Wow. That's incredible how psychedelic these images are. I'd be really curious to learn more about the link between these two seemingly distant subjects.
Brain and NNs, at least in the first visual cortex layers and the first perception layers accordingly, are doing the same thing - building optimal sparse coding for the body of imagery they've been exposed too (in general it isn't limited to images, it is just that our knowledge for image processing seems to be a bit more advanced). There are works from 199x proving that Gabor kernels - which form the first layer in the visual cortex and which (or very similar) happen to emerge in the first layers of well trained NNs too - are optimal for a wide class of image inputs (edge density, etc.), basically the class of images naturally surrounding us. That optimality provides for a good explanation of their emergence in NN.
It seems to be a natural speculation that the further layers of visual cortex/brain and NNs are subject to similar optimization, and thus they would have similar kernels. I think psychedelics somehow stimulate these deep layers to massively fire without waiting for the normally required input from the eyes to propagate to those layers to selectively fire neurons in them.
