Steps to experience the Ganzflicker illusion that helped the ancient Greek philosophers find wisdom

" I felt like I could reach through the screen to another world. The laser beams became a fan-like circle spinning around, and then it felt like the screen began to expand. out. I see old stone buildings… like a castle… I'm flying over them.'

Not a dream, that's the description of one of the volunteers involved in the Ganzflicker psychedelic study – an ancient method of psychedelic stimulation that you can make at home right now with a computer.

In general, Ganzflicker hallucinations are triggered when your hearing, sight, or both senses are exposed to unstructured and boring stimuli, such as hearing white noise, looking at a screen that is flat, flickering, or simply when you close your eyes in search of darkness.

The brain is then supposed to amplify the neurotic signals when it's trying to figure out why you're just seeing or hearing such a monotone signal. It then solves this problem by creating pieces of false memories, inserting them into your vision and hearing, causing you to see and hear images and sounds that are not real.

That's when the Ganzflicker illusion comes into play.

Guide to experiencing the Ganzflicker illusion

In the 1930s during the Nazi era, Wolfgang Metzger, a psychologist in Frankfurt identified hallucinations and altered electrical brain signals when a volunteer was asked to stare at a boring vision.

This can be considered the first modern experiment of the Ganzflicker illusion. But the history of this illusion actually goes back to ancient times. In "The Caves and Minds of the Ancient Greeks ", author Yulia Ustinova says that Pythagoreans' followers often locked themselves for days in pitch-black caves in search of information. through illusions.

Modern reports confirm cases of miners experiencing hallucinations when trapped underground for a long time. In contrast, Arctic explorers also experienced hallucinations when they saw a white landscape surrounded by only ice and snow.

Now, if you also want to try a Ganzflicker illusion, give yourself 30 minutes to rest, find a dark room, and follow the instructions below:

Step 1:  Download whitenoise white noise from this link, open the music player and choose to repeat it many times.

Step 2:  Open this link, press F11 to play the flashing image in full screen mode.

Step 3: Wear headphones to listen to white noise, sit or lie in a comfortable position that allows you to stare at the screen without getting tired.

Step 4: Relax and wait for the Ganzflicker illusion to appear. Research reports show that it usually only takes about 10-30 minutes for you to see strange images.

Alternatively, you can help scientists studying the Ganzflicker illusion by writing down your experience (in English) in this survey. They're trying to collect Ganzflicker hallucinogen data from people from all over the world.

Scientists claim the Ganzflicker illusion is harmless and disappears once you remove your headphones and turn off the screen. It leaves no lasting psychological or brain-altering effects. But people with weak astral bodies should not try this illusion because sometimes it can create many scary ghost images.

People with a history of epilepsy are advised not to look at a flickering screen, if so, they can try a static screen version of Ganzflicker as seen in the video below:

What if you still don't see the Ganzflicker hallucination?

Reshanne Reeder, a senior lecturer in Psychology at Edge Hill University in the UK, who has many years of experience studying Ganzflicker hallucinogens, said: "Actually, not everyone can experience this illusion. vividly.

" In studies with the Ganzflicker psychedelic test, we found that nearly half of the participants would fall asleep and see absolutely nothing. The other half mostly see simple geometric patterns or illusory patches of color , " Reeder wrote.

According to the researchers, the chance of experiencing Ganzflicker hallucinations is related to the visual processing ability of each person's brain.

Just like a computer monitor has a refresh rate in Hz, the part of your brain that processes visual information, or your visual cortex, also has a "button" that refreshes continuously, which helps it sample the environment. – by taking consecutive pictures from the outside world.

In other words, your brain collects visual information with a certain frequency. But unlike a flickering screen, the brain can fill in the gaps between the shadows it can't capture with extrapolated images. As a result, you can see the outside world in motion very smoothly, with almost no lag or lag.

For example, your eye has a blind spot just outside the center of your vision, but you will never see a black patch in your vision. That's because the visual cortex has filled in its extrapolated information to fill the entire field of view for you.

The same mechanism works in a Ganzflicker experiment, where the brain creates pure hallucinations when your vision is monotonous. The problem is that each person's brain scan frequency is different, leading to different experiences when testing the Ganzflicker illusion.

" People with a lower frequency of scans in the visual cortex - closer to the Ganzflicker frequency - were more prone to hallucinations, " says Reeder . In contrast, people with a higher scan frequency in the visual cortex provided give them a buffer against the effects of Ganzflicker"

However, most of us will fall somewhere between these two extremes. So you might not be drowsy when you test the Ganzflicker illusion, but you probably won't actually see a medieval castle or a surreal hologram when you test it.

Despite this, the majority of participants in the Ganzflicker psychedelic test thought it was worth a try. Themselves to " hack " into your visual cortex was an interesting idea, and why not try your luck with that? 

One last word of warning is that if you really find hallucinations amusing with Ganzflicker, watch out you might get addicted to it.

Jessica Tanner

Update 28 June 2021