I have been thinking about this for like a year. What is it really that is going on?
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Depends on the drug for what is the active ingredient. Acid is lysergic acid diethylamide . Mushrooms is psilocybin. Peyote is mescaline. There are many others. Depending on the chemical and its structure it stimulates, suppresses or otherwise modifies the activity of neurotransmitters. It is a temporary chemical imbalance in the brain which we perceive as hallucinations.
Edit: Check out the site erowid.org and they have extensive information on every drug, how it works, where it comes from, what to avoid mixing it with, personal experiences, and scholarlly articles.
Depends on the drug. Mushrooms have psilocybin. Weed has THC. Other drugs, like cocaine or lsd, are more or less pure substances that directly affect you.
In a very broad sense, these chemicals interfere with your brain chemistry. They activate pathways in chaotic ways, link parts of the brain that are not normally linked. If your subconscious is linked to your visual centers, you get visual hallucinations.
Drugs have certain chemicals (psilocybin in mushrooms) that look similar to some of the chemicals that our brain cells naturally produce and use to communicate with other brain cells (see: neurotransmitters, synapse)
The certain chemicals in drugs will create interactions between our brain cells that would otherwise not be there.
To further elaborate on the other comments, the method of action for these drugs piggybacks off of existing neurotransmitter receptors in the brain.
For example, psylocybin, as others mentioned, is the active ingredient in shrooms. That chemical resembles the binding properties of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is naturally found in the brain and is responsible for a variety of functions. Psylocybin binds to the same receptors as serotonin, however the chemical in this case causes different behavior within the neuron it binds to than serotonin.
If enough of the chemical is present, it can disrupt brain activity in a sweeping fashion across the brain. Anything from affecting internal timings for the visual cortex, which could change the rate at which visual information is processed, to triggering activity in unrelated brain regions when encountering stimuli (synesthesia).
If you’re wondering why hallucinations occur on shrooms, it’s a bit more complicated but I’ll try to explain. When looking at the type visual info the brain actually takes in, there isn’t as much data as you think that enters the visual cortex. Much of what we experience is ‘filled in’ using a predictive visual lattice, which is much faster than trying to take in more visual data.
The rate at which the eyes send data to the brain remains fixed for the most part, but we can mess with the timings of the predictive visual algorithm using mushrooms. When we take mushrooms, all systems are overclocked. However, since there are physical limitations to our rods and cones in the eyes, they will still fatigue at a certain rate we can’t change. What we can change is the amount of passes the visual cortex does on the information coming into it in order to predict the next ‘frame’ of perception.
Generally the predictive matrix takes the output from the last cycle, injects new data being perceived, and attempts to parse the information into objects we understand. When the brain is overclocked by shrooms, the new information coming in remains constant, but interestingly enough, the amount of iterations the visual predictive cycle does increases substantially. What this does is feed a much higher percentage of ‘old’ information back into the neural network – and without substantial new visual data to keep up with it, the brain plays a game of broken telephone with itself until the visual data you finally see begins to break down and stop making sense. If you stare at a blank wall on shrooms this will happen relatively quickly as your cone cells will fatigue almost instantly and you will be left with just the predictive algorithm going whack.
cannabis makes you see things from above, see the connections its not hallucination.
dmt for example opens the gate to the unconsiounss in the thalamus brain region ,so you can see, hear things that you usually couldn’t because the thalamus gate blocks everything non-important for food, shelter and sex. its not hallucination either. its a simple function of your brain,
mushrooms and led dont make you hallucinate either, they change your lvl of conscious and you are aware of more things.
its not rly a hallucatinaton thats happening, these things are real so your wording is a bit poor and for your question: we dont rly know yet how and why.
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