pictures, generated by Google's neural nets

[Rynn]

There have been plenty of studies of LSD in animals such as mice, pretty difficult to determine what (if anything) they are hallucinating though. It's not like you can get them to draw. Although having said that elephants can be taught to paint and they have been given LSD in past experiments. The latter didn't turn out so well though and good luck getting ethical approval for that, let alone any useful data. If you wanted to explore this phenomenon then the best way would be to get human volunteers, give them LCD, get them to hallucinate looking at a blank page, get them to draw it and image their brain all at the same time. Again though you might not get any useful data, and having seen people on acid before I wouldn't like to be the experimenter trying to keep them on task.

And after all that I'm skeptical you'd learn enough to improve computer algorithms. Brain imaging isn't good enough to show you the specific neural networks in play, it simply shows what areas of the brain are active. You'd have to record all that, do some solid work to be sure that your results are relevant (and not caused by other stimuli) then look for those pathways in serially sectioned brains, map them and try to model them. The modelling itself is also going to be extremely hard because sectioned brains are static data and incomplete data at that (neural weightings for example are unknown).

In other words the level of effort is very high for an unknown amount of reward.