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Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

sciencealert.com

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Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#4
post #2

Not sure if science or joke I don’t get :(

Hmm, no wikipedia page for "ganzflicker", and 90% of the google hits are dubious websites. However, I will be trying this tonight because I loves me a good hallucination and if it can be done by sitting in a dark room staring at a flickering screen for 10 minutes, it sure beats acid.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#7
This is extremely cool. Within about 10 seconds in a lit room without white noise playing I began getting fairly vivid visuals. I'll be sure to come back to this to get the full experience later, and complete the questionnaire.

For reference I tend to get interesting/vivid visuals whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, often when I look at a finely patterned/textured surface, and sometimes when I look at basically anything when I've gone >36 hours without sleep. The visuals from this are more intense than those I get from simply closing my eyes though, and more interesting/changing than those from looking at tiled floors or popcorn ceiling.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#8

This is extremely cool. Within about 10 seconds in a lit room without white noise playing I began getting fairly vivid visuals. I'll be sure to come back to this to get the full experience later, and complete the questionnaire. For reference I tend to get interesting/vivid visuals whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, often when I look at a finely patterned/textured surface, and sometimes when I look at basical…

Have you done lsd/shrooms before? This almost sounds like you can trigger the after effects yourself.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#9
Wow. I didn't see anything I would deem a full hallucination, but the visuals were pretty amazing. Lots of fractals, triangles, geometry, some shootings stars, what looked like a spiral galaxy for about 10 seconds, then a moment of staring into an abyss, X shapes in my peripheral vision, etc. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't see a tiger jump out from my screen or the Enterprise D passing by. My mental imagery is usually pretty vivid, but it's also impossible for me to really judge that.

I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I'll try this periodically and see if I get anything different.

EDIT: I am curious how this would be affected by music as opposed to white noise.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#10
post #2

Not sure if science or joke I don’t get :(

Hmm, no wikipedia page for "ganzflicker", and 90% of the google hits are dubious websites. However, I will be trying this tonight because I loves me a good hallucination and if it can be done by sitting in a dark room staring at a flickering screen for 10 minutes, it sure beats acid.

If you click through to the experiment, they say that it's actually called '"Ganzfeld imagery" (Allefeld et al., 2011; Sumich et al., 2018)'.

Searching for that led me to this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect

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