Horrors of the Mind.
October 30th 2007 06:59
Signature Tune
Extracted from Telegraph.Co.UK
The Horrors of Hallowe'en are all in the mind
Vampire craze became widespread in the 18th Century.
In pagan times, the last evening of October was "old-year's night", when bonfires were set on hilltops to scare away ghouls and spirits.
Today, science can shed new light on the darkest horrors of Hallowe'en.
The legends and superstitions are remarkable because they are not fantasies - the latest research shows that the terrifying creatures that populate the annual celebrations are utterly real to those who see them.
They are the bizarre products of flawed and faulty neurological processes, holding up a distorted mirror that allows us to glimpse the stranger recesses of the human mind.
Some sufferers hear indistinct voices and demonic gibberish, while others experience hallucinations of humans, animals and supernatural creatures.
This is because the brain paralyses the sleeping body to stop us acting out our dreams as these strange apparitions are accompanied by Terror.
It goes across many cultures each one depicting their own ideas of things.
Dr Taylor, a researcher in these areas, has come up with an even more intriguing idea to explain why we remain fascinated with vampires: it is hard-wired into our brains because our primate ancestors used to show their fangs to demonstrate their status and say: "I am an alpha male and I want sex!"
Gorillas and chimpanzees still do this today.
Other monsters, such as ghosts and witches, are born in parts of the brain that make sense of what we see.
This has been revealed in studies of people losing their sight who are untouched by the brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, that are known to cause hallucinations: their visions are conjured up when the brain attempts to make sense of degraded visual information.
"I'm sure ghosts, fairies and witches all relate in some respect to these disembodied hallucinations," he says. Phantoms were typically small and wore period clothing - 40 per cent saw figures in costume.
His suggestion is that the hallucinations occur when the brain's lateral occipital region alerts us to the possibility that what we are looking at might be a face, an idea backed by brain scans.
People who suffered from Charles Bonnet hallucinations centuries ago bequeathed us the banshees, goblins and crones that stalk Hallowe'en today.
Some interesting information there, don't you think? I have condensed it to make it as lucid as possible.
Maybe this accounts for some of us who are so drawn to Horror movies and the like and convinces others that they are seeing ghosts.
It got me in. How about you?
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