Title: Hallucinations
Description: Have you ever seen something that wasn't really there?
Heard someone call your name in an empty house?
Sensed someone following you and turned around to find nothing?

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Hallucinations don't belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. People with migraines may see shimmering arcs of light or tiny, Lilliputian figures of animals and people.
People with failing eyesight, paradoxically, may become immersed in a hallucinatory visual world. Hallucinations can be brought on by a simple fever or even the act of waking or falling asleep, when people have visions ranging from luminous blobs of color to beautifully detailed faces or terrifying ogres.
Those who are bereaved may receive comforting "visits" from the departed. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one's own body.

Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks had both a personal and a professional interest in psychedelics. These, along with his early migraine experiences, launched a lifelong investigation into the varieties of hallucinatory experience.

Here, with his usual elegance, curiosity, and compassion, Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.
Subjects: Hallucinations, Perceptual Disorders, Hallucinations and illusions, Cognition disorders, New York Times bestseller, New York Times reviewed, Alucinaciones e ilusiones, Trastornos de la cognición, Science, Neuropsychology
People: Shahar Arzy, Eugene Aserinsky, W.H. Auden, Hansen Asheim, Christopher Baethge, Frederic Bartlett, Charles Baudelaire, Lydia Bayne, A.W. Beard, Frank Benson, German Berrios, William Bexton, Molly Birnbaum, Olaf Blanke, Eugen Bleuler, Bonnie Blodgett, Jan Dirk Blom, Augusta Bonnard, Charles Bonnet, Babak Boroojerdi, Matthew Botvinick, John Paul Brady, Eva Brann, Daniel Breslaw, Joser Breuer, Chris Brewin, Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, Samuel Brock, Eylert Brodtkorb, Peter Brugger, John C.M. Brust, William Burke, Pierre R. Burkhard, Carol Burnett, Kevin Cahill, Joseph Capgras, Laurie Winn Carlson, Lewis Carroll, Paul Cézanne, J. Alan Cheyne, Paul Chodoff, David G. Cogan, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Cole, Monroe Cole, Samuel Coleridge, W.S. Colman, David Daly, Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Owen Davies, Thomas De Quincey, T.R. Dening, René Descartes, Orrin Devinsky, Kenneth Dewhurst, Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Douwe Draaisma, Hermann Ebbinghaus, David Ebin, Robert Efron, Henrik Ehrsson, Tom Eisner, Havelock Ellis, Sandra Escher, Jean-Étienne Esquirol, Gilles Fénelon, David Ferrier, Dominic ffytche, Donald Fish, Elizabeth Foote-Smith, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Diane Friedman, Steven Frucht, G.N. Fuller, John Grant Fuller, Francis Galton, Théophile Gautier, Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau, Norman Geschwind, Edward Gibbon, Martin Gilbert, William Gowers, Francisco de Goya, Celia Green, Mark Green, R.J. Guiloff, Bill Hayes, Alethea Hayter, Henry Head, Donald Hebb, Terry Heins, Ben Helfgott, George Henslow, John Stevens Henslow, Hippocrates, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Allan Hobson, Albert Hofmann, Douglas S. Holmes, Richard Howard, David Hubel, Robert Hughes, Siri Hustvedt, Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), John Hughlings Jackson, Ruth Jaffe, Henry James, William James, Murray Jarvik, Herbert Jasper, Julian Jaynes, Joan of Arc, Ernest Jones, Fred Kaplan, Kermit the Frog, John maynard Keynes, Nathaniel Kleitman, Heinrich Klüver, Eric Korn, Emil Kraepelin, Weston La Barre, George Lai, James Lance, Basile N. Landis, F.E. Leaning, Timothy Leary, Herbert Leiderman, Ivan Leudar, Eugene E. Levitt, Louis Lewin, Jean Lhermitte, Carl Linnaeus, Sara Lipman, Caro W. Lippman, Edward Liveing, John Locke, T.M. Luhrmann, Charles Lullin, Robert Macnish, Franco Magnani, Alfred Maury, Andreas Mavromatis, Richard Mayeux, Colin McGinn, Peter McKellar, Herman Melville, Lofti Merabet, Michael Merzenich, Mickey Mouse, Silas Weir Mitchell, Raymond Moody, Mozart, Arthur Thomas Myers, Vladimir Nobokov, F.W.H. Myers, Henry A. Nasrallah, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Kevin Nelson, Andrew Newberg, Isaac Newton, David Niven, Bennet Omalu, Erna Otten, Ambroise Paré, James Parkinson, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, John Pearson, Wilder Penfield, Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Giambattista Piranesi, Klaus Podoll, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Klaus Poeck, Michael Powell, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), V.S. Ramachandran, W.D. Rees, George Riddoch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Derek Robinson, Maruis Romme, David Rosenhan, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Mark Salzman, A.M. Santhouse, Paul Scatena, Jerome Schneck, Richard Evans Schultes, Benny Shanon, Leonard Shengold, Michael Shermer, Maggie Shiffrar, Ronald K. Siegel, Joe Simpson, Wolf Singer, Ruxandra Sireteanu, Daniel Smith, Socrates, Robert Southey, Jay Stevens, David Stewart, August Strindberg (1849-1912), Barbara Swartz, Michael Swash, Amy Tan, David C. Taylor, Robert Teunisse, Philip Tomas, Michael Thorpy, Louis W. Tinnin, Georges Gilles de Tourette, Robert Utter, Ludo Van Bogaert, Lev Vygotsky, Alref Russel Wallace, John Watkins, Evelyn Waugh, Judith Weissman, H.G. Wells, L. Joylon West, Torsten Wiesel, A.L. Wigan, Robin Williams, Edmund Wilson, S.A. Kinnier Wilson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul Wittgenstein, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, Giovanna Zamboni, John Zubek