I’m not a doctor, so…
Psychedelics work by relaxing the part of the brain that routes internal traffic. Get it relaxed enough, and your incoming taste buds get routed somewhere else. So you end up “seeing” or “hearing” what you ate.
Weird stuff.
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For some people who experience this while sober, it may be more or less intense while under the influence of different substances. Even the simple smelly herb is a culprit for this.
I’m not into anything harder than sugar or caffeine.
I’m not sure this is entirely synesthesia although that could be involved. I took my heart rate while sitting by this lamp and it was genuinely elevated. 90-100 vs my resting rate of 70-80.
I don’t think it is either. Just a weird what if kinda thing. Like what if you perceived the smell of coffee as the color blue? What effect would that have?
Just making random connections.
Imagine if it went really badly wrong lol.
Imagine if every time someone used a really common word, like, say ‘Hi’ or ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’, you smelled dog shit.
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Knew a guy who would experience olfactory hallucinations of maple syrup depending on which half of the room he was on. And someone with the more common number-colour synaesthesia. When I was a small quadrupedal child I had this toy I’d often see in swimming kaleidoscopic colours if I tried. I think maybe I just happened to see it that way once as my brain was forming and so afterwards I associated that way of seeing with that toy.
My father loves the variety of blue found in police sirens. I think it’s that blue that’s bright-white but the hue is still blue rather than cyan (or turquoise, if you prefer).
Cultures around the world develop a language for colour differentiation gradually, starting by only articulating the distinction of dark and light, and then adding in “red” as a general notion of colour, and then they gradually add more precise vocabulary onto the colour wheel, starting on the red side and filling in from there. Blue and cyan are as distinct as red and orange, but culturally we are more acutely aware of the distinctions on the red side of the colour wheel, so we group cyan in with blue and vaguely think of it as some kind of a “light blue,” even though light blue is quite a different colour.
If I’m understanding you @Not, you’re not seeing an additional colour outside of the colour wheel, you’re just acutely aware of how one of those very particular reds is different from the other reds? This is how I suspect our brains tend to adapt to the stimuli available to it. Which leads me to:
Did they manage to produce any stimuli that the brain didn’t eventually interpret? My hypothesis would be no. At least if the new data reaches the brain, is relevant to the brain, and it recognizes this relevance, I would expect it either to incorporate it into its existing array of colours as above, or add another axis of sensation by which to group it, something like the OPs feeling that maps to this particular blue, or else it would just end up double mapped to an existing colour.
The colour spectrum is, physically speaking, a line, and yet our minds psychologically re-map it to a circle. This combined with synaesthesia seems to indicate that our minds will take its raw medium of sensibility and subdivide it however many ways it needs in order to encode the relevant available information (like Ba’al Marduk slaying Tiamat, the oceanic chaos monster, with a sword that later myths would replace with Logos / Word / Thought / Distinction, and the ordered universe of distinct things spilled out of her bifurcated corpse). The mind, it seems to me, is not composed like atoms built up into larger bodies, but is divided like the monad into a fractal, like the Mirror of Reason, that vast frozen lake, ever cracking and splitting into more and more fine grained crystals. In other words, the mind is like information, starting in a state of entropy, and then bifurcating into either a 0 or a 1, and then bifurcating again, and then again, and maybe a few analogue subdivisions as well as binary, so that we take a single space and, without ever adding any new substance, we distinguish increasingly unique peculiarities, and from this arises each sensation of what it is like to experience all that we are experiencing in any given moment.
Sorry, didn’t mean to unfold an entire theory of mind.
My point is just that our minds will formulate a kind of “word” to distinguish any phenomenon that is relevant to us. It may be that there’s something about the lamp that you’ve subconsciously identified as relevant and so developed a mental vocabulary for, or it may be, like the toy I had when I crawled on all fours, that it is the very mental distinction that is of interest to you, and the phenomenon which serves to remind you of it is secondary. Like ASMR, a sensation which as the A(auto) suggests, can be triggered at will, and we merely make ASMR videos as a way of describing that sensation to one another and to remind ourselves of it because we find it interesting. (Mmm. I need to put my jacket on after that shiver.)
