How do you hallucinate without drugs

Anxiety and the hyper-vigilance it can spark could also lead to hallucinations, he says. For example, if a new parent is very anxious about their child crying, they might actually hallucinate the baby crying.

Sometimes, traumatic memories can make someone hallucinate, says Amesbury. One of her patients once smelled a gas leak in her home when nothing of the sort was actually happening.

This, Amesbury explains, might have been the emotional residue from a traumatic experience — her patient had witnessed a gas explosion as a child. For some people, hallucinations are associated with migraines, says James Giordano, professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center. Without the normal barrage of sensory information flooding their brains, many people reported experiencing visual hallucinations, paranoia and a depressed mood.

The findings support the hypothesis that hallucinations happen when the brain misidentifies the source of what it is experiencing, a concept the researchers call "faulty source monitoring. To choose people for their study, the researchers asked more than volunteers to complete a questionnaire called the "Revised Hallucinations Scale," which measures the predisposition of healthy people to see things that aren't really there.

The scientists picked participants who scored in either the upper or lower 20th percentile, so they could compare how short-term sensory deprivation affects a range of individuals. Study participants sat in a padded chair in the middle of an anechoic chamber , a room designed to dampen all sound and block out light. The researchers describe the setup as a "room within a room," with thick outer walls and an inner chamber formed by metallic acoustic panels and a floating floor. When light is flashed in a specific way, it causes the neurons in the brain to react and fire in a synchronized rhythm that safely guides the brain into a deeply meditative, semi-psychedelic state of consciousness.

But when the Covid pandemic led to a UK-wide lockdown after only one event, that plan was no longer workable. The need for an accessible method of subconscious exploration, however, seemed even greater. Galea and Conlon spent an intense lockdown acquiring and applying the skills necessary to develop the Lumenate experience into a smartphone app.

The Lumenate app allows users to effortlessly explore the subconsious. The change results in a diminished sense of ego and a heightened focus on the present moment. Throughout the experience, the user is in complete control. It wasn't like I was hearing it, it was like I was feeling it. And I was feeling as though, in a way, my heart was shaking my body. That was something weird. In this situation, Derek didn't exactly experience hallucinations, but what he describes with his heart does suggest his brain was amplifying things in the absence of any stimuli.

Interestingly, researchers demonstrated a similar effect in an experiment in , where they asked volunteers to stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes straight.