The thing about psychedelics that is hard (really, impossible) to convey to the uninitiated is that the hallucinations are a secondary effect. The real show is the bending of your consciousness, which no image, video, or written description can really capture. It's akin to trying to describe color to a blind person.
If you’re interested in accurate examples of visual effects of hallucinogens, check out /r/Replications. Some of them are shockingly accurate. Here are some good examples:
It's not that it didn't occur to me. Sure I understand I'm missing the immediacy and the visceral effect here, and I presume the parallel impact on other senses. But then again if I was the sort of person that mattered to, my outlook would probably be different. I'm fine with others having different preferences.
I would say to me these videos work wonders in confirming a little bit that I'm not really missing out. There's a lot of FOMO and myth-making around drugs, I think experience reports and replications are a pretty good way to make everyone's decisions more informed whether it's "for them".
This could totally be some form of confirmation bias at work, but it works for me ...
The visuals are like a fraction of the experience. Personally, I get very little in terms of visuals. It’s insight, wisdom, love, and the releasing of emotional holding patterns that is the most prominent thing for me. You can read about ego death all you want, but until you actually experience that sort of thing it’s just nice words on a page. It’s why Buddha would say don’t take my word for it, do the practice and have the experience yourself.
My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.
It is interesting to me as my first acid trip was 30 years ago but I have never gained anything profound from the experience.
My best trips were at psytrance parties as peak experiences in terms of fun.
I have tripped many times alone in a dark room and basically gained nothing from the experience besides falling into an existential void.
Personally, from so much experiences, reading thousands of trip reports, most the psychedelic literature up to about 2005, I think the psychedelic experience is like a blank white canvas. Some people end up with a Monet painting experience and some people end up with a Dali painting experience. Some run into a Hieronymus Bosch the first time and never try it again. You can't really make overall statements about what the blank canvas is going to be before someone starts to paint.
For me, my best psychedelic experiences were better versions of my most fun nights drunk. Anything I have learned that is all that deep though I have learned from reading books.
Never having a psychedelic experience I think is like never being drunk. It is really missing out on an interesting life experience but at the same time it is not this profound loss.
Working out all these life problems like some kind of pyschotherapy session is for sure something that never happened to me. That just lead me to the existential void when attempted.
This exchange reminds me a bit of the experience of becoming a parent. The permanent reconfiguration of priorities from the intense oxytocin high is also quite impossible to explain to non-parents.
The type of person who is arrogant enough to read some trip reports on the internet and look at a couple gifs and thinks "yeah I totally get this" is exactly the type of person a trip will benefit the most.
The problem with the whole "tripping has made me wiser and more kind and loving" type stuff is that it's self-serving and doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor. It's a bit like that xkcd post on homeopathy: If it actually worked at scale, health insurers would be doing it.
Experience has taught me to be wary of identity-conferring stuff that's easy and not hard to do. Taking drugs is not difficult.
> MDMA has limited approved medical uses in a small number of countries,[32] but is illegal in most jurisdictions.[33] MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is a promising and generally safe treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder when administered in controlled therapeutic settings.[34][35] In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given MDMA breakthrough therapy status (though there no current clinical indications in the US).[36] Canada has allowed limited distribution of MDMA upon application to and approval by Health Canada.[37] In Australia, it may be prescribed in the treatment of PTSD by specifically authorised psychiatrists.[38]
That could be down to the fact that homeopathic treatments have largely been legal. The studies have been done and showed that a lot of it doesn't work so it isn't offered in traditional medicine. There were a lot of promising studies into the effects of LSD and Psilocybin before they were made illegal. Now with the loosening of restrictions we are able to get more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results. The research into MDMA for PTSD is really exciting, as well as Ketamine, LSD, and Psilocybin for different forms of depression for example.
They will never be a solution for every problem like some people evangelize but where they work, they give people with these conditions another avenue to try when other "legal" drugs have failed.
> more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results
You'd have to agree, the types of people who choose to research psychedelics professionally, are the types of people who want to see, and demonstrate, positive results. These aren't unbiased research outcomes.
I don't use drugs, but the LSD situation is crazy: is well down in any rank of harm (both to user and to others). The alleged harm has been proved fabricated (people getting blind for staring at the sun) or incredibly overstated (suicides while tripping). Is way less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol, and has next to zero addiction. Their users praise the experience, and some studies show potential medical use. Yet is furiously prohibited, deviled and prosecuted.
We were having a debate among friends when a couple of people said they took MDMA once, and some of the most obviously alcoholics (drunk twice a week) went to their yugular calling them junkies and "irresponsible" because drugs fry your brain.
