Latest news with #CharlesBonnet
BBC News
04-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
The Scarborough sight loss charity using gardening as therapy
A charity is using the power of gardening to help people living with sight and hearing loss in North Coastline Sight and Hearing is running allotment sessions to give people the opportunity to come together to garden, chat and have plenty of cups of Graham Varley said when he lost his sight in 2017 after multiple strokes he felt like his world had said: "I spent two years in bed – then I met this lot and my whole life just changed." In Scalby, among the raised allotment beds, is a mix of people tending to an array of fruit and allotment is one of five in North Yorkshire established by the charity as part of a project backed by the National Lottery. Mr Varley, who has developed Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition associated with sight loss which causes people to have vivid hallucinations, said: "When you first lose your sight the world does end."But then when you get something like this, and everybody comes together, you grow again."Fellow trustee Dave Tayne said socialising and mixing with other people "gives you a feeling of worth".I've got a garden at home and I won't touch it."Coming out here, we've got a lovely day in the sun, a bit of fresh air, it's good for your health."Mr Tayne was declared legally blind in 2011 after years of eyesight issues, including losing sight in one eye after being hit by a firework when he was a child. "You could either be downbeat about it, sit in the house and sulk about 'oh poor me' or you can get out, mix with people and have fun," he said. Sir Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at the University of Manchester, said gardening was a form of therapy which had physical and mental benefits. "The sensory experience is very important, particularly for people with sight or hearing loss. It can be a form of escapism and a release from tension or issues."There's that social connectivity too, you'll often be doing it with someone."Mr Varley said the allotment sessions had encouraged him to try something added: "It gives you a great feeling of self-esteem. "When you do something you've never done before and it works, it gives you a big uplift."You think, well if I can do this, what can't I do?" Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Telegraph
14-02-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
Ask Dr James: What do vivid hallucinations really mean?
Dear Dr James, I regularly visit an elderly neighbour who's living alone but managing well despite poor eyesight from macular degeneration. She has recently started seeing the most vivid scenes on her living room wall, some ordinary – children playing, trees, buildings – others more fantastical such as a brightly coloured circus troupe. These last a few moments before fading away. She is not particularly disturbed by her 'private film shows'( as she calls them) but is hesitant about mentioning them to her doctor. Dear Reader, Though we have the overwhelming impression that the colour and forms of the world 'out there' are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, they are rather 'created' by the neuronal circuits of the visual cortex and associated areas of the brain. These are some of the reasons she might be experiencing hallucinations such as these. Visual impairment The constant barrage of nerve impulses transmitted from the retina at the back of the eye along the visual pathways is markedly diminished in those with poor eyesight. To compensate the brain fills the void with imagined or recalled images. This is the Charles Bonnet syndrome named in reference to the French philosopher who, in 1760, first described in great detail the phenomenon as experienced by his 89-year-old grandfather afflicted with cataracts. Though aware of their illusory nature, he described seeing colourful birds and tapestries and 'young dancing girls dressed in yellow silks with rose-coloured ribbons, pearl collars and diamond pendants'. In a more recent account from a decade ago, Australian neurologist Prof Chris Plummer observed how the hallucinations tend to be stereotypical with recurring themes of trees, brightly coloured vehicles, caterpillars, distorted faces – and sequential, morphing one into another. Thus one woman reported how 'the carpet in her room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake and slither under the door', while for another 'a draught horse pulling a cart transformed into a chariot before speeding away'. The hallucinations occur more frequently when drowsy and in dimly lit conditions, lasting from a few seconds to several hours. Conversely they may be relieved, Prof Plummer reports, by rapid blinking of the eyes or keeping them tightly shut. The good news is that diversionary activities (such as watching the television) can abolish them. What else could it be? Similar hallucinations featuring people, animals and children playing may occur in those with Parkinson's. Though initially benign, they become more threatening as the illness progresses posing a particular challenge as they are exacerbated by the drugs such as levodopa required for treating the characteristic disorders of movement. They may also occur (if rarely) during a severe attack of migraine. What are the treatment options? There is no specific remedy so a clear explanation of their cause is essential, along with the firm reassurance they are not a sign of psychiatric illness and should gradually diminish in frequency and intensity over time. If they are particularly distressing they may warrant treatment with drugs such as gabapentin and carbamazepine though their relative efficacy has not been formally investigated.
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
The Big Idea: how do our brains know what's real?
