Weekly News 

Cardiff University studies the science of hallucinations.  

Scientists at Cardiff University believe they can help explain why some people are prone to getting hallucinations. Researchers worked with colleagues at the University of Cambridge to study the predictive nature of the brain. They looked at the idea that hallucinations happen due to the brain's tendency to interpret the world using existing knowledge and predictions. Research published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studied 18 people who suffered from very early signs of psychosis who had been referred to a mental health service run by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.

 They compared them against 16 healthy volunteers and they were given a black and white picture of a baby trying to grab a toy of the wall. All of them were then shown the full colour original picture to improve the brain's ability to understand the ambiguous image. There was a larger performance improvement in people with early signs of psychosis compared to the healthy control group. 

The university of Cambridge say the finding are important because, not only do they tell us that the emergence of key symptoms of mental illness can be understood in terms of an altered balance in normal brain functions. Importantly, they also suggest that these symptoms and experiences do not reflect a 'broken' brain but rather one that is striving  in a very natural way to make sense of incoming data that are ambiguous."   

I believe that these findings and studies are incredibly important to future knowledge and understanding because it allows doctors and scientist go into further depth in the human mind. Off topic but it can also explain why people see ghosts or spirits.