I was using stable diffusion 1.5 when it came out and had my first LSD trip shortly after that, prolly like a few months. Anyways, what struck me was how similar the closed eyes visuals were on LSD compared to the generated images from stable diffusion when i was using it on low CFG and also some of my poorly trained textual inversions at the time. Watching the "training process" of the textual inversion in the early epochs made a lot of such images before the TI finally completed. Makes me think if the processes are somehow related, like if in human brains the reason we don't have experience seeing these "hallucinations" is because we have many robust subsystems that filter out the noise and make the mental model cohere on a stable world view.
Our culture is very image-centric. You have to understand that the drug induced image distortions are just a very specific side-effect that is part of a larger whole.
Hallucinogens act on deeper mechanisms that control from visual perception all the way to the sense of self. It can fundamentally change during the experience the way you see yourself and the world. It's not uncommon for users of LSD or DMT and psilocybin to describe the experience as getting in touch with the interconnectedness of all things. Also bad trips can be very terrifying because of how much you are exposed to the experience. Like dying or feeling the fleeting nature of existence very present in your skin.
All this to say that videos don't do any of this justice. It's just a fun way to represent the image distortions.
I get that, and I guess I try to extrapolate from the image-based examples to other senses and congnition in general. The image replications give me the idea that there is some generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on, like the brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
I recently read "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Bennet which spends quite a bit of time dwelling on "generative" simulation mechanisms in brain function and their role in cognition from prediction to mentalizing, and I think I can get a rough sense of how this would all click together.
It makes sense why creative/artistic people may be drawn to this and could consider it a heightened form or a letting loose of their normal processes, etc.
But to me it's still not that attractive. I can never shake the idea that it's a bit like driving a system past specifications and assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself. I get it's not black and white, and obviously philosophy is rife with arguments and takes on what is true experience and cognition, but given the risks and downsides I'd rather not.
I'm very fine with other people occupying different points on the spectrum.
>generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on
>brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
>assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself
The problem is that your description fully applies to "normal", non-chemically-altered cognition. Miscognitions propagate. The spec only goes as far as anatomically modern, i.e. cavefolk, where the error correction mechanism there is "get eaten by wild animals, having failed to reproduce".
We don't have sabertooth tigers any more, we have a planetary-scale material culture developed over millenia. It provides for our safety; it records and propagates imprints of what we think, say, and do; it makes meaningful actions out of human utterances and movements, by providing them with interpretations (shared collective cognitions).
It's a safe and rich environment, one where people get to live safe lives in the grasp of utter, insane delusion, we just can't agree on which ones exactly are the deluded ones. We consider that one is responsible primarily for one's own actions, so let's start with the self, shall we.
What is one to do, if one wants to say the words "I am not lying to myself" in the sense of an actual falsifiable statement, and not just as a form of "I'm significant... said the dust speck"?
I mean, how do you even know? Couldn't you just lie to yourself about that one, too, and carry on none the wiser?
You know how you can look at your eye with your eye, by means of routing photons through space in a clever way, with some help from that best friend of the psychonaut - the bathroom mirror?
Turns out you can also look at your mind with your mind, by routing concept-patterns though time in a clever way, by means of chemicals which alter the activation thresholds and signal propagation times throughout your body.
And what this gives you is a basis for comparison. Otherwise, you simply don't know. You're taking your introspection on faith, and that's massively irresponsible towards everyone else. Ask me how I know.
They're not the same thing, although visual migraines can appear at the start of a "real" migraine. It's a distortion of vision with glitchy geometric patterns that pulsate and move a bit. Here are some attempts to recreate them: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=visual+migraine+&ia=images&...
The article states that "It is most commonly induced under the influence of mild dosages of psychedelic compounds, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline."
Overdose or a "bad trip" is possible with any of these three substances, so one must be extremely careful when experimenting.
I can only speak about LSD, but its visual effects are based on constant and surprising visual transformations. People's faces transform into the faces of other people or animals (which can be even frightening). Non-animate objects can transform into other objects or resemble unexpected living forms.
However, these initially unique visual experiences quickly become boring for people with clear objectives in their life. I don't think it's contact with a spiritual universe or anything like that. It might help (or not) if you try it once or twice.
The visual experience is last on the list of things psychedelics are proven through clinical study to help with. Also, unless one of those objectives is to avoid the help psychedelics can provide, having clear objectives in life isn't a predictor of how helpful it will be. Finally, "contact with the spiritual universe it whatever" isn't even on the list things that actually help subjects in these studies.
'Wail to god' (the second piece of artwork at that link) strongly resembles a brighter, faster, and more detailed version of what I see whenever I close my eyes but still try to pay attention to what I'm "seeing".
(Normally, I "tune out" my visual field when I close my eyes. And for reference, my mind's eye is weak, but I do not think I have complete aphantasia.)
