So if this is what we would consider "hallucinations" then sure I experienced all this and more. One of the more interesting experiences for me is when I try to cook food on acid. On day to day basis I am quite good cook and I can reliably judge how well done something is but on LSD all those abilities simply disappear. I can't tell if the meat on the pan is done or not without thermometer.
But I think reducing hallucinations to distortions doesn't fully capture what is going on. LSD affects the mechanism of active perception as well as the passive perception. I think when we talk of hallucination then this is the area people have in mind and what is important hallucination is one of the least interesting ways acid affect active perception. What I mean by active perception as contrasted with passive one is that all things you mentioned are passive perceptions. But our mind does not only recognises objects in the world but it is also participating in constructing new categories which establish new objects. For further reference the key-word is "The myth of the given" but what I want to point here is that this ability of the mind to put sense data under categories is affected with LSD in a incredibly interesting way. This is why hallucinations as perception of things which completely don't exist are so difficult to have and you either need to have a "special type of soul" or take such a large dose that you no longer operate on external sense data since they are so distorted.
You're trying to clarify the neat categories you'd like to draw between layers of abstraction. As if to say "oh absolutely it effects the raw input (active perception), and maybe a tiny bit of that subconscious processing one step above there (passive perception), but I've never had it leak all the way up the chain to the seat of consciousness itself (hallucination)". Which is fine I suppose though I don't see what this structure adds.
You're correct that my immediate tests are all at the lowest level of abstraction. I picked them simply because they are the types of distortions which manifest first and quickest and least ambiguously. If you or anyone else isn't sure if the acid has kicked in, or is uncertain that they are experiencing any changes, these are the debugging tools. At higher levels of abstraction you get things like streamers, transposing of near identical objects, and sometimes even weird face distortions.
The taste thing is quite curious to me. Have you considered setting up an experiment to try and pin down exactly which flavors are distorted and how?
If we are looking for tests whenever we are tripping or not then sure, what you described is definitely the way to go. The categories I am drawing are not important for that. I make them to on the one hand tell people that they probably won't lose their consciousness and on the other that there will happen something more than simple "eye-filter". This middle step I find the most interesting, possibly dangerous and missing from wide-culture discussion so I want to pin it down. Especially that it is interesting feature of the mind independently of psychedelics.
An experiment with tastes could be interesting but lately I simply avoid eating while tripping since I feel my stomach too vividly. Once I had to eat plain rice for some time after the trip since everything else was too overwhelming.
It was probably in Psychedelic Information Theory where I read the closest to the missing middle you are looking for. The visual system, being the most complex, is the most fragile and thus any perturbation is likely to manifest as neat geometry first. Most commonly this takes the shape of one of the form constants, which is pretty easy to explain as those patterns are directly encoded in the first few layers just after the optical nerve. So you randomly poke any neuron there, you'll get those shapes. Even waking up tired can cause it (hypnogognia). The next layer of distortion up has to do with the main loop structure (hypothalmus loop? its been a while my memory sucks). These sorts of distortions you might miscategorize as the first kind since they are still most often just "vfx magic eye filter". But they aren't so simple and in fact are distortions of a higher order of pattern recognition. I'm talking about effects such as a moving object appearing to be multiple places as though a strobe light is flickering. Or looking for a dot and suddenly seeing dots amplify everywhere in your view. By that point coherent speech is a bit hard to manage and focus is usually not forthcoming for any multi-step task. From there its pretty much a continuum on up to the point where understanding the difference between in your head or not also becomes a noisy signal. But that usually doesn't happen on acid. I get what you're after, I think a continuum of effect is a more apt concept.
Without eating per se, would you consider testing an assortment of tastes such as salt, sugar, whatever spices you have etc?
I think this is a dosage thing. The first time I took acid, after about 3 hours whenever I stared at the back of my hands, I could see the skin flying off like particles of sand exposing the muscles underneath with vines growing out from between the muscles. The harder/longer you stared the more detail you'd see.
I have, in the way of things melting (for example). I've seen a dream-like image of reality, a short fat man, riding away on a horse with a rainbow tail I have used LSD quite extensively as well - I cannot tell you how many times I've done it.
But most of the time, it isn't that obvious. My hands look a little bluish or reddish. My spouse looks shiny. I get little moving lines on a blank sheet of paper: Sometimes I draw the ones that I can get (I often make art while on LSD as well as sober: I have a pretty steady hand).
It is all a bit less than I've gotten with, say, mushrooms. Of course, I don't do heroic doses or anything and the more vivid hallucinations came with a stronger dose than I tend to have.
