The Phenomenon of Creative Seeing as Discovered by Descriptive Experience Sampling: A Case Study

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) studies have found that people without known mental health conditions occasionally describe visual experiences that are distortions of reality. DES calls such visual-perceptual-distortion experiences creative seeing. Typically, participants don't realize that their perceptions are distorted until they note their descriptions, at which time they notice (with surprise) the discrepancy. We describe ""Rhea,"" a female adult (between 25 and 30 years old) DES volunteer participant. Her DES sampling happened to produce a high frequency of creative seeing; the degree of detail provided by DES allows us to describe the creative-seeing phenomenon with otherwise unobtainable detail. The creative seeing phenomenon involves distortion in sensory perception, which are in some ways similar to visual hallucinations. To evaluate whether Rhea’s distorted perceptions were signs of psychiatric disorder, we administered the Structured Interview for Psychosis-risk Syndromes (SIPS), a psychological assessment of precursors of psychiatric disorder, finding no evidence of such disorder. Of specific interest here, Rhea responded “No” to the SIPS prompt assessing whether she sees things that others would not. That seems discrepant with a main finding of her DES sampling. These results indicate that DES might be more sensitive than retrospective interviews in investigating potential serious mental illness. On the other hand, these results may suggest that creative seeing is not related to severe mental illness or its precursors.