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What happens if you make eye contact with someone for 10 minutes

Credits: charletgregory / Pixabay

An Italian psychologist has conducted a very surprising experiment which discovered that by making eye contact with someone for ten minutes in low light can cause hallucinations similar to those caused by LSD.  

Gionanni Caputo, the psychologist behind this surprising experiment, published his results in the journal Psychiatry Research. Although his experiment was very simple, it is one which very few people have tried to do. If you stand in front of someone for ten minutes and look at them in the eye without taking your eyes away – the results are quite disconcerting! You could experience hallucinations similar to those caused by an LSD.

The experiment involved 40 adult volunteers, half of which were a control group that stared at a wall for ten minutes while the other half split into pairs, sat one meter apart and stared into each others eyes in a dimly lit room.

This experiment showed that the second group were much more susceptible to hallucinations.  For 90% of the group the face of the other person became distorted, with 75% of the group seeing a monster or a close friend or relative in their place.The psychologist suggested that this reaction is possibly due to sensory deprivation as when the brain zones out and then comes quickly back to reality your subconscious then projects an image onto the person you are making eye contact with, therefore creating a hallucination.

This experience is similar to another study carried out by the American student Mandy Len Catron who told the New York Times that after having stared into the eyes of friend for four minutes they each asked a series of 36 intimate questions. After this experience she said that “I felt like I was in a state of wonder…part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.” By making eye contact with someone for 10 minutes, the same thing happens to someones face as it does to a repeated word, it loses it’s significance and it’s place in reality.

Sources : iflsciencePsychiatry Research

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