the-star-stuff: Why don’t we normally hallucinate? If you’ve ever seen strange geometric patterns while on drugs, you might have wondered what on Earth caused you to see these hallucinations. What mechanism is behind this weird effect? But a new study asks a different, equally reasonable question — not “Why do hallucinations occur?”, but “Why don’t they occur all the time?” You rely on your visual cortex, located at the back of your brain, to process the images that you see. When light enters your eye, it stimulates certain parts in the visual cortex, forming a pattern of excited neurons, which you experience as an image. But once in a while, these excitation patterns arise spontaneously, overwhelming the visual signal from the eyes and causing geometric hallucinations. This “failure mode” only occurs when some influence, such as drugs, compromises your normal brain function. The pattern of neurons that makes you visualize things that aren’t there arises because of a type of self-organizing diffusion called the Turing mechanism, which contributes to the creation of patterns in certain biological and ecological systems. Read the full article here. Top image: dimitris_k/Shutterstock.com Click for high-res image

the-star-stuff:

Why don’t we normally hallucinate?

If you’ve ever seen strange geometric patterns while on drugs, you might have wondered what on Earth caused you to see these hallucinations. What mechanism is behind this weird effect?

But a new study asks a different, equally reasonable question — not “Why do hallucinations occur?”, but “Why don’t they occur all the time?”

You rely on your visual cortex, located at the back of your brain, to process the images that you see. When light enters your eye, it stimulates certain parts in the visual cortex, forming a pattern of excited neurons, which you experience as an image. But once in a while, these excitation patterns arise spontaneously, overwhelming the visual signal from the eyes and causing geometric hallucinations. This “failure mode” only occurs when some influence, such as drugs, compromises your normal brain function.

The pattern of neurons that makes you visualize things that aren’t there arises because of a type of self-organizing diffusion called the Turing mechanism, which contributes to the creation of patterns in certain biological and ecological systems.

Read the full article here.

Top image: dimitris_k/Shutterstock.com

Posted on December 30, 2011 at 11:28pm with 123 notes and was reblogged from Sesquipedalianism!

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