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Comment by alanbernstein | Hacker News Reader

This might have been written just for me, I love the premise.

I am truly fascinated by people who attempt to reproduce the actual physiological vision effects of psychedelic drugs.

Psychoactive drugs can be probes into the inner workings of our minds - in some scientific sense - and exploring the vision effects seems likely to suggest interesting things about how our visual system works.

Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism.

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> Mostly, I am just impressed when anyone is able to capture the visual experience in graphical effects, with any level of realism.

I have to say that the cliche of super bright, super saturated, geometric or melty shapes like in the article are not a great reproduction of the typical visual effects of psychedelics. Apart from very high doses, the visual effects are much more subtle.

The /r/replications subreddit has GIFs and short videos with a much higher degree of realism https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/top/?t=year

This is 100% not what psychedelics look like. It's generally just mildly more saturated colours and the feeling that everything is possibly breathing or swaying in a more natural way. I dunno what happens if you take insane amounts tbf. I always thought that psychedelic art was a bit more about the sort of thing that is super appealing to look at while tripping.

The trick is go out of body. Eyes closed and let your mind create all the visuals. Then its like being in alex grey land

True, more interesting things happen when you close your eyes.

Maybe the most "scientifically accurate" replication of psychedelics are in these "DeepDream" images.

They were originally made to debug neural networks for image recognition. The idea is run the neural network in reverse while amplifying certain aspects, to get an idea on what it "sees". So if you are trying to recognize dogs, running the network in reverse will increase the "dogginess" of the image, revealing an image full of dog features. Depending on the layer on which you work, you may get some very recognizable dog faces, or something more abstract.

The result is very psychedelic. It may not be the most faithful representation of an acid trip, but it is close. The interesting part is that it wasn't intended to simulate an acid trip. The neural network is loosely modeled after human vision, and messing with the artificial neurons have an effect similar to how some drugs mess with our natural neurons.

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