This Is Your Brain on Acid
Originally published on January 27, 2011 in The Artful Brain under Nature Publishing Group (see original version)
An artist was given 100ug of LSD and a box of crayons during an experiment run by the once-groovy US government, circa 1950. Over the course of his eight-hour trip, he was asked to render several drawings of his experimenter, a rather serious-looking psychiatrist. Below, scans of the actual drawings depict a journey that, at its peak, transformed the artist's perceptual grip on the world into cognitive jazz.
The first question that a psychologist may ask is, "Was that ethical?," and if that psychologist is from California, "Can I try it too?" The second question is "What do his drawings represent about his thinking and did he actually see the world differently?" A neuroscientist may reply that LSD blocks serotonin 2A receptors and increases glutamate only in higher visual areas such as layers IV and V of the visual system. Thus, the artist likely perceived shapes and patterns normally but had disruptions in color perception, mimicking the crossing of senses (cross-modal integration) seen in synesthesia. Looking at the renderings above, it does appear that the basic shapes and patterns were properly reproduced, but something else is off — something more abstract. The computational neuroscientist would view this as a transformation, where a visual input is being transformed by an altered complex circuit, and ask, "What does this alteration teach us about that complex network, and can we model and reproduce some part of the altered sensory-perception transformation?" Such an idea, that the sensation is not leading to perception in a linear way, feeds the philosopher, who may beg the most profound question yet, "If reality is so profoundly subjective, how can you argue with someone who sees the world differently; is it even possible to be right about anything: religion, politics, or even philosophy?"
That's precisely what makes the brain so artistic, its ability to make a fine shrimp gumbo out of a few sensory ingredients. Even more interesting is its ability to hazard sharing that unique flavor by means of, and often against the limitations of, language. Such a curiosity brings us squarely to the purpose of this blog: to peer into that fine, fine shrimp gumbo we call a mind through the spectacles of these unique perspectives and see if we can gain a slightly larger window of the cognitive recipe.
If you're wondering about me, just know that I thoroughly enjoy cooking fine seafood dishes, playing jazz, and pondering all of the open questions about the mind and philosophy left for us to answer. Perhaps, if you've found yourself reading this, you are asking these same questions too.
