In Reply
We appreciate Dr Saravay's comments regarding similarities between the acute clinical responses of some of our healthy volunteers to intravenous procaine1 and the psychopathological features observed in some medical patients receiving more sustained intravenous lidocaine therapy.2Dr Saravay raises the important issue of whether the perceptual changes induced by short-term procaine challenge in our subjects are of peripheral vs central origin. He describes the visual and auditory experiences of our subjects as unformed sensory perceptions and, hence, suggests that they may be of peripheral origin. However, these experiences were, in fact, more heterogeneous, and in some cases more complex, than Dr Saravay suggests. Some subjects did have unformed auditory (buzzing and ringing) and visual (flashing lights) experiences while others noted partially formed auditory (electronic music) and visual (swirls of color, thumbprintlike patterns) symptoms. Fully formed auditory (spoken words) or visual (faces, landscapes) hallucinations did not occur in our