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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

#141

Post by tgflynn »

rpearl wrote: post #78
superswordfish wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we're humans and our foremost means of communication is language. Who cares if it's clumsy and imprecise? Try us, it's the best we've got. Saying it's ineffable is lazy. Unless you're talking about the centerpiece of your religion, I suppose, so I thought parent was suggesting that this person had stumbled upon the Tao. Edit: My comments are getting hammered into oblivion, forbid somebody should try to hold somet…

Okay, I'm going to try to articulate the experience? Again, words are insufficient, but here are more of them.[1] So here goes: In the day-to-day life you experience a boundary between that which we consider 'self' and that which we consider 'other'. That boundary gives the environment shape , defined by what you know to be you. To say the same thing another way, the boundary is the difference between seeing the colo…

In the day-to-day life you experience a boundary between that which we consider 'self' and that which we consider 'other'. That boundary gives the environment shape, defined by what you know to be you.

To say the same thing another way, the boundary is the difference between seeing the color blue, and describing it.

I think I understand (to some degree) what you mean by each of these statements. The first seems to relate to the Buddhist concept of non-self (at least to the degree that you perceive the boundary of self to be relative rather than a well-defined absolute) while the second I think relates to the nama-rupa distinction or in other systems to the notion of qualia as opposed to abstract descriptive knowledge.

However it isn't clear to me that these are the same thing. Could you clarify how you understand the relation between these two notions ?

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#142

Post by stared »

See also how brain connectivity gets changed by psilocybin (magic mushrooms): http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/psilocybin-changes-b... (and the actual paper: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/201408...).

In short: you get more long-range correlations, so the perceived synesthesia may have very "hardware" basis.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#143

Post by lovemenot »

superswordfish wrote: post #57
rosser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you're saying the parent commenter was made aware of the Tao? No, he's saying, "Some things are ineffable." — in exactly so many words. There are experiences we can have that simply can not be articulated in something as clumsy and imprecise as language. The same word can mean subtly different things to the parties of a single conversation, and this kind of thing is pretty much all subtlety. The experiences you…

But we're humans and our foremost means of communication is language. Who cares if it's clumsy and imprecise? Try us, it's the best we've got. Saying it's ineffable is lazy. Unless you're talking about the centerpiece of your religion, I suppose, so I thought parent was suggesting that this person had stumbled upon the Tao. Edit: My comments are getting hammered into oblivion, forbid somebody should try to hold somet…

Whilst we're on the subject of language it would be a little enlightening if you'd tell me the meaning of "woo".

It is not a word I see often, but whenever I have seen it (never yet heard) it seems like someone wishes to push ideas they cannot or will not grasp into an objective category such as "things I and other straight thinking individuals like Feynmann know to be empirically bullshit".

Was this the way you intended to used term "woo" here?

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#144

Post by DominikR »

kough wrote: post #17
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…

Sorry to hear about that :( The first time I took LSD (not hallucinogens in general, but LSD) went sort of similarly for me. Of course a life provides many confounding factors, but I ended up depressed and anxious for about three or four months afterwards. Took me a while to work my way out of it. I still think it was a worthwhile experience, but my symptoms weren't as bad as yours sound. I hope you're making a good…

I just don't get it why anyone would try a second or third time after you already had 3-4 months of depression and anxiety after the first trip?

For me that would mean the end of my business and on top of that it would certainly hurt my relationships with other people.

No way I'd ever do such a gamble.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#145

Post by duncan_bayne »

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…

> I have a ton of weird files that I wrote in VIM while I was tripping most heavily.

Which of course is the normal state for anyone who uses VIM by choice ;-)

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#146

Post by Mahn »

codebolt wrote: post #130
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…

Personally, I'm not really worried about death at all. Having spent years of my life studying physics and coming to the conclusion that an eternalistic view of (space-)time is more likely correct, as seems to be implied by the theory of relativity, I know that my life here on earth won't disappear as a consequence of death, and this gives me solace. I absolutely detest psychedelic drugs though, they nearly ruined my…

> an eternalistic view of (space-)time is more likely correct, as seems to be implied by the theory of relativity, I know that my life here on earth won't disappear as a consequence of death

Can you expand on this? Do you mean to say that your life won't disappear because you'll always exist at a specific point in time space?

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#148

Post by duncan_bayne »

meric wrote: post #129
wutf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@nefitty, you posit that the diminishment of the self is a "permanent positive change." But you didn't provide any evidence. The reductio of your argument is that it's better to just be matter, since no self is involved. Few will agree with you.

Most people enjoy being content, fulfilled, and just being themselves. A tree is usually content to sit still most years. A rock, even more so. They sit there and are content and fulfilled. They're being themselves, without having to make a move.

Humans are not rocks, nor are we trees. Our nature demands growth, change and action in order for us to flourish.

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#149

Post by mettamage »

omginternets wrote: post #125

I'm a Ph.D student in Cognitive Science and I'm currently writing my dissertation on the topic of conscious perception. I think this study is pretty damn interesting because the cingulate cortex (ACC & PCC) along with the thalamus are implicated in states of consciousness (i.e. wake/sleep/coma/vegetation/etc) and also in "access consciousness" (i.e.: “consciousness” in the sense of “I am conscious ​ of ​ such and suc…

I forgot where I read the idea but some neuroscientists proposed that consciousness in the brain is more a measure of interconnectivity of activated brain regions. Basically, whatever brain region communicates with each other allows for mixed matching, whatever that brain region does (synesthetic people are very concrete examples of this).

What do you think? Could this be true?

I find it interesting to consider but have a hard time understanding how the brainstem fits into this.

-- psych. & computer science student with a strong interest in cognitive science & neuroscience

Re: Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

#150

Post by altotrees »

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…

"Sometimes though, when I really think about the inevitability of dying it's still hard to go to sleep."

I totally understand this sentiment. Thinking about death in life's quiet moments is almost like thinking about an absurdly complex problem set, for which there is no one right answer, and maybe one that needs no answer.

I have never tried psychedelics, but my idea of death was altered recently when a friend was diagnosed with stage IV throat cancer. He went from relatively healthy to "weeks to live" within a span of days. It shook me, obviously and shifted something in my perception.

This is why I steer clear of psychedelics...I fear that I could lose my ability to attempt to reason about such events. It is also why I don't drink. I feel like I need to be able to "control" such shifts. Sometimes though, I feel that this idea of control is a total illusion, or a coping mechanism.

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