[HN Gopher] A rare disorder makes people see monsters
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A rare disorder makes people see monsters
Author : prismatic
Score : 102 points
Date : 2024-08-01 20:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| notamy wrote:
| https://archive.is/FnS1W
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240802181317/https://www.newyo...
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Or is it the sunglasses?
|
| (ref to They Live)
| card_zero wrote:
| It gets a reference in the article! (Eventually. Long read.)
|
| > "My whole scenario reminds me of the reverse," he said. He
| held up a pair of green glasses that Morris made for him, which
| he sometimes wears to alleviate distortions.
| card_zero wrote:
| Prosopometamorphopsia: _face change shape vision._ Isn 't it
| reassuring when you can put a name to your condition?
| wruza wrote:
| His case is also idiopathic: _we don't know why_.
| zendist wrote:
| Sorry to anyone having this, that sounds awful.
|
| Would we easily know if the inverse phenomenon is happening in
| the rest of us? We're seeing people "better looking" than "they
| are"?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I believe the medical term for that is "drunk". A condition
| I've had the misfortune to suffer from myself on occasion.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Some do, after sobering up.
| layer8 wrote:
| Experiments have shown that we perceive our own face as more
| attractive than it really is. When presented with a series of
| morphed pictures of their own face, from less attractive to
| more attractive, people tend to not pick the unmodified picture
| as the real one, but one morphed slightly more towards
| attractive (where "attractive" mostly means "symmetric", IIRC).
| yarg wrote:
| Don't know about that - but we're incredibly sensitive to some
| minor changes to faces;
|
| I saw a clip not too long ago of a face digitally transitioning
| between male and female, the changes themselves were incredibly
| subtle, and yet the result was obvious and undeniable.
|
| There's also the uncanny valley, faces that are almost human
| yet very slightly off, and somehow come across as incredibly
| creepy.
| timoteostewart wrote:
| Can't help but think of the 2002 Ted Chiang novelette "Liking
| What You See" and its tech "Calliagnosia," a medical procedure
| that eliminates a person's ability to perceive beauty.
| Excellent read (as are almost all his stories, imho).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liking_What_You_See:_A_Documen...
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| [flagged]
| nostromo wrote:
| I wouldn't be so quick to blame the journalist. It's likely not
| shown due to copyright concerns.
|
| (Yes, this would fall under fair use. No, that often doesn't
| matter since lawsuits are expensive.)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The underlined text items are links. Click on them and you can
| find the artwork and other content referenced by, but not
| duplicated in, the article.
| bitwize wrote:
| I'm reminded of that Japanese visual novel where you play a guy
| who sees everyone as grotesque monsters -- except there actually
| is a Lovecraftian eldritch abomination in the world, whom he sees
| as a beautiful woman.
| worble wrote:
| Yeah, Saya no Uta was my first thought as well. I wonder if
| there was some connection
| Onavo wrote:
| Maybe they are a demigod child of a Greek deity.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Tangentially related, I just watched a comedy-horror anime called
| _Mieruko-chan_ about a girl who sees horrible monsters
| everywhere. Interesting to learn that there is in fact an
| analogous real-world disorder.
| rembicilious wrote:
| I initially read this:
|
| "A rare disorder makes people sea monsters"
|
| I have a disorder that makes see monsters sea monsters.
| ben_w wrote:
| Put me in mind of this little ditty about Deep Ones of Y'ha-
| nthlei: https://youtu.be/3tTHn2tHhcI?si=BEkWRIqaTCj3Pw0K
|
| (And now I'm also wondering if Lovecraft might have had
| something like this, or if it was "just" neophobia).
| chfalck wrote:
| Ah yes dyslexseea
| srean wrote:
| I have it the other way around. It affects my writing.
|
| I would write (right) a phonetically similar word instead of
| what I intended. This happens especially when I am sleep
| deprived. The weird part is I can spot it easily if I just read
| what I wrote after I am done writing.
