I'm quite sure that the research itself is quite interesting but I hate how the "hallucinations" overtake all discussion on psychedelics. I never experienced any hallucinations, understood as believing that I perceive something which turned out to not be the case, on acid. The only text I know which describes the experience accurately is "The doors of perception" by Huxley and he as well notices how you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere. At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing. Maybe there are people who experience, and are truly overwhelmed, by the hallucinatory part but I doubt that this is the most important issue with psychedelic.
So I'd agree you generally won't get perceptions constructed seemingly out of whole cloth. They are more like non-optical illusions. Similar to optical illusions in the sense of being a form of erroneous perception which you are aware is erroneous but not really fooled by. Non-optical in the obvious sense that the mechanism isn't the same as a normal sober state optical illusion. Let's call them "distortions" instead and not get stuck on vocabulary.
There's a few reliable ways to manifest distortions and to notice the amount of distortion in your present state.
1. After images. Stare at a bright spot such as a lightbulb or a beam of sunlight through a crack for several seconds. Then close your eyes. The normal after image you are used to should now take on a deeply geometric shape rather than smoothly diffusing away.
2. Look at TV static / towel / white noise texture. These patterns are extremely reliable at manifesting crystals and fractals. I have theories why, but lets stay on point.
3. The dead man switch. Set a timer for 20 min. When it goes off, verbally acknowledge and reset. This isn't visual, but the first and most subtle distortion is your sense of time and this will make you acutely aware of it.
4. Thin line on white page. It should reliably start to jiggle around as if it were a wave on a string.
As a general rule, things which have very fine grain spatial components will be distorted in some way. If you must know the theory for whats happening (which I can back with scientific citations), the brain is doing something similar to the way jpeg/mp3 compression works. Namely it converts the incoming information into frequencies via a fourier transform (in some weird, highly optimized basis) because information processing is generally easier there. LSD changes the reference clocks so everything is out of phase. Every frequency is being slowly phase shifted from where it should be, which then causes it all to move as if it were following a wave equation.
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?
> 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.
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.
> At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing.
Not everyone is able to identify the difference between real patterns and fake, drug-induced pattern recognition, though.
I’ve even seen it happen to a friend who was otherwise a very logical, rational person. After a period of experimenting with psychedelics, he became attached to some physically impossible ideas for a period of a few years. Eventually he started recognizing that the ideas were illogical and triggered by the drug, but for a while he was thoroughly convinced that some things he “learned” during his trip were, in fact, part of a reality that the rest of us simply had seen yet.
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.
I am not denying that for some people hallucinations are possible and dangerous. I think my main point is twofold. First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. For example what you describe I wouldn't consider hallucinations. LSD can definitely induce certain ideas and motivations into you and this is the area of experience which I would like people were more aware of.
> First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle.
I think you’re downplaying the issue too much.
Whatever you want to call them, the illogical thoughts induced by psychedelics can be a significant problem for people who can’t separate them from reality.
There is a lot of talk about how psychedelics can change people’s minds and make them open to new ideas, but there has been much less talk about how not all of those drug-induced ideas are actually good or true ideas.
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.
I agree, the doors of perception and the book of the dead by timothy leary all give better examples of it it is to be on a "Trip."
Most of the common culture, goes on that LSD/Acid, you see invisible things and such - and I, myself, never experienced that - but I can understand how someone that is fully ingrained in a normal life, and having ego death and their psyche is unleashed, can perceive things differently.
That' what I feel it is, and I feel very sad that many people online post false stories about this. Places like Erowid, are also quickly eroding as people don't go there anymore, I think, to review or really get into the proper background.
But I can also say that dosage is a big factor too, I've witnessed people that had no previous experience wanting to impress friends/new friends and do what is best described as a "hero dose" or such, and while psychedelics aren't immediately harmful, the proper way would be to threshold dose - but good luck explaining what that is.
In this experience, I've witnessed this person become unable to talk, communicate and basically fall in and out of consciousness. Mind you, this was not LSD-25, but just mushrooms. They snapped out of it about 90 minutes later, but during that time if you were not an experienced trip-sitter or such, I can see panic kick in and you'd assume the worst - being poisoned, aliens out to get you, men in black or whatever is todays boogey man.
From a 3rd party viewing that session, it would just be describable as hallucinations. The person who consumed the mushrooms felt fine and had no real recollection of what transpired, and did want to try again, albeit much smaller dosage now. Which is another thing, peer pressure in some of these groups could be strong - although in this example none was actively pushing it, but just general ignorance of how strong a trip can be for a first time consumer.
I would say I have quite a bit of experience with psychedelics and I mostly agree with you - traditional "hallucinations" are quite rare and dose dependant. Experiences like those described in Huxley's book are by far the most important and interesting aspect of tripping - and I urge anyone curious to read that excellent book.
On the other hand, I absolutely have experienced amazing, deep, beautiful, true pop-culture style hallucinations. Usually visual, both geometric patterns but also full on creations of new worlds, entities, landscapes, and more. I've also experienced hallucinations that are multisensory and go far beyond the ability to put into words. I am a very visually focused person with a strong mind's eye, possibly that is related.
