On social media these days, if you show any interest in human psychology, you’ll get bombarded with the kind of vocabulary that used to be found only in the therapist’s office. Words like narcissist, boundaries, validation, and triggered have proliferated on TikTok, Instagram, and other networks. Even when these terms aren’t used correctly—most of the time—it’s good to see a growing public interest in psychological understanding.

However, many real but less common psychological concepts still haven’t made it into the mainstream. To balance this out, I’ve put together a short list of real psychological phenomena with which most social media abusers probably remain unfamiliar.

An onset of powerful, strange, frequent, and uncontrollable visual hallucinations, Charles Bonnet syndrome is most often experienced by people adjusting to a significant loss of vision (like macular degeneration). Simply put, they see things that aren’t there but in full, brilliant color and detail. These hallucinations will vary in content but may include strange visions like fantasy animals, people dressed in elaborate costumes, exotic animals, or insects.

Other hallucinations reported by Charles Bonnet patients have included spectacular landscapes, including tall mountains or waterfalls, or just patterns of brightly colored lines, dots, or shapes. These visual oddities are very likely caused by the brain’s effort to cope with the sudden loss of the ability to see, and the disorder is most frequently found among elderly people—most likely because, as a group, they suffer from degenerative problems with vision more than any other age group.

Although they may be strange, the........

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