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
Short of the long is these drugs cause physiological changes which in turn cause your senses to take in more information than they are used to. This is why your pupils dilate so much when affected by psychoactive drugs. When your senses are flooded with all this extra information your brain has to interpret that excess information in some way and this is why colors become very vivid and ‘people have auras’ or ‘the walls start breathing’.
Duno about lsd but mushrooms once ingested change their chemical composition which cause the euphoric and hallucinogenic feels.
Take note, in severely rare cases, this feeling may last forever. As in you will be high out of your mind for the rest of your life.
You will get a lot of answers here, but from my knowledge there have been such limited human trials with LSD and Mushroom that there is not enough scientific evidence or research that has been done that conclusively answers this.
In fact the “hallucinations” people see or the visions they get on LSD and mushrooms and how they usually reflect things in the persons conscious mind, is one of the mysteries that still surrounds hallucinogens.
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)
I don’t know the technical answer. But it’s just an extension of something most people experience naturally. You ever look at clouds and see things in them? Or maybe see faces in trees as a kid? What we see on LSD and Shrooms is that only moreso. You have to take some *very* high doses to think “woah a dragon” and not “woah that rock wall looks like a dragon”. In evolutionary terms, our brains developed this as a skill to find faces of camouflaged predators. Again I don’t know the chemistry but, at least in terms of “seeing things”, that’s one of the main things being enhanced (or rather you could say our ability to do it as little as possible is impaired).
Foreign Chemistry make brain go BRRRRRR
oddly enough you didnt even mention the ones that really mess people up- ie Salvia/spice
that stuff will have people comatose in hallucination-
Our brain is usually going haywire with all the sensory information it’s getting. There are regions of the brain which controls all the sensory information and filters it into normal perception.
Mushrooms & LSD turn down these regions, and allow all the sensory information into our perception without being filtered/ ordered/ controlled. It can be overwhelming for our consciousness to perceive them all.
They also have other effects on the brain, but those are less well understood.
Source: Professor David Nut has some interesting papers on psilocybin E.g. scanning people while they’re on it.
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.
Latest Answers