My understanding is that it’s an error in the brain when using substances etc, but it shows we can imagine things that aren’t real. How come we can’t make ourselves see stuff like this on purpose?
In: Biology
So NaD, but my limited understanding is that psychotropic drugs and psychedelics rely on already in place neurochemical pathways, and excite the shit out of them by imitating naturally occurring neurotransmitters to produce serotonin, dopamine, and a few others.
So basically, the stuff that makes you high and hallucinate is already in the brain, just not in the same amount as when you are high.
Plus, your brain is trained to filter and layer the world into usable information when the levels are normal. When they get higher, your brain no longer interprets the information the same way. This is also one of the reasons why psychedelics are starting to prove useful for things like neurogenesis and addiction treatment. It forces the brain to kind of slightly rewire itself, for lack of a better term.
Because we have not evolved to do that. The explanation is likely that there is not a survival advantage to actively hallucinate but would likely be a huge disadvantage. So they are not selected for ad so we cant do that.
You sort of can. It would normally mean your body isn’t working properly, though. Basically, if you could actively enter a trippy state, you’d possibly die as an animal, so evolution weeds that out. The closet you get naturally and healthily is hypnogogic hallucinations, which is a scary word for dreaming while you’re awake. This can happen when you wake up or if you’re tired.
In a sense, we are hallucinating all of the time. Your brain is taking all the input from your senses to give you a picture of what the world outside is like, but it creates this picture entirely in your head. What we actually refer to as hallucinations happens when there are glitches in the creation of this picture in your head. So, you might hear a faint sound, and your brain creates the perception that the sound is someone saying your name, even though no one is there for example. This happens all of the time for everyone. For people who have schizophrenia or who are on psychedelic drugs, the brain is just more prone to prolonged hallucinations. Since the hallucinations are glitches, we can’t really control them
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