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Creating Hallucinations Without Any Drugs Is Actually Surprisingly Easy
www.sciencealert.com ^ | 14 OCTOBER 2020 | BEC CREW

Posted on 10/15/2020 12:13:02 PM PDT by Red Badger

The human brain is a remarkable thing; our most complex machines are not even close to competing with our powers of higher consciousness and ingenuity. And yet, those 80 billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile.

If the tiniest thing goes wrong with a particular connection - maybe something misfires, or a certain neural pathway is blocked - things can fall apart very quickly.

And, oddly enough, even without any injuries or structural malfunctions, the human brain can get weird all by itself - turns out, it's surprisingly easy to trick it into seeing and hearing things that aren't actually there.

We're not talking about taking a bunch of drugs to make yourself hallucinate. The brain can do all that on its own - you just have to know how to manipulate it.

VIDEO AT LINK.................

As demonstrated by the guys in this 2016 Scam Nation video on YouTube, if you create a situation of intense sensory deprivation using some common household objects, you can induce some really strong hallucinations that mess with both your sense of sight and sound.

You're going to need:

Sheets of light, white paper

Cotton padding

Rubber bands

Stationery, including scissors, tape, a stapler, and string

A YouTube video of old television white noise or static that runs uninterrupted for at least 30 minutes

Noise-cancelling headphones

Watch the video to find out how they use each of these things to basically deprive themselves of any sensory input. The effects usually start to show after about 10 to 30 minutes.

After 20 minutes, the Scam Nation guys reported seeing "blooms of colour" - like those you see when you rub your eyelids - that would soon form shapes, such as dinosaur silhouettes, jellyfish, and the Eye of Sauron.

One heard screams, and the other heard laughter.

Sounds like nonsense? Well, sure, we have to take the word of two dudes on YouTube for this particular scenario, but what they're doing actually follows the principles of a scientific phenomenon known as the Ganzfeld effect.

The Ganzfeld effect describes how when you're exposed to "an unstructured, uniform stimulation field" - such as seeing blackness and hearing constant television static - your brain responds by amplifying neural noise in an effort to find missing visual signals.

This can result in both visual and aural hallucinations like the guys in the video describe.

Of course, every person will experience the effect in different ways.

When Derek Muller from Veritasium tried his own version of sensory deprivation - locking himself in a pitch-black, ultra-quiet anechoic chamber for 45 minutes - he debunked the myth that the lack of stimulation would send you mad, but did report a few odd sensations.

"Perhaps the weirdest thing I noticed was the sense of my heart," he says.

"I just felt like it was pumping really hard, and I could feel, almost like the blood pushing up through me. It wasn't like I was hearing it, it was like I was feeling it. And I was feeling as though, in a way, my heart was shaking my body. That was something weird."

In this situation, Derek didn't exactly experience hallucinations, but what he describes with his heart does suggest his brain was amplifying things in the absence of any stimuli.

Interestingly, researchers demonstrated a similar effect in an experiment in 2015, where they asked volunteers to stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes straight.

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

It's an imprecise science, to be sure, because every person's brain responds differently to the weird things we throw at it (figuratively), but you could give the Scam Nation method a try and see what happens to you. Just, if the Supreme Being from Time Bandits gives you a hard time, don't blame us, okay?

A version of this article was first published in April 2016.


TOPICS: Agriculture; Business/Economy; Health/Medicine; History
KEYWORDS: acid; lsd; peyote; timothyleary
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Damn! To think of all the money I've wasted............................ never mind.................
1 posted on 10/15/2020 12:13:02 PM PDT by Red Badger
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To: null and void; Slings and Arrows; SunkenCiv; Lazamataz

Ping!................


2 posted on 10/15/2020 12:13:44 PM PDT by Red Badger (Sine Q-Anon.....................very............)
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To: Red Badger

Creating Hallucinations Without Any Drugs Is Actually Surprisingly Easy

Democrats do it all the time. It’s like breathing for them.


3 posted on 10/15/2020 12:15:41 PM PDT by rightwingcrazy (;-,)
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To: All
the human brain can get weird all by itself

Truer words were never spoken.
4 posted on 10/15/2020 12:16:26 PM PDT by mmichaels1970
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To: Red Badger

John Lilly documented this with use of isolation tanks he developed where people float in a dark silent tank.

Of course Lilly also used plenty of drugs too.

A not so great movie called Altered States was made based in these isolation tank studies.


5 posted on 10/15/2020 12:16:36 PM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: Red Badger

Didn’t blotter start with sheets of light, white paper? Yeah, add 40 plus minutes and you found the light..........

See you in the morning.....


6 posted on 10/15/2020 12:17:05 PM PDT by gathersnomoss (Just the facts, ma'am......)
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To: Red Badger
Duh!

MSNBC and CNN have been doing this for some time.

7 posted on 10/15/2020 12:17:08 PM PDT by G Larry (There is no merit in compromising with the Devil.)
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To: rightwingcrazy

Good one.


8 posted on 10/15/2020 12:17:26 PM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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To: Red Badger

Just watch MSNBC


9 posted on 10/15/2020 12:17:33 PM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer.)
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To: Red Badger

This makes perfect sense. Those who have listened to the Democrats for so long have been so deprived of the truth that they can make up anything they want to believe...


10 posted on 10/15/2020 12:18:38 PM PDT by HeadOn (Love God. Lead your family. Be a man.)
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To: Red Badger

I ustah lay on the beach and concentrate on a certain centre of the back of my skull and drift off and feel i was falling forever and loved it........ no drugs
People told me that was dangerous.........


11 posted on 10/15/2020 12:19:16 PM PDT by Bell Bouy II
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To: Red Badger

I’ve heard listening to old Obama speeches has the same effect, and even faster.

Unfortunately, they also cause nausea.


12 posted on 10/15/2020 12:19:35 PM PDT by MortMan (Shouldn't "palindrome" read the same forward and backward?)
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To: gathersnomoss

Window pane.........Window pane.........Window pane.........Window pane.........


13 posted on 10/15/2020 12:19:43 PM PDT by Red Badger (Sine Q-Anon.....................very............)
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To: ifinnegan

Isolation tanks; very relaxing and rejuvenating, very pleasant experience.


14 posted on 10/15/2020 12:19:45 PM PDT by crosdaddy
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To: rightwingcrazy

Aw, man! There were only two responses when I made mine. You beat me by three minutes!


15 posted on 10/15/2020 12:19:48 PM PDT by HeadOn (Love God. Lead your family. Be a man.)
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To: Bell Bouy II

I did that once.

Got one helluva sunburn......................


16 posted on 10/15/2020 12:20:27 PM PDT by Red Badger (Sine Q-Anon.....................very............)
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To: ifinnegan

Didn’t the mafia use that as some kind of torture ?...................


17 posted on 10/15/2020 12:21:31 PM PDT by Red Badger (Sine Q-Anon.....................very............)
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To: HeadOn

Welcome to my world.


18 posted on 10/15/2020 12:21:42 PM PDT by rightwingcrazy (;-,)
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To: MortMan

Every drug has its side effects.....................


19 posted on 10/15/2020 12:22:12 PM PDT by Red Badger (Sine Q-Anon.....................very............)
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To: Red Badger

“turns out, it’s surprisingly easy to trick it into seeing and hearing things that aren’t actually there.”

It must be VERY easy, liberals do it all the time!


20 posted on 10/15/2020 12:24:19 PM PDT by null and void (Surely there must be someone on FR who makes bricks! Contact me if that's you!)
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