This is a fantastic article and I intend to spend more time reading it in detail.
Articles about psychedelics tend to be either dismissive or full of woo and this takes them seriously as tools to better understand the physical basis of human consciousness.
A major thing I took away from my experience with lsd and mdma was how impossible it seemed that such a small amount of material could so utterly transform my experience of the world.
Anything that does that seems like it must be a powerful tool for understanding what the brain does. I’m glad that scientists and the establishment are finally taking it seriously.
I think the first and second waves of scientific research (as he calls them) ran aground after the early pioneers couldn’t resist evangelizing. The current generation seems to have learned the dangers of becoming another Timothy Leary and have remained clinical and detached in their descriptions.
I'm not sure about that (re: evangelizing). Dr. Shulgin was pretty enthusiastic. I have every book of theirs, autographed. Dr. Nichols is fairly clinical though. I don't know who the up and comers are in the field, but they'll have some huge shoes to fill.
Thats what drugs do, they overwrite the brain patterns to recommend a one size-fits all solution to all problems - more drug - or more drug research. Its called psychological addiction - the you ceases to be, and the it becomes me.
Have i told you how great mdma is. Everyone should try it. I never would have expected that overriding my reward system would reveal my normal life to be such a bland mess and ilusion.
Alcohol is actually quite unique in how it requires such a large dose in order to have an effect. An active dose of ethanol for an average person is somewhere in the realm of 10-50 grams (depending a lot on the size of the person and their tolerance).
Most drugs have an active dose in the <100 mg dose, LSD is particularly low, at <100µg.
As someone who recently tried MDMA, I second this. Marijuana gives me intense anxiety, so I was very nervous to take something “hard” like MDMA. I couldn’t be happier that I took the risk and tried it.
I suspect that my first time “rolling” permanently changed pathways in my brain in one of the best ways possible; on MDMA, I experienced what it felt like to feel unconditional love for complete strangers around me. I genuinely felt like I cared and wanted to connect with everyone. I saw beauty in people I wouldn’t even notice in my normal, routine life. This, of course, was an artificially created and temporary feeling, but 6 months later, I still feel the affects from that night.
After trying MDMA, I’m convinced that the fastest way to change yourself is through drugs. Neuroplasticity goes down as you get older, but it seems like certain drugs can accelerate changes to your brain anyways. I have yet to try psychedelics, but can understand how they would have similar, mind altering affects.
I recognize a lot of this is pseudoscience and needs to be better understood, so I’m happy to see research is being done. Drugs can be a very dangerous thing, but they can also have some extremely positive affects. Figuring out how to maximize benefits while reducing risk is something that I believe will benefit many people.
It seems like the filtration theory still produced by far the most significant impact to our current understanding of psychedelic effects.
What I was surprised to learn was most research in this domain clearly distinguish adult and non-adult, and the filtration theory implies that kids or younger adults are more creative, have more imaginary freedom, and less emotionally stable - meaning they're naturally more "on drug" - make me wonder if 1 year old really feel like sky-high everyday.
Also may explain why they can be damaging to younger people. Like disturbing plants before their root system (filtration system) takes root tends to kill or damage the plants entire lifespan.
I believe there have been studies done on the detrimental effects of regular marijuana use on adolescents and resulting (permanently) impaired cognition.
Having smoked way too much marijuana in my early life, it seems fairly obvious that regular drug use is potentially damaging to the developing brain (or any brain for that matter), independent of how interesting or intense the experiences while under the influence may be.
it is absolutely generally considered a psychedelic. like I said eat a few grams of hash and tell me it's not. it has been used that way in world religions for thousands of years.
But that's like saying "Alcohol is deadly. Drink 10 bottles of whisky and tell me it's not." It's a spurious argument, irrelevant. That's nothing like how the drug is used 99.9999% of the time. Sure, it can be psychedelic, apparently--though I never came across hash that was at all. I've read about people tripping on hash, but never even heard anyone talk about anyone they know having that experience. I guess you know this.
