ELC501 (ENGLISH FOR CRITICAL ACADEMIC READING)

WRITTEN ARTICLE ANALYSIS

TITLE OF ARTICLE: HALLUCINATIONS ARE EVERYWHERE

FACULTY : FACULTY OF ACCOUNTANCY

PROGRAMME : BACHELOR OF ACCOUNTANCY (HONS)

GROUP MEMBERS :
ARTICLE ANALYSIS

This article is to discuss about the issue of hallucinations in a person with the
objective of this argument in this article is to explain hallucinations and why it happened.
The purpose in the article that is being discussed is to find the reason why and how does
hallucination exist in the mind. An hallucination can be defined as a sensory experience
in which a person can see, hear, smell, taste or feel something that is not there”
(medicine.com). There are few types of hallucinations, which are an auditory
hallucination, a gustatory hallucination, a hypnagogic hallucination, hypnopompic
hallucination, kinesthetic hallucination, Lilliputian hallucination, olfactory hallucination,
somatic hallucination, tactile hallucination and visual hallucination. The two authors are
seeking evidence on how the brain works by experimenting these hallucinations. The
medical definition of hallucination is “a profound distortion in a person’s perception of
reality, typically accompanied by a powerful sense of reality.

The two authors argued, “Hallucinations have everything to do with expectations”.

In their recent 2017 study, they have tried to induce hallucinations with their group of
participants by hearing a tone after shown a flashing light. They have two study groups
with one group that have usually experience hallucinations and the other group that do
not. The participants were ask to expect to hear a tone after being shown a flashing light
and asked to press the button when the tone was heard. To rate their confidence level
on the tone they heard, they were require to hold down the button longer. In conclusion
of their study, the participants who frequently hallucinate held longer the button that
participants that do not regularly hallucinate.

The authors see this experiment as evident on how persons grasp the world
around them. They stated that the brain works in a predictive coding. Predictive coding
explains as that the brain constantly produces models of the world based on their
perspective and information from memory recollection to predict sensory input. In the
authors words, the predictive coding is where “the idea of predictive coding is part of a
way out of a knotted, overlapping and sometimes competing lineage of trying to explain
hallucinations”.

The relevance of the research has gone through a lot of experiments in centuries.
As explain by the writing of 20th-century psychologist Julian Jaynes. “It holds that people
who heard voices are really hearing their own thoughts that feel like someone else’s”.
Now in our era, it is explain as a corollary-discharge theory or auditory hallucinations.
The auditory hallucination is a hallucination involving the sense of hearing. This type of
hallucination is in a form of false perceptions of sound. The auditory hallucination is
defined as the “experience of internal words or noises that have no real origin in the
outside world and are perceived to be separate from the person’ mental processes.” It is
also called as paracusia and paracusis. The supports came from the authors’ own
experiments with study group and Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist at Durham
University. There is no extensiveness in these research activities as the study is still on
going ever since 20th century ago.

The author’s intended audience is mainly focus primarily to the scholars and
researchers that studied on the same field and studies that focus on the brain and its
function. This includes psychiatrist, psychologist and mental-health researcher.

The validity and credibility came from the entire well-known researcher in this
field, which consist of but do not exhaust, the authors themselves, Charles Fernyhough,
a psychologist at Durham University, 20th-century psychologist Julian Jaynes based on
this article.

In summary, for this article is not the end of the research itself but the conclusion
for the authors own recent experiment as stated in this article that the hallucinations is
everywhere, in everyone brain. The brain assists the persons to react and understand
their surrounding.