It’s the 21st-century version of the old prank where you give a dumb kid oregano to smoke and watch them pretend to be high.
I just developed a new device that will get you high, but only using pulsing lights aimed right at your eyes leaving you stumbling around like you’re tripping balls… it’s called a strobe light. Send me money.
Anecdotes like this are hardly surprising and still, nothing more than placebo effect. If you went on shroomery.org and told people that inserting a black cardamon pod into your anus and spending an hour in front of a mirror in fixed and quiet contemplation induces an hallucinatory state, you would not have to wait long for positive trip reports to be posted, if you provided enough pseudoscientific context to make it seem plausible enough for the most gullible.
This is partly because people are very suggestible by nature, and partly because you will notice plenty of little perceptual oddities if you are expecting them. Stare fixedly at a mirror for long enough and you* will *“hallucinate” that your face is melting and twisting in ways that you would typically associate with psychedelic states - but we don’t generally space out in the mirror for no good reason, because who has the time?
However, if you tell someone that they are going to experience an altered state of consciousness they are going to put their attention on their state of mind and perceptions in ways that are out of the ordinary, and they are going to notice things that haven’t taken the time to - and if they have been prepared to, they are going to attribute this to the magic bean in their butt or the tones they’ve been intently listening to. This doesn’t mean that these things have altered brain function, they’ve just been tricked into accepting a post hoc fallacy.
I’ve used them from various methods (CDs, light/sound machines). The effects are nowhere near as strong as drugs, but they do have an effect.
As far as safety, I am not sure. I will tell you a bit about my own background on the subject.
A few years ago I was suffering from depression, so I started using beta wave binaural beats since those are supposed to help with depression. It did help a bit, but I noticed I got really anxious. I didn’t make the connection, but eventually read that beta can cause anxiety. After I stopped the beta music the anxiety got better. I felt really uncomfortable in my own skin and would feel that way even when I wasn’t listening to the CD.
Another thing I tried is gamma. Gamma is good for mood too, but I noticed that even when I wasn’t using the CDs my thoughts would start forming disjointed streams. Like I’d be driving to work and my thoughts would not be separate, they’d flow into each other. is that good or bad? I have no idea. But I noticed that problem.
I have not noticed bad things with the other kinds of CDs like delta, alpha, theta. In fact when I have brain fog from not getting enough sleep or thinking too hard (like when I have to learn a lot of new stuff at work) the theta cds are pretty helpful since they supposedly help reset Na and K pumps.
There is also this, based on a different concept. I don’t know how effective it is. Sometimes I feel my mood lifted, sometimes not. I don’t know how much if any is actually due to the music.
Music in general can alter mood, but to actually affect brain chemistry in the same way as a drug is more than a little doubtful.
The effect is presumably the same as one experienced in a religious frenzy, with rhythmic music, clapping, chanting, and dancing. This will create a chemical response and subsequent mood change, but not to the level of a strong hallucinagin.
have you ever noticed blurry vision?
Nitpick:
An out of body event/experience is just the sensation of floating out of the body, and few people dispute that this is a real phenomenon.
Astral projection is the belief that some sort of spirit actually exits the body and goes sightseeing.
I built one of these things about 20 years ago, from a project in an electronics hobbyist magazine, except that this one also had bright strobing red LEDs that were synchronised to the binaural beating. It was known as a hemisync, brain machine or mind machine. The binaural audio was sent to headphones, and the LEDs were mounted on wrap-around shades, to be experienced with the eyes closed as quite a lot of light still gets through the eyelids. The unit could be programmed to sweep through any beat frequency from (IIRC) 0.5 Hz to 20 Hz, and the idea was that these frequencies would stimulate a state of mind analogous to that particular brainwave frequency, i.e. Delta waves (or deep sleep) at the lower end, rising through Theta (imaginative dozing), Alpha (meditation), Beta (everyday state of mind) and finally at the upper end, High Beta (intense/anxious). Naturally, we took this machine on the road to various night clubs, and must have tried it out on a good couple of thousand people. Most people reported having an intensely enjoyable experience, a tiny minority would experience nothing, and a tiny tiny minority would have a massive epileptic fit. Mostly the people having seizures were nutted on a cocktail of hardcore drugs (the lightshow on the dancefloor was also scene for many an impromptu grand mal), but regardless, we retired the machine. I believe the binaural audio was safe, it was the strobing lights, particularly at the higher frequencies, that overloaded the occasional brain.
I also built myself an EEG - a project from the same hobbyist magazine - and wondered what would happen if I used the EEG to send my brainwaves to the hemisync, which would then output beats and strobes at the same frequency as the original brainwaves. I reckoned it would be a bit like the positive feedback howl experienced when a microphone gets too close to its speaker. Fortunately I ran out of money to buy batteries and electrodes for the EEG, because later I found out that someone else had the same idea, and found that such a neural feedback arrangement produces a very high probability of an instant epileptic fit, even on someone who doesn’t suffer from epilepsy and isn’t already high. Dodged a bullet there, though I do think it would have been quite an experience.
Naturally I used the hemisync on myself quite a lot. With the strobes it’s a psychedelic kaleidoscope, and can be intense or relaxing depending on the program. With just the binaural audio the effect is much reduced, and of course without the multi-coloured helter-skelter ride produced by the strobes.
I don’t have it any more, but I could still build another. Somewhere in all my junk is that EEG kit, and I have the money for batteries and electrodes now…
did anyone report having blurry vision following use?
Not that I recall. Quite a lot of people looked happily dazed after a 15 minute session, but the visual after effects were minimal, as the lights weren’t blindingly bright, and were viewed through closed eyelids.
You can get a reasonable idea of the light intensity by striking a flint cigarette lighter a few inches in front of your closed eyes.
Didn’t see your name in the poster list, so you may have missed this thread:
I miss Omni Magazine
People shouldn’t dismiss non-pharmacologically induced methods of hallucinating. Sensory deprivation chambers, for example, can lead to Altered States so powerful that you have to be careful you don’t get Hurt.
That took me a few seconds to get, Rhythmdvl. Nice.