A somewhat interesting study suggests that drinking a lot of coffee will make you more susceptible to auditory hallucinations.
Actually, I'm not entirely sure that's a safe conclusion, when you read how the experiment was done:
Five coffees a day or more was found to be enough to increase the participant’s tendency to hallucinate says Professor Crowe.
‘High caffeine levels in association with high levels of stressful life events interacted to produce higher levels of ‘hallucination’ in non-clinical participants, indication that further caution needs to be exercised with the use of this overtly “safe” drug,’ he says.
The participants were assigned to either a high or a low stress condition and a high or a low caffeine condition on the basis of self-report. The participants were then asked to listen to white noise and to report each time they heard Bing Crosby’s rendition of “White Christmas” during the white noise.
The song was never played. The results indicated that the interaction of stress and caffeine had a significant effect on the reported frequency of hearing “White Christmas”. The participants with high levels of stress or consumed high levels of caffeine were more likely to hear the song.
Does a tendency to think you can detect a pattern like a song mean that you're actually hallucinating it? Debatable, I would have thought.
2 comments:
I suspect a lot of music starts this way, as a kind of intense conception in the mind of the composer which they then remember and note down. Vaughan Williams was said to have heard some of his compositions in dreams.
(Then again, Beethoven obsessively worked at extremely simple ideas for years and years, going through wildly different versions of the same piece, before coming up with a final product, so it doesn’t happen in all cases.
At any rate a study of composers and how they compose looking for evidence of musical ‘hallucinations’ would be interesting.
Someone could also do a study looking for evidence of how much coffee they drank :)
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