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Anyone Tried Ganzfeld At Home?

gattino

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,523
Given the simplicity of the set up (the half pingpong balls over the eyes, red light, white noise) for producing apparently psychic and at least hallucinatory experiences, it occurs to me that there really ought to be a simple kit you could buy online to do it at home.

A quick check on amazon finds expensive goggles of some kind, but it ought to be more straightforward than that.

One could easily tape half ping pong balls to your own eyes (though I wonder how easy they are to half without creating sharp jagged edges) and there are surely recordings of static or white noise to listen to over your phone or computer. That just leaves the red...or any other colour..light. Not sure about that bit.

But anyway, has it ever occurred to anyone here to just give it a go?
 
Begs the question 'why the hell would you want to do that to yourself ?

INT21
 
gattino said:
Given the simplicity of the set up (the half pingpong balls over the eyes, red light, white noise) for producing apparently psychic and at least hallucinatory experiences, it occurs to me that there really ought to be a simple kit you could buy online to do it at home.

A quick check on amazon finds expensive goggles of some kind, but it ought to be more straightforward than that.

One could easily tape half ping pong balls to your own eyes (though I wonder how easy they are to half without creating sharp jagged edges) and there are surely recordings of static or white noise to listen to over your phone or computer. That just leaves the red...or any other colour..light. Not sure about that bit.

But anyway, has it ever occurred to anyone here to just give it a go?
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The sharp jagged edges could be softened if the halves are put on a hot plate as the least sophisticated method ..
 
Haven’t tried it. But red light bulbs are easy enough to find.

I wonder if ganzfeld is really all that different from TM or other forms of meditation. You’re just trying to disentangle your conciousness from external stimuli.
 
The key to getting the Ganzfeld effect is an unstructured and uniform sensory field. It doesn't require light of any color; you can achieve the effect simply with darkness.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The key to getting the Ganzfeld effect is an unstructured and uniform sensory field. It doesn't require light of any color; you can achieve the effect simply with darkness.
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Isn't this just an attempt at sensory deprivation?
 
Xanatic* said:
Isn't this just an attempt at sensory deprivation?
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There's a nuanced distinction between the methods applied to obtain Ganzfeld versus sensory deprivation effects. The Ganzfeld effect is obtained with a uniform and / or unstructured set of stimuli that serve as 'white noise', so to speak. Strictly speaking, a sensory deprivation approach minimizes or eliminates sensory stimuli rather than making them 'noisy'.

Staring at the visual white noise on a TV screen is the Ganzfeld approach. Turning off the TV and making the room dark is the sensory deprivation approach.

Similar, if not identical, perceptual (e.g., hallucinatory) effects can be obtained with either approach.
 
Sensory deprivation is quite easy to demonstrate in some respects.

If, for example, you rub your hand over your opposite arm, even with your eyes closed it is easy to know what is happening. Sense of touch.
But if you simply stop moving your hand and keep it resting on your arm, within a few moments you can't tell it is there.

It requires movement.

And no ribald comments, thank you.

INT21
 
INT21 said:
But if you simply stop moving your hand and keep it resting on your arm, within a few moments you can't tell it is there.

It requires movement.
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but that doesn't work for me. My arm can always feel my hand and my hand can always feel my arm. My sense of touch works all the time, movement or no movement. Doesn't everybody's?
 
Humans also have a sense of where their body parts are located in space, so to speak.
 
Humans do indeed have a memory of where their parts are. The point I was aiming at is that, taking the example I gave, although you may know (from memory) that one hand is touching your arm, until you change the position of the hand, or the pressure, you can't actually tell that it is there.

An extension of this is the 'phantom limb' effect where some people feel the presence of a limb that has in reality been removed.

So here I have to disagree with Dr_Baltar.

Maybe it is just the way I perceive motion or pressure.

INT21
 
It's not a memory, it is real time. There are people who have lost that sense, and cannot walk unless they can see their legs.
 
I just tried it - I can feel the warmth and sensation of physical contact of my hand on my arm and vice versa pretty much indefinately.
 
Xanatic* said:
Humans also have a sense of where their body parts are located in space, so to speak.
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how good it is varies - I have both poor proprioception and poor vestibular senses :) common comorbids ( or at least measurable aspects) with autism.

I really like the idea of trying this!
 
I believe we did those type of experiments at college in Optometry during my grad time in Physiological Optics class ....but I don't recall anyone having any hallucinations.
 
I would not be worried about sharp edges, a quick sandpaper of the edges, plus, they won't be touching the actual eyes but the surrounding skin.
As for a red light, a cheap rear cycle light (pound shop) would do it.
I think you should give it a go!
 
dr wu said:
I believe we did those type of experiments at college in Optometry during my grad time in Physiological Optics class ....but I don't recall anyone having any hallucinations.
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You wouldn't happen to have accurate profiles for the skin covering, would you? The eyelid muscles need space cut from the strict hemisphere, ideally. These things have to be worn for some time to kick in properly: I can sense it happening after 20 minutes, my interest is to see how the interplay between my hyperperceptive persona and the perceived abnormality works out.
 
Rahere said:
You wouldn't happen to have accurate profiles for the skin covering, would you? The eyelid muscles need space cut from the strict hemisphere, ideally. These things have to be worn for some time to kick in properly: I can sense it happening after 20 minutes, my interest is to see how the interplay between my hyperperceptive persona and the perceived abnormality works out.
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Sorry..that was over 40 years ago...I don't recall the exact protocols used then. One will see phosphene phenomena and related aspects involving visual purple or rhodopsin which certainly could be termed as 'hallucinations' but they are mostly lack of light or color effects and not like seeing pink elephants.. The eye also needs to be very still since movement will affect what one 'sees' under those conditions.
There are many web sites that go into those things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
 
I'm an advanced meditative and have channeled something external to me under test conditions as a result. Now I have more data on the underlying activity, I can see a difference between the purely opthalmic conditions you describe and the more advanced mental interpretative symbolism created by an unaccustomed loss of stimulation to the visual cortex. Having studied low-light vision in the field (often with helmet on and rifle in hand), I'm aware of how we imagine things we can barely see, and the basic hypotheses of Ganzfeld take this further, into areas of the brain which are rarely used. Effectively, in most people, when a large amount of the data the brain processes habitually disappears, then the spare capacity is available for whatever autosuggestion the brain may be open to, and that includes some of the deeper levels of distress. In my case, being hyperperceptive, because I took the brakes off aged 8 and had the capacity not to hit problems as a result, I'm interested in what actually happens personally. I'm quite comfortable with the weird, having done some really unusual but demonstrably concrete things in my time, and so with the reservation that what's happening may not be real (I always seek autonomous hard corroboration anyway, before letting the more off-the-wall stuff loose), I'm interested in seeing firstly whether I detect anything, and if so, what.
 
OK, close enough to be viable now. My first perception is that my focus shifted to nothing for a while, then to my very "Third Eye", which is in any case very active anyway, because of my hyperperception. I've never had it quite so dominant as with my eyes blanked out, though. To some extent, it was active towards nothing, because I'm not on point towards any particular need at the moment, and I'm not psychically paired with anyone. But active it most certainly was, and very powerfully so.
The next stage will be to also blank hearing out, experimenting with different white/brown noise balances, and to experiment with different goggle colours.
 
Frideswide said:
how good it is varies - I have both poor proprioception and poor vestibular senses :) common comorbids ( or at least measurable aspects) with autism.

I really like the idea of trying this!
Click to expand...

That's particularly interesting, because I've very mild Aspergers but excellent hyperperception. I'm getting something already without the noise blanking, but I'm wondering how to manage the profiling without vision.
 
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