Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
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Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#2Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#3Lone and meandering article refusing to get to the point promised in the headline.
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#4Lone and meandering article refusing to get to the point promised in the headline.
Yeah, just skimmed it and it comes down to:
Psychadelics seem to have the ability to leave the user (after the actual 'trip' has worn off) in a state of heightened receptiveness for a long duration (length is different dependent on the drug, but counts weeks in some cases). This state is called a 'critical period' and is usually experienced in childhood.
This state might allow for easier digestion of new material, forming new habits or skills or allow the user to be taken advantage of (Charles Manson, and his LSD fueled cult, is mentioned in this regard).
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#5Lone and meandering article refusing to get to the point promised in the headline.
This publication by the same scientists is probably more interesting:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3
"Here we demonstrate in mice that the ability to reopen the social reward learning critical period is a shared property across psychedelic drugs."
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#6The headline sounds exactly like the premise of Crouch's Recursion.
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#7Interesting factoid in the preamble: the biochemical basis of the addictive nature of social media?
> "Oxytocin and serotonin, she found, work together in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens to produce the good feelings that come from social interaction."
LSD and similar drugs can definitely improve one's 3D-visualization capabilities, but I think this requires putting in a fair amount of work on the concepts beforehand. It's reminiscent of the saying, 'chance favors the prepared mind', so if you spend say a month working extensively with 3D models of molecules, proteins, platonic solids and what not and then (under controlled conditions) ingest a psychedelic, a cognitive breakthrough is possible, such as gaining the ability to visualize what a 3D object looks like after successive x-, y-, z- axis rotations and so on, which is useful skill in many fields, from auto mechanic to protein chemist to structural architect.
Nice to see this subject finally being studied in a rigorous manner, at least.
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#8"There is, of course, a catch. For mice, having a critical period open for too long causes neural disruptions. Some experts fear that, for people, carelessly flinging wide the doors of personal development could put the very core of their identity in jeopardy by erasing the habits and memories that make them them. A critical period is also a time of vulnerability. While childhood can be filled with wonder and magic, children are also more impressionable. “We can really screw kids up much more than we can adults,” she says. This is why responsible adults intuitively know to protect children from exposure to potentially scary or disturbing material. Or, as Dölen puts it, “You want to teach children new things, but you don’t want them to learn Japanese from Japanese porn.”
An adult who undergoes this kind of treatment to heal PTSD could, in the wrong hands, end up traumatized further. In the worst scenarios, patients could be vulnerable to abuse. Unscrupulous therapists or other predators could try to use psychedelics to manipulate others, Dölen says. This is more than paranoid speculation. Quite a few experts, Dölen included, think that Charles Manson’s ability to completely brainwash his followers relied on the high doses of LSD he regularly gave them prior to bombarding their minds with hate-filled lectures and murderous orders."
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#9There is so much psychedelic research happening right now. But when will it reach patients outside of trials?
Re: Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
#10Lone and meandering article refusing to get to the point promised in the headline.
Yeah, just skimmed it and it comes down to: Psychadelics seem to have the ability to leave the user (after the actual 'trip' has worn off) in a state of heightened receptiveness for a long duration (length is different dependent on the drug, but counts weeks in some cases). This state is called a 'critical period' and is usually experienced in childhood. This state might allow for easier digestion of new material, fo…
It's worth noting this is not new knowledge, it's completely obvious to anyone who's tried psychedelics. I haven't properly dug through the paper for all the details yet, maybe there's some interesting nuggets of new insight in there.
But so far it's looking like this is further confirming what us psychonauts have always sort of understood. It's very encouraging to get rigorous science to back the intuition up though. It will obviously help guide future research in clinical applications.
Here's the actual most recent research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3