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Comment by mercora | Hacker News Reader

> “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following”

really would like to know what this was about and what else the voices in her head told her, especially unrelated stuff. Also if she could talk to them and if so what it was like to have a conversation like that.

i guess i am more on the X-phobes side on this one as i also suspect this woman knew about her tumor and came up with that story because she had to avoid telling the full truth for whatever reason and "this is the easiest way I could think of". However reading more about what happened with these voices while they were active would likely help me to trust her story more...

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The bah-humbug skeptic would have a number of points to question even without questioning the woman's veracity:

1. "As she arrived there, the voices told her to go in and ask to have a brain scan for two reasons—she had a tumour in her brain and her brain stem was inflamed." The article says they found a tumor; did they also find inflammation in the brain stem?

2. What was the media culture like during this era? Hallucinations are highly culturally informed; was there a pre-existing reason someone who was hallucinating would be disposed to hearing medical diagnoses?

3. How often does this happen? If only one person has ever hallucinated -- or otherwise predicted or pulled from thin air -- a medical diagnosis and that one instance was correct, that is one thing, but if thousands and thousands of people have heard a voice conveying a diagnosis, or cast the bones, or read the cards, and most of them are wrong, it makes it far more likely that one or two people would get it right by chance.

The tumor could have bootstrapped the thought that she had the tumor, which led to the actual discovery of the tumor. It's biophysical recursion!

Regarding 3: "helpful" hallucinations are not that unusual. While most who hallucinate are tormented by demons, some hallucinate neutral observers and a few get a "guardian angel" who sometimes gives useful advice. The subconscious can definitely channel "you left the stove on" into a hallucination that commands the person to go turn off the stove. So transformation of awareness of ill-health into that sort of experience doesn't seem too preposterous.

In the case when the patient suspects a brain tumour it would be easier for her to lie about having headaches or different physical symptoms. The story with voices is way too elaborate to result in desired brain scan.

I actually am even more skeptic of these kind of stories. People back then retold tales, and as somebody who has observed how these stories warp over time, i came to the conclusion that the human memory and prophecies is often nothing more then rewritten memorie errors. As in timewise sequence scrambling and rearranging, which can only be interpreted as "magic" knowledge.

I have a condition which might be described as a "blind mind's eye". I don't see internal visuals, nor do I have audio recall. Either modes do not function voluntarally, nor involuntarily.

After discovering other people saw things in mind, and heard things in mind, I found it hard to believe the stories people told me, because I didn't understand how that could be possible. Over time, I grew to understand that none of us see or hear reality in exactly the same way and I accept (as a truth) that others see things in mind, or see reality slight differently than others.

Many probably experience a similar reality, but at the end of the day each of us must trust others through the language and stories they tell.

I remember someone explaining that aphantasia was a thing, And my shock realising I had it and that most people had a completely different experience of the world.

Wiki on it of anyone is curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia?wprov=sfla1

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