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One of our more fascinating experiences from last year was discovering there is a state your brain can be in where music visualisers are hazardous, a state you can get into without drugs if you're very unlucky.
As we understand it, our brain was in some overly activated state where pattern-recognition in particular was in overdrive. It had all sorts of effects. We were (we believe) psychotic. We would in particular see connections between concepts all the time, and this was bad for us
So, in a brain that is already going haywire because it thinks it sees correlations between everything, and whose propensity to correlate things is in overdrive, what happens when you present it with an audiovisual stimulus where visuals are in fact hypercorrelated with audio…?
Well, the result was that the lines in the iTunes Visualizer looked like they were glowing incredibly brightly. It was a different thing to the “normal” increased sensitivity to light we already had in that horrible state. It happened instantly and we immediately knew it was bad.
There's a thousand more things we could talk about from that time, but very few of which we actually want to. It's still our life's greatest trauma. But we saw someone mention visualisers on the TL, and this particular piece of anecdata is unusually… self-contained, thankfully.