In the post on
psilocybin induced time-dilation, zuperkomputer added a string of comments about how science should be studying how psychedelics enhance the range of sensory perception in order to find limits of human perception and possibly verify hidden realities. While I am on record about my lack of faith in the "hidden reality" theory, I will share some of what I have learned about psychedelics and enhanced human perception while looking into this question for myself.
In normal waking consciousness there is a great deal of effort that goes into filtering incoming data. Filtering begins in the brainstem and continues all the way up to the higher cortex where focus and attention are controlled. While the brain is focusing on one subject it actively suppresses background noise through a process called tonic inhibition, a literal trickle of inhibitory chemicals keeping other areas of the brain quiet in service of maintaining focus. Control of this tonic inhibition comes from the top-down (higher areas of the brain suppressing info coming from lower areas) and from side to side (active areas suppressing neighboring areas to keep focus from leaking sideways through cortical networks). This inhibitory feature of the brain is active, meaning it takes energy and glucose and oxygen and constant metabolic process to maintain focus all the time. People with ADD have a harder time maintaining this active inhibition than others, but I digress.
So the question now becomes: What happens if this tonic inhibition is disrupted and all incoming sensory information is allowed to gush upward and echo up and down and back and forth through all areas the brain? Well, what you would get would be very much like a psychedelic experience.
The interruption of tonic sensory inhibition (also known as disinhibition), is what allows the senses to function beyond their normal range in psychedelic sessions. Low doses work best for simply augmenting sensory capacity, but higher doses tend to overload the senses with tangentially recursive phantasmagoria. With the proper mild dose of psychedelics it is true you can become super functioning, enjoying better hearing, better vision, better reflexes, better physical acuity, better muscle flexibility, better mood, and a sense of invincibility. Amphetamines can also do this, but psychedelics seem to do it a bit better at the proper dose range.
These psychedelic super-powers are a combination of sensory disinhibition and the release of dopamine and stress chemicals that prep the muscles to act in life-or-death peak-performance capacity. The primary culprit of all this hyper-activation of the body is the locus ceruleus, or LC, a brainstem organ responsible for activating physiological responses to stress and panic. The LC has been show to be hyper-responsive to incoming stimuli in the presence of psychedelics; meaning that instead of being filtered, any stray stimuli can send excitatory signals gushing upwards into the brain. Lights become brighter, sounds become louder and richer, textures feel more complex and distinct. Conversely, in the absence of stimulus the LC quiets down under the influence, but sensory deprivation on psychedelics is a slightly different topic.
Anyhow, the underlying mechanics of sensation and psychedelic effect are not all that mysterious, nor are there any parts of the brain, neuron, or neural RNA that haven't been studied in fairly close detail. There is nothing "hidden" in the brain that would allow for the access to "hidden" information that other instruments (such as a high-energy spectrometer) wouldn't also be able to see. We can push the limits of our senses with psychedelics, yes, but there's only so much performance increase we can expect before the chemical effect overwhelms the brain's ability to maintain basic focus on external reality. In this higher-dose state the brain is literally awake and dreaming at the same time, mapping imaginary data onto external reality and overriding the rational ability to tell the two apart. Some people call this madness, some call it spiritual, some call it fun. Your mileage may vary.
There's a similar mechanism at work when you have a natural sober ability to focus chi and say break through objects without harming yourself, and if you are completely blitzed and smash through things unthinkingly.
Not in the mind of course, the similarity is in the physical effects. DJ - I completely know what you mean about maintaining these states of being, and finding a way to do so that integrates with the mundane. I think that is something that will become easier to do if-when the everyday reality returns to a natural way of being, but also embraces true space-faring thinking. I also think that the 'Fall' is exactly about the loss of that natural superior joyous state of mind, because it is like having to lose heaven in order to make it in hell - but there's no other choice, so you just have to do that. It helps to point out how ridiculous and inept the human world has become, and laugh at it. The 'Alice in Wonderland' story does more or less describe the odd condition this kind of reality is in - lots of people ruled over by some senseless way of doing things; you either have to take the piss and be merry, or you become a slave of it - part of the soul-less enforcing of the insanity. Why do they do what the demi-urge says?
That still doesn't answer what it is to be able to consciously be aware of anything, nor why such a model of reality is the only one conclusively known of, nor why anyone should find themself within such a model of reality - and not some other way of making something like a universe. Or to put it another way, what's with the spherical things revolving around / about the very much larger spherical things? Consider a universe with a different design to such things as atoms and solar systems and galaxies.
What I'd call hidden - the underlying rules and reasons for this type of reality (and the required mind to behold it) being manifest, is itself also part of this type of reality - things like the dark matter (and the other dark one I forget the label for) and superstrings and the like, are still methods employed to understand what spacetime actually is. Always ask why.
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