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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

#61

Post by sammalloy »

vkomega wrote: post #43
nabla9 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will psychedelics be ‘a revolution in psychiatry’? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-021-00087-7 The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression“, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994 Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depres…

Great, thanks for the objective response. My inquiry was substantially downvoted. How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD? I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips. It wasn't clear from family history or medical history that they were at-risk for such a reaction. At least based on these outcomes, it might…

> How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD?

Family history of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia.

> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips.

I think those stories are overblown. People like to have something to blame for when a loved one goes down the wrong path.

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

#62

Post by motohagiography »

andrekandre wrote: post #54
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…

and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not do you mean to say "its not a big deal" or "its ends up not being a big deal to most people" ? it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...

It's that the discovery that our personal coherence and experience is very narrow, is very jarring when we haven't experienced it before and haven't developed cognitive tools to manage that. It's like discovering that from some other perspective that exists in the substrate, it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song. If the sudden apprehension that we may be this absurd isn't belly laugh funny, I am confident that someone else especially finds this fact of us not finding it funny even funnier. There's nothing we can do about it, so you just appreciate it for what it is, relieve suffering where you can, and be excited about what else you couldn't have known.

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

#63

Post by patcon »

motohagiography wrote: post #39
Animats wrote: post #4

Well, 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…

This is a really wonderful comment and i find it very thought-provoking.

I haven't had much in the way of trips, but it resonates a ton with my own emerging understanding of base-reality, if i can call it that

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

#64

Post by Apocryphon »

thebas wrote: post #33
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…

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.

Is it common because it's some sort of profound mystic realization, or just an expected replicable biochemical reaction?

One can experience fractal sensations from a strong cannabis high, are psychedelic ones any qualitatively different? Maybe that's just the way our minds are supposed to bend.

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

#65

Post by mikelevins »

booerino wrote: post #60

I 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.

There's some amount of social stigma associated with LSD and other psychedelics, but it seems to have faded away quite a bit since I used it in the late 1970s. Back then, and for some years afterward, the stigma was pretty strong. Admitting that you had used psychedelics was tantamount to admitting that you were crazy and possibly dangerous in many social circles. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be so much the case anymore.

I've personally never minded admitting that I used psychedelics in the late 70s, but at that time I was accustomed to be seen as a weirdo and an outsider. Indeed, I was so accustomed to it that I didn't even realize that's what was happening. I didn't find out what it was like to be treated as someone ordinary until I took a job with Apple and moved to the SF Bay Area.

I liked LSD and other psychedelics a lot in the late 70s, and used them a lot--enough to find out how often I could take them without tolerance reducing their effects noticeably. I gave up psychedelics and pretty much all other mind-altering substances in the first half of the 1980s. I never liked anything other than psychedelics as much as I liked them.

Of the other substances I experimented with, I liked cannabis best, but I gave it up, too. The best reason I can articulate is that I was no longer getting anything new from them and, as the fellow said, when you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.

I do still drink the odd glass of whiskey or port or champagne once or twice a year, but that's because I like the sensations of drinking them. I try to avoid drinking enough to get tipsy.

I never cared all that much for drugs that are supposed to make you feel good.

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

#66

Post by patcon »

motohagiography wrote: post #62
andrekandre wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not do you mean to say "its not a big deal" or "its ends up not being a big deal to most people" ? it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...

It's that the discovery that our personal coherence and experience is very narrow, is very jarring when we haven't experienced it before and haven't developed cognitive tools to manage that. It's like discovering that from some other perspective that exists in the substrate, it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song. If the sudden apprehension that we ma…

> it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song

YES. I've been following some threads related to the Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has carved out and evolved an ecological niche inside of an specific area of a biological host organism: the human mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech and biology... but we're ALREADY an organic cyborg of language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well. Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best for what we are.

Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens, I've been trying to see the way that our stories and narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find these other things more "disposable" and we feel less kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-coded to sense it as well...

And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate" btw.

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

#67

Post by jliptzin »

marosgrego wrote: post #45
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.

What is sad about it? It seems liberating to me.

Maybe it’s sad if you routinely go around treating other people like shit…

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

#68

Post by throwaway726665 »

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…

Had the same exact experience a year ago on my first trip.

We’re all the same person = experiencing one-ness/ego death.

For a lot of people it adds magic into their lives. For my materialist mind, not as much. Just confusion.

I think it gave me what Jordan Peterson calls ontological shock. Having OCD doesn’t help since I now obsess about it and I also suspect it made me feel derealized.

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

#69

Post by gherkinnn »

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…

> Many people tend to toss these things into religion or spirituality

It is a shame that interesting and/or valuable aspects of our lives are held hostage by (what I see as) irritating cults.

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

#70

Post by rantwasp »

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…

http://galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
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