................................. To leave Commie, hyper to http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html ................................. this is a bit weird, but I forward it anyways ! NEW SCIENTIST WEEKLY NEWSLETTER No 90, 23 June 2001 The walls come alive and begin to dance with colour. A tunnel of light leads into the distance as spirals of stars whirl over the ceiling. Cobwebs grow across the room as the floor becomes a giant honeycomb. This is a typical LSD trip. And according to Jack Cowan, there's nothing transcendental about it. A "trip" is really a journey into the brain, says the mathematician and neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. The "psychedelic experience" is "just the innate tendency of the brain to make patterns when it goes unstable". Cowan and his team are confi- dent that there is nothing in the brain that science can't ultimately deal with. After more than two decades, and with the help of an extra- ordinary computer, they believe they have found where hallucinations really come from. They may also have discovered a route to the more profound depths of the mind, emotions and conscious thought... http://www.newscientist.com/newsletter/features.jsp?id=ns22962 a couple of excerpts to whet your interest ... So more than half a century after Kl�ver set out his form-constants, two of them were finally explained. LSD users see spirals and tunnels because those are the real-world objects that fit the patterns of neural firing in their cortex. Timothy Leary, the guru of "tune in, turn on, drop out" fame, speculated in The Psychedelic Experience, "These visions might be described as pure sensations of cellular and sub-cellular processes." So just as Leary guessed, the spaced-out brain is tuning into its own architecture. To appreciate a hallucination, Leary said, you have to let go of the urge to rationalise it. Tom Wolfe pitched in with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. "The White Smocks liked to put it into words, like hallucination and dissociative phenomena. They could understand the visual skyrockets. Give them a good case of an ashtray turning into a Venus flytrap or eyelid movies of crystal cathedrals, and they could groove on that... That was swell. But don't you see? -- the visual stuff was just the d�cor with LSD... The whole thing was ... the experience ... this certain indescribable feeling ... The experience of the barrier between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the I and the not-I disappearing ... that feeling!"
