March 12, 2013 • 42 mins
Leprechaun Hallucinations: As Saint Patrick's Day nears, 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. And
is this episode is coming to all you guys and
gals out there. It is, of course coming to your rights.
We're leading up into St. Patrick's Day, which I have
(00:26):
always loved St Patrick's Day. I don't have I'm basically
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 into St. Patrick's Day. You know,
my mom's mom is a kindergarten teacher, so we would
(00:47):
have green things. We would eat green treats, green beer, well,
no green beer, but like 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
cupcake if the statuo pudding um. But more importantly, we
would to a certain extent, we would celebrate the the
Irish myth of the the lepri Con. We would always
(01:10):
watch Darby 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 the 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
(01:31):
watch it from 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
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 in creatures specifically, then it's great.
(01:53):
Like I can obviously Halloween. I love Christmas, you know,
you know, the Christmas season can get a bit annoying
with this over commercial realization, 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
(02:16):
on St. Nick 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
(02:38):
with Leprika? Well, quickly, Valentine's Day clearly needs some sort
of creature because it's lacking that. We should really get
into the idea of brainstorming that with our listening. Yeah, yeah,
that's another a 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
(02:58):
the street who's dressing up in um Lepricrons don't exist
July 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 lepri consays thought were fascinating as a little kid.
(03:19):
And what I find even 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 Patty's Day, but
also as a further investigation into how the mind works
(03:39):
and how it scales our reality. Yeah, so in this episode,
we're kicking off with a little pop culture lepricn shenanigans. Here.
I'm going to talk just a little bit about the
myth of a lepricn because I think it's it's ultimately
far deeper than Lucky Charms and Darby O Gill, and
I want to make sure I do that justice. And
then we're going to get into hallucinations and how uh
(04:01):
some of these hallucinations can contribute and and or possibly
are responsible for our visions of little people. That's right,
because as as we have mentioned, this is a sort
of sub type of hallucinations that exist across various conditions
that we'll get into. All right, So the Leprechnu from
(04:22):
Irish folklore, this is a fairy shoemaker uh and he's
and he goes by various names that include it really
depends on where you are in particular region of Ireland
uh and or the history books. So you have lucar
Pan and again this basically translates to little body. And
then there are various versions of that lubrican, Lubrican, lucar Pan, Luprican.
(04:45):
They are all these various takes on it. But as
the one that we really go with today, of course
is Leprecn. 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.
Two people who end up messing with said Lepricn. This
is like waste management job, like you know, maybe that's
(05:08):
for Lepricn, the being issuemaker. Yeah, like you should be
a little aware that where's the other shoe. There's something
fishing going on also, and this is something that will
come up with especially if the Lepricn is pressed about
his personal belongings. Uh, he carries a purse, but the
purse only contains a single shilling, much like a pizza
delivery boy only carries twenty dollars or less. The idea
(05:29):
here is, oh, 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 lapricns 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
(05:50):
guess repairing that one shoe over and over again. So
and there they save up their money and then they're
laundering the money. What kind of kind of money Launders
the lepricns up. 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 you three wishes.
(06:12):
But ultimately the route is, if you catch a lepricn,
you can totally rob him of everything he owns. That's
how the the average lepri con chasing uh individual was
was thinking. So what would typically happen. I should say
that the classic story, of course, is the guy catches
the Lepricn and says, oh, take me to your gold.
And you have to know that if you look away
(06:33):
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 is 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 under this bush.
(06:54):
And then the guy who's captured the Lepricn realizes I
don't have a shovel. I have no way of digging
up this goal. 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. 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 is the lepricn done. The lepricund is tied
(07:15):
the red kerchief to every bush and tree in sight,
so there's no way for him to remember which bush.
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 with the leprichn. Right, yeah, so he
(07:38):
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 Lepricns in the idea, being that
female lepricns 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 shoo, yeah, or may be their lesson
(08:00):
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, magical humanoids and that are
(08:23):
out there in the world. Um 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. Uh. And they they vary
in temperament depending on the myths. Sometimes they are they're benign,
sometimes they're mischievous, sometimes they're they help humans out. Sometimes
(08:45):
they steal babies from cribs and replace them with changelings.
It it varies. Now. Folkustorian Carol rose Um, who I love,
I've always loved her, just to Encyclopedia's One about Monsters,
one more about Fairies, and uh uh I keep always
keeping by my desk next to Brewers and my other
monster books. But she divides fairies into two types. You
have trooping fairies, and these are fairies that have communities,
(09:07):
kingdoms and governments. And then you have solitary fairies. And
these are the ones kind of like the Lebricn, they're
more associated with up one place and they don't really
necessarily have as much to do with the rest of
their kind. So for the Irish, the most famous solitary
fairies are the Lebricn of course uh arguably the Banshee Uh.
(09:27):
And then you also have they're more famous trooping fairies,
the Dinners She formerly known as the two if the
Day Diana and which means the people of the Goddess Dna,
and these are a legendary race of super beings who
overthrew two other ancient people in primoral primordial Ireland that
included the monstrous fear bowls. These were the second inhabitants
(09:49):
of Ireland, Squat and Dark also known as the Corka
o d c the people of Darkness or the Corka
Do Widney the people of night Um. When the tu
efaddani Uh defeated, then they forcing the retreat into the
mountain caves and they kind of um, you know, devolved
into grotesque goblin like creatures in the ground. And then
(10:12):
they also defeated the Fomorians, who were themselves transformed into
grotesque demons when they fell to the invading fur box. So. Um,
what's really great about about Irish legend and myth is
that when you get past the Leprecn and the Banshee,
when you get past Darby O Gill and Lucky Charms
and the the awful Lepricn movies, there's this rich, powerful
(10:33):
epic story of these uh, these genocidal wars between these
different races of super beings. Because the dynasty, the Efaddan,
and they had all these intense magical powers at their disposal.
They could turn invisible, they could shape shift, they could
blink out of existence here and blink back into existence
(10:54):
over there. Uh. And they were always fighting these wars.
