I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feelings as well as the hallucinations came and went together for me. After about 1-2 years I was completely back to normal. During that time I still microdosed occasionally, but that didn't seem to have any effect on those symptoms either way. I didn't have experience anything like that until I took pretty large doses (>200ug). I was taking 100ug doses on a regular basis without having any lasting effects, it appeared to me that the high doses came with the aftereffects. I also didn't experience anything like that with psilocin (mushrooms). I'm willing to answer any questions about my experience if anyone has any
Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.
In those books you relax and are able to see the image through the chaos.
The same can be said for when you are on these types of drugs, or at least for me personally. When I was able to relax and let my mind go, the hallucinations and visuals would come at a greater intensity. If I needed to, I was able to snap out of it by focusing my mind on the moment and tangible reality in front of me.
When I was leading a few people on their first experience I explained this to them, that if they are unable to relax and let go, the visuals would not come as quickly or be as intense. Do not be afraid, relax and let go and if needed you can ground yourself back if you have a decent mind and didn't take an amount larger than you can handle.
I didn’t realize this was a thing! I’m generally able to do this too, especially when meditating. It started after trying psychedelics in college, which probably ‘activated’ something in my brain that said “you can make the carpet swirl”. It’s sort of like looking at a Magic Eye photo. I just tried to do it now, but having just woke up, I don’t think I can concentrate enough to do it.
How early did your parents start you on meditation?
I honestly don't remember exactly where, but I was reading a wiki for psychonauts once and it provided a scale for the potency of a dose (e.g. No effect, threshold, etc) and the metric they used was the observer's ability to consciously resist the effects of the drug - kind of like when you're drunk or stoned and try to "force" yourself to sober up.
I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.
>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.
>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]
I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]
I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]
In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?
> “Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
What message, if any, were you looking for during your psychedelic explorations? Did you receive it?
The experience of ego-softening, or even complete ego-death, is something that some psychedelics bring to their users. LSD, mushrooms and especially DMT does this.
Many normal humans will not know that this experience is even possible, or might dismiss it straight off as humbo jumbo. (Many drug users that did the drugs just for fun will get this as a sort of surprise gift. Sometimes they dismiss it despite having experienced it, sadly.)
Once one have experienced this a couple of times, it is possible to learn whereto steer the mind during normal meditation. It is possible, although it requires skill, to come there with normal sober meditation.
Derealization/depersonalization (known as DPDR) is a defense mechanism against painful sensory input - typically fear and/or anxiety. You brain sort of attenuates the external world and goes inside itself like a turtle that thinks it’s in danger. The state normally occurs in response to dangerous or traumatic situations (you often hear about out of body experiences in these situations), but particularly traumatic experiences (often from hallucinogens, abuse, war, etc) can cause a sort of sensitization that makes DPDR chronic.
> I also didn't experience anything like that with psilocin (mushrooms).
A guy once told me that he was suffering from a severe form of HPPD for months. It was slowly driving him crazy, but the symptoms disappeared immediately after he consumed psilocybin.
So I wonder: psychedelics make you more likely to believe woo, and more likely to have certain classes of visual hallucinations. But some people believe woo without taking psychedelics, and some people have those same visual hallucinations without taking psychedelics.
Interesting, I believe it and have always wondered about this. I think people's sensory experiences vary wildly by nature, but we have no access to them so can't really prove anything.
Some people are audiophiles, others foodies, others fashionistas, etc.
Your athletic ability can vary from Usain Bolt to completely uncoordinated; some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).
Some people are prediposed to like drugs and others don't. (e.g. reading a lot of rock n' roll biographies it becomes apparent that the alcohol and heroin addictions aren't randomly distributed; it's somewhat "innate")
It would be surprising if our sensory experiences did NOT vary widely.
This sounds silly and is totally unsubstantiated, but I always believed my senses are "accurate". I told a friend in high school this and he said it was stupid and impossible :)
----
Although I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep. I imagine that's pretty normal/common since low light is sort of like sensory deprivation.
But they are very elaborate hallucations with all sorts of geometric forms and motion. Elaborate but not intense, if that makes sense.
> Although I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep. I imagine that's pretty normal/common since low light is sort of like sensory deprivation.
Me too, and it's definitely a result of taking psychedelics. I quite like it. I suspect that I could have always made those CEVs appear, but I didn't "know how" until taking psychedelics.
In other words, I have the distinct impression that it's a new skill I learned by psychedelics, but not a forced change caused by the drugs. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it feels like.
When I'm falling asleep, I know if I'm fully relaxed and ready to drift off to sleep when I can just "accept" the visuals without trying to process them. Somehow "letting go" of psychedelic visuals makes them more prominent, and for some reason, that leads to good sleep.
I also notice floaters way more, and I know those were always there, but now I notice them.
And I need way less weed to get as high as I want to be. I think before taking psychedelics, I felt like I was smoking weed to try to achieve something. After achieving whatever that mental goal was on psychedelics, I just don't need to smoke as much anymore.
Weird drugs for sure, but I don't regret taking them.
> Me too, and it's definitely a result of taking psychedelics. I quite like it. I suspect that I could have always made those CEVs appear, but I didn't "know how" until taking psychedelics.
