What most people don’t realise is that everyone’s imagery is different. If someone sees simple pseudo-hallucinations in the Ganzflicker, their brains may automatically interpret that information as more meaningful or realistic with help from their mind’s eye. High-level processes can interact with low-level processes to shape your brain’s interpretation of what you are seeing. Visual mental imagery, or the mental simulation of sensory information – the “mind’s eye” – is one of these high-level cognitive processes. The latter is more open to interpretation. Discriminating whether a line is vertical or horizontal, for example, is considered a low-level sensory process, whereas determining whether a face is friendly or annoyed is a high-level cognitive process. The brain is composed of many different regions interacting with each other, including “low-level” sensory regions and regions that correspond to “high-level” cognitive processes. But how do some people see complex pseudo-hallucinations such as “old stone castles”? Capacity for mental images “Simple” experiences - like seeing lasers or illusory colours - have previously been explained as your brain reacting to clashes between Ganzflicker and the brain’s rhythms. Ganzflicker is known to elicit the experience of anomalous sensory information in the external environment, called pseudo-hallucinations. If the sensory information being processed is the Ganzflicker, this will interact with your brain’s own rhythms to alter how you fill in or interpret what you are seeing. Your visual cortex extrapolates from the surrounding visual information so that your whole field of view appears to be complete. Yet you see the world as continuous and dynamic, thanks to your brain’s sophisticated ability to fill in the blanks.įor example, your eyes have a blind spot right outside the centre of vision, but you don’t see a patch of blackness everywhere you look. In other words, your brain collects sensory information with a certain frequency. Like a computer screen, the part of your brain that processes visual information (the visual cortex) has a refresh “button” which helps it sample the environment – taking snapshots of the world in quick succession. We have come up with a theory of where those individual differences come from. Visual experiences set in almost as soon as you start looking at it.īut our new study, published in Cortex, shows that while some people see castles or fractals in the Ganzflicker, others see nothing. In less than ten minutes, it creates altered states of consciousness, with no lasting effects for the brain. In reality, they are statements that different people reported after viewing the “Ganzflicker” on their computers – an intense full-screen, red-and-black flicker that anyone can access online and that we use in our experiments. ![]() ![]() I saw old stone buildings … like a castle … I was flying above it. Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen began to expand. I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream? Imaging data are stored at NeuroVault ( ).Consider the statements below. Model code and data are stored at ModelDB ( ). The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Additional support was provided by the Yale Detre Fellowship for Translational Neuroscience as well as the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in the form of a National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Young Investigator Award for A.R.P. ![]() was supported by the Integrated Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Training (IMPORT) in Psychiatry grant (5R25MH071584-07) as well as the Clinical Neuroscience Research Training in Psychiatry grant (5T32MH19961-14) from NIMH and a VA Schizophrenia Research Special Fellowship from VACHS, West Haven, CT, USA. The contents of this work are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official view of NIH or the CMHC/DMHAS. Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders, VA Connecticut Healthcare System (VACHS), West Haven, CT, USA. ![]() was funded by an International Mental Health Research Organization/Janssen Rising Star Translational Research Award National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant 5R01MH067073-09 Clinical and Translational Science Award grant UL1 TR000142 from the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) NIH roadmap for Medical Research the Clinical Neurosciences Division of the U.S. This work was supported by the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) and Connecticut State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). Feeney for technical assistance as well as A. The authors dedicate this work to the memory and legacy of Ralph E.
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