Beyond the Self

Beyond the Self: How Light and Sound Can Open a Door to Awe

When was the last time something made you forget yourself for a moment?

Perhaps it was standing beneath a vast night sky. Hearing a piece of music that seemed to fill the entire room. Watching the ocean stretch beyond the horizon. For a few seconds, the usual stream of thoughts about ourselves—our plans, worries and expectations—can seem to fade into the background.

Science has a word for this feeling: awe.

Spirituality does not always begin with belief. Sometimes, it begins with a shift in perception.

Researchers describe awe as an emotion that often arises when we encounter something so vast, unexpected or extraordinary that it challenges our usual way of understanding the world. Studies have associated awe with what psychologists call the “small self”: a temporary reduction in how dominant the self feels in our awareness. Rather than disappearing, our sense of self becomes less central, potentially leaving more room for a feeling of connection—to nature, other people or something larger than ourselves.

This does not make awe inherently spiritual. But it may help explain why awe appears so often in experiences that people describe as meaningful, contemplative or transcendent.

Interestingly, unusual sensory experiences can also interrupt our ordinary patterns of perception.

Research into flicker light stimulation shows that rhythmic light viewed through closed eyes can produce vivid colours, moving geometric forms and other temporary changes in subjective experience. Studies also suggest that the frequency and rhythmicity of the stimulation influence characteristics and intensity of these visual phenomena. In other words, the brain does not simply perceive the light: the interaction between rhythmic stimulation and our visual system can generate a surprisingly rich inner experience.

Sound may deepen that experience further. Music is itself a powerful source of emotion and awe, and recent experimental research found that combining music with flicker light stimulation enhanced participants’ reported emotional responses to music compared with music alone.

This is where the science becomes particularly interesting for NeuroVIZR.

NeuroVIZR combines patterned light stimulation with carefully designed soundscapes to create an immersive sensory environment. The changing colours, patterns, rhythms and sounds experienced with closed eyes can draw attention away from ordinary external surroundings and toward an unusual inner perceptual landscape.

NeuroVIZR creates an immersive sensory environment that may support experiences of absorption, wonder and contemplation.

That distinction matters. Science does not show that a particular frequency creates spirituality, nor has NeuroVIZR been clinically demonstrated to produce awe or transcendence. The meaning of an experience remains deeply personal. At the same time, NeuroVIZR remains committed to exploring these questions, conducting new investigation more closely into how people respond to different patterns of light, sound and immersive sensory stimulation. 

But research does give us an intriguing framework. Awe is associated with reduced self-focus and a greater sense of connection. Rhythmic flickering light can temporarily alter visual perception and aspects of subjective experience. Music can shape emotion and immersion. Bringing light and sound together may therefore create conditions in which our familiar way of perceiving ourselves and our surroundings becomes, for a moment, a little less ordinary.

And perhaps that is one place where spirituality can begin—not necessarily with an answer or a belief, but with our capacity to pause, perceive differently, and feel connected to something beyond ourselves.

Scientific sources

The central science behind the article is well supported, but importantly, none of these studies tested NeuroVIZR itself.

• Monroy & Keltner (2023), “Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health.” This review describes awe as arising in response to perceived vastness and discusses evidence connecting awe with diminished self-focus, connection and meaning.
  Read the paper on PubMed Central

• van Elk et al. (2019), “The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe.” An fMRI study using awe-eliciting videos found evidence consistent with reduced engagement in self-referential processing during awe.
  Read the paper on PubMed Central

• Bartossek, Kemmerer & Schmidt (2021), “Altered states phenomena induced by visual flicker light stimulation.” In 24 participants, closed-eye flicker stimulation produced vivid simple visual phenomena including colours and geometric patterns and measurable changes in subjective experience.
  Read the paper on PubMed Central

• Amaya et al. (2023), “Effect of frequency and rhythmicity on flicker light-induced hallucinatory phenomena.” This study found that both frequency and rhythmicity influenced flicker-induced visual experiences; rhythmic stimulation produced substantially stronger effects than frequency-matched arrhythmic stimulation.
  Read the PLOS ONE paper

• Montgomery, Amaya & Schmidt (2024), “Flicker light stimulation enhances the emotional response to music.” In a 20-participant experiment, music combined with flicker light stimulation produced stronger reported music-evoked emotion than music alone, with greater experienced flicker intensity associated with greater emotional arousal.
  Read the Frontiers in Psychology paper