Okay, maybe my wording was off but I do in fact agree with you.
I argue that hallucination is one property and personality-change is another. The article above says that they are working on hallucination-free lsd. Therefore the lsd they produce will still be personality-changing possibly. Therefore we are both worried that there might be something which makes lsd possibly dangerous and therefore unsuitable for wide medical use.
I happen to be well suited for psychedelic experience but I do have close one who went thought few months of LSD-induced anxiety and they won't ever take it again because of it.
Nevertheless I am in fact in favour of trying out the possibilities of lsd and I think that the policy of harm-reduction with specialised control system can outweigh the possible risks. The two most important takeaways which are repeated endlessly in this context is that one should treat LSD with high degree of respect and use allergic method at the beginning to find the ways in which one is affected by the drug. You start with half dose or even quarter dose. You take a break and observe yourself. Then you can take slightly larger dose. You observe yourself again. Etc.
Second there should be someone more experienced who oversees you during the trip and after it so that if there are any troublesome effect which you yourself might omit then there will be someone to catch it and stop your from taking more.
Currently both of those points are difficult because of criminalisation and I think that until this is changed we will be floating in myths (both positive and negative ones). And as long as we are floating in myths we won't be able to resolve even the simplest empirical / verifiable questions about the consequences of LSD usage.
agreed. the pop culture representation of hallucinations is actually more describing delirium. however, closing your eyes and letting your third eye wander is where the real interesting things happen, and it's possible that those experiences are so vivid even with eyes open because you are more acutely aware of what the third eye is seeing. almost as if it unlocks a sixth sense of sorts
"We live in a society that defines itself not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it's not. We are not decent and kind human beings; we are not racists or not homophobes. We can't just not care; we have to be atheists. Even with bad stuff: We are not victim blamers and choice deniers; we are anti-abortionists.
And the products marketed to us are just a reflection of what we are. Gluten-free bread. Sugar-free drinks. Non-hallucinogenic LSD. No THC weed. Low-fat milk. Etc.
Everything is becoming defined in terms of what it's not."
Basically, marketing 101 - don't sell the product, sell what it isn't or what it is. Boxed Water - It's marketed as better, even though it still is a packaged product that has supply chain woes as any product. It's a reflection of what society is, wanting the same product but not wanting to feel "bad" by it.
The above example goes with no THC weed, low fat milk, sugar free drinks, etc. Sugar has calories. Fat is not health. THC is bad but people still want to do weed, etc.
People want water, but they don't want to feel bad. Some people may know about Nestle and how they just rebottle public water, others come in that boxed water is better because there's no plastic, and it's just marketing water in a new way. Lifestyle choice.
A big thing about psychedelics, at least back in the day was that it was counter culture. There was The Man which isn't really used anymore. I think the best, newest pop culture usage of it is probably "That 70's show" to the remix "That 90's Show" or, to be seen there anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man I can go on, but - the more that psychedelics have/become a place of healing and more scrutinized and legalized, much of the original culture surrounding it is gone. And yes, many arguments are that it is better - proven results, proven research, trusted supply chain of chemicals to consume, no need to hide getting help if needed, not being penalized legally, not being criminalized, etc.
Which comes around to boxed water. Per the bloomberg article there several quotes:
"The name is not just fitting, it's precise. As much as the company is selling water, it's also selling boxes, or rather, selling its customers on paper over plastic. "
""Definitely a water company," says Jeremy Adams, vice-president for marketing at Boxed Water Is Better, when I ask him whether Boxed Water is a paper company."
"While bottled water is easily the most wasteful indulgence in the first world, it's also not going anywhere. Convenience water is a $24 billion market in the U.S., where more than 1 billion plastic water bottles are shipped annually."
"Sure, Boxed Water is selling people on a lifestyle product that everyone should rely on way less. But Boxed Water Is Better may in fact be an improvement on bottled water. Not just in terms of sustainability, but in the way that a highly disposable product is produced, packaged, and shipped."
All that, itself fits the original comment I replied too: "We live in a society that defines itself not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it's not."
Back to the article which has this nugget I'm re-quoting: "While bottled water is easily the most wasteful indulgence in the first world, it's also not going anywhere. "
> Let's call them "distortions" instead and not get stuck on vocabulary.
Let's not. What you're describing are known as pseudo-hallucinations. i.e. The floor looks wavy and like it's moving, that sort of thing. A hallucination is seeing something (and is always visual) that isn't there, such as a person or object. Delusion is believing these are real and endorsing as real, but delusion often occurs without hallucination, such as believing someone is in the room without visually perceiving them. Delusion is somewhat related to fantasy, it all depends on whether it is believed to be real. Aural hallucinations are, of course, hearing things that aren't there.
