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"There are compelling suggestions that many of the world's intricate, abstract, repeating patterns - from the colours and designs of the Persian carpets to the 'paisley' patterns of the Indian subcontinent - have some more or less direct connection with the intense colours and designs that can accompany the use of mescaline, cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, DMT and many other psychoactive substances, as well as a variety of trance-like states induced by sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation and fasting and, most commonly, some involuntary states of mind such as epilepsy and migraine. TO some extent, they can even be induced by the simple exertion of pressure on closed eyelids. Benoit Mandelbrot's famous series of self-similar fractal images, published in the 1970s, seemed to reveal the same patterns once again when they displayed precisely the sense of vertiginous travel through speeds, dimensions, spaces that so many drugs had rendered accessible and perceptible. Mandelbrot now seemed to have given such patterns a mathmatical formula which turned out to repeat itself in complex structures recurring throughout the natural world. 'One may well wonder why it has taken so long for these material effects to be recognised,' writes de Landa in 'Non-organic Life'. 'Of the many possible explanations, one undoubtedly deserves special mention: our "mathmatical technology" was simpy incapable of modelling self-organizing behaviour.' But it seems as though our chemical technologies have long been capable of rendering them perceptible.

The mathmatical precision with which these patterns recur with such perfect regularity on so many drugs, in so many cultures, at so many very different times and in such different brains, has led many drug users to explore the possibility that psychoactive substances were allowing them to perceive something of the workings of the brain itself. 'Innumerable scales. Infinite segmentation,' wrote Michaux in Infinite Turbulence, a book alive with mescaline's 'sparkling diamonds', and the 'fulgurations for microbes' which come 'rolling down upon me, towards me, loops, and infinite number of loops and twirls, twirls everywhere, intricately laced, lacework upon lacework, ceaselessly intertwined with yet more lacework, twisting and coiling, an infinity of ornaments for the sake of ornamentation.'

In Mescal, published in 1928, Heinrich Kluver suggeested that amid all the shocking variety of hallucinatory events, and for all the random chaos they were tacitly assumed to put on display, there were indeed recurring patterns of hallucination, universal geometric constants common to many drug-induced and other disturbed states of mind.

When Oliver Sacks pursued this research in the 1992 edition of Migraine, he also found that certain processes and patterns of hallucination recur with amazing regularity. Describing the spontaneous, involuntary and abstract hallucinations associated with the migraine aura, he wrote of 'spiderwebs, honeycombs, mosaics, networks, lattices' which creep across the visual field, forming a king of 'mosaic vision' in which:

"circles may spin, rotate into spirals, a spiral may deepen into a vortex, a large vortex may break up into little scrolls or eddies. The whole visual field - or sometimes half of it - may be taken over by a violent, complex turbulence, sweeping the perceived forms of objects into a sort of topological turmoil; straight edges of objects may be swept into curves, bits of scene magnified or distorted as if stretched on a rubber sheet."

The entire 'perceptual world, in such states, seems to run completely amok, everything moving and alive, in a state of gross distortion and peturbation. There may be a sense of winds and waves and eddies and swirls, of space itself - normally neutral, grainless, immobile and invisible - becoming a violent, intrusive, distortive field.' Sacks described complex lattices, geometric forms, elaborate polygonal networks which 'may grow visibly, sometimes with sudden jerks, "like frost on a windowpane", or "primitive plants". Sometimes there are radially symmetrical forms like flowers or pinecones, continually unfolding in a constant revelation of themselves. Or "maps","landscapes", pseudogeographies of great complexity, which constantly create themselves before the inward eye, enlarging endlessly in self similarity.'"

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