The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (2016)
I&#x27;m going to quickly summarize my psychedelic inspired theories on cognition which are now somewhat backed by science.<p>Basic observations:<p>1. On psychedelics your sense of time is wrong. I ran an experiment called &#x27;the deadman switch&#x27; wherein I set a 20 min timer and, when it goes off, I would verbally acknowledge and then reset it. Based on this, I estimate 20 min to feel like over an hour, thus giving a distortion ratio of at least 5:1.<p>2. The images I see when I close my eyes are the same colors as the normal after image one sees after staring at a lightbulb. In fact the kaleidoscopic hallucinations look exactly as if the after image of a light bulb has gone through some sort of frequency space filtering. Here&#x27;s a profound laymans summary: isn&#x27;t it remarkable how similar the hallucinations look to a video buffering artifact.<p>3. Thoughts of a certain size get cut off. I find it hard to exactly quantify the size of a thought, but for the purpose of this conversation lets take it for granted that such a metric exists. Sentences beyond a certain word count would almost certainly have the train of thought derailed before reaching its terminus. Multi-step tasks like standing in line, thinking about what I want to order, and being ready with what to say when I reach the front are highly unlikely to succeed. Unlike other forms of intoxication, it is not the case that all cognitive ability is equally blunted. The speaking of individual words goes unslurred and small-size tasks&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;sentences go unhampered.<p>Basic theory:<p>The atomic building block of cognition is repetition. All patterns are repetition, or repetition of repetitions, or repetitions of some nth order hierarchy of repetitions. Repetition happens at different length and time scales. The fundamental way the brain does pattern recognition and thus cognition is with brain waves, not with the individual neurons. To recognize patterns that happen at 1&#x2F;10th of a second, you use 10 hz waves.<p>Consider a big ball of neurons without an explicit input or output layer. Naturally this system will have self sustaining standing waves, looping neural paths that activate themselves. Factoring in signal propagation time, the longer waves correspond to the longer times and thus lower frequencies. The crux of my theory is that the brain is a system of coupled oscillators tuned to have resonances that represent abstract concepts called &quot;thoughts&quot;. Psychedelics introduce a slight detuning. Consider what would happen to a radio tuner if the local reference oscillator was slightly off. Alternatively, consider what a piano would sound like if every screw were turned 1&#x2F;8th of the way. The very long strings would be mostly still in tune, the very short and taut strings would be completely out of tune, and some strings would be nearly aligned with the tune in a different key.<p>In terms of visual perception, the brain is doing something similar to the 2d fourier transform but in a basis that is optimized for 3d objects projected down to the retinal surface. The visual hallucinations can be explained as the reference frequencies being miscalibrated. The spatial repetitions which are nearly the same frequency of the error will drift in and out of phase similar to a beat frequency between two guitar strings. This is why certain visual patterns appear to have a wave like fluid motion on psychadelics.<p>Scientific evidence:<p>1. Selene Atasoy has worked out the resonant waves that should be present given what we know about how things are connected in the brain. She found that these standing wave patterns correspond extremely well to MRI patterns for various known mental states. Then she looked at the MRI patterns of people on LSD and showed exactly which frequency ranges are dampened &#x2F; amplified.<p>2. People on psychedelics all consistently see hallucinations known as form constants. These form constants correspond exactly with the arrangement of the v1 layer of neurons immediately after the optical nerve. This arrangement is intrinsically related to how the rods and cones are distributed inside the retina (namely an exponential distribution). The arrangement of rods and cones in the retina suggests the brain is using log-polar coordinates, which is exactly the coordinate system you would use if you wanted invariance under projective transforms.<p>Further research:<p>I am preparing to do some off the record science wherein I prepare a systematic series of visual stimulus to look at while tripping and then keeping a record of which ones appear to be moving or otherwise distorted. The computer will randomly decide to make some of the images actually be moving &#x2F; distorted so as to blind the experiment. Later on I will superimpose the distorted frequencies together and see if it reproduces the crystal patterns. The goal is to reverse engineer visual perception and eventually make better quality machine vision.<p>Unlike with visual processing, I am not yet sure how the brain represents sentences and thoughts with frequencies. However based on the observations, I suspect that &quot;larger thoughts&quot; are somehow represented on the part of the spectrum which is being cut out. Understanding how this works exactly could be key to natural language processing.