i want to acknowledge the institute where i work, and also draulio de araãºjo, who i'm gonna talk about today we work at this place in brazil, it's brand new, it's very exciting, if you happen to be in brazil anyone can visit the brain institute, we will be very happy to have you there and we also want to acknowledge the various funding agencies that we have in particular the federal government of brazil, through cnpq and capes the state government of rio grande do norte through fapern and the pew program that has funded my post-doctoral studies many years ago and keeps a link with us
so what i'm gonna talk here today are some reflections and an effort to compare two large bodies of evidence, actually, one large body of evidence, which regards sleep and a small body of evidence, the entire field is pretty much in this room, which has to do with ayahuasca and for me at least, it started really in 2006, i had been back to brazil for a year, after many years in us and i was visiting my good friend draulio de araãºjo, who is there in yellow and we were discussing, having a relaxed conversation about what could be a model of dreaming, dreams are something very interesting to me draulio is also interested in sleep and dreams, and he had had a contact at that time with people from santo daime
and then we said, what if we came up with an experiment that could test something about the imagery properties of the ayahuasca experience so, could ayahuasca be, as a potent psychoactive substance, could it be a model for dreaming at least that was the motivation for us, and that of course resonates a preoccupation of somebody else a 100 years ago freud also thought that he could have a royal road to understand consciousness but not through a substance, but through a natural state of the mind so if we're gonna talk about dreaming, we need to talk about sleep when did sleep appear?
about 800 million years ago life began in this planet and we can be really sure that at that time these originally unicellular organisms were already subjected to a day/night cycle so, circadian effects are at the root of the behavior that we call sleep 360 million years ago animals that resemble insects began to appear, this is the begining of the insect radiation, and based on the behavior that insects have now, like fruit flies we can speculate that slow-wave sleep, this quiescent form of sleep was evolved around that time so, pretty old, and probably for very basic reasons of conservation of energy and replenishment of biomolecules, rather than more complicated stuff like cognition about a 100 million years ago, mammals began to really radiate and gave origin to many
of the groups that exist today, and in mammals that exist today, sleep is also accompanied by another state called rapid eye-movement sleep (rem), or paradoxical sleep if you're coming from france which is this very active state of sleep in which the brain looks like it's awakened, but in fact it's in an offline state. so those two complementary phases appeared many many million years ago and we still don't understand very well what's the function that they play a long time after that, less then 1 million years ago, probably, our ancestors started to develop complex behaviors that gave origin to the culture that we have nowadays, in particular the use of tools and the beginning of art, or whatever you wanna call the remains that were left by our ancestors on caverns and caves throughout europe and elsewhere
so at that point we started to have some direct indication of the kind of mind that is undergoing those states because before we can only speculate but now here we start to get a feeling that they started to be able to use icons so here we have, in addition to the hands, we can see a bison can you guys see a bison drawn there? so this is an icon, this is a very simple sign that communicates through simmilarity so what sort of mentality did those hominids have? we can probably be sure that in the past several hundred thousand years they were having two kinds of experience that is not the regular waking experience, right?
they were most probably having dreams, and they we're very likely, although we don't have the evidence they were very likely using psychoactive substances, and what dreams and psychoactive substances provide is a detachment from the immediate reality and access to this other world. what is it made of? be as it may, we know that through dreams and through the use of psychoactive substances our ancestors eventually got here. so culture was developed so what dreams and psychoactive substances provided, based on, if you read the bible, if you read the gilgamesh stories, if you read the vedas or the i-ching or whatever old text you'll see that it had to do with planning the future
had to do with integrating past information towards goals for the future whatever you want to do, achieve in the future, dreams have to do with this and also the shamanic trances induced by substances are also related to that we don't have the details about how this evolved, i mean, it's very hard to infer the mind just based on written texts, but we know that much more recently, in the beginning of the 20th century this field of neuroscience began to coalesce and what was neuroscience back a 100 or so years ago? perhaps the most concrete and safe thing to study, something people could rely on, was anatomy so anatomy doesn't change a lot over time, and the founding father of neuroscience is santiago ramã³n y cajal