Fun list, I'm glad there is language around some of this. I've drank ayahuasca around 500 times personally in a traditional context (somewhat of an apprenticeship setting) and have experienced most of these effects. In the tradition I've been learning, it's pretty fascinating just how vast the indigenous understanding of that space is- they really have words for everything and the mechanisms behind what they see (as well as an understanding of how those things manifest outside of that space, in normal waking life). And more importantly how those things can be worked with and released through the practice. We're really only beginning to scratch the surface here (in the "western" context) but at least it's starting.
One of my old friends got involved with a group drinking ayahuasca frequently.
In their case they were taking lower doses than are traditionally associated with the one-off stories you hear about people traveling for ceremonies. There is also a tolerance build up that lessens the overt effects.
However, it still resulted in some major mental health issues over time. He was outwardly happy and cheerful, but the longer you talked to him the more you realized he had developed impossible ideas about reality, distorted (and easily debunked with photos and other records) memories of past events, and a lot of mystical ideas about the world.
He had mostly learned to hide them from people who weren’t in his group. When you got a couple of them ayahuasca people together and they started talking about mysticism, telepathy, and dismissing “western science” it started to reveal how far he was down the rabbit hole.
He has since gone MIA, though we get signs that he’s still alive and active from time to time via social media. The way it changed him was scary, though.
This is common with some groups unfortunately. I've seen a lot of "casual" drinkers with big ideas show up at our center and are a little taken aback by how grounded the traditional ways are. A lot of people use it to escape and build stories instead of dispelling them. I don't blame anyone in these situations- everyone is on their own journey- but it can be a heck of a pitfall to get stuck in if you're new and actually trying to heal. The hippy-dippy spiritual tourists are stuck there and taken advantage of.
The place I was at drinks 4 times a week (9-10 months out of the year), I usually did twice/week. The shamans drink every time, thousands of ceremonies under their belts over many years.
It makes sense though. Our brains are constantly trying to recognize familiar out of everything it sees. The DeepDream from Googs does essentially the same thing. Starting with static, it "finds" patterns that then leads to seeing even more patterns that start to be recognizable. Or the other system that kept finding Ryan Gosling in images he clearly was not in. The DeepDream starting with static definitely reminds me of closing my eyes and watching the show with a head full of something.
I had struggled to describe a bad trip I'd had until some of the text-to-video models from a few years ago became more accessible and nailed the morphing visuals and general uneasiness I'd felt, of course it was unintentional. The recent increase in quality has erased those features for better or for worse.
I have such vivid memories of experiencing many of these things in infancy and early childhood. Especially pareidolia, mild object activation, and scenery slicing. Hasn't really happened much in almost thirty years. Is there any research on like, if this is a side effect of brain development? It's always made me wonder.
Anecdotally speaking, I believe many of these to be largely true and a good respresentation.
I never thought about the machinescapes visual and that is very spot on. That was over 20 years ago on Salvi. I was in a basement and visualized a train driving through the wall. The thing that stood out the most is the detail of the train. It looked like an old steam train and nothing like I had ever seen before in person. Was really cool and fun experience and really short lived. All done in like 15 minutes. Never really noticed the level of detail that was present until just now looking back on it.
Another great experience I had that was captured well in this was on LSD at a competitive paintball event. I could visualize the paintball streams coming at me as solid lines. I knew exactly where people were shooting at. It stood out very prominently. But also, I could “feel” an opponent moving on the other side of the field. We were ~20 meters/yards apart behind opposite bunkers but I knew exactly where and when he was moving. I could feel his moves through the ground. Like we were both remotely connected like the mycelium of a mushroom. His left movements pulled me to the right. We were connected together.
I’m really grateful to have experienced these things.
I would love to try hallucinogens but I’m worried that it’ll aggravate my HPPD. It’s a pretty rare condition, and only a single optometrist I’ve spoken with actually believes I experience it.
HPPD is by definition a lasting effect of hallucinogens. The diagnostic criteria begins with the phrase “Following cessation of hallucinogen use”
If you’ve never tried hallucinogens, you wouldn’t really qualify as having HPPD. There are other terms for visual issues that people can experience that look similar, but HPPD is specifically a hallucinogen-triggered condition.
I do agree, though: If you’re already having visual issues it would be very wise to avoid hallucinogens.
My best guess is that HPPD was triggered by how I used NyQuil as a young teen. I would drink half a bottle, sleep for half the day, and wake up feeling better. I did this pretty regularly for a few years whenever I got sick.
NyQuil contains DXM which is a dissociative in high doses as well as having some seratonergic activity. I wouldn't be surprised if this was why, especially taking it with a still-developing brain.
Salvia is such a slept on hallucinogen, I would highly recommend it if you have experience tripping. It's legal in California.
