this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Psychedelics definitely aren't causing your brain to malfunction. If anything, most of the research around neuroplasticity and using psychedelics for traumatic brain injuries and dementia and such show that they seemingly kick your brain into an overdrive mode where it is able to form connections at a much higher rate than normal.
Taken in measured, clinically understood doses, sure. Taken to meet Vishnu, I assure you, none of what your brain experiences is normal function. Not to say they cause damage, but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there.
Fair enough, I like the "operate way out of spec" language much more than "malfunction" but you obv have a point.
As someone who has met Vishnu more than a few times though I've very very rarely come back with a Lovecraftian dread (though the rest of the ant metaphor in OP not that bad at all)
Overclocked maybe
I mean, they kind of are...
LSD especially "breaks" pattern recognition and so does mushrooms to a lesser extent.
That's why faces can freak people out, especially your own. Very very few people have faces that are perfectly symmetrical, and our brains do a lot of subconscious processing to make them symmetrical. That's why symmetrical faces are enjoyable to look at. They're literally "easy to look at".
On LSD and mushrooms, that just stops happening.
It's why people gain insight from psychedelics, their "autopilot" stops functioning. It might not seem like a malfunctioning brain because that's the entire reason people choose to do those drugs. But it's still making the brain malfunction
Speaking of broken facial recognition...
Pro tip: if you're experimenting with microdosing shrooms and you're testing your upper limits, under no circumstances should you watch a pirated Nicholas Cage movie with poor, low quality compression. That was a fucking nightmare.
At that dosage, I wasn't hallucinating but the part of my brain responsible for recognizing and making sense of faces and, in particular, facial expressions wasn't working anymore. For example, if my wife smiled, intellectually I knew it was a smile, but instinctually it gave the same feeling you get when you watch badly animated characters smiling or if someone were to make a surprisingly realistic face out of pineapple slices and ham or on a carved pumpkin. It just seemed wrong and made me intensely uncomfortable because I knew it should feel like a person, but instead it had that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Multiplied by 100. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to describe, I hope that conveys it somewhat.
With that in mind, now imagine the faces Nicholas Cage makes.