Why fractals psychedelics

A scientist would never treat a conjecture as indisputable fact. Have you seen the study where they slowly degrade the quality of letters until a passage becomes illegible? The group on psilocybin is consistently able to derive the correct meaning from the text at levels the control group cannot.

Pupil dilation, literally allows more light to enter the eye and more signal to travel down the optical nerve. In fact, serotonin the primary neurotransmitter stimulated by most psychedelics is heavily involved in perception and the internal processes by which we make up our realities.

Like, no, this doesn't prove any of the things people have extrapolated it into, but maybe think twice before saying there is no evidence to even suggest such a thing. So you regularly dont see reality as it is because it would be too much for you to handle. Thats the whole point of the thalamus filter.

You don't "hallucinate" on LSD, your perception is altered along with possible cognitive shifts. You don't "take" marijuana, you smoke it or eat if it's been made into an edible. So LSD visuals aren't hallucinations? And I don't see what's wrong with the word "take". No meaning is lost there, and it's a trivial difference to quibble over.

I dont see spirals or geometric forms On LSD I see some people changing form or shape and the kaleidoscopes everywhere, And the colours are more vivid.

If I close my eyes the kaleidoscopes and fractals are more intense and sometimes fluorescent. I trip more with my eyes closed even when the light Is strong. On peyote and san Pedro I didnt see the fractals and geometric forms but everything was fluid and soft - like Im inside an living organism that moves with me and around me.

It was more the psychological feeling than visual. Geometrical hallucinations are just one type of visual hallucinations. Under certain circumstances one may "see" complicated objects such as faces, people, house, landscapes, etc.

How can this kind of research generalize from geometrical hallucinations to these more complicated ones? Just to hazard a guess, one could assume it has something to do with the way our brain categorizes different "contours" and patterns in the visual fields as being faces or fingers or really anything more than just lines.

Take looking at a cloud, and seeing a vague shape of a face and recognizing it even though it's quite clearly water vapor. Now given that a drug like LSD makes you more suggestable, and that it's already overloading your neurons in such a way as to cause you to see fractal patterns where none exist, then it seems logical that it would also overload the neurons relating to matching those patterns with known objects like faces, causing you to falsely associate your hallucination with the perception of a face or entity.

If you're interested in the subject Jack Cowan gave a talk at the Redwood Neuroscience center. The video lecture is online at archive. Spontaneous pattern formation in large scale brain activity: what visual migraines and hallucinations tell us about the brain When I hallucinate, I see equations and words on walls. Not fractals and patterns. I have no idea what this says about the contents of my subconcious mind, but it's interesting to think about.

I've had that with MDMA before, but only the one time strangely. I remember seeing a mess of equations and letters in the night sky, floating back and forth as hallucinations can do. Also saw crowns and diamonds ahah was a fun night though!

Correlation isn't causation. I have done many psychedelics, and I have never seen any of these patterns. Reminds me of an old person talking about "The Facebook" or whatever else you want to put in there. The scientific community saves lives, can predict the future and can make awesome things like computers. When I drink lots of alcohol I get drunk. Correlation does equal causation in this instance. When I take psychedelics I see patters hallucinations - because they are not actually there.

I have seen Paisley print on my plain blue denim jeans. Just because you don't hallucinate doesn't mean others don't. I don't hallucinate without drugs or fever. Therefore, I think it is fair to assume the the drugs are responsible for the hallucinations.

I have always been able to see my own mandala of geometric visual hallucinations from a very young age. Its just normal to me. I can see or tune into it whenever I want. It helps me meditate. I have also drawn a lot of art of geometric shapes and a couple have turned out to be optical illusions. My drawings arent planned out I just draw. I have been diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder since but even though I take medication I still have my geometric hallucinations.

Its like checkerboards spiraling in all directions sometimes there are colours mainly green and red with bright yellow lines and sometimes i can just see the spiralling shapes of the checkerboards in black and white. I have taken hallucinagens in the past and they have made the hallucinations more extreme but I always have them. Like I say I can tune in whenever I wish. Id love to know more on this subject.

I wouldnt mind being a test subject either. I personally feel more spiritual than scientific but Im open to answers as to why I have this phenomenon allll the time. I've seen some pattern like these, not exact like those, but close. And it was an amazing feeling. I have a relatively mild bipolar disorder but I function well i my job as physician and in my family.

Five years ago, during a hypomanic phase, I began to see rounded, slightly irregular, honeycomb patterns with dark contours and paler areas and a black disc in the centre, while I had my eyes closed and focused on the dark behind my eyelids. When my mood normalized after a couple of months, the pattern disappeared. But the last year I can se the patterns on demand, though my mood is normal.

