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Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

nature.com

111–120 of 208 posts

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#111
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…

Funny you quote that.

There is a song by DJ Koze with that in the lyrics and I always wondered where it came from.

https://soundcloud.com/pamparecords/pampa024-dj-koze-xtc

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm immediately skeptical of people who claim to have felt "similar" effects to LSD without LSD, but that's a pretty interesting scenario involving weed (how much?!) and schizophrenia. No clue how close you could get to emulating it, but it sounds like at least a few of the common effects of an acid trip.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#114
post #99

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…

Do read Stanislas Dehaene: Consciousness and the Brain

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#116
post #101
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but if you use it frequently you will.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#117
post #93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post the .tar.gz

I agree

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#118
LSD and psychedelics are the next frontier in science IMHO. And I don't mean just neural science, psychology or psychiatry.

It seems that these substances hold the key to how the brain "produces" reality and that could open doors to areas such as computer-brain interfaces, transfer of consciousness, fully immersive "life-long" virtual reality and so on. But that's just peanuts.

There's the social aspect - psychedelics have had a strong influence on millions of people when they became popular in the '60s, shifting their worldview, which in turn lead to new directions in music, art, film, literature, science and society in general.

Then there is the "ecological" aspect. Many people report "feeling one" or "connected" to everything including other living beings when tripping on psychedelics.

That metaphor persists after coming down and many people become aware of their place in nature, what they eat, how they treat animals and plants and eventually other humans. "Flower power" might just be what's necessary to curb humanity's most stringent problems, such as "climate change".

"Make love not war" hippy slogan will also help given how armed the world is right now. I would add "use condoms !" to it though - there's too many of us here already! :).

The MRI images are a confirmation of the "mind expanding" term used so often in conjunction with these substances.

Maybe "mind expansion" is what's needed in order to combat the "mind shrinking" that is so beneficial to the few, who, with their ignorance and greed, are about to run this ship into the ground.

I'd love to see more research, a lot more research with these substances.

Understanding these links is very important, because right now there is a new, larger, global wave of psychedelic use which is unprecedented.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#119
post #101
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, my first reaction to that statement was that that is not typical. It happens, sure, but for me it is always so fascinating that the MDMA / Ecstacy trips just kind of switch on and off, and everything afterwards is as it was before. Perception of colors, shapes, people... phases back in, but there is no real down phase. The next days are a little drab, maybe, with the serotonin level being rebuild, but not really down, just maybe less party feeling. I never took too big of a dossis though, maybe that's the reason?

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#120
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meditation is a virtue signal, like jogging or being vegetarian. It also tends to go along with a sense of being on a cosmic path toward truth, beauty, and enlightenment...

Ugh, those people. I bet they think that "turbos don't make real horsepower" too.

well, this is the topic of quality vs quantity, and most people including me prefer the former for obvious reasons
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