Recently, much has been said about psychedelic music, literature, and art. What is psychedelics? This concept denotes a set of phenomena that are associated with an altered state of consciousness and research in the field of stability of the human psyche. In order to answer the question of what psychedelicism is, it is necessary to consider this phenomenon in more detail.
This phenomenon has become widespread in music (kraut-rock, goa-trance and other areas of "music-psychedelic"). In addition, in literature, cinema and other forms of art.
If we consider the structure of the word itself, it becomes more clear what psychedelics are. The word consists of two parts: “psycho”, which is translated from Greek as “soul”, and “delicacy” - also a translation from Greek, which means “to manifest”. That is, this is what manifests the soul. Psychedelics are a fairly broad concept used in various forms of art. Everything that finds a spiritual response in a person and leads him to a new understanding of something can be called psychedelic.
Sometimes the term is used as a synonym for certain psychotropic substances, but it must be remembered that psychedelics are not only drugs!
The psychological effect, such as, for example, “expansion of consciousness”, can be achieved without using psychoactive substances. For example, in psychological practice S. Grof’s experiments are known related to the so-called holotropic (deep) breathing, sensory deprivation or sleep deprivation and various forms of meditation, spiritual enlightenment, special psychedelic programs, some forms of psychotherapy and alternative medicine, occultism, mysticism, esotericism leading to similar effects that help to understand what psychedelics are in practice.
As for psychedelic music, it is very diverse. This is Kraut rock, and psychedelic rock, trance, ambient, folk, pop, soul and some other directions.
The first musicians to play this kind of music were Jimmy Hendricks, Pink Floyd, partly the Beatles and other bands that were associated with the hippie subculture. With the development of electronic music, this genre has become more diverse.
Phenomena of this kind are sometimes extended to the so-called 25 frame. What is psychedelic frame 25? This is supposedly a certain technique of influencing a person’s subconscious by inserting into one of the additional frames any information, often of an advertising nature.
The meaning of the effect is that a person’s vision can only distinguish between 24 frames per second and that which shows less than 1/24 of a second directly affects the subconscious structures of the human psyche .
Actually, the 25th frame is not so invisible: they are all recorded by the observer's eye, but due to the inertia of the process of vision, it mixes with others and does not stand out. But thanks to the same effect, to see the 25th advertising frame is not difficult. If a short familiar word is written on it in large print, then you can even have time to read it, which is easy to see for anyone who has a computer and is familiar with video editing techniques, even at home.
Regarding the psychological impact on the human subconscious of frame 25, one can say the following: its effect was officially refuted by the American Psychological Association back in 1958.
Where did this myth come from? In 1957, someone D. Vickeri said that he had conducted an experiment in one of the American cinemas, namely, during the demonstration of the movie “Picnic”, popcorn and Coca-Cola were on sale as the 25th shot, which, according to Vikeri, increased by 33%.
Some scientists have tried to repeat the experiments of Vikeri. So, for example, in 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation advertising agency during one of its popular TV shows gave the insert “Call now!”, However, the number of calls did not increase. And when the audience was told about the experiment and asked them to guess the text of the message, not one of them sent the correct answer.
A few years later, Vickery admitted that the 1957 experiments and sales statistics were fabricated by him.