When your eyelids become a cinema screen: what strobing light reveals about the brain

By David Schwartzman, Research Fellow (Informatics), School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex

Flashing light can do more than illuminate a room. Delivered at specific rhythms and viewed through closed eyelids, it can produce vivid visual hallucinations, geometric patterns, bursts of colour and sometimes even full scenes in people with no underlying illness and no use of drugs.

These experiences are known as stroboscopic hallucinations. They offer a window into how the brain constructs perception and how conscious experience shifts when the signals reaching the visual system are altered.

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