Beenhead said:
I agree with this, I dont think you mean memories from a like your great grandfather right? I would be very interested to hear what a man saw who has never seen an alien show on discovery, or seen the Last Unicorn, or seen the Ayahuasca Pattern or Aztec pattern. Basically a feral child
Would they still see all the amazing cities, and aliens?
I think the people of the amazon see jungle oriented imagery, would a feral child see forest related imagery, but this child has no sense of religion.
Well personally I saw things that were rather than things that weren't. But I think I may have some idea why others see the kind of things they describe, based on what I saw and what I think I've learned about how we see things.
Our vision is more complex than we give it credit for. The eye, despite being a marvelous piece of biology, is actually a pretty mediocre sensor. What gives it such power is the extremely powerful and specialized hardware in the brain that works on this input at many different levels. The retina is not uniform, in that there are different characteristics such as response to motion or color or detail depending on where something appears in our visual field. Ask anyone who's had an occular migraine. But this is usually pretty well hidden for us by these processes that smooth things over.
Having had a wide variety of visual experiences from different drugs, as well as frequent occular migraines, I've found that there are lots and lots of layers of processing that go on. Things like horizontal and vertical edge detection, facial recognition, noise filtering, pattern replication, object cohesion, etc. Some of these things happen at higher levels. For example, faces are recognized as discrete things by some very specialized neurons that are probably critical to social functioning, and enable us to read the emotions others project. Likewise, when we see an object we're familiar with like a tree or a car or a person, this creates a synthesized representation of the object internally, which we can work off of. This is how we know that there are back sides to objects. Just 3D perception does not provide that information, only recognition and comparison with memories involving that object provide it, and it is crucial to properly interacting with a 3D world.
When I tried DMT, one of the major effects I noticed was object float, which I'd had before on MDA+2CB+weed. Basically while one layer of vision processing identifies these objects, another pastes their constructed version back into our perception of the image. This allows a finer level of detail that may not be in the actual raw input from the retina to be interpolated. Then the inconsistencies like edge boundaries are fixed with another filter pass to keep the image consistent. Several optical illusion types exploit things like this. I found when I tried DMT that objects weren't quite blended properly anymore. They tended to float as I'd mentioned, and slightly scale or shift around despite being internally coherent. Trees, faces, a window, pretty much all the objects I looked at did this. Since I'd experienced it before I wasn't really disturbed and just kinda spent a lot of time observing the effects since this was my first time trying DMT (though I did get 2 discrete hits and paid much more attention on the 2nd one).
Now, these object recognitions come from our memories of those objects. Sometimes we can be fooled into thinking something that isn't there is, such as when we think we see things in shadows. If someone on DMT saw things that triggered attempts to apply object recognition and synthesis, and they didn't quite fit, it's possible incorrect memories would attempt to fill in the gaps on the surrounding environment. Hence strange creatures, scenes, etc. Not sure why I didn't get anything that interesting myself, perhaps fatigue or interaction with other drugs/meds, or maybe my brain's just not wired like that.
Anyway, just a theory based on my own observations.
