A rather curious experiment with an extremely trippy outcome has been described in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Namely , a serviceman with 188 metallic patches in his mind starting seeing faces everywhere he looked when they were electrified .
The valet de chambre in question was a patient who was being treated for epilepsy . As part of this fairly data-based discussion , he had electrode strips implanted along his fusiform gyri , realm of the brain thought to play a key role in pattern and visual realization .
A team from the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies at the New York State Department of Health run into an opportunity here . This part of the human brainiac is particularly difficult to study , and most of the work that has been done has involved other order Primates . This 26 - yr - previous adult male represented a chance to directly probe this problematical cranial segment .
Previous oeuvre has demonstrated that disrupting the electrical connections in this part of the brain – the fusiform face area ( FFA ) – reduces a person ’s ability tosee facesproperly . The various individual shapes do n’t come together as a cohesive whole . What would happen if these signaling were amplified through electric stimulation ?
The squad inquire just that , and asked their topic to look at a variety of objects – include a football , a box , and a individual ’s face – while they sent electric pulses into the FFA . outstandingly , he began to see ephemeral illusory faces all over the place , include within the genuine face of a soul .
It ’s secure to say that this left him a footling deep in thought . “ Your face changed wholly , ” he said , staring at one of the investigator . “ I do n’t know what ’s going on . Your eye … interchange . ” Often , the faces – which faded from view chop-chop – looked a tidy sum like a “ cartoon character , ” or even , quite specifically , an “ anime quality . ”
These hallucinations are referred to as facephenes by the team , who aim out that such a phenomenon has not be know before .
That ’s not all . The stimulation of sites in the FFA known to be assort with vividness make ghostly rainbows to short seem on various typeface and objects . In both suit , the object did n’t seem to change themselves ; the facephenes and rainbows seemed to linger on them , as if they ’d been lay over by a projector .
This freaky subject area ’s determination advise that the FFA is a full of life part of the brain that processes very specific information about colors and faces . As pointed out byNeuroskeptic , however , an early study inquire the same thing did n’t seem to provoke the appearance of any transient toon character – so perhaps only certain masses see facephenes .
Clearly , more enquiry is demand to confirm this , although we imagine that ’s soft said than done .
[ H / T : Discover Magazine ]
