Leprechaun Hallucinations

always loved St. Patrick's Day. I don't have I'm basically of Scotch German heritage, so I don't have that you know, distinctive Irish roots link to it, and I don't have it, you know, I don't have the like the Catholic link to it either. But from a very early age, like my family was always in to St. Patrick's Day. You know, my mom's mom is a kindergarten teacher, so we would have green things, we would eat green treats, green beer, well, no green beer, but but maybe like a green cake

or a cupcake or something. And I still with St Patrick's Day comes around, I'm like I need to eat something that's green. I need to get like a pistatio cupcakes, the Statio pudding. Um. But more importantly, we would, to a certain extent, we would celebrate the the Irish myth of the of the leprechn We would always watch Darby O Gil and the Little People, that classic Disney film with Sean Connery in it. Wow, you guys did it up. Yeah. Yeah, we were big into the holidays, so we would always

watch Darbo Gil and a Little People. Sean Connery would sing and it was awesome. Lepri cons would run around, there was a banshee. Um. You know, it was just it was a great film. I still watch it from time to time. I just I feel like this is really informed, like your ideas of creatures in the world.

Like somehow this is like an early influence on you. Yeah, definitely, I mean we we really we got into Halloween and then we would really get My big thing on on holidays is that if a holiday has magic to it, then it's in creatures specifically, then it's great. Like I

can obviously Halloween. I love Christmas. You know, you know, the Christmas season can get a bit annoying when it's over commercialization, but ultimately it's a season in which, on one hand you have a magical man sneaking into your house to give you gifts. There's there's Crampus running around beating people. There's what's his name, Brumschnickel, the the other

Germanic holiday visitor. There at various takes on St. Nick And then and if you get into the more religious aspect of it too, you have like the Son of God being born on earth. They're they're all these fantastic things happening. St. Patrick's Day is also in that vein, unlike Valentine's Day, where it's just about people in love and stuff. But but St. Patty's Day there's this backbone of myth and legend to it and uh and it's awesome.

So so what is your background with Leprika? Well, quickly, Valentine's Day clearly needs some sort of creature's lacking that we should really get into the idea of brainstorming that without listening. Yeah, yeah, that's another s side project for all of us. Um, But for me, St. Pat's has

just always been St. Pat's. I gotta say. In my family it was sort of like their Santa Claus is really like the dude down the street who's dressing up and um, lepricrons don't exist truly, really, and happy fourth Birthday, I'm just kidding, no, but really that wasn't That's not really something that we celebrated much. But I will say that the diminutive, diminutive stature of lepricrons always thought were

fascinating as a little kid. And what I find even more fascinating is that there is a type of hallucination that deals with this, this Liliputian quality. Um. And that's what we're going to talk about today, because again in celebration of St. Patty's Day, but also as a further investigation into how the mind works and how it scales

our reality. Alright, So the Leprechnilipic from Irish folklore, this is a fairy shoemaker uh and he's and he goes by various names including it really depends on where you are in particular region of Ireland uh and or the history books. So you have lucre pan and again this basically translates to little body and then there are various versions of that lubrican lubrican lucre pan Luprican. They are all these various takes on it, but as the one that we really go with today, of course is Lepricn.

And the Lepricn is a is again a shoemaker. You generally would see him with just a single shoe. There would never be a second shoe around, which is a little suspect and should have been a tip off to people who end up messing with said lepricon. This is like waste management job, Like, you know, maybe that's for Lepricn being is shoemaker. Yeah, like you should be a

little aware that where's the other shoe. There's something fishy going on also, and this is something that will come up if, especially if the Lepricn is pressed about his personal belongings. He carries a p but the purse only contains a single shilling, much like a pizza delivery boy only carries twenty dollars or less. The idea here is, oh, you're gonna try and steal me gold. I only have this one shilling, but I may have lots of gold elsewhere.

