Hallucinations Research and Practice
Hallucinations continue to fascinate people throughout the world. The mere possibility of perceiving things that are not there is the stuff that campfire tales are made of. It is one thing to be in a dream state, to be asleep and to conjure up people, sce
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Jan Dirk Blom
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Iris E.C. Sommer
Editors
Hallucinations Research and Practice
Editors Jan Dirk Blom, M.D., Ph.D. Parnassia Bavo Group and University of Groningen Kiwistraat 43 2552 DH, The Hague The Netherlands [email protected]
Iris E.C. Sommer, M.D., Ph.D. University Medical Center Utrecht and Rudolf Magnus Institute of Neuroscience Heidelberglaan 100 3584 CX, Utrecht The Netherlands [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4614-0958-8 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-0959-5 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-0959-5 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011942898 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Foreword
When the editors approached me to write a foreword for this book, I was naturally flattered. They were generous enough to say that they had found some of my publications on the topic nearly 20 years ago to have been a useful starting point for some of their own investigations (Nayani and David 1996).1 However, it wasn’t long before vanity got the better of me and I started to react against being cast far too prematurely as a grand old man. More importantly, I also started to worry that, while I have maintained an interest in the topic, I wasn’t confident that I had kept up with all of the latest developments. I should not have been so concerned. This volume is itself the perfect antidote. It reminds us of how diverse and engaging the topic of hallucinations continues to be as well as paying tribute to the truly ancient body of literature that has grown up around the effort to understand it. It is indeed humbling to realise that most seemingly new contributions to the study of hallucinations echo previous thinking. The scientific study of hallucinations is, however, relatively youthful – perhaps a mere 150 years old, beginning with Esquirol and others. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a ‘Golden Age’ as far as descriptive psychopathology goes, but of course the neuroscientific contribution to psychopathology is more recent, beginning with electroencephalography but now fuelled by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed those of us in the 1990s who had the opportunity to use this ‘toy’ thought that hallucinations were an obvious target and that they wo
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