Tripping in a Pet Scanner

Mind Hacks

Highlights:

a report from a participant who describes his or her experience being PET brain scanned while tripping on psilocybin:

At the beginning of the trip I suddenly felt an urge to lie down in the lab. At that point, the optical ‘distortion’ began. First, I saw that some structures were moving and took up different colors and forms. From the gurney, I looked at the sink and the soap dispenser on the wall. All of a sudden, they looked as if they had been painted – as if you apply a filter to an image, which makes it look like an oil painting.

Before the scan, I went to the toilet, but I didn’t find my bearings there. All proportions were wrong: the toilet seemed to be huge, my hands were too big, the arms too long. The first minutes of the scan were also strange. When I realized the scientist in the corner of my eye, he looked like a rat, and the assistant’s face was a zombie-like grimace. As soon as I closed my eyes, my perception changed abruptly and totally.

I was gliding through bizarre geometric spaces, mostly cubic and intensively red. My field of vision was enormously wide, up to 270º, at the corners of which I perceived whispering human figures. Only with great effort, could I afterwards fill in the questionnaires. The answers did not seem suitable or too undifferentiated. Sometimes I did not understand the questions. But it was fascinating that I could read at least half of the questions on a page at the same time.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/06/tripping_in_a_pet_sc.html