I have begun to systematically study the phenomenon and have found that the honeycomb pattern with dark contours transforms itself constantly, so that some "cells" grow slightly bigger and other smaller in a calm way, like a living tissue. The pattern is strictly flat. After a while a minute or so , I can see another type of pattern with swiftly moving short and straight and a little shaggy lines against a total black background. Those lines form rapidly changing complex forms of a more three-dimensional appearance, like pyramids, "bubble-gitters" and so on.

If I continue the session, which is like a meditation for me, I have short flashes of photorealistic hallucinations in a limited area of the "visual" field. It can by human eyes, mouths or more complex and beautiful pictures with clear but somewhat dark colors, like old paintings. I have noticed that my ability to see the visions have improved during this year of regular practice. Now I try to paint the motifs and I feel the training is good for me and makes me feel more stable and focused i everyday life.

It was nice to read your comment and interesting to share the experience. I don't use any drugs and for the moment no medication. I have run several ultras before, but this was the hottest and hardest. About 28 hours into my 39 hour run, it was dark in the desert and running on pavement. All the shrubs, rocks, geological features started to turn to bears, bison, people, motor homes, boats, etc. Those have happened before, but after another hour or two of running the pavement turned into millions of numbers, formulas, Indian symbols, chemistry elements, graffiti, etc.

I knew these were hallucinations, but it was maddening. I hoped when the sun rose, it would reset my brain, but these "faux patterns" continued until sleep at the end of the race pm. Other than the obvious sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion, what caused this in condition in the brain? Any random set of features turned into words in one case the moles on my pacer's face. I hope I never have this condition again The reductionist conclusion that such visions are "simply" reflective of the brain's wiring, along with the comments condemning the "absurdity" of the poster who indicated a metaphysical connection, has as its basis a false dichotomy - that is that these patterns cannot simultaneously reflect both the brain's wiring or structure and "part of what makes up our reality.

In fact, I posit that that is indeed the case. My background is in math, and I experimented "back in the day" with LSD. The researchers noticed that activator neurons in the visual cortex were mostly connected to nearby activator neurons, while inhibitory neurons tended to connect to inhibitory neurons farther away, forming a wider network.

This is reminiscent of the two different chemical diffusion rates required in the classic Turing mechanism, and in theory, it could spontaneously give rise to stripes or spots of active neurons scattered throughout a sea of low neuronal activity. These stripes or spots, depending on their orientation, could be what generates perceptions of lattices, tunnels, spirals and cobwebs. In that scenario, the prey serve as activators, seeking to reproduce and increase their numbers, while predators serve as inhibitors, keeping the prey population in check with their kills.

Thus, together they form Turing-like spatial patterns. Goldenfeld was studying how random fluctuations in predator and prey populations affect these patterns. A condensed matter physicist by training, Goldenfeld gravitates toward interdisciplinary research, applying concepts and techniques from physics and math to biology and evolutionary ecology.

Roughly 10 years ago, he and his then graduate student Tom Butler were pondering how the spatial distribution of predators and prey changes in response to random local fluctuations in their populations, for instance if a herd of sheep is attacked by wolves. It became clear that ecological models need to take random fluctuations into account rather than just describe the average behavior of populations.

If an activator neuron randomly switches on, it can cause other nearby neurons to also switch on. Conversely, when an inhibitory neuron randomly switches on, it causes nearby neurons to switch off. He dubbed these stochastic Turing patterns. However, to function properly, the visual cortex must be primarily driven by external stimuli, not by its own internal noisy fluctuations. What keeps stochastic Turing patterns from constantly forming and causing us to constantly hallucinate?

Goldenfeld and colleagues argue that even though the firing of neurons can be random, their connections are not. Whereas short-range connections between excitatory neurons are common, long-range connections between inhibitory neurons are sparse, and Goldenfeld thinks this helps suppress the spread of random signals. He and his cohorts tested this hypothesis by creating two separate neural network models. One was based on the actual wiring of the visual cortex, and the other was a generic network with random connections.

In the generic model, normal visual function was substantially degraded because the random firing of neurons served to amplify the Turing effect. Abstract Psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin and LSD, represent unique tools for researchers investigating the neural origins of consciousness.

Publication types Research Support, Non-U. Gov't Research Support, U. There's some amount of social stigma associated with LSD and other psychedelics, but it seems to have faded away quite a bit since I used it in the late s. Back then, and for some years afterward, the stigma was pretty strong. Admitting that you had used psychedelics was tantamount to admitting that you were crazy and possibly dangerous in many social circles. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be so much the case anymore.

