I, myself, have never been on LSD, but i work with a couple of guys that have and have told me some outrageous stories about their trips.
Where do these insane images come from? Is it just a random firing in the brain that cooks up images of purple elephants with umbrellas, or is something else the culprit?
Umm, creativity? I can easily come up with images of purple elephants with umbrellas without any chemical. The degree to which those images significant, real, and meaningful can easily be affected by various chemicals.
Yes, i guess i wasn’t clear in my question, i meant have them realistically appear. I know anyone can come up with that stuff with a little imagination.
Well what does it mean to “realistically appear”. To see something you have to know what it looks like, and have the idea that they are in front of you right now as supported by sensory feedback. Hallucinations don’t work like that. You can only hallucinate things from within – you typically have an idea, then see the idea, then reinterpret the idea. I’ve never tried LSD but I hallucinated with a really high fever a few times before – every time it took extra effort to perceive that what I was seeing was all wrong. I wouldn’t say I saw everything normal plus then something extra – everything was wrong, and part of that wrong was the fact that the blanket was hovering and talking. The sounds were wrong, the smells were wrong, etc. Even though I’d describe it as seeing a floating blanket everything else was wrong too I just can’t describe it.
Do you know what it’s like to be dizzy? Can you see how the world is actually turning and spinning all around you? But you’re unmistakably dizzy and you realize the world is not actually spinning. From where does this idea of the world spinning come? Dizziness is not a hallucination, but the concept is somewhat similar.
The planet I live on actually is spinning.
Could people remember this is GQ not the other forums. Psycho Originals asked for why LSD makes people have wild hallucinations that seem like real at the time. Ad in you may never stop, if your unlucky enough.
To people who have never dropped LSD but have heard about it, the notion that one sees vivid visual illusions/hallucinations is a widespread one.
It’s generally not like that at all. What you get are spectacularly vivid understandings of things. Concepts, not pink elephants.
The only really common visual artifact of being on LSD that I’ve had happen to me and many other trippers have reported having experienced is that at a certain distance from you thing you look at can look as if they are moving when they are not. I don’t mean moving in the sense of “whoa man, that parked Firebird converrtible is going 120 mph!”, but rather more like “whoa, man, the surface of that Firebird convertible’s fender is wiggling back and forth like it’s covered two inches deep in tent caterpillars!”
It doesn’t work way up close, nor do things off in the distance get that effect, just at a certain focal distance. I think from this alone comes all of the legends about hallucinations. “Oh shit, man, did you know you’re, like, all covered in little bugs and they’re squirming around and stuff?” All it really amounts to is a side effect. At middle focal ranges you brain has trouble distinguishing between non-moving surfaces and surfaces that are kind of gently writhing. It does freak some people out, but most folks don’t get caught up in it; there’s too much far more interesting stuff going on.
And the interesting stuff isn’t pink elephants so much as the words of the street signs are all portentious commentaries on the ultimate truth about your love life and the ways in which your career path is a reflection of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and you’re about to enter the Imperial Era. See, “Pedestrian Crossing”, do you get what that MEANS? “Estrian” is like equestrian, you see, and, Jesus on the cross, get it?
Your mind takes one notion or idea, makes a spectacular and prodigious leap to connect it to something you would not normally associate AT ALL, then rapidly builds on that.
LSD works as a 5-HT2A agonist, which means it activates a certain type of serotonin receptor (among many others, but that is the main one). There are many theories about why this causes the effects it does. Our brains are heroic pattern-seeking engines (among other things). One theory is that the pattern-seeking mechanism of the mind is intact and stimulated, but the threshold of what constitutes a valid pattern is relaxed. So there’s a burst of activity that activates the rose-colored and animal pattern detectors, the mind puts it together as pink elephants, and does not reject it as ridiculous and counterfactual. Then, having accepted the prospect of a pink elephant, that may activate other counterfactual patterns which also are accepted as valid, and so on, and so on, recursively until you end up with some really wild shit. Obviously the example I’ve given above is necessarily limited to visual imagery, but every type of imagination can be involved and mutually reinforcing… sight, sound, touch, smell, emotions, spirituality, everything.
Edited to add: this is of course highly variable from person to person and dose to dose. Illicit pharmaceuticals do not have the same research and QA as commercial ones.
I used to get colors. Very vivid colors.
In my experience, the visual hallucinations of LSD create a sort of strobe-light effect, so I always assumed that your “refresh rate” (i.e. as with a computer monitor) slowed down (perhaps something with a more scientific background can enlighten me further; is it a form of vertigo?).
Ultimately, I’d agree with AHunter3 that the most intense part of an acid trip is the mental stimulation, and the visuals (especially the “trails” you get when someone waves a hand or something) are just an amusement.
:eek: Is that true?
-FrL-
That seems highly improbable, and strikes me as a “say no to drugs” urban legend. Just like I’ve heard that taking 6 doses (or tripping 6 times, or something like that) makes one legally insane. IMHO (and, I do realize that we are in GQ), that is utter bullshit.
Flashbacks, I believe, are another dubious claim.
This. Exactly this. I’ve never had any purple elephant-type hallucinations; only wild distortions and different perspectives on things that were already there.
They don’t seem real. In my experence, the visuals were always just distortions of colors, lights and sounds that were already there. I never actually hallucinated anything that wasn’t really there and I never thought the distortions I was getting were real. Some other people I’ve been around have had more exceptional visuals but I’ve never been around anyone who thought what they were seeing was real.
Dated a girl who dropped a bunch of acid in her teens.
Occasionally stopped talking and noted she was seeing LSD artifacting.
The best way to describe an LSD experience, IMHO is, “You don’t see shit, you see shit, man.”
It sums up the drug: no hallucinations, but new depths and distortions of the things you perceive. It also shows how dumb you’ll sound to a sober person.
As far as I know, the pink elephant drug doesn’t exist, but a deliriant like Datura seems more in that neighborhood.
I can’t provide a cite nor am I going to confirm or deny anything in a public forum but flashbacks are pretty real. It’s pretty much established that PTSD causes flashbacks and I would imagine the same mechanism is responsible for hallucinogenic flashbacks. The nature of an emotional experience so intense it causes trauma that burns into your brain is probably responsible for most long term side effects typically attributed to the chemicals themselves.
And while there are a lot of us who kind of go, “And drugs are bad…mmmkay?” here, Datura is. I strongly urge anyone reading not to fuck with it.
So does that mean that the trauma of a “bad” trip can cause flashbacks to that bad emotional experience? I can see how that would be true, assuming the experience was memorably disturbing.
I was referring to the physical effect of tripping long after the drugs are no longer being ingested.
A friend of mine was far more adventurous than I. She “got into” various things that I never wanted to try. And got out of them again, with little trouble. Very lucky & very strong. (Nowadays, she’s living an interesting but quite healthy life.)
She repeatedly advised everybody she knew that they should never take Jimson weed. (AKA Datura stramonium.) Never, ever.
The Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants is an invaluable guide to ethnopharmacology, with good historical & chemical information. Plus the excellent color illustrations seen in the other Golden Guides. It’s no longer in print, but may be available online.
My own “experiences” were along the line of really looking at the wood grain on a cheap closet door. Swirling like oil on water–except more beautiful.
But I knew it was really a closet door.
(Still no flashbacks.)