[mycroft-holmes]

On a throwaway account here. I'm currently teaching myself to draw using that book and I think the author is really onto something.

My first experience with psilocybin is also something that led me down a similar line of thinking. When the drug really hit me and I looked at anything visually appealing (a painting or a movie) all I could think was, "So this is how a kid sees the world!" A tree (I still knew it was a tree deep down) just looked different. I saw all the little parts that made up a tree. There was no longer a filter to intervene and say, "Yeah that's a tree. You've seen a million." It was like my brain did a revert to its state years ago and it was amazing.

[evincarofautumn]

Yeah, I’ve taken mushrooms, and my memories of being a young child are in retrospect very psychedelic, minus the visuals. (I imagine visuals are present at very young ages, say 0–1 years, before you learn how to fully separate your senses.) You take things at face value, it’s easy to lose context and permanence, you draw connections between things, and you feel insightful.

For example, I remember being about 3 years old, and realising that other people couldn’t hear my thoughts, and that I couldn’t hear theirs—it was mind-blowing. Of course, you tend to come to slightly more complex realisations while taking psychedelics as an adult, and therein lies the value: it’s a kind of renewal of your personality.