When did you last hallucinate? 'The visionary tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected,' wrote the 19th-century psychologist Sir Francis Galton. Setting aside the vivid, often emotive, cinema of our dreams, we are all more vulnerable to 'seeing things' than we might at first suppose. Around four fifths of people who have recently been bereaved report an encounter with their loved one: most commonly a lively sense of their presence, but some hear, see or speak with them. Up to 60% of people who lose sight in later life see things that aren't there, sometimes extravagant images such as the 'two young men … wearing magnificent cloaks … their hats … trimmed with silver' who appeared in the first reported case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, as this phenomenon is known, before 'dissolving' away. A 20-year-old woman blindfolded for 12 hours saw 'cities, skies, kaleidoscopes, lions and sunsets so bright she could 'barely look at them''. After losing a limb, most people carry a 'constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member', as Weir Mitchell, the American neurologist who coined the term phantom limb after studying 90 cases from the American civil war, put it. Pilots on long flights, travellers through snowstorms and deserts, prisoners and hostages held in darkness; their restless brains are all prone to see the things of which they're being deprived. These examples relate to vision, our dominant sense modality, but other senses can also generate compelling hallucinations: around one in 10 of us will at some point hear a voice that seems to be coming from outside but proves to be self-generated. For one in 100 – excluding people who go to see psychiatrists because of their voices – this happens regularly. How do our minds and brains conspire to create these deceptive experiences? Studies of deliberate imagery – where subjects are told to 'visualise an apple in your mind's eye' – and of hallucination show that they are cut from the same cloth: both involve activity in sensory regions of the brain. This can be strikingly similar to the activity that occurs when we perceive the real world around us. Such similarities, between brain activity during imagination and while actually perceiving, have a profound implication: that perception itself is a kind of imaginative act. The notion is an ancient one, but has been given a new lease of life by the idea, from psychology, that prediction is integral to perception, and by evidence from neuroscience that our experience depends absolutely on the work of our sugar- and oxygen-hungry brains. In other words, perception is far more dependent on prior knowledge – painstakingly created internal models of the world – than we usually take it to be. The contemporary expert Anil Seth puts it nicely: 'We tend to think of perception as occurring outside-in, but it mostly occurs inside-out.' One hundred and fifty years earlier, the French historian and psychologist Hippolyte Taine wrote presciently in the same vein: 'External perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling hallucination a false external perception, we should call external perception true hallucination.' If perception is a kind of true hallucination, a potential problem looms: how can we distinguish what we imagine from what we perceive? The examples above show that we don't always succeed; we can mistake our imaginings for reality, usually transiently, but sometimes, in psychosis for example, more persistently. The opposite also occurs: in the 'Perky effect', people fail to detect that objects they are imagining are being shown to them for real. Mostly, though, we get things right. Some rules of thumb are helpful – high levels of vividness and detail, effortlessness and consistency with context suggest that we're looking at the real world – but not always. Daydreams can be effortless and vivid; hunting for a destination in thick fog can be effortful and the resulting experience indistinct. Somehow, though, the brain weighs up the odds, and generally gets the right answer. How does it achieve this? Research in AI provides some interesting clues. In 'generative adversarial' models, two elements combine to learn about some aspect of the world: the 'generative' bit aims to predict it as precisely as possible; the 'adversary' does its best to decide whether what it is looking at is the real world or the output of the generative model. The generative model constantly ups its game to masquerade as the real McCoy; the adversary keeps honing its connoisseurship to distinguish the authentic from the fake. Something similar happens in the brain. The 'adversary' in the human brain, charged with reality checking, keeps watch from our huge frontal lobes: Area 10, in particular, at the tip of the frontal cortex, becomes active in tasks requiring us to decide whether items were seen or imagined. It is smaller and less active in people with psychosis than in healthy people, especially so in people with psychosis who hallucinate. It is fascinating that the apex of our highly evolved frontal lobes should be charged with the vital 'metacognitive' task of distinguishing the imagined from the real. But that doesn't mean those same imaginings can't be rich sources of insight into the world around us. The chemist Friedrich Kekulé famously described the circular structure of the benzene molecule after dreaming of snakes, one of which 'seized its own tail … As if by a flash of lightning I awoke … I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis.' A dream assisted Dmitri Mendeleyev in the formulation of the periodic table. Einstein imagined how the universe would appear to someone travelling on a beam of light. The author Malcolm Bradbury said: 'All writers hear voices. You wake up in the morning with the voices … and try and trap them before they run away.' Overlapping processes in our dynamic brains enable us to perceive, to imagine and to fashion anew. We need to know which is which, but as Kekulé advised: 'Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth.' Adam Zeman is the author of The Shape of Things Unseen: A New Science of Imagination (Bloomsbury Circus). Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth (Faber, £12.99) The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality by Andy Clark (Penguin, £10.99)Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross (Canongate, £10.99)