|
| Its quite annoying.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is interesting. Why only faces? Presumably this has to do
| with "face blindless", in that our brains seem to have special
| processing for faces, and it's possible for that part of the
| brain (or whatever cross-brain process is responsible for it) to
| malfunction independently of the rest.
| layer8 wrote:
| Incidentally, Sean Carroll just had a podcast episode with a
| neurobiologist, touching on how the brain perceives faces:
| https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/07/29/284-...
| kimbernator wrote:
| Interesting that there are so many similarities between how
| people describe the distortions and fantasy creatures like orcs,
| vampires, etc. It makes me wonder how much our own fiction
| influences these peoples' conditions, or in reverse how people
| with conditions such as these have influenced our fiction.
|
| Realistically, the simple answer is that it's probably not much
| of either; There's a "built-in" concept of what is scary in terms
| of physical features that has an evolutionary benefit in keeping
| us safe from certain animals that we can easily transpose onto
| humans, and that system is being tapped into in some form for
| these people in the routine processing of faces.
| micheljansen wrote:
| My son has night terrors and if I were living in the Middle
| Ages, I would probably have called in a priest for an exorcism
| by now. I can absolutely imagine that in less enlightened
| times, where we did not have access to the internet, peer
| reviewed journals and MRI machines, people with night terrors
| were believed to be possessed by demons.
| smegsicle wrote:
| still might work
| reverius42 wrote:
| Would be interesting to see a paper published on the
| efficacy of the placebo effect in exorcisms.
| leoqa wrote:
| Many parents use monster spray to combat night visions,
| seems effective.
| amelius wrote:
| If those were my parents I would have required them to
| spray every little corner of my room.
| pc86 wrote:
| This presumes that some exorcisms are not placebos.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| Prove they aren't. (only semiserious)
| xeromal wrote:
| I had night terrors for years as a 30 year old and I finally
| fixed them.
|
| * Removed all blinking lights from my room. Cover up smoke
| detector LED or turn it off. This seems to trigger my night
| terrors.
|
| * Let the brain rest before bed. No phone, screen, book,
| anything about 20-30 minutes before bed. Hop in the shower,
| hop in bed. Don't think.
| amelius wrote:
| We need more movies where the bad looking people/creatures
| are the good guys and the good looking people are the bad
| guys.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| No, please, I'm tired of what Amazon-Netflix are doing.
| Don't make it worse!
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, well I'm tired of the good guys always being better
| looking than the bad guys. Maybe I should try a Netflix
| subscription.
| type0 wrote:
| Nightmare stems from when a mare comes at night and sits on
| your chest
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mare_(folklore)
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nightmare
| smegsicle wrote:
| in other words the same monsters living in everyone's heads
| darby_nine wrote:
| > There's a "built-in" concept of what is scary in terms of
| physical features that has an evolutionary benefit in keeping
| us safe from certain animals that we can easily transpose onto
| humans, and that system is being tapped into in some form for
| these people in the routine processing of faces.
|
| I can see this with spiders and snakes, but vampires? I don't
| see it. They don't even generally resemble the bats they're
| associated with.
|
| It's worth noting those who hear audio hallucinations, literal
| voices speaking to them, appear to hear different attitudes
| depending on the culture they come from. This wouldn't be the
| first time we've noted that qualia is culturally relative.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Vampires are predators. They have prominent canines. What's
| more, they're _nocturnal_ predators, probably one of the
| scariest and most dangerous things that a protohuman on an
| African savanna could imagine.
|
| That said, vampire myths are actually extremely diverse, and
| it's not clear at all that they share an origin in some
| primordial fear of predators.
|
| Peter Watts, in _Blindsight_ , of course presents an
| interesting hypothesis: vampire myths exist because _vampires
| used to exist_. Or more precisely, there used to exist a
| hominid species or subspecies that predated on us.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Right, but we don't seem to fear predators the same way we
| fear snakes and spiders. I don't see fangs when I look at
| noise, for instance, even though I do see snakes and
| spiders. If you take hallucinogens this strong fear of
| specifically spiders and snakes is even more apparent.
