10 Minutes of Staring Into Someone’s Eyes is All it Takes to Alter Your Consciousness

By Seth M on July 5, 2016

While there are many ways to alter the functions of your brain (like LSD, magic mushrooms, etc.), there’s a much simpler way and all you need is your eyes and another person who will let you stare into their eyes for at least 10 minutes.
Eyes are easily one of the most complex and intriguing parts of the human body.  Have you ever seen a person whose eyes transfix you into an awe-inducing hypnosis?  Well, it turns out that some people actually do enter into altered states of consciousness after staring into a person’s eyes intensely.
As you could imagine, this trick as discovered by someone who was researching staring contests.  Giovanni Caputo, a vision researcher from the University of Urbino, Italy, was the person who made the discovery, but he actually found similar results a few years earlier after asking 50 volunteers to stare at themselves in a mirror in a dimly lit room for at least 10 minutes.

So, what happened?  Volunteers reported that faces started to twist and warp, sometimes resembling animals, monsters, and even dead relatives.  This unique phenomena was coined the “strange-face illusion,” and is believed to be amplified when a person stares into another person’s eyes, rather than their own in a mirror.
Caputo’s research on staring into another person’s eyes discovered that volunteers experienced a number interesting effects when doing so.  In a dimly lit room, spaced about three feet apart from one another in chairs, participants described heightened levels of color intensity as well as perceived increases in the loudness of noises around them.  
Even more interesting is that they believed time slowed down during their staring contest.  Ninety percent said that their partner’s face appeared deformed, 75 percent saw monsters in their partners, and 15 percent claimed to have seen the resemblance of a relative.