The term used by people that seek these things out appears to be “visual effects”[0] and it apparently includes any sort of change in visual perception. I have never come across the term pseudo-hallucination to describe these phenomena before this comment.
I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people don’t test what they buy before ingesting it. A lot of other drugs are marketed as something else. For example “MDMA” is often just amphetamine that the dealer sells as MDMA but they produce very different experiences. The physiological effects are similar but the mental effects are not comparable especially what it feels like the next day. Always test everything you get if you want to be sure.
The rising interest in novel antidepressants on HN suggests to me that even the wildly comfortable readership of HN is struggling with this era.
I have no judgment to cast on those who try and enjoy adaptogens, but please think through what the broader pattern means: even those who this system rewards struggle to look the morning in the eye.
I don't know what that means, per se, but it suggests that conditions are ripe for some sort of monstrous upending. For if the lucky ones are struggling, who isn't?
What would be cool would be some sort of graph over time of trending articles pertaining to depression and anxiety (and other mental health problems.)
The sentiment of HN matters simply because our industry is so monstrously important to this century. We are all unwilling --- and often unwitting --- bellweathers, by virtue of our relative affluence, influence and prestige.
A 'clean sample', if you will; a demographic that typically does not have other, intersecting problems to make the verniers read funny.
Someone please start graphing this before I lose an afternoon to it ;D
I suffer from anxiety and sometimes I think it's because I have nothing to be anxious about.
Perhaps as humans we just have a default level of anxiety, and it's supposed to go towards wolves and lightning, but in such comfortable and peaceful times, without anywhere else to go, it just ends up being directed at every day things.
Similarly I find if I really do have something real to focus my anxiety on, my day to day anxiety issues disappear.
Arguably both, since I thought of it but later found I've been beaten to it at least twice. Steven Lehar beat me by 20 years and made a phd thesis out of it.
To give a quick summary of what I'm talking about, the brain waves rather than the individual neurons are the representation of everything. Brain waves are a consequence of closed loop neuron paths and propagation delay. The longer the loop, the lower the frequency. One consequence of this is that complex signal processing tricks like fourier transform fall out very easily, far more easily than if you tried to train a regular neural net to do it. Now if you poke at the timings or connections at random, you are more likely to hit a long loop than a short loop. Hence, LSD distorts a very particular band of brain wave frequencies. You can make words just fine but sentences lose their way.
A) what was he on and B) are you sure it is just the drugs at fault here.
First, this sounds more like a DMT experience than anything. Loads of people convinced the "entities" are real. For LSD, this would be highly unusual.
Second, the one long term effect psychedelics arguably have any link to is triggering the first break in schizophrenics. Keep in mind it does not appear to cause schizophrenia, just trigger it if it hasn't happened already. So there's really really good reason to see if perhaps it wasn't just the trips leading him to this state.
That’s a hallucination. You didn’t go deep enough to forget what it is but others do.
Psychosis is the same. They don’t see a literal government agent in front of them, they smell the numbers and that means the government is listening. They can see the numbers in the walls.
Any drug that impacts the brain is going to fuck you up to some degree. We don’t want people to fuck themselves up purely for amusement.
I know you’re itching to say “muh alcohol” but it’s just not the same. It doesn’t cause hallucinations or mess with your sense of reality and it doesn’t have a high level of toxicity like MDMA. The body can process it quite cleanly. Nobody has a glass of wine and has a psychotic break.
> Nobody has a glass of wine and has a psychotic break.
Nobody has a single tab of LSD and a psychotic break, it's very very mild. People just imagine things because it's been vilified for decades. A lot of people get blackout drunk several times a week for years/decades, a bit of weed or LSD won't kill them or do any more harm than alcohol.
LSD is much less addictive and less dangerous than any other common drugs
People imagine LSD = hard drug = injecting meth straight in your eyeballs with a rusty needle when in fact at low dose it's more like a very mellow and long weed joint "good part" of the high kind of thing
Sometimes the lines between visuals and hallucinations can be blurred.
On LSD, when I am in an unfamiliar environment or looking at an unfamiliar scene, I can indeed be in a situation where I don't know whether what I'm looking at is real or not. The issue is I don't have any baseline to compare it against, so I can't tell what's a hallucination and what isn't.
...Of course, I still know I'm on drugs and not seeing the world as it is.