It's not fun in the way party drugs or low dose mushrooms are, it's more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment but sure as hell gives you a unique experience to reflect on when you're sober 10 minutes later.
> more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment
This is a funny and accurate way of looking at it.
After trying it a few times I felt like I had seen everything salvia had to show me. A dissociative kaleidoscope that leaves you coughing and sweaty loses its novelty pretty quick.
I haven't touched it in many years as well (though this thread has made me curious how I would feel about it now, so I may change that), but I think I attribute a lot of my general stability/resilience to bad trips when it comes to hallucinogens to my salvia use giving me experience with a mindstate that can easily tip into an H.R. Geiger kaleidoscope as you said.
IMHO not worth it — salvia is terrifying much more often than mushrooms / acid. Definitely not something for a "first time psychonaut," and certainly shouldn't be legal.
Among my most terrifying dissassociative moments (you will not know who you, nor anything else, is).
Correct, even though it was the first hallucinogenic substance I ever tried I would not recommend that other people do the same thing, the potential for a bad trip if you're inexperienced is very high.
My favorite part about magic mushrooms is the impact on my visual field. Colors get incredibly vibrant and at higher doses everything gets fractalized, especially if you’re looking at things like trees. If they only came with the visual effects, not the panic-inducing feeling of floating out of my body, I would take them much more frequently than once or twice a year.
The compound and the dose are predictably the same for me, but varied between them. Low dose shrooms: One with nature, universal love, watching everything alive breath. Mid dose shrooms: I become an aztec snake, get geometry, structural universe. High dose shrooms: Past life journeys and childhood memories. Low dose acid: lo-fi geometric one love reality. Mid dose: reality is electric, seeing/feeling the "walls of reality". High dose: electric, electric, what is this thing, synthetic geometry is reality? Everything looks like electricity. 2cb low dose: saturation on 3000%, everything is the light it should be and reveals itself as such. mid dose: opposite of ego death maybe? super embodied, no fractal stuff etc, but more looks like a "rubber" reality. High dose: for me not visual or auditory, very physical almost... physical hallucinations? Melting into things, becoming them etc.
The list goes on, but it's interesting how different yet the same they all kinda feel... guess that tracks given what are actually limited variables.
I've not had that experience with Salvia but I've read about what I presume you're talking about and I don't believe they are the same. 2cb feels like boundary dissolution, I'm still very much me but my edges have melted into the...couch, pillow, sheet. I think become them is way too strong of a term when compared to Salvia, I think Salvia is more towards ego replacement but 2cb is more somatic boundary changes. The 2cb effect is extremely pleasant.
I’ve occasionally seen and understood physical shapes and concepts while dreaming, which I was unable to describe or articulate in the real world once awake. It’s as if I recall how it made me feel, but I can’t describe what it was. Like the memory of a face you saw just once.
I perceive a river of sights, sounds, smells, vibes, thoughts and emotions. And that's just a narrow slice. There's also a whole vast continent of nameless stuff too.
Hallucinogens change my perspective of that river. Stuff I didn't notice I start noticing. My careful sample of the river, cultivated over a lifetime, gets jiggled and smeared all over and much that was invisible becomes visible.
The thing about psychedelics that is hard (really, impossible) to convey to the uninitiated is that the hallucinations are a secondary effect. The real show is the bending of your consciousness, which no image, video, or written description can really capture. It's akin to trying to describe color to a blind person.
If you’re interested in accurate examples of visual effects of hallucinogens, check out /r/Replications. Some of them are shockingly accurate. Here are some good examples:
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1ll9k7o/flight/
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1jkajcq/that_mome...
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1hruv4t/just_visi...
This is very cool. I have never been on drugs and don't plan to ever change that, but it's very interesting to get an impression of the experience.
I have to say it's a bit underwhelming. It's interesting how the closest analog I can think lf is early generative image AI hallucinatory stuff.
> I have to say it's a bit underwhelming
Well, yeah. It’s like watching a video of a rollercoaster on your phone, vs riding in one.
It's not that it didn't occur to me. Sure I understand I'm missing the immediacy and the visceral effect here, and I presume the parallel impact on other senses. But then again if I was the sort of person that mattered to, my outlook would probably be different. I'm fine with others having different preferences.
I would say to me these videos work wonders in confirming a little bit that I'm not really missing out. There's a lot of FOMO and myth-making around drugs, I think experience reports and replications are a pretty good way to make everyone's decisions more informed whether it's "for them".
This could totally be some form of confirmation bias at work, but it works for me ...
The visuals are like a fraction of the experience. Personally, I get very little in terms of visuals. It’s insight, wisdom, love, and the releasing of emotional holding patterns that is the most prominent thing for me. You can read about ego death all you want, but until you actually experience that sort of thing it’s just nice words on a page. It’s why Buddha would say don’t take my word for it, do the practice and have the experience yourself.