Post me some edibles over and 'll be happy to oblige. Never had that effect when I tried them before. Usually larger doses just made me giggly and put me to sleep.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - when eaten, THC is metabolised into 11-OH-THC, which is much more potent that THC. If you eat too much, cannabis has psychedelic effects that are not present when smoking/vaping, and some people compare the 'trippy' effects to those of LSD or mushrooms.
I keep hearing this....I have yet to consume enough marijuana to have this happen...I've injested at least 2000mg of thc worth of candies made from shatter at once while smoking copious amounts of doobies and shatter no hallucinations....i've taken ten 100mg THC oil pills at once...zero hallucinations....smoked several grams of shatter in one sitting...nope....made a batch of cookies out of about 3 ounces of bud and a few grams of hash...ate most of the cookies in one sitting...again...no hallucinations...the only time i've ever even come close was the very first time...as I walked around whatever part of my body I couldn't see just didn't exist.
Also...smoking weed or ingesting it is fairly incomparable to either LSD or mushrooms....like in the slightest...mushrooms will strip your brain away piece by piece and let you meet the mushroom people....and LSD is like going to a magical land of wonder....smoking weed does neither of these things...I really wish it did...i've tried really hard to get that to happen...
That is a really, really poor and flawed metaphor. It is completely arbitrary and there's no logic or reasoning behind it.
The "filtration system" that is talked about here is not comparable to a root system, or, in other words, any life-sustaining or life-promoting system.
Rather, a malignantly overgrown filtration system is the root cause of feelings of disconnectedness, deprivation, and subsequent depression, that are so common nowadays.
A societal tendency to bulk up the "filtration system" to pathological dimensions is the reason why there is an opioid epidemic in North America right now. Thanks to our massive filtration systems we have filtered out most that is good about the human race, and have managed to build a civilization/economic system that is so dehumanized, cutthroat, unfair, lifeless and ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless, that most of us subjects walk around in a daze, in states of deep emotional deprivation, just looking for something, anything, to either anesthetize those painful feelings (opioids and other downers), or distract us from them (social media, porn, television, VR..."entertainment").
Like everywhere in nature, balance is the key to a healthy state. We have erred, for centuries, on the side of boosting the filtration system through whatever means were available, and have managed to build very effective and tall walls within ourselves that separate us from our fellow men, from the environment, and even from deeper strata of our own consciousness. Now, we are reaping the harvest of that - a mankind that is plagued by mental illness, carrying out environmental destruction wherever you look.
But I digress. What I really wanted to say is - please, don't draw parallels between the "filtration system" and a root system. Really, most of us would benefit from downsizing the filtration system a notch or twenty...unlike plants, where cutting away roots would be of little benefit.
As someone who has spent close to 40 hours in VRChat so far (not to mention how many tweaking avatars in Blender and Unity), I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Of all the VR experiences out there nothing beats the ability to just make whatever skin you want for yourself and go around roleplaying in virtual worlds with other people. Or show off your creativity with shaders. You can be a walking shadertoy of your own design and awe people with raytraced fractals or whatever you wish. And it's free! It honestly feels like an early internet forum.
Anecdotally, when I experimented with these, that's basically how I felt - it was very reminiscent of my imagination when I was much younger. As I started studying neuroscience, especially in grad school (I specialized in attention and sensory systems), the filtration theory made even more sense because our brain works on a lot of things in this way, especially our senses. I was also interested in autism and there's a fascinating hypothesis that the sensory effects are from malfunctioning sensory filters.
I feel that somehow this also changed how adults process pain and happiness. Now I have a million other questions - are adults seeking psychedelic as a result of fatigue or emotional boredom, as a method to revive imagination?
I have kids, and I have family and friends who imbibe psychedelics. I have not imbibed such, but having observed their behaviour...
My mother-in-law high on psylocibin paints pictures in a manner not too dissimilar to how my toddlers approach it. The things they say, the way they use colour, the concepts being expressed, and how it becomes play...
If your mother-in-law is a professional artist, then I'd say this is interesting. If not, then she is just a novice like most people, and is having fun discovering the world of art, from the viewpoint that she discontinued it from childhood, when most kids give up drawing because their brains are frustrated with reconciling their drawings with the world around them which has correct perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
This comment seems to me to be incredibly condescending and implies that a professional artist (whatever that definition is) cannot have fun making new discoveries for themselves in the world of art.
I am sorry that you are only interested in the professional artists on psychedelics; I think looking at its effect on all artists novice or otherwise is interesting.
Well, this comment seems incredibly condescending to me. You're not 'sorry', and I can't see the implication you suggest at all. Please allow people to freely be interested in what they're interested in.
I am fine with people being interested in whatever pleases them, so long as they aren't being mean to others about it.
Granted, a sibling comment to yours made me see how the person I responded to could formulate a reasonable argument. Whereas previously I could only see bourgeois academic snobbery. So, like you, I thought there was only one way to interpret it. But now, I have been enlightened.
"So, like you, I thought there was only one way to interpret it." Wow. All I hear from you is condescending snark. Just letting you know, it's pretty toxic.
Yours is not a very charitable reading. I think gp is just pointing out that a lot of people "give up" on art at a young age, so a regression to childish tendencies when it comes to art and psychedelics may not imply such a regression generally. It would be interesting if the subject was a professional artist with many years of training and technique, because then to throw this all away to "do art as a three year old might" is much more indicative of the claim that psychedelics induce child-like behavior, which is the main point of discussion in this thread.
Yes I suppose it wasn't. I am sorry. I can see now this argument, which seems reasonable. I had mistakenly read the previous message as complete belittlement.
The problem is the theory implies that people with brain damage should experience psychological effects similar to those induced by psychedelic drugs, and we don't see anything like that.
Yes we do. For quite some effects seen in patients in psychiatry it's not too hard to come up with a drug which induces similar experiences. Take paranoia for instance. And hallucinations of course. Or, to mention an extreme and very rare example: there are people lacking a certain connection between the low-level visual processing and the parts translating that to known objects (sorry, don't remember exact terminology). It's extremely hard to imagine, but such people have normal vision yet they do not recognize based on what they see. E.g. they see a chair, but don't know it is a 'chair'. However when they touch the chair they know 'aha, chair'. Someone I know described that exactly once when on psychdelics; psilocybin IIRC.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer. Hallucinations and paranoia are only a tiny subset of the effects experienced by people on psychedelics, so logically the only part of the hypothesis that becomes more probable is that the brain usually filters out hallucinations and paranoia. But I won't accept that either, because neither brain damage or psychedelics reliably produce paranoia, and brain damage does not reliably produce hallucinations.
I don't rule anything out, but the filter hypothesis seems a lot less likely to me given the evidence, than the simpler explanation: That psychedelics just mess up the normal functioning of the brain to create a different experience. This requires less assumptions than the filter hypothesis, which is akin to suggesting that the brain is actually drunk all the time, but alcohol merely removes the filter to allow us to experience the drunk phenomenology.
I agree that fever and lack of sleep can produce hallucinations, but I'm not convinced that they are non-localized effects in the brain, nor that psychedelic chemicals are non-localized in the brain.
How do you think the temperature increase from Fever could be localized? It's just a temperature increase and you can induce the same effects by preventing the body from cooling down effectively.
I meant the effects of fever, so that perhaps different parts of the brain was affected differently by the temperature increase. I really have no idea, but I was saying that it is not an obvious fact either way.
Note I'm not claiming the filtration theory is true or false - I also have doubts about it - I'm just saying your rejection of it based on 'we don't see such effects because of brain damage ergo the theory doesn't hold' isn't exactly sound. Actually I'm not sure you can use brain damage to prove anything here. It's also too general of a term for me. As far as I'm concerned a serious head trauma where part of the brain is removed as well as a lesion applied locally for the purpose of neurophysiological research are both brain damage.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer.
Why 'reliably'? Not all brain damage is the same. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the theory but I don't think it argues that, nor is it what happens in reality.
Also, why at all? Why would certain brain damage not be able to create a less rich experience? The theory doesn't say that is impossible I think?
I'm not saying that filtration theory is false, I'm saying it seems less likely to me than the following alternative: The chemical composition of a sober persons brain causes us to have the usual experience, but taking a substance like psilocybin alters the chemical balance and therefore makes us have unusual experiences. It seems like I have to suppose more assumptions under filtration theory, and that those new assumptions are unfounded and that the consequences of accepting filtration theory leads to predictions that aren't true (vis a vis brain damage).
Which brings us to why I tried to make the point about brain damage. Since we are working with the idea that psychedelic experience is the default but that the brain is filtering out most of it, it seems to follow that strategically damaging the filter should allow psychedelic experiences to flow through. You're right, not all brain damage is the same, but enough people suffer similar brain damage that I believe we ought to have seen by now some subset of patients with certain types of trauma reliably report psychedelic experiences as part of their symptoms. If such a subset exists, then I stand corrected.
The brain damage caused by psychedelics is extremely specific. By your logic, tonsillitis shouldn't be curable by removing the tonsils, because if it were, then shooting someone in the mouth with a shotgun ought to produce similar effects to performing a tonsillectomy.
Sorry but I don't see how that follows from my logic at all. Would you please care to clarify how you reached that conclusion starting from some assumption I made?
Problem is that is quite hard to assess if it is sufficiently similar. That alone warrants an entire range of experiments. Also I don't know the literature enough to figure out if certain types of trauma reliably lead to similar experiences but I do think that is the case. For example electrical stimulation (not 'damage' per se but definitely altering the normal brain operation in subjects) has been repeatedly used to treat a myriad of problems like tinitus, tremors, ... And I know for a fact that during surgery, when attempting to find the right position for the electorde, it is not uncommon for patients to experience hallucinations/strong feelings of disgust/... because stimulating in the 'wrong' area instead of the proper target area. Also look at lobotomy for instance: quite a lot of similar symptoms in the unlucky subjects. Again: doesn't really prove filtration, but does indicate what you think doesn't happen (ie.strategical damage causing similar experiences) does in fact happen so it's imo not a good measure to reject the hypothesis.
"It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and that
is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. We provide the first evidence for this infant-synaesthesia hypothesis by showing that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical 2- and 3-month-olds, but not in 8-month-olds or adults."
From "Synaesthetic Associations Decrease During Infancy" by Katie Wagner and Karen R. Dobkins
It's too important in life to challenge yourself completely. That comes in many many forms. Allowing your brain to travel to places you're not determining is among/probably the most enlightening.
“Extremely low doses, known as microdoses, have been anecdotally associated with improvements in cognitive performance (Waldman, 2017; Wong, 2017) 'a claim that urgently requires empirical verification through controlled research' (Carhart-Harris and Nutt, 2017, p. 1103). Theoretical attempts to account for the reported effects of microdosing have yet to emerge in the literature and therefore present an important opportunity to future theoretical endeavors.”
I haven't tried any of the drugs described in this piece, and intend to keep it thus.
That said, overall, I think this is a fascinating approach to reverse-engineering the most impressive machine in existence: the human brain.
This particular article though feels hand-waivy by the end. Until we can validate these theories of mechanics [e.g. entropic brain theory] (e.g. by stimulating certain brain networks directly), they seem beyond speculative.
63 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadArticles about psychedelics tend to be either dismissive or full of woo and this takes them seriously as tools to better understand the physical basis of human consciousness.
A major thing I took away from my experience with lsd and mdma was how impossible it seemed that such a small amount of material could so utterly transform my experience of the world.
Anything that does that seems like it must be a powerful tool for understanding what the brain does. I’m glad that scientists and the establishment are finally taking it seriously.
I think the first and second waves of scientific research (as he calls them) ran aground after the early pioneers couldn’t resist evangelizing. The current generation seems to have learned the dangers of becoming another Timothy Leary and have remained clinical and detached in their descriptions.
Have i told you how great mdma is. Everyone should try it. I never would have expected that overriding my reward system would reveal my normal life to be such a bland mess and ilusion.
Most drugs have an active dose in the <100 mg dose, LSD is particularly low, at <100µg.
I suspect that my first time “rolling” permanently changed pathways in my brain in one of the best ways possible; on MDMA, I experienced what it felt like to feel unconditional love for complete strangers around me. I genuinely felt like I cared and wanted to connect with everyone. I saw beauty in people I wouldn’t even notice in my normal, routine life. This, of course, was an artificially created and temporary feeling, but 6 months later, I still feel the affects from that night.
After trying MDMA, I’m convinced that the fastest way to change yourself is through drugs. Neuroplasticity goes down as you get older, but it seems like certain drugs can accelerate changes to your brain anyways. I have yet to try psychedelics, but can understand how they would have similar, mind altering affects.
I recognize a lot of this is pseudoscience and needs to be better understood, so I’m happy to see research is being done. Drugs can be a very dangerous thing, but they can also have some extremely positive affects. Figuring out how to maximize benefits while reducing risk is something that I believe will benefit many people.
The hypocrisy is infuriating
What I was surprised to learn was most research in this domain clearly distinguish adult and non-adult, and the filtration theory implies that kids or younger adults are more creative, have more imaginary freedom, and less emotionally stable - meaning they're naturally more "on drug" - make me wonder if 1 year old really feel like sky-high everyday.
Having smoked way too much marijuana in my early life, it seems fairly obvious that regular drug use is potentially damaging to the developing brain (or any brain for that matter), independent of how interesting or intense the experiences while under the influence may be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug
That's what I mean by its not generally considered a psychedelic. I am aware some people class it as one.
Personally I have never experienced psychedelic effects from it.
Also...smoking weed or ingesting it is fairly incomparable to either LSD or mushrooms....like in the slightest...mushrooms will strip your brain away piece by piece and let you meet the mushroom people....and LSD is like going to a magical land of wonder....smoking weed does neither of these things...I really wish it did...i've tried really hard to get that to happen...
The "filtration system" that is talked about here is not comparable to a root system, or, in other words, any life-sustaining or life-promoting system.
Rather, a malignantly overgrown filtration system is the root cause of feelings of disconnectedness, deprivation, and subsequent depression, that are so common nowadays.
A societal tendency to bulk up the "filtration system" to pathological dimensions is the reason why there is an opioid epidemic in North America right now. Thanks to our massive filtration systems we have filtered out most that is good about the human race, and have managed to build a civilization/economic system that is so dehumanized, cutthroat, unfair, lifeless and ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless, that most of us subjects walk around in a daze, in states of deep emotional deprivation, just looking for something, anything, to either anesthetize those painful feelings (opioids and other downers), or distract us from them (social media, porn, television, VR..."entertainment").
Like everywhere in nature, balance is the key to a healthy state. We have erred, for centuries, on the side of boosting the filtration system through whatever means were available, and have managed to build very effective and tall walls within ourselves that separate us from our fellow men, from the environment, and even from deeper strata of our own consciousness. Now, we are reaping the harvest of that - a mankind that is plagued by mental illness, carrying out environmental destruction wherever you look.
But I digress. What I really wanted to say is - please, don't draw parallels between the "filtration system" and a root system. Really, most of us would benefit from downsizing the filtration system a notch or twenty...unlike plants, where cutting away roots would be of little benefit.