so he discovered the neuron and he started to draw neurons and circuits, and came up with a lot of conclusions about stuff that he actually couldn't be sure, for example the directionality of the flow of information in the brain, something that he inferred from the anatomy around the same time physiology was developing sherrington and adrian were the founding fathers of neurophysiology, they were also dealing with something concrete, spikes, action potentials, right? something that you can measure, you can count they were figuring out that if you put a weight on a muscle, and if you record neurons that innervate that muscle, you're gonna see that firing rate increase, so they were also doing something very quantitative
and solid, seeminlgy and then you had a guy like freud, and he was instead of studying neurons or the shape of neurons and the way that neurons function, he was studying the way that complex systems complex collections of cells that we call brains, that we call a body, would produce evidence what sort of evidence? well, actually his detractors would say: just bla bla bla... words by staying in a setting that allows for free association, the freudian setting, the psychoanalytical setting people would produce some evidence, behavioral evidence, that was not considered to be scientific by most of science for many many years, but still, yielded many many insights into human behavior in particular, around the turn of the century, freud published the interpretation of dreams
and in this book he came up with several concepts that i want to examine here with you today he proposed that dreams contain day residues, that dreams somehow reflects the stuff that happens during waking he said the desire is the motor of dreams, and he was criticized for putting things in that poetic manner he said that dreams are conglomerates of psychic formations, and you start thinking maybe people are right to criticize him because what does he mean by that? conglomerates of psychic formations, we don't know, or do we know? and then he said that very famous phrase that most likely everybody here heard before he said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious
but he didn't say what the unconscious is, and this is the source of a lot of debate and confusion we'll try to, through this talk, revisit those concepts with the biology of nowadays and see if those assertions make sense if we are to describe the phenomenology of dreams, and this freud did very well in his book we have to admit that dreams are fragmented, they are bizarre, they show condensation of time and space several operations, several logical or, if you want, illogical operations, on something that is the basic framework of reality, the waking life in dreams we deal with waking events and memories of waking events, but they get to be mixed up in very interesting and unpredictable ways
another thing that we need to recognize is this - ops, i don't wanna connect, thank you - we need to recognize that dreams very often involve anxiety, of some sort in fact, if you read the literature, about 50% of dream reports, 50, 60, 40, around there involve anxious feelings. not necessarily nightmares, but this feeling of incompletude something that you want to achieve and you haven't achieved how many people here have had dreams in which you want to achieve something or arrive at a place or find at a place and that hasn't happened throughout the dream? can you please raise your hands? so this has been published in the past 50 years, it's very clear that dreams have something to do with searching for a goal and often not getting there, but also in some cases getting there,
and this is something that freud described as the wish fulfillment dream, achieving the goal this is also in dreams and this is why freud departed from hypnosis, and in fact used dreams as the royal road to his practice so people would come to the psychoanalytical setting and by free associations, revisit those experiences those very private experiences, and come up with, in the attempt to come up with insights that could cure them of whatever problem they had so, i'm not gonna go into the details, but the fact is that freud lost really scientific credibility in part for his, and his followers attitudes, and in great part also due to the scientific establishment attitude and in the 1950's, aserinsky, kleitman and dement discovered rem sleep
in hindsight you could say, well, that was probably a very big impulse to the freudian tradition but in fact it wasn't. most people saw the discovery of rem sleep as something that would diminish the importance of dreams, and increase the importance of something concrete, that you can measure like a physiological state so, the discovery that during the night we go through a state in which we have very high brain activity our eyes move very fast, and we frequently experience vivid dreams, this was not taken as something that could enhance psychoanalytical dreaming research but in fact something that would say that this was not important at all and in the past 60 years most researchers in neuroscience
have been bashing freud as much as they can since then we discovered that sleep is composed of different stages there's a initial state that we call the hypnagogic state, that feels almost like rem sleep, or dreaming and then we have stage 2, which takes a long time, and basically is a slowing down of the brain then stages 3 and 4 are now clumped together in the new classification, it's basically what we call slow wave sleep, the brain is functioning at very low speed with very high amplitude and if you wake people up during that phase, they typically report thoughts, but not dreams and then, rem sleep, or stage 5 here, in which you frequently, at least adults, will report dreams now, freud didn't say that dreams or sleep is important for learning,
