If you want some excitement this Halloween, you should try one of these terrifying experiments that will trick your brain into asking interesting questions about consciousness and perception.
If we remember the fifth scene of the first act of the play “ Hamlet ”, by William Shakespeare, the main character, after meeting the ghost of his father, comments to his best friend: “There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horacio, the kind that have been dreamed of in your philosophy. ” Hamlet means that the world is full of gruesome mysteries that may be difficult for us to imagine.
Perhaps one of the most mysterious things to us is, in fact, the human brain.
How does our conscience work? Can we trust our senses, or do they and the brain often mislead us?
Ready to explore the limits of your perception this Halloween?
Try: The Ghost in the Mirror
A very popular legend among the youngest says that if you look at yourself in a mirror by candlelight and say Veronica nine times, the specter of a woman will appear in the mirror.
In the past, young women allegedly performed similar rituals in hopes of being able to glimpse their future husbands on the mirror surface, in low light. It turns out that if you look in a mirror in a dimly lit room, supernatural events will not occur, but it is likely to reveal to the viewer one or more strange faces, sometimes with a fearsome expression and other times benevolent. How is it possible?
The researcher Giovanni Caputo from the Department of Psychology of the University of Urbino (Italy), set out to answer this question. Their results were published in the journal Perception in 2010.
In his study, Caputo recreated the visual illusion that occurs when a person looks at their own face in the mirror in a dimly lit room. The expert used “a relatively large mirror” of 0.5 x 0.5 meters, which he placed in a room illuminated by “a 25-watt incandescent light”, although he points out that to recreate this experiment, exactly the same conditions are not necessary. .
Each volunteer sat 0.4 meters from the mirror, and had approximately 10 minutes to look into it; although the illusion, says Caputo, usually manifests itself in about 1 minute.
they varied enormously. Out of a total of 50 participants: 66% reported seeing “huge deformations” of their own faces; 18% saw “their father’s face with changed features”, with 10% of them seeing the faces of deceased parents and 8% of parents still alive; 28% saw “an unknown person”; another 28% reported having seen “an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child or the portrait of an ancestor”; 18% saw the face of an animal and 48% saw “fantastic and monstrous beings”.
Troxler effect or spectral apparitions?
First of all, this visual illusion seems to arise due to the fact that the eyes are forced to fixate on a single point. In this regard, the faces in the mirror illusion could be compared to an optical illusion called “Troxler fading” or “Troxler effect .” This phenomenon, discovered by Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler in 1804, occurs when someone stares at a single point.
When it starts to happen, everything around that point, especially the splashes of color, will start to fade. As a result, it may appear that we have temporarily lost our ability to perceive colors. This probably happens as a result of “neural adaptation”, in which our nerve cells ignore stimuli that are not essential to perceive the object of our focus.
Therefore, we end up seeing the only thing we are fixing our gaze on and little or nothing else. However, this is not the case for faces in the mirror illusion, says Caputo: “This explanation predicts that facial features will fade and eventually disappear, while mirror appearances consist of new faces with new features. “.
Instead, what can happen is that by continually observing our own faces, the stimuli initially stop connecting significantly, so that we cannot “bring together” the facial features that we perceive.
This can result in a spontaneous reassembly of these traits, making it seem to us that our faces have been deformed or are strange. However, this doesn’t explain everything, Caputo suggests.
“The frequent appearance of fantastic and monstrous beings and animal faces cannot be explained by any real theory of facial processing,” says the expert.
The ‘other’ that we project
So what happens? It seems likely that once our vision is disrupted, our brains begin to project fears or desires onto the distorted features of the mirror, giving them new identities and purposes.
The researcher deduced this by analyzing the emotional responses of the participants to their individual “appearances” of the mirror. Depending on what they thought they had seen, the volunteers used to feel scared or happy.
“Some participants saw an evil expression on the other face and became anxious. Other participants felt that the other face was smiling or cheerful, and they experienced positive emotions in response,” says Caputo.
According to him, the appearance of strange faces in the mirror, to which we then respond in such a strong emotional way, is probably due to the fact that the complex process of building our own identity, which we experience every time we see our reflections, is interrupts.
The expert believes that this can cause a “potential breakdown of self-identity” that we experience as a horrifying dissociation.
Try … Is that your hand?
There are few things that we are so sure of as that we own every inch of our bodies. Well … this is true for most of us, at least. After serious health events, such as brain injuries, a person may experience something known as “somatoparaphrenia.” It is a monothematic deception based on a sense of dissociation of a part or even the whole body.
In other words, a person will believe that a limb, some other part of the body, or his whole body, does not belong to him.
It may sound extreme, but some simple experiments have shown that most of us can be tricked into dissociating ourselves from our bodies, or feeling artificial body parts or even phantom limbs like our own.
The most famous experiment carried out in this regard is that of the rubber hand. In this experiment, a dark screen protects one of the participant’s arms from view. In addition, the researchers place a rubber arm in front of the participant. Then, they repeatedly tickle the rubber hand and the participant’s hidden real hand at the same time.
At this point, the volunteer has surprisingly taken possession of the rubber arm and seems to react as if his own real hand has been tickled.
In a study focused on the rubber hand illusion, a team of researchers from the University of Milan, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan and the University of Turin (Italy), wanted to see what happens in the brain when a person experiences this strange illusion. The key is to use certain forms of multisensory stimulation.
The MRI scans showed that when the participants began to believe that the rubber hand was theirs, the brain networks that coordinated movement in the real hand began to decline.
“The current findings that shed new light on our understanding of the different aspects that contribute to the formation of coherent self-awareness, suggest that body self-awareness is strictly dependent on the possibility of movement.”
Willing to try them?
