March 17, 2015 • 31 mins
It's Saint Patrick's Day, so our minds inevitably turn to the little people of Irish folklore. But diminutive fairy folk pop up in folk traditions around the world. Listen in for a celebration of the myth and science behind those Leprechaun encounters in this classic STBYM podcast episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
todays St Patrick's Today. So we have a little bit
of a little bit of fun here for you from
(00:23):
the archives, an episode about lepri Cons a little bit,
but also primarily about hallucination. Yes, Liliputian hallucinations we're talking
about on the tiny, tiny scale. So we hope that
you guys enjoy and have a happy holiday. I have
always loved St. Patrick's Day. I don't have I'm basically
(00:46):
of Scotch German heritage, so I don't have that you know,
distinctive Irish roots link to it, and I don't have it,
you know, I don't have the like the Catholic link
to it either. But from a very early age, like
my family was always in to St. Patrick's Day. You know,
my mom's mom is a kindergarten teacher, so we would
have green things, we would eat green treats, green beer, well,
(01:07):
no green beer, but but maybe like a green cake
or a cupcake or something. And I still with St
Patrick's Day comes around, I'm like I need to eat
something that's green. I need to get like a pistatio cupcakes,
the Statio pudding. Um. But more importantly, we would, to
a certain extent, we would celebrate the the Irish myth
of the of the leprechn We would always watch Darby
(01:27):
O Gil and the Little People, that classic Disney film
with Sean Connery in it. Wow, you guys did it up. Yeah. Yeah,
we were big into the holidays, so we would always
watch Darbo Gil and a Little People. Sean Connery would
sing and it was awesome. Lepri cons would run around,
there was a banshee. Um. You know, it was just
it was a great film. I still watch it from
(01:48):
time to time. I just I feel like this is
really informed, like your ideas of creatures in the world.
Like somehow this is like an early influence on you. Yeah, definitely,
I mean we we really we got into Halloween and
then we would really get My big thing on on
holidays is that if a holiday has magic to it,
then it's in creatures specifically, then it's great. Like I
(02:10):
can obviously Halloween. I love Christmas. You know, you know,
the Christmas season can get a bit annoying when it's
over commercialization, but ultimately it's a season in which, on
one hand you have a magical man sneaking into your
house to give you gifts. There's there's Crampus running around
beating people. There's what's his name, Brumschnickel, the the other
Germanic holiday visitor. There at various takes on St. Nick
(02:33):
And then and if you get into the more religious
aspect of it too, you have like the Son of
God being born on earth. They're they're all these fantastic
things happening. St. Patrick's Day is also in that vein,
unlike Valentine's Day, where it's just about people in love
and stuff. But but St. Patty's Day there's this backbone
of myth and legend to it and uh and it's awesome.
So so what is your background with Leprika? Well, quickly,
(02:55):
Valentine's Day clearly needs some sort of creature's lacking that
we should really get into the idea of brainstorming that
without listening. Yeah, yeah, that's another s side project for
all of us. Um, But for me, St. Pat's has
just always been St. Pat's. I gotta say. In my
family it was sort of like their Santa Claus is
really like the dude down the street who's dressing up
(03:15):
and um, lepricrons don't exist truly, really, and happy fourth Birthday,
I'm just kidding, no, but really that wasn't That's not
really something that we celebrated much. But I will say
that the diminutive, diminutive stature of lepricrons always thought were
fascinating as a little kid. And what I find even
(03:36):
more fascinating is that there is a type of hallucination
that deals with this, this Liliputian quality. Um. And that's
what we're going to talk about today, because again in
celebration of St. Patty's Day, but also as a further
investigation into how the mind works and how it scales
our reality. Alright, So the Leprechnilipic from Irish folklore, this
(04:02):
is a fairy shoemaker uh and he's and he goes
by various names including it really depends on where you
are in particular region of Ireland uh and or the
history books. So you have lucre pan and again this
basically translates to little body and then there are various
versions of that lubrican lubrican lucre pan Luprican. They are
(04:24):
all these various takes on it, but as the one
that we really go with today, of course is Lepricn.
And the Lepricn is a is again a shoemaker. You
generally would see him with just a single shoe. There
would never be a second shoe around, which is a
little suspect and should have been a tip off to
people who end up messing with said lepricon. This is
like waste management job, Like, you know, maybe that's for
(04:47):
Lepricn being is shoemaker. Yeah, like you should be a
little aware that where's the other shoe. There's something fishy
going on also, and this is something that will come
up if, especially if the Lepricn is pressed about his
personal belongings. He carries a p but the purse only
contains a single shilling, much like a pizza delivery boy
only carries twenty dollars or less. The idea here is, oh,
(05:08):
you're gonna try and steal me gold. I only have
this one shilling, but I may have lots of gold elsewhere.
That's the big thing. This idea grows that Leprichns have
access to a massive quantity of gold and and certainly
in the mythology they do. They're paid by the ferry
folk for what I'm not sure. I guess repairing that
(05:29):
one shoe over and over again. So and there they
save up their money and they're laundering the money kind
of kind of money Launders h. But people get this
in their mind, Oh there's a Lepricn. If I capture
the Lepricn, then I can get access to his fabulous gold.
I can make him tell me where it is. And
later you get into the idea of the Lepricn gives
(05:50):
you three wishes. But ultimately the route is, if you
catch a Leprichn, you can totally rob him of everything
he owns. That's how the the average Lepricn chasing uh
individual was was thinking. So, um, what would typically happen?
I should say that the classic story, of course, is
the guy catches the Lepricn says, oh, take me to
your gold. And you have to know that if you
(06:11):
look away from the Lepricn at all, then he can vanish,
he can turn it visible. He's a supernatural creature with
these powers at his disposal. So what happens if the
Lebricn says, oh, I'll take you to the bush that
I have the gold buried beneath and so, and who
knows if this bush actually has the gold under it
or not. Um it works. The trick works well either way.
But it takes him out there and says, oh, it's
(06:32):
under this bush. And then the guy who's captured the
Lepricn realize I don't have a shovel. I have no
way of digging up this gold. So he says, I
know what I'll do. I'll take this red bandana or this, uh,
this kerchief or whatever, and I'll tie it, tie this
red kerchief to this bush, and then I'll go home
and I'll get my shovel and i'll come back. So
he lets the Lepricn free, goes back home, he gets
the shovel, comes back, and what has the Lepricn done.
(06:53):
The Lepricn is tied the red kerchief to every bush
and tree in sight, so there's no way for him
to remember which uch. What's he gonna do dig up
all of them? He'll try for a little bit before
he loses his mind, I guess. But that's the trickster
aspect of the lepricn. Okay, see that just takes me
back to the thirty Rock maxim, which is never follow
a hippie to a second location. Same thing with the lepricron, right, yeah,
(07:16):
so he the elepricns engage in various tricks like this.