My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.
It is interesting to me as my first acid trip was 30 years ago but I have never gained anything profound from the experience.
My best trips were at psytrance parties as peak experiences in terms of fun.
I have tripped many times alone in a dark room and basically gained nothing from the experience besides falling into an existential void.
Personally, from so much experiences, reading thousands of trip reports, most the psychedelic literature up to about 2005, I think the psychedelic experience is like a blank white canvas. Some people end up with a Monet painting experience and some people end up with a Dali painting experience. Some run into a Hieronymus Bosch the first time and never try it again. You can't really make overall statements about what the blank canvas is going to be before someone starts to paint.
For me, my best psychedelic experiences were better versions of my most fun nights drunk. Anything I have learned that is all that deep though I have learned from reading books.
Never having a psychedelic experience I think is like never being drunk. It is really missing out on an interesting life experience but at the same time it is not this profound loss.
Working out all these life problems like some kind of pyschotherapy session is for sure something that never happened to me. That just lead me to the existential void when attempted.
One of my favorite quotes, and why I don't bother trying to explain psychedelic experiences any more -
"To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible."
This exchange reminds me a bit of the experience of becoming a parent. The permanent reconfiguration of priorities from the intense oxytocin high is also quite impossible to explain to non-parents.
The type of person who is arrogant enough to read some trip reports on the internet and look at a couple gifs and thinks "yeah I totally get this" is exactly the type of person a trip will benefit the most.
The problem with the whole "tripping has made me wiser and more kind and loving" type stuff is that it's self-serving and doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor. It's a bit like that xkcd post on homeopathy: If it actually worked at scale, health insurers would be doing it.
Experience has taught me to be wary of identity-conferring stuff that's easy and not hard to do. Taking drugs is not difficult.
They are.
> MDMA has limited approved medical uses in a small number of countries,[32] but is illegal in most jurisdictions.[33] MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is a promising and generally safe treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder when administered in controlled therapeutic settings.[34][35] In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given MDMA breakthrough therapy status (though there no current clinical indications in the US).[36] Canada has allowed limited distribution of MDMA upon application to and approval by Health Canada.[37] In Australia, it may be prescribed in the treatment of PTSD by specifically authorised psychiatrists.[38]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA
That could be down to the fact that homeopathic treatments have largely been legal. The studies have been done and showed that a lot of it doesn't work so it isn't offered in traditional medicine. There were a lot of promising studies into the effects of LSD and Psilocybin before they were made illegal. Now with the loosening of restrictions we are able to get more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results. The research into MDMA for PTSD is really exciting, as well as Ketamine, LSD, and Psilocybin for different forms of depression for example.
They will never be a solution for every problem like some people evangelize but where they work, they give people with these conditions another avenue to try when other "legal" drugs have failed.
> more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results
You'd have to agree, the types of people who choose to research psychedelics professionally, are the types of people who want to see, and demonstrate, positive results. These aren't unbiased research outcomes.
It is worth also considering the far stronger bias against psychedelics that exists in society as a whole.
LSD is illegal, and in most countries considered one of the most dangerous drugs despite being completely harmless from a physical perspective.
I don't use drugs, but the LSD situation is crazy: is well down in any rank of harm (both to user and to others). The alleged harm has been proved fabricated (people getting blind for staring at the sun) or incredibly overstated (suicides while tripping). Is way less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol, and has next to zero addiction. Their users praise the experience, and some studies show potential medical use. Yet is furiously prohibited, deviled and prosecuted.
We were having a debate among friends when a couple of people said they took MDMA once, and some of the most obviously alcoholics (drunk twice a week) went to their yugular calling them junkies and "irresponsible" because drugs fry your brain.
I was using stable diffusion 1.5 when it came out and had my first LSD trip shortly after that, prolly like a few months. Anyways, what struck me was how similar the closed eyes visuals were on LSD compared to the generated images from stable diffusion when i was using it on low CFG and also some of my poorly trained textual inversions at the time. Watching the "training process" of the textual inversion in the early epochs made a lot of such images before the TI finally completed. Makes me think if the processes are somehow related, like if in human brains the reason we don't have experience seeing these "hallucinations" is because we have many robust subsystems that filter out the noise and make the mental model cohere on a stable world view.
Our culture is very image-centric. You have to understand that the drug induced image distortions are just a very specific side-effect that is part of a larger whole.
Hallucinogens act on deeper mechanisms that control from visual perception all the way to the sense of self. It can fundamentally change during the experience the way you see yourself and the world. It's not uncommon for users of LSD or DMT and psilocybin to describe the experience as getting in touch with the interconnectedness of all things. Also bad trips can be very terrifying because of how much you are exposed to the experience. Like dying or feeling the fleeting nature of existence very present in your skin.