I've personally never minded admitting that I used psychedelics in the late 70s, but at that time I was accustomed to be seen as a weirdo and an outsider. Indeed, I was so accustomed to it that I didn't even realize that's what was happening. I didn't find out what it was like to be treated as someone ordinary until I took a job with Apple and moved to the SF Bay Area. I liked LSD and other psychedelics a lot in the late 70s, and used them a lot--enough to find out how often I could take them without tolerance reducing their effects noticeably.

I gave up psychedelics and pretty much all other mind-altering substances in the first half of the s. I never liked anything other than psychedelics as much as I liked them.

Of the other substances I experimented with, I liked cannabis best, but I gave it up, too. The best reason I can articulate is that I was no longer getting anything new from them and, as the fellow said, when you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.

I do still drink the odd glass of whiskey or port or champagne once or twice a year, but that's because I like the sensations of drinking them. I try to avoid drinking enough to get tipsy. I never cared all that much for drugs that are supposed to make you feel good. I like LSD too; I wish the government would legalize it.

LSD makes you pretty tough. Many people have a hard time digesting that, so they choose to be afraid of LSD instead of recognizing it. Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip.

I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have their own decision trees.

Also, we're all the same person or being. Weird day. I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. I experienced it myself after trying magic mushroom: We are all one being we call it the universe , it's consciousness subdivided between us all in order to escape it's solitude.

It was scary at the time believing this sad possibility. I'm not so sure but the thought remains. Also follows: whatever you do to me you will be experiencing it.

More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the literature, for example, who come to the realization that both the jailer and the jailed are the same. Jack Kornfield is one of many who is famous for relating the story about how the person being tortured suddenly observes that the person torturing them is the same entity.

I believe there are also many reports from concentration camps coming to the same conclusion. It's difficult for us to admit this, because normal waking consciousness would have us sort things into us and them, but there is a level of perception that one can reach, where the interconnectedness of all things is seen. Many people tend to toss these things into religion or spirituality, but there's nothing supernatural about it at all, it's a biological and ecological reality.

The question, however, that doesn't go away, is why are these peak experiences trying to communicate the same or similar ultimate truths to us, truths that seem to contradict and oppose the conditioning and programming of our dominant culture, which tells us we are separate from each other and should be fearful, aggressive, and violent.

The boring possibility is that humans have to self-generate an ego- babies don't really know the difference between themselves and other people, it's one of the recognized developmental stages.

So in unusual situations it's maybe not surprising that that particular ability could get disrupted, it might actually be quite fragile. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough, particularly when you read the reports of people identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even rocks.

At that point, there might be another mechanism at work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy or juvenile to look back and reflect on everything around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but as one continuous form?

Maybe the problem isn't what we are experiencing, but how we think about it. I'm an atheist post-mormon but I do consider it "spiritual" but I hate religion, so I don't group it in there, but I've been having some sort of "awakening" I'm not fully atheist though I guess, I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth Something something I can buy an afterlife, just don't buy there's a God, at least not one like any worshiped on earth, they all resemble kings too closely, and are too narcissistic.

Enki might be the only exception, he was a scientist - stood up for man, gave us knowledge, but basically is as most scientists humble and could give a rats ass about being worshipped, considers us just the discovery channel. Keyword: Aloof. Of course, that's just a myth. Still, my favorite mythological character. Anyhow, tangent aside my point - is no God, no need to worship.

One tenet : All are one, treat all as you would yourself regardless of race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Honestly, I see that as the penultimate human utopian ideal, but I think as long as we give elitism roots, we'll never get there, there's no room for elitism in a world where all are equal.

Why did they need to exist before they were generated here? Firefox didn't float through space before people invented computers and wrote it up in By the anthropic principle, we happened to start here, of all possible places, in our heads, of all possible heads, and will end here. What's beautiful, I think, is being okay with that, and overcoming ego enough to realize how petty and small our differences from each other are -- you from me, us from Ancient Romans years ago, and us from the uncountable consciousnesses years from now, which will be witness to wonders we can only dream about.

The local tragedy of death is a momentary drop of sorrow in an global ocean of adventure and beauty, experienced by people whose difference from ourselves and each other is a different sensory feed and a lonely, selfish conceit of the self.

We are not all the same person. To be specific, you and I are not the same person by any reasonable non-trivial definition of a person. We may only be parts of some larger entity duh like humanity, which may or may not be considered a person separate from us, its parts depending on definition you choose.

See nondualism. The question isn't whether or not this is delusional, it's why is this experience widely shared across human history. Judging from the page description they make the same mistake of simply ignoring definitions and coming up with their own. Is there anything special to this experience?

