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Comment by pknopf | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why, but the few times in high-school that I took acid, I could see lines in the night sky going north to south. It was deterministic, like clock work.

Does anybody have an ideas why? I mean, I wasn't really hallucinating, I didn't take too much. I could always truely find north or south. I couldn't tell what was north or south, but I could draw the line, always.

Am I crazy? I mean, I'm not saying I'm a bird, but...

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I too have experienced such "deterministic" hallucinations. This has fascinated me for some time.

One theory is that the phenomenon is always there but that that visual layer is tuned out, just how with practice you can tune into many visual layers: you can learn to see floaters, the white blood cells moving through the capillaries in your retina, your own heartbeat, noise in the image, etc.

It may serve some function yet to be discovered. At the very least, it is beautiful.

I can easily see my heartbeat in my vision by staying still and concentrating. Everything shifts slightly with each pulse, you just don't notice because the overwhelming vibrations contributed by ordinary life interfere with the weak signal of the heartbeat. But how can you train yourself to see white blood cells? What do you look for?

Look at a blue sky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon

What a sweet simulation. Thanks for the link!

Here: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/moving-spots-...

Some people affected by eye Toxoplasmosis begin to see floaters all the time. And, strangely, it make at least one person on Earth also see those white blood cells (the little white spots you see against a blue, bright sky) with the unaffected eye, too.

Interestingly, I read a while back about polarized light being visible to a portion of the naked eye.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1811/2015...

I found that I was able to see Haidinger's brush infrequently. One experiment (which I sadly cannot remember a citation for) suggested that lines in the sky would point north/south.

Interesting...

Also, I forgot to mention that the lines would curve around the light of large stars. It was almost like the oval notches/holes in wood grain. Only the large/visible stars did this.

Even if you could see magnetic fields, it wouldn't look like lines in the sky running north to south, so this does sound like an hallucination.

So what would a magnetic field look like (to the naked eye, not just a visualisation of field lines with iron filings or similar) if you could see it?

Well, I imagine the crystals can only perceive single vector values of the magnetic field at the position of the eye. Imagine each censor returning a vector defining the magnetic field at a point on the eye. There probably wouldn't be any way to focus or change depth of perception like one could with light. You'd have to move your eyes through space to get more than a localized snapshot.

But, you can probably predict what a magnetic field looks like away from the point of measurement, I.e. the eye. What is fascinating to me is that they could potentially be learning to deal with manmade magnetic fields, adapting to human culture in a possibly novel way.

Most likely it would seem as if the air is distorted by some diffuse gas other than the air contains. If you vent a nitrogen gas bottle you'll see a shadow that the gas escapes, but you cannot see it with the naked eye. So, for seeing magnetic fields you'll need also to see some specific electromagnetic wavelength which would shift in the presence of a magnetic field (much like light scatters when gases move). With complex neural networks involved in an eye it's likely that those specific light receptors found make it possible to perceive magnetic fields penetrated by sunlight. Which is basically shown in the pictures.

There are pictures in the article.

How do you explain that they were always from north-to-south? I mean, I tried hard to trick myself even. An actual hallucination couldn't know.

Knowing which way is north and south is different from being able to visually see it. It's likely that you knew which way is north and south without realising it. Even if you were very good at tricking yourself, you may have got it right just by chance.

I seem to have a very good intuitive sense of direction. When I lived in Ottawa, though, I used to always get lost when I hit the river. It took me years to figure out what the problem was. The river runs roughly east west and so all the signs say "East" or "West", but it's actually in the shape of a V. Most of the time it's running NW/SE or NE/SW. Every time I hit the river, I'd consciously think that I'm going East/West when in reality I was going in a completely different direction. It really threw me off.

I think people are more attuned to direction than they think. Direction of the sun, time of day, landmarks, direction of shadows, position of moss on trees, etc, etc. After years and years of seeing it, your brain get's pretty good at orienting you -- even if you don't consciously understand it. These days, I try not to reason about my orientation, but rather guess. I tend to have better results.

I don't think I have to explain (though the first explanation that comes to mind is that you were familiar enough with the location to have a pretty good idea of approximately which direction you were facing).

The point is that magnetic field lines are a convenient diagrammatic tool, but don't have a direct correspondence to any physical reality. It's just like the way we sometimes draw electromagnetic radiation as a sine wave, but try as you might you won't ever observe little squiggly sine waves in physical reality.

> The point is that magnetic field lines are a convenient diagrammatic tool, but don't have a direct correspondence to any physical reality.

Magnetic field lines correspond as much to physical reality as anything possibly can. https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/80913

Also here's a trippy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUZsojDdEbE

There's a vector field, but it's continuous - you can't point to two points in space and say "a field line passes through this one, but not this one".

You can point to points in space and say that the scalar value of their vector field is the same or different, and say whether or not there is a continuous path of scalar value sameness between them.

Iron filings do a pretty good job of showing us "lines" in physical reality.

The iron filings actually concentrate the field, which leads to a bit of an avalanche effect as the concentrated field attracts more filings towards it that creates the lines.

Those lines are entirely conceptual.

If you see these lines in the iron filings, they are perceived, i.e. perceptual-level evidence not conceptual.

Well, you could repeat the experience and arrange for a double-blind trial or something. :)

" I could see lines in the night sky going north to south. It was deterministic, like clock work."

Even though I am open to alternative explanations, I would say it is also possible, that your knowledge of where north and south is - and your knowledge about the magnetic field - might be enough as an rational explanation.

So to prove - you would need to be able to do the same in an enviroment, where you do not know the directions ...

Weak condensation trails that you didn't bother looking for sober? Aircraft often follow deterministic paths.

LSD or any psychedelic, can make the user more sensitive the energies that we normally cannot sense. Non-humans seem more sensitive to these energies than we are, whether because their stronger senses allow them to notice what we cannot, or whether they have better intuition than we do, because they're not taught to subconsciously disregard it as fantasy, delusion or coincidence, etc.

LSD + "Energy perception" = Free Energy Movement wavies.

Can you please give a link to a peer reviewed article about these energies?

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