Cortisol, Serotonin, Vision and Imagination.

[Greyfox]

When I get stess and serotonin low enough (meditation, sometimes cypro), I notice the emergence of mental imagery. 99% of the time my consciousness is afflicted with incessant subvocalisation. Like reading a book in your head. Words are flowing through my mind most of the day.
I also don't really dream in general, though I have had a visit from a sleep paralysis demon a few times in my youth. When I was in my single digits, she was always scratching on my bedroom window with long, disgusting fingernails, trying to get in. When I was 22 she managed to get in my room and was standing by my bed and I couldn't move at all, though my eyes were open. Terrifying stuff. I haven't seen her since luckily. I'm 33 now. I've also had a situation/dream during my high PUFA days where I had the most VIVID imagery of people's faces streaming through my head. Of people I had never met but seemed as real and idiosyncratic as anyone. I remember it being so vivid that my body seemed to be having a seizure. I've never had any problems with seizures in my life but it's as close to that as I can describe.

Anyway. The feeling I get when this imagery arises is a palpable sense of peace. Not including the previously mentioned dreams. It has a somewhat different quality than simple relaxation through progesterone or anything else. It feels like true peace.
It also seems this low stress state interfaces with the eyes as well causing the gaze to widen into the periphery, making colour more vivid and pleasurable to the brain. Stress and serotonin do seem to be a major player in tunnel vision and our perception of what we are seeing.

LSD
The psychoactive qualities of LSD have been narrowed down to serotonin's inhibition in the brain, causing an opening effect on consciousness and vision. I've never tried it, but I recall a funny story my friend told me about a trip he had with his friends. He told me his friend took the LSD and couldn't stop noticing his own nose on his face. When he told me I instantly noticed my own nose just sitting there in my vision. It seems serotonin helps us to filter out things that are extraneous, makes us close off, shut down, gives us singlemindedness and might be involved in our ability to focus. Obviously excessively high amounts make us rigid and unfeeling, lacking in creativity and imagination.

Is my inability to properly regulate stress and endotoxin essentially locking me out of this more visual part of the brain and eyesight? I feel like this part of me has been so underutilised, that the neurochemistry involved has atrophied, making it difficult to keep this part of the brain engaged over the more dominant language centers.
Are people attracted to the arts less serotonergic naturally and so find great therapy in their work?
I loved art but my approach was always more rigid. More like a printer or photocopier. Taking small pleasure in replicating already existing images with unusual accuracy. The process was completely devoid of creativity and imagination and was clearly a redundant life path for someone like me.

 

[Highserotonin90]

@Greyfox In my ordinary health situation (physical, psychological, neurological, endocrine, immunological, in short the so-called PNEI, I only added the physical one because the degenerative disease is inevitably affecting it) I can only tell you that the interconnections are many and too many, with the belief that we can keep track of everything… is impossible. Cipro at 1mg made me lethargic but I wanted to try it just to understand if the delirium symptoms could derive from a desensitization to the serotonin receptors resulting from systemic and central/peripheral nervous system degeneration/inflammation. I don't think they are involved because the symptoms remain, even though there are so many serotonin receptors in the brain and Cipro only affects a part, including histamine and cholinergic ones. the entire package, suffering an antagonizing effect, could momentarily induce the individual more inclined to drowsiness and with a certain detachment from reality perceiving (and here I would like to overdo it because each individual, based on his internal balance, will have his own objective perception, and it will be always like this) everything with a slower effect. Sorry if I wasn't at the center of your reasoning and I digressed...just small considerations based on experience.