That's the big thing. This idea grows that Leprichns have access to a massive quantity of gold and and certainly in the mythology they do. They're paid by the ferry folk for what I'm not sure. I guess repairing that one shoe over and over again. So and there they save up their money and they're laundering the money kind of kind of money Launders h. But people get this in their mind, Oh there's a Lepricn. If I capture the Lepricn, then I can get access to his fabulous gold.

I can make him tell me where it is. And later you get into the idea of the Lepricn gives you three wishes. But ultimately the route is, if you catch a Leprichn, you can totally rob him of everything he owns. That's how the the average Lepricn chasing uh individual was was thinking. So, um, what would typically happen? I should say that the classic story, of course, is the guy catches the Lepricn says, oh, take me to

your gold. And you have to know that if you look away from the Lepricn at all, then he can vanish, he can turn it visible. He's a supernatural creature with these powers at his disposal. So what happens if the Lebricn says, oh, I'll take you to the bush that I have the gold buried beneath and so, and who knows if this bush actually has the gold under it or not. Um it works. The trick works well either way. But it takes him out there and says, oh, it's

under this bush. And then the guy who's captured the Lepricn realize I don't have a shovel. I have no way of digging up this gold. So he says, I know what I'll do. I'll take this red bandana or this, uh, this kerchief or whatever, and I'll tie it, tie this red kerchief to this bush, and then I'll go home and I'll get my shovel and i'll come back. So he lets the Lepricn free, goes back home, he gets the shovel, comes back, and what has the Lepricn done.

The Lepricn is tied the red kerchief to every bush and tree in sight, so there's no way for him to remember which uch. What's he gonna do dig up all of them? He'll try for a little bit before he loses his mind, I guess. But that's the trickster aspect of the lepricn. Okay, see that just takes me back to the thirty Rock maxim, which is never follow a hippie to a second location. Same thing with the lepricron, right, yeah, so he the elepricns engage in various tricks like this.

They are largely solitary creatures, though they do have a king name Lubden. They're all males too, correct. Yeah. I did see some possible mention of female elepricns, and the idea being that female elepricuns do exist, but they're even more tricky, so they're I guess they're harder to observe in nature. They're making that second too, yeah, or maybe they're lessened to messing around and and and deceiving humans. Because ultimately, the idea here is that lepricns are a

type of fairy folk. They are fairies and fairies. The notion of fairy varies greatly around the world, but there exists a nearly global idea of diminutive men, magical humanoids and that are out there in the world, often generally hidden from view, kind of an underworld taking place or you know, or in the natural world or underground or you know, somewhere that the humans are less likely to

see them during the course of their day. What I'm trying to say is that they have a rich cultural history um and some amazing mythology going on there beyond the lepricn but all of this relates to fairy f like Eventually, the idea is that even these magical people were defeated by essentially the modern day Celts, and they drive all these magical people out into the peripheries of the world. But you can still glimpse them, you still

see them sometimes. Well. See, this is what I think is so interesting about it, is that it is so deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric, particularly and when we talk about lebri cons in Ireland right and how this really informs everybody's perception of life. And I wanted to point out a couple of things. One is that Lepricrons are protected under European Union Law KULD you not, yes, at least the ones that dwell in calling Ford in Ireland.

The directive is an effort to preserve the rich biodiversity of the area called the slab Foy Loop, which is now a protected area for flora, fauna, wild animals, and lepri cons. And this is a directive that was stemmed in part by a group of lobbyists who recounted a tale in nineteen nine of p J. O'Hare who happened to be over by wishing well this man and he heard a scream and he said he went to the wishing well and he found, um, first of all, a

patch of burnt ground. And beside this patch he found a little hat, jacket and trousers with four gold coins in the pockets. The close of the naked lepre con, as this lepricon is called, are actually on display at Pj's Pub in carling Ford. So you know, as this a tourist trap, absolutely, but again is it part of the imagination, the the cultural fabric. And um, you know, I'm not saying that pg o hair was that he actually witnessed. You know this What we see is that

maybe a streaking lebre con gone gone wild. But um, but but perhaps p J O'Hare was also participating and um, you know, some sort of cultural tradition. Maybe he had too much to drink, or maybe he had a hallucination. Okay, And this is where this really comes into play because, according to Oliver Sacks and his World Science Festival interview about his new book on hallucinations. He says that hallucinations really are cultural in nature and specific to the individual's background.