So, that was all very abstract (and far too many words) but perhaps it will be useful as a general framework, a sense of the space you are navigating. As for the specific question of this particular blue, I don’t know, but I am curious about how others experience particular colours. I haven’t experienced this particular sensation that I’ve noticed. My father seems to find his favourite blue to be mesmerising, tranquillizing, peaceful, beautiful rather than adrenaline inducing. I bought RGB lights and would like to temporally organize my room for different activities depending on what colour I use, and I expect I could build associations of any colour to any activity arbitrarily, but of course studies do indicate that different colours encourage different moods, and I’d like to learn more about that.
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I think what might - MIGHT be happening, is that because I understand that blue is shortwave light, I think of it as being a powerful, forceful, amped-up color. At some point, my brain was reorganizing some thoughts, and filed blue away in the same drawer as adrenaline because it made sense to group the powerful high-energy things together.
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I mean there is some studies on Blue light therapy but it’s mostly about directed healing not necessarily psychosomatic affects
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That makes sense. These days we think of blue as a “cool” colour, but I think it was the ancient Greeks who considered it a “hot” colour. It’s just a matter of association. We associate it with water and ice, while they associated it with the hot and cloudless summer sky.
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For me it’s that I associate it with heightened energy because I understand that it’s shortwave light.
So it doesn’t seem that weird that my brain groups blue with adrenaline.
I heard back from the neuroscientist Dr David Berson. He said it might be to do with melanopsin but that’s hard to figure just from one email from me because there are other things involved such as the rod and cone activity of the retina. He also said that if this were just melanopsin it should happen with any type of bright light, not just blue.
This is specific to blue. So, if it’s a melanopsin anomaly then it’s that stacked with something else.
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Didn’t they also refer to water and sky as wine colored?
I remember reading somewhere that the word blue is relatively new
That’s what happens when you drink way too much wine…
Yes, they did. Historians used to think the Greeks were all colour blind until they realized that all cultures do that. That’s what I was referring to here:
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I do find it weird that we’ve all got eyes and we’ve all got adrenal glands but when I search for similar experiences I turn up nothing.
I’ll admit that a number of factors had to line up here. I often sit and write in a dark room with just a colored lamp going. Most people are not isolating other stuff and then zonking their retinas with extremely intense blue.
I still find it odd because there are people who do fit this set of criteria. Surely there are people such as gamers and twitch streamers - people who also often go for dark rooms and colored LEDs - who also experience this?
I guess though they’d realistically have noise going on that would mask the signal. They’d already be producing adrenaline for other reasons, such as excitement during tense games or anger when tilted. They’d be too busy concentrating to notice feeling a soft pressure in their retroperitoneum.
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Update: My powerful 470nm lamp arrived.
It IS adrenaline inducing if you look right into it, but it’s also so bright you can’t do that for long without a headache.
I’m still delighted to have it because it makes for a really nice energizing environment. I’ve been dragging my feet finishing up some creative writing projects and now this arrived I’m genuinely looking forward to evening so I can sit in a dark room and just let the blue-violet glow be my modafinil lol.
Having a session with my main one after a week long ‘tolerance break’ and omg. It feels like someone has on velvet gloves and they’ve somehow reached in and are running their fingertips over my adrenal medullae and that velvet rasps sooooooooooooooo good.
And yup, my heart rate skipped into the 90-100 range, it can’t be entirely imaginary.
Ok I’m sitting in a dark room with the pure 470nm one going and it also feels very nice on that area, albeit like a compression bandage more than a hard vigorous massage.
It would probably intensify x100 if I looked right into it, but I’m not going to do that again lol. This one radiates palpable heat if you touch it. No retinal burns for me.
Update: I compromised with myself by putting on a pair of very dark sunglasses and looking into the beam. Ooooooooooooooo. Big surge, VERY intense sensations. I didn’t dare do it for long because even with the dark lenses I had blue blobs in my vision for a while after.
I’ll maybe allow myself to look directly into it once per year as a treat…any more often and I would have no retinas left lol