EXPERIENTIAL HALLUCINATION

   Also referred to as experiential hallucinosis, experiential phenomenon, experiential response, experiential seizure, flashback, memory flashback, psychical hallucination, and reperceptive hallucination. The first five terms were used - and probably also coined - by the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976) to denote a lively "visual, "auditory, or "compound hallucination depicting a scene experienced previously by the affected individual (i.e. a reperception). Penfield's ideas on the notion of experiential hallucination stemmed from his cerebral cortical probing experiments in individuals with therapy-resistant epileptic seizures. As he wrote in 1958, "These hallucinations are made up of elements from the individual's past experiences. They may seem to him so strange that he calls them dreams, but when they can be carefully analyzed it is evident that the hallucination is a shorter orlonger sequence of past experience. The subject re-lives a period of the past although he is still aware of the present."

   References

   Penfield, W. (1958). The excitable cortex in conscious man. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

   Penfield, W. (1975). The mystery of the mind. A critical study ofconsciousness and the human brain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.