Research Finds Staring Into Someone’s Eyes Can Give You Hallucinations – Here’s How They Did it

And you thought staring into someone's eyes was something you only did when you were in love.

It turns out you can experience LSD-like hallucinations by staring into someone's eyes in a dimly lit room for 10 minutes.

A researcher, Giovanni Caputo, asked 20 people to stare in each others’ eyes while another 20 people stared at a wall. Afterward, those staring eye-to-eye said time got slower, they felt spacey and experienced strange hallucinations.

As reported in Psychiatry Research, 90% of them saw the other person's face deform, 75% witnessed monster-like beings, and 30% saw animals. So what's it all about? Caputo says it may be "dissociation," or a person's departure from reality:

In this case, he says, the appearance of monsters or animals may come after returning from a dissociative state brought on by minimal sensory stimulation.

It worked for Jenni Avins, who sat down a colleague in a supply closet, stared into her eyes, and saw her facial contours replaced by the features of a mountain lion: "I cried the whole time," Avins writes at Quartz. "Then we went back to work." For the record, her colleague had roughly the same experience. That must have lead to an interesting afternoon at their job.