Hello !
I would like to discuss about an experiment run by Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbinorun, Italy in august 2015.
Let me quote BEC CREW from Science Alert for a better explanation than mine (I don't know well this website but it's a pretty good explanation and all the sources talk about the same things) :
Source : http://www.sciencealert.com/staring-into-someone-s-eyes-for-10-minutes-induces-an-altered-state-of-consciousness
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It's possible to find a good synthesis of this experience on the website "Psychatry Research" :
Source : http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(15)00321-2/fulltext
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Some of you might already know Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslav performance artist based in New York. In 2012, a french article had been written on SOTT about her experiment run in Zagreb in 1974 and called Rhythm 0. She stayed 6 hours without moving whatever the people around could od to her. 72 objects were disposed on a table wich could be used for pain or pleasure. Go to see the result if you are curious...
Source : https://humansareweird.com/2013/02/21/marina-abramovic-a-performing-artist/ or in french https://fr.sott.net/article/19747-Une-performance-qui-montre-ce-que-les-gens-peuvent-faire-en-des-circonstances-inhabituelles
In 2010, Marina experimented another weird thing. She decided to spend more than 700 hours seated on a chair to face volunteers for several minutes each without moving and looking in each other eyes. All people who run this test talk about the same kind of effects.
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Several journalists all around the world tried themselves the experience with a friend or a colleague. Each time, they could confirm some perception effects as distorsions. Here is an example :
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2015/aug/24/look-eyes-staring-hallucinate-10-minutes
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C's said that the center of each sphere can be a window or a portal or both.
Source : Session of February 27th 2016 http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,41076.0.html
Humans use to say that the eye is a way to reach the soul of someone, is there any sense in that ?
Does this experiment show us a brain reaction, an after effect of a prolonged view on something frozen ? Or maybe as some persons explain it, we approach the LSD effects on our perception of reality ?
Is there something "special" in that case or is this a simple optical effect ?
I plan to try this with someone soon and I think it could be nice and interesting to share our points of view and experiences about that.
For now, I don't know what to think. Everything's possible but if I'd have to chose I'd say that it's more than a simple optical effect.
For a long time, humankind is attracted by eyes and many theories exist about it.
By the way, I advice you a good movie (according to me) about these beautiful spheres : I Origins (2014) from Mike Cahill (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2884206/)
We always say that we live in an illusion. It's true if you're referring on our society according to a metaphoric way of speaking but we already know that it's also true in a physical point of view. Things are not exactly the way they seem to be...
Maybe, it's a natural path for seeing things from another perspective and maybe train ourselves to see behind the veil of illusion.
Thanks for your attention.
I would like to discuss about an experiment run by Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbinorun, Italy in august 2015.
Let me quote BEC CREW from Science Alert for a better explanation than mine (I don't know well this website but it's a pretty good explanation and all the sources talk about the same things) :
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".
Once the 10 minutes were up, the volunteers were asked to complete questionnaires related to what they experienced during and after the experiment. One questionnaire focussed on any dissociative symptoms that the volunteers might have experienced, and another questioned them on what they perceived in their partner’s face (eye-staring group) or their own face (control group).
Dissociation is a term used in psychology to describe a whole range of psychological experiences that make a person feel detached from their immediate surroundings. Symptoms such as a loss of memory, seeing everything in distorted colours, or feeling like the world isn’t real can be brought on by abuse and trauma; drugs such as ketamine, alcohol, and LSD; and now, apparently, face-staring.
"The participants in the eye-staring group said they'd had a compelling experience unlike anything they'd felt before," Christian Jarrett writes for the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest.
Reporting in journal Psychiatry Research, Caputo says 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.
Source : http://www.sciencealert.com/staring-into-someone-s-eyes-for-10-minutes-induces-an-altered-state-of-consciousness
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It's possible to find a good synthesis of this experience on the website "Psychatry Research" :
Highlights
•Interpersonal gazing in dyads of individuals is investigated.
•Tests of dissociation, dysmorphic face perception and strange-face apparitions.
•Dissociative symptoms and face dysmorphia were correlated.
•Strange-face apparitions were non-correlated with dissociation and dysmorphia.
•Strange-face apparitions and dissociative symptoms might be independent processes.