For instance, uh, they were fighting at one points against
the Fomorian chief bowler, who had an evil eye in
his forehead, destroyed all who looked upon it. And uh
and sometimes you see this is kind of like a
third eye in his head. Some depicted that way, others
depict him he's like a one eyed man with like
a Uh. The in the one eye has to be
(11:14):
covered because if anybody makes side contact with it, they die.
One of my favorite artistic examples of this, though, is
the idea that he has like one eye where his
two eyes should be, but his brow has grown out
into this grotesque flap that falls over his face, and
so to unleash the power of his eye in battle,
(11:35):
he has to have two people with like a wooden
pole come up and use that wooden pole to lift
his floppy brow up so that he can destroy them
with his sight. So, well, one more and then I'm done. Uh.
And then also uh, the two fo they had done,
and they had a they had a king named Nuada,
and Nuada lost an arm in battle. Uh, and so
(11:57):
they replaced it with a silver arm, which they men
grew flesh over. So we had this amazing like magical
cybernetic arm. So okay, I'll stop now. No, I mean,
when we get into prosthetics series, it's pretty crazy. Um.
What I'm trying to say is that they have a
rich cultural history UM, and some amazing mythology going on
(12:18):
there beyond the lepricn but all of this relates to
fairy for 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
(12:39):
is so 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 lebri cons are protected under European Union law. Kid you, yes,
(13:02):
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 that's leab 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 nine of p J O'Hare who happened to
(13:25):
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 coron, as
(13:45):
this leapricon is called, are actually on display at Pj's
pub in carling Ford. So you know, is this a
tourist trap? Absolutely, But again is it part of the imagination,
the cultural fabric? And um, you know, I'm not saying
that PJ. O hair was that he actually witnessed. You
know this. What we see is that maybe a streaking
(14:09):
lebre con gone gone wild. But um, 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
(14:31):
to Oliver Sacks and his World Science Festival interview 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,
(14:55):
a dwarf, a fairy. So that's why I think this
is fascinating because is uh, if you have this hallucination,
it is colored by your perception what you have grown
up with, the sort of stories that maybe the warfare,
maybe the prosthetic arm of a lebri con got lodged
into your brain, and this is the sort of thing
that might be expressed depending on certain external conditions or
(15:17):
neurological conditions that you have. So, of course, if we're
going to talk about these Liliputian hallucinations, and that's 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
(15:40):
our alien abduction episode. People have always seen weird things
in the woods and the skies. It used to 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 the youngster to neurological disorder and uh
(16:04):
and and it's it's definitely happening for the person who's
experiencing them. Yeah, and um. When we talk about hallucinations,
we're talking about many different sensory modalities, turning about visual, auditory, olfactory, 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
(16:25):
figure out the type of hallucination there have having by
looking at the blood flow to the region of their brains. 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.
(16:45):
So it's kind of funny to me because when we
talk about hallucinations, we really think about them as being
apart 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. And because I was
(17:08):
thinking about this. We really do have a very tenuous
line between imagination and reality. And I was thinking about
this in the context of our blue sky, right, because
what is the blue sky butt an allusion to us,
Because if you think about it, the only reason why
we're seeing a blue sky is because violet and blue
(17:30):
have the shortest wavelengths and they scatter a lot more
than long ones, and particles like 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 the machinery that we have um with our perception
(17:53):
of color, it kind of has to mix some of
that with white until it turns out to this cohesive
blue that we look up in the sky. Yet Yeah,
and is is pointed out in the Excellent Colors episode
of Radio lab Um. It's it's arguable that too, that
individuals who do not have a preconceived notion of blue
would not really see the sky as blue. Like there's
(18:14):
also that level of cultural layering of it. So it
really makes you think to what extent am I experiencing
the world around you? I mean, ultimately, our brain it's uh,
it's it's inside of some bone, it's inside of some skull.
It depends on these sensory uh mechanisms to experience the
world and then translate that into data. So essentially the
(18:35):
brain is blind anyway. Well, and it's highly sensitive to suggestion.
We've mentioned this before, but there's a study at Whole
University in the UK and it asked participants to imagine
a color while looking at a gray pattern. And what
they found is that those people who were most susceptible
to hypnosis in other words, given to suggestion, they were
(18:56):
able to actually hallucinate the colors at will when they
were asked to you, 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 so much of the I mean
you can argue that our perception of reality itself is
a is an hallucination, and any um alteration of that
(19:19):
is just a it's just a change in the flavoring um.
For instance, there's a close eyes visualization closed eye hallucinations
that occur. When I was a kid, I would do
this a lot, where I would close my eyes. No
guests to his board, and generally you see colors moving around.
It's like an instant fireworks show. Maybe I was just
easily amused. I don't know, I was. I was. I
(19:39):
was an only child for a bit until my my
sister's were born, so I just s been a lot,
you know, a certain amount of time by myself. But
even now, as I've discussed before in yoga, when I'm
engaged in Shivasana, the corpse pose meditation, at the end
of the yoga session, I'm closing my eyes and I'm seeing,
and I'll end up seeing colors and ultimately I'll see
forms and figures and faces even and uh and really
(20:00):
that is an example of closed eye hallucination. I'm not
doing anything to my body in this an instance, except
working out with yoga for a little bit and then
sort of calming myself. But I'm seeing things that are
are not there within my mind. That's interesting because when
I was little, one of my favorite things to do
was to close my eyes and pretend I was on
(20:20):
a grid and shrink myself and then expand myself on
that grid. And I thought I was a little bit insane,
but you know, I felt my body doing that, and
so it's it's interesting that there's part of our brain
that we can really tap into to manipulate our experiences
like this. 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
(20:44):
detection of tiny things, tiny people, tiny animals. All right,
we're back. And in this episode, we of course started
off by talking a little bit about fairy folk and
Leaprikaans paranormal experience essentially, and we're getting into into discussion
(21:05):
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 this perception or
this illusion of tiny people or things, I wanted to
point out that it is amazing when you think about it,
(21:27):
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 over and over again visually reconstruct
those items and also do that, um, you know, in
(21:47):
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 a plate, and is still the
demension that it is, is still the scale that it is.
