The experiences are typically brief,lasting seconds to minutes, silent and may be confined to a particular area within the patient’s visual field. The second syndrome is derived from a different palette.
Here the hallucinations range from isolated animals and figures (often familiar and without the bizarre costumes and hats
of the first grouping), through extracampine hallucinations (‘feeling’ rather than ‘seeing’ an object, typically a person watching you), to multi-modality hallucinations (e.g. hearing the hallucinations talking or feeling them crawl up one’s arm) and complex delusional explanations for the experiences (e.g. the neighbour’s children have stolen a key to the house and wander in and out uninvited). The experiences may be brief but can last for hours or even days. Table 1 summaries key phenomenological points to help discriminate the two syndromes