Me too and it's probably not a result of taking psychedelics; as I've never tried them recreationally. I did, however, have vivid hallucinations as a result of Nitrous oxide at the dentist office as a child.
I don't think I see floaters, as my vision doesn't require correction. They also seem unrelated to afterimage.
I thought these were more common, but after some research, most people only see these after applying some pressure, such as rubbing their eyes. Interesting stuff.
This is absolutely fascinating. Not too long ago I thought that everyone experienced level 3, and occasionally level 4 effects, but I learned that my friends did not. The first link says that it's rare without psychedelic drugs. I've never tried any psychedelics, but I regularly experience level 3 effects, and occasionally level 4 ones too. I can't remember a time when I didn't.
I also frequently experience/remember hypnagogia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia), which I previously did not know the name of. I absolutely love experiencing it, as it's often euphoric, although it can sometimes be terrifying and stressful.
> I think people's sensory experiences vary wildly by nature, but we have no access to them so can't really prove anything.
> ... some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).
Many of these sensory experiences can be empirically and objectively analyzed. For example, photographic memory is not a real thing. Nobody has ever shown the ability to recall particular details of a scene which they hadn't already focused or been cued on. There's been considerable, sincere effort invested in testing these claims, both in claimants and random individuals. (There are people who remember endless amounts of seemingly non-episodic daily trivia of their everyday life for literally every day of their life, but this isn't photographic memory and definitely doesn't describe LeBron James.)
Large number mental arithmetic and recitation of long strings (or other trivia) is a learnable skill, though many people develop the skill independently, many of whom describe their techniques in a manner that comports with well-known techniques.
Sources: "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by an American journalist who became the American Memory Champion as part of his research; "Your memory: how it works and how to improve it" by Kenneth L. Higbee, a professor of psychology who has a personal interest in mnemonics techniques; and "The Art of Memory" by Frances A. Yates who traces the historical practice of the Method of Loci from Ancient Greece and its transformation into esotericism by the time of the Renaissance.
Of course, there's no accounting for people who believe and feel they have a photographic memory[1], just like there can be no accounting for people who believe they're being personally surveilled 24/7 by hidden cameras everywhere. But that doesn't mean I have to accept that there are some people who are actually inexplicably and secretly being surveilled; left to wonder why I'm so lucky/unlucky.
Conversely, there are some people with a real, extraordinary sense, like tetrachromats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans), who have a fourth peak in their color spectrum reception. They see the world in much richer color than normal humans, and this has been empiricallyverified.
[1] Indeed, I'm pretty sure most people (myself included) feel like they can shut their eyes and retain a photographic picture of a scene. I was told I had a photographic memory by many different teachers, going back to at least third grade. But, again, it doesn't stand up to scientific experimentation. And I never believed my teachers as it was always self-evident to me that while I may have remembered more seemingly esoteric facts or events than they did, it was because I had consciously found those things curious, however briefly. (As an adult I was diagnosed with ADHD, which perhaps goes a long way to explaining why so many things caught my attention.)
> Your athletic ability can vary from Usain Bolt to completely uncoordinated; some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).
I'm going to quibble with you. When you say that individual humans vary widely, you're mostly assuming a baseline scale of typical human variation. Which is basically begging the question. Of course the fastest or smartest people look very extreme, when you're implicitly comparing them to typical people.
Usain Bolt is very fast for a human. But he's slower than the average housecat. On the flip side some people have really good memories. But even the dumbest humans manage to remember a huge number of symbols compared to what a chimp's capable of. Same for virtually everything else you listed. Food taste, aesthetic preferences, auditory capabilities, intoxicant consumption, etc.
Normal human variance is swamped by variance between different animal species. This is mostly invisible to us, because most of our day-to-day interactions are with other people. Not exotic organisms.
So I would guess just the opposite. I believe that sensory experiences across different people are very likely to be substantially similar. At least compared to an alien species, or AI, or even just an intelligence from a distant evolutionary branch (like an octopus).
I see what you're saying, but he is claiming that some people might literally see auras around other people.
Or the other person sees a literal grid in her visual field all the time and projects meaning onto it.
And that's within normal human variation. Sure you can imagine that bats or octopuses have much weirder subjective experiences.
But it's still not something that's widely recognized. They would likely say if you literally see auras then you must be a crazy, non-functioning person, when really it's just a quirk of your perception that is invisible to everyone else.
Iirc those symbols in your vision with your eyes closed aren’t hallucinations. They’re reflective of the blood pressure and flow around your eye/eye lid. Though I definitely have an ability to relax by paying attention to them. I can’t offer a source for this though.
But the degree to which they turn into "hallucinations" varies.
By that I mean very elaborate geometric shapes with a lot of motion and rotation. Sort of like a Persian rug in 3D and 4D (time), with a lot of scale. Fractals, etc.
I suspect there is some common physiological reason why people find fractals "trippy" and say pictures of cars in traffic are not "trippy".
Drugs tickle your brain in a certain ways, but as the OP suggests, they're not the only way your brain can be tickled like that. And some brains are more predisposed to such hallucinations than others.
The phenomenon you describe affects the phenomenon GP describes, but they are different phenomenon. Also, if you have relatively strong bloodflow you can see these fluctuations while staring at a white wall.
