In Scott Alexander's Lot's of People Going Around with Mild Hallucinations All the Time, he shows that several people not currently on LSD still experience mild hallucinations commonly associated with currently taking LSD.
I would like to test to see if I could teach you how to see these mild hallucinations, regardless of experience with psychedelics. Below are 3 tests that should take 1-2 minutes to complete. If you choose to complete 1 or more of these, please comment both failed and successful attempts. Please also comment if you can already see some of these, even if you think it seems obvious.
Test 1: Visual Snow
Description: See the Visual Snow Wiki for a nice visualization on the top-right. I would describe it as "jumpy spiderwebs made out of light", similar in feel to the "black stars" people see when feeling faint (when they get up too quick).
I would say it's NOT the same experience as mental imagination or eye floaters.
[Edit: Honestly I mixed up different phenomena for "visual snow" in my description. Here's the update:
1. Visual Snow - Like a million very tiny dots. Very much like static/white noise in the wiki. More visible in low light conditions or when you're tired. I saw it for the first time this (8/12) morning in low-light conditions.
2. Patterned lines (?) - Like the geometric/kaleidoscopic shape in this picture. Doesn't have to be that consistent or patterned but is better described by "lines" than either of the other two. This is what I meant by "jumpy spiderwebs made out of light" and what I thought visual snow was.
3. Blue-sky Sprites - The picture is a nice animation (can be seen without looking at the blue sky but apparently it's more prominent in that case). Dots and wisps the size of a mm or a little bigger. Maybe 5-100 at a time vs the million in "visual snow". Resembles afterimages and the "black stars" when feeling faint.
4. (Also very possible there's more that I've missed)
]
Test: For 1 minute (click here for a 1 minute timer), close your eyes and try to see the back of your eyelids using your peripheral vision. If a minute elapses with nothing resembling "visual snow", then it's a failure.
If it's a success, then try to see visual snow with your eyes open, again for 1 minute at most.
Test 2: Afterimage Around Objects
Description: It's similar in feel to the image on the right in the afterimage wiki. Similar to seeing a bright light and still seeing it in your vision after you look away.
Test: For 2 minutes max (click here for a 2 minute timer), find a brightly colored object that's against a different flat colored background (a red towel hanging in front of a light tan wall, your face in the mirror in front of a white door, etc), and just stare at the object using your peripheral vision. Don't shift your eyes, just pick a spot and focus on your peripheral vision. If you don't see a colored afterimage of the object around parts of that object, then it's a failure.
Test 3: Breathing Walls
Description: It looks like the static surface you're looking at (floors, walls, ceilings) is shifting, rotating, swirling, "breathing" (sort of dilating back and forth?) even though you know that it's actually still static. Usually more apparent in patterned surfaces than plain colored ones.
Test: For 1 minute, find a larger, textured surface (carpet, pop-corn ceilings, [other examples?]), and stare at it using your peripheral vision. If after a minute of staring you don't see any moving, shifting, etc, then it's a failure.
Well having global set of rules is one feature of the context-blindness explanation for the kind of variation. One of the possible linkages is that appying this kind of universality to moral behaviour allows one to avoid being a hypocrite as you consistently and without fail apply the honed behaviour. In contrast a person with strong comparmentalization has trouble arriving at the generalization. You have "don't steal at shop", "don't steal from family", "don't steal from classmates" ie you accumulate contexts where the behaviour is appropriate/inappropriate. If you get caught stealing and it feels punishing you form an opinion that "I should not steal here" (a very context sensitive person could go "I should not steal at the north end of this store" separate from "I should not steal at the south end of this store") and do not form an opinion of "I should not steal". In away you have to solve the same appropriateness problem all over in a new context. It need not be that the contextes are not recognised but their role in cognition is not so pronounced.
What I was more getting at I guess iddn't write that explicitly is that context affects memory recall and attention too. That is when I try to see an object one doesn't pay attention to a narrow group fo neurons but a whole big data dump most of which is probably irrelevant to the task at hand. However what you don't recall can't be used in the end product of the mental processing. For example in programming it is usual to declare most variables private. But you could declare all variables public. If you do the program constructs can use each others functionality. At the most extreme you could have the program function as a holistic whole where classes refer to each other public variables willy nilly. However if you a have code where there are lots of private variables you can be sure that those variables are refererenced from a narrow range that having the one class definition open you are aware of all the code that could influence it. Trying to do otherwise would not make the program compile or would raise a segfault.
But in a world where there is no segfaults if higher abstraction level is interested in the details it can explicitly go look at them. That is if I call a function and I know that as a side-effect of that the objects internal variables have changed if I want I can go read those variables. [code] result=fruit_detectorIsApple(blob)
curiosity=fruit_detector.pearness [/code] If pearness was declared private this would not be permitted
In brains it could be that if each brain region has a separate memory store that only it has access that would lead to a type of encapsulation. In the reverse if all functionalities dump their data to a common information store then they can interfere/cooperate. At one extreme all data could be sent all the time to all functionalities but each functionality only really digests a small portion of it. But while the production is made seeking for a particular important pieces of data a lot of secondary data would be floating around too. Or in reverse a brain that gets easily confused by garbage data might limit by only transitting information really required for the operations. And this involves hiding/destroying data that doesn't directly answer questions it is asked. LIke in a math test you are supposed to show your midsteps but in this kind of arrangement the less steps revealed the better and preferably only the bottomline.