10.54103/ai/19595
From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to expand our sensory knowledge and to support our communications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason.The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked, in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without objects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol has survived to the present day. However, the history of the scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoretical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten: the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign.
application/pdf
2785-7433
19595
II
en
Marcin Sobieszczanski
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Classical theories and perspectives
Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
1
Thematic Section
2022-12-20
2023-01-07
2022-12-20
2023-04-17
AN-ICON
Marcin Sobieszczanski
2022/12/20
10.54103/ai/19595
Université Côte d'Azur 
2785-7433
II
Classical theories and perspectives
en
Wellek, R., Warren, A., Theory of Literature (Harcourt Brace, and Company, 1948).
Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image. Classical theories and perspectives
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/19595/17775
1
Hallucinatory
syndromes / Immersion
in the image. Classical theories
and perspectives
by Marcin Sobieszczanski
              Hallucinatory syndromes
                           Immersion in the image
                           Classical theories and perspectives




                             Issue №2 Year 2022
                             → Just an illusion? Between simulation,
                             emulation, and hyper-realism
                             Edited by Pietro Conte
                             and Lambert Wiesing
Hallucinatory syndromes
/ Immersion in the image.
Classical theories and
perspectives
MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI, Université Côte d’Azur – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8024-8780
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595



Abstract                      From the outset, the inventors of 3D, VR/AR and
                analogue and digital immersion thought of these devices as
                functional models of our perceptive capacities, serving to
                expand our sensory knowledge and to support our commu-
                nications based on multisensory storytelling. How is it that a
                solid critical tradition then assimilates them to hallucinatory
                phenomena? The answer lies in marketing techniques that
                have always associated dreams and illusions with the desire
                to play with reality. But there is a deeper, epistemic reason.
                The sources of scientific thought of hallucinations are marked,
                in the 19th century, by the theory of “sensations without ob-
                jects.” Perception being distorted, the knowledge it provides
                is pointless. It is therefore possible to replace the vacant
                object with our desires to act out subjectively the real. This
                conviction initiated by Dr. Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol
                has survived to the present day. However, the history of the
                scientific approach of hallucinations shows another theoret-
                ical framework, particularly prolific but curiously forgotten:
                the theory of reality monitoring and arbitration of sources of
                information provided from Dr. Henri Ey. We propose to forge
                on these concepts a critical tool of the current mediadesign.

Keywords         Hallucinatory syndromes                        Immersion in the image
                 Classical theories and perspectives
To quote this essay: M. Sobieszczanski, “Hallucinatory syndromes / Immersion in the image.
Classical theories and perspectives,” AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
2 (2022): 113-132, https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/19595

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                         113                                       AN-ICON
                             What if we were to compare immersion in artifi-
               cial sensoriality (or “virtual” - although this last word is more
               of a showcase than a solid concept) to all the phenomena
               of treachery, feints, and sensory artifices, phosphenes, il-
               lusions, dreams, effects of psychotropic substances, and
               more specifically to hallucinatory states?
                             This is, obviously, a marketing slogan for vari-
               ous VR devices, but let’s not forget that in the similar con-
               text of the appearance of technical novelties in the cinema
               of the 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry1 has been able to make a
               banality forged in extra-scientific circles the foundation of
               an important vein in the theory of filmic narration. It was also
               at this time that the controversy around the “oneiric” char-
               acter of cinema sometimes led to accusations of oneirism,
               the latter term clearly designating a mental disorder. If then
               today, we evoke the comparison VR / illusion, it is to take
               advantage of the heuristic potential of this metaphor. In-
               deed, the long history of scientific understanding of illusion
               phenomena and their methods of remediation can provide
               an interesting intellectual tool for clarifying the relationship
               between cultural practices in VR and reality. We will pro-
               ceed in parallel, on the perceptual level, by approaching the
               comparison between the episodes of disturbed perception
               and the sessions of immersion in the sensory peripherals
               of computers acting on the mode of interactivity and vi-
               sual and sound spatialization, as well as on the intelligible
               content plan, by approaching the comparison between the
               construction of illusory meaning by the subject presenting
               nosologies relating to perception, and the construction of
               narrative meaning during the use of VR products.
                             This approach will first lead to the highlighting
               of contrasting results, similarities and dissimilarities be-
               tween the mechanisms of perception in different types of
               perceptual failure and of perception in immersive environ-
               ments. Secondly, faced with a certain lack of intelligibility
               in the relationship between VR practices and the real world,
               we will take advantage of a brief history of the theories of

      1   J.-L. Baudry, “The device,” Communications 23 (1975): 56-72.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                         114                        AN-ICON
              sensory dysfunctions and hallucinations which, after a ter-
              minological reframing in the light of standards in the current
              cognitive sciences, will allow us to propose, on the inspi-
              ration of the theory of monitoring of informational sources
              of Dr. Ey, a critical epistemology of Virtual and Extended
              Reality.

