Interesting half-awake experiment

[kiwibonga]

I had to wait 8 hours at a bus terminal between the US and Canada border today. I was with the same two people for those 8 hours, we chatted a bit and then I tried to take a nap. The girl was on the phone with her relatives from Norway, so she was speaking norwegian.

Hypnogogic images started coming to me so I decided to try a little "I wish I had superpowers" experiment. I did not understand a word she was saying, but I tried to "tell" the hypnogogics to translate for me. Obviously, it didn't work, but what happened was quite surprising... The images that came to me were pictures of words she was saying that sounded like english words!

What was particularly surprising was that I wasn't really listening, only hearing, if that makes sense. The words were indeed "translated" ; rather they were interpreted to match words that I knew in a completely automated manner.

So I want to try a new experiment now -- I'll download audiobooks in languages I know nothing about and play them as I fall asleep.

My theory is that paying attention to a language you don't understand causes your brain to go into an altered state, a concept similar to the ganzfeld effect -- in the absence of knowns, the brain enters a "meditative" state by itself and tries to process an endless flow of seemingly random information, causing hallucinations and the like.

So if anyone feels like trying it out too, please post your results

[Woah]

Neat, good luck!

..I'll think about trying, if you get good results.

[bounda]

this is an absolutely excellent idea, i think im going to try it, thanks for the heads up man this is pretty cool  also good luck with it and plz post ur results cuz before i try it i want to see wat happens 

[Synergy]

Wow you will have to post results after you use the audiobooks

[fliesatnite]

What a great idea!  Now the trick is to get something that doesn't also do an english translation.  What have you found so far for usage?  Do you think an audio book would work?  Something of that nature? or have you downloaded something?  I'm interested to try this as well.

I remember a dream I had many years ago, the whole dream was in spanish and I remember thinking during the dream that all the words translated in my head to English.

[kiwibonga]

I haven't had a chance to try yet because I had morning classes in the last two days, but I will most likely do it tonight.

To find audiobooks, try any file sharing service, look for "audiobook," and there should be little tags on the file names like [EN] [FR] [DE] [ITA] [SPA], etc.. Make sure you don't get anything that says "TTS" or "Text-to-speech" ; it means it's a computer generated audiobook with a very monotonous and annoying computer-like voice

Then all you need to do is put it on a mp3 player, either portable or on the computer, and you're good to go!

Oh, and to stay on the legal side of things, look for "Public domain" or "free."