The colors themselves aren’t. However if you have even mild HPPD they take more complex forms (esp faces) and switch rapidly, like one face morphing into another
Some people hallucinate without drugs. There's a range of this, in terms of intensity and type.
Some people take drugs.
They tend to onset around the same age (adolescence to early adulthood).
Ergo, by base rates, some will start around the same time completely by chance.
Also, I get the sense that some hallucinations are "amplifications" of various types of pre-existing sensory experiences. I wouldn't be surprised if some people just started noticing certain things they were doing already but hadn't noticed before.
Not really arguing against the idea/phenomenon of [semi-]permanent drug-induced hallucinations. Just suggesting that it's hard to interpret the data in some cases because of various alternative explanations.
I bet you "a signed dollar" that Le Bron James is not the first verifiably recorded case of an adult posessing a photographic (eidetic) memory. [1]
Without singling out Mr James it is reasonable to very, very skeptical about any strong claims of ability of any famous person outside the field for which they are famous. Hype is a thing pushed by entourages if not the famous person themselves. Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.
But hey, he can submit to testing and put it on a video sharing site. Walk into a room with a table with N (N=80?) objects on it, under a sheet. Remove the sheet for 3 seconds. Put it back. See how many he can list from memory alone. That's actually not definitive for Eidetic (I believe - I'm not the expert) but it is pretty impressive nonetheless. If he can do that ask him for a book and edition that he has read then pick a geniunely random page (eg roll dice) and ask him to read it to you from memory alone. If he did it on the modern Johnny Carson show (where Uri Geller failed abysmally all those years ago, for example) it would be super-impressive, as it would if literally any human did it.[2]
[2] James Randii at 91 may not be available to advise the fraud busting setup as he did for Mr Carson but at a pinch I bet Penn Jilette, Teller, Derryn Brown or someone of similar advanced deception skills could do the job. How exciting would it be if someone convincingly displayed it?
I didn't claim he was the first case? That would be ridiculous.
And this is a tangent, but I used that example to subtly poke at this kind of "common wisdom":
Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.
Why do you think that an exceptional memory would not contribute to exceptional basketball playing? Are those two things completely unrelated?
In other words, you're probably underestimating the cognitive skill it takes to win at high levels. Of course I can't know for sure, because I haven't done it, but you haven't either.
I don't remember what the best sources for his memory were, but they seemed credible to me at the time, e.g.:
The article alludes to it, but understates how difficult it is to ask questions about things similar to psychosis with no frame of reference.
For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people. Upstream of the visual input, so to speak. But it's triggered by seeing.
Or one can see something as being in motion, without actually seeing it move. Like, things look normal, but seem to squirm. Again, the mind can separate qualities which are normally inherently connected. Every aspect of physical reality is interpreted by a module that can more or less go haywire separately.
So when someone depicts by illustration what hallucination is like, that is a subset, possibly a small subset of the possibilities, whether drug induced or otherwise.
And there's also the limitations and unpredictability of memory. Who knows whether the memories people have of hallucinations are complete or accurate?
> For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people.
Yes. I've had a psychotic break and saw my hands as animal paws. At the same time, some part of my brain was vaguely away something was very wrong and as a result, I successfully hid these symptoms for 4 months until they cleared up. For that time, I was an animal pretending to be human.
The memories from my animal self are as real as anything I've experienced as a human. None of it feels abnormal to me.
This isn't just an experience I've had. I've talked to other people in my support group who are bipolar or schizoaffective (bipolar type). They have similar experiences.
My theory is, there's some part of the brain where reality and imagination cross. In me, they merged for a time. So far, antipsychotics have kept this from repeating.
I developed HPPD in 2017, and I've been seeing unusual things for a bit over 2 years. The HPPD was triggered by dropping on the order of 1000-1400 micrograms of LSD - and for context a reasonable dose was 50 micrograms. This was way too much, and I fried for a few days. I'm not sure when I came down because HPPD decided to show up and it took me a while to realize that the HPPD was, well, persistent.
The effect is pretty minimal - I see faint geometric shapes in the sky, blank walls, monochromatic screens, such like that. When I look at things like pine trees or complex shapes the patterns vanish. The patterns are actually quite pretty, though it gets irritating at times. It's hardly crippling, but maybe I've gotten lucky.
A few months before I developed HPPD, I also developed tinnitus due to a combination of incredibly severe stress, severe life-long depression, and a doctor prescribed high dosage of Zoloft. I got my ears tested and I have perfect hearing in my left and near perfect in my right, so this isn't auditory damage. In contrast to HPPD, tinnitus can be crippling. Tinnitus is a neurological condition so there's no limit on how bad it can get - and when it gets so loud that you can't hear people over the tin, you get pretty desperate.
With both HPPD and tinnitus, the only real treatment is to learn to not let it get to you. As you become more stressed and anxious the symptoms worsen, so if you fixate on it then you'll quite literally drive yourself mad.
HPPD is vaguely frustrating, but I know that it was my actions that caused this. However I'm livid about the tinnitus because it was most likely a legally prescribed drug with known side effects, and doctors hand out scripts for that stuff like it's candy. It's easy to say "oh no, the psychedelics are going to break our brains!" - but doctors regularly prescribe ototoxic drugs, SSRIs that are _incredibly_ habit forming and aren't effective in the long run.
