Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks fame, wrote a really interesting article on "post-bereavement ghosts" over at Mind Matters. I had no idea that such hallucinations were so ubiquitous:
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved's passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren't just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.Occasionally, these hallucinations are heart-rending. A 2002 case report by German researchers described how a middle aged woman, grieving her daughter's death from a heroin overdose, regularly saw the young girl and sometimes heard her say "Mamma, Mamma!" and "It's so cold." Thankfully, these distressing experiences tend to be rare, and most people who experience hallucinations during bereavement find them comforting, as if they were re-connecting with something of the positive from the person's life. Perhaps this reconnecting is reflected in the fact that the intensity of grief has been found to predict the number of pleasant hallucinations, as has the happiness of the marriage to the person who passed away.
In other words, we hallucinate a loved one because the brain can't bear to let go. It's like a phantom limb, only the phantom is actually a phantom. William James, a rationalist who cultivated an interest in seances and ghosts, would have had something interesting to say about this.
Brain & Behavior
Comments (9)
I remember quite vividly, soon after my mother's death, stopping mid-stride on the top step of the stairwell in our house with a sigh as I turned around to go back downstairs and see what it was she had called my name for, only to feel doubly guilty for such a sigh.
It's interesting, though, that knowledge of death is a prerequisite for these hallucinations of loved ones. I frequently see various acquaintances from high school and college who most certainly are not where I'm living now or, granted a marginal possibility that they are, at least not as commonly as my weekly double-takes would make them seem to be. Yet I never mistakenly see my still living or long-distance loved ones. Given, I generally know where their bodies are at the moment, but not those of the acquaintances.
Posted by: Ste | December 2, 2008 4:15 PM