And this is 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
(22:08):
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 little bit of something can can go wrong
(22:29):
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 parts of your brains working in concert.
There is something called micropsha or alice in Wonderland syndrome,
(22:53):
and this is when objects actually appear smaller. And it's
not necessarily the mechanics of the guys, but it's really
the repretation of the data that causes the objects in
the visual field to appear minuscule. So when you have
these littlopuction hallucinations, um, they are forming complex visual hallucinations
of people, objects, or animals that are greatly reduced in
(23:14):
size or sometimes exaggerated. Yes, sometimes exaggeration also ends up
going into all sorts of mythological possibilities there as well. Right,
we've got some examples 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 across the board and people who are
experiencing delirium tremens from alcohol withdraw, people who have eyesight
(23:38):
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 littlocution is very rare. Yeah,
and of most of the cases that we're looking at
with lillipution, Uh, it's a it's a situation where the
person is otherwise mentally fine. They're not. They're not a
(24:02):
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 about in in
his book Hallucinations, which is excellent, Highly recommend anyone at
all interested in this pick that up. It's very readable,
just a great book. Uh. In his book, he talks
(24:24):
about a patient that he refers to his Zelda, who
he treated in two thousand nine. She was an historian,
and some of the hallucinations that she uh ended up
seeing included she saw a great granddaughter. She saw a
trio of witches. She saw her hair rising up in
the mirror like it was waitless. She saw tiny people
(24:44):
crawling out of the TV. She saw gaily dressed figures
sort of trading 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 children. Uh, sort of moving around as well, just
to give you an idea, because a lot of these hallucinations,
(25:04):
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 they're they're really brilliant to the whole
The color scheme will be amazing, so you in the costuming,
if they costumes are perceivable, the costumes will be crazy
and exotically bright. So you can really see where the
(25:25):
idea of a fairy folk can emerge from this, because oh,
they were little people, and they were dressed like they
were from another world, and the colors were unreal and magical. Well,
and they were mischievous to write, a lot of times
these accounts have um the little people 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
(25:48):
laws of our world. Now, these are called release hallucinations
because it's thought that they are released or instigated by
the removal of normal visual afferent input into the association
core texts. So in the case of Zelda, there was
reduced blood flow to the optical and parietal lobes, and
so this caused the hallucinations, um, but probably one of them.
(26:14):
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 that compromised vision, of course, we're not saying
the person is necessarily completely blind. Uh, they might be
suffering from just age related necular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic
(26:34):
eye disease. The 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 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
(26:55):
begins to fill in those gaps by creating this sort
of fantasy 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 world that we
live in because you can we look at like when
we're just looking around our room, we're looking at particular
little spaces, and then then we're looking in another little
(27:16):
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 case of a misssy,
an eighty year old woman. She complained of little people
dressed in blue and gray leaves hiding in her cup
for cupboards, and she also saw tiny black cats from
(27:40):
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 cognitive functions were
fined find 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
(28:02):
being processed. Another interesting aspect about lilocutions, especially as a
as related to CBS. All for Sax points out that
most CBS hallucinations are ultimately it's inspiring, pleasant, even friendly.
Um not to say they all are. There. There will
be some that are a little serving, such as the
brown uh, dressed men that are really tall. They're around
(28:25):
Zelda's hospital that was that was ominous in nature. But
for the most part, they tend to be lighter and
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 scenario, which is
rooted in say, sleep paralysis, which is terrifying because your
your mind body connection is doing something weird and add
(28:49):
a little flavoring to it from whatever your worldview 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. Ye. There's this idea too
that perhaps, um, you know, it has an adaptive function
in terms of people who in general with hallucination is
(29:11):
not just little people. That if someone has lost someone,
and 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 hallucinations that this
is a whole area as well. Um yeah, it's this
idea that we're as one. If we're losing our ability
to update the mental image in our head, we're having
(29:33):
to update it internally. Like imagine you're inside 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
(29:53):
memory to try and and and and alter that picture
and make it as accurate as possible. But then inevitably
you're bringing in errors, you're bringing in even magical creations
into that pain. That reminds me of Anton syndrome when
they're you have someone who is trying to replace I'm
putting quote their their reality with a hallucination to simulate eyesight.
(30:16):
Because because this occurs in telling people that are really
like totally blind, extremely deteriorating, 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 insists that
they can still see. Yeah, like they'll say, they'll they'll
(30:39):
say like, hey, you you're blind. Don't try and walk
across the living room because their 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
(31:00):
the person. The description may be completely wrong, or it
may be reasonably correct based 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
(31:22):
your your eyesight and you are lacking that's stimuli, then
your brain is just making us some sme alacrum of
that of reality, which I think is just fascinating. Sacs
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
(31:45):
midst of this drinking, like the next morning remembered having
seen as if his side had returned. But it was
a hallucination hallucination. But and again it's just all a
lot of this really drives home just how complex side is,
and how how complex are our observation of the world
is to it and to what extent is is all
(32:05):
of our site hallucination. Yeah, again, this idea that there's
this uh, this visual constancy that 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 Sex
points out, Liliputian hallucinations can also occur in migraines. Particularly,
He points out the Migraine Blog by a series host
(32:28):
of it on New York Times, which is a blog
just about the author's experiences with migraines. Now, 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
(32:50):
call an aura, it's a feeling, and and they also
get the Strobe light effect. Interesting. I've never experienced a migraine.
