how do mushrooms and LSD work?

Question

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?

In: 31

Answer 1

Your brain has to do a lot of heavy lifting interpeting the signals it gets from your senses, it’s sort of like a decoder for a tv screen.
With sight alone your brain has to correctly process; depth perception, color contrast, color hue, object sizes, identify object boarders and what is and isn’t a distinct object, additionally the brain has to take in what it gets as a 2D image and process it into a 3D reality, but most importantly it has to remember and fill in the blind spots of your vision (almost all optical illusions take advantage of this last one).

Psychedelics are able to disrupt all of these, and it doesn’t do so statically, e.g. just staring at an object it would appear to get closer and further away, bigger and smaller, brighter/ more vibrant, all the while the dimensional proportions are changing, stretching, or even “melting”.
The drug disrupting all of these processes at once accounts for most if not all psychedelic effects, at least at moderate to heavy doses. And many people find all of these processes being interfered with and everchanging to be quite novel/different and entertaining, however for inexperienced people it can easily become overstimulating and cause anxiety to build causing a “bad trip”. Additionally it’s worth noting that it does all this by increasing serotonin, which is responsible for a variety of feelings and emotions, and therefore will amplify feelings significantly, e.g. heightened senses of awe, wonder, euphoria, novelty, and also less desireable ones such as anxiety are all commonly reported.

Side note: (Very high doses of DMT, Salvia take this to 11, and cause a temporary loss/forgetfulness of who you are as a person, and possibly not even let you process sight/visual inputs, instead replacing it with something similar to the pattern seen when eyes are closed, but much more intense, but that’s such a wildly different experience altogether most would consider “hardcore” psychedelics/amounts of psychedelics completely different)