Effects - Why does one see fractals?

[teknobytes]

Swim always wondered why one would get intense fractals on lsd or other hallucinogens?

What are they, why is the brain producing this only when on psychs? Are they always present but you just can't tap into them sober?
Swim tried researching online and swim can not find much information about why psychs induce fractals.

Swim has always been fascinated by them and always wanted to know more about them..

Any input and opinions would be most appreciated.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Good question!

[Jatelka]

There is a very interesting paper in the archive here...

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/loc...tid=68&id=1333

On geometric hallucinations and what they tell us about the visual cortex.

[fatal]

a visual interpretation of the patterns of rogue electrical impulses riding around in circles through your neurons for hours and hours on end.

[Desertfox]

They are always present. one does not need to ingest hallucinogens to see them. SWIY can meditate and focus on breathing in and out for several hours and watch the visual light show on the back of SWIYs eyelids.

And SWIY can use the search engine to find a old video by Jack Cowan, the man who wrote the article posted above. its a video of his lecture on the same subject SWIM posted a while back.

[Peace]

Ah there is a cover story about that in a new scientist from 2001 and the main picture from the article is blue tacked onto my door. Very interesting stuff.

[Felix Guattari]

What makes the visualizations we're referring to 'fractal' is that they seem to arise from a recursive process; i.e., focusing on one facet of a phenomenon seems to yield further elements which seem to be generated from the same pattern as the whole. Repeating the process gives more detail, etc. The act of focusing, esp. on an object of some complexity, seems to be integral to the fractal phenomenon.

The appended link describes it in far better detail, but when one considers that the brain is always about the task of pulling meaningful patterns from the constant flux of given data, and consider the possibility of the primary mode of psychedelic action to be an intensification of the activity of pattern formation... fractalization of multiple sensory modalities seems a pretty logical conclusion.

James Kent describes this recursivity as feedback, and has a pretty nifty overview of his theory here, in poster form.


re: the Jack Cowan lecture: I think the phenomena he is talking about are not totally unrelated, but the basic form constants might be best seen as the simple 'seeds' for the recursive/feedback processes of visionary states. One can easily produce form constants, and they are themselves quite distinct from infinitely recursive forms. However, they are suitable starting points for feedback processes.

[Votorx]

Yes it is possible sober but I doubt it could ever be as intense. Meditation is pretty key as Desert Fox said. Watching the back of your eyelids is an easy way to view morphing shapes and alternating colors. Colors are usually dark tints of purple, red and blue (for me anyways), and hard to distinguish from each other, its also hard to tell what it is your seeing.

The difficulty in perceiving the image (or shapes) is that meditation is key in producing the visuals and to focus on and confirm a shape while meditating is incredibly difficult...if you want an idea try putting a picture at the very edge of your vision and rely solely on your peripheral vision to describe the image. You'll be tempted to get a better look at the picture but if you move your eye even a millimeter in its direction, you failed. Now take that temptation and make it 10x worse while meditating.


If swAm is interested in producing these visual swIm would recommend learning how to meditate then doing so the next swAm takes a hallucinogen. Meditation is not as hard to learn, as many people would think, and is a great stress reliever swAm should take advantage of. If swAm decides he wants to try it sober, swIm advices swAm to practice before swAm went to sleep (the meditation will also help swAm fall asleep after wards) although the easiest time to produce these visuals is if swAm woke up in the middle of the night.

It gets even deeper than that though, if swAm has never heard of lucid dreams or WAKE & sleep paralysis then swAm needs look it up. There's a whole world of infinite possibilities existing inside swAm's head that not even LCD can achieve.

[Third/Eye]

If you want to see a really good interpretation of what you see (SWIM sees it on acid too, it's fantastic) download 'Milkdrop 2'. I'd imagen most of the world would've seen it, but incase SWIY hasn't SWIM thought he'd mention it. It's a visual plugin for winamp.

Hope SWIM won't get in trouble for advertising D: