All of your senses are just responses to physical stimuli that then cause chemicals to be released in your brain to create the experience of seeing, hearing, feeling etc. If similar reactions happen in the brain without external stimuli you will still perceive there to be something like hearing or seeing things that aren’t ther physically.
Imagine if you had a 2000 piece jigsaw puzzle and only put together the border with a few spots in the middle, but you’ve done the puzzle before so you can roughly visualize what the whole thing is going to look like.
That’s what happens with your brain/eyes. What your eyes actually sense are just borders and random splotches of color (light waves) in the middle. Then your brain takes that data and fills in the rest of the picture from memory which is what you end up actually ‘seeing’.
Hallucinations happen when your eyes sense ambient light particles or get incomplete data, and your brain accidentally fills it in with the wrong picture. Likewise, hallucinatory drugs basically work by making your brain really bad at guessing the picture.
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