If you don't want HPPD, maybe take it easy on the drugs, but in the grand scheme of thing there are numerous medical practices that are dramatically more damaging than seeing some mildly weird shit.
Happy to answer questions if that would help anyone here.
Interesting. It could suggest that you formed some permanent new connections between some unusual parts of the brain.
My own experience was kind of opposite so far.
In the beginning I had pretty apparent visual illusions, like wall corners, patterns breathing, or actually seeings beams of light shaped by different music, even on 100ug.
But over time it seems my brain was somehow adapting to it. On many following trips, the visual illusions become more like 'shaking' a little bit, just some noise.
I started to think that either the acid's gone bad or I had a different kind of sorts.
Some time ago, even on 300ug, i had almost no visual illusions (which was quite disappointing, as I expected the music to still bring it).
Instead, I have a more vivid imagination.. But it's not visual, just more like if you think of some scene from memory.
I have never heard Tinnitus described as a neurological condition. I had pretty bad Tinnitus as a result of a jaw injury. It has gradually faded but it made sleeping difficult for a very long time.
I'm on the run so can't respond in depth, but check out ototoxic drugs which attack the auditory nerve. SSRIs may not be directly ototoxic but numerous studies have shown that sertraline can cause tinnitus, due to the role that serotonin plays in filtering audio signals. So there are multiple causes of tinnitus, and the impact of SSRIs is partially known but not fully understood.
Perhaps I’m the exception but on the off chance it can help someone else I had tinnitus for my entire adult life and it disappeared almost overnight when I started getting botox injections for migraines.
I was surprised to have my new audiologist describe it as neurological, and it can be the result of the brain trying to fill in "missing gaps" of auditory signals- like the static on analog TVs. Then said new studies show hearing aids can reduce the severity of tinnitus, even when hearing loss is moderate.
She's fairly fresh out of school, and I haven't been able to filter out yet whether there is any new science, or if it's more of a trendy academic topic included in new textbooks, or even a new sales tactic by the hearing aid companies.
With HPPD, do you find that you're able to increase/decrease the levels of distortions by mentally moving into it/ pulling out of it?
I developed fairly severe HPPD from a large dose of LSD as well. This was about 20 years ago. It eventually waned over the course of a few years and is no longer noticeable though.
It's a gigantic amount. For context Hoffman took around 300mcg and was clearly tripping very hard (based on his account); that's around 4X street acid at 75mcg per tab.
Even if you were to measure a single tab as 150mcg the OP is claiming they took nearly 10 tabs, which is a massive amount, you'd be out of your mind for days.
To be fair it was tabs of acid rather than anything precisely measured, but it was enough to keep me going for 48 hours. Might have been more, might have been less, but that's really a bit too much.
I have always steered clear of psychedelics. I know some people are super into legalization, but I wager it's a bit irresponsible considering we barely understand their long (and short, for that matter) -term effects. There's some evidence where psychedelics (particularly LSD) may have triggered schizophrenia in some patients[1].
Musician Daniel Johnston (he passed away a few months ago) is a notable case.
Whose fault is it that we "barely understand the long term effects"? Clearly, the war on drugs is the very reason why scientists have been unable to study the benefits (or side effects) of these drugs for so long. There are signs that is finally changing (with the JH research center), but we've lost decades to something we could've understood so much better by now.
The harm done by criminal penalties exceeds the harm done by any possible bad effects of using psychedelics by a huge margin. To claim otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
This claim isn't obvious at all (let alone its converse being intellectually dishonest). You're acting as if justice and law enforcement is made up of solely either stupid or nefarious people.
Nah I'd flip the complete opposite direction. Responsible use of psychedelics has many strong upsides, and I think the outright ban has done a lot of net harm to society.
At the very least I think doctors and researchers ought to be able to prescribe them and run experiments.
With that said, charging people with felonies for possession is ridiculous. Fine the individual and confiscate for relatively small amounts of psychedelics.
Latent schizophrenics shouldn't take psychoactive drugs of any kind. Schizophrenics (like other people suffering from mental illness) are prone to self-medicate as well though. And the evidence that someone prone to schizophrenia who develops it because of drug use but wouldn't have otherwise developed schizophrenia is scant or non-existent.
> And the evidence that someone prone to schizophrenia who develops it because of drug use but wouldn't have otherwise developed schizophrenia is scant or non-existent.
It's much easier to prove that something happens, than something doesn't happen.
There is a lot of evidence that suggests that taking psychedellics can lead to schizophrenia. To conclusively prove that that person wouldn't have gotten it without those drugs is extremely difficult.
While I 100% agree that we can't conclusively prove causation at this point, we do have solid evidence that there is a correlation, and that shouldn't be discounted given the research into psycheddelics is too immature to have a chance of proving anything past that.
I think the issue is that someone who is predisposed to schizophrenia might not be aware that this is the case.
Also, we already know that drug use can have permanent effects that presumably would not have manifested if the person had not taken drugs, unless you think that people who didn't see hallucinations before LSD and see hallucinations after LSD would have started seeing hallucinations anyway.
