Was just thinking about this from the last time I did shrooms my whole friend group were stuck staring at the floor because there were incredibly complex geometric visuals all over the floor ?
In: Biology
Basically the frontal cortex is experiencing a state of partial to total equivalence in regards to the absence of stimuli exceeding the threshold of perception that could allow one to react and make sense of the patterns
The exact link between psychedelic mushrooms and geometric hallucinations is still being researched but what we do know is that psilocybin (the chemical compound in shrooms), alters brain activity in ways that show it increases the “fractal dimension” of brain activity, which is linked to a more complex and interconnected way of processing information.
The part of your brain that recognizes patterns goes crazy. Normally a lot of boxes gotta be checked and a lot of specific neurons gotta fire for your brain to be like “oh ok that is a triangle” but the mushrooms let it skip some steps, and fill in the blanks creatively.
anything’s possible. the times i did it I had mild hallucinations. like I would look at a dish rag, and it would move like a sea anemone. if they look at some interesting shapes, it might come across like fractals or moving geometry
Chemically what is happening when you see things is that the altered experience is a product of serotonin dysfunction in the brain and body. All classical psychedelics (psilocybin, mescaline, LSD and a few others) are all serotonin analogues and have affinity for specific biding sites on the serotonin receptors. This distortion in your serotonin system is what cause the mental component but you get a lot of the physical components as well because serotonin is produced all throughout your body. Some of the things you might see, the fractal geometries, is a product of both the distorted bodily perceptions – the psilocybin is distorting how your is perceiving your sensory input – and some of it is actual physical reaction because of how serotonin can affect muscle tone and other things like balance. Like you may see distortions because of pressure in your eye, and then you also interpret this as, like, floating patterns. When it comes to seeing things, say faces in leaves, the scrambled pattern recognition process – which I think is partly dopamine mediated – goes a little into overdrive so yeah, you perceive patterns that aren’t there. And yeah, some of the shapes are just kind of endogenous mental processes that come about because any part of your central nervous system that uses serotonin – and it’s a lot, especially in your gut – is sending scrambled input. No one is quite sure “why” serotonin disruption and indirect effects on dopamine, in the case of psilocybin specifically, like this produces these symptoms, because we just don’t know enough about a lot of things that go on in the brain.
it more of a visual blending from the light on objects that are in front of you…. it very cool, also scary at time….
[this image in this article helped me understand mushrooms effects at a ELI5 level.](https://www.wired.com/2014/10/magic-mushroom-brain/) I had done them a few times around 2 decades ago and had also been curious how they affected my brain at a neurological level.
We don’t exactly know. These drugs seem to modify the activity patterns in various areas of the brain.
There are some half-mathematical, half-neurological possible explanations. One is the generic observation that many things you can graph with a set of functions tends to form fractals when the functions are fluctuating around their critical point. The critical point is where the output of function nears zero, and often on one side of the critical point the output of the function is above zero, and on the other side it is below zero. E.g. if you draw a curved line that goes up and then goes down, the critical point is the peak of the line.
There have been studies where it’s been noted that the visual cortex activation patterns have a higher fractal dimensionality when subjects are exposed to psychedelic drugs. E.g. [this study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920305358).
Now the reason isn’t that the drugs themselves somehow produced fractals. Rather, it is that they disturb the ordinary function of the neural networks to a more random direction, meaning that the activation of those individual neurons fluctuates more around their critical point.
This sort of fluctuation around the critical point tends to produce fractal patterns, e.g. the [self-avoiding walk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-avoiding_walk) being a good example of this.
Now this is really just one hypothesis with some empirical and theoretical evidence for it. The truth is that we don’t know; but what we do know is that fractals are pretty common and many phenomena tend to produce fractals.
here’s how i’ve explained it to people:
Shrooms and other psychedelics will make you see ‘motion blur’ due to a miriade of chemical triggers. While you’re seeing motion blur, your mind is also hyper interpreting patters. So now, your motion blur might take on a color, and now you see auras. Or perhaps your motion blur is fixed on a flat surface. So your brain sees the textures of the surface as liquid (or fractals) moving behind the surface.
In my own personal case of LSD, i constantly see ‘eyes’ which, i think is mainly the brain being hyper trained to notice human features. So the motion blur, and curves all start to form eyes, and makes me think ‘the earth is watching me’.
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg) is a great watch on your topic
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