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• shadowpuppetmaster - Apr 10 2008 | the, art, world

  it just occurred to me that some of my salvia trips are almost isomorphic with the descriptions of visual migranes, or 'auras'...except it's not limited to one side of the visual field.

  Quoted:
  "Seeing multitudes of tiny, identical structures, sometimes “unrolling” steadily, sometimes flickering, forming and reforming, all over the visual field, is common in migraine auras, though it is only occasionally that these are elaborated into tiny skulls, or arrays of faces or animals or other objects."

  EDIT: whoops, should've kept reading, the association with self-induced drug hallucinations is already brought up here.

  ..."Klüver spoke here of hallucinatory “form constants” and the tendency to “geometrization,” to the “geometrical-ornamental,” seemingly built into the brain-mind. The visions produced by mescal and other hallucinogens would usually progress from these elementary forms of hallucination to elaborate visions of a much more personal and sometimes mystical sort (including scenes of people, animals, and landscapes). But Klüver remarked that the lower-level, geometric hallucinations that preceded these were identical to those found in a variety of conditions: migraine, sensory deprivation, low blood sugar, fever, delirium, or the hypnopompic and hypnagogic states that come immediately before and after sleep. Indeed, even in the absence of any special medical conditions, they could be evoked in anyone by flickering lights, or sometimes even by simply applying pressure to the eyes."

  • shadowpuppetmaster - Apr 10 2008
    

    okay here we go, i was waiting for Descartes' "natural geometry" from The World to finally show up here, and it did:

    "They are archetypes, in a way, universals of human experience."

    snap.

  • shadowpuppetmaster - Apr 10 2008
    

    "Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?
    Whether or not this is the case, there is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins."

    go oooonnnnnnn....

    Descartes licks his lips..."GOT ONE!"
    i play, but it's interesting to note the continuity of modern brain science's explanations of these things and those of their forefather...

  • shadowpuppetmaster - Apr 10 2008
    

    out of fairness, she does move more toward auto-poeitic systems and chaos theory than cartesian planar geometry, but still...

  • shadowpuppetmaster - Apr 10 2008
    

    WHOA!
    the comments to the piece just got way crazy, almost crazier than the article...

    "White blood cells and antibodies “see” what the distribution of electrical charges on their surfaces allow them to see. If falsely programmed, they can “see” an enemy where there is none (molecular paranoia, perhaps?)– leading to autoimmune attack. However, if given a more distracting molecular view, white blood cells and antibodies can be fooled into preferentially attacking the immunodistractant, and the patient may finally obtain some welcome relief from his autoimmune misery."

    molecular war!
• ehansen - Feb 14 2008 | brain, art, mind

  The comments are even more interesting than the article

  Quoted: Perspectives on a headache.

  • CE - Feb 15 2008
    

    i linked to it from my blog and cited my wonderful brother

  • ehansen - Feb 15 2008
    

    oh - you shouldn't have!