[precisioncoder]

Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.

I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.

I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.

YMMV of course.

[aphextim]

This came naturally for me although I'm sure the technique is not as refined as someone who practices it a lot.

When I first tried this I noticed that the hallucinations were very similar to those old magic eye books.

https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Eye-New-Looking-World/dp/083627...

In those books you relax and are able to see the image through the chaos.

The same can be said for when you are on these types of drugs, or at least for me personally. When I was able to relax and let my mind go, the hallucinations and visuals would come at a greater intensity. If I needed to, I was able to snap out of it by focusing my mind on the moment and tangible reality in front of me.

When I was leading a few people on their first experience I explained this to them, that if they are unable to relax and let go, the visuals would not come as quickly or be as intense. Do not be afraid, relax and let go and if needed you can ground yourself back if you have a decent mind and didn't take an amount larger than you can handle.

[theNJR]

I didn’t realize this was a thing! I’m generally able to do this too, especially when meditating. It started after trying psychedelics in college, which probably ‘activated’ something in my brain that said “you can make the carpet swirl”. It’s sort of like looking at a Magic Eye photo. I just tried to do it now, but having just woke up, I don’t think I can concentrate enough to do it.

How early did your parents start you on meditation?

[precisioncoder]

When you grow up in a buddhist family it's more like something that's always there. My parents were heavy meditators (1 hour+/day) so I would often just hang out with them. They probably half taught me a few dozen times when I was young, it's a culture thing. Kinda like growing up a Christian household I'm sure you accumulate random knowledge about the bible, god and jesus. When I was older I went through some more official training but it was purely an interest thing, they let me pick my own path. These days I meditate but I do it in a purely secular non religious way.

[theNJR]

That’s really cool. Appreciate you sharing.

[dejawu]

I honestly don't remember exactly where, but I was reading a wiki for psychonauts once and it provided a scale for the potency of a dose (e.g. No effect, threshold, etc) and the metric they used was the observer's ability to consciously resist the effects of the drug - kind of like when you're drunk or stoned and try to "force" yourself to sober up.

[csorrell]

I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.

[jokowueu]

Fascinating thank you for sharing . Never heard of this

[morningseagulls]

>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.

>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.

There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]

I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]

I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]

In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ...

[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b...

[5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts

[khafra]

Extrapolating from the article and associated research, what you're describing as a mental "flex" may be an ability to consciously weight higher-level models over lower-level ones, and vice-versa. I'd be interested to see the fMRI results of a bunch of people who can do that "flex."