God Helmet (opens in new tab)

This made me recall some wild online catalog website from the early 2000s that was primarily known (and advertised) for hoverboard sales, where the hoverboard was basically a small noisy gas-powered rectangular hovercraft you could stand on. I think I first saw their ad in Wired, or maybe a gaming magazine. Anyway if you dug into their catalog there was all sorts of wild stuff, from sleep masks that used LEDs to induce lucid dreaming to things more like this. Anyone know the website I'm talking about?

I’ve had good results with a DIY version of a hypnogogic light.

I used one of these at a psychedelic science conference in SF but they wanted $25k to buy it. So I set out to build an open-source version for under $100.

The LSD (Light Stimulation Device) can be built for under $50 and is being used for therapy, relaxation and inducing psychedelic like experiences.

Current version is made with ski googles, lith ion USB rechargable battery, Arduino with Bluetooth and can pair with a terminal program on IPhone.

The whole project is on GitHub and can be found here:

Http://AnthonyDavidAdams.com/lsd

As a semi-related aside, I have epilepsy and one of the signs I am about to have a seizure is a sense of presence. It's really hard to describe but I get an intense feeling like someone is watching me close by. It's a very familiar feeling, last time I had a seizure, just before I fell to the floor I began to run away from what I perceived as a presence. Not fun.

There doesn't seem to be much to the god helmet, besides the placebo effect, but at least it inspired this great short story by Peter Watts: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Heathens.pdf

If I put this thing on my head, would the aluminum foil I'm already sporting cause amplification or attenuation of the effect?

On a side note, I remember the first time I tried an isolation tank; how I fell into a deep sleep that was different from all previous ones. Felt like my consciousness was halved but not quite gone (the way it usually is when you fall asleep).

It was very pleasant. Like an idle dream. An hour went by in a few minutes. I’ve tried replicating it a few times but never had the same success as the first time I went.

I’d be curious to know what other states of consciousness exist (and how to consistently trigger them).

I’d pay good money for some experiences I can do in the comfort of my home.

Or as I call it, the Placebo Effect Helmet.

> The foundations of his theory have been criticized in the scientific press.

> One attempt at replication published in the scientific literature reported a failure to reproduce Persinger's effects and the authors proposed that the suggestibility of participants, improper blinding of participants or idiosyncratic methodology could explain Persinger's results.

> Other groups have reported no effects at all or have generated similar experiences by using sham helmets, or helmets that are not turned on, and have concluded that personality differences in the participants explain these unusual experiences.

>Jack Hitt, a journalist from Wired magazine, visited Persinger's lab in 1999 and expressed confusion over Persinger's post-stimulation debriefing ("One question: Did the red bulb on the wall grow larger or smaller? There was a red bulb on the wall? I hadn't noticed.") and reported: "Many other questions suggest that there were other experiences I should have had, but to be honest, I didn't. "

What a joke. Why is this in HN? There are better examples of suggestibility out there.

Makes me think of Dr. Weisleder who healed his patients with moonlight, and eventually drew massive crowds of people to be healed.

This is one of the things I've always wanted to try. Even if it is hockey pseudoscience as long as it's not actively dangerous it could be interesting.

Alas this and the overview effect are two things I'll probably never experience.

The placebo effect is marvellous...

I thought for most my life that the domain of the objective and the domain of the real were equivalent. But I missed the subtle gradation toward uncertainty, maybe seen as concentric concepts starting from center: commonality of perception (objective) -> body’s reaction to reality (subjective) -> reality itself (unknowable totality).

The God Helmet is an objective thing you wear (with magnetic property on/off), with a linguistic component (the story of what it will do), and a subjective component (the unique experiences the person brings to it and from it). If the resulting experience has no measurable/repeatable effects across all people, then it is by definition not admissible as an objective phenomenon (i.e. it does not fit the lowest common denominator of experience).