All this to say that videos don't do any of this justice. It's just a fun way to represent the image distortions.
I get that, and I guess I try to extrapolate from the image-based examples to other senses and congnition in general. The image replications give me the idea that there is some generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on, like the brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
I recently read "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Bennet which spends quite a bit of time dwelling on "generative" simulation mechanisms in brain function and their role in cognition from prediction to mentalizing, and I think I can get a rough sense of how this would all click together.
It makes sense why creative/artistic people may be drawn to this and could consider it a heightened form or a letting loose of their normal processes, etc.
But to me it's still not that attractive. I can never shake the idea that it's a bit like driving a system past specifications and assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself. I get it's not black and white, and obviously philosophy is rife with arguments and takes on what is true experience and cognition, but given the risks and downsides I'd rather not.
I'm very fine with other people occupying different points on the spectrum.
>generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on
>brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
>assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself
The problem is that your description fully applies to "normal", non-chemically-altered cognition. Miscognitions propagate. The spec only goes as far as anatomically modern, i.e. cavefolk, where the error correction mechanism there is "get eaten by wild animals, having failed to reproduce".
We don't have sabertooth tigers any more, we have a planetary-scale material culture developed over millenia. It provides for our safety; it records and propagates imprints of what we think, say, and do; it makes meaningful actions out of human utterances and movements, by providing them with interpretations (shared collective cognitions).
It's a safe and rich environment, one where people get to live safe lives in the grasp of utter, insane delusion, we just can't agree on which ones exactly are the deluded ones. We consider that one is responsible primarily for one's own actions, so let's start with the self, shall we.
What is one to do, if one wants to say the words "I am not lying to myself" in the sense of an actual falsifiable statement, and not just as a form of "I'm significant... said the dust speck"?
I mean, how do you even know? Couldn't you just lie to yourself about that one, too, and carry on none the wiser?
You know how you can look at your eye with your eye, by means of routing photons through space in a clever way, with some help from that best friend of the psychonaut - the bathroom mirror?
Turns out you can also look at your mind with your mind, by routing concept-patterns though time in a clever way, by means of chemicals which alter the activation thresholds and signal propagation times throughout your body.
And what this gives you is a basis for comparison. Otherwise, you simply don't know. You're taking your introspection on faith, and that's massively irresponsible towards everyone else. Ask me how I know.
Ever heard of "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley?
It looks like visual migraine to me.
Having just had a migraine end, why can’t I have this, rather than pain and vomiting?
They're not the same thing, although visual migraines can appear at the start of a "real" migraine. It's a distortion of vision with glitchy geometric patterns that pulsate and move a bit. Here are some attempts to recreate them: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=visual+migraine+&ia=images&...
> I have to say it's a bit underwhelming.
I mean, yeah, you're looking at an image on your computer screen.
Seeing a video of Niagara Falls or a photo of a person at the Grand Canyon similarly capture the difference to the real thing.
All those reddit images are blocked if you don't have an account btw bevause they are flagged as "mature"
Use old reddit redirect extension or just prefix the URL with old.
(Like this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1ll9k7o/fligh...
https://old.reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1jkajcq/that_...
https://www.old.reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1hruv4t/j...
)
I don't have a reddit account and none of the images above were blocked.
The article states that "It is most commonly induced under the influence of mild dosages of psychedelic compounds, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline."
Overdose or a "bad trip" is possible with any of these three substances, so one must be extremely careful when experimenting.
I can only speak about LSD, but its visual effects are based on constant and surprising visual transformations. People's faces transform into the faces of other people or animals (which can be even frightening). Non-animate objects can transform into other objects or resemble unexpected living forms.
However, these initially unique visual experiences quickly become boring for people with clear objectives in their life. I don't think it's contact with a spiritual universe or anything like that. It might help (or not) if you try it once or twice.
The visual experience is last on the list of things psychedelics are proven through clinical study to help with. Also, unless one of those objectives is to avoid the help psychedelics can provide, having clear objectives in life isn't a predictor of how helpful it will be. Finally, "contact with the spiritual universe it whatever" isn't even on the list things that actually help subjects in these studies.
Cool story, though.
This article is a lazy ctrl-c from psychonautwiki.
For example: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Geometry#8B_-_Perceived_expo...
I'm so sorry you did not enjoy it! We wanted to bring Josie Kins' index and research to our readers and did reach out to them for a bit of background.
I enjoyed it, people like to complain. If you wanna go further back on sources there's some pretty good stuff in like, math magazines hahaha
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...
'Wail to god' (the second piece of artwork at that link) strongly resembles a brighter, faster, and more detailed version of what I see whenever I close my eyes but still try to pay attention to what I'm "seeing".