in fact jung was closer to saying it, he said "dreams prepare the dreamer for the future", for the next day but, if you admit that memories are acquired during waking and they reoccur during dreaming if learning is something that occurs during waking, then you might as well think that sleep is involved with learning. and indeed this is the case, this was shown for the first time in 1924 by jenkins and dalenbach, they were performing a very simple experiment in psychology, a very classical experiment, which is the ebbinghaus forgetting curve, so late in the 19th century ebbinghaus showed that if you learned syllables that do not exist in your language, over time you forget with very characteristic exponential decay and this also true in humans, in rats, in bees, this is a general law of learning, you forget
what they did was to replicate this classical experiment, but they had the subjects either stay awake, going to some college class, or sleep in between the acquisition and testing, and what you see is that sleep protected those memories it's much better to sleep than going to classes, if you want to remember stuff that is not in the classes so this finding was not followed up until the 60's, for reasons i don't quite understand but then in the 60's there was a surge of interest in this kind of study using animal models mice and rats in particular, and this happened in the us and happened in france, who were actually competing for who was to own rem sleep/paradoxical sleep and then in the 70's a lot of people published papers like this, saying that sleep deprivation
impairs learning, and then there was this discussion about the confounds of sleep deprivation whether this is stress or not, there was some protocols in the 90's, bob stickgold in harvard was able to show that you can discount stress from your preparations making some arrangements so that you can convince people that it's really sleep that is doing the trick but why is sleep important for learning? what is going on that can subserve memory function? the first thing that is happening is what we call memory reactivation or memory reverberation and there are many examples of that, i brought one that for me is particularly clear and cute which is that of zebra-finches, australian birds that exist in every songbird lab here in the us you can see those same effects in mammals, ok? but i brought this example because it is particularly clear
there's no math, no transformation of the data to convince you that there is a reactivation so it goes like this: this is the sonogram of a zebra-finch's song the animal was singing syllables here, this is time, this is frequency, and the brightness is the power of the vocalization, this is one syllable another one, another one, another one and a small one, ok? something very sexy for female zebra-finches like "meh-meh-meh", this is what they're singing now, if you stick an electrode in a nucleus called ra, which is a descending motor nucleus which projects to the nuclei that controls the syrinx, the vocal organ what you're gonna record when the animal sings, are action potentials from a given neuron
that are very stereotyped, so if the animal sings a hundred times, this neuron will fire always for the first syllable with three bursts, and then will be silent for the second syllable then is gonna fire bursts here at the beggining of third syllable and then again and again so there's a signature, each neuron has a particular pattern of activation, a specific moment with regards to what's going on in terms of behavior now what is really cool, and this is a work done in chicago, in margoulish's lab is what happens when the animal is asleep, this is what happens so you can see here, with no mathematical tricks, that the pattern that the neuron had the firing pattern that relates to singing reoccurs with very small changes during sleep
so you could almost say, well i can now confirm that the animal was somehow dreaming of this very important behavior which is the birds own song, ok? this was shown in humans, in monkeys, in rats, so there's a vast literature about this in the past 20 years we can also trace this reverberation at a lower level, not at the electrophysiological level, but at the molecular level, what sorts of molecules are active inside the cells, that have to with learning so this are experiments that i did myself, and i studied two groups of rats, really rats that never left they're homecages, a very boring situation, nothing new to learn and animals that were exposed to sort of a rat disneyland, with cardboxes connected by pvc tubing and lots of new kinds of food, very scientific stuff, that allows animals to engage, and be happy
stimulate their cortex and hippocampus as they explore, so after that we brought them into another chamber, recorded their sleep, waited some hours, and when they entered specific sleep stages slow wave sleep, rem sleep, as compared to waking, we looked into the expression of a gene, called zif-268 you don't need to remember this, this is a gene that is involved with the consolidation of memories it's a key gene to transform a short term memory trace into a long lasting memory trace it's typoically expressed during waking, we acquire memories during waking so we asked is this gene also active during sleep? and our findings were very exciting for us, not for the rats, what we found was that when the animals were in the boring situation,
the expression of gene is very strong in the cortex, this is one hemisphere of the rat brain and in the hippocampus, this is an in situ hybridization for this gene using radioactive probes during waking you see strong expression of the gene, during slow-wave sleep the expression is very much reduced, and so it is in rem sleep however, when the animal was exposed to novelty some ours before, the expression is still high during waking, it's decreased during slow wave sleep but then it's reinduced, it's increased again during rem sleep this is the first demonstration that there is a molecular day residue, not just an electrophysiological not just what happens at the membrane level with the potentials, but if you go inside the nucleus,
