For instance, when I get (got: my blood pressure is treated) migraine visual effects, I would say "lightning bolt" but thats just a textual analogue/simile. What I actually saw was more complex than that: lightning is white. My effect was polychrome.
When I had posterior vitreous detachment (PVD), the visual effect was as if I was looking at TV "snow" from the analogue days, combined with a shape unquestionably like red blood cells. Was I seeing blood? I am told no: I was seeing small points inside the focal zone of my eye, below the minimum resolving size, and the optical path turns points into rings.
So is "little people" moving stimulation of the nerve endings interpreted as "walking" and a strong vertical alignment for some reason? Is the colour an aspect of rods and cones being involved, or the nerves going to rods and cones being differentially effected?
Human RBCs are ~6µm - 8µm diameter. Human retinal light sensing cells range from ~0.5µm - 10µm diameter, depending on type and position. They're close packed.
Given the geometry, RBCs leaking onto retinal cells should cast shadows that could be resolved as images. And that's right where leakage is most likely to occur during a PVD event.
They're pretty tiny though, I'm not sure if you'd actually see a center in the RBCs
In my experience when hallucinating (from sleep deprivation), it is the brain failing to correctly interpret patterns seen through the eyes.
For e.g., I would think I see a cardboard box on the ground ahead of me, but then when I get closer I realise it is just dirt of different shades that was perceived as a 3d box. Similar experience when hallucinating people. In my mind I imagine my friend with a certain colour shirt, then during a period of sleep deprivation, I think I see him on the trail ahead of me. But it was just a rock that was a similar colour.
Do hallucinogenics typically affect the brain and also the actual optics? Maybe it is some combination that is causing the perception of "little people".
Your mind also creates the visual field. It is not real even though it is usually quite consistent. Brain fills the gaps after it has filled all the rest.
Just a handy visualization of a world that is likely to be a lot more chaotic.
I very much doubt that in future times, people will be reporting seeing tiny people in North Face fleece tops and leggings, or with Asymmetrical haircuts and goth make-up but you never know..
“ Patients describe colourful figures only a few centimetres tall, marching, dancing and climbing over the furniture.”
Worth noting micropsia ("Alice in Wonderland syndrome") shows up in migraines and epilepsy too, so maybe the mushroom just hits a failure mode that's already wired in. Still, "evolved its own psychoactive pathway, and it's closer to porcini than to anything in Psilocybe" is a great sentence.
After some time, I could see a small-scale but very extensive science fiction space base on top of the bed covers, as if the bed covers were the surface of a moon or planet.
It was populated, and in motion - rockets launching from gantries as I watched, etc. I know it wasn't a dream, because my parents remember me describing it to them as it happened.
I've never experienced anything like that again, and never heard of anything like it until reading about these mushrooms last year.
It definitely seems like an odd quirk of the brain that it apparently has a ”1990s god video game" (e.g. Populous) visualization mode.
There's some neat sci fi novel potential there, though, like it being a remnant of some kind of distant ancestor with a hive mind that could synthesize the visual input of multiple members into a disembodied third-person camera point of view.