[HN Gopher] LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of...
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LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
Author : DreamScatter
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-06-13 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.biorxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.biorxiv.org)
| anm89 wrote:
| Totally separate from whatever this paper is claiming, I'm
| already dreading a conversation at some future party in which
| some person rambles on regarding a very unscientific
| understanding of this paper and something about burning man.
| okareaman wrote:
| You might get lucky and someone will bend your ear about
| Terence McKenna and Machine Elves
| bronzeage wrote:
| Why is it even legal to conduct LSD experiments? There was some
| animal testing post earlier, but giving people illegal
| consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse.
| _Microft wrote:
| I'll take the bait. A drug being regulated by narcotics
| regulation does not mean that its use has to be completely
| forbidden. Just because Average Joe is not allowed to do
| something does not mean that there might not be professionals
| who are. Opiates for example are both regulated and used for
| pain treatment.
|
| Any study with human participants has to go through an ethics
| review and the participants have to be both informed about the
| goals of the study, possible risks and consequences of the
| procedures and also have to take part voluntarily. (Regarding
| "consequences": a brain scan could e.g. show a medical
| condition and having _knowledge_ of that condition would mean
| that the participant would have to state this as existing
| condition in the future whenever they wanted to sign up for
| health insurance for example. So: it is complicated!).
|
| The Helsinki Declaration contains ethical principles on human
| experimentation if you want to have a look:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki
| fredgrott wrote:
| You have to understand that because animals borrowed cell
| signaling form plants that most transmitter blockers and
| analogues can be found plant cell signal chemicals
|
| Or to put in broad terms our brains are powered by degrees of
| getting high. Its more of the degree and method that produces
| bad social results
| _Microft wrote:
| The similarities between very different species are
| absolutely mind-blowing indeed. Anesthesia works on plants
| for example! Jellyfish have to sleep, despite having no
| brain at all. They even suffer from disorientation when
| being sleep-deprived (afaik researchers frequently poked or
| otherwise disturbed them in their tank during their normal
| sleep-phase. On the "next day" they showed signs of sleep
| deprivation).
| thatswrong0 wrote:
| Why are they illegal to begin with?
| baq wrote:
| People have a choice.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I would assume the people taking these drugs in a modern study
| would be participating having given their consent and under the
| supervision of an ethics review board. I've never taken LSD in
| my life but I would be willing to participate in a study like
| this and I can't imagine I'm alone.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Psychedelics are a tool. You don't ban powerful lasers because
| someone might get hurt. You regulate and prescribe how they may
| be used safely. And they are a very powerful tool, not only as
| a medicine to treat addiction and depression but also as a lens
| to inspect the nature of consciousness.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so
| much worse"_
|
| It would be interesting to learn why you think it would be so
| bad.
| modmans2nd wrote:
| .....
| GuB-42 wrote:
| It is all explained in the paper, they had all the necessary
| licences.
|
| One noteworthy point is that they only took sane adults with
| experience in psychedelics (that's the tl;dr).
| unparagoned wrote:
| There is lots of potential benefits that far outweigh any
| downsides,so it's worth investigating. They were made illegal
| for political reasons rather than for scientific or evidence
| based reasons
| vkomega wrote:
| Sources for benefits (plural) vs. downsides? Source for
| politically-motivated criminalization?
| acid_enthusiast wrote:
| Lots (hundreds? thousands? a large cross section of the
| population of every music music festival on the planet for
| the last 50 years) of human beings report them encouraging
| a good time with increased enjoyment, openness, creativity,
| ability to do things, and they where praised by the
| creators of AA to be helpful in the treatment of alcholism.
| Very few of the doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, support
| workers, shop keepers, crafters, farmers, scientists who
| attend these events and lie about their participation go on
| to develop serious social or medical problems or they
| wouldn't have the money to go back year on year for more
| illegal fun. Unfortunately the majority of these positive
| experiences are not recorded by government backed science,
| since reporting LSD use to the government results in the
| loss of jobs, driving privileges, children and ultimately
| homes and freedom. Users complained about the war, lsd was
| banned (- over simplification for brevity.). Laughter has
| no accepted medical use and trying to prove otherwise is a
| crime
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2015.00358
|
| Szabo A. (2015). "Psychedelics and Immunomodulation: Novel
| Approaches and Therapeutic Opportunities". _Frontiers in
| immunology_ , 6, 358.