They are largely solitary creatures, though they do have a
king name Lubden. They're all males too, correct. Yeah. I
did see some possible mention of female elepricns, and the
idea being that female elepricuns do exist, but they're even
more tricky, so they're I guess they're harder to observe
in nature. They're making that second too, yeah, or maybe
(07:38):
they're lessened to messing around and and and deceiving humans.
Because ultimately, the idea here is that lepricns are a
type of fairy folk. They are fairies and fairies. The
notion of fairy varies greatly around the world, but there
exists a nearly global idea of diminutive men, magical humanoids
(08:01):
and that are out there in the world, often generally
hidden from view, kind of an underworld taking place or
you know, or in the natural world or underground or
you know, somewhere that the humans are less likely to
see them during the course of their day. What I'm
trying to say is that they have a rich cultural
history um and some amazing mythology going on there beyond
(08:22):
the lepricn but all of this relates to fairy f
like Eventually, the idea is that even these magical people
were defeated by essentially the modern day Celts, and they
drive all these magical people out into the peripheries of
the world. But you can still glimpse them, you still
see them sometimes. Well. See, this is what I think
is so interesting about it, is that it is so
(08:44):
deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric, particularly and when we
talk about lebri cons in Ireland right and how this
really informs everybody's perception of life. And I wanted to
point out a couple of things. One is that Lepricrons
are protected under European Union Law KULD you not, yes,
(09:06):
at least the ones that dwell in calling Ford in Ireland.
The directive is an effort to preserve the rich biodiversity
of the area called the slab Foy Loop, which is
now a protected area for flora, fauna, wild animals, and
lepri cons. And this is a directive that was stemmed
in part by a group of lobbyists who recounted a
tale in nineteen nine of p J. O'Hare who happened
(09:28):
to be over by wishing well this man and he
heard a scream and he said he went to the
wishing well and he found, um, first of all, a
patch of burnt ground. And beside this patch he found
a little hat, jacket and trousers with four gold coins
in the pockets. The close of the naked lepre con,
as this lepricon is called, are actually on display at
(09:51):
Pj's Pub in carling Ford. So you know, as this
a tourist trap, absolutely, but again is it part of
the imagination, the the cultural fabric. And um, you know,
I'm not saying that pg o hair was that he
actually witnessed. You know this What we see is that
maybe a streaking lebre con gone gone wild. But um,
(10:16):
but but perhaps p J O'Hare was also participating and um,
you know, some sort of cultural tradition. Maybe he had
too much to drink, or maybe he had a hallucination. Okay,
And this is where this really comes into play because,
according to Oliver Sacks and his World Science Festival interview
(10:40):
about his new book on hallucinations. He says that hallucinations
really are cultural in nature and specific to the individual's background.
So he said that seeing miniature people is one type
of hallucination, as we said, a subtype. But depending on
the person's cultural background, the miniature person could be a lepricn,
a dwarf, a ary. So that's why I think this
(11:02):
is fascinating because, uh, if you have this hallucination, it
is colored by your perception, what you have grown up with,
the sort of stories, and this is the sort of
thing that might be expressed depending on certain external conditions
or neurological conditions that you have. So of course, if
we're going to talk about these Liliputian hallucinations, and that's
(11:24):
what they're called, we should first sort of give a
little bit of an intro on hallucinations. Yeah, it's worth
noting that hallucination is we're discussing here. It's just one
way of looking at essentially paranormal experience. As we discussed
in our alien abduction episode. People have always seen weird
things in the woods and the skies. He used to
(11:44):
be fairies. Then depending on your cultural flavoring, maybe it's
angels or maybe sci fi flavoring makes you see UFOs.
We've always seen things, We've all we've always had these experiences,
and there are various ways you can explain them that
range from simple imagination of a youngster to neuro logical
disorder and uh and and it's it's definitely happening for
(12:05):
the person who is experiencing them. Yeah, and UM. When
we talk about hallucinations, we're talking about many different sensory modalities,
turning about visual, auditory, old factory, gustatory, tactile, and other um.
And you can actually if a person is undergoing a
hallucination at the same time that they're going m R right,
you can actually try to figure out the type of
hallucination there have having by looking at the blood flow
(12:28):
to the region of their brain. And so, for instance,
if you see increased blood flow to the fusiform gyus,
which is where you detect face faces, then you know
someone is having some sort of um visual hallucination having
to do with perhaps even a little person. UM. So
it's kind of funny to me because when we talk
about hallucinations, we really think about them as being apart
(12:50):
from us and otherworldly. Yeah, we tend to think of them.
An hallucination is seeing something in the world as it is,
not it's seeing the world wrong, but that that really
implies that there is a correct and definitive way to
experience reality. Yeah, because I was thinking about this. We
really do have a very tenuous line between imagination and reality.
(13:13):
And I was thinking about this in the context of
our blue sky, right, because what is the blue sky
butt an illusion to us? Because if you think about it,
the only reason why we're seeing a blue sky is
because violet and blue have the shortest wavelengths and they
scatter a lot more than long ones. Some particles like
(13:33):
oxygen and nitrogen molecules are present, so those are the
ones that are most apparent to us. So that's what
we see when we're looking up in the sky. And
then it's not that we just see a purple and
a blue sky. No, the mind can't even really sort
of deal with that because of the machinery that we
have um with our perception of color, it kind of
has to mix some of that with white until it
(13:54):
turns out to this cohesive blue that we look up
in the sky at so it really makes you think
to what extent am I experiencing the world around you?
I mean, ultimately, our brain, it's it's it's inside of
some bone, it's inside of some skull, depends on these
sensory uh mechanisms to experience the world and then translate
(14:15):
that into data. So essentially the brain is blind anyway. Well,
and it's highly sensitive to suggestion. We've mentioned this before,
but there's a twenty eleven study at Whole University in
the UK, and it asked participants to imagine a color
while looking at a great pattern. And what they found
is that those people who were most susceptible to hypnosis
(14:36):
in other words, given to suggestion, they were able to
actually hallucinate the colors at will when they were asked to,
which was corroberated by an m R. I. So again
there's this idea of you know, what is you know,
we bring this up a lot, like what is reality
and how much of it is colored by our perceptions? Yeah?
