Natural Mandalas created our Visual cortex

If you dynamically combine all four of the Form Constants, a beautiful swirling mosaic emerges.

Who Identified the Visual “Form Constants”?

Heinrich Klüver (1897–1979) was a German-American psychologist and brain researcher who later spent much of his career at the University of Chicago. He was deeply fascinated by visual perception and by how activity in the brain gives rise to the things we experience as vision.

In the 1920s, Klüver studied the visual effects of mescaline, a psychedelic compound found in peyote cacti. As part of his research, he experimented with mescaline himself and carefully documented the recurring visual phenomena associated with the experience.

How He Made the Discovery

Klüver noticed something fascinating: although visual hallucinations can feel unpredictable and complex, certain simple geometric patterns appeared again and again.

He grouped these recurring patterns into four categories that became known as Form Constants:

1. Grids & Checkerboards: Repeated patterns such as lattices, honeycombs and checkerboards.

2. Cobwebs: Web-like geometric structures.

3. Tunnels & Funnels: Concentric forms that can create the impression of looking through a tunnel or funnel.

4. Spirals: Swirling patterns winding around a central point.

These patterns are not exclusive to psychedelics. Similar geometric visual phenomena have since been reported during migraine aura, sensory deprivation, flickering light stimulation and other altered visual states.

Why Does This Happen? 

When you look at something, visual information travels from your eyes into the brain, eventually reaching areas including the primary visual cortex, known as V1, at the back of the brain.

V1 contains an organized map of visual space. Researchers have proposed that under certain conditions, unusual patterns of neural activity can emerge within this visual system. Mathematical models suggest that repeating waves or patterns of activity in the visual cortex may help explain why people can perceive characteristic geometric forms such as tunnels, spirals and grids.

In other words, these patterns may tell us something fascinating about the underlying architecture and activity of our own visual system.

Perhaps this is also why similar geometric motifs have appeared throughout human art, symbolism and spiritual traditions across cultures and history. Researchers have explored whether some ancient geometric imagery could have been influenced by internally generated visual experiences, although these interpretations remain debated.

From ancient patterns and sacred geometry to the NeuroVIZR logo, there is something fascinating about the possibility that some of the forms humans repeatedly create externally may echo patterns our own visual system is capable of creating internally, acting almost like a Mind Mirror between the brain and the world around us.