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.
(Throwaway account)
I've known I've seen visual snow as long as I can remember - I've thought of it as "eye pixels".
I took a moderate dosage of shrooms (approx. 1g) - enough to feel high like taking edible weed, and a little bit of a things-are-connected, but not enough to feel out of it or see hallucinations.
When I closed my eyes, I was surprised to notice the visual snow didn't look the same anymore. Now it formed into kaleidoscope patterns. It was the same color and density as the visual snow, but now it no longer looked like random noise- it mostly looked like hexagons, but also some other regular patterns.
The exact pattern that was formed would change from second to second - but it was a regular pattern repeated all across my visual field and made from the visual snow. The "my vision / normal vision" in Scott's post is accurate, except imagine those patterns just when I close my eyes or looked at something plain like a featureless wall, and made from the visual snow.
Note it wasn't visual snow with this pattern overlaid - the visual snow had become this pattern.
It's weird, because I remember thinking to myself at the time:
"My eyes are not firing in a way to produce these patterns, some low level part of my visual processing is telling me that these patterns exist, and yet they look as real as anything I see. It's not the same as when my visual imagination is strong and I visualize (like just before drifting off) or when I'm dreaming. It's literally there (though faint). I'm not controlling it or imagining it. This is input to my conscious perception of reality."
I felt like I had a first-hand insight into how processed by our body and mind our view of the world is - how what we see is not literally what's coming into our eyes. Because suddenly random noise literally did not look like random noise any more. Along with the heightened sense of profundity that one experiences too, this felt like a significant realization.
I also wonder how much my perception of what I view as simply real, what I experience as being just-so on a conscious level is actually strongly filtered in this sense from a lower level, in such a way that as much as you might be able to reason about it and say "aha, there aren't actually any hexagons" it doesn't change the fact that you will still literally in your conscious mind get that input of "there are hexagons" (where here "hexagons" are a metaphor for ideas in general).
Thanks for taking the time make another account!
That's interesting. I see the "kaleidoscope patterns" like the picture, but also like ~100 pulsating/popping tiny dots that resemble afterimages (is this what others think for visual snow?).
I view these as two separate low-level information because I could see the first yesterday, but I can now see the second today. Someone I asked today could only see the second. But, you said
which makes it s... (read more)