Glare hypothesis

The current ideas about the action of the MP on visual performance, which were recently reviewed (Loughman et al. 2007), have previously been grouped into three separate hypotheses the acuity hypothesis and visibility hypothesis (Wooten and Hammond 2002), and the glare hypothesis (Stringham and Hammond 2007). 

Note the equation of an extremely stimulated imagination with a dreamlike state. From the facts that he found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring and the corresponding release of an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, we can safely conclude that Hofmann s LSD visions were produced by a dreamlike shift in the chemical balance of his visual brain. And, indeed, Hofmann himself offered the hypothesis that the stimulating effects on his visual brain were caused by LSD s interference with serotonin, the brain modulator that later physiological studies showed to be radically reduced in REM sleep. 

The second, and major, problem with this hypothesis is the fact that N-substitution with propyl groups can ruin concepts of orderly structure-activity relationships. The most glaring example of this is the activity of N,N-di-(n-propyl)-5,6-ADTN in the DA receptor of the renal artery (28). In this case the electron pair must be oriented normal to the plane of the molecule and should not, by the above reasoning, be active. Empirical calculations reveal that the propyl groups essentially "iock the nitrogen so that it cannot rotate about the C(2)-N bond. Thus, the presence of di-n-propyl groups constitutes a unique feature which must somehow distort the receptor so that... 

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