Hallucinations - Few Warning Signs You Might be Suffering From!

Getting Hallucinations is a mental condition where a person sees, feels, hears, and tastes things that actually don't exist beyond one's heightened imagination or delusion. It involves the experience of perceiving something not present. Hallucinations can be pleasing or frightening. However, there is almost always an identifiable cause behind it.

They can be triggered by:

1. Taking hallucinogenic or psychotropic substances
2. Mental conditions like dementia and schizophrenia
3. Neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease
4. Macular degeneration, leading to loss of vision
5. Migraines and brain tumor can also lead to such delusions

Some of the signs of hallucinations:

• Hearing voices: The medical term for hearing voices is called an 'auditory hallucination'. A person may sense sounds or noises coming from inside or outside of their mind. The noise might be random or disrupting. One might also feel the voices talking to each other or trying to tell them something. Most of the times, these voices come from inside the person's mind; or in some cases, one's heightened perception may make a normal noise delusional.
• Seeing things: This is also called visual hallucinations. For instance, one may see unnatural things like a floating chair in thin air. It all depends on a person's perception. Sometimes these hallucinations appear as bright flashy spots or rays of light.
• False sense of taste and smell: Technically these are known as gustatory and olfactory hallucinations respectively. One may feel a kind of odor coming from one's body or surrounding; or a person might feel that something he/she is drinking or eating has an odd taste. This is again heightened mal-perception causing delusional sensory activities.
• Tactile hallucinations: This is when a person feels things that don't exist. One may feel that he/she is being touched or tickled even when no one else is around or that insects are crawling beneath the skin. One may experience strange sensations, which are not a part of a reality. If you wish to discuss about any specific problem, you can consult a Neurosurgeon.