Why do we see Fractals?

[TheAppleCore]

Wow -- fascinating ideas there, solistus.

Although, I'm absolutely positive that most of the open-eye visual "hallucination" that I have experienced on LSD, for instance, has not been a result of such an early neurological disruption. Most of it is actually perceptual -- the raw sensory data remains intact. For instance -- looking at a rough textured surface and perceiving facial images or letters in the actual surface, rather than random perturbations. Comparable to seeing constellations in the stars.

 

[nearjat]

I think I tend to see fractals when I'm tripping MUCH more when looking at actual near-fractals. Like a tree without its leaves for example.

 

[Sentience]

Why do we see Fractals?

Because we take psychedelics?

 

[Sentience]

I think I tend to see fractals when I'm tripping MUCH more when looking at actual near-fractals. Like a tree without its leaves for example.

Maybe the fractals are real, but changes in our rate of brain firing and perception changes how we interperet light or other stimuli. Maybe our brain in its normal state would block those lights out, because they are too unstable and do not provide anything useful that we need to evaluate our environment.

 

[eatcod]

Having worked on computer vision research I believe fractals are the result of the human vision process being run on low frequency noise (amplified by 5-ht2 receptor activation in some neurons). It may have something to do with the visual system attempting to build up a scene from memory and/or by fitting predefined functions to the data. Fractals are a good class of functions to match repetitive visual data against and they are probably what the noise gets fitted to.
To understand the fitting process in the visual system we need to know the nature of the noise (which by definition is pseudorandom) and the resulting fractal if there is one - many times there seem to be matches to memory instead.

I apologize if this reply wasn't in the spirit of the question.

This explanation makes the most sense to me, seems to describe a lot of my experiences: random flowing geometric shapes that occasionally turn into recognisable things from memory.