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The Ganzfeld Effect Is Similar to Meditation

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Roger Williams
The Ganzfeld Effect Is Similar to Meditation

The Ganzfeld effect happens when your brain is starved of visual stimulation and fills in the blanks on its own. This changes your perception and causes unusual visual and auditory patterns. It can even lead to hallucinations.

Ganzfeld is a German word coined by Gestalt Psychologists at the beginning of the 20th century and means “entire field”. We see only red and we hear only a waterfall. The Ganzfeld elicits visual and auditory illusions and it can induce stable — although, in most people, comparably weak—altered states of consciousness.

The Ganzfeld was first introduced in 1930, by German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger. Metzger was interested in elementary visual phenomena produced by impoverished visual conditions. The Ganzfeld contains no luminance border, luminance ramp, or texture. The light reaching the eye is absolutely equal from all possible directions. Such conditions, called whiteout, can occur naturally during a snowstorm or in an airplane flying through clouds.

The Ganzfeld procedure is a mild sensory isolation technique that was first introduced into experimental psychology during the 1930s and subsequently adapted by parapsychologists to test for the existence of psi--anomalous processes of information or energy transfer such as telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.

Subjective reports of alterations referring to the visual experience of the Ganzfeld include emerging illusionary percepts, diminishing luminance, the appearance of structures such as moving shapes, and dreamlike imagery with pseudo-hallucinatory quality. Changes in the auditory modality comprise illusionary percepts like sounds of machines, chirping birds or water, and even more complex percepts of voices or music.

Ganzfeld, i.e., exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field, elicits in most observers pseudo-hallucinatory percepts, and may even induce global functional state changes (‘altered states of consciousness’).

The Ganzfeld effect happens when you undergo sensory deprivation for some time and your brain tries to make sense of what is happening. Everyday life is full of sights and sounds. So, without sensory stimulation, your brain will fill in the gaps, which often causes visual hallucinations and auditory hallucinations. ‌

The Ganzfeld technique consists of exposing a person to an intense homogenous, unstructured sensory field. This type of sensory field can be induced through constant visual and auditory stimulation. For example, through specially designed goggles, one sees a red light and through earphones, one hears “brown” noise, which sounds like a waterfall.

In telepathy experiments, one person acts as the receiver and is exposed to white noise and a homogeneous red light. Another person, the sender, attempts to relay information to the receiver. With mixed results, these investigations are controversial and have been fiercely debated. The Ganzfeld effect has also been used to research hallucinations. It has provided information on how our senses, especially vision, function to detect change. Some people look at it as a way to induce visual phenomena and hallucinations without taking dangerous drugs. Some use it as a form of deep meditation.

The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to ‘unstructured’ sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones. It is probably best known for its uses in parapsychology experiments, but it is also used to induce hallucinations and sensory distortions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sensory experiences. A better way to achieve the Ganzfeld effect is by using the Ganzframe system from MindPlace.

The hardest part about performing the Ganzfeld experiment is getting the visual conditions right. This is achieved by cutting a ping pong ball in half and placing each half over your eyes. The balls have to be spotless and shouldn't let any light in through the corners. A tape is placed around the edges of the balls to account for this and to ensure that the balls don't fall off during the experiment.

Your brain builds your own reality. It’s also in charge of interpreting it. In fact, it receives electrical and chemical information sent by your senses. These environmental signals are generally variable. However, in a few circumstances, they’re homogeneous. In fact, it’s when these circumstances occur that a strange effect known as the Ganzfeld effect can happen.

If you can see, your brain uses visual input to make sense of the world. To create the Ganzfeld effect, you have to deprive your brain of the information it needs to perform this task. With no incoming signals, your perception of brightness slowly decreases. This is called the fade out. As retinal cells become more active, you might start to see the blood vessels in your eyes. In a few minutes, things may turn gray. Then you might see zigzag lines, dots, or a blob of color. The full effect usually takes 5 to 7 minutes.

For years, parapsychologists and other academics have used the Ganzfeld experiment to try and find evidence for the sixth sense. This is the ability of your brain to know future events or predict things without any sensory input. Although often considered pseudoscience, parapsychology is the study of psychic abilities, precognition, and telepathy. The Ganzfeld experiment was thought to be the link between this field and the scientific community.

Reality, as you see it, hear it, smell it and feel it, doesn’t come from outside. It comes from within. In fact, your brain builds its own reality before receiving information from your senses. This is known as the internal model.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman states that the foundation of this model can be observed in the anatomy of the brain. Almost all sensory information passes through the thalamus, on its way to the region of the brain responsible for processing these signals. There are many connections that go from the thalamus to the cortex. However, there are many more that go in the opposite direction (cortex-thalamus).

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