RTFA: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/graphics/0…

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

The reasoning goes: if people are getting cheap, wild thrills from a ping-pong ball taped to their eyes, then there’s something that just ain’t right about it… and we should probably protect our kids from it! After all, Internet Blogs are making such fantastical claims that the average teenager will be unable to resist. I submit, for your revulsion, the following excerpt from the blog called RTFA:

Yes kids, you too can start “tripping balls” (ed: this is what kids are calling it these days) thereby experiencing wild, sensory-deprivation effects as you zonk out on an intergalactic space cruise.

…but such sensational claims are never accompanied by responsible warnings: if you get too “far out” you might never come back… perhaps you wear your ping pong balls to work one day, thereby interfering with your ability to type… or you might try “tripping balls” while driving, which will interfere with your reaction time and might lead to a fatal car crash. You might even go blind – or at least fail eye exams – if you keep these ping pong balls on your eyes all the time. Will this nation stand for such cheap and shallow shortcuts to enlightenment?

You have been warned, and the following is just a taste of what you can look forward to. Ah-hahaha! POWER TOOLS ARE ZOMBIE REPELLENT!

Okay… Good fun… But seriously, Mind Hacks have been all the rage for several years, and the Boston Globe has stepped up to the plate with a bite-sized, infographic introduction to hacking your gray matter.

From the comment thread on boingboing:

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect

The tape “X”s over them actually ruins the effect. The idea is to have a uniform field thus the sacades (small motions) of your eye no longer introduce any change and very quickly, everything becomes a uniform gray. If you try this, and use a strongly colored light (blue for example), it will turn gray until there is a change (like moving your hand in front of the light) which will cause it to pop back to blue. Kinda fun.

Also, don’t use the half of the ping pong ball that has writing on it – so you actually need two.