Eli5: How do drugs manage to alter our perception?
In: Biology
INANeurobiologist but I was interested in the that exact question while in the Uni and took courses in psychopharmacology to understand exactly your question.
When people talk they don’t depend on touch to communicate, they use sound. It’s possible to whisper so quietly the other person can’t hear it, it’s possible the sound is so loud it’s incomprehensible, maybe it’s in a foreign language. But the bottom line is that we can speak and sound is the media. Neurons in the brain behave analogously. Sometimes the signal bridges the gap, sometimes it doesn’t. The brain does pattern recognition of the signal that makes it across and we see a dog.
Likewise when neurons in the brain communicate, they don’t touch either. There’s a very small gap between them and the neurons produce chemicals called neurotransmitters (NTs) to communicate. Many, many factors influence the production of NTs, it’s a delicate balancing act.
Psychoactive drugs alter many different things on the neuron that alter how much NTs are produced. Some drugs actually mimic NTs and so, sort of short circuit the neuron temporarily. Things like cocaine cause massive dumps of NTs, other drugs inhibit NTs.
When the production of NTs is out of balance, the brain does pattern recognition on the altered signal and interprets some of the ‘noise’ to the best of its ability. When the neurons being chemically stimulated are in the visual portion of the brain for example, we might hallucinate things which are not there or misinterpret what we are seeing, like a purple colored dog.
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