My mother-in-law high on psylocibin paints pictures in a manner not too dissimilar to how my toddlers approach it. The things they say, the way they use colour, the concepts being expressed, and how it becomes play...
Make of that what you will.
I am sorry that you are only interested in the professional artists on psychedelics; I think looking at its effect on all artists novice or otherwise is interesting.
Granted, a sibling comment to yours made me see how the person I responded to could formulate a reasonable argument. Whereas previously I could only see bourgeois academic snobbery. So, like you, I thought there was only one way to interpret it. But now, I have been enlightened.
I am indeed sorry.
“Brain damage” usually means gross structural damage, while psychedelics seem to operate at the neurotransmitter level.
Yes we do. For quite some effects seen in patients in psychiatry it's not too hard to come up with a drug which induces similar experiences. Take paranoia for instance. And hallucinations of course. Or, to mention an extreme and very rare example: there are people lacking a certain connection between the low-level visual processing and the parts translating that to known objects (sorry, don't remember exact terminology). It's extremely hard to imagine, but such people have normal vision yet they do not recognize based on what they see. E.g. they see a chair, but don't know it is a 'chair'. However when they touch the chair they know 'aha, chair'. Someone I know described that exactly once when on psychdelics; psilocybin IIRC.
I don't rule anything out, but the filter hypothesis seems a lot less likely to me given the evidence, than the simpler explanation: That psychedelics just mess up the normal functioning of the brain to create a different experience. This requires less assumptions than the filter hypothesis, which is akin to suggesting that the brain is actually drunk all the time, but alcohol merely removes the filter to allow us to experience the drunk phenomenology.
However, fever lack of sleep and other non localized effects can produce a wide range of Hallucinations.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer.
Why 'reliably'? Not all brain damage is the same. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the theory but I don't think it argues that, nor is it what happens in reality.
Also, why at all? Why would certain brain damage not be able to create a less rich experience? The theory doesn't say that is impossible I think?
Which brings us to why I tried to make the point about brain damage. Since we are working with the idea that psychedelic experience is the default but that the brain is filtering out most of it, it seems to follow that strategically damaging the filter should allow psychedelic experiences to flow through. You're right, not all brain damage is the same, but enough people suffer similar brain damage that I believe we ought to have seen by now some subset of patients with certain types of trauma reliably report psychedelic experiences as part of their symptoms. If such a subset exists, then I stand corrected.
Problem is that is quite hard to assess if it is sufficiently similar. That alone warrants an entire range of experiments. Also I don't know the literature enough to figure out if certain types of trauma reliably lead to similar experiences but I do think that is the case. For example electrical stimulation (not 'damage' per se but definitely altering the normal brain operation in subjects) has been repeatedly used to treat a myriad of problems like tinitus, tremors, ... And I know for a fact that during surgery, when attempting to find the right position for the electorde, it is not uncommon for patients to experience hallucinations/strong feelings of disgust/... because stimulating in the 'wrong' area instead of the proper target area. Also look at lobotomy for instance: quite a lot of similar symptoms in the unlucky subjects. Again: doesn't really prove filtration, but does indicate what you think doesn't happen (ie.strategical damage causing similar experiences) does in fact happen so it's imo not a good measure to reject the hypothesis.
"It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and that is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. We provide the first evidence for this infant-synaesthesia hypothesis by showing that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical 2- and 3-month-olds, but not in 8-month-olds or adults."
From "Synaesthetic Associations Decrease During Infancy" by Katie Wagner and Karen R. Dobkins
That said, overall, I think this is a fascinating approach to reverse-engineering the most impressive machine in existence: the human brain.
This particular article though feels hand-waivy by the end. Until we can validate these theories of mechanics [e.g. entropic brain theory] (e.g. by stimulating certain brain networks directly), they seem beyond speculative.