Years ago, one of the first effective antidepressants, called Norpramin (Desipramine Hydrochloride), was widely prescribed throughout the US to some 2 million people.
Even though it had a huge number of side effects, people were willing to put up with them to get around severe depression. After approval by the FDA, most research was discontinued in the US. However, it continued in Japan, making a strange discovery.
As infant mammals grow, they develop rigid parameters in their perceptions of reality. Things such as size, shape, color, perspective, and accuracy about what senses perceive what input.
However, Desipramine tends to “soften” these parameters.
To demonstrate this, they took ordinary cats, and sewed one of their eyelids shut. Then they injected Desipramine into the optical center of their brain. In about two weeks, after the drug was out of their system, the stitches were removed.
The cats had relearned how to see, with monocular vision. That is, the eye that had been closed still worked, and still sent signals to the brain, but those signals were ignored. The cats had relearned how to see with just one eye.
Now imagine the effect of this on the entire brain.
Importantly, the human mind effectively ignores the vast majority of the sensory input our bodies receive. We skim off just a tiny amount, then further discriminate it by putting it through our rigid mental template of how we define reality. Then we use several other tricks to get just a tiny part of what we could have perceived.
And yet this is so thoroughly trained into us as we mature that it is almost universal among people on Earth. We all use the same tiny amount of information.
So imagine what would happen if a large number of people suddenly were able to stray from the status quo of reality?