Fun list, I'm glad there is language around some of this. I've drank ayahuasca around 500 times personally in a traditional context (somewhat of an apprenticeship setting) and have experienced most of these effects. In the tradition I've been learning, it's pretty fascinating just how vast the indigenous understanding of that space is- they really have words for everything and the mechanisms behind what they see (as well as an understanding of how those things manifest outside of that space, in normal waking life). And more importantly how those things can be worked with and released through the practice. We're really only beginning to scratch the surface here (in the "western" context) but at least it's starting.
One of my old friends got involved with a group drinking ayahuasca frequently.
In their case they were taking lower doses than are traditionally associated with the one-off stories you hear about people traveling for ceremonies. There is also a tolerance build up that lessens the overt effects.
However, it still resulted in some major mental health issues over time. He was outwardly happy and cheerful, but the longer you talked to him the more you realized he had developed impossible ideas about reality, distorted (and easily debunked with photos and other records) memories of past events, and a lot of mystical ideas about the world.
He had mostly learned to hide them from people who weren’t in his group. When you got a couple of them ayahuasca people together and they started talking about mysticism, telepathy, and dismissing “western science” it started to reveal how far he was down the rabbit hole.
He has since gone MIA, though we get signs that he’s still alive and active from time to time via social media. The way it changed him was scary, though.
This is common with some groups unfortunately. I've seen a lot of "casual" drinkers with big ideas show up at our center and are a little taken aback by how grounded the traditional ways are. A lot of people use it to escape and build stories instead of dispelling them. I don't blame anyone in these situations- everyone is on their own journey- but it can be a heck of a pitfall to get stuck in if you're new and actually trying to heal. The hippy-dippy spiritual tourists are stuck there and taken advantage of.
The place I was at drinks 4 times a week (9-10 months out of the year), I usually did twice/week. The shamans drink every time, thousands of ceremonies under their belts over many years.
It makes sense though. Our brains are constantly trying to recognize familiar out of everything it sees. The DeepDream from Googs does essentially the same thing. Starting with static, it "finds" patterns that then leads to seeing even more patterns that start to be recognizable. Or the other system that kept finding Ryan Gosling in images he clearly was not in. The DeepDream starting with static definitely reminds me of closing my eyes and watching the show with a head full of something.
I had struggled to describe a bad trip I'd had until some of the text-to-video models from a few years ago became more accessible and nailed the morphing visuals and general uneasiness I'd felt, of course it was unintentional. The recent increase in quality has erased those features for better or for worse.
The effort is purely descriptive and does not seem to correlate the various effects with their cause (nothing wrong with that, still interesting).
This article provides a good overview of various theories:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...