How do psychedelics affect the brain that people experience insane things so quickly or intensely?
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Nobody really knows. The vast majority of psychedelics affect your serotonin system, it seems they generally produce more serotonin but also the actual molecule of the drug itself fits into serotonin receptors. This varies in effect too, psilocin and LSD generally fit into this profile, but then you have drugs like salvinorin (salvia) which primarily effects dopamine and also usually causes dysphoria (most psychedelics cause euphoria). Salvia is interesting because it is arguably the most intense and immediate “””psychedelic”” but it’s different from all of the others. The long answer, and the short answer, are that nobody truly knows exactly why they do what they do. There has also been an increasingly strong contingent of people arguing that DMT is a neurotransmitter. It’s been found present in at least human lung tissue and various other human tissue, and is in many other natural organisms. It also is burned up by the body in about 5 minutes even when consumed at like the 100mg dose, so it being a tiny tiny little bit of your body’s neurotransmitters, like in the micrograms, seems plausible and the implications of that and our connection to reality are something that is a whole other conversation.
They screw up the things which your brain uses to interpret reality. Everything we sense is converted into electrical signals in our brain, which puts the pieces together to make something coherent. But if you get something in there that disrupts this process, those electrical signals change.
And since reality is interpreted based on those signals, the altered signals make you experience sensory information in the exact same way you would if what you were experiencing was actually real.
Short answer is that we know a little bit about the mechanism, but not much.
We know psychedelics mainly affect the serotonergic system, which means the regulation of serotonin, and important part of keeping your brain working “normal,” is disrupted, causing it to be not normal.
The psychedelic experience isn’t as “crazy,” as people think though. You’re not going to see a dragon in your kitchen, or walk through a portal in a solid wall. The “crazy,” parts of the experience are more emotional and mental, while the visuals tend to be distortions of the world around us, such as a the pattern on a wooden table flowing like a river, or the tiles in a bathroom wall shifting around. Part of the difficulty in understanding psychedelics is that it’s very hard to convey what the exact experience is actually like to someone who hasn’t experience psychedelics, in a similar way to how it’s difficult for us 3 dimensional beings to understand the 4th dimension.
There’s been some research to suggest that psychedelic hallucinations aren’t being “added,” to our reality, but instead by the psychedelics interfering with the natural “filter,” that filters out noise and random information from our sensory system, causing our brains to interpret that extra noise as data. Sort of like seeing images in clouds.
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