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
I’ve personally never gotten hallucinations from them but lights become more enjoyable to look at even if there isn’t much of a visual difference.
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.
The most modern research (by people like David Nutt) suggest that the shrooms aren’t actually making us see anything “extra.”
Instead, it suggests that the part of our our brains responsible for filtering all the chaos around us into usable data actually goes starts to slow down and go to sleep, meaning were actually kind of seeing more of the _real world_ around us, our brains just dont know how to process that extra (and mostly useless) information and thus we end up seeing it as fractals and hyperbolic geometry.
So essentially the fractals are made by our own brains, the psychedelics are just allowing the extra information in.
Many people (including myself) see visual patterns for example even when pressing hard on eye balls. Like when you are tired and you “massage” your eyes. I see very complex geometrical patterns.
So I would assume psychedelics are just stimulating this mechanism.
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