The Ganzfeld Experiment

[Sier_Pinski]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment

Has anyone else tried this yet?

Basically, what you do is try to deprive your mind of any variations in sensory input to experience hallucinations. To do this, you must first 'force' your eyes to see only one uniform unchanging sight by placing ping pong balls over your eyes while looking at a dim red light. The same rule applies to your sense of hearing--you use headphones or a radio to listen to a continuous, nonsensical noise, such as white or pink noise. In addition, you must find a comfortable place to lay down and relax, because your sense of touch must also be completely ignored. After about 20-30 minutes, your brain 'panics' and tries to make sensory variations on its own, and what you see as a result are swirling patterns of color, followed by vivid concrete visions, similar to dreaming. Some say that the effects are similar to those that are experienced while taking certain illegal drugs. In this experiment, though, no drugs are required.

I've tried this several times myself using different equipment (such as a red toy parachute or a pitch black closet), but I couldn't quite get myself to see any visions. Perhaps I'm just not depriving myself of enough sensory input yet.

An alternative way to experience sensory deprivation is to go to your local "sensory deprivation tank". But they're asking for around $80 an hour of using it.

 

[Omnis]

If you close your eyes for a while it looks like you're traveling through the stars. That's about the closest I've gotten to any kind of hallucination. Never heard of this before.

 

[granturismite]

I heard there were pharmaceuticals for this kind of thing. Just don't ask me where to get them, because no one is supposed to have them

 

[hawkeye122]

If you close your eyes for a while it looks like you're traveling through the stars. That's about the closest I've gotten to any kind of hallucination. Never heard of this before.

I get this. But also, there starts to be a Grey field, with rounded-off rectangles, that are outlined in Blue, Yellow, Red and Green

 

[White & Nerdy]

No thanks.

 

[1241Penguin]

I've always wondered what that picture of a red faced man with balls for eyes meant.

 

[Skython]

I laughed because of the drugs bit. It just means that when they take it and then become so dull and lifeless that their brain panics and tries to get working. It shows why after a long time of drugs they become so stupid. Their brain just gets sick of saving their butt. So they just stay in this state eternally.

 

[W3H5]

I'd rather take the drugs than go to all that effort. Saying that, despite my colourful past and history of drug abuse I've only ever hallucinated from combining fluroxetine and California bud. That was trippy!

 

[Raikkonen1337]

you can always try and do astral projection...its not as hard as it seems...

 

[Tesla]

I laughed because of the drugs bit. It just means that when they take it their become so dull and lifeless that their brains panic and tries to get working. It shows why after a long time of drugs they become so stupid. Their brain just gets sick of saving their butt. So they just stay in this state eternally.

What an educated, unbiased opinion

 

[axletramp]

I thought that picture reminded me of something...

 

[Aldo]

Wtf is that?! I already felt sick but that picture has just made me 10 times worse!

 

[axletramp]

Total Recall.

 

[Bopop4]

The only thing that has ever made me see colours is if I close my eyes for while and relax, the backs of my eyelids turn into a colour. It's usually green, red or orange and I can change the colour and shade sometimes by looking in different directions and closing my eyes harder.

 

[Aldo]

Total Recall.

Remind me never to watch that film.

The only thing that has ever made me see colours is if I close my eyes for while and relax, the backs of my eyelids turn into a colour. It's usually green, red or orange and I can change the colour and shade sometimes by looking in different directions and closing my eyes harder.

You're just looking at traffic lights. 👍

 

[MarinaDiamandis]

The only thing that has ever made me see colours is if I close my eyes for while and relax, the backs of my eyelids turn into a colour. It's usually green, red or orange and I can change the colour and shade sometimes by looking in different directions and closing my eyes harder.

Happens to me too. Often if I face a coloured wall with my eyes closed, the inside of my eyelids will show the contrasting colour. So if I look at my blue bedroom wall, I see orange.

 

[AlexGTV]

I have seen some lucid dreams but awake the trippiest thing I ever saw was Bugs Bunny with eyes closed. I was at the bridge of sleep and there was Bugs Bunny by the beach sitting on a small plastic chair under an umbrella. With my mind I was ordering him to do various things like exercise, stand up, sit down, read a book, dig a hole, lie down e.t.c. All those in rapid speed. The awesome thing was that my imagination and the imagery were one and the same. I was not looking the black of my eyes but the actual scenes very vividely. Sadly, my mum shouted and destroyed the experience.

 

[Skython]

What an educated, unbiased opinion

[Sarcasm] Me!? Biased!? Noooooooo. [/Sarcasm]

 

[Sier_Pinski]

I have recently came across this short film that is centered around this experiment. It's entirely fictional, of course, but it's still worth a look.

 

[Raikkonen1337]

you can always try and do astral projection...its not as hard as it seems...

 

[Sier_Pinski]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqVV2u_1ADA&feature=player_embedded

That is a very interesting video. I am, however, particularly skeptical about the part where you become a ghost that can sense the current physical world. The video did say that Astral projection was the same as lucid dreaming--and dreaming involves a fantasy world that is entirely rendered by your subconscious.

Back on the thread topic, I have read an interesting report from a science journal that has successfully completed the experiment. Here is some of what the participant had to say about it:

“For quite a long time, there was nothing except a green-greyish fog. It was really boring, I thought, ‘ah, what a non-sense experiment!’ Then, for an indefinite period of time, I was ‘off’, like completely absent-minded. Then, all of sudden, I saw a hand holding a piece of chalk and writing on a black-board something like a mathematical formula. The vision was very clear, but it stayed only for few seconds and disappeared again. The image did not fill up the entire visual field, it was just like a ‘window’ into that foggy stuff.”

"...And then, suddenly, a young woman passed by on a bicycle, very fast, she crossed the visual field from the right to the left, with her blond long hair waving in the air. The image of the entire scene was very clear, with many details, and yes, the colours were very vivid.”

“A friend of mine and I, we were inside a cave. We made a fire. There was a creek flowing under our feet, and we were on a stone. She had fallen into the creek, and she had to wait to have her things dried. Then she said to me: ‘Hey, move on, we should go now’.”

“In the right side of the visual field, a manikin suddenly appeared. He was all in black, had a long narrow head, fairly broad shoulders, very long arms and a relatively small trunk…. He approached me, stretching out his hands, very long, very big, like a bowl, and he stayed so for a while, and then he went back to where he came from, slowly.”

Source:
http://mindhacks.com/2008/11/17/ganzfeld-hallucinations/

That all sounds pretty concrete to me.