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Doesn't LSD merely exaggerate your sensory perceptions?

ava1enzue1a

ava1enzue1a

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Jul 3, 2012
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MI, USA
From what I've heard, an LSD trip doesn't really involve full-blown hallucinations, so then doesn't it just pretty much exaggerate what you've already been perceiving in the world around you? For example, when you're tripping and simply looking at a circle, it looks "VERY" circle-ish, not just "simply a circle" (lol)? And what about your very own thoughts and feelings? E.g. an ordinary fear transforms into a full-blown feeling of utter doom and total annihilation? 8o

I already know LSD does things like enhance your perception of color and sound (if I recall correctly) but am wondering if this is merely all it does. So am I getting the gist here or is it more complex than this (if so explain please)?

Just curious is all, thanks :)
 
Exaggerations of the world around you could be called illusions; this is where you perceive things that are really there, but in a distorted or different way (eg seeing faces in the leaves in trees, or a stone wall rippling, or ). "True" hallucinations involve seeing things that aren't there at all, and are much less common.

I don't know much about the specifics of how LSD affects your perception, but I expect the lovely people in Psychedelic Drugs do!

BDD > PD :)
 
It's a much less clearheaded experience than people who haven't experienced it expect. At least for me, I didn't think that it would give you the mind jambled-up-ness that weed can give you. Its much harder to do simple things too, affecting your hand-eye coordination I guess. An author named Aldous Huxley hypothesized that serotonin-receptor hallucinogens (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, etc.) work by opening your brain up to things that you otherwise wouldn't notice. Its like you suddenly notice the little things that your brain normally ignores (such as your heartbeat, white noise, unimportant things in the room, etc.). I've never read any work testing this theory (from the 1950s or '60s); as far as I know, scientists don't understand how it affects the brain besides involving serotonin.
 
Many people assume the hallucinations perceived under LSD are full blown "Seeing things that aren't there" type illusions. This is not the case. You see everything as it is, only exaggerated. Colors are enhanced, and your vision gains what I like to describe as a waviness, flowing look to it. It's extremely difficult to describe in words, as it's an extremely subjective experience.
 
Datura gives you true hallucinations. Read some trip reports on erowid. Some of the stories are a bit out there, I don't recommend trying it however.
 
Cycik said:
Datura gives you true hallucinations. Read some trip reports on erowid. Some of the stories are a bit out there, I don't recommend trying it however.
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Usually I can understand, or at the very least grasp a basic understanding as to why somebody would do a certain something.

Why somebody would ever in their right mind want to take Datura, is something I'll never understand.
 
The closest to "true" open eye hallucinations I've had were at very high doses of LSD, however they are not seeing things that aren't there it seems in my experience, but a problem with pattern recognition and your consciousness seeing an incorrect pattern and making you see something that isn't what you are actually looking at.

I was talking to a friend once online, when I could no longer read anything because all the letters no longer looked like English, they looked like Thai (I'm familiar with the Thai language due to travel).

The morphing at that dosage level was so intense, it actually allowed me to see what I believe is the cause of morphing. I would look at a picture of a friend of mine, and their face was continually shifting from different pictures I remember them being in. It appeared as if my brain was seeing parts of the data, and filling in the rest of it through pattern recognition.

Going by what I've read/been taught (by experts in cogsci) about how our memory and sensory perception, my hypothesis on the whole visual morphing is just a glimpse into what's going on subconsciousness in our visual system.

Also very close to "true" hallucinations, is synesthesia that can come with a psychedelic. When I was writing my notes for that experience on the computer, I saw what I can best describe as syntax highlighting seen in a software development IDE. However it was phonemes being highlighted. I could at a glance see all locations of something like "sh", "ch", "pl", etc.

All the visuals seen on psychedelics can be attributed to a distortion in pattern recognition and random noise in the various parts of vision processing. The walls breathing effect can be simulated when modifying a video with a depth perception randomization algorithm for example.

J.Wallace said:
Usually I can understand, or at the very least grasp a basic understanding as to why somebody would do a certain something.

Why somebody would ever in their right mind want to take Datura, is something I'll never understand.
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To know what it is like. Curiosity.

The level of preparation required to ensure safety for something like Datura though makes it something someone can't take recreationally. Multiple trip sitters, safe location, etc.
 
The higher you dose, the more your senses warp. At 1mg+ doses, you would probably, for all intents and purposes, see things that weren't really there. I've also heard that on extreme (sometimes called 'breakthrough') doses of mushrooms or cactus, the visual effects become so overpowering that you might as well be in another world. I've never experienced anything like this myself, however.
 
You can see your thoughts tripping. Sometimes a day dream can engulf you in full vividness, eyes open.
Is it "really there"...? We don't normally see our thoughts, but are bound by our own perception of a situation. This increasing vividness in ones thoughts and ideas can sometimes cover up ones view of an object. But in all actuality all we ever have is our own perception of any object, no objective view.

Fine line ha :-)
 
I've done a heavy dose of 2C-B (accidental overdose - ridiculous visuals) and acid. But the only time I saw hallucinations was when I took MDMA. I saw people standing and looking at me. I would look away and look back and they were still there. The creepiest thing is I wasn't bothered. I wasn't even the least bit surprised. Almost like I had known they are there. I know for a fact they weren't real people. I had a friend confirm it.
 
People, the OP isn't asking about achieving true hallucinations, he's trying to get a grip on what the visual and mental aspects of the psychedelic experience entail.