|
| Abstract:
|
| _Classical psychedelics are psychoactive substances,
| which, besides their psychopharmacological activity, have
| also been shown to exert significant modulatory effects on
| immune responses by altering signaling pathways involved in
| inflammation, cellular proliferation, and cell survival via
| activating NF-kB and mitogen-activated protein kinases.
| Recently, several neurotransmitter receptors involved in
| the pharmacology of psychedelics, such as serotonin and
| sigma-1 receptors, have also been shown to play crucial
| roles in numerous immunological processes. This emerging
| field also offers promising treatment modalities in the
| therapy of various diseases including autoimmune and
| chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, and cancer.
| However, the scarcity of available review literature
| renders the topic unclear and obscure, mostly posing
| psychedelics as illicit drugs of abuse and not as
| physiologically relevant molecules or as possible agents of
| future pharmacotherapies. In this paper, the
| immunomodulatory potential of classical serotonergic
| psychedelics, including N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT),
| 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), lysergic acid
| diethylamide (LSD), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, and
| 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine will be discussed from a
| perspective of molecular immunology and pharmacology.
| Special attention will be given to the functional
| interaction of serotonin and sigma-1 receptors and their
| cross-talk with toll-like and RIG-I-like pattern-
| recognition receptor-mediated signaling. Furthermore, novel
| approaches will be suggested feasible for the treatment of
| diseases with chronic inflammatory etiology and pathology,
| such as atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple
| sclerosis, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer 's
| disease._
| ljf wrote:
| Not lsd but the reason behind the banning of cannabis and
| heroin is a pretty well known story
| https://www.unharm.org/the-racist-truth-behind-the-war-on-
| dr...
|
| They were criminalised to criminalise part of society. Lsd
| was similar - the govt was worried about losing control of
| people and their desires.
|
| Lsd has never been an interest of mine, but I am aware many
| people find the experiences they have truly profound.
|
| there was some excellent work in curing alcoholism that
| used Lsd and proved very successful prior to it being
| banned; BBC News - LSD 'helps alcoholics to give up
| drinking' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17297714
| nabla9 wrote:
| Will psychedelics be 'a revolution in psychiatry'?
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-021-00087-7
|
| The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of
| Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a
| Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y
|
| "Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression",
| https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994
|
| Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive
| Disorder. A Randomized Clinical Trial, Alan K. Davis et
| al., 2020 doi : 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285
|
| Can Psychedelic Drugs Attenuate Age-Related Changes in
| Cognition and Affect? https://link.springer.com/article/10.
| 1007/s41465-019-00151-6
|
| LSD is one of the safest drugs there are. You may get a bad
| trip but it ends. Of course people in danger of psychosis
| should not take it.
|
| People don't get addicted to LSD or psychedelics in
| general. It's not something you want to take frequently
| (excluding some who microdose at the levels where you don't
| feel the psychedelics effects).
| vkomega wrote:
| Great, thanks for the objective response. My inquiry was
| substantially downvoted.
|
| How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis
| prior to consuming LSD? I've heard many stories of people
| who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense)
| after having bad LSD trips. It wasn't clear from family
| history or medical history that they were at-risk for
| such a reaction.
|
| At least based on these outcomes, it might be a bit
| inaccurate to claim LSD is safe. I suspect it was
| outlawed in part due to observed risks decades ago, but
| am still curious about political motivations. (e.g. "they
| want to deny us access to knowledge, man." or racial
| reasons, etc)
|
| Perhaps there will be technology advancements in support
| of ascertaining propensity for adverse reactions to
| psychedelics. I suspect there's a strong component
| related to dosage. Maybe this is related to the
| microdosing movement?
| [deleted]
| mikelevins wrote:
| The idea that someone took LSD and "was never the same"
| is a common trope, but I doubt it's based much on fact. I
| wrote a paper years ago in college about the difference
| between what "public education" about LSD said and what
| the medical literature said (I attended a university with
| a good medical school and a good medical library), and
| the short version is that federally-funded "public
| education" about LSD was mostly a lot of scare stories
| made up to serve someone's social or political agenda.
| They had little or no basis in fact.
