Essay On Hallucination

After doing a little research I have come across a very interesting topic which is Fear-Induced Hallucination. What this paper is going to focus on is How Sleep Paralysis Triggers Hallucination. After researching, I learned that hallucination actually starts during an episode of sleep paralysis. As stated in the textbook, sleep paralysis is often compared to being an evils work of art. It results from some errors of the neural transmission in the brain during REM sleep. Also, during a frightening state of sleep paralysis, one experiences total body immobility and cannot speak or move besides little eye movements and respiration.

As stated in the text book, hallucination during Sleep Paralysis also occurs due to the sudden high blood pressure in the human brain and the change in the membrane potential of the neurons in the visual and/or auditory cortex. What this means is that one person starts to feel fear or terror when under the state of paralysis, it causes the blood pressure in the brain to increase. The emotion of fear is stated to be perceived in a structure called amygdala in the brain. The amygdala tends to be a small structure which is deep inside the brain and has several distinct nuclei which are the following: medial, lateral, basal, and central. According to the article “Sleep paralysis episode frequency and number, types, and structure of associated hallucinations”, the lateral nucleus seems to receive input from thalamus and cortical sensory and association areas. Then after this happens, the basolateral nucleus integrate the input as fear and send the information to the central nucleus, from which a major output transmits through projections to the hypothalamus and brainstem autonomic areas.

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... big role in hallucination. Serotonin which exits in the brain affects a wide range of conditions relating to aggression, sleep regulation, depression, anxiety, pain reception and etc. Serotonin most concentrated region lies within the hypothalamus and the pineal gland. Researchers have found that when its active potential carrying out the information of fear actually reaches the hypothalamus from the amygdala, the hypothalamus releases the serotonin into the system which provides assists to epinephrine and norepinephrine to prepare the body for the fight or flight response. When all of this is in process, the serotonin tends to cause the calm muscles of the actual blood vessels to constrict. As a result, the blood pressure tends to rise in the brain and the membrane in the optic or audio cortex begin changing, and that is what starts to trigger the hallucination.