Thanks for that, it's very interesting. Although there are similarities between the face thing you mentioned, and the psychomantium, it doesn't appear that you should angle the mirror to see yourself in the psychomantium? From what I've read, the mirror should be angled to reflect what is behind you, but only what is above and to the side of you, and no part of yourself.
Indeed. I was just highliting some experiments that involve humans and mirrors, which might suggest they are connected or share an explanation in common.
I've often scared myself looking into a mirror at night, I believe this is very common and easy to achieve, when all you can see is a dark figure of yourself, with your outline illuminated from behind by what little ambient light is present. Just a minute of that, and briefly I will panic at random moments, when I think the figure is somebody else looking at me, and not myself.
My own 'staring' type experiments where you don't blink, can also produce weird visual effects, colour, luminosity, shape and pattern distortions, together with totally false perceptions in my periphery vision. I've never studied why, just assumed that restricting visual input causes some sort of problem for visual processing, and stops me updating my internal visual spatial construction of the world, leading to larger and larger distortions from the visual centre outwards...
The psychomantium seems to have a rather different effect... i.e. Fully formed apparitions of other people? But as you point out, I'm guessing that if you ain't well focused in the lead up to the experiment. You might manifest other imagery... That's the part I'm scared of! Lol...
I think Apparitions, or at least some apparitions might have a neurological basis. There's this case, for example, about a woman named Ruth. Now, Ruth had a very traumatizing infancy, as she was raped by her dad when she was just a little girl. At her young adultness, she developed the strange tendency of having apparitions of her dad ( who was still alive, and wasn't aware of this apparitions IIRC) in her bedroom, and sometimes his dad "took the place" of his husband at his side of the bed.
The apparitions became so annoying that she started going to terapy with a psychiatrist. The psychiastrist, instead of taking the common route ( that is, taking steps to prevent the apparitions of happening, which apparently can be done) did the exact opposite and encouraged her to control the Apparitions. Ruth, after a long journey managed not only to control apparitions at will of her dad, but also of friends, and other persons. This helped her to cope with her traumas, as she was able to "speak" with his "dad" and solve many issues.
Some studies, for sheer curiosity, where done by this psychiatrist to Ruth strange and interesting case. He, for example, scanned her brain while seeing a screen that produces a very characteristic brain pattern ( due to some flashing lights in the screen, or something like that, can't recall the detail ), and while seeing the screen he asked her to summon (in lack of a better word) his dad. As he apparated, Ruth's retina still responded normally to the flashy lights, but her neurological pattern changed, suggesting that light entered into his eyes, but along the path something "blocked" the light and inserted instead his apparated dad. Suffice is to say his dad didn't appeared in cameras, but Ruth, IIRC, claimed she managed to "show" his dad to other persons.
At least me, I've never heard of anyone else being studied in a scientific way while making apparitions at will of persons. While the case cannot be extrapolated to far ( due to Ruth being a mentally ill person and hence not representative of the larger population) it seems to be a phenomenon that might have therapeutic uses while also being something you can control for your own purposes ( at least to me, it would be interesting to "store" persons inside my mind, and then just make them apparate at will and in my own conditions, to ask them questions or just do some brain storm :P ). It also, of course, open a whole bunch of philosophical questions. This "apparitions" of living persons, ¿"who" are they?, ¿does it make sense to talk about them as "who's"?, ¿do they have feelings?, ¿can you use this "persons" to see distant objects?, ¿what happens when they are not apparated, do they still exist in some way?, ¿what way?, etc.