Pseudo-Hallucinations? Take This Simple Test and See If You Generate Mental Images Better Than Others

People have been taking a full-screen online test and are reporting different experiences — from nothing at all to complex patterns like castles and fractals.

Known as the Ganzflicker Experience, the rapidly flickering red and black display in full screen is accompanied by nothing but white noise and can induce a variety of experiences in 10 minutes or less. To achieve the "best results" the people behind it suggest watching it in "a dark room with no distraction" and in full screen mode. Listening to white noise supposedly adds to the experience.

Additionally, users can accomplish a consent form to allow them to record their experience and be used for a study.

Researchers also warned that the online test is not for people with photosensitive epilepsy and if users experience discomfort during the experience, they can stop at any time.

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Evaluating Pseudo-Hallucinations from Ganzfeld Imagery

The red and black flicker is expected to induce Ganzfeld imagery upon those who view it. According to a 2018 study in the Neuropsychologia journal, the use of light flicker to induce Ganzefeld imagery creates pseudo-hallucinations. Furthermore, it has been associated with the generation of mental images and trait positive schizotypy.

Now, researchers behind the online Ganzflicker Experience have published their own findings in the Cortex journal, in a report titled "The Ganzflicker experience: High probability of seeing vivid and complex pseudo-hallucinations with imagery but not aphantasia." They present a theory that attempts to explain why some people see vivid mental images while some people leave with nothing from the light flicker experience.

Writing for The Conversation, researcher Reshanne R. Reeder compares the human mind to a computer screen. The visual cortex has its own "refresh button," which takes snapshots of the world around us in quick succession — similar to how cameras and sensors take samples of the analogous data available to them, converting them into a format that can be processed by its system.

The brain is a sophisticated machine that fills the gaps in between these "snapshots," resulting in a vivid, dynamic, and continuous experience as we see it. Another example of the brain filling in the blanks automatically is in how it ignores your nose, which is literally in between your eyes. Similarly, there are blind spots right outside our center of vision, yet we do not register a patch of darkness everywhere we look. It employs the power of the visual cortex that extrapolates from the visual information available to make things appear complete.

How the Ganzflicker Messes Up This System

In the event that the sensory information available is similar to the one from the Ganzflicker Experience, this interacts with the brain's rhythms and basically changes how the mind fills the blanks in and how it interprets the available information.

The brain, as Reeder explains, is also composed of many different regions that work with each other. Some of these regions work toward processing "low-level" and "high-level" sensory data. The low-level information includes the basic distinguishing between a line being vertical or horizontal. On the other hand, determining emotional states from facial cues is considered a high-level cognitive process.

Then, the brain's ability to generate mental images depends on the brain's ability to respond to the sensory available to it, or lack thereof. People seeing the more complicated patterns from the Ganzflicker Experience, according to Reeder, have brains that automatically interpret the information as something more meaningful or realistic.

The use of Ganzfeld imagery in similar tests such as the Ganzflicker Experience could help scientists better understand mechanisms such as the "mind's eye" that generates these mental images.