Mathematical models describing patterned visuals (for psych nerds)

Probably belongs in Psychedelic Articles but I figure it'd get more views here. Move it if you think you need to.

http://plus.maths.org/issue53/features/hallucinations/index.html

There is an area of your brain where visual information is sent to be processed. The first visual area of the brain is the most elementary and consists of a nearly-faithful copy of your visual field composed of patterns of neuronal activation. That is, if you showed someone the letter A and you could see the activation of individual neurons finely enough in this area of the brain through some sort of imaging you would be able to see the rough shape of the letter A on this person's brain.

Here's where psychedelics come in: take a psychedelic and the resulting patterns of activation in the primary visual cortex will correspond to the patterned visuals that you see. Or rather, the visuals are a result of this patterned and mathematically-describable neuronal activation.

The article goes a lot more in-depth about this and other aspects of patterned visuals.

Nifty stuff, I think. And I think you guys will also think it's nifty.

 

:cheers2: incredible

 

roy orbison..

 

tao bless those mathematician's! it won't be long before we crack the brain, and when we do...who knows?

 

Awsome, thanks for posting, this is right up my alley.
This topic really needs to be studied in much more depth, it would be cool if some algorithims were devised that would correlate the repetition of certain visuals with specific chemicals.

On a side note here is a freeware fractal generator that is fun to play around with
http://www.chaospro.de/