I JUST DISCOVERED THE GANZFIELD EXPERIMENT…STAY TUNED FOR THE RESULTS
Sometimes sitting at your laptop while bored takes you down a rabbit hole which was evident today as I just learned about the Ganzfeld experiment, and I need you to understand something right away: the second I read “you can hallucinate with radio static and red colored ping pong balls,” I stopped adulting and became a person on a mission.
I immediately went to the store and grabbed some ping pong balls and a thick red Sharpie.
It’s a little bothersome that I could’ve been hallucinating on purpose this whole time over the last year and escaping reality of what is going on in our country with nothing but half a ping pong ball, a red tint, and some static instead of taking out my frustrations maintaining this blog that nobody fucking reads?
So what is this “Ganzfeld” thing anyway?
From what I understand, the Ganzfeld setup is basically DIY sensory deprivation:
You cut ping pong balls in half
Color them red (or use a red light)
Put them over your eyes so your vision becomes a smooth, featureless field
Play white noise/radio static so your hearing becomes a smooth, featureless field too
And then your brain, being the overachieving little pattern machine it is, goes:
“Oh, no input? Cool. I’ll make my own.”
Which can lead to weird visuals, shifting shapes, faces, colors, dreamy imagery, that kind of thing. Pretty much your brain doesn’t want you to have a blank canvas so it starts painting an image.
Is this safe?
I mean, it’s not like I’m jerking off with scissors here.
From what I’ve gathered from many people’s testimonies, this is basically harmless, stupid fun.
Here’s the sensible part I’m legally obligated to include because I, too, enjoy having a functional nervous system:
also…
I’m about to be snowed in, so what else am I going to do?
Maybe nothing happens, and I just lie there listening to static like when you fell asleep watching network TV as a kid after masturbating to the Girls Gone Wild infomercials.
Maybe my brain paints me some wild stuff, and I almost end up on a vision quest on what direction I should take my life on next.
