I have to say that I didn’t see any hallucinations when I watched this video from I Fucking Love Science. The instructions are given at the beginning of the video, and extra information is here:
If you follow the video’s instructions, when you look away you will continue to see wavy lines in your wall or on the floor. This happens due to an optical illusion that is the result of repeated psychological stimulation. When the video ends and you look away, your brain still expects to see the waves, and therefore it creates them for you. Saying the letters out loud doesn’t really play a role, it just ensures that you are focusing on the center of the screen, where you can best receive the stimulus.
For best results, view the video full screen on an HD display. The resultant hallucination is temporary and should wear off within a couple of minutes.
WARNING: Please use your discretion when viewing. If you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, please do not view this video.
Maybe readers will have better luck.
n.b. I just tried it again, and I got very mild hallucinations of the type that so-so acid used to provide: swelling of objects but no “visions”
h/t: Ant
Ya, cute. It warps the visual field as if it is the surface of the ocean with swells.
That sums up nicely what I experienced.
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Ditto.
Nothing here either.
Moderate drug user in the 80s and less since.
worked for me. Everything ripples for maybe 10-15 seconds.
And for me. And for about the same length of time. Quite amazing.
Trying to shoo the dragons out of my office…
Right – I’d encountered this too. I had to guess that “hallucinations” referred to said apparent distortion and nothing more.
I went to college in the ’70s. I knew hallucinations. Hallucinations were a friend of mine. These, sir, were no hallucinations.
Optical illusions, maybe, not hallucinations. Didn’t even induce a decent flashback (or “bonus round,” as they were known back in the day).
It worked on me. My wall circled and receded for about 10 seconds and the shadow of my flower bouquet moved sideways. Reminds me of this song from high school, which was popular to listen to while high. I never tried acid, as I was there with a friend who did. She thought she was a dragon and that turned me off. But I tried weed, which altered my perception enough that I felt both giddy and paranoid. People at a distance, especially in cars, looked like cartoon characters.
Comfortably Numb
All that time and all I got was this hat … no, about half a second of fading waviness and a few seconds of a bright spot in the center of the field of view.
About the same for me…. a few seconds of waviness or rippling and a bit longer for a darkish spot within a brightish spot.
Cool video! For me, everything was wavy for a bit after watching the video. I shrunk the screen down from full screen to the smaller one on this website, and all the letters were moving. About half way through the video, I realized that the letters were spelling out a phrase: “We dont live in a world of reality but in a world of perceptions!” Trippy and scientific!
Glad you got the whole phrase. I was getting a word here and there but sometimes forgot to pay attention, and was too lazy to go back and try again.
The letters reminded me of those Stroop tests where you can’t help paying attention to the words.
How many times did you have to watch it to get the entire sentence?
Twice. The first time, about half way, I figured that it was a phrase. I read the letters aloud, so maybe that had something to do with recognizing that there was a phrase. With “but in a world of perceptions”, I went back to the start.
I should have added that I did pause the video the second time and back it up to double check that I was getting the start of the phrase right. So, two and a half times.
I’d be so dizzy! Could you walk afterwards? 🙂 It was like a rollercoaster watching just once for me!
I know what you mean. After I figured out the phrase, I watched the video a few more times because I found it amusing and mildly pleasant to look around my office. But when I got up and walked around after, I did feel a little dizzy, for sure. But maybe I was sitting in front of the computer for too long!
Let me guess–are those the ones that have letters of one color spell another color?
Yeah. I read about it in Pinkah’s “Stuff of Thought”. It is hard to state the colour and not to read the word.
I know, I’ve tried! It helps a bit if you try to only look at the last letter of the word.
People used to have posters that challenge–quite diabolical!
*of* that challenge
@Diane: I spent all day on Saturday penning a letter to a friend. I proofread it three times. It wasn’t until after I hit send and looked again (obnoxious self-torture) that I saw three glaring typos–one in the first sentence, which got introduced in my last round of proofreading. It was precisely that I cared so much about the draft that I didn’t see the errors. I’ve been in knots since, though I know it’s silly. For whatever’s this is worth. Also, I think I had a whopping typo just last week calling bird pics “lovely shits.” I gave up on typing not long after that because I introduced another typo in the correction. Infuriating.
I can proofread pretty well anyone’s writing but mine. (And that’s a well-known phenomenon, of course.)
And then there’s always Muphry’s Law. Seriously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
I remember having a hearty laugh at your shits-for-shots goof. 😀 Really, you’d think if all the auto-correcting shot, I mean shit, in our programs were going to be of any help at all, it would be in cases like that. But noooooooo.
Many years as a programmer have me feeling sympathetic. It happens.
Infuriating.
I worked in IT training for a while. Among other things I coached dozens of graduate entrants through a computer-based training course in COBOL. When they wrote their first program, surprisingly many stumbled over “ENVIRONMENT DIVISION”, missing the second “N”.
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And that’s not even a “silent n!”
It seems to be elided in some British accents…
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Possibly because the second ‘N’ is right next to a ‘M’
I was fiddling with computer code last night, inserting bugs (well, writing code; the bugs insert themselves) and it occurred to me that computer code is probably the most unforgiving milieu in existence for typos. One letter in the wrong place and it doesn’t work, at best.
cr
COBALT is a VERY WERDY_LANGWIDGE.
IT makes_one_prone TO ERRER.
The letters are only there (obviously!) to make sure you keep looking at the centre of the picture.
cr
Oh, and I got the phrase first time. It was highly likely the letters were going to say something, wasn’t it?
cr
… which of course is exactly what it says in the original post.