|
| Things like that get repeated, though. People like to
| repeat scare stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that's
| where most of the "never the same" stories come from.
|
| I will admit that I took LSD quite a few times at the end
| of the 1970s, and that at the peak of that period I spent
| a month or two in a fairly confused and impressionable
| state. Someone who had known me before and who
| encountered me during that period might be forgiven for
| concluding that I would "never be the same". It was
| temporary, though.
|
| I gave up on psychedelics and other mind-altering
| substances by the early 1980s. They were no longer
| showing me anything new. As the fellow said, once you've
| gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.
|
| The literature that I found in the late 70s made LSD look
| fairly harmless, as long as you were not already
| psychotic or close to it. That was peer-reviewed
| research, though, not news stories. It would have been
| scandalous at that time for anyone in the mainstream
| press to suggest that LSD was anything less than the
| scourge of Western Civilization.
|
| Sometime around the late nineties or early 2000s,
| respectable researchers began to obtain permission to
| conduct research with psychedelics again, and have gotten
| some pretty interesting results, especially in areas like
| treatment of alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. By the
| way, they don't seem to be finding a lot of civilization-
| ending dangers in the process. Judging by the medical
| literature, they just aren't very dangerous.
|
| As far as I know, based both on personal experience and
| medical literature, the main dangers from psychedelics
| are that they can be very disorienting and several of
| them amplify the experience of emotion. Bad trips mostly
| seem to be a combination of disorientation and fear, with
| the disorientation becoming frightening, and the fear
| amplified by the drug so that it becomes terror.
|
| But bad trips end, just like good ones do.
|
| So if you're going to experiment with them, you want to
| be in a safe place, in a reasonably sane and calm state
| of mind, and in the company of trustworthy people who
| have your best interests in mind--preferably mental-
| health professionals with some experience with
| psychedelics, if possible.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis
| prior to consuming LSD?
|
| Family history of mental illness, particularly
| schizophrenia.
|
| > I've heard many stories of people who were "never the
| same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD
| trips.
|
| I think those stories are overblown. People like to have
| something to blame for when a loved one goes down the
| wrong path.
| vkomega wrote:
| > history
|
| This was addressed in my previous comment. I've known
| folks who took the stuff and had a horrible reaction,
| without family history as such.
|
| Also, consuming street drugs of unknown quality in
| uncontrolled settings with uncontrolled dosages is quite
| different than controlled medical experiments.
|
| > overblown
|
| I never wanted to try the stuff after personally
| observing people change after having a "bad trip". If it
| permanently alters perceptions in unpredictable ways,
| then ingesting it likely catalyzes alternate life
| trajectories, also in unpredictable ways.
|
| Seems like a double edged sword. Many report the positive
| benefits but the supporters seem to downplay risks or
| point to other factors without supporting evidence.
|
| It's unclear how to determine safety with prospective
| victims/winners whose family history doesn't include
| mental illness. Again, I suspect dosage is a critical
| factor to trip outcome; this being common pharmacological
| wisdom.
| sammalloy wrote:
| All true, of course. I have had great success helping two
| people who had "bad trips" as a trip sitter. Both people
| had a troubled adolescence, but are now doing extremely
| well as adults and are highly successful. Whenever I see
| them, they always thank me for helping them. The truth of
| the matter, is that I didn't do anything at all, I just
| made them feel safe and let them knew that everything was
| going to be okay.
| totony wrote:
| >but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems
| so much worse.
|
| Why do you think so?
| haswell wrote:
| Out of curiosity, which part bothers you?
|
| 1. That the drugs are illegal
|
| 2. That the drugs alter consciousness
|
| What's your stance on cannabis?
| yoloyoloyoloa wrote:
| I decided to start a career in programming and IT oneday at 21 on
| a LSD bad trip from hell. It was really an eye opening trip and
| just realized this would be the best possible career path to
| take. I have never looked back since.
| fastball wrote:
| How is it a bad trip that set you on a career path you like?
| andyana wrote:
| I believe it is possible to have a bad trip in this sense
| because it typically takes time to integrate the experience.
| The time spent trying to integrate can be scary, because you
| don't understand it yet.
|
| I had a vision of a blonde child, perhaps six years old,
| burst out of a tunnel of light during a DMT trip. I still
| don't know what it means, and because my son is blonde, i
| can't help but feel that maybe there is a message im not
| seeing (this is coming from an ex-atheist of twenty years).
| It was a weird event, but it has made me make positive
| changes in my life regardless. For example, I try a lot
| harder to have the time for him. I've decided to stop trying
| to date because of it (so that I don't have to divide my time
| more), and that's given me a self esteem boost.
|
| It is a complex thing, one that we don't understand. Its a
| beautiful experience, but one I don't take lightly. It needs
| respect.
| Animats wrote:
| Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a
| signal.
|
| "Shannon entropy" is noise.
|
| "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
| dorkmind wrote:
| Does listening to white noise increase the fractal dimension
| the same way as drugs?
| arbitrage wrote:
| No.
| motohagiography wrote:
| This is an important description, as when you think of a
| chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to
| signals in your brain, and a lot of the geometric and fractal
| artifacts we see resemble noise artifacts you would get from
| interfering with other analogue signals.
|
| Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it,
| impairing that ability is going to create signals-based
| feedback that is described in information theory and signal
| processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on
| the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that
| are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and
| the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state
| is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It
| implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something
| like an NTP service.)
|
| Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and
| the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you
| didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not
| exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might
| experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the
| question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our
| shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted
| by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily
| real?
|
| You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there
| is something else, a true substrate of reality where the
| televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible,
| but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the
| televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is
| still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the
| identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you,
| because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with
| delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems
| profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't
| work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I
| think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that
| reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist
| in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily
| physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to
| cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people
| believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is
| inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in
| their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really
| big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to
| chopping wood and carrying water.
| bts327 wrote:
| Just an amazing comment. As someone who has experienced
| profound states of psychedelia, and having consumed vast
| amounts of data pertaining to such experiences, yours may be
| the most unique and original commentary regarding the topic
| that I've seen yet. Bravo, and I'll certainly be returning to
| this comment at a later time and date.
| singingfish wrote:
| Creating noise in the brain that the nervous system then
| makes sense of. Interesting theory.
|
| Now if I put my mystical hippie hat on I'm going to ask you
| what you think noise is? Personally I think it's some
| fundamental property of the universe.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| For me the (rather strong) trips from mushrooms showed me how
| some part of the brain (not sure which one though) is very
| good at interpolating bits and pieces of reality when there
| is no longer strong coming in via our senses. Its a blurry
| picture of reality, but the blur isn't the loss of detail but
| rather its fractalization (which in the end is the opposite
| of it).
|
| The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more
| brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so
| although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and
| in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such
| a unique take on it.
|
| And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing
| input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so
| 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback
| loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed
| eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very
| consistent interconnected trip).
|
| Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the
| 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal
| brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that
| don't give full picture or don't make much sense.
| andrekandre wrote:
| and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really,
| it's not
|
| do you mean to say "its not a big deal" or "its ends up not
| being a big deal to most people" ?
|
| it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...
| motohagiography wrote:
| It's that the discovery that our personal coherence and
| experience is very narrow, is very jarring when we haven't
| experienced it before and haven't developed cognitive tools
| to manage that. It's like discovering that from some other
| perspective that exists in the substrate, it's likely that
| your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-
| entropy as a drawing or a song. If the sudden apprehension
| that we may be this absurd isn't belly laugh funny, I am
| confident that someone else especially finds this fact of
| us not finding it funny even funnier. There's nothing we
| can do about it, so you just appreciate it for what it is,
| relieve suffering where you can, and be excited about what
| else you couldn't have known.
| patcon wrote:
| > it's likely that your entire experience of the world is
| as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song
|
| YES. I've been following some threads related to the
| Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that
| human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly
| because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has
| carved out and evolved an ecological niche _inside_ of an
| specific area of a biological host organism: the human
| mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is
| not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an
| otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech
| and biology... but we 're ALREADY an organic cyborg of
| language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already
| weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well.
| Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best
| for what we are.
|
| Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens,
| I've been trying to see the way that our stories and
| narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying
| to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than
| we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find
| these other things more "disposable" and we feel less
| kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-
| human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely
| as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is
| wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own
| bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic
| systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we
| should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning
| and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-
| coded to sense it as well...
|
| And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate"
| btw.
