From: Gina Miller (nanogirl@halcyon.com)
Date: Fri Dec 10 1999 - 01:52:05 MST
They find in studies that faces are the #1 hallucinations in a drug induced
or psychotic state.
Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Zeb Haradon wrote:
>Something about marijuana which I have never seen mentioned or discussed.
>Perhaps this effect was particular to me, I would like input. When I would
>be high, I would always see faces, and I would recognize friends and family
>members in the faces of strangers who looked nothing like them. For
example,
>I see an elderly woman and think it's my grandmother. She is 300 pounds
>heavier, and has no hair, and every individual feature I can point to is
>different from my grandmother's, but she just *looks like my grandmother*,
>and I keep stressing over the fact. This was not a hallucination, because
if
>I had been able to "take a picture" of what was in my mind's eye and look
at
>it later, I would see that this woman doesn't look a thing like my
>grandmother. It was just that for some reason, my Grandmother Facial
>Recognition Module was triggered.
>I would also have this effect with inanimate objects - that is, seeing
>inanimate objects as faces. Like knots in a wood table, or a pattern in the
>leaves on a tree. The most bizarre case was when I looked up at a building
>and saw that one of the bricks was a different color from the rest of the
>bricks, and thought that the brick must be Bram Stoker (I don't even know
>what Bram Stoker looks like - he's the guy who wrote Dracula).
>It's well known that the neural pathways for recognizing objects are
>different from those used in recognizing faces. This is illustrated by
>various disorders in which a person can recognize common household objects,
>but cannot recognize his father's face, or the opposite disorder where he
>can recognize faces but not objects. I suggest a line of research to
>discover if the receptor which THC binds to is responsible for mediation of
>facial recognition, and possibly usage of THC for treatment of facial
>aphasia (I don't know if that's the proper term for it). It's been
>discovered recently that there are THC receptors in the eyes (which is why
>marijuana helps glaucoma patients), I'd bet that the receptors go all the
>way down the facial visual system.
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Zeb Haradon
>My personal website:
>http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~haradon
>A movie I'm directing:
>http://www.elevatormovie.com
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:02 MST