How does a basilisk operate?
The short answer is: we mustn’t say. Detailed information is classified beyond Top Secret. The longer answer is based on a popular-science article by Berryman (New Scientist, 2001), which outlines his thinking. He imagined the human mind as a formal, deterministic computational system — a system that, as predicted by a variant of Gödel’s Theorem in mathematics, can be crashed by thoughts which the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The Logical Imaging Technique presents such a thought in purely visual form as a basilisk image which our optic nerves can’t help but accept. The result is disastrous, like a software stealth-virus smuggled into the brain.