So he said that seeing miniature people is one type of hallucination, as we said, a subtype. But depending on the person's cultural background, the miniature person could be a lepricn, a dwarf, a ary. So that's why I think this is fascinating because, uh, if you have this hallucination, it is colored by your perception, what you have grown up with, the sort of stories, and this is the sort of thing that might be expressed depending on certain external conditions

or neurological conditions that you have. So of course, if we're going to talk about these Liliputian hallucinations, and that's what they're called, we should first sort of give a little bit of an intro on hallucinations. Yeah, it's worth noting that hallucination is we're discussing here. It's just one way of looking at essentially paranormal experience. As we discussed in our alien abduction episode. People have always seen weird things in the woods and the skies. He used to

be fairies. Then depending on your cultural flavoring, maybe it's angels or maybe sci fi flavoring makes you see UFOs. We've always seen things, We've all we've always had these experiences, and there are various ways you can explain them that range from simple imagination of a youngster to neuro logical disorder and uh and and it's it's definitely happening for

the person who is experiencing them. Yeah, and UM. When we talk about hallucinations, we're talking about many different sensory modalities, turning about visual, auditory, old factory, gustatory, tactile, and other um. And you can actually if a person is undergoing a hallucination at the same time that they're going m R right, you can actually try to figure out the type of hallucination there have having by looking at the blood flow

to the region of their brain. And so, for instance, if you see increased blood flow to the fusiform gyus, which is where you detect face faces, then you know someone is having some sort of um visual hallucination having to do with perhaps even a little person. UM. So it's kind of funny to me because when we talk about hallucinations, we really think about them as being apart from us and otherworldly. Yeah, we tend to think of them.

An hallucination is seeing something in the world as it is, not it's seeing the world wrong, but that that really implies that there is a correct and definitive way to experience reality. Yeah, because I was thinking about this. We really do have a very tenuous line between imagination and reality. And I was thinking about this in the context of our blue sky, right, because what is the blue sky

butt an illusion to us? Because if you think about it, the only reason why we're seeing a blue sky is because violet and blue have the shortest wavelengths and they scatter a lot more than long ones. Some particles like oxygen and nitrogen molecules are present, so those are the ones that are most apparent to us. So that's what we see when we're looking up in the sky. And then it's not that we just see a purple and

a blue sky. No, the mind can't even really sort of deal with that because of the machinery that we have um with our perception of color, it kind of has to mix some of that with white until it turns out to this cohesive blue that we look up in the sky at so it really makes you think to what extent am I experiencing the world around you?

I mean, ultimately, our brain, it's it's it's inside of some bone, it's inside of some skull, depends on these sensory uh mechanisms to experience the world and then translate that into data. So essentially the brain is blind anyway. Well, and it's highly sensitive to suggestion. We've mentioned this before, but there's a twenty eleven study at Whole University in the UK, and it asked participants to imagine a color

while looking at a great pattern. And what they found is that those people who were most susceptible to hypnosis in other words, given to suggestion, they were able to actually hallucinate the colors at will when they were asked to, which was corroberated by an m R. I. So again there's this idea of you know, what is you know, we bring this up a lot, like what is reality and how much of it is colored by our perceptions? Yeah?

