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Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

nature.com

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Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#101

Post by tpm »

lossolo wrote: post #9
nefitty wrote: post #4

Pretty cool. I'd like to point out that meditation might have a similar dampening effect on the default mode network as well. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 The question arises again, can psychedelics have lasting effects or is meditation the only way to create permanent positive change in that direction? Finally, a quote from a letter to Osho: "Many people are experimenting with the drug ecstasy. I hear…

I did ecstasy and i did LSD. Ecstasy is like a lie in this quote comparison. You get high in the beginning and it brings you down at the end, really awful feeling at the end. LSD is different, i experienced world differently even for couple of days after i took LSD. World seemed different. I knew what was important in life and what not, very clear. I can't describe how you feel on LSD, and people that didn't took LSD…

I never had bad feelings on MDMA, or afterwards. No comedown either, on the contrary, plenty of afterglow. The interpersonal variability of these experiences is amazing.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#103

Post by kr4 »

taneq wrote: post #85
notthegov wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you meditate for emotional stillness and spiritual depth, then there is no reason you can't seek happiness and awareness from a girlfriend or a psychedelic drug experience. Or from both at the same time. You could meditate alone for a thousand lifetimes and not experience love. Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially…

> Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. Even if some people can experience psychedelic states through extensive meditation, that doesn't make their experience intrinsically better. They're chasing the same experience as someone who experiments with psychedelic drugs, but there always seems to be an irritating sen…

meditation is just like teaching yourself programming for years. after 10k hours of practice in either you can reach to a state of expertise. E.G., you can write any kind of software in your expertise with ease. Similarly you can repeat the same experience as per your wish (like traveling through different planes of existance, hering/seeing extra-dimensional stuff and much more).

Taking drug to experience the state is like throwing yourself onto the source code without any learning/experience to fix a bug. You might end up fixing the bug by accident in some cases, but it can very well lead to other failures which you couldn't imagine with virtually zero experience in programming. More often you end up having bad experiences In both and frustration thereafter.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#104

Post by StanislavPetrov »

lsd_throwaway wrote: post #61
martin1975 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna bet you're not addicted to any external substance and that in your case, this was purely a mind expanding experience. One could also say LSD might have unlocked what was already there in the background (i.e. "subconscious") of your mind. I would not consider this a bad trip. More like a rude awakening. Had you gone through something else in real life, major trauma of sorts, you may have experienced exactly…

I'm a fairly introspective person and I wouldn't say that it shook my world view - in the sense that I went in with a scientific world view and came out with one. I do have a better empathetic appreciation for mental illness and psychosis though (read And Then I Thought I was a Fish if you want to scare yourself). A trip makes you realize how incredible differently someone else's mind can perceive the world. The chal…

>The challenging or scary part for me at least is when you rely on your own mind as a place where you can reason about things and then you start to worry if your ability to do that has been compromised.

As someone who did LSD many years ago and was deeply moved by it, the scary part wasn't worry that my brain had been compromised by LSD. What was scary was that suddenly I was aware that perhaps my brain had been compromised all along, and I just didn't realize it until I did LSD.

If it does anything, LSD (at least at moderate-high doses) tears away the ego and strips away the unconscious filters through which we view reality. It can be a profoundly humbling, illuminating, and terrifying experience, all at the same time. Use with caution.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#105

Post by throwaway102942 »

throwaway163 wrote: post #32
lsd_throwaway wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a counterpoint to this - I decided to do 150 micrograms of LSD after reading a lot about it on HN, talking with many friends that had tried it or do it fairly regularly and reading as much as I could find (Sam Harris, Huxley, What the Dormouse said etc.). Nothing can really prepare you for it - the dream like state, the visuals and just the capacity of how different things can be. When looking at things I saw the…

I had a similar experience. Except it was caused by marijuana. It sounds like a classic case of Depersonalization disorder, which is a subset/interconnected with anxiety. Google it. The consensus is that it can be triggered by substances in approx 3% of the population. Weed, mushrooms, ectstacy and LSD are the most common culprits. It's extremely common, though it has very little mindshare among mental health profess…

I tried marijuana and my experience with it was a lot more like what my friends and you describe LSD or similar drugs to be like. Before marijuana I already had mild hallucinations and I was diagnosed with schizophrenia from a mild psychosis. It's definitely made my existing hallucinations much stronger even years after smoking.

For me the general feel of the trip was as if some sort of filter had been removed so you get to experience things you probably shouldn't experience. This includes experiencing experiences (fractals). What we experience tends to be individual so I won't go into that. But you get a wider eye view, motions are more defined, shapes are more defined, etc. It's like a burn in effect (in an image editing sense) but applied to other senses as well.

My favorite was probably not being able to determine the size of objects (or that it would fluctuate) which made sitting in front of a computer like sitting in a gigantic room with a gigantic tv.

It was a bit uneasy after the trip at first but I got used to it quickly. I've already had similar experiences but of course not as strong.

