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Lauren McD's picture

Sanity

I found it really interesting this week that we looked at many optical illusions. They were always intriguing to look at as a kid, but now we have the ability to look at them and analyze the functions in our brain that relate to them. Every illusion we looked at doesn't have a true image; it is merely a pattern of lines and light. How we interpret those patterns is what creates the image in our head.

This may be slightly off topic, but our discussion of the movie 'A Beautiful Mind' was interesting as well. I can't possibly imagine attempting to ignore something that I thought was reality. Is there any possibility that schizophrenic patients can actually find the will power to ignore their hallucinations? It's an interesting thought that patients with schizophrenia are only seeing another version, or story, of reality. And yet humanity deems them 'crazy.' In class, we discussed how we can never truly know what's out there because we can only see it through human eyes. If there are different 'stories' of reality, who decides where to draw the line of stories between sanity and insanity? Surely someone who is colorblind is not considered insane, but someone who has hallucinations is. Isn't everyone's reality slightly different? Perhaps our conception of insanity is a story so different that it is difficult to function in everyday life.

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