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Hallucinations and Why They're Key to Effective Immersion

Hallucinations and Why They’re Key to Effective Immersion

Hallucinations are both much more common and benign than you may expect. And the art of engendering them in your audience is the key to effective immersion.

Hallucinations and Why They're Key to Effective Immersion

Hallucinations are both more common and benign than you might expect,

Let me tell you about some weird things that have happened when I’ve been listening to binaural (3D) audio.

Some years back, I was listening to the first cut of our ‘Walk with Lady Mary’ audio trail for Conwy Council and the Forestry Commission. One sequence involved us journeying back to the 16th century to meet Lady Mary’s Tudor ancestor, who comes barrelling out of the woods on his trusty steed. On the soundtrack, a horse neighed and, from the corner of my eye out of my office window, right on the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw a horse trotting along the road outside. When I turned, it wasn’t a horse at all but a car. But I was sure I’d seen a horse…

Another time, I was listening to an underwater track for a piece of scuba diving VR. Now, I haven’t spent much under the sea but I did do some scuba diving when I was a backpacking around Australia in the early 90s. That track alone created a strange sensory reaction – my skin went cold and goosebumps started to rise on my arms. The track had clearly surfaced that 30-year-old memory of diving off the Great Barrier Reef – but not the visual part of it, just the feeling of being under the sea.

I had a similar sensory reaction when I was sitting in my office listening to a soundtrack recorded on a tropical lake in South America. It was a cold, winter’s day and I didn’t have the heating on (it was the early days of PastPorte and I had to mind the pennies…) Even though I was wearing two pairs of socks, my toes were getting a little stiff with cold. But I was listening to this sound track and the strangest thing happened – my toes began to warm up, as if my brain believed I was really in the tropics.

How do you explain all of this? Well a recent article in The Atlantic on the nature of hallucinations may go some way to doing so.

As soon as I say ‘hallucinations’ that will make you think of people seeing things that aren’t there. That’s a partially correct definition of the word but a hallucination is actually any sensory perception of something that isn’t there. Ever felt your mobile vibrate in your pocket, taken it out and found there’s no reason why it would have done so? Or felt a phantom rain drop on a cloudy day when it wasn’t raining? Or thought you heard someone in your house calling your name, checked and found that nobody had? Well, all of those occurrences are forms of hallucinations. And before you question your sanity (or I question mine) you should know that hallucinations are remarkably common things and for the most part, entirely benign and not the result of any deep seated psychosis.

So what causes us to perceive things that aren’t actually there? Well, the experts think it may be down to how our brain perceives the world around us.

Corlett and Powers, both from Yale School of Medicine, have advanced the theory of ‘predictive coding.’ “When we go about the world, we’re not just passively perceiving sensory inputs through our eyes and ears,” Corlett says. “We actually build a model in our minds of what we expect to be present.”
It’s Corlett and Powers theory that the brain doesn’t always get this model right – it has the capacity of overpredict – to be fooled, in essence. I can expect something to be there which isn’t, and this expectation can be so strong that the brain creates something that isn’t there. A hallucination.

I should say at this stage that the predictive modelling theory is speculative and isn’t yet accepted psychological fact but it goes some way to explain the false sensory reactions that I, and others that have listened to binaural audio have experienced. Those hyper realistic three dimensional sounds have made our bodies build a false model of our surroundings and elicited some quite remarkable sensory hallucinations.

Why particularly does sound have the power to do this? We think it’s something to do with our sensory hierarchy. We’re so visually dominant – so programmed, from our earliest days of roaming the Africa plains, to look out for danger – that it’s easier to fool those other senses that are well down the pecking order. And clearly, this ability to fool the brain aurally can create these sorts of false sensory reactions – benign hallucinations which have the ability transport people, immerse them further in our imagined-worlds and create truly deep-seated and memorable multi-sensory experiences.

We think we’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential of audio – and other, second tier senses such as smell – in cultural attractions, particularly inside heritage attractions where there’s already an authentic visual backdrop to work with. The secret to effectively to transporting people to new times and places isn’t necessarily through their eyes – where they’ll likely see the flaws in your illusion – but through those other, secondary senses that are easier to fool. And the theory of predictive modelling would suggest that you only have to create part of the illusion – then you can rely on their imagination to do the rest…

What Families Want from Museums and Heritage Attractions

With the Summer holidays approaching, your mind will be turning to what you can do to attract more families. But first, you need to understand what they want. And that’s simpler to understand than you might think.