So much of the I mean you can argue that
our perception of reality itself is a is an hallucination,
(14:59):
and any um alteration of that is just a it's
just a change in the flavoring. Um. We're gonna take
a quick break, and when we get back, though, we
are going to talk about this specific type of hallucination
that deals with the detection of tiny things, tiny people,
tiny animals. All right, we're back. And in this episode,
(15:29):
we of course started off by talking a little bit
about fairy folk and Laprikaans paranormal experience essentially, and we're
getting into into discussion of how hallucination, it's particular modes
of hallucination make us see tiny people and tiny things. Yeah,
and you know, before we start talking about um about
(15:51):
this perception or this illusion of tiny people or things,
I wanted to point out that it is amazing when
you think about it, that our eyes and our minds
are able to visually reconstruct things. So for instance, if
you have, you know, a plate on the table and
the fork next to it, and you continue to look
back and forth at those items, your brain has to
(16:13):
over and over again visually reconstruct those items and also
do that, um, you know, in the context of moving
back and forth. So it's got the movement element. And
what we're talking about here is perceptual constancy. So what
your mind is doing is saying that plate is still
the plate, and is still the dimension that it is,
is still the scale that it is. And this is
(16:34):
a lot of work for your brain to do, in
your eye to do, to take in all of this
data and make us feel as though we are on
the same, uh constant state where things are the same
and have a constancy to them. Yeah. One of the
things that this discussion of hallucination really drives home is
that site and our perception are the mental processes that
makes site possible are pretty complex and uh, the least
(16:58):
little bit of something can can go wrong or or change,
and it can can have some pretty dramatic effects on
how you perceive reality. Yeah, it's funny because you really
do take it for granted. How stable the images are
around you and how stable the story that that your
perception is telling you is all because of these different
(17:18):
parts of your brains working in concert. There is something
called micropesha or alice in Wonderland syndrome, and this is
when objects actually appear smaller, and it's not necessarily the
mechanics of the guys, but it's really the interpretation of
the data that causes the objects in the visual field
to appear minuscule. So when you have these lilocution hallucinations, um,
(17:41):
they are forming complex visual hallucinations of people, objects, or
animals that are greatly reduced in size or sometimes exaggerated, Yes,
sometimes exagger which also ends up going into all sorts
of mythological possibilities there as well. Right, we've got some
example too that that really sort of dwell in this.
And the hallucinations are vivid and they evoke varied responses
including fear, anxiety, or even pleasure. Um, They've been seen
(18:04):
across the board and people who are experiencing delirium tremens
from alcohol withdraw, people who have eyesight problems such as
macular degeneration, and people with mental disorders like schizophrenia. Although
in schizophrenia, even though hallucinations are are more common, this
type of hallucination, this little acution, is very rare. Yeah,
(18:24):
And most of the cases that we're looking at with
little acuction, Uh, it's a it's a situation where the
person is otherwise mentally fine, Like they're not They're not
a disturbed individual or a quote unquote crazy person. It's
not like, oh, that crazy person on the streets seeing
little people. Of course, they are they're crazy. No. It's
for instance, one of the cases that Oliver Sacks talks
(18:46):
about in in his book Hallucinations, which is excellent high
They recommend anyone at all interested in this pick that up.
It's very readable, just a great book. Uh. In his book,
he talks about a patient that he refers to his Zelda,
who eated in two thousand nine. She was an historian,
and some of the hallucinations that she ended up seeing
(19:08):
included she saw a great granddaughter, she saw a trio
of witches. She saw her hair rising up in the
mirror like it was witless. She saw tiny people crawling
out of the TV. She saw gaily dressed figures sort
of parading around. She saw six ominous tall men in
brown suits around her hospital bed. She saw a little
men in green caps. And she saw small fairy like
(19:30):
children sort of moving around as well. Just to give
you an idea, because a lot of these hallucinations, again
it's things are larger or smaller than they need to
be um So you're you're encountering giants, you're encountering little
people oftentimes that they're really brilliant to behold. The color
scheme will be amazing. So you in the costuming if
(19:50):
the if costumes are perceivable, the costumes will be crazy
and exotically bright. So you can really see where the
idea of a fairy folk can emerge from. This beca
all they were little people, and they were dressed like
they were from another world, and their colors were unreal
and magical. Well, and they were mischievous. To write, a
lot of times these accounts have um the little people
(20:12):
that are running around doing various things that we are
nefarious or yeah, and they're disappearing or they're reappearing necessarily
obeying the physical laws of our world. Now, these are
called released hallucinations because it's thought that they are released
or instigated by the removal of normal visual afferent input
into the association quartex. So in the case of Zelda,
(20:34):
there was reduced blood flow to the optical and parietal lobes,
and so this caused the hallucinations. Um. But probably one
of the one of the things that is most associated
with this is something called the Charles Bonnet syndrome yes
or CBS, and this is a common condition among people
with compromised vision. So when you think compromised vision, of
(20:57):
course We're not saying the person is necessarily completely Uh.
They might be suffering from just age related necular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma,
diabetic eye disease. Their site may be somewhat limited, but
they're still able to visually perceive the world to a
certain degree. Yeah. The idea is that the information received
from your eyes actually stops the brain from creating its
(21:18):
own pictures. So when you lose your sight or partially
lose your sight or it's damaged, your brain is not
receiving as much information from your eyes as it's used to,
and it begins to fill in those gaps by creating
this sort of fantasy uh, pictures or patterns. And then
when this occurs, you experience the images short in your
brain as hallucinations. It's kind of this idea that the
(21:40):
world that we live in, because you can we look
at like when we're just looking around a room, we're
looking at particular little spaces, and then then we're moving
in another little space where we're kind of basically the
world that we're in exists in our minds, and we
use our vision to constantly upgrade the details of that
mental image that we interact with there was a one
(22:01):
case of a Miss c an eighty year old woman.
She complained of little people dressed in blue and gray
leaves hiding in her cupboard cupboards, and she also saw
tiny black cats from time to time, and her chief
complaint was that the little people like to watch her undressed.
So of course she was examined. They found that her
(22:21):
cognitive functions were fined fine, fine and uh, and that
really again it came down to impairments in her visual field,
again creating in this story from this lack of information
that was being processed. Another interesting aspect about little acutions,
especially as a as a related to CBS, Alver Sachs
(22:43):
points out that most CBS hallucinations are ultimately inspiring, pleasant,
even friendly. Um not to say they are there. There
will be some that are a little serving, such as
the brown uh dressed men that are really taller around
Zelda's hospital that was that is ominous in nature, But
for the most part they tend to be lighter and
(23:03):
more amusing and magical in a in an uplifting sense.
Whereas there's a lot that goes on with with paranormal experience,
be it alien abduction, that is rude of scenario which
is rooted in say sleep paralysis, which is terrifying because
your your mind body connection is doing something weird and
add a little flavoring to it from whatever your worldview
(23:24):
or mythology is, and it's it can be a terrifying situation.
But with CBS you tend to see these more sort
of like, huh, there are little people in my closet.
