When Franz Anton Mesmer, the 18th-century physician and populariser of hypnotism, asked patients to gaze into his eyes, he believed that he instigated a flow of “animal magnetism” between himself and his client that cured ailments, altered consciousness and caused weird and wonderful effects.
Mesmerism, as it became known, was eventually dismissed as quack science, with Mesmer himself disgraced.
Now it seems he could be owed a partial apology.
An Italian psychologist claims to have found that gazing deeply into someone else’s eyes can transport people to an altered state of consciousness in which they experience strange hallucinations and feel disassociated from the world around them.
Giovanni Caputo, from the University of Urbino, put 20 people in a dimly lit room and instructed them to sit opposite each other in pairs. They then stared at each other, expressionless, for ten minutes.
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His study, published in the journal Psychiatry Research, found that many of his subjects had “a compelling experience that they never had before”. They answered various questions about their experience such as, “Did you see the face of a monster?”, “Did you see the face of one of your relatives?”, “Did you see that some facial traits were deformed?” and “Did you see the face of a domestic or savage animal?”
Ninety per cent reported hallucinating that they had seen a deformed face, and 75 per cent said they had seen a monster. Half said their partner’s face had partially morphed into their own and 15 per cent said they had seen a relative’s face.
Dr Caputo, whose past research has found that people also experience the illusion of seeing strange faces when they stare intensely at themselves in the mirror, hypothesised that the result could be a consequence of “rebounding” to the real world after feeling detached from it.
“A possible explanation of the results can be [that] the sensory deprivation (low lighting) and the sustained gazing toward a stimulus (the other’s face) induces a general level of dissociation,” he wrote, while acknowledging that further research and larger studies were needed.
“The strange-face apparition momentarily interrupts the dissociative state by provoking a temporary hallucination. In other words, the strange-face apparition can be a form of rebound to ‘reality’ that occurs from a general state of dissociation due to sensory deprivation,” he added.