So I don't see why it would be unreasonable to think that drug use can trigger an onset of schizophrenia in an already predisposed person that would have not happened otherwise.
I’ve used LSD and psilocybin, though not for many years, and have had minor, infrequent, non-disruptive hallucinations.
They usually consist of momentary visual deformations of repeating patterns, e.g., tiles on a BART platform will appear to shift or move. These visual variances are a small taste of a full-on trip, in which everything can shift, move, or dance.
It’s nice to see others have shared this experience.
Related: Psychedelics caused me to have a permanent, positive attitude adjustment. I recommend them highly.
Yeah I have several permanent overhangs from my experiences with psychedelics as well. At one point I did 500+ug of LSD in a single trip and I am still working through PTSD from some of my delusions.
That said, the net effect on my life has been massively positive and has directly contributed to me being comfortable with myself, my body, my mind, my friends, and my place in this world.
Despite the overhangs, I highly recommend psychedelics as well. Though maybe stay under 400ug :)
When you say PTSD, would you mind expanding on how that manifests? Is it a low level constant anxiety, or more akin to sudden anxiety due to a certain trigger, or something else? I understand if it's too personal a topic. I'm very interested in psychedelics, but am worried about the potential negative side effects. Someone I know said LSD caused them anxiety once, and it lasted for a few months but eventually sorted itself out. Is your PTSD sorting itself out slowly? How long ago was your 500+ug experience?
Also you say you have some permanent overhangs; would you mind telling me a bit more so I know what to expect?
That's probably more related to working for YouTube where the comments are absolute vitriol. Actually reading this article this person was clearly not mentally equipped for a trip, ended up taking 2 additional doses after already "becoming delusional" and then going on a rampage when his friends tried to get him to stop. All because they rented a house on the fourth of July and thought what better thing to use to party with loud explosions than the most introspective and revelatory substance ever discovered by mankind. What? How about a little respect for the aperture in the navel of the Universe? I wouldn't chug a liter of Ayahuasca and go mow the lawn, what sort of world do people think this is? No consequences is the lie that got us here if you ask me. Of course there are consequences. Nurture altruistic intentions.
As one guru at a random festival once said regarding someone having a bad trip,
>"That is what happens when you try to put a 6 cylinder drug into a 4 cylinder brain."
Some people just aren't ready for what they are about to experience and if you are not in a good place, it isn't like alcohol which masks your feelings and makes you numb. From what I gather it forces you to confront your inner demons and come to terms with the meaning of your existence itself, which not everyone is suitable to handle.
I’ve always thought of this as more of an anxiety attack and possibly a bit of PTSD from what is often an incredibly powerful and upsetting experience.
I think most people experience minor visual disturbances or have what can be loosely defined as ‘trippy’ experiences from time to time and just ignore them or compensate for them, but imagine having recently had a tremendously upsetting experience that began with similar sensations and how that could tweak someone’s anxiety so that they hyper focus and worry about it to the point that it becomes a serious issue for them.
I kind of got this after a heavy meditation session 6 months ago after reading Mindfulness in Plain English and listening to Om (the band.)
Never seriously meditated before but after that I became pretty good at meditation and so depending on my mood and whether I meditated in the morning I slip into a meditative state right away when concentrating and see pretty small perceptual abnormalities.
I was seriously ready to kill myself back then so pretty small tradeoff.
Readit News
I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.
YMMV of course.
When I first tried this I noticed that the hallucinations were very similar to those old magic eye books.
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Eye-New-Looking-World/dp/083627...
In those books you relax and are able to see the image through the chaos.
The same can be said for when you are on these types of drugs, or at least for me personally. When I was able to relax and let my mind go, the hallucinations and visuals would come at a greater intensity. If I needed to, I was able to snap out of it by focusing my mind on the moment and tangible reality in front of me.
When I was leading a few people on their first experience I explained this to them, that if they are unable to relax and let go, the visuals would not come as quickly or be as intense. Do not be afraid, relax and let go and if needed you can ground yourself back if you have a decent mind and didn't take an amount larger than you can handle.
How early did your parents start you on meditation?
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>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.
There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]
I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]
I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]
In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ...
[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b...
[5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts
> “Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”
What message, if any, were you looking for during your psychedelic explorations? Did you receive it?
I just wanted to get stoned out of my head, and see some weird colors and shit man.
>Did you receive it?
Oh, yeah.
(I'm a little snarky here about the whole coming into psychedelics looking for some "message", and seeing that you receive it too).
Many normal humans will not know that this experience is even possible, or might dismiss it straight off as humbo jumbo. (Many drug users that did the drugs just for fun will get this as a sort of surprise gift. Sometimes they dismiss it despite having experienced it, sadly.)
Once one have experienced this a couple of times, it is possible to learn whereto steer the mind during normal meditation. It is possible, although it requires skill, to come there with normal sober meditation.
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Psychedelics are a tool that can be used to remove psychological disorders, but in the same vain can be used to create psychological disorders.
In an ideal world, if psychedelics were legal, they'd come with an instruction manual.
A guy once told me that he was suffering from a severe form of HPPD for months. It was slowly driving him crazy, but the symptoms disappeared immediately after he consumed psilocybin.