                               Nature of sensory experiences in
                               immersive devices: towards the digital
                               modeling of vision and gesture

                           In the register of symbolic behaviors, the visual
              production of Man started, according to the facts attested
              since 100,000 BP, probably by adornment and the addition
              of aesthetic elements to natural or artificial objects such
              as tools, to then pour in the production of artifacts aimed
              at reproducing, in a gesture of externalization, the retinal
              image and the process of its mental treating, the vision
              of the world. Thus, appeared pictorial artefacts, around
              40,000 BP and sculptural and architectural productions
              (additions to natural shelters) around 32,000 BP. The first
              representations (the bestiary) already implicitly composed
              with the notion of dimension, first by spreading out over the
              surfaces (2D + the roughness of the natural surface) and
              then by regaining the rudiments of perspective, which is a
              way of raising awareness of the constraints of the process
              of visual perception: the light imprint of reality in three di-
              mensions, its projection on the retina (in 2D + the concave
              nature of the back of the eye) and the cerebral processing
              of the image retinal reconstruction, thanks to the various
              3D indices, the reality of the spatial relationships present
              in the ecological niche.2,3
                           The ergonomics of vision dispenses with the 3D
              image since the human brain is capable of restoring depth
              from the flat image. But it should be noted that if it is just

      2 T. Deacon, Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); J.-L. Baudry, “The device:”
      56-72.
      3 D. Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (New York:
      Thames and Hudson, 2002).

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                        115                                        AN-ICON
               suggested in the 2D image by the elements of perspective
               reproducing the indices of depth, spatiality is present in
               the imagery from the art of caves and rocky surfaces, also
               by the bias of the accumulation of the sources of visual
               information, an accumulation which, once again by cere-
               bral processing, reproduces the immersion of the cognitive
               subject in the environment parameterized in three dimen-
               sions. Humans have never ceased to reproduce space in
               their visual symbolic productions, from rock walls, through
               the vaults of temples and dwellings, to immersive “analog”
               installations such as “circular perspectives” or the “vedute.”
                             Digital immersive devices, which appeared in
               the mid-1960s, took over the game of 3D/2D/3D transition,
               first optical and then mental. But unlike previous devices,
               the pioneer of digital graphics and VR, Ivan Sutherland,
               drawing inspiration from Gestalt Theory, by descent from
               Köhler, passing through Green, Wallach, O’Connell and
               Gibson, adds an important element, by placing ourselves
               from the start on the level of bio-inspiration that we also
               call cognitive realism.4

The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to
present the user with a perspective image which changes as
he moves. The retinal image of the real objects which we see
is, after all, only two-dimensional. Thus, if we can place suitable
two-dimensional images on the observer’s retinas, we can create
the illusion that he is seeing a three-dimensional object. Although
stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion,
it is less important than the change that takes place in the image
when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the
three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the
image of a real object would change for similar motions of the us-
er’s head. Psychologists have long known that moving perspective
images appear strikingly three-dimensional even without stereo

       4 B.F. Green, “Figure coherence in the kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental
       Psychology 62, no. 3 (1961): 272-282, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045622; H. Wallach, D.N.
       O’Connell, “The kinetic depth effect,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 45, no. 4 (1953):
       205; J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1950),
       https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056880.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                          116                                         AN-ICON
presentation; the three-dimensional display described in this paper
depends heavily on this “kinetic depth effect.”5
                            The physiological approach adopted by the
              inventors of immersive environments places us not only
              in the 3D image, in the saturation of the visual field by the
              circular and spatial character of this image or by the accu-
              mulation of images imitating the surrounding space, but it
              also allows us to add to our relationship to the image, the
              motor and gestural dimension, through which we regain
              one more stage in the process of symbolic representation
              of reality: its “kinesthetic” and “manipulative” dimension,
              the possibility of acting on the image inspired by the actions
              that the Human exercises on his environment.
                            In an experience of immersive cave or a semi-im-
              mersive installation, we are subject to the perceptual action
              of a 3D image produced by the display device: the projec-
              tion run by a computer equipped with graphic synthesis
              capabilities of a synthetic image itself produced by graphics
              software or resulting from the capture of reality as it is the
              case with a digital image captured by photography, vide-
              ography, or scanning then synthesized as a 3D model of
              this captured reality. The visual effects of the embossed
              image, which is not a real 3D model that can be positioned
              at will within the geometrically simulated 3D space and
              be used, but rather a handling of the image reduced to its
              positioning relative to the surface of objects and not with
              the conservation of truthful reports of depth. This narrow
              depth technique is broadly used in 3D cinema which, for
              obvious economic reasons, using the twin-lens cameras
              with surface relief vision more often than real “full” 3D mod-
              els constructed geometrically or raised by algorithms. In
              several installations, the 3D image is also reinforced by the
              stimulations coming from other sensory generators. This
              image, alone or reinforced, fills a large part of our sensory
              field. It imposes itself as perceived reality so much so that

      5 I.E. Sutherland, “A head-mounted three-dimensional display,” Proceeding AFIPS ‘68,
      (1968) https://doi.org/10.1145/1476589.1476686.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                       117                                        AN-ICON
              it constitutes a partial substitution of reality that coexists
              with the other fragments of reality felt through the active
              fields of the senses that are not, or not entirely affected by
              the 3D image or by generators of complementary sensa-
              tions. In this way, the perceptual field6 of the subject in the
              immersive experience is composed of a blend of sensations
              coming from the directly perceived external and internal
              reality, and sensations coming from a digital generator of
              3D images often combined with other digital generators of
              sensations, auditory, olfactory, or even tactile.