So much of the I mean you can argue that our perception of reality itself is a is an hallucination, and any um alteration of that is just a it's just a change in the flavoring. Um. We're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back, though, we are going to talk about this specific type of hallucination that deals with the detection of tiny things, tiny people,

tiny animals. All right, we're back. And in this episode, we of course started off by talking a little bit about fairy folk and Laprikaans paranormal experience essentially, and we're getting into into discussion of how hallucination, it's particular modes

of hallucination make us see tiny people and tiny things. Yeah, and you know, before we start talking about um about this perception or this illusion of tiny people or things, I wanted to point out that it is amazing when you think about it, that our eyes and our minds

are able to visually reconstruct things. So for instance, if you have, you know, a plate on the table and the fork next to it, and you continue to look back and forth at those items, your brain has to over and over again visually reconstruct those items and also do that, um, you know, in the context of moving back and forth. So it's got the movement element. And

what we're talking about here is perceptual constancy. So what your mind is doing is saying that plate is still the plate, and is still the dimension that it is, is still the scale that it is. And this is a lot of work for your brain to do, in your eye to do, to take in all of this data and make us feel as though we are on the same, uh constant state where things are the same

and have a constancy to them. Yeah. One of the things that this discussion of hallucination really drives home is that site and our perception are the mental processes that makes site possible are pretty complex and uh, the least little bit of something can can go wrong or or change, and it can can have some pretty dramatic effects on how you perceive reality. Yeah, it's funny because you really

do take it for granted. How stable the images are around you and how stable the story that that your perception is telling you is all because of these different parts of your brains working in concert. There is something called micropesha or alice in Wonderland syndrome, and this is when objects actually appear smaller, and it's not necessarily the mechanics of the guys, but it's really the interpretation of the data that causes the objects in the visual field

to appear minuscule. So when you have these lilocution hallucinations, um, they are forming complex visual hallucinations of people, objects, or animals that are greatly reduced in size or sometimes exaggerated, Yes, sometimes exagger which also ends up going into all sorts of mythological possibilities there as well. Right, we've got some example too that that really sort of dwell in this. And the hallucinations are vivid and they evoke varied responses

including fear, anxiety, or even pleasure. Um, They've been seen across the board and people who are experiencing delirium tremens from alcohol withdraw, people who have eyesight problems such as macular degeneration, and people with mental disorders like schizophrenia. Although in schizophrenia, even though hallucinations are are more common, this

type of hallucination, this little acution, is very rare. Yeah, And most of the cases that we're looking at with little acuction, Uh, it's a it's a situation where the person is otherwise mentally fine, Like they're not They're not a disturbed individual or a quote unquote crazy person. It's not like, oh, that crazy person on the streets seeing

little people. Of course, they are they're crazy. No. It's for instance, one of the cases that Oliver Sacks talks about in in his book Hallucinations, which is excellent high They recommend anyone at all interested in this pick that up. It's very readable, just a great book. Uh. In his book, he talks about a patient that he refers to his Zelda,

who eated in two thousand nine. She was an historian, and some of the hallucinations that she ended up seeing included she saw a great granddaughter, she saw a trio of witches. She saw her hair rising up in the mirror like it was witless. She saw tiny people crawling out of the TV. She saw gaily dressed figures sort of parading around. She saw six ominous tall men in brown suits around her hospital bed. She saw a little men in green caps. And she saw small fairy like

children sort of moving around as well. Just to give you an idea, because a lot of these hallucinations, again it's things are larger or smaller than they need to be um So you're you're encountering giants, you're encountering little people oftentimes that they're really brilliant to behold. The color scheme will be amazing. So you in the costuming if the if costumes are perceivable, the costumes will be crazy and exotically bright. So you can really see where the

idea of a fairy folk can emerge from. This beca all they were little people, and they were dressed like they were from another world, and their colors were unreal and magical. Well, and they were mischievous. To write, a lot of times these accounts have um the little people that are running around doing various things that we are nefarious or yeah, and they're disappearing or they're reappearing necessarily

obeying the physical laws of our world. Now, these are called released hallucinations because it's thought that they are released or instigated by the removal of normal visual afferent input into the association quartex. So in the case of Zelda, there was reduced blood flow to the optical and parietal lobes,

and so this caused the hallucinations. Um. But probably one of the one of the things that is most associated with this is something called the Charles Bonnet syndrome yes or CBS, and this is a common condition among people with compromised vision. So when you think compromised vision, of course We're not saying the person is necessarily completely Uh. They might be suffering from just age related necular degeneration, cataracts, glaucoma,

