PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
passive perceptual mode, and it becomes more dominant,
more compelling in quality, and perhaps antagonistic to form
articulation in conditions in which active perceptual organizing
capacity is impaired or only rudimentary." Further support
for the concept of selective automatization is found in
the report by Von Senden of the visual experiences of congenitally
blind persons who began using the visual function
for the first time following surgery for removal of lens cataracts.
His accounts support the idea that, as perceptual learning
takes place, the vivid qualities of stimuli decrease in proportion
as formal organization is imposed upon them through
perceptual learning. The gain in economy and utility through
automatization is paid for by a foreclosure of possibilities, a
dulling or "jading" of sensory experience that is an all-too
common occurrence. The extent of this loss of vividness and
detail resulting from automatization can be appreciated when
one undergoes an experience of de-automatization through
such techniques as meditation, use of LSD-25, sensory isolation,
or spontaneous mystic experience: colors may appear to
have gained (temporarily) a new richness and vividness so
that the natural world is seen in a "fresh" state. Again, this
makes good sense developmentally, for intensity and sensory
richness are usually not important stimulus properties for
the accurate manipulation of objects.
If, as evidence indicates, our passage from infancy to adult-
hood is accompanied by an organization of the perceptual
and cognitive world that has as its price the selection of some
stimuli to the exclusion of others, it is quite possible that a
technique could be found to reverse or undo, temporarily, the
automatization that has restricted our communication with
reality to the active perception of only a small segment of it,
Such a process of de-automatization might then be followed
by an awareness of aspects of reality that were formerly un-
available to us.
To return to the data from the meditation experiment, it
may be that the simpler perceptions of color, light, energy
force, and movement represent a shift of the normal per-
ceptual processes to aspects of the stimulus array previously
screened out—or it may be that these percepts are registered
through the operation of new perceptual processes. In the