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RE: Exploding Head Syndrome; the Scariest Thing You'll Never Die From.

in #life7 years ago

I love this. The brain and its quirks is one of my favorite topics. I remember when they first had ads for drugs for "Restless leg syndrome" and all these comedians were making fun of it as a non-existent condition. But all I could think was, "Finally! Someone has finally described what I used to experience as a child." I used to have these weird leg sensations when I was trying to sleep, as if all the nerves in my legs suddenly had the impulse to move, but moving didn't really help. And I couldn't get to sleep sometimes because of it. This was back in the late 1970s, so when they started talking about it on tv 40 years later I couldn't believe there was finally a name for it.

I've only heard someone calling my name when I lived in a creepy old apartment where there were other unexplained phenomena.

I was just reading a fascinating book recently that covers at least some of these phenomena. It's called Hallucinations and is by the late Oliver Sachs. He was a neuroscientist who studied all manner of interesting phenomena and pathologies of the brain. In this book he describes patients who have gone blind who have compensatory visual hallucinations and people who have become deaf who start to hallucinate sounds. His hypothesis is that the brain is looking to stimulate the areas of itself that used to have outside input and no longer do, so it creates them so that that part of the brain continues to be exercised and to function. This obviously doesn't cover people who are not deaf, but he talks about numerous other types of hallucinations in the book in a very respectful and thoughtful way and goes out of his way to make it clear that these experiences are completely real for the people having them and it does not make them mentally ill.