Eli5: What is it in e.g drugs and mushrooms that makes you hallucinate?

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I have been thinking about this for like a year. What is it really that is going on?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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