                                Review of illusion-producing phenomena

                           The phosphene was commented on by the An-
              cient Greeks as a specific mode of appearance of images,
              by the pressure7 of the eyeball. The famous South African
              anthropologist David Lewis-Williams attributes to the phos-
              phene a preponderant role in the creation of non-figurative
              parietal icons of the Upper Paleolithic. Hermann von Helm-
              holtz was passionate about the study of this phenomenon
              and recorded several varieties of it. Produced by direct,
              mechanical, or electromagnetic stimulation of the sight’s
              organs, the phosphene constitutes an experience often
              founding the awareness of the functioning of the sensory
              pathways in juvenile subjects, experience of the duality
              and at the same time of the interdependence of the ocular
              and mental image.
                           The illusions, studied since antiquity among
              the peoples of the Mediterranean region but also in Asia,
              especially in India, they are first linked to the problem of
              apparent and relative magnitudes in astronomical obser-
              vations of the celestial vault, and then to atmospheric phe-
              nomena, to the role of shadow and finally to all sorts of

      6 Also called “receptive field” and defined as follows: “A specific region of sensory space
      in which an appropriate stimulus can drive an electrical response in a sensory neuron.” D.H.
      Hubel, T.N. Wiesel, Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration (Oxford-
      New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
      7 O.J. Gruesser, M. Hagner, “On the history of deformation phosphenes and the idea of
      internal light generated in the eye for the purpose of vision,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74
      (1990): 57-85.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                          118                                         AN-ICON
               optical reverberations produced by different “screens,” va-
               pors, smooth surfaces, and liquid surfaces. Although the
               Platonic philosophical teaching of perceptual skepticism
               derives directly from this experience, the study of illusions
               nevertheless leads to the beginning of sensory realism.8 The
               Platonic analysis of the cave with “screen” effects (projec-
               tions, reflections, traces, etc.)9 is also one of the first trea-
               tises on perception in which the foundation of all prescien-
               tific and scientific theories of knowledge (gnoseology), the
               dichotomy “perception versus cognition” clearly appears.
               From an epistemic perspective, it should be remembered
               that perception is considered in Antiquity as an interaction
               between the sensory organs, the medium (undulatory, ca-
               loric, material, etc.) of contact with the thing, and the thing
               itself, the object of perception, while the term cognition is
               reserved for the mental interpretation of the signal that the
               sensory organs transmit to the understanding. Both Plato,
               Aristotle, and philosophers of late Antiquity like Plotinus
               attached great importance to the versatile nature of the
               contact medium which under different conditions and un-
               der different surrounding constraints can give the distorted
               image of the thing. The role of the mind, the understanding
               or the intellection is above all to exercise control over the
               sensory sphere. Current cognitive sciences have a rather
               unitary vision of the nervous system and consider the sen-
               sory organs as extensions of the brain...
                             Oneiric activities provide Ancient Humanity
               with an enormous reservoir of stories that are both mne-
               sic and premonitory. The imaginary, the abductive force of
               the creative projection on the “commonplace” world pro-
               duces a reasoning that confirms the subject in his role, if
               not central then certainly active, in the gnostic process. In
               short, the dream is an omnipresent source of the explana-
               tory hypotheses of reality, as Baudry says when relating the
               contributions of the dreamlike sphere discovered by Freud:

      8 M. Sobieszczanski, “Two key factors in the history of communicating immersive
      environments: mix of reality vs. cognitive realism,” LINKs-series, no. 1-2 (2019), https://hal.
      archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02281583.
      9 Plato, The Republic, Book VII.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                            119                                           AN-ICON
The transformations wrought by the sleep in the psychic appara-
tus: removal of cathexis, lability of the different systems, return to
narcissism, withdrawal of motor skills (impossibility of resorting to
the reality test), contribute to producing the specific characteristics
of the dream: its capacity for figuration, translation of thought into
image, reality accorded to representations.10
                            Another experience, at the individual level, and
              - among all prehistoric peoples - strongly collective, is pro-
               vided using psychotropic substances. The inoculation of
               a chemical factor modifying both, perception, and con-
               sciousness, affects as well the centripetal sensory afferents,
               and their centrifugal control, most often thalamic but also
               caused by neocortical intellectual patterns. And if in cur-
               rent societies the practice of narcotics is mainly associated
               with personal deviance and destructuring addictions, in
               prehistory and antiquity, drugs served as a (bio)chemical
               substrate for divinatory trances. These states were both
               reserved for the use by a restricted class of hierophants,
               and essential for social regulation in general and for the
               management of individuals, particularly during initiation
               rites and rites of passage.11

                                Towards the clinical approach of
                                hallucinatory phenomena