Historically, all kinds of delusions were "widely shared". This is true even today. People "talked" to trees everywhere around the world. Yes, it is plausible, but logically impossible. What do you mean by "impossible"? I just described exactly how people get that experience: they mess up definitions. It is a perfectly logical description. Under influence people think peeing in public is OK is plausible, though logically it is not the best action to take.

So that is not unique either. At its heart, the Tao is nonverbal in its essence, beyond the confines of language. The Tao is an experience rather than definition. Each tradition has their own version. For the west, it's the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa.

This goes beyond definitions because language can't describe it. This is not a failing, this is the essence of its impossibility. What you just described makes about as much sense as Seado - a word that I just came up with - e. You're starting to get it. Paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsense is how these traditions attempt to get the practitioner to overcome dualism.

The problem is that you think you can use either-or logic to understand it when the practice is designed to destroy it. Get what? Understand what? Destroy what? Dualistic thinking. As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts.

For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition of a person had a clause, that would prevent congregates of persons to be a person, no amount of "dualistic thinking" would make two of us, or the entire humanity a person.

Sadly, this discussion appears to be at an end. Nondualistic thought processes are not based on definitions. They are based on direct experience of the ineffable, beyond words themselves. You keep trying to impose Aristotelian logic on to paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsensical attempts to break one out of dualistic perceptions. There are numerous ways this works, from dreaming, to creativity, to peak and flow experiences of all kinds, all of which aim to break the mind out of what is perceived as separate and to give it a new holistic POV.

Just as you cannot have music without the notes that define it, you also cannot have the notes without the empty spaces between them. You can pretend that the notes represent the music, but it is also equally composed by its absence in the form of silence.

They are one and the same. There's nothing ineffable in anything you are referring to. Anyone can generate tons of bullshit by combining letters and words. You are clearly much worse at Seado than I am at non-dualism. Your thought process needs to grow much before you can realize significance of Seado. Then you will learn some truth and still it will not be universal. I would call spirituality in general the 'mapping' of these spaces, descriptions of the way to get there and navigate them, and the preservation of accounts of people who've visited them.

A religion, as I see it, is already focused on one particular version of the map. This can be fine, for example if the particular path is especially compatible with the rest of the culture that's around it. It starts being problematic once it discredits other versions and accounts. Irritating cults is what it becomes when it gets further warped by ego concerns and misinterpretations. The relationship aspect is also an important feature of psychosis in paranoid schizophrenia.

Apocryphon 5 months ago root parent prev next [—]. Is it common because it's some sort of profound mystic realization, or just an expected replicable biochemical reaction? One can experience fractal sensations from a strong cannabis high, are psychedelic ones any qualitatively different?

Maybe that's just the way our minds are supposed to bend. What is sad about it? It seems liberating to me. That sounds like a profound experience, would you say these insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask, in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and some bad emotions later on.

I would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing reality, and I can open that door whenever I want, but I don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions I've made. It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times probably with the exact same details. You can never rest, it's all an infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely distressed, like this fractal nature was some sort of punishment or permanent purgatory.

Consider that you're remarking on his takeaway here. The "insights". The conceptual end-product of all that strange-seeing. But it's the strange-seeing that's the real feast. Here's Tom with the weather. Somewhat similar: Based on the fact that if you break a holographic picture in half then the two halves show a fainter representation of the whole and not a left and right portion, I imagined we each contain the whole mind of god, but a faint representation of it, since we are only a part of the whole.

I've noticed No, it wasn't bad memory. I'm agnostic exmormon , I think God s are narcissistic man-king-modeled control structures. However after experience reality shift -- all without any drug use I've become somewhat "spiritual" in a sense, in that I feel there's a lot more to everything than I ever imagined.

Simulation theory is my strongest belief, but secondary would be entropic multiverses colliding when they have no more room to split into new universes. Scientifically, I find the Cosmological Axis of Evil quite odd that it puts our solar system somehow "central" to the universe on one axis , from a simulation perspective you could argue the simulation renders what's needed and started here on out.

Anyhow, i've been going down rabbit holes on "occult" wisdom trying to see if there's a way to actually change reality by one's accord. So far dead ends or I haven't gone far enough yet to reach "enlightenment" , most promising idea is meditation silencing brain completely might open some "conduit" to learn from the universe or make changes, or both.

Learn to meditate. Lucid dreams may help. Astral Projections could help. I guess in other words train your brain to find some of the same things LSD brings organically without the need for drugs. Probably healthier that way, but it's a long process. There is a big benefit though in working on meditation practices: anxiety goes way down.