The Lamp That Puts Psychedelic Colors in Your Brain

Sundays are traditionally a day of meeting friends, going to the bar, barbecuing, going to the park—those sort of meandering, lazy activities that you can drift through on neutral. But last Sunday, instead of sitting around and watching TV, I spent some time in the back room of an arts center in north London, tweaking my third eye using stroboscopic light stimulation to create an artwork in my mind. And it was pretty awesome.

The experience was delivered to me by an apparatus called Lucia No. 3, a device that consists of a lamp surrounded by LEDs that hangs off the end of a pole structure, which the participant sits in front of with eyes closed. The device is hooked up to a computer with some custom built software controlling the emitted patterns of light. This triggers strange visions in the recipient.

It recently exhibited at the Kinetica Art Fair in London and is the work of Dr. Dirk Proeckl (neurologist and psychologist) and Dr. Engelbert Winkler (psychologist and psychotherapist) who have teamed up with Maria Lopes to form Traveller Unlimited, an experiential art project where you are the artist.

The device works by affecting alpha brain waves and stimulating something called the pineal gland, which is located in the center of the brain. The pineal gland responds to both the intensity and rhythms of the light, triggering a visionary reaction in the person’s brain.

Read the rest of this article at the The Creators Project.