As part of their “TED Q & A” series, Wired published an interview with Neurologist Oliver Sacks where he discusses visual hallucination and his experiences after losing central vision in his right eye.

To compensate for the missing visual data once supplied by his right eye, his brain has projected hallucinations and patterns onto the dark stage -– a phenomenon common to people who have lost their sight. Ever curious about the mind’s varied responses to disease, Sacks has chronicled it all in a series of unpublished journals containing drawings and writings.

Last year at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference, one of the most popular talks was given by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who described what occurred in her mind and body as she experienced a stroke. On Thursday, Sacks will speak at TED about the mysteries of perception and what occurs in the mind when the body loses its senses. He spoke with Wired.com about how the mind sometimes plays tricks on what we see and what it has meant to lose part of his vision.

The complete article can be found here.

Do people meet alien entities on DMT because they expect to meet alien entities? It’s not an idle question, it’s grounds for a fun experiment, too. From the Rodruigez paper:

To validate or falsify this hypothesis, the experimenter should perform a single blind study in which human subjects are used who have never heard of DMT and its extraordinary effects on the human psyche. These subjects are told that DMT inebriation will provide them solely a visual and auditory hallucination. By simply defining the experience as that experienced in front of the veil, the ill-informed subject will have no preconception as to what is possible given the right conditions for entering into the DMT-induced alternate reality. If subjects continually return only to describe the world in font of the veil, then it can be concluded that the DMT experience can be influenced by biasing the subject. In this sense, the hallucination is driven by preconceptions and therefore may be understood solely as an inconsistent subjective hallucination. On the other hand, if the inexperienced human subjects return with testimonies of encounters with alien beings, then DMT is responsible for alien entity experiences. It is noted that this experiment has already been implemented with positive results. Dr. Strassman’s work used unassuming human subjects that did, in fact, return from DMT inebriation with entity experiences (Strassman 2001).

Full Story: Brainsturbator.

From Phil Hine’s site, a ritual from Dave Lee.

The realm of the media is the Inferno of Choronzon, the Demon of the Abyss of Hallucination. We will recapitulate these images under magical conditions, rending the veil of illusion, and plunging into the basal layer of primitive impersonal terror underlying the images. This is the Abyss, where the Great Old Ones or Archons of terror surge up from the depths of our being. These Archons are the primal forces of the instincts, of the first two neural circuits, corresponding to a vision of fear and greed on a cosmic scale.

Link.