My father used to get them, and I think my
sister experiences and from time to time as well. But
in their their 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,
(33:15):
but in in a certain way, illuminating le for a
few seconds or minutes or what have you. Um. And again,
what we're talking about is uh a sort of impairment
of the visual feeling here 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
(33:37):
some cases tiny man and tiny animals uh. In On
the Migraine blog, the author I 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 obviously, as they were perfectly made creatures, and
except for their color, they looked very real. They didn't
(33:59):
speak to me, but they walked around and I watched
them with fascination and a 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 is 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,
(34:20):
which which ties in nicely with when you were talking
about very experiences and in alien ex paranormal experiences 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 just a matter of for a brief second,
you have a peek into a magical world just beyond
(34:41):
our own. Well. I think anybody who has ever had
a really bad migrant can attest to 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's to
some degree it does feel like your vision is being affected,
not just with the strobe Lde effect, but as if, um,
(35:02):
something's just kind of moving over your brain like a cloud.
So it's interesting to see that that sort of deprivation
of stimulation or stimuli might manifest itself with a Liliputian hallucination. Yeah.
In in the book, Sax points out that in a migraine,
a wave of quote, electrical excitation slowly moves across the
(35:26):
visual cortex and on 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, et cetera. 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
(35:48):
it's it's it's matching the movement of the shimmering 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'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
(36:08):
was like, Wow, how can a headache do that bad?
That you just you know that you're you're just you know,
gripping your skull Like I've never had had a had
a headache that bad. Uh. But But now that now
that I see a little bit more that what's involved
in it, I can totally get it. Well, there you go. Uh.
I hope that everybody has a wonderful St. Patrick's Day
and that you keep in mind these little Abutian hallucinations
(36:29):
as you go about your day clad in green drinking
green beer, and and maybe thinking a little more about
about leprecons, being respectful of them, knowing not to chase them,
don't try and kidnap them and rob them because they
will trick you. And maybe also when you're when you're
thinking about about Irish culture and Irish mythology, know that
there's there's a lot of rich stuff in there. In
(36:51):
addition to the LEPrecon in addition to Lucky Charms and
and uh the and the awful lepricn horror movies. I mean,
you have the two Eth the Day then and and
and they're pretty fabulous and and post Lebricnism transformations with
prosthetics that exists for futurists, we can transform into labricns. UM. So,
(37:15):
if if anyone has anything you would like to share,
be it on Irish smith and legend, be it on
your own history with lebricns, but more importantly on your
your your thoughts on the hallucination aspect of this episode. UH.
Do you deal with migraines? And if you do, what
kind of UH hallucinatory experiences do you encounter? We would
(37:36):
love to hear about that. Do you see the grid
pattern the fortification? Have you ever seen little people uh
due to migraines, due to cb s tow due to
any other kind of UH paranormal experience. We would love
to hear from you if we you know, and because
we're curious about about how other people perceive the world
and about how neurological things can contribute to that uh
(37:59):
and and if we share your material, you know, obviously
we're going to do some in a respectful manner. So
so let us know. In the meantime, let's call the
robot over and do some quick listener mail we received.
We recently, of course, did the slime episodes and we
did the Valentine's Day episode about slugs, which there there
you go. If you need a monstrous creature to to
associate with Valentine's Day, the slug is perfect, in particular
(38:24):
the banana slug, which is a penis chewing slug, yes,
so to speak, and it is also the it is
also a mascot, yes, you see Santa Cruz, which we
mentioned and we had a bit of a laugh about.
And lo and behold, we heard from a listener who
is a PhD candidate at the USC You see Santa Cruz.
(38:45):
So she writes in with this fabulous postcard for starters
and says, hi, I just wanted to say thanks for
the shout out to w c SC in your podcast
Slug Life. Uh. It came out the same week I
handed in my PhD dissertation on lizard making behavior not slugs.
And by the way that the title of the the
paper is Maile aggression varies with throat color and two
(39:08):
distinct populations of the mesquite lizard. She continues, It was
still a perfect timing, though, because your podcast, UM has
helped me through many long hours in the lab. Please
enjoy some slug theme goodies at the token of appreciation. Beth. So, Yeah,
so she sent a box that contained, first of all,
(39:28):
some some uh some buttons uh and these I don't
mind them. One of them says one slug, which um,
you know means that you're one behind this team and
they're they're slug scot. And then there's also this other
button that UM that I actually don't mind either, that
says that that has the university insignia, and then has
(39:49):
his cartoon slug that's reading the works of Plato and
he has a g little glasses on itable and he
has arms for some reason. So I can stand that too,
because that's right, all right, he's a slug sort of
and he's also he's reading playto he's he's he's even
more intelligent than we thought. But then she also said this,
there's another UM portion of the care box that is
(40:09):
kind of horrifying. Okay, so this is a box of chocolates.
What could be horrifying about that? Well, because they're all
shaped like slugs. They're beautiful they and some of them
are banana slugs, yeah. Some of them are yellow coated
in something and uh, and others are just more like
a dark chocolate and some seem to have like a
white chocolate infusion that gives them kind of that model
(40:31):
of color that is common to slugs. I was gonna
say that looks like the leopard slug, as we know,
is the gymnast of the sexual reproductive world. Um, this
is so cool, Beth, Thank you so much, and um congratulations.
I'm glad that we could be in your in your
ear holes with you while you are working on your dissertation.
And I think that's just awesome. Indeed, we always love
(40:52):
to hear from listeners who all listeners, but also when
they have you some sort of science in their their lives.
It's always fun. And thank you for aking Robert squirm
with that chocolate. I do not know if I will
ever eat one of these, um, but we were talking.
It would be an interesting experiment to see to what
extent people of the office here actually ate them, and
if they did, where they only eat the rear portions
(41:13):
of the slug Because for me. If I had to,
I would break off the rear end of the slug
and eat that, because, as we discussed in the podcast,
all sorts of horrible stuff happens at the front of
the slug. The rear of the slug where you're you're safe.
The front's got the penis the anus. But we'll definitely
need a control box of chocolates to place alongside it
to do a representation of what happens here. But all
(41:37):
of this is awesome, So thank you Againbeth. So. If
you would like to reach out to us, um you
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We're stuffed with all your mind on both of those.
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(41:58):
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(42:22):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works?
Dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. And
is this episode is coming to all you guys and
gals out there. It is, of course coming to your rights.
We're leading up into St. Patrick's Day, which I have
(00:26):
always loved St Patrick's Day. I don't have I'm basically
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 into St. Patrick's Day. You know,
my mom's mom is a kindergarten teacher, so we would
(00:47):
have green things. We would eat green treats, green beer, well,
no green beer, but like 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
cupcake if the statuo pudding um. But more importantly, we
would to a certain extent, we would celebrate the the
Irish myth of the the lepri Con. We would always
(01:10):
watch Darby 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 the 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
(01:31):
watch it from 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
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 in creatures specifically, then it's great.
(01:53):
Like I can obviously Halloween. I love Christmas, you know,
you know, the Christmas season can get a bit annoying
with this over commercial realization, 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
(02:16):
on St. Nick 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
(02:38):
with Leprika? Well, quickly, Valentine's Day clearly needs some sort
of creature because it's lacking that. We should really get
into the idea of brainstorming that with our listening. Yeah, yeah,
that's another a 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
(02:58):
the street who's dressing up in um Lepricrons don't exist
July 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 lepri consays thought were fascinating as a little kid.
(03:19):
And what I find even 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 Patty's Day, but
also as a further investigation into how the mind works
(03:39):
and how it scales our reality. Yeah, so in this episode,
we're kicking off with a little pop culture lepricn shenanigans. Here.
I'm going to talk just a little bit about the
myth of a lepricn because I think it's it's ultimately
far deeper than Lucky Charms and Darby O Gill, and
I want to make sure I do that justice. And
then we're going to get into hallucinations and how uh
(04:01):
some of these hallucinations can contribute and and or possibly
are responsible for our visions of little people. That's right,
because as as we have mentioned, this is a sort
of sub type of hallucinations that exist across various conditions
that we'll get into. All right, So the Leprechnu from
(04:22):
Irish folklore, this is a fairy shoemaker uh and he's
and he goes by various names that include it really
depends on where you are in particular region of Ireland
uh and or the history books. So you have lucar
Pan and again this basically translates to little body. And
then there are various versions of that lubrican, Lubrican, lucar Pan, Luprican.
(04:45):
They are all these various takes on it. But as
the one that we really go with today, of course
is Leprecn. 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.
Two people who end up messing with said Lepricn. This
is like waste management job, like you know, maybe that's
(05:08):
for Lepricn, the being issuemaker. Yeah, like you should be
a little aware that where's the other shoe. There's something
fishing going on also, and this is something that will
come up with especially if the Lepricn is pressed about
his personal belongings. Uh, he carries a purse, but the
purse only contains a single shilling, much like a pizza
delivery boy only carries twenty dollars or less. The idea
(05:29):
here is, oh, 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 lapricns 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
(05:50):
guess repairing that one shoe over and over again. So
and there they save up their money and then they're
laundering the money. What kind of kind of money Launders
the lepricns up. 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 you three wishes.
(06:12):
But ultimately the route is, if you catch a lepricn,
you can totally rob him of everything he owns. That's
how the the average lepri con chasing uh individual was
was thinking. So what would typically happen. I should say
that the classic story, of course, is the guy catches
the Lepricn and says, oh, take me to your gold.
And you have to know that if you look away
(06:33):
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 is 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 under this bush.
(06:54):
And then the guy who's captured the Lepricn realizes I
don't have a shovel. I have no way of digging
up this goal. 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. 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 is the lepricn done. The lepricund is tied
(07:15):
the red kerchief to every bush and tree in sight,
so there's no way for him to remember which bush.
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 with the leprichn. Right, yeah, so he
(07:38):
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 Lepricns in the idea, being that
female lepricns 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 shoo, yeah, or may be their lesson
(08:00):
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, magical humanoids and that are
(08:23):
out there in the world. Um 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. Uh. And they they vary
in temperament depending on the myths. Sometimes they are they're benign,
sometimes they're mischievous, sometimes they're they help humans out. Sometimes
(08:45):
they steal babies from cribs and replace them with changelings.
It it varies. Now. Folkustorian Carol rose Um, who I love,
I've always loved her, just to Encyclopedia's One about Monsters,
one more about Fairies, and uh uh I keep always
keeping by my desk next to Brewers and my other
monster books. But she divides fairies into two types. You
have trooping fairies, and these are fairies that have communities,
(09:07):
kingdoms and governments. And then you have solitary fairies. And
these are the ones kind of like the Lebricn, they're
more associated with up one place and they don't really
necessarily have as much to do with the rest of
their kind. So for the Irish, the most famous solitary
fairies are the Lebricn of course uh arguably the Banshee Uh.
(09:27):
And then you also have they're more famous trooping fairies,
the Dinners She formerly known as the two if the
Day Diana and which means the people of the Goddess Dna,
and these are a legendary race of super beings who
overthrew two other ancient people in primoral primordial Ireland that
included the monstrous fear bowls. These were the second inhabitants
(09:49):
of Ireland, Squat and Dark also known as the Corka
o d c the people of Darkness or the Corka
Do Widney the people of night Um. When the tu
efaddani Uh defeated, then they forcing the retreat into the
mountain caves and they kind of um, you know, devolved
into grotesque goblin like creatures in the ground. And then
(10:12):
they also defeated the Fomorians, who were themselves transformed into
grotesque demons when they fell to the invading fur box. So. Um,
what's really great about about Irish legend and myth is
that when you get past the Leprecn and the Banshee,
when you get past Darby O Gill and Lucky Charms
and the the awful Lepricn movies, there's this rich, powerful
(10:33):
epic story of these uh, these genocidal wars between these
different races of super beings. Because the dynasty, the Efaddan,
and they had all these intense magical powers at their disposal.
They could turn invisible, they could shape shift, they could
blink out of existence here and blink back into existence
(10:54):
over there. Uh. And they were always fighting these wars.
