Live data from Hacker News

Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

nature.com

211–220 of 276 posts

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#211
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar thing. My good friend and early college roommate took his own life with a gun after having a bad trip. I wasn’t there for it, but the way he described it he felt ridiculed and deserted by his old high school friends during the trip. He was left alone to deal with these feelings. His mood post trip became increasingly abysmal. He became highly paranoid, and started questioning the loyalty of the people close t…

Access to weapons is also a problem. That could have been a transient event he would have recovered from.

Couldn’t agree more. I’m disappointed that I didn’t include this in the original comment because it was definitely in the back of my mind. As far as I know roughly 2/3rds of the firearm deaths in the US are suicides.

If anything this event further radicalized me into the gun control argument. I have shot a few and they’re fun and all, but at the end of the day it’s impossible to detach the form from the function. They are killing machines. Something as powerful as a firearm should absolutely have a regular psychiatric evaluation attached to it if you insist on owning one.

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the lesson of this story is the danger of having a gun in the home at all. He could have been sober and depressed and did the same just as easily thanks to having access to a gun. There's a lot of statistical evidence for how dangerous situations like depression or domestic violence can become once a gun is nearby.

Like the other child comments I don’t agree with the presupposition that guns are an entity that somehow incites people to commit violent (Which is what you are implying). For example most people have access to cars, statistically much more dangerous than guns, and no one seems to imply that having a car around incites people to violence. People who are mentally ill and dangerous could as easily use any array of comm…

Roughly 2/3rds of firearm deaths in the US are suicides. Do automobiles have the same statistics?

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betting your life to get a hallucination is not worth it even at 1:10000 odds. Guess what - you're missing out on a fentanyl high, so awesome that people sell all they have to get more!

Then you should never step in a vehicle again for the rest of your life, after all, the odds of the average American dying in a vehicle accident every year is 1 in 5000[1]. That doesn't take into account drivers/non-drivers, but I think it's reasonable to assume drivers are at higher risk than pedestrians considering pedestrians make up only a small portion of vehicle-related fatalities [2][3]. I do wonder what the a…

This is a false equivalency. Evaluating risks to some individuals reaction based on incomparable research material is irrational and irrelevant. Consider, mathematically, there are infinities that are not the same as other infinities.

Most people who are licensed to drive are unlikely to have a negative reaction from the act of driving for 2 hours under controlled conditions. The same can not be said (at all) about use of mind altering substances, given the mind cannot necessarily be controlled. Set and setting.

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should never step in a vehicle again for the rest of your life, after all, the odds of the average American dying in a vehicle accident every year is 1 in 5000[1]. That doesn't take into account drivers/non-drivers, but I think it's reasonable to assume drivers are at higher risk than pedestrians considering pedestrians make up only a small portion of vehicle-related fatalities [2][3]. I do wonder what the a…

Where I live it's more palatable 1/22k/year, and a lot of that are thrill seekers on motorcycles, drunk drivers etc. More importantly, driving a car gets me where I want to be, not just triggers an unexpected condition bug in my brain.

There are just a lot of similar risks like these in life. Camp in the wrong place for example and you might lose the ability to eat red meat [1].

I think it's irresponsible to tell people to take this or that drug since we still don't have good numbers on the risks. But I also think telling people to completely abstain is dumb, and the government trying to enforce complete abstinence even more dumb.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/health/alpha-gal-ticks-me...

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#216

While it's amusing in the short term, the long term side effects for me were awful. I felt like my brain was slow and unfocused, I was no longer quick in conversation or able to concentrate as well as usual, I felt disconnected from myself, sort of like when you recall a memory so old that it seems like it belongs to someone else, I had a headache for almost 3 weeks. Throwing this in here as there are a fair few "dud…

People who are fucked up and take drugs and find it tolerable because they feel less fucked up will likely always assume the same is true of others. That is likely from the effect of having low empathy for the outliers.

Risk taking is not something to advise others to practice in. It is for each and every person to evaluate their own risk tolerance and not have them influenced by those who took risks and came out the other side "for the better".

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#217
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mushrooms are very contradictory in their nature to the modern "cog in the machine" lifestyle. It's a bit like being subjected to a software fuzzer. I imagine if learning from one's inputs, one will be afterwards less sure of concepts one was very sure about, but also less sure about concepts thought previously to be impossible. That will surely increase cognitive load, especially when one's life is pretty straightfo…

Agreed. Before a controlled high dose Psilocybin experience I "felt" my emotions: Anger, Fear, Frustration. Afterwards, I gained the ability to observe and "catch" my emotions in-flight. Not sure if it was neuroplasticity induced by the substance, or "you don't know what your brain can do until you know it". I liken it to previously having Ring 1 access to my thoughts, now I have Ring 0 access. Definitely persistent:…

Sounds a lot like vipassana meditation. I equated it to an "overwatch VM".

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I read about shroom usage in ancient times, it almost always has some type of guidance and ceremony associated with it. The laws have turned it into something taboo and then people often start consuming psychedelics in a weird and suspicious way to begin with...because it's not legal potentially leading to more and more bad trips. Meditation is similar, often seemed to be associated with guidance from someon…

What is the name of the book?

The Joy of Living by Mingyur Rinpoche. I was like "what's this nice innocent book, how wonderful sounding"...

It was a great book, but the way I thought about myself was let's say, very incompatible with the Buddhist ideas about self. The words I read in that book were undeniably true, and it shocked me.

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should never step in a vehicle again for the rest of your life, after all, the odds of the average American dying in a vehicle accident every year is 1 in 5000[1]. That doesn't take into account drivers/non-drivers, but I think it's reasonable to assume drivers are at higher risk than pedestrians considering pedestrians make up only a small portion of vehicle-related fatalities [2][3]. I do wonder what the a…

This is a false equivalency. Evaluating risks to some individuals reaction based on incomparable research material is irrational and irrelevant. Consider, mathematically, there are infinities that are not the same as other infinities. Most people who are licensed to drive are unlikely to have a negative reaction from the act of driving for 2 hours under controlled conditions. The same can not be said (at all) about u…

I don't think it's entirely incomparable. You can't control the other drivers on the road either.

Also, you can control your own dose. I've never heard of anyone encountering any long term side effects from trying a single low dose of psilocybin. Especially since some studies show that very low doses aren't any different than placebo.

Then again most people don't start with a very low dose and ramp up slowly because people are human and do dumb things.

Re: Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

#220
post #176
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When someone decides to do it, they will try, and there are things worse than dying. Science disagrees. Many attempts are impulsive and a minor hurdle can be enough to stop them.

To have been stopped by a minor hurdle one must necessarily have started. It seems like you mean to disagree with the idea that "there are things worse than dying" and I expect they meant being maimed can be thought of as worse than being successful, due to the long-term personal consequences.

This argument makes sense semantically, but not in practice. Consider these two people

"I should kill myself" grabs gun and fires

"I should kill myself. I'll go buy some poison pills tomorrow." feels better the next day and never actually does

Post reply on HN