Hallucinogenic form constants
For anyone who has taken a major psychedelic drug, the notion that their effects amount to nothing more than a colorful light show seems to leave out something important. Hallucinogenic experiences, although potentially very entertaining in their own right, provide access to levels of conscious that make profound statements about the nature of reality and what it means to be human. For this reason, the power of psychedelic states comes not only from their hedonic qualities, but also from the potential for accessing new subjective vantage points in order to understand the workings of the conscious and subconscious mind. One example of this is the consistency of fundamental visual forms common across psychedelic states, suggesting that these experiences are not arbitrary hallucinations, but reflect something about the underlying mechanisms in the visual system that gives rise to visual states in ordinary consciousness.
The first experiment seeking to analyze consistencies in psychedelic visual hallucinations was performed by Heinrich Kluver in 1966, in which participants were given mescaline — the main psychoactive ingredient in peyote — and asked to report on their visual experiences. Comparing the reports across subjects, Kluver found four main form constants: (1) lattice (a.k.a. honeycomb, grating, or chessboard) (2) cobweb-like (3) tunnel (a.k.a. funnel, cone or vessel) and (4) spiral. These forms could occur with the eyes open or closed, and generally could not be voluntarily controlled. Importantly, Kluver noted that similar form constants appear in other states, including hypnagogic states and fever deliriums. Kluver also differentiated between simple and complex images occurring at different stages of the hallucinogenic experience.
A problem encountered by Kluver was that different individuals may use different vocabularies to describe their subjective experiences, thus confounding the analysis of consistent patterns. Ronald Siegal (1977; Siegel & Jarvik 1975) overcame this by training participants on an image classification system used to identify particular forms. For example, they were taught to classify and name examples of webs, tunnels, spirals and so forth.
What Kluver and Siegal found was that at about 90–120 minutes after ingestion, there was significant overlap between the types of simple forms identified across participants. These constants were discovered even across drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline etc). As time progressed to the later hallucinogenic stages where more complex forms began to appear, differentiation between subjects began to emerge. This is allegedly due to gradual integration of the individual’s memory systems. They took the consistency of visual forms across subjects, drugs, and states to mean that there is a common underlying processing mechanism responsible for diverse hallucinogenic experiences.
Given the results of these studies, further investigation of geometric forms using modern mind-brain frameworks, perhaps from a mathematical perspective, could be enlightening. Why do particular forms exist? Do they reflect specific algorithmic processes that most efficiently process incoming sensory data, or are they mere incidental byproducts of the ingested drug? What is their relationship to conscious experience? Even if the forms are produced purely by incidental stimulations, rather than reflecting ongoing and underlying processes, the interesting question remains why there are reliable commonalities irrespective of culture or conditioned experience.
As mentioned above, there is a difficulty in extracting precise representations from subjective reports. Also, psychedelic research doesn’t exactly have a track record for objective and controlled science. Furthermore, it might turn out there are severe limitations to how much can be inferred from hallucinogenic states — how generalizable they are, and what real information can gleaned from them. However, I think major psychedelics should be taken seriously, not just for their psychological effects and psychiatric uses, but also for their potential in shedding light on concrete informational processing mechanics in the brain.