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What if the brain can perceive more signals but that the most common signals are those that are "known" to be captured by the average of the population? To pu
by aatd86 3y ago
What if the brain can perceive more signals but that the most common signals are those that are "known" to be captured by the average of the population?
To put it another way, there could also be cases where what is deemed an hallucination isn't, but it might lead to psychosis if the subject doesn't know how to interpret the new signal.
To reason by analogy, that would be akin to everyone being blind and a couple people developping sight.
Whole point is that unless we can understand what the brain is doing, we simply observe a phenomenon but we don't know what the phenomenon actually is.
(not talking about drug induced hallucinations, just to be clear)
- Ilverin 3y agoThere are plenty of good scientists and engineers who do psychedelics. If what you say were true, I think at least one of them would have figured out what the sense data is caused by in the environment and have set up a demo such that they can reliably react to a signal sent by a skeptical tester who turns the demo device's power switch off and on, in order to provide evidence to skeptics of their superior perception ability.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoRelated and interesting, there are some common visual patterns across many hallucinogenic experiences, “form constants”. Possibly related somehow to the organization of our visual system. It blew my mind when I learned these exist, and especially when I learned there has been apparently little research into them. Maybe more informed minds than I have determined there’s nothing to learn from them, but it seems like there would be insights to gain about how we see. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant