Seeing Things can be Quite Normal

You may have heard of Tinnitus, the sounds that people with this condition hear, which aren’t really there. It can vary quite a bit, from high pitched tones to what sounds like white noise. In my case, years of drumming in garage bands has left me with a hiss that includes random chirping sounds like distant birds. I once got up at 3 am, thinking I could hear the dawn chorus, only to find it was still night time after opening the curtains.

But did you know that there is a little known visual condition that in some ways is like Tinnitus and that maybe we all may experience? Tinnitus is thought to be caused by damage to our inner ear hair cells, which don’t send enough of the correct signals to our brains, and so our hearing centres just make it up.

Similarly if you experience sudden worsening of your eyesight you may get visual disturbances caused by your brain trying to interpret the poorer information being sent from your eyes. How do I know about this? Because my mother lives it every day.

She is blind now after many years of declining sight, due to a progressive scarring of the retinas in her eyes called Macular Degeneration. She can see if it is light or dark and some movement at the very edge of her visual field, like a bird landing on a branch beside her, but the centre is empty. This, as you can imagine, is not easy to deal with, especially as she was a keen artist. Her paintings are on the walls of the homes of her many friends and of her children and grandchildren. She knew her home well and being an artist meant that she could ‘see’ all her surroundings in her mind’s eye and so she coped, as long as things didn’t get moved around.

Then one day she spilled the beans. She had been acting a bit weird on and off for a while and seemed anxious about people coming in to her house that we knew weren’t there. We had come to the obvious conclusion that maybe, being quite elderly, she was sadly starting to feel the effects of dementia, but we were wrong.

She was hallucinating. Seeing scenes before her eyes that could be complex, like a street full of people going to market in an Italian town or, more frighteningly, strangers in her bedroom staring at her from across the room in the night. Of course, she had come to the same conclusion as we had and thought she was going mad and for her generation mental illness was a much greater stigma than it is now. She is fiercely independent and had been trying to hide her experiences from everybody for months.

So what was going on? My sister got to the bottom of it when, in her practical way, she researched ‘visual hallucinations in the blind’ on the internet. She was interested by the fact that Mum never heard anything strange and was much worse in bad light and in unfamiliar places and that her insight and memory weren’t that bad for someone in their late eighties. She came across a page that mentioned a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome and then found a charity that dealt with this misunderstood problem. I have put a link at the end if you think it may be useful.

It turns out that as much as a third of people with declining eyesight sometimes see things that are not there and in most cases they never tell anyone at all for fear of being labelled with the dread words, dementia or mental illness. They see things happening silently and what they see reflects the mood they are in. Hallucinations can put you in a scared place and so sometimes life may get dramatic, but often it is beautiful scenery. A lovely view.

It is thought that, as with Tinnitus, the visual centre in the brain is filling in the gaps in the information our eyes send to it. With a sudden decline in sight our minds try to make sense of this noise and so it creates scenes in our mind’s eye to ‘explain’ what is being seen. If you have a good visual imagination that might mean very complex visions like a movie playing out in real time. Then, as the brain becomes used to this new level of signal it adapts and the hallucinations decline.

The good news is that most people with Charles Bonnet learn that there is nothing really there and that they are alright in every other way and so after a while begin to ignore these imaginary happenings and stop worrying so much about them. Of course it is possible for the elderly to develop dementia as well and then it may lead to interesting situations as the hallucinations are given full attention, but good care and reassurance can make them lessen and become more friendly and quite often entertaining.

So why did I say at the beginning of this article, that I think we all may experience something like Charles Bonnet Syndrome? I am not a doctor or a health professional but I do have a pet theory. Well you see, the hallucinations occur when the brain is first deprived of the visual stimulation it craves, stimulation that comes from our eyes perceiving the world in all it’s infinite variety. I have been wondering if this might be what happens to us all automatically, when we shut our eyes for a long period of time. Like when we sleep.

If you want to know more here is the web address of the Macular Society: https://www.macularsociety.org/macular-disease/macular-conditions/charles-bonnet-syndrome/