I'm only mildly trypophobic but those images did have a minor effect - and I have a possible hypothesis for why it happens: what these images and trypophobia-triggering ones all have in common is a huge number of edges of various shapes and sizes, and it's this "edge overload" stimulating many more neurons than usual that's causing the disturbance. I find that the repetitive, but not-quite-the-same patterns like (organic) holes or other curvy shapes have the greatest effect; in contrast, straight lines don't do much. This makes sense since straight lines probably only trigger neurons that detect one direction, but curves have many "directions" to them.
I've always wondered about this! Back when I was a teenager I remember playing around with one of the Kai's Power Tools to generate fractal-like images (I forget exactly which one it was, but it had a bunch of presets that would generate cell-like textures).
Thing was, I found them MASSIVELY anxiety-provoking and have never been able to figure out why. They'd literally make me panicky.
These images are doing the same. Even now, just thinking about them, my stomach is fluttering. It's something about the way they're organic, but I don't know what it is. It's definitely nothing rational.
I've never heard of trypophobia; this does seem like it. I wonder if it's closely related to the feeling of disgust; somehow an evolved response to keep us away from rotten food perhaps? Things like bacteria growing on bread, or beehives. Or any food that's started decomposing.
There's a cool documentary I remember seeing called "How Art Made The World". One of the things it talks about is how we're driven to make more-than-perfect representations of things in our art. Say we find something in the real world aesthetically pleasing. With art, we can take that aesthetically pleasing stimulus and exaggerate it, resulting in the art being more pleasing than anything in the real world.
I wonder if that's what happens here, with the almost-organic images somehow being 'hyper-disgusting' as they coincidentally line up with a hyper-exaggerated version of a stimulus that on the scale of disgusting might be 'slightly unappealing' in the form that we'd encounter it in the real world.
I found an image which stimulates the edge detectors in people's brains, far more than a natural image. It tends to cause people to feel weird and not want to look at it, in a way they can't quite describe. And making the image flash and rotate rapidly made it far worse.
My wife found them somewhat too intense to take in rapidly. If viewing these makes you uncomfortable you should probably steer clear of psychedelic drugs, which tend to induce this sort of imagery for hours on end; as you can imagine this would be mentally tiring at the best of times.
