I’ve never understood how they make people see things. Same thing with ayahuasca. Obviously, there’s some sort of chemical reaction within our brain like with any drug, but what about these makes us see things that aren’t there? Also, how does our brain create so many realistic images in front of us without them being real?
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The very simple wildly over reductive answer, is to understand that a majority of the brain’s job in sensory processing is to disregard irrelevant information. Essentially filtering your environment.
The mechanism that filters your conscious experience is sensitive to changes in brain chemistry. This let’s it do important things like let memories through that are related to your current experiences, help you concentrate, or slow down your perceptions during an emergency.
LSD interacts with one of the many complex sets of serotonin receptors that are primarily in a region of your brain just above and behind your eyeballs. LSD interacts in such a way as to throw the door wide open. Essentially, the hallucinatory effect you’re seeing is the excess noise and stimulation your brain normally filters out, struggling to be interpreted by your conscious brain who doesn’t know how to understand most of it. As a result, the image it constructs is hallucinatory.
There are some important facts about this mechanism of action however. The big one being that everything you see (almost, we’ll come back to that) is a result of your environmental stimulus. Its not “not real” its just not how you normally interpret your world.
However, something that you see are the result of real-time brain processes like imaginination and and memory. Because most visual processing happens in the filtering stage prior to being consciously perceived, your conscious brain has an otherwise impossible opportunity for memories and imagination to interact with your visual and sensory processing.
Importantly, whipe you sleep, one of the things dreaming does is test the Brian’s framework for navigating your life. It tests it with complex sensory inputs and combinatiosn of memories and environmental factors and interprets whether the result is coherent. You have a whole sensory process dedicated to detecting when things “make sense”
LSD allows you to be conscious while the same thing occurs. This provides intense euphoria (or other emotional states) to the user as they experience these unique combinations of process. It can also be therapeutic by allowing the user to intervene and conciously reason about their subconcious brain processes whike they’re being exercised.
However, there is a cost. In addition to LSD being mildly poisonous especially with prolonged use, the brain is not designed to work that way. When you conciously process information and all your subconscious processes that aren’t meant for you to go monkeying with, you can do damage.
Your brain hides these things from you because they’re actually finely tuned over complex and continuous processes that pay attention to everything every second of your life. Essentially, it’s smarter and working harder than you ever are. Admittedly, there are certainly pitfalls that your subconscious interpretations can get stuck in, but you can easily push yourself into then by trying to tamper with them as well.
In summary, LSD inhibits the filtering mechanisms that separate your conscious mind from your unconscious and raw sensory stimulus. This is fun and novel, but also has therapeutic value in allowing you to interact with and introspect about subconscious thought patterns, like those that produce trauma. However, when you open up that box, it’s a two way street. If you put your hands on the controls like that, you can easily inflict self harm just as easily as improve yourself.
Please do not interpret this as instruction or guidance on the process of tripping. It’s a very complicated and risky prospect in addition to re rational drug use being dangerous and illegal just as a matter of what chemical you put in your body, not even addressing the risks of what you do once you’re intoxicated.
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