| golergka wrote:
| It's all the more interesting because consciousness itself is
| often described as a consequence of a sensory loop on the
| brain. The book "I am a strange a loop" goes into detail
| about this theory.
| patcon wrote:
| This is a really wonderful comment and i find it very
| thought-provoking.
|
| I haven't had much in the way of trips, but it resonates a
| ton with my own emerging understanding of base-reality, if i
| can call it that
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I thought Shannon entropy described the amount of information
| content in a message; its uncertainty or surprise. Why would it
| be noise?
| sritchie wrote:
| Adding one random bit increases the entropy by a bit because
| there are now two possible messages - your message with a 0
| or with a 1. Add a bunch of noise and you add a bunch of
| bits; entropy is average bits per message.
| Animats wrote:
| See Shannon's original paper, "Communication in the presence
| of noise".[1] In that view, where the goal is to reproduce
| the original signal, noise and information are not
| distinguished, because they look the same on the channel.
| Both "increase the fractal dimension". Adding noise will make
| a lossless compression of something much larger. Go add some
| noise to a simple picture in Photoshop, then export in some
| lossless compressed format, like .png.
|
| Now, _lossy_ compression algorithms, such as JPEG, MP3, and
| almost all video compressors, are different. They have some
| model of what the content is "supposed to be like", and fit
| to that model. This works badly for content that does not fit
| the model, such as the mess JPEG makes of hard edges.
|
| The original author referenced Shannon. The tests he's
| running use signals from which he cannot extract meaning, so
| he can only extract the statistics you can compute from a
| signal you do not understand. There are other tests for "is
| it signal or is it noise" - looking at the spectrum,
| autocorrelation to look for repetition (they did some of
| that), correlation with other signals, and such - but
| "fractal dimension" isn't one of them.
|
| [1] https://course.ccs.neu.edu/csg250/ShannonNoise.pdf
| TenJack wrote:
| Interesting. What do you mean by zip file?
| Animats wrote:
| Lempel-Ziv compression is used by some file compression
| utilities.[1] The ratio of original size to compressed size
| is essentially the Lempel-Ziv complexity. If you compress a
| file of AAAAAAAA..., you will get a very small file, and a
| low complexity. If you compress a file of random numbers, the
| file will not compress much, if at all, and you get a high
| complexity.
|
| "Lempel-Ziv complexity is the number of different sub-strings
| (or sub-words) encountered as the binary sequence is viewed
| as a stream (from left to right)"[2] This leads to a
| compression algorithm.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93
| Wel...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv_complexity
| Gravityloss wrote:
| You can look at the EEG spectrogram or calculate its spectral
| entropy. When you think hard, it resembles white noise and has
| high entropy. If you close your eyes and relax, it gets more
| regular and entropy goes down. I've done this myself. And we've
| known about alpha and delta waves etc for more than a century.
| When you fall asleep, the signal goes more towards a sine wave,
| ie less entropy.
|
| Many of these complexity or information content metrics work in
| similar ways. You can even turn EEG recordings from medical
| operations with anesthesia to a sound and listen to them. The
| frequencies are of course very low so you must speed it up. You
| can clearly say when the person fell asleep. A waterfall turns
| into a hum.
|
| It makes sense, if you're making measurements of a complex
| system, of course white noise like results are more probable if
| there's actually something significant going on, than a simple
| sine wave. Or picture the modem calling sound. The low data
| rates are simple waves but the high data rate resembles white
| noise.
| edem wrote:
| Can someone explain this in plain English? What's this fractal
| structure about? And what's critical state?
| voldacar wrote:
| To increase the "fractal dimension" of anything, just EQ up the
| high frequency components. White noise has great fractal
| dimension, lol
|
| Can't wait for this to be on joe rogan
| booerino wrote:
| I like LSD quite a lot but have a hard time talking about it. I
| find it kind of highly embarrassing for some reason. Afraid of
| being judged a freak (I look and act pretty odd, but it's not
| because of LSD).
|
| I am baffled how open some people are. I guess this is the curse
| of having conservative family you'd not like to upset.
| mikelevins wrote:
| There's some amount of social stigma associated with LSD and
| other psychedelics, but it seems to have faded away quite a bit
| since I used it in the late 1970s. Back then, and for some
| years afterward, the stigma was pretty strong. Admitting that
| you had used psychedelics was tantamount to admitting that you
| were crazy and possibly dangerous in many social circles.
| Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be so much the case anymore.
|
| I've personally never minded admitting that I used psychedelics
| in the late 70s, but at that time I was accustomed to be seen
| as a weirdo and an outsider. Indeed, I was so accustomed to it
| that I didn't even realize that's what was happening. I didn't
| find out what it was like to be treated as someone ordinary
| until I took a job with Apple and moved to the SF Bay Area.
|
| I liked LSD and other psychedelics a lot in the late 70s, and
| used them a lot--enough to find out how often I could take them
| without tolerance reducing their effects noticeably. I gave up
| psychedelics and pretty much all other mind-altering substances
| in the first half of the 1980s. I never liked anything other
| than psychedelics as much as I liked them.
|
| Of the other substances I experimented with, I liked cannabis
| best, but I gave it up, too. The best reason I can articulate
| is that I was no longer getting anything new from them and, as
| the fellow said, when you've gotten the message, it's time to
| hang up the phone.
|
| I do still drink the odd glass of whiskey or port or champagne
| once or twice a year, but that's because I like the sensations
| of drinking them. I try to avoid drinking enough to get tipsy.
|
| I never cared all that much for drugs that are supposed to make
| you feel good.
| akomtu wrote:
| LSD also increases activity of that fractal dimension.
| [deleted]
| jb775 wrote:
| There's a company called MindMed that's doing clinical trials
| with Psilocybin/LSD/MDMA and finding that micro-dosing has really
| positive benefits on human disorders linked to the brain
| (depression, PTSD, etc). Could be huge to harness the power of
| these drugs for the benefit of humanity.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Here is interesting study lecture and article, maybe somewhat
| related.
|
| The Geometry and objects of things you see in typical to DMT
| experiences are hyperbolic.
|
| Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg
|
| The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets,
| and Saddled Scenes https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-
| hyperbolic-geomet...
| virtualritz wrote:
| Very interesting indeed. Thank you for sharing.
|
| Why on Earth is this being downvoted?
| fogof wrote:
| Well, I'm not a downvoter, but I would disagree with the idea
| that this is related to the OP. OP is looking at mathematical
| properties of informational structure of brain scans, whereas
| this is just describing what people see when they trip.
| There's no reason the geometry of what you hallucinate should
| be related to the geometry of cortical activity while you see
| it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You should consider submitting that second link as its own
| story. Excellent content.
| throwaway64389 wrote:
| Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip.
|
| I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space,
| time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains
| within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same
| time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other
| temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space,
| and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to
| the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have
| their own decision trees.
|
| Also, we're all the same person or being.
|
| Weird day.
| tcmb wrote:
| That sounds like a profound experience, would you say these
| insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask,
| in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping
| for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and
| some bad emotions later on.
| swayvil wrote:
| Consider that you're remarking on his takeaway here. The
| "insights". The conceptual end-product of all that strange-
| seeing.
|
| But it's the strange-seeing that's the real feast.
| throwaway64389 wrote:
| I would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing
| reality, and I can open that door whenever I want, but I
| don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions
| I've made.
|
| It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies
| that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably
| with the exact same details). You can never rest, it's all an
| infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely distressed,
| like this fractal nature was some sort of punishment or
| permanent purgatory.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time
| implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times
| (probably with the exact same details)."_
|
| This echoes Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence of
| the Same, which he thought would in fact be terrifying to
| the ordinary man, but the overman could live their life in
| such a way that the infinite repetition would be fully and
| unreservedly welcome.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| I find these experiences like a video game. And since I have to
| take ketamine for my depression it sometimes provides
| entertainment to distract me from the other side-effects.
| okareaman wrote:
| Somewhat similar: Based on the fact that if you break a
| holographic picture in half then the two halves show a fainter
| representation of the whole and not a left and right portion, I
| imagined we each contain the whole mind of god, but a faint
| representation of it, since we are only a part of the whole.
|
| https://www.litiholo.com/blog/2019/10/11/what-happens-when-y...
| noja wrote:
| I think this is the way your brain decides things: by replaying
| events slightly differently, and choosing the best option.
