Psychedelics: A Lesson On Tracers
Written by: SAVANNAH BLAKE
If you’ve dabbled in the world of psychedelics you no doubt have experienced the often mesmerizing sometimes disconcerting wave of tracers. If you’re like me, you heard the tales of tracers and other hallucinations before you even tried a mind altering substance for the first time.
Tracers are often accompanied by other coinciding effects such as drifting and after images. Most commonly, tracers are induced under the influence of mild doses of psychedelic compounds, such as LSD 4-7, psilocybin and mescaline. Although they can also occur less commonly under the influence of other stimulants and dissociatives such as MDMA.
So what is a tracer? Tracers are defined as the visual experience of trails of varying lengths and opacity being left behind moving objects in a manner that is similar to those found in long exposure photography. They can manifest as exactly the same colour of the object producing it, or can sometimes be a randomly selected color pulled ones psyche. If you haven’t experienced this phenomenon as a result of taking some sort of drug, you may have still seen tracers in your lifetime. Waving your hand rapidly in front of your face, or redirecting the light emitted from your self phone in a dark room can have the same effect, albeit extremely brief. On psychedelics however, you may see traces for the entire duration of your trip, observing as they slowly fade the more you come down.
Tracers have four distinct levels of intensity:
Subtle - At the lowest level, tracers can be described as an almost completely transparent after image which disappears quickly and drags closely behind moving objects.
Distinct - At this level, tracers increase in length to become roughly half as long as the distance across the visual field which the object it is following has travelled. The clarity of these tracers shifts from barely visible to distinct.
Intense - At this level, tracers become mostly solid in appearance and almost completely opaque with increasingly distinct and sharp edges. This creates a clear contrast between the tracer itself and the background behind it. The tracers become slower to fade from a person's vision and can remain in the air for up to several seconds.
All-encompassing - At the highest level, a person’s visual field has become so sensitive to the creation of tracers that it entirely smudges and blurs into an all-encompassing tracer at the slightest movement of an object or the eye. This can cause the person to feel disoriented and can make it extremely difficult to see.
Although they can be a bit alarming when experiencing them for the first time, seeing tracers whole hallucinating is expected and completely normal. According to researchers using software to replicate the phenomenon, tracers may even be our window into how rhythmic feedback dynamics are used to control the content of our experience.
