Staring Into Someone's Eyes For 10 Minutes Can Alter Your Consciousness Like Drugs

If you like taking drugs---then do it. Not by ingesting the substance abuse materials, but just by staring into someone's eyes in a dim room for 10 minutes, according to newser.

This is what Jenni Avins says. She sat with someone else in a supply closet, got into a staring match and saw the other person's face morph into a mountain lion.

"I cried the whole time," Avins writes at Quartz. "Then we went back to work."

Her colleague repeated her story---in fact, she thought Avins looked like a lioness.

This was what Italian researcherGiovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino said. He collected 40 people in a room with "low illumination" and kept them all looking at a group's eyes, while the other half stared at walls while sitting back-to-back, IFL Science reports.

What happened to the 'staring' group was weird. They said that "time slowed down, they felt spacey and went through some strange hallucinations".

So 90% of them saw faces deform, while 75% encountered "monster-like beings", and 30% saw animals.

This is all about "dissociation," or a person moving away reality. Hence, monsters might be springing up after a person comes back from a "dissociative state brought on by minimal sensory stimulation".

Another theory is that of "Troxler fading," or the effect of just staring at one point for long, according to Scientific American.

Says IFL Science: "If this were to explain" the latest study, it says, "then we would expect facial features to gradually vanish, rather than having strange things appear. ... We clearly still have a lot to learn about these strange phenomena."