What is LSD, what does it do to your brain and the reason it’s not lethal even at large doses?
In: Biology
In normal circumstances your brain’s various regions are isolated from eachother. You only perceive one at a time and they go through a part of your brain that acts like a switch keeping them from talking to eachother. LSD silences that switch and parts of your brain that never talk can now speak directly. This gives you weird perceptions, you see how the lower parts of your brain process information and imagery and the barrier that separates things you imagine from what you perceive becomes blurred the higher you go in dosage. This leads to things like seeing sound, or recognizing objects as other objects, having walls move etc. You’re just seeing raw unprocessed data that your brain normally hides from you.
There is another layer in your brain that acts as shortcuts. A good way of explaining it is when you take the same path to work everyday for months and then one thing changes and you suddenly recognize a building you’ve never seen before like it’s appeared out of nowhere. The truth is your brain through repeated exposure drew a line to useless information because you repeatedly told it that it wasn’t important. Then when it became novel because something changed your brains filtering is disrupted and you see it.
Thinking is expensive and at times uncomfortable so your brain is as lazy as it possibly can be and relies heavily on these shortcuts for everything. Depression and addiction can exist within this system, where people have issues/patterns that trap them mentally in circular thoughts they can’t escape. They cannot change their perception to adapt to their realities. When you take LSD in a dose high enough to induce ego death you are removing these shortcuts. This is where psychedelics can be transformative and it allows you to rewrite the shortcuts, to give new interpretation to events and circumstances. This allows you to figure out what view point serves you best which you can then use to let go of traumatic events, reorient your relationships and transform how you view yourself. You’d be surprised how many people truly hate themselves and how much it negatively effects their life in ways they are incapable of normally perceiving.
It may well be true that what we experience as our ego is just a series of ingrained mental shortcuts that while useful is not without its downsides. There are technical/scientific terms for everything I’m describing, but I find these descriptions do it justice. I have a decent explanation of religious experiences too, but I’ve been told it kills the mystery of psychedelics for some people.
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