That's totally cool, but I would rather than not look
at me while I'm naked. There's this idea to you
that perhaps, um, you know, it has an adaptive function
in terms of people who in general with hallucination is
not just little people that if someone has lost someone
(23:47):
in particularly in the elderly, if they hallucinate, you know,
maybe a loved one who has departed, that this is
a source of comfort to them, bereavement hallucination, so that
this is a whole area as well. Um yeah, it's
this idea that we're as as one. If we're losing
our ability to update the mental image in our head,
we're having to update it internally. Like imagine you're inside
(24:08):
your house and you're wanting to paint an image of
your backyard, so you look out the back window every day,
and you paint a little more of this image, and
you updated a little more, and then one day your
windows are walled up or they're frosted over and you
can't see out them all that. Well, well then you
have to maybe you're listening, maybe you're you're drawing on
your memory to try and and uh and and alter
that picture and make it as accurate as possible. But
(24:31):
then inevitably you're bringing in errors. You're bringing in um
even magical creations into that painting. That reminds me of
Anton syndrome when they'ror you have someone who is trying
to replace I put in quote their their reality with
a hallucination to simulate eyesight. Because because this occurs and
joining people that are really like totally blind, extremely deteriation,
(24:54):
totally blind from cortical damage um and and that damage
can be caused by stroke UM and this affects the
optic lobes. So these people are absolutely unaware of their
blindness and they insist that they can still see. Yeah,
like they'll say they'll they'll say like, hey, you you're blind.
Don't try and walk across the living room because their
(25:15):
toys all over the floor and they'll say I can
totally see, and like they believe they can see now,
they'll they'll end up stepping on the toys because ultimately
they that they can't they are blind. But but to them,
they feel they're experiencing. Now. If you tell them, hey,
describe that person setting on the couch over there, they
won't blink. They'll just describe the person. The description may
be completely wrong, or it may be reasonably correct based
(25:38):
on previous knowledge of the individual, you know, whatever, But
but they won't hesitate because in their in their mind,
they do see and see. I find that example so
fascinating just because that really does point to this adaptive function,
because if you have lost your your eyesight and you
are lacking that's stimuli, then your brain is just making
(25:59):
us smelacrum of that of reality, which I think is
just fascinating. Sacks also shared an account of a patient
who in the in the nineteen eighties, UH would a
blind patient went on a drinking binge and saw again
while in the midst of this this drinking like the
next morning remembered having seen as if his side had returned,
(26:24):
But it was a hallucination. Hallucination and again it's just
all it's a lot of this really drives home just
how complex side is and how how complex our our
observation of the world is to it and to what
extent is is all of our site hallucination. Yeah, again,
this idea that there's this, uh, this visual constancy that
(26:44):
goes on that we just that's running in the background,
and we don't even think about how tenuous that is. So,
as Oliver Sacks points out, Liliputian hallucinations can also occur
in migraines. Particularly, He points out the Migraine Blog, a
series host of it on New York Times, which is
a blog just about the author's experiences with migraines. Now,
(27:07):
I do experience migraines. I do. Yeah, what what are
they like for you? Do you ever see anything with them? Sometimes?
I've seen lights And actually a good many of the
females in my family have histories of really like pretty
intense histories with migraines, and they complain of something they
call an aura. It's a feeling, and and they also
get the strobe light effect. Interesting, I've never experienced a migraine.
(27:30):
My father used to get them, and I think my
My sister experiences them from time to time as well.
But in there they're more extreme nature. There, it's almost
like a supernatural experience, like it's it's like something from
another world is reaching out and touching your brain rather painfully. Uh,
but in in a certain way, illuminatingly for a few
(27:51):
seconds or minutes or what have you. Um. And again,
what we're talking about is uh a sort of impairment
of the visual field care right, Yeah, people will see lights,
like you said, geometric patterns, uh, flashes of light, zigzags,
blind spots, shimmering spots or stars are as, and in
some cases tiny man and tiny animals uh. In On
(28:12):
the Migraine blog, the author of was talking about how
they were reading a reading a book lying there, um,
and they looked down and they saw a small pink
man and his pink ox, perhaps six or seven inches high.
So the audice says, they were perfectly made creatures, and
except for their color, they looked very real. They didn't
speak to me, but they walked around and I watched
(28:33):
them with fascination and the kind of um amiable tenderness.
They stayed for some minutes and then disappeared. I have
often wished they would return, but they never have um,
which is this just amazing to think of that. And
you know, you just said there's migraine hits and you
look down and there's a little pink farmer in his
ox and they're they're not really concerned with you, which
(28:53):
which ties in nicely with when we were talking about
fairy experiences and in a lien experience. Paranormal exper is
around the world. They vary so much. Sometimes it is
a terrible experience where you're like, oh, I'm being abducted
by aliens or I'm tormented by demons. But in other
cases it's it's a matter of for a brief second,
you have a peak into a magical world just beyond
our own. Well. I think anybody who has ever had
(29:17):
a really bad migraine can attest to you. One of
the things that is probably interesting to them as well
as me, is that when you have an awful one,
it feels like the fog is rolling in and it
to some degree it does feel like your vision is
being affected, not just with the strobe light effect, but
as if, um something's just kind of moving over your
brain like a cloud. So it's interesting to see that
(29:40):
that sort of deprivation of stimulation or stimuli might manifest
itself with a Litiputian hallucination. Yeah. And in the book,
Fax points out that in a migraine, a wave of quote,
electrical excitation slowly moves across the visual cortex and on
(30:00):
the way, it's possible that it directly directly stimulates clusters
of orientation sensitive neurons in the visual cortex, and this
direct stimulation causes patterns patients to see shimmering light, zigzag fortifications, etcetera.
As we and as we see the wave move through
the brain during a migraine, when we're looking at brain scans, uh,
it's it's it's it's matching the movement of the shimmering
(30:23):
bars in the patient's site. Huh. So that that's very
interesting that that sense of movement isn't necessarily an illusion. Yeah,
it's it's it's it's amazing. I mean, I I'm not
envious of people who have to deal with migraines because,
like I said, it's just a normal headache suffer. Um.
I would see my father get these migraines and I
it was like, Wow, how can a headache do that bad?
That you just you know that you're you're just you know,
(30:45):
gripping your skull like I've never had had I had
a headache that bad. Uh. But but now that now
that I see a little bit more that it's involved
in it, I can totally get it. So there you
have it, leprech On Hallucinations. Fun little topic that we did,
and uh, you know, today was a perfect day to
bring it back out for your amusement. Hey. In the meantime,
(31:08):
check out the rest of stuff to Blow your mind
dot com, where you'll find all of our podcasts, videos,
blog posts, and links out to our social media accounts.
