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Trans personal effects of pupil dilations
Pupillometry research increasingly points to pupil dilation as a window into deep autonomic and even dyadic states that extend well beyond simple reflex. The locus coeruleus linkage, synchronized interpersonal dilation, and its appearance in dissociative and psychedelic states together suggest the pupil is a live broadcast of interior, and possibly shared, consciousness dynamics. The transpersonal dimension — dilation as a channel of non-verbal, cross-body emotional transmission — has empirical footing that mainstream optics ignores.
Evidence
- The locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system, which Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann's remote viewing protocols at SRI indirectly touched via arousal-state calibration, is now confirmed as the dominant driver of task-invoked pupillary response.
- The Wounded Healers Institute published pupillometry research in December 2025 framing dissociative states — including those induced by psychedelics — as producing a distinctive and measurable pupillary profile.
- Rick Strassman's DMT research noted profound mydriasis during peak endogenous DMT release moments, and Stanislav Grof documented pupillary changes during holotropic breathwork as markers of transpersonal threshold crossings — states where ego boundaries dissolve.
- The transpersonal layer emerges most sharply in synchronized dilation research: two individuals gazing at each other show correlated pupil responses, with infants responding emotionally to dilating pupils in caregivers.
- This brainstem nucleus is itself a core node in what researchers at the Monroe Institute describe as the arousal gateway to altered states — the very threshold remote viewers were trained to hold open.