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
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.
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