system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
While hallucinating, is the brain rendering extremely accurate parts of reality on its own?

As a computer science major, the idea of this fascinates me. While someone is hallucinating, is the brain actually rendering bits and pieces of reality completely on its own? I'm guessing it does some kind of lazy rendering, like omitting the details of the back of someone's head, for example.

Is there research being done on this topic? If the brain is able to simulate parts of the world accurately during hallucinations, I think that would be an incredibly interesting thing to study. Perhaps the brain has more raw power than we currently understand.
gpt
The simple fact is we have no idea. However, it seems far more likely that the neural mechanisms of hallucinations should be thought of as a perturbation of normal processes. The theories that usually get thrown around are abnormal spread of neural activity (i.e. activity that codes for one thing "leaks" into other areas) and deficient gating of sensory input (your brain normally selects what data streams proceed into higher areas, this process may begin to fail).

But honestly, there is very very little research in this area, because of a) the difficulty in giving hallucinogens to humans and more importantly b) funders don't want to fund it, as in, why fund that when you could fund disease research?