For instance, uh, they were fighting at one points against
the Fomorian chief bowler, who had an evil eye in
his forehead, destroyed all who looked upon it. And uh
and sometimes you see this is kind of like a
third eye in his head. Some depicted that way, others
depict him he's like a one eyed man with like
a Uh. The in the one eye has to be
(11:14):
covered because if anybody makes side contact with it, they die.
One of my favorite artistic examples of this, though, is
the idea that he has like one eye where his
two eyes should be, but his brow has grown out
into this grotesque flap that falls over his face, and
so to unleash the power of his eye in battle,
(11:35):
he has to have two people with like a wooden
pole come up and use that wooden pole to lift
his floppy brow up so that he can destroy them
with his sight. So, well, one more and then I'm done. Uh.
And then also uh, the two fo they had done,
and they had a they had a king named Nuada,
and Nuada lost an arm in battle. Uh, and so
(11:57):
they replaced it with a silver arm, which they men
grew flesh over. So we had this amazing like magical
cybernetic arm. So okay, I'll stop now. No, I mean,
when we get into prosthetics series, it's pretty crazy. Um.
What I'm trying to say is that they have a
rich cultural history UM, and some amazing mythology going on
(12:18):
there beyond the lepricn but all of this relates to
fairy for 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
(12:39):
is so 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 lebri cons are protected under European Union law. Kid you, yes,
(13:02):
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 that's leab 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 nine of p J O'Hare who happened to
(13:25):
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 coron, as
(13:45):
this leapricon is called, are actually on display at Pj's
pub in carling Ford. So you know, is this a
tourist trap? Absolutely, But again is it part of the imagination,
the cultural fabric? And um, you know, I'm not saying
that PJ. O hair was that he actually witnessed. You
know this. What we see is that maybe a streaking
(14:09):
lebre con gone gone wild. But um, 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
(14:31):
to Oliver Sacks and his World Science Festival interview 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,
(14:55):
a dwarf, a fairy. So that's why I think this
is fascinating because is uh, if you have this hallucination,
it is colored by your perception what you have grown
up with, the sort of stories that maybe the warfare,
maybe the prosthetic arm of a lebri con got lodged
into your brain, and this is the sort of thing
that might be expressed depending on certain external conditions or
(15:17):
neurological conditions that you have. So, of course, if we're
going to talk about these Liliputian hallucinations, and that's 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
(15:40):
our alien abduction episode. People have always seen weird things
in the woods and the skies. It used to 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 the youngster to neurological disorder and uh
(16:04):
and and it's it's definitely happening for the person who's
experiencing them. Yeah, and um. When we talk about hallucinations,
we're talking about many different sensory modalities, turning about visual, auditory, olfactory, 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
(16:25):
figure out the type of hallucination there have having by
looking at the blood flow to the region of their brains. 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.
(16:45):
So it's kind of funny to me because when we
talk about hallucinations, we really think about them as being
apart 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. And because I was
(17:08):
thinking about this. We really do have a very tenuous
line between imagination and reality. And I was thinking about
this in the context of our blue sky, right, because
what is the blue sky butt an allusion to us,
Because if you think about it, the only reason why
we're seeing a blue sky is because violet and blue
(17:30):
have the shortest wavelengths and they scatter a lot more
than long ones, and particles like 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 the machinery that we have um with our perception
(17:53):
of color, it kind of has to mix some of
that with white until it turns out to this cohesive
blue that we look up in the sky. Yet Yeah,
and is is pointed out in the Excellent Colors episode
of Radio lab Um. It's it's arguable that too, that
individuals who do not have a preconceived notion of blue
would not really see the sky as blue. Like there's
(18:14):
also that level of cultural layering of it. So it
really makes you think to what extent am I experiencing
the world around you? I mean, ultimately, our brain it's uh,
it's it's inside of some bone, it's inside of some skull.
It depends on these sensory uh mechanisms to experience the
world and then translate that into data. So essentially the
(18:35):
brain is blind anyway. Well, and it's highly sensitive to suggestion.
We've mentioned this before, but there's a study at Whole
University in the UK and it asked participants to imagine
a color while looking at a gray pattern. And what
they found is that those people who were most susceptible
to hypnosis in other words, given to suggestion, they were
(18:56):
able to actually hallucinate the colors at will when they
were asked to you, 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 so much of the I mean
you can argue that our perception of reality itself is
a is an hallucination, and any um alteration of that
(19:19):
is just a it's just a change in the flavoring um.
For instance, there's a close eyes visualization closed eye hallucinations
that occur. When I was a kid, I would do
this a lot, where I would close my eyes. No
guests to his board, and generally you see colors moving around.
It's like an instant fireworks show. Maybe I was just
easily amused. I don't know, I was. I was. I
(19:39):
was an only child for a bit until my my
sister's were born, so I just s been a lot,
you know, a certain amount of time by myself. But
even now, as I've discussed before in yoga, when I'm
engaged in Shivasana, the corpse pose meditation, at the end
of the yoga session, I'm closing my eyes and I'm seeing,
and I'll end up seeing colors and ultimately I'll see
forms and figures and faces even and uh and really
(20:00):
that is an example of closed eye hallucination. I'm not
doing anything to my body in this an instance, except
working out with yoga for a little bit and then
sort of calming myself. But I'm seeing things that are
are not there within my mind. That's interesting because when
I was little, one of my favorite things to do
was to close my eyes and pretend I was on
(20:20):
a grid and shrink myself and then expand myself on
that grid. And I thought I was a little bit insane,
but you know, I felt my body doing that, and
so it's it's interesting that there's part of our brain
that we can really tap into to manipulate our experiences
like this. 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
(20:44):
detection of tiny things, tiny people, tiny animals. All right,
we're back. And in this episode, we of course started
off by talking a little bit about fairy folk and
Leaprikaans paranormal experience essentially, and we're getting into into discussion
(21:05):
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 this perception or
this illusion of tiny people or things, I wanted to
point out that it is amazing when you think about it,
(21:27):
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 over and over again visually reconstruct
those items and also do that, um, you know, in
(21:47):
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 a plate, and is still the
demension that it is, is still the scale that it is.