You can also drop us a liney. You can do
that by sending us the email to blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
(31:30):
dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
todays St Patrick's Today. So we have a little bit
of a little bit of fun here for you from
(00:23):
the archives, an episode about lepri Cons a little bit,
but also primarily about hallucination. Yes, Liliputian hallucinations we're talking
about on the tiny, tiny scale. So we hope that
you guys enjoy and have a happy holiday. I have
always loved St. Patrick's Day. I don't have I'm basically
(00:46):
of Scotch German heritage, so I don't have that you know,
distinctive Irish roots link to it, and I don't have it,
you know, I don't have the like the Catholic link
to it either. But from a very early age, like
my family was always in to St. Patrick's Day. You know,
my mom's mom is a kindergarten teacher, so we would
have green things, we would eat green treats, green beer, well,
(01:07):
no green beer, but but maybe like a green cake
or a cupcake or something. And I still with St
Patrick's Day comes around, I'm like I need to eat
something that's green. I need to get like a pistatio cupcakes,
the Statio pudding. Um. But more importantly, we would, to
a certain extent, we would celebrate the the Irish myth
of the of the leprechn We would always watch Darby
(01:27):
O Gil and the Little People, that classic Disney film
with Sean Connery in it. Wow, you guys did it up. Yeah. Yeah,
we were big into the holidays, so we would always
watch Darbo Gil and a Little People. Sean Connery would
sing and it was awesome. Lepri cons would run around,
there was a banshee. Um. You know, it was just
it was a great film. I still watch it from
(01:48):
time to time. I just I feel like this is
really informed, like your ideas of creatures in the world.
Like somehow this is like an early influence on you. Yeah, definitely,
I mean we we really we got into Halloween and
then we would really get My big thing on on
holidays is that if a holiday has magic to it,
then it's in creatures specifically, then it's great. Like I
(02:10):
can obviously Halloween. I love Christmas. You know, you know,
the Christmas season can get a bit annoying when it's
over commercialization, but ultimately it's a season in which, on
one hand you have a magical man sneaking into your
house to give you gifts. There's there's Crampus running around
beating people. There's what's his name, Brumschnickel, the the other
Germanic holiday visitor. There at various takes on St. Nick
(02:33):
And then and if you get into the more religious
aspect of it too, you have like the Son of
God being born on earth. They're they're all these fantastic
things happening. St. Patrick's Day is also in that vein,
unlike Valentine's Day, where it's just about people in love
and stuff. But but St. Patty's Day there's this backbone
of myth and legend to it and uh and it's awesome.
So so what is your background with Leprika? Well, quickly,
(02:55):
Valentine's Day clearly needs some sort of creature's lacking that
we should really get into the idea of brainstorming that
without listening. Yeah, yeah, that's another s side project for
all of us. Um, But for me, St. Pat's has
just always been St. Pat's. I gotta say. In my
family it was sort of like their Santa Claus is
really like the dude down the street who's dressing up
(03:15):
and um, lepricrons don't exist truly, really, and happy fourth Birthday,
I'm just kidding, no, but really that wasn't That's not
really something that we celebrated much. But I will say
that the diminutive, diminutive stature of lepricrons always thought were
fascinating as a little kid. And what I find even
(03:36):
more fascinating is that there is a type of hallucination
that deals with this, this Liliputian quality. Um. And that's
what we're going to talk about today, because again in
celebration of St. Patty's Day, but also as a further
investigation into how the mind works and how it scales
our reality. Alright, So the Leprechnilipic from Irish folklore, this
(04:02):
is a fairy shoemaker uh and he's and he goes
by various names including it really depends on where you
are in particular region of Ireland uh and or the
history books. So you have lucre pan and again this
basically translates to little body and then there are various
versions of that lubrican lubrican lucre pan Luprican. They are
(04:24):
all these various takes on it, but as the one
that we really go with today, of course is Lepricn.
And the Lepricn is a is again a shoemaker. You
generally would see him with just a single shoe. There
would never be a second shoe around, which is a
little suspect and should have been a tip off to
people who end up messing with said lepricon. This is
like waste management job, Like, you know, maybe that's for
(04:47):
Lepricn being is shoemaker. Yeah, like you should be a
little aware that where's the other shoe. There's something fishy
going on also, and this is something that will come
up if, especially if the Lepricn is pressed about his
personal belongings. He carries a p but the purse only
contains a single shilling, much like a pizza delivery boy
only carries twenty dollars or less. The idea here is, oh,
(05:08):
you're gonna try and steal me gold. I only have
this one shilling, but I may have lots of gold elsewhere.
That's the big thing. This idea grows that Leprichns have
access to a massive quantity of gold and and certainly
in the mythology they do. They're paid by the ferry
folk for what I'm not sure. I guess repairing that
(05:29):
one shoe over and over again. So and there they
save up their money and they're laundering the money kind
of kind of money Launders h. But people get this
in their mind, Oh there's a Lepricn. If I capture
the Lepricn, then I can get access to his fabulous gold.
I can make him tell me where it is. And
later you get into the idea of the Lepricn gives
(05:50):
you three wishes. But ultimately the route is, if you
catch a Leprichn, you can totally rob him of everything
he owns. That's how the the average Lepricn chasing uh
individual was was thinking. So, um, what would typically happen?
I should say that the classic story, of course, is
the guy catches the Lepricn says, oh, take me to
your gold. And you have to know that if you
(06:11):
look away from the Lepricn at all, then he can vanish,
he can turn it visible. He's a supernatural creature with
these powers at his disposal. So what happens if the
Lebricn says, oh, I'll take you to the bush that
I have the gold buried beneath and so, and who
knows if this bush actually has the gold under it
or not. Um it works. The trick works well either way.
But it takes him out there and says, oh, it's
(06:32):
under this bush. And then the guy who's captured the
Lepricn realize I don't have a shovel. I have no
way of digging up this gold. So he says, I
know what I'll do. I'll take this red bandana or this, uh,
this kerchief or whatever, and I'll tie it, tie this
red kerchief to this bush, and then I'll go home
and I'll get my shovel and i'll come back. So
he lets the Lepricn free, goes back home, he gets
the shovel, comes back, and what has the Lepricn done.
(06:53):
The Lepricn is tied the red kerchief to every bush
and tree in sight, so there's no way for him
to remember which uch. What's he gonna do dig up
all of them? He'll try for a little bit before
he loses his mind, I guess. But that's the trickster
aspect of the lepricn. Okay, see that just takes me
back to the thirty Rock maxim, which is never follow
a hippie to a second location. Same thing with the lepricron, right, yeah,
(07:16):
so he the elepricns engage in various tricks like this.