diabetic eye disease. Their site may be somewhat limited, but they're still able to visually perceive the world to a certain degree. Yeah. The idea is that the information received from your eyes actually stops the brain from creating its own pictures. So when you lose your sight or partially lose your sight or it's damaged, your brain is not receiving as much information from your eyes as it's used to, and it begins to fill in those gaps by creating

this sort of fantasy uh, pictures or patterns. And then when this occurs, you experience the images short in your

brain as hallucinations. It's kind of this idea that the world that we live in, because you can we look at like when we're just looking around a room, we're looking at particular little spaces, and then then we're moving in another little space where we're kind of basically the world that we're in exists in our minds, and we use our vision to constantly upgrade the details of that mental image that we interact with there was a one case of a Miss c an eighty year old woman.

She complained of little people dressed in blue and gray leaves hiding in her cupboard cupboards, and she also saw tiny black cats from time to time, and her chief complaint was that the little people like to watch her undressed. So of course she was examined. They found that her cognitive functions were fined fine, fine and uh, and that really again it came down to impairments in her visual field, again creating in this story from this lack of information

that was being processed. Another interesting aspect about little acutions, especially as a as a related to CBS, Alver Sachs points out that most CBS hallucinations are ultimately inspiring, pleasant,

even friendly. Um not to say they are there. There will be some that are a little serving, such as the brown uh dressed men that are really taller around Zelda's hospital that was that is ominous in nature, But for the most part they tend to be lighter and more amusing and magical in a in an uplifting sense.

Whereas there's a lot that goes on with with paranormal experience, be it alien abduction, that is rude of scenario which is rooted in say sleep paralysis, which is terrifying because your your mind body connection is doing something weird and add a little flavoring to it from whatever your worldview or mythology is, and it's it can be a terrifying situation. But with CBS you tend to see these more sort of like, huh, there are little people in my closet.

That's totally cool, but I would rather than not look at me while I'm naked. There's this idea to you that perhaps, um, you know, it has an adaptive function in terms of people who in general with hallucination is not just little people that if someone has lost someone in particularly in the elderly, if they hallucinate, you know, maybe a loved one who has departed, that this is a source of comfort to them, bereavement hallucination, so that this is a whole area as well. Um yeah, it's

this idea that we're as as one. If we're losing our ability to update the mental image in our head, we're having to update it internally. Like imagine you're inside your house and you're wanting to paint an image of your backyard, so you look out the back window every day, and you paint a little more of this image, and you updated a little more, and then one day your windows are walled up or they're frosted over and you

can't see out them all that. Well, well then you have to maybe you're listening, maybe you're you're drawing on your memory to try and and uh and and alter that picture and make it as accurate as possible. But then inevitably you're bringing in errors. You're bringing in um even magical creations into that painting. That reminds me of Anton syndrome when they'ror you have someone who is trying to replace I put in quote their their reality with

a hallucination to simulate eyesight. Because because this occurs and joining people that are really like totally blind, extremely deteriation, totally blind from cortical damage um and and that damage can be caused by stroke UM and this affects the optic lobes. So these people are absolutely unaware of their blindness and they insist that they can still see. Yeah, like they'll say they'll they'll say like, hey, you you're blind.

Don't try and walk across the living room because their toys all over the floor and they'll say I can totally see, and like they believe they can see now, they'll they'll end up stepping on the toys because ultimately they that they can't they are blind. But but to them, they feel they're experiencing. Now. If you tell them, hey, describe that person setting on the couch over there, they

won't blink. They'll just describe the person. The description may be completely wrong, or it may be reasonably correct based on previous knowledge of the individual, you know, whatever, But but they won't hesitate because in their in their mind,

they do see and see. I find that example so fascinating just because that really does point to this adaptive function, because if you have lost your your eyesight and you are lacking that's stimuli, then your brain is just making us smelacrum of that of reality, which I think is

just fascinating. Sacks also shared an account of a patient who in the in the nineteen eighties, UH would a blind patient went on a drinking binge and saw again while in the midst of this this drinking like the next morning remembered having seen as if his side had returned, But it was a hallucination. Hallucination and again it's just all it's a lot of this really drives home just how complex side is and how how complex our our observation of the world is to it and to what

extent is is all of our site hallucination. Yeah, again, this idea that there's this, uh, this visual constancy that goes on that we just that's running in the background, and we don't even think about how tenuous that is. So, as Oliver Sacks points out, Liliputian hallucinations can also occur in migraines. Particularly, He points out the Migraine Blog, a series host of it on New York Times, which is a blog just about the author's experiences with migraines. Now,

