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Last summer, in various UK cities, more than 40,000 people visited the Dream machine, a large space designed to induce hallucinatory experiences with white strobe light and electronic music. “We had guardians there to initially guide and relax people through breathing exercises,” says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex and a collaborator on the project, which includes a team of artists, engineers, designers and musicians. Twenty to thirty people were allowed into the room and asked to lie down and close their eyes. After the 30 minute session, the participants would typically describe the experience with adjectives such as vivid, kaleidoscopic, powerfuland Magic. “Seeing the responses from the participants when they come out on the other side of the curtain and have just had this experience was so weird and magical,” says Seth. “We are really turning something that is internal and transcendental and personal into a collective experience.”
One of the goals of the Dreamachine project is to shed light on something Seth has researched for over a decade: the effect of strobe lights on the brain. “It is a phenomenon that is not yet understood,” he says. “Flickering light gives rise to really unexpected and powerful perceptual effects and conscious experiences that have no relation to what’s out there. It’s just white light, but people see colors and shapes.” This psychedelic effect could be key to understanding the neural basis of visual experience, because participants report having visual experiences even when their eyes are closed. “There is something about experiencing the power of your own mind and brain to create an experience that is truly transformative,” says Seth.
What also fascinates Seth is that the participants reported very different experiences even though they were immersed in the same environment. “Of course, this isn’t just true of the Dreamachine,” he says. “One of the lessons is that everywhere, all at once, all the time, we are all having a different experience, even when we share the same objective reality.”
To further map that internal perceptual diversity, Seth and his team also started a project called the Perception Census, an online survey that aims to measure how different people perceive different dimensions like sound, time, color, and even light. expectations. “The idea is to understand latent space,” he says. “The underlying organizational structure by which we all vary on the inside because it’s so hard to see. It seems to us that we see the world as it is, so it is very difficult to realize that other people may see it very differently. Already, 20,000 people from more than 100 countries have participated in the census, making it one of the largest experiments of its kind.
Despite that diversity, Dreamachine participants overwhelmingly report experiencing one common emotion: peace. This finding could show that, in the near future, the Dreamachine could also lead to new forms of mental health therapy. “There’s a long history of light-based treatment for things like depression and grief, whether it’s treating seasonal affective disorder or other forms of depression,” Seth says. “Experience has certain parallels with psychedelics in that they elicit an unusual, unexpected, and vivid perceptual experience in the brain. The experience really made people feel different and, in most cases, much better.”
This article appears in the July/August 2023 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
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