rational exploration of the underground

Form Constants and the Visual Cortex

There are common visual concepts which cut across boundaries of culture and time and reflect what it truly means to be human. Near death experiences are often associated with seeing a “light at the end of a tunnel”. In the Bible, God appeared to Ezekiel as a “wheel within a wheel”. Spirals and concentric circles are commonly found in rock carvings from cultures long dead. Similar visual effects are reported during extreme psychological stress, fever delirium, psychotic episodes, sensory deprivation, and are reliably induced by psychedelic drugs.

Type I Form Constant Visualization

Type I form constants were described as “tunnels” by Kluver, and postulated to be generated by the non-contoured roll noise pattern described by Cowan and Ermentrout. I decided to visualize this model in higher resolution to further explore the generated forms. All of the following use sinusoidal noise to approximate visual cortex noise for the first half of the video, and then show the transformed result of the mind’s eye for the latter half of the video.

Breathing Wall Visualization

Using the same mathematical model that produced Type I form constants, transformed sinusoidal noise is mapped to depth values instead of hue values. This reproduces the classic “breathing wall” psychedelic visual effect.