They are largely solitary creatures, though they do have a
king name Lubden. They're all males too, correct. Yeah. I
did see some possible mention of female elepricns, and the
idea being that female elepricuns do exist, but they're even
more tricky, so they're I guess they're harder to observe
in nature. They're making that second too, yeah, or maybe
(07:38):
they're lessened to messing around and and and deceiving humans.
Because ultimately, the idea here is that lepricns are a
type of fairy folk. They are fairies and fairies. The
notion of fairy varies greatly around the world, but there
exists a nearly global idea of diminutive men, magical humanoids
(08:01):
and that are out there in the world, often generally
hidden from view, kind of an underworld taking place or
you know, or in the natural world or underground or
you know, somewhere that the humans are less likely to
see them during the course of their day. What I'm
trying to say is that they have a rich cultural
history um and some amazing mythology going on there beyond
(08:22):
the lepricn but all of this relates to fairy f
like Eventually, the idea is that even these magical people
were defeated by essentially the modern day Celts, and they
drive all these magical people out into the peripheries of
the world. But you can still glimpse them, you still
see them sometimes. Well. See, this is what I think
is so interesting about it, is that it is so
(08:44):
deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric, particularly and when we
talk about lebri cons in Ireland right and how this
really informs everybody's perception of life. And I wanted to
point out a couple of things. One is that Lepricrons
are protected under European Union Law KULD you not, yes,
(09:06):
at least the ones that dwell in calling Ford in Ireland.
The directive is an effort to preserve the rich biodiversity
of the area called the slab Foy Loop, which is
now a protected area for flora, fauna, wild animals, and
lepri cons. And this is a directive that was stemmed
in part by a group of lobbyists who recounted a
tale in nineteen nine of p J. O'Hare who happened
(09:28):
to be over by wishing well this man and he
heard a scream and he said he went to the
wishing well and he found, um, first of all, a
patch of burnt ground. And beside this patch he found
a little hat, jacket and trousers with four gold coins
in the pockets. The close of the naked lepre con,
as this lepricon is called, are actually on display at
(09:51):
Pj's Pub in carling Ford. So you know, as this
a tourist trap, absolutely, but again is it part of
the imagination, the the cultural fabric. And um, you know,
I'm not saying that pg o hair was that he
actually witnessed. You know this What we see is that
maybe a streaking lebre con gone gone wild. But um,
(10:16):
but but perhaps p J O'Hare was also participating and um,
you know, some sort of cultural tradition. Maybe he had
too much to drink, or maybe he had a hallucination. Okay,
And this is where this really comes into play because,
according to Oliver Sacks and his World Science Festival interview
(10:40):
about his new book on hallucinations. He says that hallucinations
really are cultural in nature and specific to the individual's background.
So he said that seeing miniature people is one type
of hallucination, as we said, a subtype. But depending on
the person's cultural background, the miniature person could be a lepricn,
a dwarf, a ary. So that's why I think this
(11:02):
is fascinating because, uh, if you have this hallucination, it
is colored by your perception, what you have grown up with,
the sort of stories, and this is the sort of
thing that might be expressed depending on certain external conditions
or neurological conditions that you have. So of course, if
we're going to talk about these Liliputian hallucinations, and that's
(11:24):
what they're called, we should first sort of give a
little bit of an intro on hallucinations. Yeah, it's worth
noting that hallucination is we're discussing here. It's just one
way of looking at essentially paranormal experience. As we discussed
in our alien abduction episode. People have always seen weird
things in the woods and the skies. He used to
(11:44):
be fairies. Then depending on your cultural flavoring, maybe it's
angels or maybe sci fi flavoring makes you see UFOs.
We've always seen things, We've all we've always had these experiences,
and there are various ways you can explain them that
range from simple imagination of a youngster to neuro logical
disorder and uh and and it's it's definitely happening for
(12:05):
the person who is experiencing them. Yeah, and UM. When
we talk about hallucinations, we're talking about many different sensory modalities,
turning about visual, auditory, old factory, gustatory, tactile, and other um.
And you can actually if a person is undergoing a
hallucination at the same time that they're going m R right,
you can actually try to figure out the type of
hallucination there have having by looking at the blood flow
(12:28):
to the region of their brain. And so, for instance,
if you see increased blood flow to the fusiform gyus,
which is where you detect face faces, then you know
someone is having some sort of um visual hallucination having
to do with perhaps even a little person. UM. So
it's kind of funny to me because when we talk
about hallucinations, we really think about them as being apart
(12:50):
from us and otherworldly. Yeah, we tend to think of them.
An hallucination is seeing something in the world as it is,
not it's seeing the world wrong, but that that really
implies that there is a correct and definitive way to
experience reality. Yeah, because I was thinking about this. We
really do have a very tenuous line between imagination and reality.
(13:13):
And I was thinking about this in the context of
our blue sky, right, because what is the blue sky
butt an illusion to us? Because if you think about it,
the only reason why we're seeing a blue sky is
because violet and blue have the shortest wavelengths and they
scatter a lot more than long ones. Some particles like
(13:33):
oxygen and nitrogen molecules are present, so those are the
ones that are most apparent to us. So that's what
we see when we're looking up in the sky. And
then it's not that we just see a purple and
a blue sky. No, the mind can't even really sort
of deal with that because of the machinery that we
have um with our perception of color, it kind of
has to mix some of that with white until it
(13:54):
turns out to this cohesive blue that we look up
in the sky at so it really makes you think
to what extent am I experiencing the world around you?
I mean, ultimately, our brain, it's it's it's inside of
some bone, it's inside of some skull, depends on these
sensory uh mechanisms to experience the world and then translate
(14:15):
that into data. So essentially the brain is blind anyway. Well,
and it's highly sensitive to suggestion. We've mentioned this before,
but there's a twenty eleven study at Whole University in
the UK, and it asked participants to imagine a color
while looking at a great pattern. And what they found
is that those people who were most susceptible to hypnosis
(14:36):
in other words, given to suggestion, they were able to
actually hallucinate the colors at will when they were asked to,
which was corroberated by an m R. I. So again
there's this idea of you know, what is you know,
we bring this up a lot, like what is reality
and how much of it is colored by our perceptions? Yeah?
