By Peter Kaidheim
“First, shut your eyes. Now, along with your index fingers on the interior fringe of your eyeballs, press in and towards the temples. Press till it’s barely painful and preserve at it for about ten seconds.”
“Like this?”
“That’s proper. Now what do you see?”
“The darkness is disappearing. There’s a really shiny gentle swelling up within the heart of my eyes. It’s getting even brighter. And now there’s a form of crisscross sample arising from inside the sunshine, like a checkerboard with luminous squares.”
“Good. Launch the stress for a number of seconds, however preserve your eyes closed. Now, press once more and inform me what you see.”
“I see wavy traces this time—a number of them. Coloured traces, shiny blues and greens. They’re sliding throughout my eyes from left to proper. Jogs my memory of tripping on acid.
“Okay. Now take your fingers away, open your eyes and focus them shortly on the white wall over there. Can you continue to see any wavy traces?”
“You’re proper. I can.”
What’s going down is an illustration of phosphene hallucinosis carried out by Dr. Gerald Oster, professor of biophysics at Mount Sinai College of Medication in New York. Basically, phosphene imaginative and prescient is what the followers of Sat Guru Maharaj Ji, the erstwhile good Grasp at 13, used to name the sunshine. If you confirmed up at a Maharaji ashram, the senior premies, would maintain you in a no-food state of sensory deprivation for 48 hours, then press down onerous in your eyelids and then you definitely’d see the sunshine. They claimed that solely the Excellent Grasp’s chosen adepts may administer the sunshine, however, as we now know, anyone with eyes to see and two fingers to jab into them, à Ia Moe Howard, can take pleasure in this trippy, optical delusion within the privateness of their very own dwelling for free of charge in any respect. Really the spirits rule us. No one is aware of precisely what phosphenes are. The phrase comes from Greek phos (“gentle”) and phasno (“to indicate”), and means what we see once we’re “seeing stars.” What they could be are sparks of pure power, gentle perceived in the mean time of its conversion into nervous-system data between the cornea and the mind. Thus, phosphenes would be the habits of atomic particles as noticed by the bare eye: the interface of two worlds, the traditional and the nuclear—the fourth dimension. Via phosphenes you may, like Luke Skywalker, “swap to hyperspace”—simply by closing your eyes or utilizing your head to catch a baseball.
Phosphene pictures are frequent to all folks, besides the congenitally blind. The subtle experiments at the moment being carried out within the laboratories of optic researchers like Dr. Oster is a part of a practice of phosphene analysis that stretches again no less than two centuries.
When Benjamin Franklin was serving as ambassador to France through the eighteenth century, one of many parlor video games then standard referred to as for a bunch of friends to type a circle, clasp fingers collectively and clutch a static electrical energy generator. The end result was a delightful electrical increase. One evening, Franklin seen that in case you shut your eyes when the jolt hits, you see quite a lot of luminous shapes—flickering filigrees of sunshine and showers of shiny sparks.
Since Franklin’s discovery that phosphenes may be electrically induced, most phosphene analysis has employed electrical stimulation in a single type or one other. Alessandro Volta, father of the volt, found that phosphenes are produced solely on the making and breaking of {the electrical} circuit, not through the time of present circulate. Volta additionally discovered that the simplest option to induce phosphenes electrically is by inserting electrodes on the temples. In one in every of Volta’s experiments he moistened one hand and took maintain of an electrode with it. He then touched the opposite electrode to his brow, producing a “gentle, reasonably shiny,… [that] seems like a luminous circle, below which determine it presents itself additionally in a number of different experiments.”
Within the early a part of the nineteenth century, the Bohemian physiologist Jan Purkynë discovered that by making use of one electrode to his brow and one other to his mouth, whereas making and breaking the present with a string of steel beads, he may produce a reasonably regular circulate of phosphenes. Purkynë’s curiosity in phosphenes, like Dr. Oster’s, apparently had its roots in deeper questions in regards to the nature of human consciousness. In an essay on the physiology of the attention, Purkynë wrote: “The attention, by its uninterrupted relation to the mind, seems to be a particular organ of fantasy.”
A more moderen contributor to our understanding of phosphenes was the late Max Knoll, a German scientist greatest referred to as one of many builders of the electron microscope. In his laboratory in Munich, Knoll employed trendy electrical tools (a square-wave generator) to generate a extra steady form of on-off present than Purkynë had been capable of produce along with his steel beads. Knoll discovered that by various the frequency of {the electrical} pulse administered to his topics he may change the character of the phosphenes they had been seeing. In accordance with Knoll, pulses within the vary from 5 cycles per second to 40 cycles per second (the identical frequency as mind waves) are the best for producing phosphenes. By analyzing sketches drawn by the individuals in his experiments, Knoll was capable of establish 15 courses of phosphene figures. He additionally offered proof which confirmed that every class of phosphene sample was linked to a really particular frequency vary.
Investigation of the frequency-dependence of phosphenes is at the moment being continued by Dr. Oster, who has theorized concerning the causes of that dependence. In an article Up to date in Scientific American a number of years in the past, Oster wrote:
Phosphenes would be the habits of atomic particles as noticed by the bare eye: the interface of two worlds, the traditional and the nuclear— the fourth dimension.
The frequency dependence of phosphenes’ type is suggestive of some form of resonance phenomenon, with totally different teams of nerve cells appearing collectively when they’re pushed electrically at a sure fee.
