Jimmy Ferrer

People will do a number of stupid things for fame, fortune, or hell, even digital attention.

Think likes and shares.

Myself, I'd repeatedly tried to grow my social media pages over time with little success.

Regardless of the viral internet trend, I tried to copy on my page.

It would always receive a fraction of the attention that even the smallest influencers would get.

I was about to give up when I started seeing a trend that interested me at an intellectual level.

You might have even heard of it.

The challenge was, essentially, to kill your senses and put your mind in a state of panic.

So much so that it could cause hallucinations.

I'd watch so many influencers try to last, but they'd go less than five minutes.

And I think up to that point, the longest I'd ever seen was 15 minutes with the guy acting like he was being murdered, giving a dire warning to his viewers to not try the challenge.

The challenge was as follows.

the victim would tape half a ping-pong ball over each eye, shine a red light over their face, and then put on a pair of headphones playing white noise.

The thought behind this is that by blocking out all your senses for an extended period, you would cause your brain to panic, in a sense.

This panic is said to cause the brain to fill in the unoccupied space with noises, with shapes, and general hallucinations of varying severity.

As I looked deeper into this phenomenon, I discovered the name.

The Gansfield Effect.

The effect is explained as your brain amplifying the lack of senses.

The brain is looking for missing visuals to the best of its abilities, and then it just, well, makes things up to fill the space.

What I would be doing is what is called the Multimodal Gansfield Effect.