Veteran's Hospital LSD Testing (1956) [video]

I'm never sure what to make of people praising the therapeutic value and giving statements like "it's like a series of breakthroughs you'd get after years of therapy wrapped up into a couple hours.".

LSD, like other psychedelic drugs (Psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, ...), floods the brain with (mimics of) neurotransmitters, enabling it to make (almost arbitrary) connections. Hence the synesthesia. It's "therapeutic" effect stems from the fact that the brain/mind/consciousness is leaving the treaded paths it usually takes "automatically" and forms (forces) new trains of thoughts.

Hence the fascination: People are used to their brains working in a particular way, sorting your experiences into "proper" categories, and are stunned when they realize that they can actually process information in completely different ways as well. This is what people mean talking about "filters" being "removed". Aldous Huxley popularized this idea in "The doors of Perception".

Different medications like SSRIs have this effect as well, but by magnitudes less strong.

It's a torrent of thought(fragments) that your brain switches through on this drug. There might be some in there that actually help you cope with a problem you had in your life, but there are lot of "useless" bits as well.

So what taking LSD does is giving you a perspective you haven't had before. This might be of therapeutic value, but so can be other experiences you haven't had before. Like living in a monastery in Tibet. Getting a baby. Seeing a fellow soldier getting killed in the field. Not sleeping for 70 hours.

I'm sceptical of the praises because:

* LSD doesn't make your prior brain-structure go away. It softens it and forms new paths, but chances are high that you go back feeling the same and thinking the same as before. True therapeutic progress is always slow and iterative, because that way it is stable and lasting. Slamming the psychedelic hammer onto your mind knocks you out of your path, but the experience can't be integrated that well because it usually is too random. Also the iterative approach (meditating, behavioural therapy) makes your brain actually start to produce the neurotransmitters needed to form the desired thoughts.

* People usually feel really well for some time after taking this. This is logical, because they realized that their mind isn't as immutable and frozen as they were afraid it is. Also on strong serotonergic agents like LSD you also experience bodily effects like low to moderate fever (which you don't feel cause you're somewhere else). This can culminate in a serotonin-syndrome [1] [2]. When coming down from this condition it's naturally that you feel well, like you would "coming down" from food-poisoning.

What I find really interesting are two common emotions/feelings that people on psychedelic drugs experience:

* Spontaneous insight: that all the things they are experiencing are "true", "right", "eternal". Also "sacred" or "holy".

* All the things around are alive, vibrant, conscious.

I would like to know what in the mind actually produces the feeling of "truth" and what in the mind discerns between "conscious" and "unconscious" things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin_syndrome

[2] This is actually the main reason for people dying while partying on MDMA/ecstasy: their organs overheat.

> What do you mean by "slow"? Hours, days, weeks, months, or years?

Depends on the issue, but yes. Weeks to years.

> Singular use of LSD or other 5ht agonists is unlikely to cause serotonin syndrome in lieu of other metabotropic properties which affect the serotonin system.

Technically correct. Diagnostic criteria include temperature > 38 °C for example, so it's only called serotonine-syndrome when symptoms get into the dangerous zone. What LSD does anyway is steering your body into that direction, so you might not have 38°C on LSD, but e.g. 37.4°C. Simply because it affects serotonergic systems and those regulate body-temperature. I'll update my post.

She goes to sleep and dreams every night. People, including "housewives", are way less fragile than you might imagine.

That cuts both ways - people can equally say "I was able to because I never took ."

Without some objective data, there's no way to attribute the abilities and accomplishments to the absence or presence of LSD.

Crick developed his understanding of the structure of LSD during an LSD trip. Steve Jobs developed an active aversion to buttons during one of his LSD trips. These were merely two examples of direct counterpoints to the GGP post. These weren't concepts that were enabled indirectly by LSD; they were the direct results of the LSD trips, not cases of "I was able/not able to do because I took/never took ".