                             Often times, individuals performing the same
               types of behaviors without the (bio)chemical support are
               viewed by the Ancients as representatives of the deity itself,
               and their verbal and iconic creations as direct expressions
               of religious truths that may serve as a vehicle for the intelli-
               gibility of reality. Western science began to take interest in
               the pathological dimension of these people and to associ-
               ate different clinics with them. Thus, the head doctor of the

       10 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72.
       11 J. Clottes, D. Lewis-Williams, Les Chamans de la Préhistoire. Trans et Magie dans
       les Grottes Ornées (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996); E. Guerra-Doce, “The origins of inebriation:
       archaeological evidence of the consumption of fermented beverages and drugs in prehistoric
       Eurasia,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory Theory 22 (2014): 751-782 https://doi.
       org/10.1007/s10816-014-9205-z.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                          120                                         AN-ICON
                Salpêtrière, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, interpreted
                in 1838 the difference between illusions and hallucinations
                based on the nature of their references to reality, which
                led him to the definition of pathological hallucinations by
                preterition. “Perception without an object” is a normative
                view of the phenomenon which insists on its perceptual
                nature while denying the percept of this perception, and
                ultimately its object, in accordance with a “common sense.”
                Relayed without any critical readjustment by later research-
                ers, J. Baillarger, J.-P. Falret, E. Régis or P. Guiraud,12 this
                conception had to wait for the second half of the twentieth
                century to finally, in the research of Dr. Henri Ey, lead to the
                study of the nature of the hallucinatory process itself.
                               The much-vaunted merit of Ey’s synthesis is
                first of all its distinction between hallucinosic eidolia and
                delirious hallucinations which are, alone, hallucinations
                properly speaking.
                              “The eidolia do not come from a delusional func-
                tioning of the patient and are compatible with reason, in this
                they can be qualified as ‘psychonomy’. It is a ‘non-delusion-
                al hallucinatory modality’. The subject finds them ‘unreal’,
                incongruous in relation to his perceptual experience: he
                knows that he is hallucinating.”13
                               We will return to this definition in the context
                of certain immersive experiences with virtual spaces, such
                as vacuum or narrowing, producing effects of somatic re-
                actions even though the subject is aware of the “virtuality”
                of these spaces and their characteristics.
                               On the other hand, the definition of delusional
                hallucinations provides us with another important theoret-
                ical dimension:

Thus, for Ey “The hallucinatory phenomenon experienced by the
subject must [...] have a double character: that of affecting his
sensitivity or his sensoriality and that of being projected out of his
subjectivity” ([2] p. 44-45). The patient must thus be able to attest
       12 G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J. Pedinielli, “Study of the evolution of the concept of
       hallucination in classical psychiatric literature,” L’evolution psychiatrique 68 (2003): 289-298.
       13 Ibid.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                             121                                           AN-ICON
to a sensory experience (“I see, I hear, I feel”) by his reference to
the attributes of sensoriality and support the objectivity and reality
of this experience.14
                              This means, in essence, that a cerebral effect
                positioned in the sensory information processing areas, in
                certain clinical circumstances, can be correlated by intra-
                cerebral communication pathways with a cortical effect
                that mobilizes the oscillation between knowledge current
                (operational) and the thought of presumption, inclinations,
                convictions (doxic).
                              In this situation, it is clear that there is a de-
                tachment of the sensory areas from the sensory organs,
                or rather a functional doubling of the cerebral support. On
                the one hand, there is evidence that patients suffering from
                hallucinations often achieve to conceive that the people
                accompanying them, the caregivers in this case, are not
                subject to the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the
                same patient simultaneously develops a hallucinatory syn-
                drome. The sensations “with object” do not disappear, on
                the contrary, the “generic” sensory excitations accompany
                the delirious subject throughout his “specific” experiences.
                              In the article by G. Gimenez, M. Guimont, J.-
                L. Pedinielli, we read: “Minkowsky’s remarkable text on
                Le temps vivant, and in particular the chapter ‘Towards
                a psychopathology of space’, which shows very well the
                possible cohabitation, in the same subject, of a hallucina-
                tory neo-reality and a perceptual reality, often remaining
                actively separated by processes of splitting.”15
                              The “Perception without an object” was biased
                by its implicit use of the physiologically improbable, direct
                inversion of nervous influx16 in the optic or auditory nerves.
                In reality, the sick subject carries out two processes both
                highly demanding in terms of synaptic energy: that of the