So much of the I mean you can argue that
our perception of reality itself is a is an hallucination,
(14:59):
and any um alteration of that is just a it's
just a change in the flavoring. Um. We're gonna take
a quick break, and when we get back, though, we
are going to talk about this specific type of hallucination
that deals with the detection of tiny things, tiny people,
tiny animals. All right, we're back. And in this episode,
(15:29):
we of course started off by talking a little bit
about fairy folk and Laprikaans paranormal experience essentially, and we're
getting into into discussion of how hallucination, it's particular modes
of hallucination make us see tiny people and tiny things. Yeah,
and you know, before we start talking about um about
(15:51):
this perception or this illusion of tiny people or things,
I wanted to point out that it is amazing when
you think about it, that our eyes and our minds
are able to visually reconstruct things. So for instance, if
you have, you know, a plate on the table and
the fork next to it, and you continue to look
back and forth at those items, your brain has to
(16:13):
over and over again visually reconstruct those items and also
do that, um, you know, in the context of moving
back and forth. So it's got the movement element. And
what we're talking about here is perceptual constancy. So what
your mind is doing is saying that plate is still
the plate, and is still the dimension that it is,
is still the scale that it is. And this is
(16:34):
a lot of work for your brain to do, in
your eye to do, to take in all of this
data and make us feel as though we are on
the same, uh constant state where things are the same
and have a constancy to them. Yeah. One of the
things that this discussion of hallucination really drives home is
that site and our perception are the mental processes that
makes site possible are pretty complex and uh, the least
(16:58):
little bit of something can can go wrong or or change,
and it can can have some pretty dramatic effects on
how you perceive reality. Yeah, it's funny because you really
do take it for granted. How stable the images are
around you and how stable the story that that your
perception is telling you is all because of these different
(17:18):
parts of your brains working in concert. There is something
called micropesha or alice in Wonderland syndrome, and this is
when objects actually appear smaller, and it's not necessarily the
mechanics of the guys, but it's really the interpretation of
the data that causes the objects in the visual field
to appear minuscule. So when you have these lilocution hallucinations, um,
(17:41):
they are forming complex visual hallucinations of people, objects, or
animals that are greatly reduced in size or sometimes exaggerated, Yes,
sometimes exagger which also ends up going into all sorts
of mythological possibilities there as well. Right, we've got some
example too that that really sort of dwell in this.
And the hallucinations are vivid and they evoke varied responses
including fear, anxiety, or even pleasure. Um, They've been seen
(18:04):
across the board and people who are experiencing delirium tremens
from alcohol withdraw, people who have eyesight problems such as
macular degeneration, and people with mental disorders like schizophrenia. Although
in schizophrenia, even though hallucinations are are more common, this
type of hallucination, this little acution, is very rare. Yeah,
(18:24):
And most of the cases that we're looking at with
little acuction, Uh, it's a it's a situation where the
person is otherwise mentally fine, Like they're not They're not
a disturbed individual or a quote unquote crazy person. It's
not like, oh, that crazy person on the streets seeing
little people. Of course, they are they're crazy. No. It's
for instance, one of the cases that Oliver Sacks talks
(18:46):
about in in his book Hallucinations, which is excellent high
They recommend anyone at all interested in this pick that up.
It's very readable, just a great book. Uh. In his book,
he talks about a patient that he refers to his Zelda,
who eated in two thousand nine. She was an historian,
and some of the hallucinations that she ended up seeing
(19:08):
included she saw a great granddaughter, she saw a trio
of witches. She saw her hair rising up in the
mirror like it was witless. She saw tiny people crawling
out of the TV. She saw gaily dressed figures sort
of parading around. She saw six ominous tall men in
brown suits around her hospital bed. She saw a little
men in green caps. And she saw small fairy like
(19:30):
children sort of moving around as well. Just to give
you an idea, because a lot of these hallucinations, again
it's things are larger or smaller than they need to
be um So you're you're encountering giants, you're encountering little
people oftentimes that they're really brilliant to behold. The color
scheme will be amazing. So you in the costuming if
(19:50):
the if costumes are perceivable, the costumes will be crazy
and exotically bright. So you can really see where the
idea of a fairy folk can emerge from. This beca
all they were little people, and they were dressed like
they were from another world, and their colors were unreal
and magical. Well, and they were mischievous. To write, a
lot of times these accounts have um the little people
(20:12):
that are running around doing various things that we are
nefarious or yeah, and they're disappearing or they're reappearing necessarily
obeying the physical laws of our world. Now, these are
called released hallucinations because it's thought that they are released
or instigated by the removal of normal visual afferent input
into the association quartex. So in the case of Zelda,
(20:34):
there was reduced blood flow to the optical and parietal lobes,
and so this caused the hallucinations. Um. But probably one
of the one of the things that is most associated
with this is something called the Charles Bonnet syndrome yes
or CBS, and this is a common condition among people
with compromised vision. So when you think compromised vision, of
(20:57):
course We're not saying the person is necessarily completely Uh.
They might be suffering from just age related necular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma,
diabetic eye disease. Their site may be somewhat limited, but
they're still able to visually perceive the world to a
certain degree. Yeah. The idea is that the information received
from your eyes actually stops the brain from creating its
(21:18):
own pictures. So when you lose your sight or partially
lose your sight or it's damaged, your brain is not
receiving as much information from your eyes as it's used to,
and it begins to fill in those gaps by creating
this sort of fantasy uh, pictures or patterns. And then
when this occurs, you experience the images short in your
brain as hallucinations. It's kind of this idea that the
(21:40):
world that we live in, because you can we look
at like when we're just looking around a room, we're
looking at particular little spaces, and then then we're moving
in another little space where we're kind of basically the
world that we're in exists in our minds, and we
use our vision to constantly upgrade the details of that
mental image that we interact with there was a one
(22:01):
case of a Miss c an eighty year old woman.
She complained of little people dressed in blue and gray
leaves hiding in her cupboard cupboards, and she also saw
tiny black cats from time to time, and her chief
complaint was that the little people like to watch her undressed.
So of course she was examined. They found that her
(22:21):
cognitive functions were fined fine, fine and uh, and that
really again it came down to impairments in her visual field,
again creating in this story from this lack of information
that was being processed. Another interesting aspect about little acutions,
especially as a as a related to CBS, Alver Sachs
(22:43):
points out that most CBS hallucinations are ultimately inspiring, pleasant,
even friendly. Um not to say they are there. There
will be some that are a little serving, such as
the brown uh dressed men that are really taller around
Zelda's hospital that was that is ominous in nature, But
for the most part they tend to be lighter and
(23:03):
more amusing and magical in a in an uplifting sense.
Whereas there's a lot that goes on with with paranormal experience,
be it alien abduction, that is rude of scenario which
is rooted in say sleep paralysis, which is terrifying because
your your mind body connection is doing something weird and
add a little flavoring to it from whatever your worldview
(23:24):
or mythology is, and it's it can be a terrifying situation.
But with CBS you tend to see these more sort
of like, huh, there are little people in my closet.