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Interesting, I believe it and have always wondered about this. I think people's sensory experiences vary wildly by nature, but we have no access to them so can't really prove anything.
Some people are audiophiles, others foodies, others fashionistas, etc.
Your athletic ability can vary from Usain Bolt to completely uncoordinated; some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).
Some people are prediposed to like drugs and others don't. (e.g. reading a lot of rock n' roll biographies it becomes apparent that the alcohol and heroin addictions aren't randomly distributed; it's somewhat "innate")
It would be surprising if our sensory experiences did NOT vary widely.
This sounds silly and is totally unsubstantiated, but I always believed my senses are "accurate". I told a friend in high school this and he said it was stupid and impossible :)
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Although I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep. I imagine that's pretty normal/common since low light is sort of like sensory deprivation.
But they are very elaborate hallucations with all sorts of geometric forms and motion. Elaborate but not intense, if that makes sense.
Me too, and it's definitely a result of taking psychedelics. I quite like it. I suspect that I could have always made those CEVs appear, but I didn't "know how" until taking psychedelics.
In other words, I have the distinct impression that it's a new skill I learned by psychedelics, but not a forced change caused by the drugs. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it feels like.
When I'm falling asleep, I know if I'm fully relaxed and ready to drift off to sleep when I can just "accept" the visuals without trying to process them. Somehow "letting go" of psychedelic visuals makes them more prominent, and for some reason, that leads to good sleep.
I also notice floaters way more, and I know those were always there, but now I notice them.
And I need way less weed to get as high as I want to be. I think before taking psychedelics, I felt like I was smoking weed to try to achieve something. After achieving whatever that mental goal was on psychedelics, I just don't need to smoke as much anymore.
Weird drugs for sure, but I don't regret taking them.
Me too and it's probably not a result of taking psychedelics; as I've never tried them recreationally. I did, however, have vivid hallucinations as a result of Nitrous oxide at the dentist office as a child.
I don't think I see floaters, as my vision doesn't require correction. They also seem unrelated to afterimage.
I thought these were more common, but after some research, most people only see these after applying some pressure, such as rubbing their eyes. Interesting stuff.
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Sounds like a closed-eye hallucination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination) caused by the Ganzfeld effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect). I get these too, usually just if I concentrate. I think they've been easier to get since I tried mushrooms a couple of times, but I did get them before as well.
One hop away from that page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema
> Others have noted a connection between the form the lights take and neolithic cave paintings.
That's a really great way to explain it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting#/media/File:(1)J... is pretty accurate for me
I also frequently experience/remember hypnagogia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia), which I previously did not know the name of. I absolutely love experiencing it, as it's often euphoric, although it can sometimes be terrifying and stressful.
> ... some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).
Many of these sensory experiences can be empirically and objectively analyzed. For example, photographic memory is not a real thing. Nobody has ever shown the ability to recall particular details of a scene which they hadn't already focused or been cued on. There's been considerable, sincere effort invested in testing these claims, both in claimants and random individuals. (There are people who remember endless amounts of seemingly non-episodic daily trivia of their everyday life for literally every day of their life, but this isn't photographic memory and definitely doesn't describe LeBron James.)
Large number mental arithmetic and recitation of long strings (or other trivia) is a learnable skill, though many people develop the skill independently, many of whom describe their techniques in a manner that comports with well-known techniques.
Sources: "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by an American journalist who became the American Memory Champion as part of his research; "Your memory: how it works and how to improve it" by Kenneth L. Higbee, a professor of psychology who has a personal interest in mnemonics techniques; and "The Art of Memory" by Frances A. Yates who traces the historical practice of the Method of Loci from Ancient Greece and its transformation into esotericism by the time of the Renaissance.
Of course, there's no accounting for people who believe and feel they have a photographic memory[1], just like there can be no accounting for people who believe they're being personally surveilled 24/7 by hidden cameras everywhere. But that doesn't mean I have to accept that there are some people who are actually inexplicably and secretly being surveilled; left to wonder why I'm so lucky/unlucky.
Conversely, there are some people with a real, extraordinary sense, like tetrachromats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans), who have a fourth peak in their color spectrum reception. They see the world in much richer color than normal humans, and this has been empirically verified.
[1] Indeed, I'm pretty sure most people (myself included) feel like they can shut their eyes and retain a photographic picture of a scene. I was told I had a photographic memory by many different teachers, going back to at least third grade. But, again, it doesn't stand up to scientific experimentation. And I never believed my teachers as it was always self-evident to me that while I may have remembered more seemingly esoteric facts or events than they did, it was because I had consciously found those things curious, however briefly. (As an adult I was diagnosed with ADHD, which perhaps goes a long way to explaining why so many things caught my attention.)
I am curious as how you could verify that. You can't observe someone else's experience, just their reaction to it.
I'm going to quibble with you. When you say that individual humans vary widely, you're mostly assuming a baseline scale of typical human variation. Which is basically begging the question. Of course the fastest or smartest people look very extreme, when you're implicitly comparing them to typical people.
Usain Bolt is very fast for a human. But he's slower than the average housecat. On the flip side some people have really good memories. But even the dumbest humans manage to remember a huge number of symbols compared to what a chimp's capable of. Same for virtually everything else you listed. Food taste, aesthetic preferences, auditory capabilities, intoxicant consumption, etc.