       14 Ibid. Here the article refers to H. Ey, Treatise on Hallucinations, vol. 2 (Paris: Masson and
       Co, 1973).
       15 Ibid. The article refers to E. Minkowsky, The Lived Time. Phenomenological and
       Psychopathological Studies (Neuchatel: Delachaux and Niesle, 1933).
       16 The blocking of the inversion is ensured by the mechanism of the alternation of refractory
       periods and periods of excitability of the elementary nerve cell.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                            122                                          AN-ICON
               control of the real and that of the control of his own cere-
               bral activities of the sensory areas pathologically auton-
               omized to the point of competing with the gnosic results
               of perception. Under the light of current neuroscience re-
               sults supported by functional cerebral imaging, MRI and
               positron emission device, the etiology and consequently
               the nosography of delusional pathologies is shifting from
               the psychoanalytical vision where the sphere of symbolic
               topics takes pathologically precedence on the phenomenal
               sphere, towards a neuro-cognitivist vision compatible with
               the hypotheses of Dr. Ey, as Thomas Rabeyron states it:

hallucinations should first be considered from the point of view
of “reality monitoring,” a process that is part of a larger whole
called “source monitoring.” According to Bentall (1990), hallucina-
tions would thus be the consequence of a bad categorization: an
internal perception, a representation, or a reminiscence, instead
of being represented as coming from inside, would be categorized
by the brain as coming from outside. There would therefore be
confusion between internal source and external source, confusion
being more specifically at the level of the thalamus, a real system
for filtering information reaching the cerebral cortex.17
                             In fact, we are here in a process of intracerebral
               communication where, both in the presence of a meticu-
               lous monitoring of reality18 and independently of its gnosic
               results and its metacognitive achievements,19 the different
               neocortical areas exchange with each other. In this play,
               essentially triangular, the central position is ensured by (1)
               the thalamic zones which seem to distribute flows joining
               (2) the prefrontal cortex with (3) sensory, parietal or posterior,

       17 T. Rabeyron, “Exceptional experiences: between neuroscience and psychoanalysis,”
       Research in Psychoanalysis, no. 8 (2009). The reference “Bentall (1990)” refers to R.P. Bentall,
      “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research on hallucinations,”
       Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82.
       18 Let us remember the experiences cited by Merleau-Ponty where schizophrenics
       systematically thwarted attempts at scenographies recalling their imaginary world: M.
       Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also the
       connection between Merleau-Ponty and Dr. Ey, in: T. Grohmann, “Délire et hallucination en
       schizophrénie: une perspective phénoménologique,” Phainomenon 28 (2018): 103-125.
       19 On this subject, see the “Higher-order thought theory” by David Rosenthal, in D.
       Rosenthal, Consciousness and Mind (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                           123                                           AN-ICON
              somatosensory, auditory and visual areas. The implication
              of the latter is proved indirectly by research combining the
              pathological phenomenon of synesthesia, the non-volun-
              tary association of sensations originating from different sen-
              sory modes, and hallucinatory sensations. This particular
              research has produced increasing evidences since Binet’s
              founding experiments.20

                               Reality monitoring

                           With the dimension of “reality monitoring,” the
              theories of hallucinations begin to move away from their
              origins anchored in a naive realism where the third instance
              of a healthy observer arbitrated, in the light of “common”
              and “objective” representations, the pathological represen-
              tations of reality produced by the sick subject. In fact, they
              also abandon the solipsistic simplifications of a “a world to
              yourself” in which the patient would have been locked up.
              We are here within the framework of a duality where the
              two gnosic procedures hold comparable “realizing” forces
              from the point of view of their aesthesies. The nosological
              qualification of dysfunctions no longer consists in arbitrat-
              ing between the flow of consciousness of the sick subject
              and the flow of consciousness of the healthy subject, but
              in qualifying the way in which a subject oscillates between
              the two gnosic modes reputed to be constructive.
                           It is therefore the attentional processes that
              make the nosology of delusional mental behaviors and not
              the hallucinations themselves, or again, in other words: we
              speak on hallucinations when the “fictio-creative” activities
              occur, by the alteration of the attentional processes, to sub-
              stitute themselves to the interoceptive and exteroceptive
              controls of reality.
                           Attentional processes, whether defined accord-
              ing to peripheral filter theories or central manager theories,
              cannot be associated with an organic function or, even less,
              with a delimited convolution or a particular nerve bundle.

      20   A. Binet, “The problem of colored hearing,” Revue des Deux Mondes 113 (1892): 586-614.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                        124                                       AN-ICON
              These are complex states of mobilization of cognitive re-
              sources assembling different parts of the nervous system,
              appearing to be identifiable with the different functional
              aspects of the circuits assigned to the different other pur-
              poses, as it is the case of the reticular system disposed on
              the path joining the lower bulbar region to the lateral and
              posterior hypothalamus. Following the inventory of con-
              vergent experimental facts, some theories on the rhythms
              of cerebral electro-biological activities, detectable at the
              cortical and subcortical level, propose here some interest-
              ing hypotheses, in particular on the role of theta waves.21
              These processes are also associated with the presence of
              certain cognitive event-related potential (ERP) and in par-
              ticular the famous N400 discovered in 1978 by Kutas and
              Hillyard.22
                           The attentional processes have the capacity
                        23
              to move, by means of calibration and thalamic reinforce-
              ments, not only in the direction of association or selection
              of external sources of sensory stimuli but also in the direc-
              tion of interchange and variation of the internal sources,24
              among which we count usually different kinds of memo-
              ry,25 but also hallucinogenic stimuli.26 It is at this level that
              the problem of indissociation between the veracity and