And this is 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
(22:08):
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 little bit of something can can go wrong
(22:29):
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 parts of your brains working in concert.
There is something called micropsha or alice in Wonderland syndrome,
(22:53):
and this is when objects actually appear smaller. And it's
not necessarily the mechanics of the guys, but it's really
the repretation of the data that causes the objects in
the visual field to appear minuscule. So when you have
these littlopuction hallucinations, um, they are forming complex visual hallucinations
of people, objects, or animals that are greatly reduced in
(23:14):
size or sometimes exaggerated. Yes, sometimes exaggeration also ends up
going into all sorts of mythological possibilities there as well. Right,
we've got some examples 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 across the board and people who are
experiencing delirium tremens from alcohol withdraw, people who have eyesight
(23:38):
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 littlocution is very rare. Yeah,
and of most of the cases that we're looking at
with lillipution, Uh, it's a it's a situation where the
person is otherwise mentally fine. They're not. They're not a
(24:02):
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 about in in
his book Hallucinations, which is excellent, Highly recommend anyone at
all interested in this pick that up. It's very readable,
just a great book. Uh. In his book, he talks
(24:24):
about a patient that he refers to his Zelda, who
he treated in two thousand nine. She was an historian,
and some of the hallucinations that she uh ended up
seeing included she saw a great granddaughter. She saw a
trio of witches. She saw her hair rising up in
the mirror like it was waitless. She saw tiny people
(24:44):
crawling out of the TV. She saw gaily dressed figures
sort of trading 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 children. Uh, sort of moving around as well, just
to give you an idea, because a lot of these hallucinations,
(25:04):
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 they're they're really brilliant to the whole
The color scheme will be amazing, so you in the costuming,
if they costumes are perceivable, the costumes will be crazy
and exotically bright. So you can really see where the
(25:25):
idea of a fairy folk can emerge from this, because oh,
they were little people, and they were dressed like they
were from another world, and the colors were unreal and magical. Well,
and they were mischievous to write, a lot of times
these accounts have um the little people 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
(25:48):
laws of our world. Now, these are called release hallucinations
because it's thought that they are released or instigated by
the removal of normal visual afferent input into the association
core texts. So in the case of Zelda, there was
reduced blood flow to the optical and parietal lobes, and
so this caused the hallucinations, um, but probably one of them.
(26:14):
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 that compromised vision, of course, we're not saying
the person is necessarily completely blind. Uh, they might be
suffering from just age related necular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic
(26:34):
eye disease. The 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 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
(26:55):
begins to fill in those gaps by creating this sort
of fantasy 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 world that we
live in because you can we look at like when
we're just looking around our room, we're looking at particular
little spaces, and then then we're looking in another little
(27:16):
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 case of a misssy,
an eighty year old woman. She complained of little people
dressed in blue and gray leaves hiding in her cup
for cupboards, and she also saw tiny black cats from
(27:40):
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 cognitive functions were
fined find 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
(28:02):
being processed. Another interesting aspect about lilocutions, especially as a
as related to CBS. All for Sax points out that
most CBS hallucinations are ultimately it's inspiring, pleasant, even friendly.
Um not to say they all are. There. There will
be some that are a little serving, such as the
brown uh, dressed men that are really tall. They're around
(28:25):
Zelda's hospital that was that was ominous in nature. But
for the most part, they tend to be lighter and
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 scenario, which is
rooted in say, sleep paralysis, which is terrifying because your
your mind body connection is doing something weird and add
(28:49):
a little flavoring to it from whatever your worldview 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. Ye. There's this idea too
that perhaps, um, you know, it has an adaptive function
in terms of people who in general with hallucination is
(29:11):
not just little people. That if someone has lost someone,
and 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 hallucinations that this
is a whole area as well. Um yeah, it's this
idea that we're as one. If we're losing our ability
to update the mental image in our head, we're having
(29:33):
to update it internally. Like imagine you're inside 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
(29:53):
memory to try and and and and alter that picture
and make it as accurate as possible. But then inevitably
you're bringing in errors, you're bringing in even magical creations
into that pain. That reminds me of Anton syndrome when
they're you have someone who is trying to replace I'm
putting quote their their reality with a hallucination to simulate eyesight.
(30:16):
Because because this occurs in telling people that are really
like totally blind, extremely deteriorating, 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 insists that
they can still see. Yeah, like they'll say, they'll they'll
(30:39):
say like, hey, you you're blind. Don't try and walk
across the living room because their 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
(31:00):
the person. The description may be completely wrong, or it
may be reasonably correct based 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
(31:22):
your your eyesight and you are lacking that's stimuli, then
your brain is just making us some sme alacrum of
that of reality, which I think is just fascinating. Sacs
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
(31:45):
midst of this drinking, like the next morning remembered having
seen as if his side had returned. But it was
a hallucination hallucination. But and again it's just all a
lot of this really drives home just how complex side is,
and how how complex are our observation of the world
is to it and to what extent is is all
(32:05):
of our site hallucination. Yeah, again, this idea that there's
this uh, this visual constancy that 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 Sex
points out, Liliputian hallucinations can also occur in migraines. Particularly,
He points out the Migraine Blog by a series host
(32:28):
of it on New York Times, which is a blog
just about the author's experiences with migraines. Now, 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
(32:50):
call an aura, it's a feeling, and and they also
get the Strobe light effect. Interesting. I've never experienced a migraine.
