How do psychedelics affect the brain that people experience insane things so quickly or intensely?
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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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