      21 M.C.M. Bastiaansen et al., “I see what you mean: theta power increases are involved in
      the retrieval of lexical semantic information,” Brain and Language 106 (2008): 15-28, https://
      doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2007.10.006.
      22 M. Kutas, K.D. Federmeier, “Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language
      comprehension,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 12 (2000): 463-470, https://doi.
      org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01560-6.
      23 M.I. Posner, “Orienting of attention,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32
      (1980): 3-25.
      24 J.K. Roth et al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus
      external information,” NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608.
      25 E. Awh, E.K. Vogel, S.H. Oh, “Interactions between attention and working memory,”
      Neuroscience 139, no. 1 (2006): 201-208, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2005.08.023.
      26 R.P. Bentall, “The illusion of reality: at review and integration of psychological research
      on hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 107, no. 1 (1990): 82, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-
      2909.107.1.82; M.K. Johnson, C.L. Raye, “Reality monitoring,” Psychological Review 88
      (1981): 67-85, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.88.1.67; M.K. Johnson,
      S. Hashtroudi, D.S. Lindsay, “Source monitoring,” Psychlogical Bulletin 114 (1993): 3-28,
      https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.3; G. Brébion et al., “Reality monitoring failure in
      schizophrenia: The role of selective attention,” Schizophrenia Research 22, no. 2 (15 Nov.
      1996): 173-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0920-9964(96)00054-0; A. Schnider, “Spontaneous
      confabulation, reality monitoring, and the limbic system - a review,” Brain Research Reviews
      36, no. 2–3 (2001): 150-160, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0173(01)00090-X; J.K. Roth et
      al., “Similar and dissociable mechanisms for attention to internal versus external information,”
      NeuroImage 48 (2009): 601-608.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                          125                                           AN-ICON
             the coherence of different topics, imaginary and sensory,
             must occur. From then on, the fictitious topics that we will
             begin to call fictional (see below), can exercise a “realizing”
             role they can effectively embed into the sensible real, by
             the means of intensity of esthesia (contribution from sen-
             sory areas), sequential plausibility, and causal relevance
             (contributions from frontal areas). From the moment when
             the “realization” efficiency is obtained, the altered attention
             moves indiscriminately from the external to the internal
             and withdraws from its task as a source checker. Thus, on
             the double psychic substrate, emerges an internal fiction
             without the subject being able to exercise any criticism
             towards it. In the patient, the source of suffering stems
             more from the awareness of this impotence of discernment
             than from the disconcerting contents of the hallucinations
             themselves. Even if the patient still has the possibility of
             diverting his attention, what his attention points to is, in both
             directions, internal and external, impetuously “real.” As Dr.
             Ey said, delusional work is characterized by “foreignness,
             incoercibility, assertiveness and aesthesis.” Foreignness,
             because the internal and external sources have the same
             rank of veracity and can therefore be interchangeable; in-
             coercibility because this process prevails over the mecha-
             nisms of anti-hallucinatory coercion; assertiveness because
             the sequences of topics obtained through hallucinations
             can serve as a basis for the subject’s discursive activities;
             and aesthesia because the subject is aware of the fact
             that thanks to the strident aesthesia of his hallucinations
             he can distinguish them from ordinary memory material,
             but cannot to mobilize enough to distinguish them from
             perceptual sensations.
                          We are touching here on the doxic status of
             hallucinations and in this the comparison between sensory
             immersion with artificial origin and hallucinations becomes
             for us more than a superficial metaphor. In schizophrenia,
             the activations of sensory areas stimulated by prefrontal
             activities and categorized by thalamic operations bring out
             a threshold effect beyond which the complex neural sub-
             strate is ready to exercise a creative role and generates
MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                126                              AN-ICON
               a fictional “effect.” This “effect” is both gnosic, active in
               the symbolic sphere, and assertoric in the domain of the
               subject’s discursive approach. To summarize, in patholog-
               ical states of this type, fiction begins to compete, through
               attentional maneuvers, with the real apprehended by the
               sensorial way.27

                                  Hallucinogenic function vs. Cultural and
                                  artistic creations

                            It is obvious that the comparison between
               immersion in artificial sensory devices and hallucinatory
               states overlaps with the very old theoretical concerns of
               specialists in literature and cinema, notably René Wellek
               and Austin Warren,28 and Jean-Louis Baudry,29 concerning
               the status of the “presented reality” in the verbal story and
               in the visual narration. On this topic, for methodological
               reasons, we propose to dissociate two blocks of questions:
               what comes from diếgêsis and what comes from mimesis,
               in order to better synthesize them later on.30
                            On the one hand, the comparison of immersion
               and hallucination appears as existential experiences. We
               call “existential” the situations and the experiences that
               are attached to them, when it is a question, for a human
               subject, of facing an immediate environment, offering to his
               perception the sensory substrate which allows him to carry
               out his habitual activities: standing, sitting, walking, etc.,

