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
For very ELI5 explanation,
Imagine you look at a working car. Normally, we’d register that car is humming, vibrating a bit and making engine noise.
That’s all that your brain outputs for you. But, the ears can hear much more. They can hear the crankshaft going around, oil slushing, pistons getting pushed from ignited fuel and air mixture, cooling liquid getting circled in radiators, so forth. But your brain dismisses all that, and just says “engine’s growling”. It doesn’t really dismiss it, it adds it all together and makes sense of it. But your consciousness receives a result of this formula or function, not the parts that make it up.
It’s a filter, and it’s a good filter, because we don’t need rest of the information on daily basis.
That’s how we’re normally. Under psychedelic drugs, like shrooms – or especially – LSD, that filter gets bypassed. You start to see everything, hear everything, smell and taste everything. And parts you don’t or miss, your imagination will fill in with hallucinations, much like AI language models do (I’m ready to die on the hill that ChatGPT is same as human on acid).
So, with severe problems in filtering, your friend might “see” the parts that go into the “calculation”. Maybe not the whole calculation, but humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, so there’s surely some sort of computer-software-like functions that evaluate patterns. So perhaps their brain projects triangles and hexagons and whatever on the floor and compares them to the floor, trying to understand what floor looks most like. And it’s likely they leak through, making your friend see the data before final “product” is formed in the brain. So he thinks he’s seeing patterns, while they’re just part of the process of “seeing” the floor.
Latest Answers