There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere.
Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.
The overall field of visual paraperception is very interesting. You have Charles Bonnet Syndrome as described, and other really interesting phenomena like blindsight and complex visual agnosias, and then Anton-Babinski anosognosia where a patient IS blind but confabulates their visual field and maintains they can see!
I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.
also, if you are blind from birth or go blind within a year of birth you won't develop schizophrenia. those folk are completely absent in the population.
Great point. I forgot about that one. It’s a very interesting observation and I’ve never been able to square it with my other reading into SCZ
Makes me wonder if there's some consortium of effects that just causes our very active face recognition system to start perceiving faces.