In my trips on any psychedelics, probably one of the main 'features' is seeing geometric patterns every where,as if they somehow 'form' reality, and the deeper i go into a psychedelic experience, the geometrical patterns or kaleidoscopes seems to sort of ''create'' everything, I really cant describe it hah.

Anyways my question is, how do you think these perfect geometrical patterns are noticed when one is under the influence of a psychedelic drug? Just leave thoughts on how you think we are able to perceive them/ what allows us to perceive them under psychs.

There is much discussion going about what exactly causes the effects of psychedelics. A lot of the classic psychedelics such as mushrooms, DMT and LSD are serotonergic. They bind to the specific serotonin receptors to work their magic. But the precise reason why they cause these effects can only be speculated about.

One of the theories is that psychedelics lower the subconscious filters which filter out irrelevant information to prevent the conscious mind from being overloaded with information. You have several million nerves endings, taste buds, pain receptors and your hearing, eyes, smell and taste. All together those produce around millions if not tens of millions of impulses per second. If your conscious mind had to process all of these together you'd go insane.

So your brain has a subconscious filter. This is a smart adaptive filter that filters out all information deemed unnecessary. For instance, if you enter a room with a spring-powered clock you'll quickly notice that it makes a very distinct ticking sound every second. After several minutes you no longer notice it because your conscious mind stopped paying attention to it, the filter picked that up and filtered out the sound to free up processing space in your conscious mind.

Psychedelics turns those filters down and eventually off(dissolution of the self, ego death). The source of the fractals could be a lot of things. It could be the way in which your brain is structured, feedback loops that infinitely blend senses with memories of things.

This article does a really good job at explaining it, way better than I can.

In a nutshell that's all just your retinal cells bombarding brain with sensory signals at a nigher than normal speed. Quite related to the phenomenon when you put pressure on your eyeballs and see similar patterns but this time the "pressure" is being put chemically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...Closed-eye_hallucination
http://tripzine.com/pit/signal_theory_poster.pdf
http://www.scholarpedia....of_visual_hallucinations

In a nutshell, that only (possibly) accounts for low-level visuals. Flicker phosphenes have little to do at all with breakthrough level visuals. I've seen 4 pharaohs in a pyramid with details to the T that matched King Tut's sarcophagus (blue/gold and all in the right places) interdimensionally fold through each other in the most sophisticated of ways. I somehow doubt this has much to do with retinal cells bombarding the brain.

Congratulations on solving the mystery.

Now seriously... psychedelic tryptamines, and other substances like diterpenes in salvia, work in a much more complex way than just affecting retinal cells. They act as agonists or antagonists with several receptors, mostly 5-HT (serotonin related) receptors, or kappa opioid receptors in the case of salvia diterpenes, for instance. The changes they trigger in the neurochemistry of the brain have been largely studied, but that doesn't mean that we fully understand the connection between these interactions and the hallucinogenic effects they trigger.

If you want to follow a reductionist approach, you might look at many processes in the brain circuitry, but even then you should start looking in the visual cortex, not the retina. Claiming that "in a nutshell, that's all just your retinal cells bombarding brain with sensory signals" is more than a large oversimplification, it's simply not true.

I'm sorry, but a truly hefty breakthrough in the dosage realm of 40mg+ done properly in one inhalation threw out any and all ideas i've ever had on this matter. Completely beyond any sort of explanation. Sure, lower dosages done in successive hits...you have a sliver of an attempt in your head of explaining what could be going on visually, but the higher breakthrough dosages done in one go.....an explanation...hehe.....yeah....not happening.

...........

Sure that was oversimplified but the idea is that what you see in an altered state of consciousness, i.g. while dreaming or under influence of a drug may be triggered by:
1. Bodily signals.
No matter how distorted they are and where particularly that distortion happens. The initial trigger is sensor-cell that converts some external, real-world signal into a nervous impulse that is then transmitted further. The neurotransmitter's role - whatever particular receptor mechanism you take - is just to transmit the impulse from one cell to another. This is where distortion happens. The drug either mimics the NT thus triggering an extra pulse at a synapse or blocks such impulse. Psychedelic drugs are classified as hyperstimulants which means that they are agonists of a particular receptor type. If a particular drug interacts with the NT chain of the optic nerve you see fractal patterns, if it doesn't you don't. DMT is highly visual 5-MEO-DMT is not. The drugs trigger extra pulses every time the impulse travels from cell to cell therefore overloading braing with non-existing details. In IT that's called aliasing. Say one portion of photons hits your retinal cell and that NORMALLY triggers one impulse. Under the drug you get a whole series of them from the same portion of photons. Or, from the normal noise-floor of this system. This is exactly the reason of what this topic is about. Caleidoscopic patterns, fractal shapes etc. They all are triggered by the sensor cells. Retinal cells if we talk about visual perception, and ear-cell if we discuss auditory "fractals". The cause of the fractallness and caledioscopicness of the psychedelic imagery is this. But NOT the content of it. If you recognize a pink elephant in a TV noise, of in a Rorschach test OR in that distorted and fractalized by DMT or LSD retinal noise that's because of:

2. Imagination. You will see some internal images even if you have your retinal cells and your optic nerve destroyed. This is what happens when you pass out and cross over. You get disconnected from you the bodily signals and plunge into pure subconscious imagery. There's a HUGE difference in the nature of 1 and 2. It is mixed when you haven't crossed over and are still awake. Then you have the TV noise situation - firstly, your cells trigger some impulse the transmission of which is being distorted by the drug, secondly you brain assembles some image out if it.

And if we dig even further, the pure, "internal" images, separate from the bodily triggers may be your forgotten memories collecting dust on the distant shelves of your subconsciousness, or some archetypes - the imagery of genetic programs, instincts. Or it may be something else. Not triggered by your body, not being your personal memories, not being the genetic programs of your species, but being something truly transcendent and mystic.

And the point of my statement is that there are very few people who treat the problem of perception methodologically and can discern the phenomena that CAN be classified as mystic experience from distorted bodily signals and forgotten memories. And most of the "mystic" reports is schizoteric bullcrap

I'm glad to see that your simplification was not a lazy conclusion.

It's precisely your point #2 what makes extremely difficult to dissect deep psychedelic effects. Or any deep altered states of awareness, for that matter.

We can track perception of the five traditional senses to a certain extent, but some of the strangest experiences with powerful psychedelics affect stimuli that do not follow the same relatively simple route.

Think about "neurological senses", such as proprioception (sense of the physical self), perception of personal identity (attached to memories and experience), or kinesthesia (sense of movement). Although it's not very difficult to suggest that fractal or caleidoscopic imagery, at their most common level, might be a construct of our visual brain trying to give coherence to scattered, chaotic backfiring of a neuronal circuit (hence the symmetry, hence the variability and the random appearance of known patterns and figures), can we really make the same kind of assumptions with subjective experiences like transfer of identity, trans-dimensional experiences, OOB experiences and space travel?

It's very slippery. And even if most mystical explanations of deep psychedelic experiences might be, if you want, yet another attempt to imbue sense and coherence to critical episodes in one's own reality, there are several traits of psychedelics that are still very difficult to take on. What about the hyper-reality of some experiences? The life-changing insights? The reports of remote viewing, synchronicities, or precognition?

But I'm going off topic with this. Whether fractal-caleidoscopic imagery is or not a first stage of an incredible neuronal jam session, moving towards way more complex phenomena that are essentially following the same rules, is still a question that cannot be answered. And even if you go reductionist-materialist, and by thinking so you remove the spirit quality to substances like DMT, you are moving the magic onto the brain itself. So no matter how you look at it, it's mind-boggling.