(Normally, I "tune out" my visual field when I close my eyes. And for reference, my mind's eye is weak, but I do not think I have complete aphantasia.)
The article is a short selection from a more complete website: https://www.effectindex.com/effects
The effort is purely descriptive and does not seem to correlate the various effects with their cause (nothing wrong with that, still interesting).
This article provides a good overview of various theories:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...
Fun list, I'm glad there is language around some of this. I've drank ayahuasca around 500 times personally in a traditional context (somewhat of an apprenticeship setting) and have experienced most of these effects. In the tradition I've been learning, it's pretty fascinating just how vast the indigenous understanding of that space is- they really have words for everything and the mechanisms behind what they see (as well as an understanding of how those things manifest outside of that space, in normal waking life). And more importantly how those things can be worked with and released through the practice. We're really only beginning to scratch the surface here (in the "western" context) but at least it's starting.
That's crazy?
Once a week for 10 years? Everyday for almost 2?
One of my old friends got involved with a group drinking ayahuasca frequently.
In their case they were taking lower doses than are traditionally associated with the one-off stories you hear about people traveling for ceremonies. There is also a tolerance build up that lessens the overt effects.
However, it still resulted in some major mental health issues over time. He was outwardly happy and cheerful, but the longer you talked to him the more you realized he had developed impossible ideas about reality, distorted (and easily debunked with photos and other records) memories of past events, and a lot of mystical ideas about the world.
He had mostly learned to hide them from people who weren’t in his group. When you got a couple of them ayahuasca people together and they started talking about mysticism, telepathy, and dismissing “western science” it started to reveal how far he was down the rabbit hole.
He has since gone MIA, though we get signs that he’s still alive and active from time to time via social media. The way it changed him was scary, though.
This is common with some groups unfortunately. I've seen a lot of "casual" drinkers with big ideas show up at our center and are a little taken aback by how grounded the traditional ways are. A lot of people use it to escape and build stories instead of dispelling them. I don't blame anyone in these situations- everyone is on their own journey- but it can be a heck of a pitfall to get stuck in if you're new and actually trying to heal. The hippy-dippy spiritual tourists are stuck there and taken advantage of.
The place I was at drinks 4 times a week (9-10 months out of the year), I usually did twice/week. The shamans drink every time, thousands of ceremonies under their belts over many years.
What I find very interesting is the strong resemblance to dreams some generative image/video AI can produce.
It makes sense though. Our brains are constantly trying to recognize familiar out of everything it sees. The DeepDream from Googs does essentially the same thing. Starting with static, it "finds" patterns that then leads to seeing even more patterns that start to be recognizable. Or the other system that kept finding Ryan Gosling in images he clearly was not in. The DeepDream starting with static definitely reminds me of closing my eyes and watching the show with a head full of something.
I had struggled to describe a bad trip I'd had until some of the text-to-video models from a few years ago became more accessible and nailed the morphing visuals and general uneasiness I'd felt, of course it was unintentional. The recent increase in quality has erased those features for better or for worse.
I have such vivid memories of experiencing many of these things in infancy and early childhood. Especially pareidolia, mild object activation, and scenery slicing. Hasn't really happened much in almost thirty years. Is there any research on like, if this is a side effect of brain development? It's always made me wonder.
Discussed in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44804768
Anecdotally speaking, I believe many of these to be largely true and a good respresentation.
I never thought about the machinescapes visual and that is very spot on. That was over 20 years ago on Salvi. I was in a basement and visualized a train driving through the wall. The thing that stood out the most is the detail of the train. It looked like an old steam train and nothing like I had ever seen before in person. Was really cool and fun experience and really short lived. All done in like 15 minutes. Never really noticed the level of detail that was present until just now looking back on it.
Another great experience I had that was captured well in this was on LSD at a competitive paintball event. I could visualize the paintball streams coming at me as solid lines. I knew exactly where people were shooting at. It stood out very prominently. But also, I could “feel” an opponent moving on the other side of the field. We were ~20 meters/yards apart behind opposite bunkers but I knew exactly where and when he was moving. I could feel his moves through the ground. Like we were both remotely connected like the mycelium of a mushroom. His left movements pulled me to the right. We were connected together.
I’m really grateful to have experienced these things.
I would love to try hallucinogens but I’m worried that it’ll aggravate my HPPD. It’s a pretty rare condition, and only a single optometrist I’ve spoken with actually believes I experience it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
HPPD is by definition a lasting effect of hallucinogens. The diagnostic criteria begins with the phrase “Following cessation of hallucinogen use”
If you’ve never tried hallucinogens, you wouldn’t really qualify as having HPPD. There are other terms for visual issues that people can experience that look similar, but HPPD is specifically a hallucinogen-triggered condition.
