I just looked these up. Those stares inspire a little sadness in me; you can tell the person has been saddened/hardened by the conflict. But the psychedelic eyes comfort me.

Maybe I'll get my friends to set up an experiment for me to test if I can see the difference between normal, psychedelic, and traumatized eyes. This would be quite the mini-study!

I remember working with schizophrenics, you'd get the 1,000-yard stare. Generally a sign that things were about to go rapidly south. If you've ever watched Bronson, Tom Hardy does this thing where he'll be laughing, and then the smile and face just drops into the hardest of all glares. That's what I had to deal with on a daily basis, and hats off to Tom Hardy for capturing it so perfectly.

Here's a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RmzcSuqwhM

As for the main discussion, I'm not sure its the eyes that change, more a person's disposition effecting how they look. Slight mannerisms are different, there's more confidence in how they choose to look, move, and act, and a similar story is told on the face, especially surrounding the eyes. Again, that could just be finding a pattern when there's none there - a common human fallacy - but if psychedelics have a powerful and long lasting positive effect on mood, mind, and outlook, then surely that would be represented in some way by their physical image?

Shanghigher, how are you able to say that a common human fallacy is "finding a pattern when there's none there"?

Your life is the only one in which you are accurately able to discern the presence of patterns. If there is no pattern in your life, there is no pattern in your life. As an advocate of the devil, one could also claim that a common human fallacy is to chock patterns up to coincidence when there is no coincidence. How do you know the processing speed and ability of another human's mind to perceive fractals, or better yet, how can you say that it is a 'human' fallacy, affecting the entire species?

I think you are taking the pattern thing the wrong way. Nothing to do with actual patterns you might see tripping or anything like that.

It's more how we've evolved - we try and find patterns in everything, and add those patterns to our understanding of the world. For example, say you go to an island with loads of penguins on it. You are in a hut in the centre, and to the north, south, east, and west of you are a group of penguins 1,000 strong. You get to see a sample group of 20 to represent that group, selected at random from the wider population. Now say 10 of the 20 from the south group are wearing hats, whereas none of the others have any hats at all.

When you now asked, "Well, what did you think of the penguins, then?", you are likely to go "well, they didn't seem all that different, apart from the group from the south which seems to have a fairly high hat to penguin ratio." You may then go on to assume that most penguins from the south of your island are into hats. That is the pattern fallacy.

As it turns out, the south has only 50 hats between them, while the north, west, and east all have 100 hats, and treat the southern penguins as a lower class. Why more hats didn't show up in the sample group, I can't say. Perhaps they were all having a hats-only party so couldn't attend the sample picking event. The point is, you now believe in something about the penguins which isn't accurate because you attempted to make sense of what you are seeing by putting a pattern over it which isn't there.

This is how you get people saying stuff like "Oh, X Town is a great place to move if you want to win the lottery" because it's had more winners than anywhere else. However, it doesn't actually improve your chances wherever you live, therefore its a pattern fallacy.

The reason I said it above is because, yes, you see these confident mannerisms more in people who trip, which could effect how they look at you, and thus your opinion of their eyes looking different. But is that actually proven, or am I just going "Oh, I trip, these guys trip, everyone here looks at ease with themselves, nice," and therefore just subjective. Is it accurate that the eyes change due to a generally more relaxed outlook affecting how we physically project ourselves because we trip, or am I just accepting that as fact without actual proof?

Oh well that explains it. I must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Sorry for the negative tone in that last one.

I'm with you now, thanks for the hilarious description by the way. I've studied this list of cognitive biases before and I think that's precisely what you are referring to.

I've experienced something like this, but just in the short term, a few days say following an ayahuasca session or iboga flood. I've noticed it in others and others have commented about my eyes. With aya it is described as an extra sparkle. Iboga, the whites of my whites seem incredibly white and "clean". I've noticed this in myself (ok so more subjective) but others have noticed this too, and also subtle changes in my appearance and energy (including people who aren't "on the level" if you catch my drift.

No worries, Ouroboros The first thing I did the other day was troll the hell out of someone on Facebook who'd taken exception to my double-barreled surname, so I can relate.

You would probably enjoy David McRaney's book "You are not so smart", and his eponymous blog/podcasts. Psychology but with a journalist's wit and layman's touch. I highly recommend them!

I've experienced this eye phenomenon many times with many people and most of them I didn't know at all but you can feel it and see it and I could tell they had the same thing going on too because we just look at each other and you just know.

What i have experienced is an change in how i use my eyes, because of massive mental changes.
Basicly, i am more aware of my awareness; it is like an energy-field wich emmanates from my eyes like photons from a light source.
People can 'sense' this energy.
At first i was in this state where i would constantly felt the look of others, currently i have the feeling that everybody else is sensing when i look at them.
A couple of years ago i would absolutly avoid eye contact longer than 2 seconds with strangers, especially with attractive females, now i could rudely eyefuck every female for as long as i whish. (its tempting, but i don't do it )
With the entheogen medicines i trained my self-confidence, which is visible in my eyes, not as a physical change, but as changed behavior.
Before i was shy and tried not to attract attention;
now i feel a strong sense of beeing (me), while strangly attracting the attention without trying/doing.

At the age of 17, a junior in high school, I began my first lunch on my first day in a new city not knowing a soul.

From across the cafeteria I sensed that there was someone sitting waiting for me. At that distance I could discern this person more with my mind than my eyes. Once I introduced myself and was welcomed to sit, a friendship began that has lasted many years.

During a conversation about art and the energy in human beings, we talked about how it can be seen when looking into someone's eyes how bright their "spark" is. It's that little extra something... something I cannot describe in words, but it is real. It is that thing which shines like a beacon in an intellectual sea of darkness. This is what drew me to my friend.

I learned soon after that he had once tried LSD less than a year before, and had the hubris to take "3 hits at once" as he described it. Myself, through somewhat of an accident, ingested about 6 grams of shrooms the first time. What we were connected to is that universal matrix, or as Stan Grof described when meeting a guru: "Ah, I see that you have seen Shiva!"

When travelling in public, I have since been able to tell via body language, what is left unspoken, pieces of time left in silence, and (most importantly) by the emanations from people's eyes whether or not they have been humbled and confronted the awesome greatness of the universal unknown.

So yes, I know what you mean.