Oliver Sacks recently sat for an interview with Tim Adams at the Guardian to discuss his new book, Hallucinations. One exchange concerning a shift toward rationalism in the last 200 years, although we continue to create mundane ways to distance ourselves from facts:

“Guardian:

It seems that such visual disorders at certain points in history have been more ‘believable’ and also, therefore, more commonly noted?

Oliver Sacks:

Yes, in other places and at other times, hallucinations were far more acceptable. Up to about 1800, people were allowed to have visions or to hear voices. They were seen to have some external spiritual reality; they were ghosts or angels or demons. The word hallucination only really became a pejorative at the end of the 18th or early 19th century. We still associate it with madness. But how those who hallucinate understand what they see also changes. We are more likely to see UFOs and aliens when people in earlier times would see angels.”