This reminds me of those blinky goggles that made you see a bunch of trippy patterns (even though the blinkiness was completely diffuse!), here's the instructio

This reminds me of those blinky goggles that made you see a bunch of trippy patterns (even though the blinkiness was completely diffuse!), here's the instructions (http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build-goggles.html http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build-gogg...) and here's a proper scientific paper about this phenomenon: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002158 http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou... . The interesting thing is that the patterns that recur (known as "form constants, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant ) in these geometric visual hallucinations are pretty similar to those obtained by taking hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD). As one might expect, these "form constants" don't directly originate from the flickering light nor the LSD molecule -- there's certainly no way to encode a description of those swirling geometric patterns in a small molecule or in diffuse light -- the information for those hallucinations has to reside in the brain somehow. Fascinatingly enough, these trippy geometric hallucinations are generated by the exact same brain structures and mechanisms that the visual system uses to process edges/contours, surfaces, and textures: http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf ! Certain operational modes (that LSD or diffuse flickering light can help create) in the edge/contour/surface/texture-detection machinery -- once transformed to the visual field's coordinates -- look exactly like the form constants. These geometric visual hallucinations -- the imagery fed to a conscious mind whose visual system is temporarily malfunctioning -- have a deep correspondence with the normal mechanisms of vision, in much the same way that the "glitches" produced by feeding a H.264 decoder with a slightly corrupt video file let you immediately appreciate the motion-compensating machinery of the codec. There is sublime beauty in seeing these "form constants" in images that look like geometric visual hallucinations appear in machine learning research. The universal adversarial perturbations (which, when added to an image, are said to cause misclassification) in page 6 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf were striking to see, as they strongly resemble the same beautiful swirly colourful geometric visual hallucinations that humans experience when taking a hallucinogenic drug (or staring at diffuse flickery lights with the hallucination goggles).