47 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadYou're correct that my immediate tests are all at the lowest level of abstraction. I picked them simply because they are the types of distortions which manifest first and quickest and least ambiguously. If you or anyone else isn't sure if the acid has kicked in, or is uncertain that they are experiencing any changes, these are the debugging tools. At higher levels of abstraction you get things like streamers, transposing of near identical objects, and sometimes even weird face distortions.
The taste thing is quite curious to me. Have you considered setting up an experiment to try and pin down exactly which flavors are distorted and how?
Without eating per se, would you consider testing an assortment of tastes such as salt, sugar, whatever spices you have etc?
Primarily because people don’t know what they are and are afraid to question it.
But most of the time, it isn't that obvious. My hands look a little bluish or reddish. My spouse looks shiny. I get little moving lines on a blank sheet of paper: Sometimes I draw the ones that I can get (I often make art while on LSD as well as sober: I have a pretty steady hand).
It is all a bit less than I've gotten with, say, mushrooms. Of course, I don't do heroic doses or anything and the more vivid hallucinations came with a stronger dose than I tend to have.
I happen to be well suited for psychedelic experience but I do have close one who went thought few months of LSD-induced anxiety and they won't ever take it again because of it.
Nevertheless I am in fact in favour of trying out the possibilities of lsd and I think that the policy of harm-reduction with specialised control system can outweigh the possible risks. The two most important takeaways which are repeated endlessly in this context is that one should treat LSD with high degree of respect and use allergic method at the beginning to find the ways in which one is affected by the drug. You start with half dose or even quarter dose. You take a break and observe yourself. Then you can take slightly larger dose. You observe yourself again. Etc. Second there should be someone more experienced who oversees you during the trip and after it so that if there are any troublesome effect which you yourself might omit then there will be someone to catch it and stop your from taking more. Currently both of those points are difficult because of criminalisation and I think that until this is changed we will be floating in myths (both positive and negative ones). And as long as we are floating in myths we won't be able to resolve even the simplest empirical / verifiable questions about the consequences of LSD usage.
"We live in a society that defines itself not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it's not. We are not decent and kind human beings; we are not racists or not homophobes. We can't just not care; we have to be atheists. Even with bad stuff: We are not victim blamers and choice deniers; we are anti-abortionists. And the products marketed to us are just a reflection of what we are. Gluten-free bread. Sugar-free drinks. Non-hallucinogenic LSD. No THC weed. Low-fat milk. Etc.
Everything is becoming defined in terms of what it's not."
Basically, marketing 101 - don't sell the product, sell what it isn't or what it is. Boxed Water - It's marketed as better, even though it still is a packaged product that has supply chain woes as any product. It's a reflection of what society is, wanting the same product but not wanting to feel "bad" by it.
The above example goes with no THC weed, low fat milk, sugar free drinks, etc. Sugar has calories. Fat is not health. THC is bad but people still want to do weed, etc.
People want water, but they don't want to feel bad. Some people may know about Nestle and how they just rebottle public water, others come in that boxed water is better because there's no plastic, and it's just marketing water in a new way. Lifestyle choice.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-06/is-boxed-...
A big thing about psychedelics, at least back in the day was that it was counter culture. There was The Man which isn't really used anymore. I think the best, newest pop culture usage of it is probably "That 70's show" to the remix "That 90's Show" or, to be seen there anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man I can go on, but - the more that psychedelics have/become a place of healing and more scrutinized and legalized, much of the original culture surrounding it is gone. And yes, many arguments are that it is better - proven results, proven research, trusted supply chain of chemicals to consume, no need to hide getting help if needed, not being penalized legally, not being criminalized, etc.
Which comes around to boxed water. Per the bloomberg article there several quotes:
"The name is not just fitting, it's precise. As much as the company is selling water, it's also selling boxes, or rather, selling its customers on paper over plastic. "
""Definitely a water company," says Jeremy Adams, vice-president for marketing at Boxed Water Is Better, when I ask him whether Boxed Water is a paper company."
"While bottled water is easily the most wasteful indulgence in the first world, it's also not going anywhere. Convenience water is a $24 billion market in the U.S., where more than 1 billion plastic water bottles are shipped annually."
"Sure, Boxed Water is selling people on a lifestyle product that everyone should rely on way less. But Boxed Water Is Better may in fact be an improvement on bottled water. Not just in terms of sustainability, but in the way that a highly disposable product is produced, packaged, and shipped."
All that, itself fits the original comment I replied too: "We live in a society that defines itself not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it's not."
