Old crumbling stone buildings. Spidery webs of sunshine. Bright faces that morph between animal and human and again once more. All imagery you may see in the event you’re in the course of a mushroom journey, but additionally what you may see in the event you take a look at the “Ganzflicker”—an intense, purple and black flickering display that anyone can access online.

Though the aforementioned flicker has been utilized in psychology experiments since 2011, this most up-to-date iteration was put on-line by a bunch of German and UK-based researchers who introduced their analysis in the journal Cortex earlier this month. Their aim, as a part of an ongoing experiment, is to determine why this purple and black flash causes some folks’s brains to hallucinate vividly, whereas others solely see… a purple and black flash. (People who expertise seizures induced by flashing lights ought to keep far-off.)

According to the researchers behind the research, what you see—and the way vividly you’ll see it—boils all the way down to the habits of your visible cortex, which is the a part of your mind chargeable for processing all visible information, together with optical illusions. Writing for The Conversation final week, one of many researchers, Reshanne Reeder, explained that this chunk of the cortex is superb at “filling in the blanks” in our notion. It’s the visible cortex that enables us to fill in blind spots simply outdoors our imaginative and prescient, for instance, or that “fills in” missing space in the event you lose the power to see in one in every of your eyes.

Being in a position to mentally fill in these kinds of blanks with your individual psychological imagery, the researchers mentioned, is an instance of a “high-level” cognitive course of that this cortical chunk is chargeable for whereas figuring out whether or not a line is vertical or horizontal is a “low-level” course of. As Reeder defined:

High-level processes can work together with low-level processes to form your mind’s interpretation of what you’re seeing. If somebody sees easy pseudo-hallucinations within the Ganzflicker, their brains could routinely interpret that info as extra significant or practical with assist from their thoughts’s eye.

In different phrases, the explanation I’d seen some weirdly practical inexperienced vegetation after staring on the Ganzflicker for all of 5 minutes is solely an indication that my visible cortex is simply attempting to patch collectively some form of sample within the random flashes of purple and black that I’m gazing. You’ll in all probability see one thing utterly totally different, simply because everybody’s mind anatomy is slightly unique, and everyone’s own perception of the world round them is, too.

Hopefully, research just like the Ganflicker can educate us extra about why that could be the case. If you check out the sparkle for your self, be at liberty to fill out the related questionnaire, which principally asks questions on the way you’d describe your individual psychological imagery, and what you noticed within the flicker, if something.