An Italian study found that merely staring into the eyes of someone can cause one to hallucinate and also feel detached from his body.
The findings are quite similar to previous studies which found that staring into someone’s eyes can cause one to experience feelings of disconnection from reality.
The lead author of the study, Dr. Giovanni Caputo can’t totally explain the hallucinations though he has some theories.
To conduct the study, 20 healthy young adult volunteers were paired up and asked to stare, emotionless, into each others’ eyes as they sat in a dimly lit room, while 20 other participants were asked to sit in the same room and stare at a black wall for 10 minutes. The study participants weren’t told the reason for the study.
The study participants then filled a questionnaire about their experience. It revealed that the people who engaged in interpersonal staring were very likely to experience symptoms of dissociation, including a loss of connection with reality, a feeling of time dragging on, and changes in sound and color perception.
Also, 90 percent of the participants reported experiencing hallucinations during interpersonal staring. They reported seeing changes and distortions to the person’s face, sometimes seeing the person’s face morph into a monster or animal, into their own face or into the face of a friend or relative.
The people who stared at the wall also experienced some symptoms of dissociation, but they did not have any hallucinations.
According to Dr. Giovanni Caputo, Hallucinations might happen “as the brain snaps back to reality after zoning out and the mind projects subconscious thoughts onto the face of the other person”.
PhilÂ