Meditation is often used for relaxation and stress reduction, but a 2015 experiment found that staring into someone’s eyes for 10 minutes caused dissociative symptoms such as memory loss and altered states of consciousness. This may be due to neural adaptation.
People have been practicing meditation for thousands of years. These days, the ability to focus the mind on an object, or a mantra, or even one’s breath, is used to usher in relaxation and stress reduction. Focusing attention on something and blocking out extraneous thoughts and stimuli helps some people increase their physical and emotional well-being. However, a 2015 experiment by an Italian researcher yielded quite different results. Twenty volunteers were asked to stare into another’s eyes for 10 minutes. Twenty more stared at a blank wall. But the participants who looked into each other’s eyes did not find inner peace. Based on a questionnaire taken after the experiment, the participants experienced dissociative symptoms such as memory loss, visual distortion, detachment from reality, and an altered state of consciousness, as if they had taken a mind-altering drug.
Look into my eyes:
Dissociation is a term used in psychology to describe a series of psychological experiences that make a person feel detached from their surroundings.
“Participants in the staring eyes group said they had a compelling experience unlike anything they had ever experienced before,” wrote researcher Christian Jarrett in the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society.
The researchers explained that the findings likely had something to do with a concept called “neural adaptation,” in which a person’s neurons slow down, or even stop, in response to unchanging stimuli.
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