there's a switch in the gene expression program so as to generate long term memories during rem sleep, but only when there's something new to learn, ok? so, in the past few years many people have been joining this field of study, and it's now clear that sleep is important for learning now, what is happening in the human brain, not the rat brain, when we are in rem sleep? there's still come controversy, i would say, because people use different methods, fmri, spect, eeg, you come up with not exactly the same findings, so even though there's a lot of people interested in this there's still some room for debate but mostly, people would agree on this
there are some areas, which are more active, which are here in red, like motor and pre-motor cortex, occipital areas, visual cortex, but actually there's a big debate whether it involves the primary visual areas, areas 17 in the human, ok, so most studies are saying that the activation does not reach the occipital pole, it gets those secondary, tertiary areas, ok? and then there is the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus of course, the pons which generates rem sleep basal forebrain, and anterior cingulate, all those regions are active during dreaming during rem sleep, sorry also some areas showed decreased activity, in particular the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
the inferior parietal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus what is interesting here? if people have lesions of the extrastriate visual regions, this is work by mark solms, in england, people will loose the ability to dream they will enter rem sleep alright, but they will not have dreams so you need this extra-striate areas in order to have dreams, this is a necessity what can we infer based on this pattern of deactivation? these are regions involved with executive function, with planning of actions and with having a feeling of your own body so having a deactivation of these regions here, may explain why, first of all, do not control the actions
during the dreams, and may explain why we accept the bizarre weird things that happen as ok we're not so much in control the fact that we have a lot of activation in the amygdala and the hippocampus has to, or is interpreted as evidence for a substrate for the emotionality of dreams now the emotionality of dreams is somewhat contentious, some people will say that dreams are very emotional, some people would say that in fact you're sort of detached from emotions and in my own experience, my introspective experience, you can have both dreams probably change in flavor, depending on what you're living, right? one important thing that we should note is that until very recently,
most researchers said that dreaming was the equivalent to rem sleep ten minutes? that's not good if they were equivalent, if you were able to abolish dreaming, rem sleep should disappear as well then mark solms did many many neurological investigations to find which regions when lesioned, would abolish dreaming but not abolish rem sleep, and he came up with a conclusion that vta, which is the core of what we call the reward-punishment system, is necessary for dreaming to occur. people that have lesions of the vta or of the dopaminergic axons projecting axons that leave vta, what we call the meso-cortico-lymbic circuit when this is lesioned, people loose the ability to dream, even though they have rem sleep
what happens in animals that have this circuitry lesioned is that they become anhedonic they do not search reward and they do not avoid punishment in the same way the idea that desire is the motor of dreams, something that freud defended based on this kind of finding, seems to be very true. if you do not have the circuits that allow you to desire what is good and avoid what is bad, you also don't dream so dreams are not just reactivations of memories, or reverberations of memories but reverberations of memories with a purpose, towards a goal and how many dreams you had in which you had a goal that was unfulfilled? this is very typical of dreams. more recently we gained insights into a special kind of dreaming
that is commonly associated with the ayahuasca experience, which is called lucid dreaming how many people here have had a lucid dream? great, those are dreams in which you know you are dreaming and you can control the dream partially or fully, ok? and during those dreams, this is work done by ursula vos and alan hobson, there is an increase in gamma frequencies in the frontal regions in comparison to rem sleep so it sounds like an intermediary state between waking and rem sleep this would acount perhaps for the feeling of more control that you have whe you are having a lucid dream
we have work in our own lab, done by sergio rolim, during his phd, finished last year, unpublished yet, in which we sort of replicated the same data, there's more activation in frontal regions, in high frequencies, we also have more activation in the occipital regions for alpha frequencies, somewhat congruent with that now, there's something about dreams that has been perhaps the most important aspect for artists which is the issue of creativity, dreaming has been associated with increased creativity and that is a report by many artists, and in particular salvador dali, i brought here his painting called the dream caused by the flight of a bee around the pomegranate one second before awaking is almost a materials and methods of a paper, right?
