Now, for most people, life is all about spending time with friends, with family, with lovers you know, kind of laughing and making memories, of people that you think will always be there and always be around you. But what if that changed?
What if we viewed these people as impostors at as fakes, as people that have been replaced by other humans? What if the people in your life right now are real at all? Let's find out.
Now I discovered this topic a while back and it's my favorite because it does describe really accurately just how crazy the human brain can be when something goes wrong.
Imagine for a moment your best friend you've known for years. You've been to their house, you understand how they act towards things, how they react, what they like what they don't like, probably what they smell like, and what sort of words they use the most. One day when you were hanging out with them, something seemed different. They seemed off, they seem to smell a little different, look a little different, and you started to realize in that moment that it wasn't your best friend. It was a complete stranger pretending to be your best friend.
What would you do? And this isn't just a kind of plot for a movie, this happens in real life too. It's something known as the cop grand illusion or the capgras syndrome. It's a very rare disorder where an individual’s brain convinces that person that one person or two or maybe all of the people in their lives are imposters and have been replaced by fakes, by actors, or by different strangers pretending to be their loved ones or their family.
And it gets worse, because over time, this elusive process in these patients can spread. So if I saw one of my friends and I had the capgras illusion, and over time, it would go to my other friends and then my family until it gets to a point where everyone in your life is an imposter. Everyone you know has been replaced by fakes.
And it's kind of a scenario is actually how Joseph Capgras in 1923 defined it to a patient he had who had these cues and occurrences happen. It started with her sister and spread to everyone and now she thought she lived in a world where everyone around her was fake.
Another weird part about the capgras illusion besides the fact that he thinks everyone in life is an imposter, is that scientists don't really know why it happened. It's one of the few delusions we have that we haven't really pinpointed as to why.
To some people, it happens naturally, to others it happens after they survive a car accident. It's always a different scenario. The interesting part is that they think it deals with sensory perception in a way that people are sensing double or over sensing anything or visual. What they hear, what they smell and therefore misidentifying it.
So, say your friend comes over and you have the capgras illusion. What scientists think might be happening is that usually you just smell it both caogras revolution Your brain misunderstands that to feel like you've smelled them one-and-a-half times or 2 times over and therefore, it's a different natural smell or different natural sight than you normally have.
This extra bit of information is what would make you step back and go, wait. I think this is a different person completely. I think this person smells different. I think this person looks a little different which is exactly what an imposter would do except they're not. We are just thinking with this delusion that they are but because it might lie in the realm of sensory perception, it’s also kind of borderline between an hallucination and a delusion in its own right. It could be both. We simply don't know and that's kind of a scary thing. To have a disease out there that is degenerative and is able to make us so distant and dissociated with those around us and have no idea why it happens.
But we are getting closer to finding it. A study in 2010 actually showed that patients under the effects of ketamine (a very strong tranquilizer drug taken recreationally), might have slight notions of capgras syndrome when looking at other people. This suggests that it might actually be an hallucination that comes on naturally.
So what does this really mean? I mean it's not exactly something that's pertinent to your life. I just really found this psychological phenomenon in our brain really interesting. Just how do you know that a little bit of mis-tweaking, a little bit of a correction in the human mind, can make something this intense happen to us on a natural level? It's one of those illusions that I think are super interesting that I wanted to share with you guys. So, pay more attention about your life, go home and think about it. Do you have capgras illusion? You might have it and not even know. You might be experiencing an on set. Are your friends real or your friends fake? Do they exist at all? That's something for you to decide. Go home or go outside right now and analyze the situation. Go look at your parents, your friends and make sure that you don't have this delusion as well.
That's a little post I think on the way the brain works in a certain sense.
Thank you guys so much for reading this post.