There's a company called MindMed that's doing clinical trials with Psilocybin/LSD/MDMA and finding that micro-dosing has really positive benefits on human disorders linked to the brain (depression, PTSD, etc). Could be huge to harness the power of these drugs for the benefit of humanity.
LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
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Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#52Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
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…
For me the (rather strong) trips from mushrooms showed me how some part of the brain (not sure which one though) is very good at interpolating bits and pieces of reality when there is no longer strong coming in via our senses. Its a blurry picture of reality, but the blur isn't the loss of detail but rather its fractalization (which in the end is the opposite of it).
The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such a unique take on it.
And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very consistent interconnected trip).
Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that don't give full picture or don't make much sense.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#53Anecdata: 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…
What did you do next? :)
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#54Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
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…
and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not
it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#55Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
You can look at the EEG spectrogram or calculate its spectral entropy. When you think hard, it resembles white noise and has high entropy. If you close your eyes and relax, it gets more regular and entropy goes down. I've done this myself. And we've known about alpha and delta waves etc for more than a century. When you fall asleep, the signal goes more towards a sine wave, ie less entropy.
Many of these complexity or information content metrics work in similar ways. You can even turn EEG recordings from medical operations with anesthesia to a sound and listen to them. The frequencies are of course very low so you must speed it up. You can clearly say when the person fell asleep. A waterfall turns into a hum.
It makes sense, if you're making measurements of a complex system, of course white noise like results are more probable if there's actually something significant going on, than a simple sine wave. Or picture the modem calling sound. The low data rates are simple waves but the high data rate resembles white noise.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#56Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
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…
It's all the more interesting because consciousness itself is often described as a consequence of a sensory loop on the brain. The book "I am a strange a loop" goes into detail about this theory.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#57Earlier 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…
The boring possibility is that humans have to self-generate an ego- babies don't really know the difference between themselves and other people, it's one of the recognized developmental stages. So in unusual situations it's maybe not surprising that that particular ability could get disrupted, it might actually be quite fragile.
Agreed. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough, particularly when you read the reports of people identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even rocks. At that point, there might be another mechanism at work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy (or juvenile) to look back and reflect on everything around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but as one continuous form? Maybe the problem isn't what we are experiencing, but how we think about it.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#58Anecdata: 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…
I think this is the way your brain decides things: by replaying events slightly differently, and choosing the best option.
And if that is the way the brain works, then that is the way you would make sense of the world.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#59I decided to start a career in programming and IT oneday at 21 on a LSD bad trip from hell. It was really an eye opening trip and just realized this would be the best possible career path to take. I have never looked back since.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#60I like LSD quite a lot but have a hard time talking about it. I find it kind of highly embarrassing for some reason. Afraid of being judged a freak (I look and act pretty odd, but it's not because of LSD).
I am baffled how open some people are. I guess this is the curse of having conservative family you'd not like to upset.