In my experience with all of this so far the best tool for me is being skeptic. My only fear is that I'll lose the ability to reason forever, which I have already lost in short bursts here and there.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#106

Post by devishard »

kr4 wrote: post #99
devishard wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern science hasn't even started to appreciate the existence of consciousness let alone validating which is the better method. Wow, you sure don't know what you're talking about. David Nutt, Albert Hoffman, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Charles Darwin... every single one of these scientists has both made statements about the nature of consciousness and done research which has significantly fur…

so tell me any theory that tries to validate the existence of non-material consciousness. Giving loads of names of scientists won't help in establishing what modern science says about consciousness. The current stance is to try to define consciousness in physical terms (as a matterial substance) but with no success. As per scientists consciousness behaves to be more than the sum total of neurons in the brain. It's im…

> so tell me any theory that tries to validate the existence of non-material consciousness.

A great deal of the context around quantum mechanical study has been to validate the existence of free will; whether consciousness can be ascribed to deterministic processes or not.

> Giving loads of names of scientists won't help in establishing what modern science says about consciousness.

It would be a great starting point if you decided to bother to inform yourself on what these people have said about consciousness.

> As per scientists consciousness behaves to be more than the sum total of neurons in the brain.

Some scientists take this few. Many don't.

> It's impossible so far to articulate consciousness in The law of thermodynamic,

That's because the law of thermodynamics deal with heat and entropy. If you're expecting laws about heat and entropy to apply to consciousness I'm not sure where your thought process has gone so horribly wrong, so I can't really help you.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#107

Post by goldenkey »

adrusi wrote: post #68
ChristianBundy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that any medical professional you saw has already told you this, but the symptoms you experienced are normal, and referred to as "hallucinogen persisting perception disorder", and I had a very similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep... The symptoms will go away, and you'll feel better. Promise. 150 mcg of LSD is, in my opinion, more than I'd recommend someone taking f…

What the parent was describing isn't HPPD, which involves sensory disturbances, usually minor optical hallucinations, and is mostly limited to people who used psychedelics heavily over a long period. The parent probably experienced the disturbances of mood that psychedelics can cause in the days following a trip, got panicked that something was wrong, and then the anxiety perpetuated their destabalized state. Or some…

More likely, he experienced derealization or depersonalization. The shake in consciousness can be jarring in that, one realizes the weight of being the "one" behind the sensors, heuristics, and thinking. The ghost in the machine... Really, there are books written about this. The Wisdom of Insecurity by Allen Watts. Life is intrepid and scary because consciousness is a black box. Anxiety is just a symptom of being shown the unusual, being shaken to a core of meaning that defeats the usual humdrum of assumed knowledge.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#108

Post by executesorder66 »

kough wrote: post #72
superswordfish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I ended up depressed and anxious for about three or four months afterwards Holy shit, that sounds awful.

Like I said, there were a lot of confounding factors that make it hard for me to put the blame solely on the acid. But pretty much I went in to it without taking it seriously. I ended up tripping pretty hard, by myself, from 1 PM - 9 PM, then kept tripping (not very hard, but enough that I didn't like it) throughout the rest of the night. I ended up watching the movie Chinatown on Netflix because I absolutely could n…

Why not post them now? I'd be very interested in reading them.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#109

Post by notpresident »

martin1975 wrote: post #70
lsd_throwaway wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fairly introspective person and I wouldn't say that it shook my world view - in the sense that I went in with a scientific world view and came out with one. I do have a better empathetic appreciation for mental illness and psychosis though (read And Then I Thought I was a Fish if you want to scare yourself). A trip makes you realize how incredible differently someone else's mind can perceive the world. The chal…

Religion is what the unconverted soul does in order to do right by God. To "make it to heaven", so to speak, by doing good things and avoiding doing bad or downright ugly things. All attempts at pleasing God - i.e. religion - are doomed because you inevitably will fail to meet the standard, because it is an impossible one - i.e. don't lust for women in your heart. Just as I wrote that...probably a thought or an image…

> because it is an impossible one - i.e. don't lust for women in your heart.

Not impossible. Hard. Worth it IMO.

I'm now married after having lived that way for a number of years and it still has benefits. Not only for my SO.

As mentioned above, breaking into that state was hard, I worked for months without luck so I totally can relate to the "impossible" claim.

I relate the breakthrough to my being "born again" experience and I think I would rather die happily on the spot instead of going back.

Edit: posted from sockpuppet account because while I happily might share personal stuff I try to separate it from work stuff.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#110

Post by de_Selby »

stevedekorte wrote: post #62
jdpigeon wrote: post #5

Finally some good research on LSD in humans. Very interesting finding about the increased connectivity to the visual cortex. It certainly vibes with my anecdotal experience -- the whole visual world just seems more meaningful and 'in focus'. Tripping in an art gallery can be a real treat :)

I tried that at the Van Gough museum but got creeped out at seeing everyone ignoring each other and staring at walls and had to escape to a nearby park.

Sounds like a pretty normal art gallery experience then.
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