I do experience migraines. I do. Yeah, what what are they like for you? Do you ever see anything with them? Sometimes? I've seen lights And actually a good many of the females in my family have histories of really like pretty intense histories with migraines, and they complain of something they call an aura. It's a feeling, and and they also get the strobe light effect. Interesting, I've never experienced a migraine.

My father used to get them, and I think my My sister experiences them from time to time as well. But in there they're more extreme nature. There, it's almost like a supernatural experience, like it's it's like something from another world is reaching out and touching your brain rather painfully. Uh, but in in a certain way, illuminatingly for a few

seconds or minutes or what have you. Um. And again, what we're talking about is uh a sort of impairment of the visual field care right, Yeah, people will see lights, like you said, geometric patterns, uh, flashes of light, zigzags, blind spots, shimmering spots or stars are as, and in

some cases tiny man and tiny animals uh. In On the Migraine blog, the author of was talking about how they were reading a reading a book lying there, um, and they looked down and they saw a small pink man and his pink ox, perhaps six or seven inches high. So the audice says, they were perfectly made creatures, and except for their color, they looked very real. They didn't speak to me, but they walked around and I watched them with fascination and the kind of um amiable tenderness.

They stayed for some minutes and then disappeared. I have often wished they would return, but they never have um, which is this just amazing to think of that. And you know, you just said there's migraine hits and you look down and there's a little pink farmer in his ox and they're they're not really concerned with you, which which ties in nicely with when we were talking about fairy experiences and in a lien experience. Paranormal exper is

around the world. They vary so much. Sometimes it is a terrible experience where you're like, oh, I'm being abducted by aliens or I'm tormented by demons. But in other cases it's it's a matter of for a brief second, you have a peak into a magical world just beyond our own. Well. I think anybody who has ever had

a really bad migraine can attest to you. One of the things that is probably interesting to them as well as me, is that when you have an awful one, it feels like the fog is rolling in and it to some degree it does feel like your vision is being affected, not just with the strobe light effect, but as if, um something's just kind of moving over your brain like a cloud. So it's interesting to see that that sort of deprivation of stimulation or stimuli might manifest

itself with a Litiputian hallucination. Yeah. And in the book, Fax points out that in a migraine, a wave of quote, electrical excitation slowly moves across the visual cortex and on the way, it's possible that it directly directly stimulates clusters of orientation sensitive neurons in the visual cortex, and this direct stimulation causes patterns patients to see shimmering light, zigzag fortifications, etcetera.

As we and as we see the wave move through the brain during a migraine, when we're looking at brain scans, uh, it's it's it's it's matching the movement of the shimmering bars in the patient's site. Huh. So that that's very interesting that that sense of movement isn't necessarily an illusion. Yeah, it's it's it's it's amazing. I mean, I I'm not envious of people who have to deal with migraines because,

like I said, it's just a normal headache suffer. Um. I would see my father get these migraines and I it was like, Wow, how can a headache do that bad? That you just you know that you're you're just you know, gripping your skull like I've never had had I had a headache that bad. Uh. But but now that now that I see a little bit more that it's involved in it, I can totally get it. So there you

have it, leprech On Hallucinations. Fun little topic that we did, and uh, you know, today was a perfect day to bring it back out for your amusement. Hey. In the meantime, check out the rest of stuff to Blow your mind dot com, where you'll find all of our podcasts, videos, blog posts, and links out to our social media accounts. You can also drop us a liney. You can do that by sending us the email to blow the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this

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