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Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

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Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#11

Post by ams6110 »

poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

Do you mean John Lilly? I'm not finding much about a Robert Lily with regards to "psychedelics" and "cognitive metaprogramming."

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#12

Post by jayherdabell »

meowface wrote: post #10
poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth. Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?

Or she or he wanted to stay anonymous/safe while admitting to the use of psychedelics. If you believe, then why do you doubt?

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#13

Post by poke53281 »

meowface wrote: post #10
poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth. Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?

Yes, this is a dummy account; my regular account here has 4497 karma, but is linked to my real name. The conservatism of some of my clients -- and the fairly public role I sometimes must play -- is such that I'd rather not have my former illegal exploits broadcast quite yet. Hopefully you can understand!

In answer to your question: yes, I very much believe that it can be applied to programming and computer science -- and in fact already has been. Much of the early development of those disciplines was directly influenced by psychedelics.[1] I personally haven't tried to apply psychedelics to programming/CS in the same explicit way as I did for math, but I've found that the general visualisation skills developed over about a decade of fairly steady experimentation -- tripping about 3-4 times per year -- have been invaluable in solving constraints problems, visualising codeflow, etc. But one could argue, in that case, that I might have developed the same skills without psychedelics, since it was a slow development over many years. Whereas in the case of the "mathematics trip", the cognitive change literally happened overnight.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#14

Post by poke53281 »

ams6110 wrote: post #11
poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

Do you mean John Lilly? I'm not finding much about a Robert Lily with regards to "psychedelics" and "cognitive metaprogramming."

Good grief, yes, thanks for catching that! It's late in my timezone... [editing my post now...]

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#16

Post by meowface »

jayherdabell wrote: post #12
meowface wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds quite incredibe. In fact, very incredible, considering you just registered that account and this is your only post. But I believe you may be telling the truth. Do you think the same could be applied for other disciplines, like programming and computer science?

Or she or he wanted to stay anonymous/safe while admitting to the use of psychedelics. If you believe, then why do you doubt?

Creating a throwaway is perfectly reasonable for disclosing something like this. I just remain skeptical of all sorts of claims like these.

But I am leaning towards his telling the truth.

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#17

Post by natdempk »

poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

Could you go into more detail about the trip? I would love to hear about the design of it and how you convinced yourself to love math.

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#19

Post by poke53281 »

natdempk wrote: post #17
poke53281 wrote: post #9

Myself, I used LSD to learn calculus -- or rather, to overcome a lifelong crippling phobia/anxiety of mathematics, which allowed me to rapidly learn calculus. When I was 21, I encountered John Lilly's theories of cognitive metaprogramming with psychedelics, and I designed a trip to convince myself -- at a really primal level -- of the fundamental beauty, power, and accessibility of math. 12 hours after dosing, my fea…

Could you go into more detail about the trip? I would love to hear about the design of it and how you convinced yourself to love math.

Well, I'd always had a love of fractals, without ever truly comprehending how the underlying maths worked. Same goes for cosmology -- utterly fascinated by the outputs, but didn't really understand the actual mechanisms thereof. So during the trip, I used fractal and cosmology images and videos as an emotional "anchor" -- grounding the trip in material I already loved and was comfortable with / fascinated by. I then surrounded those materials with more mathematically technical videos, images, and texts about fractals & cosmology -- the things I traditionally would have shied away from as too mathematical for me to understand; and finally, surrounding that material, I spread out the quite trivial mathematics I was struggling with at the time -- textbooks, homework assignments, etc. The intention was to create a continuum ranging from the mundane to the transcendent, with the hope that when the boundaries dissolved between them, I would understand that they're all really one and the same, and that my enthusiasm for the transcendent could be extended into every corner of mathematics.

This more or less worked as planned, although during the peak of the trip -- I had taken quite a lot of LSD -- my vision got too wobbly to actually make sense of words and numbers, so I put on a video of "Baraka" instead, which seemed comprehensible at the time and somehow in alignment with the whole "transcendent" angle of the trip. As I came down, I moved back to reading chapters of James Gleick's Chaos and finally to doing math homework which had previously irritated the piss out of me -- but now I loved it. That attitudinal switch was instant and permanent.

At the same time as this was a very positive experience for me, it also gave me the a level of respect for LSD such that I don't approve of it being used as an uncontrolled "party" drug. The changes I made to my brain were intentional and beneficial, but I can easily see how somebody who wasn't controlling their environment and intentions could end up bricking their brains on a bad trip. That kind of power is something that should be used with care.

Re: Psychedelics in problem-solving experiment

#20

Post by adbge »

im3w1l wrote: post #4
darkFunction wrote: post #2

Googling around turned up some pretty interesting results from programmers specifically: http://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/1n93n4/the_lsd_m...

Given the subtlety of the effects, I would like to see blinded washout crossover.

Gwern did a convincingly rigorous self-experiment with LSD microdosing. [1] He sums it up as, "No beneficial effects reached statistical-significance and there were worrisome negative trends. LSD microdosing did not help me."

[1] http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing

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