But only for the brains of people with severe or undertreated epilepsy of carefully selected varieties. You can trigger a potentially fatal seizure by showing them an appropriately stimulating image. Which likely was a known concept to the author of the story.
For the rest of us the negative feedback along the optical axis puts a stop to such shenanigans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect is evidence to the contrary. This seems to rewire something outside the optical pathway. The effect can last for months. Works on almost all brains, no epilepsy required...
That sounds more like a learned visual effect, something quite different from frying the brain of anyone with a basilisk.
Experiments with cats( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1111849/ ), and the outcome of patients with strabismus/lazy eye(effective blindness on defective eye), suggests that seeing (or not seeing) is a learned trait. Which is a few steps removed from being a backdoor to epileptic seizures or remote controlling heart activity
Exert from that same wiki page about the anti-McCollough effect, I may have the two confused.
Given that AMEs do transfer interocularly,[8] it is reasonable to suppose that they must occur in higher, binocular regions of the brain. Despite producing a less saturated illusory color, the induction of an AME may override a previously induced ME, providing additional weight to the argument that AMEs occur in the higher visual areas than MEs.[8]
GenAI images sometimes do this to me. Not anything scary per say, but some of the faults make my brain feel weird as it tries and fails to interpret parts of the image that were "AI smeared".
But only for the brains of people with severe or undertreated epilepsy of carefully selected varieties. You can trigger a potentially fatal seizure by showing them an appropriately stimulating image. Which likely was a known concept to the author of the story.
For the rest of us the negative feedback along the optical axis puts a stop to such shenanigans.