      27 The subject being aware of the imbalance between the respective parts of the internal
      fiction and of its “reality monitoring,” falls into the suffering stemming from the anxiety of
      failing in reality. In this, schizophrenia involves a double danger: that which stems from
      the often disconcerting nature of the “visions” and that of the depression provoked by the
      awareness of one’s own failures in the duty of reality.
      28 R. Wellek, A. Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). “As Wellek
      and Warren (La Théorie littéraire) point out, there is a use for these invented stories, which
      is to entertain and instruct, a use that should not be confused with forgetting boredom.
      Fiction triggers desire, pleasure, escape and knowledge, without the seriousness of a duty to
      accomplish, a lesson to learn. This plural pleasure is to live adventures that daily life refuses us,
      to which we access by proxy. The knowledge transmitted by fiction is of a different order from
      that provided by science, philosophy or history.” Yves Chemla about F. Tremblay, La Fiction
      en Question (Balzac-Le Griot editor, 1999) coll. Littératures à l’essai, Montréal, in Acta Fabula,
      Autumn 2000, vol. 1, no 2, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.
      29 J.L. Baudry, “The device:” 56-72.
      30 E. Souriau, “The structure of the film universe and the vocabulary of filmology,” Revue
      internationale de filmologie 7-8 (1951).

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                            127                                            AN-ICON
              activities whose purpose lacks a delayed-causal goal, the
             “short-term” behavior. The notion of immediacy must also
              be addressed. Situations are immediate when the goals
              pursued by the subject affect his current vital needs, unlike
              the pursuit of medium and long-term goals. In this sense,
              we are forced to separate, for example, the expectation
              of resolution of a legal case that mobilizes our energy for
              several years, from the posture that we adopt in the last
              minutes before the last trial, although the lasting experience
              conditions, to a certain extent, the momentary behaviors,
              and vice versa; the punctual and immediate existential ex-
              perience merges, in a certain way, with the image and the
              memory that we have of the entire event.31
                           On the other hand, the immersion can be com-
              pared with the effects of fiction which are elaborated in the
              brain of the readers of literary stories and the spectators
              of cinematographic storytelling. Here, it is not a question
              of evaluating the effects of immersion by the yardstick of
              immediate perceptions, which can feed temporary postural
              reactions, move in the relative field of vision, explore its
              space immediately adjoining our body or behave according
              to the volumes found, suggested by the 3D image-models
              of the show unfolding before the eyes of the subject, but
              it is a question of listing the psychological and somatic
              effects of a “world” which is constructed in the process of
              mediated communication, through signs and their bodi-
              ly and technical supports, i.e. writing, icon, image-move-
              ment. It is a question, for example, of distinguishing two
              perceptual occurrences, in the complex reaction that we
              can have when seeing and manipulating, including by our
              movements, the model of the staircase of the Capitol of
              Washington drawn up for the CAVE at California Institute for
              Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2)
              in San Diego: the monumental effect of architecture and
              the symbolic effect produced by the political heritage of the

      31 In The Trial of Franz Kafka, the literary effect of “reversal of experiences” consists
      precisely in this substitution of the momentary experiences of the waiting corridors in the legal
      institutions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for the synthetic experience of the long period
      between the indictment and the execution of the sentence.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                           128                                           AN-ICON
             United States. Although the distance separating the sign
             from its denotat is arranged as a continuum running from
             presence, through deferred presence and through the trace
             of presence, to the sign of presence, the consciousness
             and gnosic processes arising therefrom are categorized
             according to the jurisdiction of discrete boundaries. Verbal
             and visual narrations do not lead to the same results as
             immediate perceptions, coming from the real environment.
                           Our hypothesis is that the productions of hu-
             man culture both generate and use the same human abili-
             ties to produce fiction, without this process resulting from
             any pathology. In other words, in the healthy creative sub-
             ject, fiction benefits from substantially the same psychic
             substrate as hallucinations in schizophrenics, but the at-
             tentional processes retain all their effectiveness in them.
             In delirious patients, there is an increase of the psychic
             substrate which manages and admits to the doxic sphere
             the different sources, internal and external, without mak-
             ing any discernment between them, or rather transgresses
             this discernment. In the healthy creative human, the same
             fictional process does not come from a doubling of the psy-
             chic apparatus but from an externalization of the psychic
             contents “projected” on an apparatus or a device which in
             the process of communication exercises a fictional function.
             In humans as “consumer” of culture and receivers of the
             creative message, there is no confusion between the two
             flows either, there is, on the other hand, from his point of
             view, a duplication of the substrate of cultural productions,
             a substrate that sometimes can be apprehended in what it
             offers as affordances to direct sensory and postural cog-
             nitive actions, and sometimes as a generator of fiction on
             the basis of quasi-affordances that can be seized by the
             sensory-motor brain areas correlated to the frontal areas
             via the weighting of the thalamic zone. This latter process
             can be initiated by the action of the mirror neuron system.
                           The person subject to hallucinations oscillates
             between the two streams of consciousness, the creator
             mobilizes his attentional processes in order to work on the
             perceived reality in a manner similar to the ways fictional
MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI              129                            AN-ICON
              topics inhabit him. And since the parity of the flows of the
             “intus” and of the flows of the “extra” is in him maintained
              and oriented according to the precedence of the perceptual,
              his internal fiction is itself “perception oriented.”

