A psychologist in Italy discovered how to change consciousness without drugs. Twenty volunteers were asked to sit and stare at each other for 10 minutes.
This simple, tricky task did not only make volunteers undergo "out of body" experiences, but caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, or themselves in the faces of their partners.
An experiment by Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino involved 20 young men (15 of them girls) in pairs, sitting in a dimly lit room one meter apart and staring at each other for 10 minutes.
The lighting in the room was bright enough for volunteers to see the faces of their partners easily, but they were dim enough to reduce their general perception of colors.
An officer group of 20 volunteers was asked to sit and stare for 10 minutes in another dimly lit room in pairs, but their seats were facing a white wall.
The volunteers knew very little about the purpose of the study, and it concerned "a contemplative experience with the opening of the eyes."
Once the 10 minutes were over, volunteers were asked to complete questionnaires about what they had experienced during and after the experiment.
One questionnaire focused on any dissociative symptoms that volunteers may have experienced, and another questionnaire asked them what they perceived in the faces of their partners (the group that met their eyes) or their own faces (the control group).
Dispersion is a term used in psychology to describe a whole range of psychological experiences that make a person feel separated from his immediate surroundings.
Violation, psychological trauma, drugs such as ketamine, alcohol and LSD, and now face-to-face irritation, can cause symptoms such as memory loss or seeing everything in distorted colors or feeling that the world is not real.
Christian Jarrett wrote in the British Society's Research Digest blog: "The participants in the eye-catching group said they had a magical experience that did not resemble anything they had ever felt before."
Kaputo said in Psychiatry Research that the group that was staring at the eyes exceeded the control group in the total number of questionnaires, indicating that there were profound effects of staring into someone else's eyes for ten minutes connected to visual perception and mental state
"In the case of case studies, they responded with the strongest estimates of items related to reduced color intensity, quieter sound or higher than expected, brain problems, and the passage of time slowly.
In the strange faces of a questionnaire 90 percent agreed that the group was staring at the faces they had seen the faces of distorted features; as 75 percent of them said they had seen the beast, and said 50 percent they had seen aspects of their faces own in the faces of their partners, and said 15 percent they had seen The face of one of their relatives ».
These results call for Kabuto's 2010 results when he conducted a similar experiment with 50 volunteers staring into a mirror for 10 minutes.
The paper, titled The Unusual Face in the Mirror, said volunteers began less than a minute later to see what Kabuto calls "the illusion of a stranger."
He wrote both Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L.Macknik magazine Scientific American: «included descriptions of the participants see huge distortions of their faces were special, seeing the faces of the living parents or dead, typical faces like an old or a child or face a ancestral woman, or the faces of animals such as a cat or Pig or lion, and even wild or imaginary creatures. All 50 participants said they felt alienated when confronted with a seemingly unfamiliar face, and some felt strong emotions. "
Kabuto -ofaqa says what Jarrett wrote in Psychological Association The effects were British-stronger than those experienced by volunteers who stared in the mirror in 2010, although the group I stared at this eye contact recent experience got the average total is higher than the control group B 2.45 points in their questionnaires (which used a scale of five points, the lowest of which was zero and the most 5).
Martinez-Conde and macknik explain that it is probably related to something called neural adaptation, which describes how our nerves slow down or even stop their responses to static stimuli.
It happens when we stare at a scene or something for a long period of time, your consciousness begins to fade until your eyes close or the scene changes, or you may be caught by small, involuntary eye movements called Microsaccades.