Normal human variance is swamped by variance between different animal species. This is mostly invisible to us, because most of our day-to-day interactions are with other people. Not exotic organisms.
So I would guess just the opposite. I believe that sensory experiences across different people are very likely to be substantially similar. At least compared to an alien species, or AI, or even just an intelligence from a distant evolutionary branch (like an octopus).
Or the other person sees a literal grid in her visual field all the time and projects meaning onto it.
And that's within normal human variation. Sure you can imagine that bats or octopuses have much weirder subjective experiences.
But it's still not something that's widely recognized. They would likely say if you literally see auras then you must be a crazy, non-functioning person, when really it's just a quirk of your perception that is invisible to everyone else.
But the degree to which they turn into "hallucinations" varies.
By that I mean very elaborate geometric shapes with a lot of motion and rotation. Sort of like a Persian rug in 3D and 4D (time), with a lot of scale. Fractals, etc.
I suspect there is some common physiological reason why people find fractals "trippy" and say pictures of cars in traffic are not "trippy".
Drugs tickle your brain in a certain ways, but as the OP suggests, they're not the only way your brain can be tickled like that. And some brains are more predisposed to such hallucinations than others.
Some people take drugs.
They tend to onset around the same age (adolescence to early adulthood).
Ergo, by base rates, some will start around the same time completely by chance.
Also, I get the sense that some hallucinations are "amplifications" of various types of pre-existing sensory experiences. I wouldn't be surprised if some people just started noticing certain things they were doing already but hadn't noticed before.
Not really arguing against the idea/phenomenon of [semi-]permanent drug-induced hallucinations. Just suggesting that it's hard to interpret the data in some cases because of various alternative explanations.
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I bet you "a signed dollar" that Le Bron James is not the first verifiably recorded case of an adult posessing a photographic (eidetic) memory. [1]
Without singling out Mr James it is reasonable to very, very skeptical about any strong claims of ability of any famous person outside the field for which they are famous. Hype is a thing pushed by entourages if not the famous person themselves. Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.
But hey, he can submit to testing and put it on a video sharing site. Walk into a room with a table with N (N=80?) objects on it, under a sheet. Remove the sheet for 3 seconds. Put it back. See how many he can list from memory alone. That's actually not definitive for Eidetic (I believe - I'm not the expert) but it is pretty impressive nonetheless. If he can do that ask him for a book and edition that he has read then pick a geniunely random page (eg roll dice) and ask him to read it to you from memory alone. If he did it on the modern Johnny Carson show (where Uri Geller failed abysmally all those years ago, for example) it would be super-impressive, as it would if literally any human did it.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
[2] James Randii at 91 may not be available to advise the fraud busting setup as he did for Mr Carson but at a pinch I bet Penn Jilette, Teller, Derryn Brown or someone of similar advanced deception skills could do the job. How exciting would it be if someone convincingly displayed it?
And this is a tangent, but I used that example to subtly poke at this kind of "common wisdom":
Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.
Why do you think that an exceptional memory would not contribute to exceptional basketball playing? Are those two things completely unrelated?
In other words, you're probably underestimating the cognitive skill it takes to win at high levels. Of course I can't know for sure, because I haven't done it, but you haven't either.
I don't remember what the best sources for his memory were, but they seemed credible to me at the time, e.g.:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44106321
https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-turnovers-photographi...
There are also some video of him recalling games that seem credible too.
For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people. Upstream of the visual input, so to speak. But it's triggered by seeing.
Or one can see something as being in motion, without actually seeing it move. Like, things look normal, but seem to squirm. Again, the mind can separate qualities which are normally inherently connected. Every aspect of physical reality is interpreted by a module that can more or less go haywire separately.
So when someone depicts by illustration what hallucination is like, that is a subset, possibly a small subset of the possibilities, whether drug induced or otherwise.
And there's also the limitations and unpredictability of memory. Who knows whether the memories people have of hallucinations are complete or accurate?
Yes. I've had a psychotic break and saw my hands as animal paws. At the same time, some part of my brain was vaguely away something was very wrong and as a result, I successfully hid these symptoms for 4 months until they cleared up. For that time, I was an animal pretending to be human.
The memories from my animal self are as real as anything I've experienced as a human. None of it feels abnormal to me.
This isn't just an experience I've had. I've talked to other people in my support group who are bipolar or schizoaffective (bipolar type). They have similar experiences.
My theory is, there's some part of the brain where reality and imagination cross. In me, they merged for a time. So far, antipsychotics have kept this from repeating.
I developed HPPD in 2017, and I've been seeing unusual things for a bit over 2 years. The HPPD was triggered by dropping on the order of 1000-1400 micrograms of LSD - and for context a reasonable dose was 50 micrograms. This was way too much, and I fried for a few days. I'm not sure when I came down because HPPD decided to show up and it took me a while to realize that the HPPD was, well, persistent.
The effect is pretty minimal - I see faint geometric shapes in the sky, blank walls, monochromatic screens, such like that. When I look at things like pine trees or complex shapes the patterns vanish. The patterns are actually quite pretty, though it gets irritating at times. It's hardly crippling, but maybe I've gotten lucky.
