REPERCEPTIVE HALLUCINATION

Also known asexperiential hallucination, experiential hallucinosis, experiential phenomenon, memory flashback, andhallucination of memory. All six terms are used to denote a hallucination taking the form of a reperception or re-enactment of previously perceived scenes, objects, or stimuli. As the British physician John Ferriar (1761-1815) noted as early as 1813, hallucinations may well spring from recollections of familiar images. In 1866 the German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum (1828-1899) called this processReperzeption. He dubbed the resulting percepts reperceptive hallucinations, so as to distinguish them from what he called " perceptive hallucinations.During the era of classic psychiatry, reperception tended to be envisaged as the result of direct cortical stimulation. As the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) wrote in 1899, "It is possible that in the ordinary process of thinking recurrent stimulation, [or] 'reperception' as Kahlbaum called it, always occurs to a very slight degree, and that only when this process reaches a pathological extension or when the sensory areas are in a state of increased excitability, does the vividness of the memory image approach that of sense perception." Kahlbaum's "reperception model gained empirical support from the cortical probing experiments carried out by the group headed by Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976). As noted by this group, the electrical probing of distinct sensory cortical areas may result in lively re-enactments of previously memorized events. Although initially Penfield agreed with classic authors such as Kraepelin that the sensory cortical areas themselves might be responsible for the mediation of these hallucinations, in his later work he drew attention to the involvement of limbic structures such as the hippocampus. This view concerning the involvement of limbic structures is in keeping with the now dominant long-term potentiation (LTP) model of synaptic transmission, which links memories to alterations in the synaptic transmission of hip-pocampal neuronal circuits. It has been suggested that reperceptive hallucinations may be related in a conceptual and phenomenological sense (and perhaps in a pathophysiological sense as well) with other mnestic events such as "flashbacks in PTSD, "palinopsia, drug-related "flashbacks, "eidetic imagery, and "flashbulb memories.

Ferriar, J. (1813).An essay towards a theory of apparitions. London: Cadell and Davies.

Gloor, P., Olivier, A., Quesney, L.F., Andermann, F., Horowitz, S. (1982). The role of the limbic system in experiential phenomena of temporal lobe epilepsy.Annals of Neurology, 12, 129-144.

Kahlbaum, K. (1866). Die Sinnesdelirien.Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychischgerichtliche Medizin, 23, 56-78.

Kraepelin, E. (1990).Psychiatry. A textbook for students and physicians. Volume/ Translation of Volume I of the German sixth edition (1899) by Metoui, H. Edited by Quen, J.M. Canton, MA: Watson Publishing International.

Penfield, W., Perot, P. (1963). The brain's record of auditory and visual experience: A final summary and discussion.Brain, 86, 595-696.