Instead, the FOMC will take into account various factors “in determining the extent to which additional policy firming may be appropriate.” It omitted a line from its previous statement in March that said the committee “anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate.” “The committee will closely monitor incoming information and assess the implications for monetary policy,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement Wednesday. Hallucinations, Charles Bonnet syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, mental imagery, music IntroductionĮver since Broca’s demonstration of focal left hemisphere damage in his aphasic patient ‘Tan’, neurologists have sought to correlate neurological deficits of every sort with lesions in particular areas of the brain or their connections, as Déjèrine (1892) did in regard to the alexia of his patient ‘Monsieur C’.The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point and hinted it may be the final move in the most aggressive tightening campaign since the 1980s as economic risks mount. But Hughlings Jackson stressed the importance of studying positive disorders as well. Whereas localizing function on the basis of lesion studies was indirect and inferential, Jackson felt that the positive phenomena of seizures, migraine auras, hallucinations, etc., could allow one to directly observe the functions of specific parts of the brain. It is in this light that Dominic ffytche and his colleagues in London study what they call ‘the positive pathologies of vision’ (chiefly hallucination, but also palinopsia, polyopia and other forms of visual perseveration). They have done this particularly in relation to Charles Bonnet syndrome, which may develop in a sizeable percentage of people who lose significant vision.įfytche and colleagues ( Santhouse et al., 2000) have delineated a dozen or more categories of hallucinations: geometric patterns, tesselopsia, dendropsia, landscapes, vehicles, figures with hats, cartoon-like faces, children or small figures, etc. They estimate that more than a quarter of their patients have ‘text hallucinations’, an overall term used for hallucinated letters, lines of print, musical notes, numerals, mathematical symbols or other types of notation. Hallucinations of scores or musical notation seem to be much rarer than hallucinations of letters or lines of print (D. ffytche, personal communication), although my own experience is the opposite of this, perhaps because I have investigated various musical syndromes, and people often write to me about these. Thus I have seen or corresponded with a dozen or more people whose hallucinations include-and sometimes consist exclusively of-musical notation. I have encountered this symptom particularly in patients with Charles Bonnet syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, fever and hypnopompic states as the following cases illustrate and it is possible that such hallucinations may occur in other conditions that predispose to hallucination, including certain types of migraine and epilepsy, intoxication, etc.
Wrote to me about what she called her ‘musical eyes’: However, patients may not volunteer these descriptions unless asked specifically about them. ‘I am a 77-year-old woman with glaucoma damage to mostly the lower half of my vision. About two months ago, I started to see music, lines, spaces, notes, clefs-in fact written music on everything I looked at, but only where the blindness exists.
I ignored it for a while, but when I was visiting the Seattle Art Museum one day and I saw the lines of the explanatory notes as music, I knew I was really having some kind of hallucination …. I had been playing the piano and really concentrating on music prior to the musical hallucinations …. It was right before my cataract was removed, and I had to concentrate hard to see the notes. Occasionally I’ll see crossword puzzle squares … but the music does not go away. I’ve been told the brain refuses to accept the fact that there is visual loss and fills in-with music in my case.’Ī few months later, she reported that the musical hallucinations had begun to fade (as often happens with Charles Bonnet syndrome-type hallucinations), unless she specifically focused on them. ‘I would read a newspaper and the print lines in my lower peripheral vision were music lines …. However, if I moved my eyes to look at it, it disappeared, but reappeared as I moved my glance back. But mostly it was and is small single lines and single notes but with the lines and clefs and rests, etc.’ Sometimes it looked like the music in hymnals-I used to sing in choirs years ago. 15 years later, her vision had been much improved by further eye surgery-she was able to read real scores again and no longer hallucinated them.
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