Back to the article which has this nugget I'm re-quoting: "While bottled water is easily the most wasteful indulgence in the first world, it's also not going anywhere. "
That. That's what it means.
Let's not. What you're describing are known as pseudo-hallucinations. i.e. The floor looks wavy and like it's moving, that sort of thing. A hallucination is seeing something (and is always visual) that isn't there, such as a person or object. Delusion is believing these are real and endorsing as real, but delusion often occurs without hallucination, such as believing someone is in the room without visually perceiving them. Delusion is somewhat related to fantasy, it all depends on whether it is believed to be real. Aural hallucinations are, of course, hearing things that aren't there.
[0] https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Visual_effects
Must not exist then.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudohallucination
I have no judgment to cast on those who try and enjoy adaptogens, but please think through what the broader pattern means: even those who this system rewards struggle to look the morning in the eye.
I don't know what that means, per se, but it suggests that conditions are ripe for some sort of monstrous upending. For if the lucky ones are struggling, who isn't?
What would be cool would be some sort of graph over time of trending articles pertaining to depression and anxiety (and other mental health problems.)
The sentiment of HN matters simply because our industry is so monstrously important to this century. We are all unwilling --- and often unwitting --- bellweathers, by virtue of our relative affluence, influence and prestige.
A 'clean sample', if you will; a demographic that typically does not have other, intersecting problems to make the verniers read funny.
Someone please start graphing this before I lose an afternoon to it ;D
Perhaps as humans we just have a default level of anxiety, and it's supposed to go towards wolves and lightning, but in such comfortable and peaceful times, without anywhere else to go, it just ends up being directed at every day things.
Similarly I find if I really do have something real to focus my anxiety on, my day to day anxiety issues disappear.
To see real “hallucinations”, head deep into Oaxaca, magic ‘schroom communities. Be prepared to eat a lot of dirt too.
You will find what you seek. :-)
http://slehar.com/wwwRel/
Psychedelic Information Theory also echos basically everything I was conjecturing at the time and backs it up in a ton of depth.
http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/
To give a quick summary of what I'm talking about, the brain waves rather than the individual neurons are the representation of everything. Brain waves are a consequence of closed loop neuron paths and propagation delay. The longer the loop, the lower the frequency. One consequence of this is that complex signal processing tricks like fourier transform fall out very easily, far more easily than if you tried to train a regular neural net to do it. Now if you poke at the timings or connections at random, you are more likely to hit a long loop than a short loop. Hence, LSD distorts a very particular band of brain wave frequencies. You can make words just fine but sentences lose their way.
A paper that confirms the fourier trick is going on in the optical system: http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf
Experimental evidence of the shift in frequency partition function due to LSD https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17546-0.
First, this sounds more like a DMT experience than anything. Loads of people convinced the "entities" are real. For LSD, this would be highly unusual.
Second, the one long term effect psychedelics arguably have any link to is triggering the first break in schizophrenics. Keep in mind it does not appear to cause schizophrenia, just trigger it if it hasn't happened already. So there's really really good reason to see if perhaps it wasn't just the trips leading him to this state.
Psychosis is the same. They don’t see a literal government agent in front of them, they smell the numbers and that means the government is listening. They can see the numbers in the walls.
I know you’re itching to say “muh alcohol” but it’s just not the same. It doesn’t cause hallucinations or mess with your sense of reality and it doesn’t have a high level of toxicity like MDMA. The body can process it quite cleanly. Nobody has a glass of wine and has a psychotic break.
It is, alcohol isn't any different, it's a drug, it's abused, it has awful effects, probably more than some other illegal drugs
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/HarmCaus...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Drug_danger_a...
> Nobody has a glass of wine and has a psychotic break.
Nobody has a single tab of LSD and a psychotic break, it's very very mild. People just imagine things because it's been vilified for decades. A lot of people get blackout drunk several times a week for years/decades, a bit of weed or LSD won't kill them or do any more harm than alcohol.
LSD is much less addictive and less dangerous than any other common drugs
People imagine LSD = hard drug = injecting meth straight in your eyeballs with a rusty needle when in fact at low dose it's more like a very mellow and long weed joint "good part" of the high kind of thing
On LSD, when I am in an unfamiliar environment or looking at an unfamiliar scene, I can indeed be in a situation where I don't know whether what I'm looking at is real or not. The issue is I don't have any baseline to compare it against, so I can't tell what's a hallucination and what isn't.
...Of course, I still know I'm on drugs and not seeing the world as it is.
If there is one thing missing from 21st century, 1st world societies, it’s transcendence.