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during the same trip, an Inuit guide told me that this was a
common phenomenon on the sea ice of the far north and that
it was the voice of spirits.
'The ancestors say that you must never answer the spirits
when they call your name,' he said in a quiet, serious voice.
Another, less poetic, explanation is that my brain, starved of
data by the white noise of the constant wind, was simply filling
in the gaps - an auditory hallucination. To avoid a repeat of
these experiences while I was alone, the sport psychologist Dr
Pack had suggested in one of our pre-expedition conversations
that I use mental imagery to provide the stimulus my brain
craved. I was to spend time mentally recalling scenes I knew
well, such as a room of my flat or scenes from a journey I
made regularly. He advised me that the trick was to make
the images as vivid as possible by enhancing the colours and
the detail, remembering each and every element of the scene
one by one to recreate the whole, like assembling a high
resolution photograph one pixel at a time. By providing my
brain with so much virtual stimulus the theory was that it
would be prevented from noticing the lack of real material
in the polar landscape around me. If my brain didn't notice
the blanks it would hopefully be prevented from creating
'fill-in' perceptions and I wouldn't have any hallucinations of
any variety.
When Dr Pack explained all this to me I remember an
awkward pause, as if there was something that he hesitated
to ask.
'If, after using the imagery technique, you still had
hallucinations, what would be really interesting is to see
whether the subject of the imagery you use affects them,' he
admitted. 'For example, if you consistently recalled images
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