A few months before I developed HPPD, I also developed tinnitus due to a combination of incredibly severe stress, severe life-long depression, and a doctor prescribed high dosage of Zoloft. I got my ears tested and I have perfect hearing in my left and near perfect in my right, so this isn't auditory damage. In contrast to HPPD, tinnitus can be crippling. Tinnitus is a neurological condition so there's no limit on how bad it can get - and when it gets so loud that you can't hear people over the tin, you get pretty desperate.
With both HPPD and tinnitus, the only real treatment is to learn to not let it get to you. As you become more stressed and anxious the symptoms worsen, so if you fixate on it then you'll quite literally drive yourself mad.
HPPD is vaguely frustrating, but I know that it was my actions that caused this. However I'm livid about the tinnitus because it was most likely a legally prescribed drug with known side effects, and doctors hand out scripts for that stuff like it's candy. It's easy to say "oh no, the psychedelics are going to break our brains!" - but doctors regularly prescribe ototoxic drugs, SSRIs that are _incredibly_ habit forming and aren't effective in the long run.
If you don't want HPPD, maybe take it easy on the drugs, but in the grand scheme of thing there are numerous medical practices that are dramatically more damaging than seeing some mildly weird shit.
Happy to answer questions if that would help anyone here.
My own experience was kind of opposite so far. In the beginning I had pretty apparent visual illusions, like wall corners, patterns breathing, or actually seeings beams of light shaped by different music, even on 100ug.
But over time it seems my brain was somehow adapting to it. On many following trips, the visual illusions become more like 'shaking' a little bit, just some noise.
I started to think that either the acid's gone bad or I had a different kind of sorts.
Some time ago, even on 300ug, i had almost no visual illusions (which was quite disappointing, as I expected the music to still bring it).
Instead, I have a more vivid imagination.. But it's not visual, just more like if you think of some scene from memory.
She's fairly fresh out of school, and I haven't been able to filter out yet whether there is any new science, or if it's more of a trendy academic topic included in new textbooks, or even a new sales tactic by the hearing aid companies.
1000-1400 mcg is like 5-7 solid doses, which is no joke, but it's not 20-30 doses like you sort of imply.
Even if you were to measure a single tab as 150mcg the OP is claiming they took nearly 10 tabs, which is a massive amount, you'd be out of your mind for days.
Musician Daniel Johnston (he passed away a few months ago) is a notable case.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6870484
At the very least I think doctors and researchers ought to be able to prescribe them and run experiments.
With that said, charging people with felonies for possession is ridiculous. Fine the individual and confiscate for relatively small amounts of psychedelics.
The same is true of marijuana, although the key word is triggered, and not necessarily caused. (Obviously some debate about this)
It's not randomly distributed among the general population, which suggests it mainly affects persons already predisposed.
Black American teen boys seem especially at risk, in a population that otherwise sees symptoms present in the early 30's.
But the striking thing to me, is that it typically happens with the very first dose, is acute onset, and is irreversible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#...
It's much easier to prove that something happens, than something doesn't happen.
There is a lot of evidence that suggests that taking psychedellics can lead to schizophrenia. To conclusively prove that that person wouldn't have gotten it without those drugs is extremely difficult.
While I 100% agree that we can't conclusively prove causation at this point, we do have solid evidence that there is a correlation, and that shouldn't be discounted given the research into psycheddelics is too immature to have a chance of proving anything past that.
Also, we already know that drug use can have permanent effects that presumably would not have manifested if the person had not taken drugs, unless you think that people who didn't see hallucinations before LSD and see hallucinations after LSD would have started seeing hallucinations anyway.
So I don't see why it would be unreasonable to think that drug use can trigger an onset of schizophrenia in an already predisposed person that would have not happened otherwise.
Legalization would be highly irresponsible until we understand why.
They usually consist of momentary visual deformations of repeating patterns, e.g., tiles on a BART platform will appear to shift or move. These visual variances are a small taste of a full-on trip, in which everything can shift, move, or dance.
It’s nice to see others have shared this experience.
Related: Psychedelics caused me to have a permanent, positive attitude adjustment. I recommend them highly.
That said, the net effect on my life has been massively positive and has directly contributed to me being comfortable with myself, my body, my mind, my friends, and my place in this world.
Despite the overhangs, I highly recommend psychedelics as well. Though maybe stay under 400ug :)
Also you say you have some permanent overhangs; would you mind telling me a bit more so I know what to expect?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/youtube-engin...
>"That is what happens when you try to put a 6 cylinder drug into a 4 cylinder brain."
Some people just aren't ready for what they are about to experience and if you are not in a good place, it isn't like alcohol which masks your feelings and makes you numb. From what I gather it forces you to confront your inner demons and come to terms with the meaning of your existence itself, which not everyone is suitable to handle.
I think most people experience minor visual disturbances or have what can be loosely defined as ‘trippy’ experiences from time to time and just ignore them or compensate for them, but imagine having recently had a tremendously upsetting experience that began with similar sensations and how that could tweak someone’s anxiety so that they hyper focus and worry about it to the point that it becomes a serious issue for them.
I was seriously ready to kill myself back then so pretty small tradeoff.