Little kids = early acid trips

Ever notice the wide-eyed wonderment on a child's face when they walk around? Absolutely everything is interesting to them. The most seemingly insignificant objects provide hours of entertainment. When they walk into a mall or other brightly lit up area, they stare and stare and want to touch and play with everything they can get their hands on. For those that have done acid, it's similar. It all becomes novel again. Predispositions fade and sensitivity to new stimuli increases. A child hasn't come into contact with most of the things that they see on a daily basis. They can't help but be enthralled. LSD has the strange ability to permit you for 8-12 hours to see things in a different light, to once again feel a sense of awe and wonderment and remind you that the world isn't purely man-made.

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley talks about the mind as a set of filters. The automatic (unconscious) discarding of information that has no bearing on the immediate survival of the individual is a pro-survival trait, and an important one.

The extended period of immaturity characteristic of humans allows us the luxury of delaying the development of such filtration mechanisms.

The mushroom, or LSD, (or whatever) that jams those filters seems to transport us at once to reality and to childhood.

This may be one instance where "taking a good hard look at reality" may be both true and ill-advised. There may be others.