I do agree, though: If you’re already having visual issues it would be very wise to avoid hallucinogens.
My best guess is that HPPD was triggered by how I used NyQuil as a young teen. I would drink half a bottle, sleep for half the day, and wake up feeling better. I did this pretty regularly for a few years whenever I got sick.
NyQuil contains DXM which is a dissociative in high doses as well as having some seratonergic activity. I wouldn't be surprised if this was why, especially taking it with a still-developing brain.
Have you seen the interviews about HPPD that Andrew Callaghan has done? He's a long time sufferer as well.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder - 5CAST with Andrew Callaghan (#4) feat. Dr. Wesley Ryan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9pK4q7_VUc
No, I haven’t. Thank you for the link!
Salvia is such a slept on hallucinogen, I would highly recommend it if you have experience tripping. It's legal in California.
It's not fun in the way party drugs or low dose mushrooms are, it's more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment but sure as hell gives you a unique experience to reflect on when you're sober 10 minutes later.
Salvia is great if you are down with weird. Not fun, not euphoric, but weird. A level of weird that most people would instictively recoil from.
> more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment
This is a funny and accurate way of looking at it.
After trying it a few times I felt like I had seen everything salvia had to show me. A dissociative kaleidoscope that leaves you coughing and sweaty loses its novelty pretty quick.
I haven't touched it in many years as well (though this thread has made me curious how I would feel about it now, so I may change that), but I think I attribute a lot of my general stability/resilience to bad trips when it comes to hallucinogens to my salvia use giving me experience with a mindstate that can easily tip into an H.R. Geiger kaleidoscope as you said.
>sure as hell gives you a unique experience
IMHO not worth it — salvia is terrifying much more often than mushrooms / acid. Definitely not something for a "first time psychonaut," and certainly shouldn't be legal.
Among my most terrifying dissassociative moments (you will not know who you, nor anything else, is).
Correct, even though it was the first hallucinogenic substance I ever tried I would not recommend that other people do the same thing, the potential for a bad trip if you're inexperienced is very high.
Best recreation that I've seen (by a large margin) of the visual experience of a mushroom trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BxiYkCPZwI
My favorite part about magic mushrooms is the impact on my visual field. Colors get incredibly vibrant and at higher doses everything gets fractalized, especially if you’re looking at things like trees. If they only came with the visual effects, not the panic-inducing feeling of floating out of my body, I would take them much more frequently than once or twice a year.
The compound and the dose are predictably the same for me, but varied between them. Low dose shrooms: One with nature, universal love, watching everything alive breath. Mid dose shrooms: I become an aztec snake, get geometry, structural universe. High dose shrooms: Past life journeys and childhood memories. Low dose acid: lo-fi geometric one love reality. Mid dose: reality is electric, seeing/feeling the "walls of reality". High dose: electric, electric, what is this thing, synthetic geometry is reality? Everything looks like electricity. 2cb low dose: saturation on 3000%, everything is the light it should be and reveals itself as such. mid dose: opposite of ego death maybe? super embodied, no fractal stuff etc, but more looks like a "rubber" reality. High dose: for me not visual or auditory, very physical almost... physical hallucinations? Melting into things, becoming them etc.
The list goes on, but it's interesting how different yet the same they all kinda feel... guess that tracks given what are actually limited variables.
> High dose of 2cb: Melting into things, becoming them
You mean like Salvia? I didn't know 2cb had this effect as well
I've not had that experience with Salvia but I've read about what I presume you're talking about and I don't believe they are the same. 2cb feels like boundary dissolution, I'm still very much me but my edges have melted into the...couch, pillow, sheet. I think become them is way too strong of a term when compared to Salvia, I think Salvia is more towards ego replacement but 2cb is more somatic boundary changes. The 2cb effect is extremely pleasant.
I’ve occasionally seen and understood physical shapes and concepts while dreaming, which I was unable to describe or articulate in the real world once awake. It’s as if I recall how it made me feel, but I can’t describe what it was. Like the memory of a face you saw just once.
(2023)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36207268
Schopenhauer
I perceive a river of sights, sounds, smells, vibes, thoughts and emotions. And that's just a narrow slice. There's also a whole vast continent of nameless stuff too.
Hallucinogens change my perspective of that river. Stuff I didn't notice I start noticing. My careful sample of the river, cultivated over a lifetime, gets jiggled and smeared all over and much that was invisible becomes visible.
That said, I prefer shikantaza meditation.
According to Chat GPT, Nautilus still hasn’t paid its writers after the 2018 dispute.
It can get real bad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_r...
So can embarking on building a startup: https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/theranos-darden-case
Neither cases prove that either ecosystems are net-negative compared to the overall benefits.