That's totally cool, but I would rather than not look
at me while I'm naked. There's this idea to you
that perhaps, um, you know, it has an adaptive function
in terms of people who in general with hallucination is
not just little people that if someone has lost someone
(23:47):
in particularly in the elderly, if they hallucinate, you know,
maybe a loved one who has departed, that this is
a source of comfort to them, bereavement hallucination, so that
this is a whole area as well. Um yeah, it's
this idea that we're as as one. If we're losing
our ability to update the mental image in our head,
we're having to update it internally. Like imagine you're inside
(24:08):
your house and you're wanting to paint an image of
your backyard, so you look out the back window every day,
and you paint a little more of this image, and
you updated a little more, and then one day your
windows are walled up or they're frosted over and you
can't see out them all that. Well, well then you
have to maybe you're listening, maybe you're you're drawing on
your memory to try and and uh and and alter
that picture and make it as accurate as possible. But
(24:31):
then inevitably you're bringing in errors. You're bringing in um
even magical creations into that painting. That reminds me of
Anton syndrome when they'ror you have someone who is trying
to replace I put in quote their their reality with
a hallucination to simulate eyesight. Because because this occurs and
joining people that are really like totally blind, extremely deteriation,
(24:54):
totally blind from cortical damage um and and that damage
can be caused by stroke UM and this affects the
optic lobes. So these people are absolutely unaware of their
blindness and they insist that they can still see. Yeah,
like they'll say they'll they'll say like, hey, you you're blind.
Don't try and walk across the living room because their
(25:15):
toys all over the floor and they'll say I can
totally see, and like they believe they can see now,
they'll they'll end up stepping on the toys because ultimately
they that they can't they are blind. But but to them,
they feel they're experiencing. Now. If you tell them, hey,
describe that person setting on the couch over there, they
won't blink. They'll just describe the person. The description may
be completely wrong, or it may be reasonably correct based
(25:38):
on previous knowledge of the individual, you know, whatever, But
but they won't hesitate because in their in their mind,
they do see and see. I find that example so
fascinating just because that really does point to this adaptive function,
because if you have lost your your eyesight and you
are lacking that's stimuli, then your brain is just making
(25:59):
us smelacrum of that of reality, which I think is
just fascinating. Sacks also shared an account of a patient
who in the in the nineteen eighties, UH would a
blind patient went on a drinking binge and saw again
while in the midst of this this drinking like the
next morning remembered having seen as if his side had returned,
(26:24):
But it was a hallucination. Hallucination and again it's just
all it's a lot of this really drives home just
how complex side is and how how complex our our
observation of the world is to it and to what
extent is is all of our site hallucination. Yeah, again,
this idea that there's this, uh, this visual constancy that
(26:44):
goes on that we just that's running in the background,
and we don't even think about how tenuous that is. So,
as Oliver Sacks points out, Liliputian hallucinations can also occur
in migraines. Particularly, He points out the Migraine Blog, a
series host of it on New York Times, which is
a blog just about the author's experiences with migraines. Now,
(27:07):
I do experience migraines. I do. Yeah, what what are
they like for you? Do you ever see anything with them? Sometimes?
I've seen lights And actually a good many of the
females in my family have histories of really like pretty
intense histories with migraines, and they complain of something they
call an aura. It's a feeling, and and they also
get the strobe light effect. Interesting, I've never experienced a migraine.
(27:30):
My father used to get them, and I think my
My sister experiences them from time to time as well.
But in there they're more extreme nature. There, it's almost
like a supernatural experience, like it's it's like something from
another world is reaching out and touching your brain rather painfully. Uh,
but in in a certain way, illuminatingly for a few
(27:51):
seconds or minutes or what have you. Um. And again,
what we're talking about is uh a sort of impairment
of the visual field care right, Yeah, people will see lights,
like you said, geometric patterns, uh, flashes of light, zigzags,
blind spots, shimmering spots or stars are as, and in
some cases tiny man and tiny animals uh. In On
(28:12):
the Migraine blog, the author of was talking about how
they were reading a reading a book lying there, um,
and they looked down and they saw a small pink
man and his pink ox, perhaps six or seven inches high.
So the audice says, they were perfectly made creatures, and
except for their color, they looked very real. They didn't
speak to me, but they walked around and I watched
(28:33):
them with fascination and the kind of um amiable tenderness.
They stayed for some minutes and then disappeared. I have
often wished they would return, but they never have um,
which is this just amazing to think of that. And
you know, you just said there's migraine hits and you
look down and there's a little pink farmer in his
ox and they're they're not really concerned with you, which
(28:53):
which ties in nicely with when we were talking about
fairy experiences and in a lien experience. Paranormal exper is
around the world. They vary so much. Sometimes it is
a terrible experience where you're like, oh, I'm being abducted
by aliens or I'm tormented by demons. But in other
cases it's it's a matter of for a brief second,
you have a peak into a magical world just beyond
our own. Well. I think anybody who has ever had
(29:17):
a really bad migraine can attest to you. One of
the things that is probably interesting to them as well
as me, is that when you have an awful one,
it feels like the fog is rolling in and it
to some degree it does feel like your vision is
being affected, not just with the strobe light effect, but
as if, um something's just kind of moving over your
brain like a cloud. So it's interesting to see that
(29:40):
that sort of deprivation of stimulation or stimuli might manifest
itself with a Litiputian hallucination. Yeah. And in the book,
Fax points out that in a migraine, a wave of quote,
electrical excitation slowly moves across the visual cortex and on
(30:00):
the way, it's possible that it directly directly stimulates clusters
of orientation sensitive neurons in the visual cortex, and this
direct stimulation causes patterns patients to see shimmering light, zigzag fortifications, etcetera.
As we and as we see the wave move through
the brain during a migraine, when we're looking at brain scans, uh,
it's it's it's it's matching the movement of the shimmering
(30:23):
bars in the patient's site. Huh. So that that's very
interesting that that sense of movement isn't necessarily an illusion. Yeah,
it's it's it's it's amazing. I mean, I I'm not
envious of people who have to deal with migraines because,
like I said, it's just a normal headache suffer. Um.
I would see my father get these migraines and I
it was like, Wow, how can a headache do that bad?
That you just you know that you're you're just you know,
(30:45):
gripping your skull like I've never had had I had
a headache that bad. Uh. But but now that now
that I see a little bit more that it's involved
in it, I can totally get it. So there you
have it, leprech On Hallucinations. Fun little topic that we did,
and uh, you know, today was a perfect day to
bring it back out for your amusement. Hey. In the meantime,
(31:08):
check out the rest of stuff to Blow your mind
dot com, where you'll find all of our podcasts, videos,
blog posts, and links out to our social media accounts.
You can also drop us a liney. You can do
that by sending us the email to blow the mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
(31:30):
dot com.
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