A lot of the proof gathered by Oster appears to assist his resonance principle. He found that the flickering phosphenes produced by electrical stimulation disappear if the frequency of {the electrical} pulse exceeds 40 cycles per second. Oster described the eerie visible impact that takes place when the crucial frequency is surpassed: “The phosphenes out of the blue disappear, leaving one with a sense of being alone in area.”
All of the analysis into the character and performance of phosphenes to date has produced no clear and full understanding of the hows and whys of those subjective pictures. However even the partial image now out there is stuffed with essential and sometimes fascinating particulars about this visible phenomenon. It’s identified that there are a selection of nonelectrical causes for phosphenes. You don’t essentially need to wire your temples to a Lionel practice transformer to present your self a phosphene present.
One apparent methodology of seeing stars is to manage a pointy blow to the top. Vacationing in Paris a number of years in the past, Dr. Oster found {that a} comparatively secure option to convey on a phosphene present was to hit himself on the again of the top with a French bread.
Different causes of phosphenes are migraine complications and alcohol. Alcoholics who’ve progressed to the stage of delirium tremens are particularly inclined, which helps to elucidate the tendency of delirium tremens victims to see “spiders” and different shapes the place they actually don’t exist. In fact, essentially the most venerable methodology of inducing phosphenes is a technique broadly practiced earlier than the primary scientific laboratory was even imagined— stimulation with psychoactive chemical substances. As Oster says, “Phosphenes look like a big characteristic of psychedelic intoxication.” Certainly.
Though hallucinogenic medicine weren’t employed in scientific analysis on phosphenes till Max Knoll first administered LSD to some individuals in his experiments, “unscientific” consciousness of the connection between psychedelics and phosphenes goes again virtually to prehistory. The literature of psychedelics medicine, from the Rig-Veda to Leary, comprises an abundance of comparable descriptions of what can solely be phosphene imagery. A typical instance of such an outline is the next passage from Heinrich Klüver’s basic Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations. After swallowing peyote buttons for the primary time, Klüver reported seeing:
…clouds from left to proper by means of optical discipline. Tail of a pheasant (in heart of discipline) turns into shiny yellow star; star into sparks. Shifting scintillating screw; “a whole bunch” of screws. A sequence of quickly altering objects in agreeable colours. A rotating wheel within the heart of a silvery floor.
Not surprisingly, topics who obtained hallucinogens in Knoll’s experiments reported “visions” much like Klüver’s, main Knoll to conclude that small quantities of hallucinogenic medicine, similar to LSD, produce phosphene pictures which can be dramatically “extra elaborate.”
Writing in Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Evaluate in 1966, Oster described his experiment with LSD and the insights he gained concerning the nature of phosphenes whereas below the affect of the drug. Throughout the course of his six-hour journey, he studied plenty of moiré patterns that had been projected onto a white wall via an overhead projector. Moiré patterns are “figures produced by the overlapping of two or extra households of traces; the locus of factors of intersection type the moiré sample.” Oster’s observations led him to conclude that every one imaginative and prescient has a round sample superimposed on it by the curved nerve fibers surrounding the retina of the attention. Underneath regular circumstances, we’re not conscious of the sample created by these nerve fibers, however psychedelic medicine make us conscious of this round “display screen” via the moiré results it creates once we open our eyes and have a look at objects in the actual world. In different phrases, the sample of traces within the eye’s “display screen” interacts with the traces shaped by the objects we’re viewing to trigger the shimmering, dynamic high quality.
Anybody who has visited an exhibition of op artwork work by artists similar to Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Larry Poons or Gerald Oster (that’s proper, he’s additionally a well-regarded op artist) is prone to be accustomed to moiré patterns. In truth, the methods of op artwork are a direct outgrowth of what optic analysis has taught us concerning the functioning of the human eye. The 1965 “Responsive Eye” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork—the primary main exhibition of op artwork work—was a veritable grocery store of phosphene imagery. The artists represented within the exhibit manipulated traces and colours of their work in order to create artistic endeavors which can be workouts in pure notion. Within the phrases of the “Responsive Eye” catalog, “by creating particular optical results (however on a flat floor!) we take away it from the surface world and take it into that terra incognita between the cornea and the mind.”
The op artwork painters of the Sixties had been hardly the primary artists to delve into that terra incognita and return with phosphene-based pictures, nevertheless. Examples of phosphene shapes may be present in paintings from such divergent sources as prehistoric cave work in Almería, Spain, and woven tapestries from Peru’s Incan civilization. The essential 15 phosphene shapes recognized in the midst of Max Knoll’s analysis may be seen within the people artwork of many various cultures, from prehistory to the current. The significance of phosphenes within the growth of artwork is a subject that has not but been completely explored. However as Dr. Oster says, “Artwork historians would possibly nicely contemplate the potential results of phosphenes as an ‘intrinsic’ supply of inspiration for males of many various societies when they’re speculating on relations and cross-influences amongst primitive societies.”
A lot stays to be defined concerning the thriller of phosphenes and their connection to the complicated functioning of the human mind, however even the data we now have of those inner gentle reveals holds monumental implications for our understanding of consciousness and notion.
In Carlos Castaneda’s Tales of Energy, the sorcerer don Juan says that people are “luminous beings” made up of “luminous fibers” however that the majority people should not attuned to noticing this situation. Nonsense, most rational folks would say. But one of many essential implications of the data gained from phosphene analysis is actually that we’re certainly able to planes of consciousness that transcend what now passes for “regular” notion. It has typically been acknowledged that our consciousness of the exterior world is conditioned by the bounds of our sense perceptions. By increasing these limits, we develop our world.
Learn the complete difficulty right here.