New Research: What can we learn from artistic depictions of hallucinations? (preprint)

Attendees of Dreamachine drew many thousands of images of their experiences.

In 2022, the Dreamachine exhibition showed tens of thousands of people hallucination-inducing strobe light. 

After this, people had the opportunity to reflect on this experience by drawing.

We analysed these images, and found that the geometric patterns people drew bear many similarities to geometric forms reported from other types of hallucinations. 

However, many drawings suggested the existence of geometric structures that remain under-documented in the scientific literature.

You can read the preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.18.705710v1

Ethan J Gove, Trevor Hewitt, Anil K Seth, Fiona Macpherson, David J Schwarzman (2026) A Large-Scale Computer-Vision Mapping of the Geometric Structures of Stroboscopically-Induced Visual Hallucinations. bioRxiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.18.705710