Abstract
Interpersonal gazing in dyads, when the two individuals in the dyad stare at each other in the eyes, is investigated in 20 healthy young individuals at low illumination for 10-min. Results indicate dissociative symptoms, dysmorphic face perceptions, and hallucination-like strange-face apparitions. Dissociative symptoms and face dysmorphia were correlated. Strange-face apparitions were non-correlated with dissociation and dysmorphia. These results indicate that dissociative symptoms and hallucinatory phenomena during interpersonal-gazing under low illumination can involve different processes. Strange-face apparitions may characterize the rebound to “reality” (perceptual reality caused by external stimulus and hallucinatory reality caused by internal input) from a dissociative state induced by sensory deprivation. These phenomena may explain psychodynamic projections of the subject׳s unconscious meanings into the other׳s face. The results indicate that interpersonal gazing in dyads can be an effective tool for studying experimentally-induced dissociative symptoms and hallucinatory-like apparitions.
Source : http://www.psy-journal.com/article/S0165-1781(15)00321-2/fulltext
----------------------------------
Some of you might already know Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslav performance artist based in New York. In 2012, a french article had been written on SOTT about her experiment run in Zagreb in 1974 and called Rhythm 0. She stayed 6 hours without moving whatever the people around could od to her. 72 objects were disposed on a table wich could be used for pain or pleasure. Go to see the result if you are curious...
Source : https://humansareweird.com/2013/02/21/marina-abramovic-a-performing-artist/ or in french https://fr.sott.net/article/19747-Une-performance-qui-montre-ce-que-les-gens-peuvent-faire-en-des-circonstances-inhabituelles
In 2010, Marina experimented another weird thing. She decided to spend more than 700 hours seated on a chair to face volunteers for several minutes each without moving and looking in each other eyes. All people who run this test talk about the same kind of effects.
----------------------------------
Several journalists all around the world tried themselves the experience with a friend or a colleague. Each time, they could confirm some perception effects as distorsions. Here is an example :
I feel nervous, which seems ridiculous considering I’ve seen C lose her father, she’s seen me give birth and hers is the face I’ve looked at most in my adult life. But what if it is the equivalent of feeding a mogwai after midnight and C goes all gremlin on me? Will I ever look at her in the same way again? Also, we had a fight earlier. Maybe now isn’t the best time to be gazing into each other’s eyes, looking for monsters.
With all these misgivings pouring out of the windows to my soul, I set the stopwatch and we’re off …
Minute one: my heart knocks in my chest, I keep forgetting to breathe and C’s eyes seem to have hoovered up all the oxygen in the room. Must all forms of meditation begin this way?
Minute two: dog burp.
Minute three: the world seems very loud (as people in Caputo’s experiment also reported). Buses wheeze, traffic lights beep, the damn dog breathes.
Minute five: how have I never noticed how blue C’s eyes are? The windows are reflected in her pupils, producing winking white lights at each centre like two tiny parties. Definitely a bit hallucinatory. I spend ages looking at her left eye, then the right, then I try to look at them at the same time. Ow. Looking into someone’s eyes is surprisingly hard. We should really call it looking into someone’s eye.
Minute seven: I don’t see monsters, myself or my mother, but I do start to zone out. C’s face goes a bit distorted, like when my friends and I used to draw eyes on our chins and hang upside down. When I blink, I can still see the blotted outline of C’s face, as if my eyes have been dazzled by the sun. I start to think mmm, I could do this forever … and then the alarm goes off.
Source : https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2015/aug/24/look-eyes-staring-hallucinate-10-minutes
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C's said that the center of each sphere can be a window or a portal or both.
Q: (Pierre) Uh, okay. This cosmic energy coming from the sun and its interaction with its companion powers El Niño. But I guess El Niño is not the only effect of these surges...
A: Remember that the center of a sphere is a window!
Q: (Pierre) Yeah, I remember that.
A: Portal too!
Source : Session of February 27th 2016 http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,41076.0.html
Humans use to say that the eye is a way to reach the soul of someone, is there any sense in that ?
Does this experiment show us a brain reaction, an after effect of a prolonged view on something frozen ? Or maybe as some persons explain it, we approach the LSD effects on our perception of reality ?
Is there something "special" in that case or is this a simple optical effect ?
I plan to try this with someone soon and I think it could be nice and interesting to share our points of view and experiences about that.
For now, I don't know what to think. Everything's possible but if I'd have to chose I'd say that it's more than a simple optical effect.
For a long time, humankind is attracted by eyes and many theories exist about it.
By the way, I advice you a good movie (according to me) about these beautiful spheres : I Origins (2014) from Mike Cahill (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2884206/)
We always say that we live in an illusion. It's true if you're referring on our society according to a metaphoric way of speaking but we already know that it's also true in a physical point of view. Things are not exactly the way they seem to be...
Maybe, it's a natural path for seeing things from another perspective and maybe train ourselves to see behind the veil of illusion.
Thanks for your attention.