My father used to get them, and I think my
sister experiences and from time to time as well. But
in their their 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,
(33:15):
but in in a certain way, illuminating le for a
few seconds or minutes or what have you. Um. And again,
what we're talking about is uh a sort of impairment
of the visual feeling here 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
(33:37):
some cases tiny man and tiny animals uh. In On
the Migraine blog, the author I 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 obviously, as they were perfectly made creatures, and
except for their color, they looked very real. They didn't
(33:59):
speak to me, but they walked around and I watched
them with fascination and a 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 is 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,
(34:20):
which which ties in nicely with when you were talking
about very experiences and in alien ex paranormal experiences 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 just a matter of for a brief second,
you have a peek into a magical world just beyond
(34:41):
our own. Well. I think anybody who has ever had
a really bad migrant can attest to 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's to
some degree it does feel like your vision is being affected,
not just with the strobe Lde effect, but as if, um,
(35:02):
something's just kind of moving over your brain like a cloud.
So it's interesting to see that that sort of deprivation
of stimulation or stimuli might manifest itself with a Liliputian hallucination. Yeah.
In in the book, Sax points out that in a migraine,
a wave of quote, electrical excitation slowly moves across the
(35:26):
visual cortex and on 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, et cetera. 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
(35:48):
it's it's it's matching the movement of the shimmering 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'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
(36:08):
was like, Wow, how can a headache do that bad?
That you just you know that you're you're just you know,
gripping your skull Like I've never had had a had
a headache that bad. Uh. But But now that now
that I see a little bit more that what's involved
in it, I can totally get it. Well, there you go. Uh.
I hope that everybody has a wonderful St. Patrick's Day
and that you keep in mind these little Abutian hallucinations
(36:29):
as you go about your day clad in green drinking
green beer, and and maybe thinking a little more about
about leprecons, being respectful of them, knowing not to chase them,
don't try and kidnap them and rob them because they
will trick you. And maybe also when you're when you're
thinking about about Irish culture and Irish mythology, know that
there's there's a lot of rich stuff in there. In
(36:51):
addition to the LEPrecon in addition to Lucky Charms and
and uh the and the awful lepricn horror movies. I mean,
you have the two Eth the Day then and and
and they're pretty fabulous and and post Lebricnism transformations with
prosthetics that exists for futurists, we can transform into labricns. UM. So,
(37:15):
if if anyone has anything you would like to share,
be it on Irish smith and legend, be it on
your own history with lebricns, but more importantly on your
your your thoughts on the hallucination aspect of this episode. UH.
Do you deal with migraines? And if you do, what
kind of UH hallucinatory experiences do you encounter? We would
(37:36):
love to hear about that. Do you see the grid
pattern the fortification? Have you ever seen little people uh
due to migraines, due to cb s tow due to
any other kind of UH paranormal experience. We would love
to hear from you if we you know, and because
we're curious about about how other people perceive the world
and about how neurological things can contribute to that uh
(37:59):
and and if we share your material, you know, obviously
we're going to do some in a respectful manner. So
so let us know. In the meantime, let's call the
robot over and do some quick listener mail we received.
We recently, of course, did the slime episodes and we
did the Valentine's Day episode about slugs, which there there
you go. If you need a monstrous creature to to
associate with Valentine's Day, the slug is perfect, in particular
(38:24):
the banana slug, which is a penis chewing slug, yes,
so to speak, and it is also the it is
also a mascot, yes, you see Santa Cruz, which we
mentioned and we had a bit of a laugh about.
And lo and behold, we heard from a listener who
is a PhD candidate at the USC You see Santa Cruz.
(38:45):
So she writes in with this fabulous postcard for starters
and says, hi, I just wanted to say thanks for
the shout out to w c SC in your podcast
Slug Life. Uh. It came out the same week I
handed in my PhD dissertation on lizard making behavior not slugs.
And by the way that the title of the the
paper is Maile aggression varies with throat color and two
(39:08):
distinct populations of the mesquite lizard. She continues, It was
still a perfect timing, though, because your podcast, UM has
helped me through many long hours in the lab. Please
enjoy some slug theme goodies at the token of appreciation. Beth. So, Yeah,
so she sent a box that contained, first of all,
(39:28):
some some uh some buttons uh and these I don't
mind them. One of them says one slug, which um,
you know means that you're one behind this team and
they're they're slug scot. And then there's also this other
button that UM that I actually don't mind either, that
says that that has the university insignia, and then has
(39:49):
his cartoon slug that's reading the works of Plato and
he has a g little glasses on itable and he
has arms for some reason. So I can stand that too,
because that's right, all right, he's a slug sort of
and he's also he's reading playto he's he's he's even
more intelligent than we thought. But then she also said this,
there's another UM portion of the care box that is
(40:09):
kind of horrifying. Okay, so this is a box of chocolates.
What could be horrifying about that? Well, because they're all
shaped like slugs. They're beautiful they and some of them
are banana slugs, yeah. Some of them are yellow coated
in something and uh, and others are just more like
a dark chocolate and some seem to have like a
white chocolate infusion that gives them kind of that model
(40:31):
of color that is common to slugs. I was gonna
say that looks like the leopard slug, as we know,
is the gymnast of the sexual reproductive world. Um, this
is so cool, Beth, Thank you so much, and um congratulations.
I'm glad that we could be in your in your
ear holes with you while you are working on your dissertation.
And I think that's just awesome. Indeed, we always love
(40:52):
to hear from listeners who all listeners, but also when
they have you some sort of science in their their lives.
It's always fun. And thank you for aking Robert squirm
with that chocolate. I do not know if I will
ever eat one of these, um, but we were talking.
It would be an interesting experiment to see to what
extent people of the office here actually ate them, and
if they did, where they only eat the rear portions
(41:13):
of the slug Because for me. If I had to,
I would break off the rear end of the slug
and eat that, because, as we discussed in the podcast,
all sorts of horrible stuff happens at the front of
the slug. The rear of the slug where you're you're safe.
The front's got the penis the anus. But we'll definitely
need a control box of chocolates to place alongside it
to do a representation of what happens here. But all
(41:37):
of this is awesome, So thank you Againbeth. So. If
you would like to reach out to us, um you
can find us on Facebook. You can find us on tumbler.
We're stuffed with all your mind on both of those.
On Twitter, we go by the handle blow the Mind.
And if you ever do get a wild hair and
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(41:58):
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(42:22):
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United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.