely devoid of stimulation for long periods of time, but the level of stimulation can vary wildly from weak and subtle to huge and overwhelming. To cope with the huge variation in level of stimulation, the brain evolved mechanisms to attenuate or amplify the signals coming in from the sensory organs to a level the brain can work with.
If a person is placed in an environment utterly devoid of sensory stimulation, the brain behaves as if the stimulation must be there, but just too subtle to detect at that time, so increases the amplification. Eventually it becomes so sensitive to the input signals it is getting that it begins to react to the random fluctuation of the body’s sensory organs. An example of this is, if it’s really quiet for a while, you begin to notice the sound of your breathing and heartbeat. The human body is never entirely inactive, so it will randomly generate weak “noise”. Normally, that is overwhelmed by real signals, but in their absence, the brain starts to listen to them and assign meaning, hence hallucinations.
Basically in evolutionary terms, humans never existed in a zero-stimulation environment for more than brief periods, so the brain never evolved a “let’s chill” setting.
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