he had a method to dose with a very heavy silver spoon in his hand, and we he finally lost the muscular tone the spoon would fall and he would wake up and paint so creativity is boosted by dreaming, and this also influences science, in a big way you're probably all familiar with the story of august kekule, that was stuck with the number of carbons that goes into benzene and he could not fit with any linear structure and he came up with the benzene ring by dreaming of the ourobourus alchemical symbol of the snake that eats is own tail a perhaps more important effect of dream on science is the discovery of the periodic table that mendeleyev attributed to dreaming, and a very known case is the story of otto loewi that came up
with the experiments that proved the existence of chemical transmission in the heart in a dream in fact he came up with the idea in a dream, woke up, forgot it, and the next night had the same dream and the woke up, went to the lab and finished them, actually got the noble prize for this experiments but it's very difficult to capture this phenomenon in the laboratory, because it's one of a kind phenomenon when you have an insight, you come up with an idea, it's an n of 1, how are you gonna replicate that? so people in lubeck, the group of jan born, in germany, they were able to come up with a very nice experiment, i'm not gonna go into the details, because i only have 5 minutes and a lot of slides to go but basically what they did was to get a psychological test called the number reduction test
that is very standard in psychology, but they had a trick, an implicit structure, they had some information that was hidden, and what they found was that when people had access to sleep they were much more likely to come up with the answer to understand the implicit information and this is what they attribute to restructuring of memories if you come up with a new idea, you have to admit, if you're within the physical realm that this new idea came from your old ideas that were somehow remixed, ok? so they're showing that sleep promotes that. now that brings us to ayahuasca. one thing that people often report about ayahuasca, and benny shanon wrote a piece on this is the fact that ayahuasca improves creativity and improves improvistaion
for those that are practiced, or trained, right? so, i don't have to explain, in this track, what ayahuasca is or what ayahuasca does when we got interested on this, when i started collaborating with draulio de araujo on this issue, we were interested in particular on the miraã§ãµes, the visions, that somehow resemble dreams now, what is remarkable about those miraã§ãµes is that they do resemble dreams in the sense that you have subjects, entities, complex concepts, a person, a snake, a frog, a river, things that have a very complete existence in the outter world, they are there, but in addition to that thing which you also have in dreams there is a lot of patterning, a very rich quality for vision and in particular textures how many people here have experienced that? can i just get a feeling?
ok, it's interesting, i couldn't find a paper that gives those numbers. i was talking to brian can i get a paper that gives a reference to this, to the patterning quality of ayahuasca? and there's nothing published, so there's a big avenue for new research this idea that sleep has to do with ayahuasca experiences is natural, given what it is so actually here we have jordi riba in the audience, certainly the leading guy in this field in the biomedical aspects of the ayahuasca experience, and he was interested in this and he assessed the amount of sleep after the ayahuasca intake and he came up with a very surprising answer, he said, he found, with numbers, that the latency to rem sleep is increased after ayahuasca, and the total time in rem sleep is less
this is counter intuitive, if ayahuasca is like dreaming, why is it that rem sleep is less and takes longer to kick in? one caveat here is that sleep was recorded at night, but intake was at noon, so we don't know what really would have happened if they had been recorded during the afternoon, possibly they wouldn't go to sleep, at least that is what jordi observed, but we also don't know what would have happened if they had taken ayahuasca at night, which often occurs during rituals, so this is an open interesting question: is rem sleep reduced many hours after intake, as a rebound of something that was increased before? or just because it was decreased throughout? we don't know, it's something we need to assess
one interesting aspect of sleep is the effect it has on learning and this is something that very recently jordi has started to address, he talked about this yesterday i'm not gonna go into the details, but he showed yesterday that experienced users do better on ayahuasca on the tower of london then they do without ayahuasca so that could be related to those findings in sleep, we don't know he also showed that in a working memory task, the experienced users, without ayahuasca do better than non-experienced users. is that a reflection of increased learning? we don't know, so to assess learning after ayahuasca intake is an open research question and if the effects are there, there would be a similarity with sleep
my time is up, but i'm almost done. thank you i'm not gonna go into the details but it's important to remember that ayahuasca is a very complex inebriant it has dmt, which will act on different kinds of receptors, which are widespread in the brain and also increases the levels of monoamines, big time, so when people tend to, i used to do this well ayahuasca is like psilocybin, is like lsd, but in fact it isn't, it is considerably more complex and jordi has gained a lot of insights during electroencephalographic recordings showing that the effects are mostly concentrated here around two hours after intake, more recently has done work with spect to find regions that, in the resting state, when people are quiet with their eyes closed, in a quiet environment, what regions get mostly activated?
