This is just a presumption
Charles Bonnet Syndrome
Charles Bonnet Syndrome
1 person in every 600 may not be aware they have CBS and instead, may mistakenly report what they see as a paranormal event.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome
Following his wife’s death, David Stannard became accustomed to spending quiet evenings alone at his home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.
So it came as a surprise to the 73-year-old when he looked up from his television one evening to discover he was sharing his living room with two RAF pilots and a schoolboy.
‘The pilots were standing next to the TV, watching it as if they were in the wings of a theatre,’ he says.
‘The little boy was in a grey, Fifties-style school uniform. He just stood there in the hearth looking puzzled. He was 18 inches high at most.’
Mr Stannard’s guests never said a word and vanished after 15 minutes. That night, he says, the walls of his house, which had always been white, looked as though they had been redecorated in patterned wallpaper with a brickwork effect.
The next morning he was caught off-guard again when he found a fair-haired girl standing on his sofa. She also appeared to be from the Fifties, but was life-size, wearing a short skirt and pink cardigan, with chubby knees, white ankle socks and ribbons in her hair.
‘I watched her for a while,’ he says. ‘She didn’t move much. Then she was gone.’
Classic case paranormal reports, from not one person but many the world over. But is there an explanation? In the case of Mr Stannard there is, it would be easy to dismiss Mr Stannard’s story as the bizarre imaginings of an elderly mind. Fortunately, he knew he wasn’t losing his mind; neither was his house haunted.
A few weeks earlier he had been registered blind, though he was still able to watch television if he sat at a certain angle. He’d been warned that as his eyesight deteriorated, he might experience visual hallucinations in the form of Charles Bonnet Syndrome
Charles Bonnet syndrome is a term used to describe the situation when people with sight problems start to see things which they know aren’t real. Sometimes called ‘visual hallucinations’, the things people see can take all kinds of forms from simple patterns of straight lines to detailed pictures of people or buildings.
A Swiss philosopher named Charles Bonnet first described this condition in 1760 when he noticed that his grandfather, who was almost blind, saw patterns, figures, birds and buildings which were not there. Although the condition was described almost 250 years ago, it is still largely unknown by ordinary doctors and nurses. This is partly because of a lack of knowledge about the syndrome and partly because people experiencing it don’t talk about their problems from fear of being thought of as mentally ill.
Charles Bonnet syndrome affects people with serious sight loss and usually only people who have lost their sight later in life but can affect people of any age, usually appearing after a period of worsening sight. The visual hallucinations often stop within a year to eighteen months.
The exact cause of Charles Bonnet Syndrome is not presently known, but the popular theory suggests that the brain is merely attempting to compensate for a shortage of visual stimuli. Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second, a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons are left standing idle.
It is worth noting that the human brain already has significant talent in dealing with partial blindness. Every human eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve passes through the retina, and the visual cortex automatically fills in these blind spots by extrapolating what should be there based on the surrounding detail. Since a person’s two blind spots do not overlap, the brain can also cross-reference the eye data when both eyes are active. In gradual-onset blindness, it is possible that these brain pathways attempt to fill in the new obscured areas. Since the eyes are sending reduced amounts of data with a greater frequency of errors, the visual cortex may produce more and more outlandish guesses.
At the moment little is known about how the brain stores the information it gets from the eyes and how we use this information to help us create the pictures we see. There is some research which shows that, when we see, the information from the eyes actually stops the brain from creating its own pictures. When people lose their sight, their brains are not receiving as many pictures as they used to, and sometimes, new fantasy pictures or old pictures stored in our brains are released and experienced as though they were seen. These experiences seem to happen when there is not much going on, for example when people are sitting alone, somewhere quiet which is familiar to them or when they are in lying in bed at night.
An estimated 100,000 people in the UK have Charles Bonnet Syndrome, but many won’t realise it because the condition remains something of a mystery
Usually people with Charles Bonnet syndrome are aware that their hallucinations, although vivid, are not real. Charles Bonnet syndrome hallucinations only affect sight and do not involve hearing things or any other sensations. People with Charles Bonnet syndrome do not develop complicated non-medical explanations about the cause of their hallucinations (sometimes called ‘delusions’)..
There seem to be two different kinds of things people see. Both of them can be black and white or in colour, involve movement or stay still, and they can seem real – such as cows in a field, or unreal – such as pictures of dragons.
Firstly, there are the hallucinations of patterns and lines, which can become quite complicated like brickwork, netting, mosaic or tiles.
Secondly, there are more complicated pictures of people or places. Sometimes whole scenes will appear, such as landscapes or groups of people, which are sometimes life-size, and at other times are reduced or enlarged in size. These pictures appear ‘out of the blue’ and can carry on for a few minutes or sometimes several hours. Many people begin to recognize similar things appearing in their visions such as distorted faces or the same tiny people in particular costumes.
Generally the pictures are pleasant although the effects can be scary.
Sometimes the complicated pictures can make it difficult to get around. For example, streets and rooms may have their shape changed or brickwork and fencing appear directly in front of you making it difficult for you to judge exactly where you are and whether you can walk straight ahead. One gentleman describes how, approaching the top of the stairs, he had a vision of being on top of a mountain, and had considerable problems getting down the stairs. Good knowledge of your surroundings can help overcome this particular problem.
The complicated pictures can sometimes be a little scary. Although the visions themselves may not be of anything frightening, it is disturbing to start seeing strangers in your home or garden. People often overcome this by getting to know the figures in their visions. Another man describes how, when he wakes up in the morning, he says to the figures he is seeing: “Right, what have you got in store for me today?” This allows him to have some control over the way he feels about his seeing things.
So a little affliction, which, if put into the perceptions of UK paranormal reports, and a population of around 60,000,000 divided by the number approximately suffering from Charles Bonnet Syndrome of 100,000. Means that there is a high chance of 1 person in every 600 who may not be aware of their condition and instead, may mistakenly report this as a paranormal event.
Could this be another plausible explanation for medical conditions causing paranormal like events?