CR’s standard order of procedure:
1. Watch video
2. Post comment
3. Read original post
4. Feel like an idiot.
cr
As deeply ashamed as you feel (I, personally, never do like that), it is a testament to the amazing quality and quantity of material on this site. It drives one (not me though) to shoot from the hip so as to get to the next post or comment. Happily, I am never guilty of doing like that.
🙂
It worked for me. It was extra cool when I looked st my aquarium. The warning reminds me of hypno toad.
Ha! I turned round and looked at my aquarium too. Wavy!
Focusing just on the letters was so boring that I kept on glancing around the lettered centre to check out other patterns which was way more enthralling. But afterwards I did experience brief visual hallucinations, and definitely not just an illusion. A nearby glass door has a texture consisting of tiny squares, as does my office textured wallpaper, and these small geometrical shapes spiralled and spun. Very interesting. 🙂
Nicely done movement after-effect illusion. I looked at the Xmas tree and got a lovely swelling rolling movement of the lights and tinsel. IT’S BROWN, MAN! [(C) PCCE] – MC
Woodstock <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoLlKmQSHU"<public address announcement: “Watch out for the brown acid, man. The brown acid is bad.”
“The walls are fucking brown”
That’s one of my favourite PCC quotes… 🙂
When I got bored reciting the letters I noticed that they weren’t random. I read “we don’t live in a world of reality but a world of perception” or there abouts.
I perceived the flowers on the painting in my office waving and undulating for about 5 seconds. Pretty cool.
I report the same effects as others describe. I have seen variations of this illusion, but this is a very nice one.
I found the effect pretty powerful, though it only lasted less than 10 seconds. Quite profound visual distortion, with objects bent out of shape and dancing around. Pretty cool.
Nothing. I need the real stuff to make anything happen.
It’s nothing like the time I had some 12-hour virus that had me hallucinating that hundreds of hot dog length therapy woolly bears had come from somewhere to massage my legs. Where they came from and where they went after having a caterpillar convention on my legs I’ll never know, let alone where you even get trained therapy woolly bears from.
If there were aliens from a dying planet who invaded the earth to make it their world isn’t this precisely how they would do it?
Nothing from this. Sorry.
I did all the hallucigens in the 70’s.
I didn’t see wavy lines but I did see the ghastly Carly Fiorina on my wall so, don’t read articles about her just before watching the video, I guess.
Pretty cool! I’ve had vertigo after a car accident, worried this might trigger it… but only a little wall breathing, nothing I can’t handle 🙂
No, no hallucinations. The tentacled creatures sent by Cthulhu were trying to break through the weak spots in the walls, but I beat them off with a fly swatter and a can of bugspray as usual.
cr
Have you tried reporting them to the local housing authority?
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So I’m not the only one being persecuted by nameless dread monsters from other dimensions.
What a relief!
cr
No hallucinations, or visual effects – but I did see 13 nightjars, 7 cats and 17 grey tree frogs…
Absolutely nothing. Then again I may be hungover/still drunk.
I shall try again in a moment of clarity.
This is similar to the spinning effect I did when I was performing my magic act. I spun a disk that had spiraled either into the middle or away from the middle at the audience. After about 60 seconds, I stopped it and instructed the audience to look at my head. If the disk spun inwards, my head would appear to shrink. If the disk were spinning outwards, my head would appear to expand like a balloon. Always got a response from about 95% of the audience.
This is cause by the brain continuing to see a constant motion after it stops. It is certainly not a “hallucination.”
What’s your definition? Wp says, “a perception in the absence of external stimulus that has qualities of real perception.” That’s certainly this.
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I’d disagree with your interpretation of that definition. A ‘hallucination’ implies that you’re seeing some apparently coherent object that isn’t there, as distinct from seeing what is there in a mildly distorted way.
Under your quoted definition, there IS an external stimulus – whatever you’re looking at. You’re just not seeing it quite right. If I take my glasses off so this screen goes all blurry, that doesn’t make this laptop a hallucination. If I see a grand piano instead, that would be a hallucination.
cr
But the effect of taking your glasses off is physics (optics); this effect is psychological.
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Still doesn’t make it a hallucination.
I’d say it’s more neurological than psychological. Like tinnitus. If you hear voices telling you to do stuff – THAT’s a hallucination (and psychological).
cr
A variant of the ‘waterfall effect’, I think.
cr
The Wallpaper followed the same patterns as in the Video, interesting.
There’s a Bill Hicks joke in here somewhere.
Water effect with little flower patterns
I experienced a couple of seconds of spiral lines radiating from a point, rotating slowly.
The mind is such an amazing thing- I too, posted a comment this evening where I’d proofread it twice only to find, once I’d posted it, that I’d misspelled the very first word!
I believe it was in Oliver Sacks’ “The Mind’s Eye” that he talked about the brain’s tendency to “fill in” objects in the visual field that the brain “expects” to be there: he had a blind spot in one eye as the result of his cancer and was amazed to watch his mind try to “fill in” the missing part of a brick wall at which he was looking.
He talked of another man who, missing a foot, could actually watch his brain try to “re-create” a foot on his stump- wild!
I’ve seen better “persistence” illusions; mostly I just saw the pattern repeated on the blank parts of my screen- I remember back when I was 15 and on my first acid trip: I was listening to the soundtrack of, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” which, of course, brought Western themes to mind; I was seeing cookie-cutter type patterns of cowboys and Indians on every wall of my parents’ house.