|
| And if that is the way the brain works, then that is the way
| you would make sense of the world.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| somewhat related to your second point
| https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI (egg theory)
| gerdesj wrote:
| You mention microseconds and micometers. Those are on the scale
| of the edge of our various human senses.
|
| Now, your quantum thingies happen on the scale of the Planck
| constant. I've just asked Google what h is and I got this
| beast:
|
| 6.62607004 x 10^-34 m^2 kg / s
|
| Note the mixed suffixes and the silly precision for a web
| search result. I'm not a mathematician. If I was a physicist or
| chemist or whatever doing calcs for real, I probably wouldn't
| use Google to look up the latest result. I'd quote a paper. So
| 6.63 is more than enough for the number in a search result.
|
| Units: metres squared kilograms per second. The notation for
| the number is different to the notation for the unit, so we can
| conclude that Mr Google is a bit slack. The number is given
| with negative exponent notation and the units with slash
| notation.
|
| OK, so Google is a bit crap.
|
| Back to my thesis: Your trippy self needs to really get to
| grips with the fabric of reality. That fabric is far more
| fantastic and granular than you have experienced so far on LSD.
|
| You carved things up into 10^-3 (micro) when you stuffed some
| pretty funky drugs into your bloodstream. Mr Planck has shown
| that you need to worry about 10^-34 if you are going to really
| get to grips with the fabric of reality. You'll need quite a
| large lab and some decent funding .... or a bit more
| imagination.
|
| Good luck.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I've noticed ... changes to existing facts in reality that
| shouldn't change. No, it wasn't bad memory. I have a bad
| memory, but when it's something I'm hyper (adhd) obsessively
| focused on, and then it changes within 3 days, that is
| different than a mis-remembered childhood spelling like
| Berenstein/Berenstain Bears.
|
| I'm agnostic (exmormon), I think God(s) are narcissistic man-
| king-modeled control structures. However after experience
| reality shift -- all without any drug use... I've become
| somewhat "spiritual" in a sense, in that I feel there's a lot
| more to everything than I ever imagined.
|
| Simulation theory is my strongest belief, but secondary would
| be entropic multiverses colliding when they have no more room
| to split into new universes.
|
| Scientifically, I find the Cosmological Axis of Evil quite odd
| that it puts our solar system somehow "central" to the universe
| (on one axis), from a simulation perspective you could argue
| the simulation renders what's needed and started here on out.
|
| Anyhow, i've been going down rabbit holes on "occult" wisdom
| trying to see if there's a way to actually change reality by
| one's accord. So far dead ends (or I haven't gone far enough
| yet to reach "enlightenment"), most promising idea is
| meditation (silencing brain completely) might open some
| "conduit" to learn from the universe or make changes, or both.
|
| Looking at toltec (/r/castaneda), spiritual subs, buddhist,
| hindu, etc... that's the one common thread: quiet the mind.
| Learn to meditate. Lucid dreams may help. Astral Projections
| could help. I guess in other words train your brain to find
| some of the same things LSD brings organically without the need
| for drugs. Probably healthier that way, but it's a long
| process.
|
| There is a big benefit though in working on meditation
| practices: anxiety goes way down. That's nice after last year.
| I've had panic attacks, etc. So, I guess if I figure shit out
| or not, there's at least a benefit for trying.
| throwaway726665 wrote:
| Had the same exact experience a year ago on my first trip.
|
| We're all the same person = experiencing one-ness/ego death.
|
| For a lot of people it adds magic into their lives. For my
| materialist mind, not as much. Just confusion.
|
| I think it gave me what Jordan Peterson calls ontological
| shock. Having OCD doesn't help since I now obsess about it and
| I also suspect it made me feel derealized.
| skindoe wrote:
| Welcome to what mystics from the west and east have been saying
| for thousands of years.
| rantwasp wrote:
| http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
| romesmoke wrote:
| >Also, we're all the same person or being. > >Weird day.
|
| Not that weird according to Alan Watts' "Book" AKA "On the
| Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are". This is the main tenet, and
| it can briefly be described as a God who plays hide n' seek
| with Godself.
| fastball wrote:
| Sounds like a fantastic trip.