It's a big question, and not one easily answered (especially not with brevity), my first recommendation would be to go to erowid and start reading trip reports.
 
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LSD and other psychedelics alter the filter your brain uses to gather information. In this case colours seem more vivid, art comes alive, food tastes better, all that shit.
 
"Exaggerate" doesn't quite capture what LSD does to my senses (or to those of most people I know.) I'd prefer to say it "transforms" them. You won't see tigers pop put of thin air, but your cat might look like one. That circle might be "really circle-y," or it might look like a square. Or it might look like a three-dimensional double helix waving in the breeze. All depends on how much you take.
 
I know people who have had full blown hallucinations on smallish dosages, one person in particular. It's extremely few and far between though.

I find it just tends to put things in other things for me, if that makes sense. As in faces in the walls, huge layers of depth between everything, aliens trying to pop through the sand on the beach was a recent one I enjoyed. I have had the walls of a room blow around wildly like loose curtains in heavy wind, that was pretty cool.

It's so different for so many people, that friend of mine who claims to have had two separate full hallucinations from LSD rarely gets OEV's and constant powerful CEV's.
I however, get extremely powerful OEV's even on smallish dosages, and don't get really any clear CEV's until I start upping the dosage to at least 150 - 200ugs.

Also if you want to know his claimed hallucinations: A horde of tiny fire breathing dragons flying around his head (high dose), full lion in the front yard for about 10 seconds (lowish dose)
 
I already know LSD does things like enhance your perception of color and sound (if I recall correctly) but am wondering if this is merely all it does. So am I getting the gist here or is it more complex than this (if so explain please)?
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It's difficult to say, but reading some trip reports, Huxley's Doors of Perception (which is specifically about mescaline), and maybe reading/listening to what some of the other old heads had to say about it is a good start.

For visuals, things look different, but the same. You can find some neat artists attempts at demonstrating breathing walls, apophenia, color shifts, CEVs, etc. There was a really good blog post somebody linked to somewhere, but I dunno where it is. Maybe some has it and knows what I'm talking about.

For mental effects, I really like what my old copy of Goodman & Gilman has to say in their introductory paragraph on pyschedelics:

"...The feature that distinguishes the psychedelic agents from other classes of drugs is their capacity reliably to induce or compel states of altereed perception, thought, and feeling that are not (or cannot be) experienced except in dreams or at times of religious exaltation.
Most descriptions of the 'psychedelic state' include several major effects. There is heightened awareness of sensory input, often accompanied by an enhanced sense of clarity, but a diminished control over what is experienced. Frequently there is a felling that one part of the self seems to be a passive observer (a 'spectator ego') rather than an active organizing and directing force, while another part of the self participates and receives the vivid and unusual sensory epxeriences. The environment may be perceived as novel, often beautiful, and harmonious. The attention of the user is turned inward, pre-empted by the seeming clarity and portentous quality of his own thinking processes. In this state the slightest sensation may take on profound meaning. Indeed 'meaningfulness' seems more important than what is meant, and the 'sense of truth' more significant that what is true. Commonly, there is a diminished capacity to differentiate the boundaries of one object from another and of the self from the environment. Associated with the loss of boundaries there may be a sense of union with 'mankind' or the 'cosmos.' To the extant that these drugs reveal this innate capacity of the mind to see more than it can tell and to experience and believe more than it can explain, the term mind expanding is not entirely inappropriate."
 
I would also recommend Huxley's Doors Of Perception. He describes the psychedelic experience with a very level head. You don't have to sort through the bullshit. I've never had a full blown hallucination from psychedelics.

7g of mushrooms caused some serious warping and that's all I remember seeing with my eyes open. The stuff inside my head was more interesting.

~400 mics LSD + 1.5g mushrooms made me feel as if I was witnessing some sort of hidden energy field. It was my first time understanding what sort of megalomania LSD can cause. I would dismiss my ideas fairly quickly, but it was something totally new to me and caught me off guard.

The closed eye visuals I get is nothing like anything I've known sober. Moving and dripping tapestry-like images behind eyelids that seem too complex to be true. So yeah, it's much more complex than just merely an increase in normal perception and varies with psychedelics and doses.
 
Its the same with most serotonin-hallucinogens to be honest from experience. It merely increases the power of your imagination and your senses to the point where your imagination wields significant power over senses for OEVs.
Although on stronger doses your thoughts can completely overpower your vision, you don't see objects that are there but it is pretty damn west

^and yeah CEVs are pretty cool to look at if you want something from nothing :)

diphenhydramine causes shit to appear from nothing but I would not recommend it at all as it stems from delirium. Ketamine has also caused vague objects to appear from nowhere but my imagination, like shadows in windows etc
 
This is kind of how it's felt to me - that the filter/curtain is being dropped and whatever you're experiencing (pleasant or otherwise) is magnified several times. Everyone knows its all about set and setting and starting off in a good place with good music at your disposal is always key to kicking things off properly.

I don't think I've ever flat out hallucinated either, but the mind has done some interesting things with objects that were already there (walls breathing, bathroom rugs that look like some sort of undersea coral, etc) I can remember living in an old apartment and a smudge of dirt on the wall that had been missed when cleaning kept phasing in and out from hardly being noticeable to looking dark, twisted and decayed. Needless to say, it was cleaned up properly the next day, but it was certainly interesting at the time!
 
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