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Form Constant

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32 pointsbenbreen10 comments

Auras that precede migraine headaches do resemble these, and also apparently resemble the patterns people see when they use hallucinogenic drugs. This narrative around things being revealed on drugs seems less plausible than your ability to cohere sensory data is impaired by poisoning, and the remaining signal/information is reduced to crude geometric patterns that resemble interference patterns because when you mess with sampling rates between two eyes/hemispheres, you get artifacts that resemble geometric forms.

Constructing stories around the experience is how we reconcile it after the fact. I can't explain the DMT elves, but these forms could have an explanation as simple as poisonous mushrooms impairing the rate at which your brain samples sensory data and attempts to normalize and cohere it.

Merely watching videos of these patterns doesn't change self perception, so drugs probably do a lot of other stuff, but revealing the underlying structure of the universe seems less likely than these being equivalent of a guitar effects pedal on a signal.

It can be explained as your visual cortex and optic nerve are vestigial components to help you navigate in 3 dimensions. Nobody said that’s how reality is or how it ought to be. Your monkey brain just presents it as such.

> A level 8A experience can be described as the feeling of being exposed to a seemingly infinite mass of geometry comprised entirely of innately comprehensible representations which are perceived to simultaneously convey every internally stored concept, memory, process, and neurological structure stored within the mind. [..]

That is some dope Original Research right there, lol

I wish I knew why I saw this stuff when I wasn't even high though :)

There is a surprisingly large amount of people that agree on the psychonaut wiki's (I'm not sure if it originated here) levels of hallucinated geometry. I say it's surprising because of for descriptions of subjective experiences that could seemingly manifest in infinite ways, it's eerily specific.

I see a scintillating checkerboard pattern when I'm getting a migraine. It actually replaces most of my vision, then slowly fades until the pain starts. So if I start getting one I have about 10 minutes to get home before I'm blind enough to be unable to drive safely, and another 20 before I need to lay down in a dark room.

I don't know if this is purely coincidental but folks doing ML are using something similar to make machine vision better at identifying. https://distill.pub/2019/activation-atlas/

I see what seem like fractal patterns if I so much as rub my eyes. Always wondered what it was.

That very likely is just the blood vessels in your eyes. I discovered them when looking at an LED light at an angle, certain angles will highlight them in your vision.

I thought I might be tripping actually when I saw that, I had just taken a psychedelic but there is no way enough time had passed for it to take effect.

I’ve considered this, though it seems odd that blood vessels would cause me to see huge repeating geometric patterns, but I dunno, so as good a guess as anything.

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