| >> | >>899222
>I wonder if it's down to the visual cortex communicating with the language centers in the brain.
Not this this doesn't play a part in it, but I'm pretty sure the prevalence of the language-centered hallucinations is in large part due to how the brain organizes, stores, and constructs meaning out of sensory information. There is a reason we remember stories (narratives) and songs with ease, while studying some list of individual facts is easily forgotten. Music and stories both construct a narrative by having a clearly patterned structure and using that structure to integrate as much information/experiences/perceptions from as many of our available senses as possible. Emotion, sensorimotor and spatial feelings, the five basic senses, etc. by stimulating them all in some way or another, be it directly or by association with the content itself.
Looking at it that way, all experiences, knowledge, perceptions, and interpretations of them are formed in pattern whose structures resembles or mirrors language itself. Oral and written language is just a manifestation of this greater underlying process or principle. Likewise, all perceptions and experiences are too, only language lends itself more easily to logical analysis... as does music. It's not at all a stretch for this fundamental truth underlying our consciousness is something that the unconscious mind picks up on while tripping, and this association begins to affect the trip, and effectively, therefore, the nature of the reality we experience. The difference between words and what we see and otherwise experience, in this instance, becomes so blurred that they essentially make one another up on a fundamental.
What you see is words... I mean, what you see is symbols, and we understand and organize our memory and knowledge of these symbols in a way that is informed by the words that correspond to these symbols, and the way that we use and pair these words to encode that knowledge and memory in particular. How and what we think of things (in terms of thinking in words/language) determines how this information is stored and accessed at any given time. So, isn't everything you look at always both words and dictated by words anyway? At some point, given abnormal enough brain activity (like the kind that results from taking psychedelics), there ceases to be any real functional difference. Thus, the mind begins to interpret what is seen not as simply images, but as words and language itself. |
