True Hallucinations?

Is reality a  lie?  Pop-culture Gnosticism thinks it might be, as films like The Matrix, The Truman Show, Inception, and Blade Runner demonstrate.  Descartes, an orthodox Christian, argued against a "demon" who could confound our senses, and for the proposition that reality - mostly - doesn't lie, in his Meditations.

Now comes this intriguing news from an article called "Drug Hallucinations Look Real in the Brain," in New Scientist:

[Researchers] asked the volunteers to look at images of people or animals while their brains were scanned using functional MRI, then asked the volunteers to close their eyes and imagine they were still viewing the image. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that neural activity in the primary visual cortex dropped off when volunteers imagined seeing the image rather than actually viewing it.

But when the team then gave the volunteers a dose of ayahuasca and repeated the experiment, they found that the level of activity in the primary visual cortex was virtually indistinguishable when the volunteers were really viewing an image and when they were imagining it. This means visions seen have a real, neurological basis, says de Araujo – they are not made up or imagined.

It doesn't prove we live in The Matrix.  (Or in Terance McKenna's world)  But the hardware is ready.  Legacy support?  Or future proofing?