                                Perspectives of applied research in 360°
                                imaging

                           The tradition of research definitely established
              since the 2010s, especially at the continuation of the theo-
              retical work of David Bordwell,32 first in different academic
              centers, in Japan,33 in the United States,34 and then spread
              in vast circles of internationals researchers,35 offers ex-
              perimental research involving spectators, individual and
              collective,36 engaged in actions of narrative construction
              based on the video-film creations. In our book from 201537
              we commented on the difference between the spatio-sym-
              bolic narrative construction in the frontal cinema with cen-
              tral and oriented projection and attempts of the spherical
              and interactive cinema. In this latter area the theory pre-
              dominant seems to be organized around the environmental
              concept of enaction.38 Note that this concept also applies




      32 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London-New York: Routledge, 1987).
      33 M. Kimura et al., “Human visual system automatically encodes sequential regularities of
      discrete events,” Journal of Cognitive Neurosciences 22, no. 6 (2010): 1124-1139, https://doi.
      org/10.1162/jocn.2009.21299.
      34 J.E. Cutting, “Perceiving scenes in film and in the world,” in J.D. Anderson, B.F. Anderson,
      eds., Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
      University Press, 2005): 9-27.
      35 K.S. Heimann et al., “Cuts in action: a high-density EEG study investigating the neural
      correlates of different editing techniques in film,” Cognitive Science 41 (2017): 1555-1588,
      https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12439; K. Pajunen, Immersed in Illusion, an Ecological Approach
      to the Virtual (Jyväskylä: Bookwell, Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis, 2012); P. Francuz, E.
      Zabielska-Mendyk, “Does the brain differentiate between related and unrelated cuts when
      processing audiovisual messages? An ERP study,” Media Psychology 16, no. 4 (2013): 461-
      475; P. Tikka et al., “Enactive cinema paves way for understanding complex real-time social
      interaction in neuroimaging experiments,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2012), https://doi.
      org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00298.
      36 K. Lankine et al., “Consistency and similarity of MEG- and fMRI-signal time courses
      during movie viewing,” NeuroImage 173 (2018): 361-369.
      37 M. Sobieszczanski, Les Médias Immersifs Informatisés. Raisons Cognitives de la Ré-
      analogisation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015): 300.
      38 P. Tikka, V. Rasmus, K. Mauri, “Narrative logic of enactive cinema: obsession,” Digital
      Creativity 17, no. 4 (2006): 205-212, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626260601074078.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                          130                                         AN-ICON
              to classical cinema, as has been underlined in Bordwell’s
              founding works...
                           Can we believe that going through the com-
              parison between hallucinations and cognitive effects of
              the interactive and immersive cinema can provide us with
              a tool, both theoretical and empirical, even more powerful?
              If we imagine a multi-scale analysis proving the existence
              of a multi-layered and harmonized neural substrate, spe-
              cialized in performing arbitration tasks between different
              sources of information: external, internal, and those used
              for weighting memory of sensory-motor anticipations, we
              can hope that the monitoring of reality can become this
              powerful tool.
                           There are three preliminary problems to pose
              as the epistemological background before proceeding to
              analysis of information sources in video-film products.
                           Frontal cinema operates its management of
              attentional points within the framework of a language put
              into place through the process of acculturation for 120
              years. This device, both technical, grammatical and se-
              mantic shapes the audience of the cinema by constituting
              a quasi-cognitive functionality which participates in the
              construction of the image of the world in the broad sense.
              There is here a kind of sloping of a cultural function in the
              field of generic cognition. Experiences in spectation and the
              construction of the image of the world, both: from truthful
              world and the world as illusion, must first take care to put
              out of the game the artefact of the appearance of classic
              cinema.
                           Immersive or spherical cinema is part of an-
              other “grammar.” Its “editing,” the rules of his language, is
              a “natural editing,” called for by Pasolini,39 is operated by
              bodily movements, gaze movements and ocular saccades.
              The same “objective” real can be looked at in different



      39 “When we talk about the semiology of cinematographic language, we must at the same
      time talk about the semiology of reality,” extract from an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini by
      André S. Labarthe on 15/11/1966.

MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI                           131                                           AN-ICON
            ways by the same person and by the different spectators,
            according to their own management of attentional points.
                         And finally, immersive cinema manages its spa-
            tio-temporal referential external to the device of the same
            way that it manages the spatiality and the dynamics of
            the contents which are presented into the device. In other
            words, the grammar of cutting and exploring of the sen-
            sitive, natural and artefactual material, is the same as that
            which governs our spatio-temporal relationship to the world.
            The perspective of empirical research on the hallucinatory
            illusion can then lead to the establishment of a normative
            system allowing people subject to hallucinations to ex-
            change with their caregivers not by means of art-therapy,
            but by means of the shared control of sources of informa-
            tion on reality.




MARCIN SOBIESZCZANSKI             132                            AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



                                                                                           1 / I                                                                              AN-ICON