|
| That said, I think vampires can be traced back to burial
| practices in medieval Eastern Europe. They aren't exactly
| an ancient myth, nor are they cross-cultural.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| There is still a variety of hominid that, if not strictly
| nocturnal, is often enough up at odd hours of the night
| that you aren't and will suck the life out of you. They
| tend to grow as they do until at adulthood they are
| indistinguishable from an ordinary human. Over 30% of adult
| human beings are believed to have been born as babies.
|
| Real talk though, it's a huge stretch because to label the
| range of "vampire myths" with the same word elides a huge
| diversity of beliefs in which none of being hominid,
| nocturnal, or particularly toothy are a given.
| ip26 wrote:
| Vampire bats were named ex post facto. They are a New World
| species, and vampires as an idea predated discovery of the
| bat.
| asveikau wrote:
| I sometimes get visual migraines and I can strangely relate to
| this. I don't have what is described in the article. But
| sometimes I have a tendency to "soldier on", push through and
| tune out the symptoms. One way it catches up with me and I know
| I'm about to have a bad time with it is when faces don't look
| quite right, in a way I can't describe. I guess I have trouble
| focusing on them when this happens. And when I do pay continuous
| attention, I notice I'm experiencing the visual migraine
| symptoms, and that I should take it easy in a dark room for a
| bit.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| A visual novel that is quite related to the content of the
| article:
|
| Koncolos
|
| VNDB: https://vndb.org/v34195
|
| Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1912490/Koncolos/
|
| Description: "At the place where Aras works, a woman makes a
| scene every night. Aras feels an oddness in what little
| information he has managed to find out and realizes that every
| clue points to a single fact. Monsters are real, and they live
| among us. Aras learns that in all those spooky stories that he
| has been listening to since his childhood, these creatures who
| have troubled people continue in their way."
| uwagar wrote:
| the conspirators are saying its a post covid vaccine thing.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind
| arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul
| then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after
| cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.
|
| Remember this fact before making big decisions. You only have
| this now for a short while, and then it's back to the pre-
| conception infinite void.
| cooolbear wrote:
| > Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the
| mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like
| a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and
| days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.
|
| Is it ...?
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Is recognizing your mother's or spouse's face a
| spiritual/soul function? If the mind did not arise from the
| brain, how does one explain lesions in the fusiform face area
| making one unable to recognize faces? This is without
| blindness, you see everything and go about your day normally.
| It's just that the meaning of faces may as well be kanji
| characters in hanzi-land and all you know is English.
| standardUser wrote:
| Has there ever been one iota of hard evidence for the existence
| of a soul? I've always categorized the idea of soul the same
| way as the Greek gods. Fanciful nonsense with no basis in
| reality.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I too conclude as much. I used to be christian until I read
| revelatians and realized it was classic mafia racketeering. I
| went full bore after discovering Conway's Game of Life, that
| it was Turing complete (and what that means), then Stephen
| Wolfram and his principle of computational equivalence. I can
| see exactly how I am a living computational program encoded
| and processed in a 3D particle automaton, I can see how from
| a few simple rules, simple systems, you get complex behavior
| no less complex than the Intel sitting on your desk can
| produce.
|
| When I read revelations, I felt god was an egomaniac if he
| actually cared for humanity at all. The perfection of the
| clockwork universe contrasts with the imperfection of the
| human spiritual and material conditions. Such a god is a
| bastard for punishing you for doing what you were destined to
| do by his very design for you. Satan is a far less cruel
| master. However, if no such monster exists in reality and we
| are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational
| systems, nature and the world become beautiful again. No
| longer is it a frail imperfect creation but instead a
| beautiful floral tapestry.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Computation is Life!(tm)
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