#oh and visual and olfactory hallucinations when I get dizzy

[swamp-spirit]

I like junky shows where people talk about ghost encounters, but, as somebody whose sensory information gets a lot of junk data, I always get amazed by people's trust in their own senses.

Like there is this dichotomy between "everything I see and hear is real" and "I have Gone Insane"

And like... as somebody who has seen 3-4 ghosts and also does not believe in them, there is an exciting variety of ways to see shit that Is Not There.

You're telling me when you were super stressed and sleep deprived you kinda sorta saw a dude? Bad news, your brain loves seeing a dude. Sometimes it gets a false positive. When you are sleepy or scared or overwhelmed, you get more false positives.

Also, being insane isn't an on/off switch. Everybody is prone to delusional thinking, sensory misinformation, etc. And pretty much anything can make you more prone to getting bad information. Anxiety, trauma, and sleep deprivation increase paradolia (resolving nonsense information into shapes, anything from mistaking a suitcase for a dog to seeing a human figure in the shadows). All sorts of temporary medical conditions cause full hallucinations (being sick, methane poisoning, migraines, trauma, UTIs, dehydration, pain)

To be clear, if you are having regular bad information of any kind (images, scents, sensations) , talk to somebody about it and make sure you know what's going on because things like poisoning and psychosis are time sensitive and deserve care.

But... I just... as somebody who gets a lot of bad information from my brain, the amount of people who will be under tremendous mental stress and feel their options are to conclude "I am literally under attack from the dead" or "I have Gone Mad" without considering "I have a weird, squishy brain that gets bad signals and might have given me some bad info" is wild.