![]() Visual mental imagery, or the mental simulation of sensory information – the “mind’s eye” – is one of these high-level cognitive processes. The latter is more open to interpretation. The brain is composed of many different regions interacting with each other, including “low-level” sensory regions and regions that correspond to “high-level” cognitive processes.ĭiscriminating whether a line is vertical or horizontal, for example, is considered a low-level sensory process, whereas determining whether a face is friendly or annoyed is a high-level cognitive process. But how do some people see complex pseudo-hallucinations such as “old stone castles”? Capacity for mental images “Simple” experiences - like seeing lasers or illusory colors - have previously been explained as your brain reacting to clashes between Ganzflicker and the brain’s rhythms. Ganzflicker is known to elicit the experience of anomalous sensory information in the external environment, called pseudo-hallucinations. If the sensory information being processed is the Ganzflicker, this will interact with your brain’s own rhythms to alter how you fill in or interpret what you are seeing. Your visual cortex extrapolates from the surrounding visual information so that your whole field of view appears to be complete. Yet you see the world as continuous and dynamic, thanks to your brain’s sophisticated ability to fill in the blanks.įor example, your eyes have a blind spot right outside the center of vision, but you don’t see a patch of blackness everywhere you look. In other words, your brain collects sensory information with a certain frequency. Like a computer screen, the part of your brain that processes visual information (the visual cortex) has a refresh “button” which helps it sample the environment - taking snapshots of the world in quick succession. We have come up with a theory of where those individual differences come from. Visual experiences set in almost as soon as you start looking at it.īut our new study, published in Cortex, shows that while some people see castles or fractals in the Ganzflicker, others see nothing. In less than ten minutes, it creates altered states of consciousness, with no lasting effects for the brain. In reality, they are statements that different people reported after viewing the “Ganzflicker” on their computers - an intense full-screen, red-and-black flicker that anyone can access online and that we use in our experiments. I saw old stone buildings … like a castle … I was flying above it. Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen began to expand. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream? I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place.
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