The Company You Keep, by Shruti Ravindran

Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self.

Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin and overall worthlessness. One day, another voice spoke up. It was gravelly and hoarse, like a grandma who had chain-smoked cheroots for half a century. ‘There is a goddess within you,’ it rasped. ‘She can make you fairer and prettier. Listen to her instructions.’ That is how Rosie arrived at the beauty regimen she followed every day for the next 10 years: collecting excrement at dawn, and carefully smoothing it across her limbs and face.

The regimen caused her father, a widower, to eject her from his home. Rosie eventually found herself in a shelter on the outskirts of the city Chennai. Here, a kind young man informed her that she suffered from schizophrenia, and that the old lady didn’t exist. Rosie listened to what he said, but she was not sure she believed him. After all, the old lady said only what Rosie had been hearing all her life, from her mother, her friends, her husband, and her television set. They all spoke in one voice, telling her that dark skin was unlovable, that fairness was synonymous with femininity, and that she should whiten her skin at any cost.

 I first heard about Rosie from the social worker Vandana Gopikumar, co-founder of the Banyan, the shelter in Chennai where Rosie lives. She said hers was one of the most extreme cases she’d seen. ‘But what struck me then,’ she said, ‘was how much the voice reflected her socio-cultural background.’ Like many epiphanies, Gopikumar’s sounds startlingly obvious. It seems natural that imagined voices reflect the fears, anxieties and desires of their hearers, and for these emotions to be shaped, in turn, by the pressures and expectations of local culture.

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The Reality Show, by Mike Jay

Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras – and make a lot of sense

Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled ‘The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village’, published in the May 2012 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its authors, the brothers Joel and Ian Gold, presented a striking series of cases in which individuals had become convinced that they were secretly being filmed for a reality TV show.

In one case, the subject travelled to New York, demanding to see the ‘director’ of the film of his life, and wishing to check whether the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in reality or merely in the movie that was being assembled for his benefit. In another, a journalist who had been hospitalised during a manic episode became convinced that the medical scenario was fake and that he would be awarded a prize for covering the story once the truth was revealed. Another subject was actually working on a reality TV series but came to believe that his fellow crew members were secretly filming him, and was constantly expecting the This-Is-Your-Life moment when the cameras would flip and reveal that he was the true star of the show.

Few commentators were able to resist the idea that these cases — all diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and treated with antipsychotic medication — were in some sense the tip of the iceberg, exposing a pathology in our culture as a whole. They were taken as extreme examples of a wider modern malaise: an obsession with celebrity turning us all into narcissistic stars of our own lives, or a media-saturated culture warping our sense of reality and blurring the line between fact and fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales for an age in which our experience of reality is manicured and customised in subtle and insidious ways, and everything from our junk mail to our online searches discreetly encourages us in the assumption that we are the centre of the universe.

But part of the reason that the Truman Show delusion seems so uncannily in tune with the times is that Hollywood blockbusters now regularly present narratives that, until recently, were confined to psychiatrists’ case notes and the clinical literature on paranoid psychosis. Popular culture hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more sense than they used to?

The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between new technologies and the symptoms of psychosis was Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1919, he published a paper on a phenomenon he called ‘the influencing machine’. Tausk had noticed that it was common for patients with the recently coined diagnosis of schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being controlled by advanced technologies invisible to everyone but them. These ‘influencing machines’ were often elaborately conceived and predicated on the new devices that were transforming modern life. Patients reported that they were receiving messages transmitted by hidden batteries, coils and electrical apparatus; voices in their heads were relayed by advanced forms of telephone or phonograph, and visual hallucinations by the covert operation of ‘a magic lantern or cinematograph’. Tausk’s most detailed case study was of a patient named ‘Natalija A’, who believed that her thoughts were being controlled and her body manipulated by an electrical apparatus secretly operated by doctors in Berlin. The device was shaped like her own body, its stomach a velvet-lined lid that could be opened to reveal batteries corresponding to her internal organs.

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Snapshots of an AI's Psychedelic 'Dreams', by Emiko Jozuka

If you give an artificial neural network free reign to create something visually, what does it come up with? The answer: multi-coloured psychedelic landscapes with hybrid beasts and mutant horsemen.The images, which are as stunning as they are surreal, were created by Google’s image recognition neural network—a bunch of statistical learning models inspired by biological systems—in a project dubbed “Inceptionism”.

Researchers trained the neural network to recognize things like animals and objects in photographs by showing it millions of samples. Their aim is to hone a computer’s visual system so that it’ll be able to tell the difference between different objects and, in this case, interpret images in similar ways that humans do. For example, Google’s neural network can “see” shapes in images, in the same way that we can sometimes see the shape of an animal in a cloud.

The neural network is made of ten to 30 stacked layers of artificial neurons. The researchers feed an image into the input layer, with each layer communicating with the next until the network’s “answer” is produced from the final output layer.

The primary layers of the neural network identify relatively simple features such as edges or corners. Further up the chain, the middle layers interpret simple features that can suss out individual shapes like a leaf or a window. The final layers interpret the information collated from the first and intermediary layers so that the network can come up with something as complex as a tree or a house.

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The Behavioral Sink, by Will Wiles

How do you design a utopia? In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.

Four breeding pairs of mice were moved in on day one. After 104 days of upheaval as they familiarized themselves with their new world, they started to reproduce. In their fully catered paradise, the population increased exponentially, doubling every fifty-five days. Those were the good times, as the mice feasted on the fruited plain. To its members, the mouse civilization of Universe 25 must have seemed prosperous indeed. But its downfall was already certain—not just stagnation, but total and inevitable destruction.

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Hibbert’s Ghosts: An Autopsy of the Unconscious, by EsoterX

“The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them” ― Philip K. Dick

Long before the Father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) arrived on the scene to remind us of the retrospectively obvious, yet poorly understood fact that we are all neurotic, sex-obsessed slaves of our id, inevitably traumatized by our childhood, and that “dreams are the most profound when they seem the most crazy”, English doctor, antiquarian, and psychical hobbyist Samuel Hibbert-Ware (1782-1848) was toying with the idea that metaphysical speculation regarding the origin of ghostly apparitions was a philosophical dead end, and that various species of specters and phantasms were a side effect of what he called “the association of ideas”, an acutely vivid, and conscious expression of what has remained dormant in our unconscious. That is to say, the specters of our consciousness were merely an associated chain of thoughts and feelings (even from infancy) which are revitalized due to some form of mental excitement. In short, Hibbert-Ware proposed that ghosts were peculiarly concrete, conscious expressions of unconscious associations, emerging from deep within our mental catalog linking emotions, predispositions, cognitions, and traumas, and as we were unconscious of the source of these re-emergent impressions that had suddenly leapt into consciousness, they seemed to spring forth from nowhere, like a ghost, one might say.

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