"you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere"
If you sit down in a completely dark room on LSD, you really do start seeing things out of nowhere. Or I did at least.
Was it pattern recognition? In a completely dark room? What was I recognizing patterns of?
Was it a distortion? Of what?
Was it real? In the PKD sense of reality, probably not. There seems to be a reluctance to accept the possibility of a hallucination.
I would look down at my legs and there would be snakes crawling up my legs. Then I would realize that those weren't my legs, those were my pants. I had come to accept my clothing as part of "me". And that's when things started to go, I realized that the idea of "me" was arbitrary.
There's no definite boundary of where "me" starts and where "me" ends, those boundaries start to disappear. Maybe "me" isn't my physical body, it's everything I've experienced, everything I've ever seen or felt. Everything I've ever loved or hated. Everything I've ever created or destroyed.
Everything I've ever done or said. Everything I've ever eaten. All that I slight, everyone I fight. All that is now, all that is gone, all that's to come, and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
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 was on acid, being driven by a friend in a car at night, and I saw the car ahead of us drive off the side of the road.
It didn't happen.
It was basically a daydream - I was just thinking to myself, "I hope that car doesn't crash", then zoned out and literally saw it happen with my eyes open. I watched the tail lights drive off the edge.
Afterwards I zoned back in and the car ahead of us was back.
That is the only time I've ever seen anything that wasn't actually there except patterns and "breathing". I haven't ever taken anything near a heroic dose though.
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.
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.
Me neither, but I have aphantasia and thus an under-developed mind's eye - if I can't visualise detailed imagery within my head normally, it makes sense that that machinery isn't available for LSD to build realistic hallucinations out of.
People are asked to imagine a bicycle. They are asked "Are you imagining a bicycle right now?" and the answer is "yes."
The interlocutor says "ok, please diagram/draw the bicycle you are imagining."
The results are insane. It becomes clear very quickly that people are not really imagining a bicycle. They are pulling up a partial memory of a bicycle that their brain is willing to rubber-stamp as "good enough."
I wonder how many people with "aphantasia" have the same internal images and are correctly unsatisfied with the level of imagery that human memory provides.
That doesn't mean I doubt aphantasia sometimes exists, on some level, but the accuracy of internal images seems to me like an important part of the discussion about it.
This is relevant to LSD because it is possible that you are "seeing" the same things that other people do but you are less willing to treat these visual effects as representing an image. Somebody else looks into the darkness and sees a person-shaped shadow... they think they see a person, you think you see a vaguely person-shaped blob. A schizophrenic looks into that shadow without LSD and sees a person chasing after them.
That's really interesting, thanks. And sure, a significant amount of remembered imagery is undoubtedly reconstruction and interpolation, but when I try and imagine a bicycle all I get is those partial memories of bicycles that flicker in an out of my mind's eye intermittently, there isn't really any reconstruction or interpolation that produces stable imagery. My visual memory is fine (although the inattention and working memory deficits of ADHD in itself may affect how much detail is committed) - I recognise what things are and things I've seen before - it's my mind's eye and the ability to envision that's lacking. And without being able to envision you can't really imagine visually.
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.
There is plenty of hallucination going on in my head though, often so crystal clear and undeniable that I all but see it out in the world. I think that’s enough to qualify as hallucination even though it’s not the cartoony meme of seeing aliens walking around or whatever.
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
Surely this is all dose dependent? Micro-dosing results in perhaps more vivid colour/pattern recognition and observation and injesting a couple of 'tabs' resulting in much more vivid illusions that can be confusing and lead you to mistake what the object is. That's my experience anyway.
Partially but as far as other people commented I rather think that each person experiences it differently. I took few heroic doses and the closes experience I had was a running conviction that floor was trying to eat me because I binge-watched attack on titan the week before. Still, it was not a hallucination per say.
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.
A lot of the old literature describes LSD as ‘psychotomimetic’ which is entirely wrong. The hallucinations that LSD users have are entirely different from the hallucinations that schizophrenics have. There is no commonality in the experience at all.
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.
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.
"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. "
I don't know about that. This sounds more like having a reference and deviations from it.
Whole milk is milk. Milk with the fat removed is fat free milk. Milk with chocolate added is chocolate milk. So you can have fat free chocolate milk defined in terms of what it doesn't have and what it has extra.
Reference LSD causes psychedelic visuals. LSD that doesn't is LSD sans hallucinations. LSD that makes you also taste chocolate in your mouth is chocolate LSD.
Not sure there's a deep observation about culture to be made.
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
Oh my god, I've been looking for this song for about a decade!
I had faint memories of an electronic song with footsteps in it. Listened to it about 20 times on repeat at a friend's house probably 30 years ago, but I remembered those lyrics immediately while reading your comment.
Therefore, we performed a pan-aminergic-wide GPCR functional screening campaign using a G protein dissociation BRET-based assay platform38 optimized for 33
