jrs12 7 points 4y ago
There is actually a condition called charles bonnet syndrome where people who have lost vision will experience visual hallucinations. It's typically people who have had vision and then lost it, but from what I understand it can be terrifying and disorienting.
fastfinge 5 points 4y ago
Well, auditory hallucinations happen to everyone pretty regularly. I'm sure you've had that feeling where you turned your head, because you thought you heard someone call your name, or you thought you heard a voice you knew in a crowd. Or you've woken up in the middle of the night because you thought you heard something. However, you have sight, so you probably don't notice these auditory illusions as often as blind people do, and you probably pay less attention to them and ascribe less meaning to them than blind people might.
If I believed in the paranormal, sure, there are some places I'd probably assume were haunted. Especially when it's quiet, some rooms just give me the overwhelming impression that someone else is in the room with me, even when I know that to be impossible (everyone's gone, the door is locked, etc). However, it's probably a combination of the air flows in the room, sounds carried in from other places in the building (perhaps through walls or pipes), background sounds caused by the ventilation system and the materials of the building expanding/contracting, etc. Especially in one friend's basement, it all just ads up in a way that convinces me that someone else is standing in the room with me. I know it's just a trick of the senses, but never the less, I won't stay in that basement alone, just because it makes me uncomfortable. If I could see, I suspect this elusion wouldn't be nearly as strong, because I could glance over and see nothing, and so my brain would stop connecting random sensory impressions into that pattern.
quanin 4 points 4y ago
I'm like you, very much in the skeptical camp. Several years ago I knew someone, pretty much totally blind, who believed herself to be a psychic. Not the "let me read your palm" type, but more the "I know what you're thinking/feeling/planning to do, even if you don't" type. One of these energy people, I used to call her. I honestly never gave it a whole lot of thought, beyond thinking mostly she was just kind of... weird. My skepticism of course wasn't helped any by the fact her predictions, if you want to call them that, seemed to be fairly closely aligned to her opinion of you. I could usually tell what she thought of someone based on what she predicted or how she predicted it. That was really the only real benefit to her abilities, though.
Drunken_Idaho 3 points 4y ago
There are a lot of blind people who are into mystical nonsense. I don't remember the name of the author, but in the book the Social Model of Disability, the guy basically identified the mystic as a subtype of blind people. They often get social capital out of acting like they are ultra spiritual as a method of demonstrating value to the sighted people in their lives.