Brilliant psychology secrets for staring into the eyes

An Italian psychologist conducted psychological research on how to change people's consciousness without using drugs and asked 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes.

This simple and deceptive task not only made the volunteers go through "out of body" experiences, but also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, or themselves in the faces of their partners.

The experiment, conducted by Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino, involved 20 young men (15 of them girls) meeting in pairs, sitting in a dimly lit room a meter away from each other, and staring each other into their partner's eyes for ten minutes.

The lighting in the room was bright enough for volunteers to easily see the features of their partners' faces but dim enough to reduce their general perception of color.

Scientists asked the control group consisting of 20 volunteers to sit and stare for 10 minutes in another room dimly lit in pairs, but seated facing a wall white.

The volunteers were informed very little about the purpose of the study, and that is related to a "contemplative experiment with eyes open."

Once the 10 minutes were up, the volunteers were asked to complete questionnaires regarding what they experienced during and after the experiment.

One questionnaire focused on studying schizophrenic symptoms the volunteers might be experiencing, and another asked them about what they saw on their partners (the group that was asked to stare) or their faces.

Dissociation is a term used in psychology to describe a whole set of psychological experiences that cause a person to feel disconnected from their immediate surroundings.

Abuse and trauma, drugs such as ketamine, alcohol, LSD, and now seemingly face-staring can cause symptoms such as memory loss, seeing everything in distorted colors, or feeling like the world is not real.

"Participants in the staring group said they had a magical experience unlike anything they had felt before," Christian Jarrett wrote in the Research Digest of the British Psychological Association.

In the journal Psychiatry Research, Caputo said that the eye-staring group outperformed the control group in all of the questionnaires, indicating that there are profound effects of staring into another person's eyes for ten continuous minutes on visual perception and mental state.

“In the dissociative states test, they answered the strongest estimates of items related to low color intensity, quieter or louder than expected sounds, mind wandering, and the slow passage of time,” Jarrett explains.

In the strange faces survey, 90 percent of the group that stared at faces agreed that they had seen distorted facial features. 75 percent of them confirmed that they saw a monster, 50 percent said they saw sides of their faces on their partners' faces, and 15 percent said they saw the face of a relative."

These results illustrate what scientist Kabuto found in 2010 when he conducted a similar experiment with 50 volunteers who stared at themselves in the mirror for ten minutes.

The research paper said; Titled, The Illusion of the Strange Face in the Mirror, the volunteers began, less than a minute later, to see what Caputo describes as "the strange illusion."

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik wrote in Scientific American: “Participants' descriptions included seeing huge deformations of their faces, seeing the faces of their living or dead parents, typical faces such as an old woman or a child or the face of an ancestor, or the faces of animals like a cat or Pig or lion, and even wild or fictional creatures.

The 50 participants all said that they had felt jealous when faced with a face that suddenly seemed unfamiliar to them, and some of them felt strong emotions. ”

Caputo says - according to what Jarrett wrote in the British Psychological Society - that the effects were stronger than those experienced by volunteers who stared in the mirror in 2010, although the eye-staring group in this latest experiment had a higher average total than the control group by 2.45 points in their questionnaires (which used a five-point scale of which the least 0 and the most 5).

Martinez-Conde and Machnik explain that it is most likely a matter of something called neurodegeneration. It describes how our nerves slow down or even stop responding to constant stimuli.

This happens when we stare at any sight or object for an extended period, your perception begins to fade until you close your eyes, or the view changes, or it may be caught by small, rapid involuntary eye movements called microsaccades.