01/20/03: The Face Thing

[juju]

When I was a witch, there were all sorts of amazing things I thought I could do. All of them were basically unprovable to anyone scientifically. We had a rather twisted line of logic to counter this with, though. "Magic isn't something you can prove to somebody else. You have to prove it to yourself." Sounds almost noble, doesn't it?

There is one thing, though, that I always found I could reproduce with anybody. You take two people, and have them sit down across from each other. Each person stares into the eyes of the other person, and just waits. You don't break eye contact, and you've got to try to look deeply into their eyes. After a while, you get that blurred vision that comes with staring at something for too long. Go with it, allow it happen. Keep looking into their eyes. Eventually, the blurry vision will go away, and their face will begin to change into someone else's! It's pretty freaky. You're looking at someone, and they have another person's face, and it's crystal clear.

Of course we claimed that the faces people saw was who their parter was in their former lives. It just made sense. Most people freaked out, gasped, and looked away, which ended the whole thing. But if you just let the illusion happen, it got easier, and you could see their face morph into lots of other faces, too.

Today, I believe that the human brain often sees what it wants to see. And this is a fine, fine example of that. At any rate, has anyone seen any psychologial journals that this phenemenon has been mentioned in?