What do families want? Fun, family time and me time.

What do families want? Fun, family time and me time.

I’ve done some pretty challenging jobs in my time but nothing as tough as being a parent.

You want to nurture the innate talent in your child so they become a happy, productive and well regarded member of society. And sometimes, you genuinely think you’re achieving that. And at other times – usually after a blazing row over the removal of some electronic gadget – the only future you can imagine is one based around the visiting hours of whatever state institution they happen to locked up in.

Of course, there’s an opportunity for museums and heritage attractions here to help make the life of parents a little easier. But first, you have to know what families want. Lots of ‘experts’ in the field will tell you that’s terribly complicated, but actually it’s quite simple.

There are two sides to this ‘happy family’ equation – parent and child – so let’s focus on the child’s side first. And I have to admit that despite racking my brains for some considerable time, I could only come up with one ‘want’ which applied to my two boys – Fun (with a capital ‘F’!) Whether playing games on the Playstation, kicking a football around the garden, watching YouTube on their tablets or transforming the front room into a Ninja Warrior course, they just want to have fun. And let’s be frank – unencumbered by responsibility, that’s what we’d want too.

For parents, things are a little more complicated – but only a little more. They want two things rather than one – a little quality time with their kids, and a little ‘me time’ without their kids.

Quality time with your kids happens when they’re having fun and you’re having fun at the same time, whilst doing something together. Purely having fun is enough some of the time but it’s even better if that fun has an additional benefit – like getting some exercise or, and this is where museums and heritage attractions come in, learning something useful.

To give you can example, I took my kids to Jumptastic the other week. We had great fun leaping into foam pits and throwing soft balls at each other whilst bouncing on trampolines. But I had the added satisfaction of knowing both I, and my kids, where getting one of our two recommended weekly doses of strenuous exercise.

Quality family time at Jumptastic.

Quality family time at Jumptastic.

What ‘quality time with your kids’ isn’t is what’s billed as ‘family interpretation’ at some museums and heritage attractions. Let me give you an example.

Take my visit to a high profile castle recently. Audio guides were offered – one billed as the ‘adult’ version and one billed as the ‘child’ version. My 9 year old and I stood listening to our respective guides. We had no idea what the other was listening too and no prompts to interact with each other. We weren’t having a shared experience – we were having two parallel experiences. There wasn’t even an attempt to dovetail the length of commentary between guides – sometimes, my son would be standing there, bored rigid, for 2 minutes waiting for my commentary to finish. It was as if the designers of that tour had envisaged children visiting the castle by themselves.

Contrast that with going to the cinema to see a well written children’s movie like Minions. There’s plenty of slapstick to get the kids laughing like drains and lots of clever irony aimed at the adults. We can all enjoy the same movie even though we each get something different out of it. Surely that same approach can be easily extended to family interpretation in museums?

Let’s move on from that to the concept of child-free ‘me time’. This is the time that parents crave to have by themselves (and I challenge you to spend time with the same person 24/7 and not crave a little me-time) but frankly, feel a little guilty about. That guilt is lifted if you know your kids are engaged in doing something that’s both fun and good for them whilst you’ve got your feet up – in contrast to activities perceived to rot their brains like shooting zombies on their PS4 or being transfixed by a talking cat app on their tablet.

The museum cafe is the prime place for a little ‘me-time’ over a cuppa, but museums and attractions rarely take advantage of this opportunity to give parents a bit of a break. Adults and kids attitudes to the cafe are very different – adults want to take their time and have a little mental and physical break whilst children want to consume what’s in front of them as fast as they can and then bomb off to have some more fun. The logical thing to do is to offer the kids something to do in the vicinity to give the parents a bit more of break.

At a recent exhibtion I came across a company that offered interactive floor projection games. Their biggest clients? Family orientated cafes. If more museums and visitor attractions offered things like this to give parents an extra few minutes of ‘me-time’ while the kids have some educational fun, then families would be singing their praises.

Parents genuinely love their kids but keeping them entertained can be a challenge. Museums and heritage attractions can help by offering things that enable them to have fun together, and a little guilt free ‘me time’ apart. And your reward won’t just be the warm feeling that comes from creating happy memories of good times together – although that’s reward enough in itself – but by more families beating a path to your door.