| Applejinx wrote:
| What did you do next? :)
| thebas wrote:
| I find this description quite unsettling because it is so
| common. I experienced it myself after trying magic mushroom: We
| are all one being(we call it the universe), it's consciousness
| subdivided between us all in order to escape it's solitude. It
| was scary at the time believing this sad possibility. I'm not
| so sure but the thought remains. Also follows: whatever you do
| to me you will be experiencing it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Is it common because it's some sort of profound mystic
| realization, or just an expected replicable biochemical
| reaction?
|
| One can experience fractal sensations from a strong cannabis
| high, are psychedelic ones any qualitatively different? Maybe
| that's just the way our minds are supposed to bend.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > I find this description quite unsettling because it is so
| common.
|
| More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip
| reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people
| who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes
| involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the
| literature, for example, who come to the realization that
| both the jailer and the jailed are the same.
|
| Jack Kornfield is one of many who is famous for relating the
| story about how the person being tortured suddenly observes
| that the person torturing them is the same entity. I believe
| there are also many reports from concentration camps coming
| to the same conclusion. It's difficult for us to admit this,
| because normal waking consciousness would have us sort things
| into us and them, but there is a level of perception that one
| can reach, where the interconnectedness of all things is
| seen.
|
| Many people tend to toss these things into religion or
| spirituality, but there's nothing supernatural about it at
| all, it's a biological and ecological reality. The question,
| however, that doesn't go away, is why are these peak
| experiences trying to communicate the same or similar
| ultimate truths to us, truths that seem to contradict and
| oppose the conditioning and programming of our dominant
| culture, which tells us we are separate from each other and
| should be fearful, aggressive, and violent.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| > Many people tend to toss these things into religion or
| spirituality
|
| It is a shame that interesting and/or valuable aspects of
| our lives are held hostage by (what I see as) irritating
| cults.
| tcmb wrote:
| I would call spirituality in general the 'mapping' of
| these spaces, descriptions of the way to get there and
| navigate them, and the preservation of accounts of people
| who've visited them.
|
| A religion, as I see it, is already focused on one
| particular version of the map. This can be fine, for
| example if the particular path is especially compatible
| with the rest of the culture that's around it. It starts
| being problematic once it discredits other versions and
| accounts. Irritating cults is what it becomes when it
| gets further warped by ego concerns and
| misinterpretations.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I'm an atheist (post-mormon) but I do consider it
| "spiritual" but I hate religion, so I don't group it in
| there, but I've been having some sort of "awakening" ...
| I'm not fully atheist though I guess, I could sign on to us
| all being one consciousness re-living until we experience
| them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow
| floated through space and got attached to this earth...
|
| Something something... I can buy an afterlife, just don't
| buy there's a God, at least not one like any worshiped on
| earth, they all resemble kings too closely, and are too
| narcissistic. Enki might be the only exception, he was a
| scientist - stood up for man, gave us knowledge, but
| basically is as most scientists humble and could give a
| rats ass about being worshipped, considers us just the
| discovery channel. Keyword: Aloof.
|
| Of course, that's just a myth. Still, my favorite
| mythological character. Anyhow, tangent aside my point - is
| no God, no need to worship. however if we're all each
| other, and we are the universe, or part of it and it's all
| different layers of conscious "agents" as Donald Hoffman
| calls it, then I think maybe a religion based on that could
| at least encourage fairness. One tenet : All are one, treat
| all as you would yourself regardless of race, nationality,
| religion, sexual orientation, etc.
|
| Honestly, I see that as the penultimate human utopian
| ideal, but I think as long as we give elitism roots, we'll
| never get there, there's no room for elitism in a world
| where all are equal.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The boring possibility is that humans have to self-generate
| an ego- babies don't really know the difference between
| themselves and other people, it's one of the recognized
| developmental stages. So in unusual situations it's maybe
| not surprising that that particular ability could get
| disrupted, it might actually be quite fragile.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Agreed. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like
| philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough,
| particularly when you read the reports of people
| identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even
| rocks. At that point, there might be another mechanism at
| work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of
| organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy
| (or juvenile) to look back and reflect on everything
| around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but
| as one continuous form? Maybe the problem isn't what we
| are experiencing, but how we think about it.
| marosgrego wrote:
| What is sad about it? It seems liberating to me.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Maybe it's sad if you routinely go around treating other
| people like shit...
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