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LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

biorxiv.org

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Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#121

Post by dmt0 »

throwaway64389 wrote: post #24

Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip. I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that ta…

“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”

https://youtu.be/DWpzT56nxZI?t=71

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#124

Post by shrimp_emoji »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #80
sammalloy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the literature, for example, who come to the realization that both the jailer and the jailed are the same. Jack Kornfi…

I'm an atheist (post-mormon) but I do consider it "spiritual" but I hate religion, so I don't group it in there, but I've been having some sort of "awakening" ... I'm not fully atheist though I guess, I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth... Something something... I ca…

>I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth...

Why did they need to exist before they were generated here? Firefox didn't float through space before people invented computers and wrote it up in 2002.

By the anthropic principle, we happened to start here, of all possible places, in our heads, of all possible heads, and will end here. What's beautiful, I think, is being okay with that, and overcoming ego enough to realize how petty and small our differences from each other are -- you from me, us from Ancient Romans 2000 years ago, and us from the uncountable consciousnesses 2000 years from now, which will be witness to wonders we can only dream about. The local tragedy of death is a momentary drop of sorrow in an global ocean of adventure and beauty, experienced by people whose difference from ourselves and each other is a different sensory feed and a lonely, selfish conceit of the self. :p

You only need an afterlife insofar as you can't overcome the ego to empathize with those who come after you as much as you do with yourself.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#125

Post by esperent »

______- wrote: post #88

I never hallucinated after trying shrooms, even at high doses. I found this odd, since I have read about countless people saying they saw stuff that wasn't there or saw colorful fractal geometry. So my conclusion is that shrooms simply increased my perception and allowed in more information, and that all this fractal geometry is already there , just waiting to be discovered. It's just like tuning into a higher freque…

I think it really depends on the type of lsd/shroom.

Myself and some friends recently came into a new batch of acid. I don't usually have major visuals but with this batch I really do, and so does everyone else who takes it. Eyes open and the whole room has turned into a beautiful shifting geometric fractal pattern. When I closed my eyes it was even more intense, incredibly colorful, beautiful, sexual, shifting fractal geometries. It really felt like I had stepped into one of those AI art generators except far more coherent and personally meaningful.

Also I had the opportunity to try DMT a few months ago and that really did take me to another reality (not literally of course). Incredible, beautiful multi-sensory experience that I won't try to explain here, however the visual and auditory components were extremely intense.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#126

Post by danwills »

josephcsible wrote: post #105
type0 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the concept of "illegal consciousness" fascinating

You misparsed the sentence. "illegal" and "consciousness altering" both modify "drugs". "illegal" doesn't modify "consciousness".

I agree that's the intended sense of what was said, but what a fascinating side-track! I can readily imagine the idea of illegal "states of mind" (1984/Orwell style: simply things the state made a law stating that it's illegal to think or whatever) but the idea of illegal consciousness is much more bizarre!

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#127

Post by 52-6F-62 »

dorkmind wrote: post #113
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terence McKenna would often say all sorts of crazy-sounding things but he never struck me as someone who took himself too seriously. Here's a short clip [0] which I believe perfectly captures his essence; at the end you can hear him laugh at himself and his story. Edit: I've enjoyed listening to many hours of Terence McKenna speaking, but I wouldn't recommend swallowing all of his pills. [0] https://www.youtube.com/w…

What is the Tao-drug connection? I feel like this is a case of Orientalism where Western drug culture is getting in the way of popular perception of Taoism, especially Chuang Tzu. Why aren't intellectual snobs trading in-jokes about Taoism and Zen and Mahayana Buddhism and the Diamond Sutra? It's like they ceded a huge swath of territory to the stoners, and for no good reason, I might add. Why is there no popular Tao…

Hippies are marginalized?

I thought all of that movement has been more or less mainstreamed over the past forty years.

This isn’t exactly Crowley’s England.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#128

Post by IIAOPSW »

int_19h wrote: post #91
motohagiography wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important description, as when you think of a chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to signals in your brain, and a lot of the geometric and fractal artifacts we see resemble noise artifacts you would get from interfering with other analogue signals. Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is de…

I'm very skeptical of this interpretation, if only because LSD doesn't just (or even mostly) cause "noise" hallucinations. It makes you actually notice the tiny details and patterns in everyday things. Not a different reality so much so as a deeper awareness and appreciation of the reality normally perceived.

I'm very nodding-along with this interpretation, but only because when I closed my eyes I realized that what I saw looked like the normal after image of staring at a lightbulb but shoved through some form of Fourier space filter. I came to this revelation that the entire experience, the sense of time, the visual distortions, the losing trains of thought, all of it could be explained if brain waves are representations of repeating patterns at that same time scale. The acid simply damps or phase shifts the larger time scales. Visual signals become time series in a manner similar to analogue TV.

The opposite of tiny detail happens. I looked at a brick wall and all the bricks were identical. Like lazy copy paste game texture identical. I knew that the bricks weren't actually like that. You see patterns in things because the frequency resolution needed to encode the difference is cut off. The result is like a JPEG artifact but instead of localized square pixelation you get globalized crystal pixelization. Everything looks like it fits a crystal pattern. Especially random noise. Here is some noise that worked particularly well one time. https://ibb.co/D1rd6bN

You can't tell me you are seeing patters that are really there in literal randomness.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#129

Post by lostmsu »

sammalloy wrote: post #41
thebas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. I experienced it myself after trying magic mushroom: We are all one being(we call it the universe), it's consciousness subdivided between us all in order to escape it's solitude. It was scary at the time believing this sad possibility. I'm not so sure but the thought remains. Also follows: whatever you do to me you will be experiencing it.

> I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the literature, for example, who come to the realization that both the jailer and the jailed are the same. Jack Kornfi…

> ultimate truths

OMG man, this is delusional. We are not all the same person. To be specific, you and I are not the same person by any reasonable non-trivial definition of a person. We may only be parts of some larger entity (duh) like humanity, which may or may not be considered a person (separate from us, its parts) depending on definition you choose.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#130

Post by nabla9 »

vkomega wrote: post #103
nabla9 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips. This seems to be weird legend with very little fact behind it. > claim LSD is safe. Obliviously nothing is perfectly safe, but pharmacologicallly LSD is the safest drug there is. Safer than Aspirin. It's virtually impossible to overdose it, it's not toxic and LD50 is way 10^5 - 10^6 times of what is…

People who I knew long ago took LSD and wound up going crazy. They weren't the same. It's not weird legend. Safety in terms of physical overdose isn't the only metric.

Sigh. I accidentally tried to engage with 15 days old account.

Remember people, check first.

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