We All Hallucinate

Quick question for you: Do you hallucinate? (Hallucinate - to see or hear something that's not really there)

If you said “no,” then you need to take some time to consider the questions below and rethink your answer. You can also still do it even if your answer was “yes.”

Have you ever relied on information that did sound reasonable and later turned out to be fictional? Do you sometimes create facts the way people create imaginary arguments in the shower? Have you ever answered like someone in love, like the way they are confident even when they are imagining things? Do you remember how you accept the “I read the terms and conditions” section?
How many times have you trusted and forwarded that WhatsApp forward?

Our brain is very good at filling gaps. And it fills even those gaps that may not be necessary to fill. We all have experiences of seeing, hearing, or feeling things that might not exist. These experiences can feel very real and can also impact our senses. We might have heard our phone ring when it did not, we might have felt the phone vibrate when it did not, or we might have replied to a text in our mind when in reality we did not, and so on. That’s just a ghostly version of the phone we have, and we can collect many such examples from the things around us.

Something to reflect on now is this: did this hallucination help in evolution? That little fancy of imagining things and falsely creating things, did it allow for creativity? When we don’t observe patterns, we create stories. That’s how we have tools, art, and ideas. The human mind going beyond reality is the reason we dream, innovate, and survive. For a beginner, the imagination that makes them worry a presentation might go badly is the same thing that helps them think ahead and prepare answers. People who imagine possible problems often end up doing better than those who assume everything will be perfect. The same quick mental shortcut that sometimes makes us misread a message tone is also what helps us catch social cues in meetings. Imagination is when your mind creatively thinks about possibilities. Hallucination is when those thoughts feel real without proof.

This also reminds us of something important about the systems we build and the knowledge we pass on. Any system that learns from human examples will naturally reflect human habits, patterns, and mistakes. If the input is incomplete, emotional, or biased, the output cannot magically become perfect or neutral. When we plant mango seeds, we only get mango trees. Information does carry assumptions, shortcuts and blind spots.

For the love of God, we hallucinate. That’s how we evolved. That’s how machines may evolve too. If imagination helped us grow, could it be the very thing that helps machines learn to grow as well?