They say the eyes are windows to the soul, well according to this scientific study out of Italy, they’re also portals into completely altered states of consciousness. If this is true, then the illegal drug trade in this country may be in for some serious competition. From ScienceAlert.com:
Pixabay 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 adults (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”.
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Max Pixel Once the 10 minutes were up, the volunteers were asked to complete questionnaires related to what they experienced during and after the experiment. “The participants in the eye-staring group said they’d had a compelling experience unlike anything they’d felt before,” Christian Jarrett wrote for the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest at the time. Reporting in journal Psychiatry Research, Caputo said the eye-staring group out-scored the control group in all the questionnaires, which suggests that something about staring into another human being’s eyes for 10 uninterrupted minutes 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.”
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Public Domain So what’s going on here? Martinez-Conde and Macknik explain that it’s likely to do with something called neural adaptation, which describes how our neurons can slow down or even stop their responses to unchanging stimulation. It happens when you stare at any scene or object for an extended period of time - your perception will start to fade until you blink or the scene changes, or it can be rectified by tiny involuntary eye movements called microsaccades. We normally like to end articles like this by saying, “Don’t try this at home,” but this one might actually be worth a shot! Have you done this before? Do you think you’ll give it a try? Leave us a comment and let us know how it goes.