The human brain can generate notable experiences, including seeing extremely tiny people. The experience is called Lilliputian hallucinations.
A ScienceAlert report specifies that hallucinations of very tiny or "diminutive humans" can be amusing or distressing depending on who they see it. More so, accounts of these microptic or Lilliputian visions are limited in the scientific literature.
As a matter of fact, only a few scientists have attempted to find out the reason behind such strange encounters.
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The human brain can generate notable experiences, including seeing extremely tiny people and this means an experience of hallucinations, specifically, Lilliputian hallucinations.
A 'Mystery of the Mind'
During the early1900s, Raoul Leroy, described in Histoire de la Folie as a French psychiatrist, became interested in sightings of human figures akin to the small inhabitants of Lilliput in the famous 1726 novel of Jonathan Swift dubbed Gulliver's Travels. To him, such sightings are a "mystery of the mind" and one that begs for scientific reasoning.
In one particular case's introduction, he said that such hallucinations exist beyond any "micropsy," while the patient has a standard idea of the objects surrounding them.
Sometimes, they happen on their own. At times they go with other psycho-sensory disorders. A very small handful of occurrences Leroy curated was notably varied. However, generally, he noted that such visions were dressed colorfully, extremely mobile, and more often than not, pleasant.
Seldom, findings were of individual figures, although most patents described them as arising in groups, interacting with the material world, as if they were actually present, climbing chairs, squeezing beneath doors, and "respecting the pull of gravity," as described in this report.
Dismissed as 'Mere Delusions'
Not all encounters were considered benign. In one research, a 50-year-old woman who had chronic alcoholism claimed to have seen a pair of men "as tall as a finger" in blue outfits and smoking a pipe.
While he watched, the patient said she heard a voice that threatened to kill her, at which point, the vision vanished, and she fled.
Describing such an occurrence, Leroy told the Medico-Psychic Society, that these hallucinations were characterized as a "rather pleasant character" and the patient who looked at them with as much as a shock as with pleasure.
What may have been dismissed as "mere delusions" Leroy interpreted as probable symptoms of mental conditions worthy of classifying for the doctors to come up with better ways to diagnose and even treat the condition.
Lilliputian Hallucinations at Present
Despite the historic work and advances of Leroy in understanding the conditions of the mind, surprisingly, not a lot is known about the reason some brains are cooking visions of tiny humans.
In a study published in Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, medical historian and psychotic disorders researcher Jan Dirk Blom from Leiden University aimed to change that insight by conducting a laborious search of case reports, particularly of Lilliputian hallucinations in modern medical archives.
Following an extensive hunt, Blom came up with only 26 papers on the said hallucination type that might be regarded as "relevant." Of these papers, only 24 provided descriptions of original cases.
Related information about Lilliputian hallucinations is shown on Harm Signals' YouTube video below:
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