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disappears the brain fills in the blanks, creating the vaguest
impression of a world that isn't there. It creates forms and
shapes that are almost recognisable because they are drawn
from a melding of our memories and experience of sight over
a lifetime.
For decades parapsychologists looking for evidence of
psychic abilities, telepathy and extrasensory perception have
created artificial Ganzfelds. Subjects are often blindfolded,
placed in enclosed rooms flooded with red light, their hearing
restricted to only white noise and static. Some are confined to
special beds or inside flotation tanks to produce almost total
sensory deprivation. The research into parapsychology has so
far proved inconclusive but the dramatic effect of a Ganzfeld
on the brain isn't disputed. The electrical activity of the brain
changes and it often produces nearly immediate hallucinations
that can be both vivid and complex.
A polar whiteout has to be one of the most perfect natural
Ganzfelds imaginable.
It had been a week since I had struggled to the top of the
Leverett Glacier and the weather I had enjoyed beneath the
Transantarctic Mountains was now nothing but a distant
memory. For the last seven days cloud had blotted out the blue
so thickly and with such tenacity that it was hard to imagine
that the sky had ever been anything other than the palest of
greys. The weather descended to the ground, eclipsing any
peripheral view and cloaking me in a cocoon of gritty white. As
I skied through the gloom I could sense rather than see the huge
masses of cloud drifting around me like stealthy battleships.
The silence that had suffocated me during my first few days on
the ice was replaced by a continuous white noise of blizzard
and storm. The wind threw snow into the air, further reducing
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