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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : August 25, 2015 3:22 PM IST
Remember the game where you and your friend would look into each other eyes, and the one to blink first would lose? What a harmless little game. But it apparently is not as harmless as it sounds. According to scientist gazing into someone's eyes can transport you to an altered state of consciousness where you can experience strange hallucinations. Researcher Giovanni Caputo, from the University of Urbino, Italy, studied 20 subjects who were made to sit in a dimly lit room opposite each other in pairs. The subjects then stared at each other expressionless for 10 minutes.
Many of the subjects had 'a compelling experience that they never had before' and were asked questions about their experience. The questions were like, 'Did you see the face of a monster?', 'Did you see the face of one of your relatives?', 'Did you see that some facial traits were deformed?' and 'Did you see the face of a domestic or savage animal?'
Ninety percent reported hallucinating that they had seen a deformed face, and 75 percent said they had seen a monster.Half said their partner's face had partially morphed into their own and 15 percent said they had seen a relative's face, 'The Times' reported. The subjects also felt disassociated from the world around them.
'A possible explanation of the results can be that the sensory deprivation (low lighting) and the sustained gazing toward a stimulus (the other's face) induces a general level of dissociation,' Caputo said.'The strange-face apparition momentarily interrupts the dissociative state by provoking a temporary hallucination.'In other words, the strange-face apparition can be a form of rebound to 'reality' that occurs from a general state of dissociation due to sensory deprivation,' he added. The study was published in the journal Psychiatry Research.
With inputs from PTI