and he found the cingulus, the anterior cingulus, medial frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, the insula the amygdala and the parahippocampal gyrus i'm gonna compare this with a task and technique that is different, this is work that draulio showed friday but this is people imagining, they had their eyes closed but they had the intention to imagine an image that they had just seen, and everything is dark, it's just the imagination that seems to be driving those changes, and we see activations in the occipital pole, in regions v1, v2, v3, the very early regions of vision, and also the extrastriate regions, and we see activation of the parahippocampal area and activation of the frontal pole in particular something that i want to call your attention to, the only region that showed
activation proportional to the mental changes that we could measure was v1 so this is a primary visual area, this is not supposed to be involved in anything when you have your eyes closed still we found that when people have their eyes closed and they are trying to imagine, v1 is as active as if the person had the eyes open, so when people say i'm seeing things, it's not a joke they are, they are seeing it as vividly as if they had their eyes open now, as i said, this is a field that it is still small, and it's hard because we have only a few papers and if we want to really compare them, it's difficult. the techniques are difficult, people are different the way we did things are different, so what we need to do is to do more studies and to do studies of different things on the same subject, so the subject goes to sleep, then goes through ayahuasca
this is something draulio is conducing the next year, with hopefully 80 subjects but this is a summary of what's out there so if you get jordi's work on eeg, he found activation of middle superior temporal gyrus, precuneus, anterior cingulate cortex, parahippocampal cortex. using spect he found frontal cortex, acc, insula parahippocampal cortex and hippocampus and draulio and our team found occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, precuneus, middle frontal gyrus so some overlap on those findings, not complete, but some, ok? if you compare with the literature in rem sleep, which is a literature derived from spect and fmri
we find activation of medial prefrontal cortex, extrastriate cortex, acc, hippocampus and amygdala so this is similar, this is similar, this is maybe similar, maybe not, depending on which paper you're looking at, and the deactivation dorsolateral prefrontal, orbitofrontal, inferior parietal, precuneus, you see the precuneus here, an activation and here a deactivation so we can, if we are to take these informations as face valid, we can say that there is a partial overlap on the systems that involve ayahuasca intake and rem sleep to conclude very briefly, two minutes more, ok? what we are proposing here is that ayahuasca allow you, by activating visual regions and also temporal regions related to memories, allow you to revisit your memories in a very vivid manner
and this is somewhat what you try to do in a psychoanalytical setting, ok? so imagine when you are born, you don't have a lot of memories, you have a very few innate memories so your landscape of memories is flat, as you age you acquire a lot of memories how many different possible rivers exist here? many but then when you go to sleep, activity will bombard the system, water will flow and even though it falls randomly, it will not flow randomly when it hits the ground it will flow according to your own memories, so if you have a trauma, it's because that's a very deep river and that's why the activity always flows from there, or through there and the ayahuasca probably gives you the same kind of thing, however there are few differences
sorry, sorry, but i just need to finish this (laughing) when we say that dreams contains day residues, we can say safely that dreams reverberate memories at the electrophysiological and molecular levels what can we say about ayahuasca? we haven't done those experiments, this is stuff to do desires are the motor of dreams, dreams require the activation of the reward-punishment vta circuitry what can we say about ayahuasca? we actually don't know what the vta is doing during ayahuasca because it's a very small region, right? i don't know, maybe jordi will tell me dreams are conglomerates of psychic formations, we can say that dreams comprise memory complexes
they come together, not one single memory, but many complexes ayahuasca does activate those complexes, but also something more about the patterning of images and i'm gonna talk about this in the next slide and dreams are the royal road to the unconsciouss, they grant access to the memory database this is the notion that the unconscious is just a memory database with all the possible combinations of memories, and that is what is feeding the ayahuasca experience, as much as it's feeding the dreaming experience. we know very well that dreams are mostly visual and somewhat auditory these data are missing for ayahuasca, this is research that needs to be done, and it's very easy to do and hasn't been done yet, so we don't know
and finally, before brian kills me, how can we explain this exacerbated patterning? i think it has to do with something that james kent has been proposing in the psychedelic information theory that the processing at the low levels is disrupted and there's some information about this in jordi's work showing that the prepulse inhibition is less, so this is probably generating confusion, or change in the way we process, at very early stages, the information there is another issues, those early areas are themselves, like mandalas if this image is from the primary visual cortex, this is orientation maps, this are occular dominance columns these are blobs for color vision, so probably when we have the ayahuasca experience, we are overwhelmed by acitvity in the lower levels and we are sort of seeing the architecture
and i want to finish with this nice image by clancy cavnar that illustrates this concept that perhaps the similarity between dreaming and ayahuasca is partial, because during dreaming we don't have activation of those primary visual areas, so we only dream about concepts but in ayahuasca you have it all mixed, you have a concept, a person, you also have a lot of patterning, which is beautifull, nice to experience but also important to understand, thank you very much subtitles by the amara.org community
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