Staring into eyes induces altered state of consciousness

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Pink Panther

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Staring into eyes induces altered state of consciousness

Post19 Aug 2015

Staring into someone’s eyes for 10 minutes induces an altered state of consciousness

Volunteers ended up hallucinating and saw deformed facial traits and monsters.
BEC CREW19 AUG 2015

A psychologist in Italy has figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight in a dimly lit room. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, and themselves in their partner’s face.

The experiment, run by Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino, involved having 20 young adult (15 of which were women) pair off, sit in a dimly lit room 1 metre away from each other, and stare into their partner’s eyes for 10 minutes. The lighting in the room was bright enough for the volunteers to easily make out the facial features of their partner, but low enough to diminish their overall colour perception.


A control group of 20 more volunteers were asked to sit and stare for 10 minutes in another dimly lit room in pairs, but their chairs were facing a blank wall. The volunteers were told very little about the purpose of the study, only that it had to do with a "meditative experience with eyes open".

Once the 10 minutes were up, the volunteers were asked to complete questionnaires related to what they experienced during and after the experiment. One questionnaire focussed on any dissociative symptoms that the volunteers might have experienced, and another questioned them on what they saw in their partner’s face (eye-staring group) or their own face (control group).

Dissociation is a term used in psychology to describe a whole range of psychological experiences that make a person feel detached from their immediate surroundings. Symptoms such as a loss of memory, seeing everything in distorted colours, or feeling like the world isn’t real can be brought on by abuse and trauma; drugs such as ketamine, alcohol, and LSD; and now, apparently, face-staring.

"The participants in the eye-staring group said they'd had a compelling experience unlike anything they'd felt before," Christian Jarrett writes for the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest.

Reporting in journal Psychiatry Research, Caputo says the eye-staring group out-scored the control group in all the questionnaires, signifying that something about staring into another human being’s eyes for 10 uninterrupted minutes had had a profound effect on their visual perception and mental state.

Jarrett explains:

"On the dissociative states test, they gave the strongest ratings to items related to reduced colour intensity, sounds seeming quieter or louder than expected, becoming spaced out, and time seeming to drag on. On the strange-face questionnaire, 90 percent of the eye-staring group agreed that they'd seen some deformed facial traits, 75 percent said they'd seen a monster, 50 percent said they saw aspects of their own face in their partner's face, and 15 percent said they'd seen a relative's face."

The results recall what Caputo found back in 2010 when he performed a similar experiment with 50 volunteers staring at themselves in a mirror for 10 minutes. The paper, entitled Strange-Face-in-the-Mirror Illusion, reports that after less than a minute, the volunteers started seeing what Caputo describes as the "strange-face illusion".

"The participants' descriptions included huge deformations of their own faces; seeing the faces of alive or deceased parents; archetypal faces such as an old woman, child or the portrait of an ancestor; animal faces such as a cat, pig or lion; and even fantastical and monstrous beings," Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik write for Scientific American. "All 50 participants reported feelings of ‘otherness' when confronted with a face that seemed suddenly unfamiliar. Some felt powerful emotions."

According to Jarrett at the British Psychological Society, while the eye-staring group of this most recent experiment only scored on average 2.45 points higher than the control group in their questionnaires (which used a five-point scale where 0 is "not at all" and 5 would be "extremely"), Caputo says the effects were stronger than those experienced by the 2010 mirror-staring volunteers.

So what's going on here? Martinez-Conde and Macknik explain that it's likely to do with neural adaptation, which describes how our neurons can slow down or even stop their response to unchanging stimulation. It happens when you stare at anything - your perception will start to fade until you blink, the scene changes, or can be rectified by tiny involuntary eye movements called microsaccades.

Head to Scientific American to read a fascinating breakdown of the research into this, and if you're going to try to this at home, here's something to contemplate as you while away those long, long minutes:

source
http://www.sciencealert.com/staring-int ... sciousness

jann

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Re: Staring into eyes induces altered state of consciousness

Post19 Aug 2015

Yes, did it a long time ago. Had to step out, it scared the xxxx out of me.
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ex-l

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Re: Staring into eyes induces altered state of consciousness

Post20 Aug 2015

Used to happen a lot whilst teaching the meditation course one to one. We generally sat in a "dimly lit room" too. You would switch out the main light and turn on a glowing red light.

But what exactly governs the faces etc that people see? We, of course, used to apply all sorts of BK interpretations onto what they say, e.g. Mama (Om Radhe), Lekhraj Kirpalani, Hanuman, Christ or Mary if they were Christians. Those are all actual ones that come to memory.

Now, if the BKWSU was a *really* university or had any intellectual integrity whatsoever, they would be forced to question what is happen during their practises.

There is a documentary of an American actor discussing Scientology where he discusses a very similar practise and "exteriorising", "leaving the body" in BK terms.

Interesting how similar it all is.

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