How do you think various conditions alter perception?

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I read of a shooting in a cafe (I think; forgot its name, at the moment) where just before the act the shooter (who seemed to have some severe mental disturbances) thought that all the people felt like insects buzzing around.

I don't think that's merely a metaphor... or, at least, it's an analogy that the mind must have perceived. I frequently feel like people are cockroaches, for example, because cockroaches seem to annoy others as much as people annoy me (and, consequently, I don't feel like cockroaches are like 'cockroaches', if you get what I mean).

Anyway... I've experimented with various hallucinogens, which alter perceptions, and I could see how vastly different our senses can amount to. I'm pretty sure, for example, that schizophrenia is mostly about how people perceive others - in a wholly fearful light, in this case, whereas some other conditions are much more physiological (Tourette's?) or emotional (bipolar). Still, the existence of those very states must result in different perceptions, however small. I once noticed that even by having a cold one could end up seeing things differently - the only difference being, with the other conditions, is that they're long-term and often people don't notice the differences in perception due to that.

By the way, if anyone is interested in these kind of topics I'd be interested to chat to you about them. I try to approach psychology from a holistic perspective.

I would really enjoy chatting about it (might spout into spontaneous rants because this is one of my "obsessions")

I think what you might be onto is what can be called "The Lucifer Effect" (term coined by book I actually started reading the other day which I am really excited about). It kind of goes into the whole aspect of "evil". One person sees the other as less than human and commits atrocities like the shooter you mentioned.

From my own personal experience, I try to avoid developing opinions of people, but I have engaged in my own "psychological experiments" to analyze altered perception (I have the curse of being able to see everything from every single plausible point of view). One of these was with the emotions of Love and Hate (while I lack the ability to process emotion, I mimicked stereotypical thought patterns). From my conclusion, they are pretty much the same thing - the only difference is one is a positive-constructive approach, the other is negative-destructive. There is also the whole concept of "survival" if you want to call it that. When something threats to discredit what has been your primary emotional/value support (for example, religious beliefs), people can get extremely defensive and irrational about everything - trying to find what justification they can, but because they lack it, they fall into animalistic behavior.

How are you able to see from every point of view?

ps. the author of that book is a Roman Catholic... considering the book's title, he's not trying to push religious agenda, is he?

Super interesting thread. I was watching Charlie Rose last night and one of the panelists mentioned that parents of children with autism sometimes notice differences in their children's behavior when they are running a fever. One child who hadn't spoken in a long time asked for food and another was hugging and cuddling which was something totally out of the ordinary. So a fever altered consciousness and perception.

As a personal anecdote I've suffered from extreme bouts of agoraphobia off and on. Turns out what I thought was an inner issue was a reaction to abuse. An environmental factor altered my sense of reality, and my behaviors. Our perception is influenced by both our inner environment and outer environment. What we see as "I" is something like a node on a feedback loop connected to literally everything in the universe and this "I" and it's perceptions are vastly influenced by literally everything.

Great thread, thank you! I believe I'll start researching this as well as I'm intimately concerned with this at the moment. I haven't read the book mentioned but is it possible that evil is more a construct of projection?

(Massive Summary)
Basic level there is: Approve, Disapprove, and Indifference. Then they break apart into their own subcategories, such as why would someone approve/disapprove? Could it be religious views, political views, how they were raised (which factors into religious views), a bias due to the former three, the necessity to believe what they believe - in which case you would factor in the different emotions such as happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and so on (which again loops back to all previously mentioned - or factor in the societal influences such as stereotypes (which have levels of agreement with a person - someone could use a stereotype as a default or just loath the idea of stereotypes - again looping back to everything previously mentioned). There is also personality to include as well. How much empathy do they posses? Extrovert or Introvert - People loving or self centered - Enthusiastic about life or Depressed - etc etc.

Why someone would be indifferent is a whole other issue and much more complex. Not only does it go through the whole approve/disapprove process, but it factors in other tangent issues as well that are often not considered in an argument. Effect of the environment, effect on technology, effect on traffic, effect on macro-economy, effect on the starving people in Africa, etc. For example, the recent Chick-fil-a issue with traditional vs non traditional marriage caused me to question why no one was standing up for vegetarianism/against chicken abuse. These are usually unappreciated and unwanted because they apparently have "nothing to do with what is going on" (though personally I think they do). Being indifferent is not the same as indecisive - which is more the inability to make a decision because all views have an equal weight in terms of logic/emotion/values and just make a person confused/conflicted - though one can be both.

Risk factor is something else to consider, but this is more of a logical conclusion which could be regarded as a level of its own. But generally it considers plausible future outcomes and goes with any of the former that will produce the more favorable outcome of the person. You can also consider things like how an alien visiting from another planet would perceive something, or the perspective of the atomical particles in the chair thrown across the room, but things like that you actually could consider irrelevant.

You can probably train yourself to do the above (I am a writer, so I do this often - having ADD helps). Kind of like doing an analysis for an English paper, just start factoring in how "others" would think about it - What if this - what about that - did anyone consider this point of view, etc. Otherwise, it might just be an attempt to make up for my ability to not understand/empathize with people (aka, if I think of everything possible, then I am probably right about one of them - ruins the end of books all the time). Fake empathy maybe? Who knows. Can be too many things and I should shut up now.

OTHER THAN THAT
We all have definitions of evil. One I heard of was that "evil is doing something you know is wrong, but doing it anyway." It could likely be the result of projection (if you are referring to the defense mechanism), but it can take place at a societal level as well. For example: the Standford Prison project, Rape of Nanking, Rwanda massacres, etc.

The author is not trying to pursue a religious agenda. He mentions that at the very beginning and is going from a social psychology point of view (and then show that even though we are all capable of evil, there is a hero in us all as well). He is also the one who put together the Standford Prison Experiment, so much of the book is based on studying that as well.