[Unbefleckt]

While it's amusing in the short term, the long term side effects for me were awful. I felt like my brain was slow and unfocused, I was no longer quick in conversation or able to concentrate as well as usual, I felt disconnected from myself, sort of like when you recall a memory so old that it seems like it belongs to someone else, I had a headache for almost 3 weeks.

Throwing this in here as there are a fair few "dude just take drugs" comments and worry they might be the religious types.

[loa_in_]

Mushrooms are very contradictory in their nature to the modern "cog in the machine" lifestyle. It's a bit like being subjected to a software fuzzer. I imagine if learning from one's inputs, one will be afterwards less sure of concepts one was very sure about, but also less sure about concepts thought previously to be impossible. That will surely increase cognitive load, especially when one's life is pretty straightforward.

[brotchie]

Agreed.

Before a controlled high dose Psilocybin experience I "felt" my emotions: Anger, Fear, Frustration.

Afterwards, I gained the ability to observe and "catch" my emotions in-flight. Not sure if it was neuroplasticity induced by the substance, or "you don't know what your brain can do until you know it".

I liken it to previously having Ring 1 access to my thoughts, now I have Ring 0 access.

Definitely persistent: DRAMATIC improvement in my happiness and wellbeing.

YMMV

[_rs]

Do you mean you can catch them and stop them? Or catch them and say "oh I'm starting to feel angry" without letting the anger consume you, but still let it exist. I'd love any elaboration you can share on this

[brotchie]

The feeling still exists, but I can observe it and can run a secondary self-introspection loop to unpack that feeling, and often dig deeper and resolve where they feeling is coming from.

Another way of putting is that I'm self aware that the "qualia" of feeling angry is being projected into my conscious experience as a token, rather than simply experiencing "feeling angry" qualia.

I liken it to being able to set a breakpoint on my emotions, and then single step through the root cause of that emotion.

I seriously didn't have that functionality in my brain before that hero dose trip (even after doing many years of meditation).

[azurelake]

Your second sentence is more on the right path (speaking for myself at least). It's about labeling and observing the literal physiological sensation that is occurring in your body and choosing how to react vs. identifying strongly with the current emotion and reacting.

Easier said than done, of course!

[shrimp_emoji]

And mindfulness meditation is training yourself to detach your conscious sense of self from those physiological sensations, noticing but not reacting to them at all!

[kordlessagain]

Sounds a lot like vipassana meditation. I equated it to an "overwatch VM".

[Unbefleckt]

This is the best insult I've ever received.

[kordlessagain]

People who are fucked up and take drugs and find it tolerable because they feel less fucked up will likely always assume the same is true of others. That is likely from the effect of having low empathy for the outliers.

Risk taking is not something to advise others to practice in. It is for each and every person to evaluate their own risk tolerance and not have them influenced by those who took risks and came out the other side "for the better".

[lamp_book]

Sounds like it could be mild dissociation/depersonalization. It's not typically considered a primary effect of psilocybin, but there is a small mention here on classical psychedelics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative

[progmetaldev]

I was already predisposed to anxiety, but after using LSD quite a bit in my teens, my anxiety took over my waking life. During high anxiety and panic attacks, I often experience dissociation/depersonalization effects. I feel like I am disconnected from myself, and watching what is happening, like in a dream. The only thing I really connect with is the anxiety and fear. Over the years, through therapy and medication, this has become rarer.

[raincom]

It is very interesting to note that the same depersonalization is experienced after a long, deep meditative practice. I realized that this meditative depersonalization was same as when I was really mad.

[progmetaldev]

I actually had to change my meditation practice from deeper states to mindfulness meditation, because I would get that depersonalization feeling. Strangely enough, being angry would break me out of that state.

[cthalupa]

That's interesting, because I don't that anyone really has reported these side effects and I don't believe there are any known pharmacological effects from psilocybin or psilocin that would cause any of that.

Were they dried mushrooms you ate? Do you trust the provenance of them? If they were a chocolate bar or similar, many of those do not actually have psilocybin or psilocin in them, and are instead using a variety of different research chemicals that are significantly less understood. If it was dried mushrooms, there are a variety of species that induce hallucinogenic effects through other chemicals than what you find in your usual magic mushrooms.

They might have been regular shrooms, of course - people react to things differently - but that's a different enough outcome that I wonder if it wasn't something else entirely.

[newzisforsukas]

> I don't believe there are any known pharmacological effects from psilocybin or psilocin that would cause any of that

What are your qualifications to make a claim like that? There hasn't been much clinical research in humans using psilocybin until very recently [1], and they certainly do not cover the range of different species of mushrooms that contain the alkaloids [2].

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11016263/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psilocybin_mushroom_sp...

[cthalupa]

My qualifications for saying "I don't believe there are any known effects that match that" is... reading quite a lot of clinical research on their usage, and not having seen anything that would match those effects. You'll notice I qualified that statement in two ways - both that it is limited to my personal understanding and that of 'known' effects.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing - neither of these links indicate otherwise. Are you familiar with the null hypothesis? Unless we have evidence of something being the case, why would we think it would be the case?

We also have decades of anecdotal reports on usage of psilocybin and psilocin containing mushrooms and I'm also not aware of any significant evidence from that that such an effect is even remotely common - it's the first I've ever encountered that sort of story about persistent headaches for multiple weeks following their usage.

[newzisforsukas]

It seemed to me that you were downplaying this person's experience and were suggesting that they were possibly given other substances.

> neither of these links indicate otherwise

The articles I provided were to back my own statements that I made, not to refute yours, and I am not sure how that wasn't clear.

> I'm not really sure what you're arguing

I am saying that there really isn't a large enough body of scientific evidence yet to conclude definitively that there are no possible mechanisms that could cause this effect, as you stated. Humans aren't uniform systems.

> Are you familiar with the null hypothesis?

Yeah.

> it's the first I've ever encountered that sort of story about persistent headaches for multiple weeks following their usage.

HPPD comes to mind, serotonin syndrome, all sorts of possibilities that do not necessitate it being caused by another substance.

[cthalupa]

> It seemed to me that you were downplaying this person's experience

I'm not.

> were suggesting that they were possibly given other substances.

I am. There are a lot of people buying mislabeled products thinking they are ingesting chocolate made out of mushrooms that, in fact, are not. There are also people who sell other mushrooms, such as amanita muscaria, as your garden variety magic mushrooms. (I'm not aware of anything that would cause this with it, either, but it's got significantly less study and anecdotal reports.)

> I am saying that there really isn't a large enough body of scientific evidence yet to conclude definitively that there are no possible mechanisms that could cause this effect, as you stated. Humans aren't uniform systems.

You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about there being definitively no possible mechanisms. I said there are, to my knowledge, not known pharmacological mechanisms. If you want to dispute that, you're going to need to find some known pharmacological mechanism.

> HPPD comes to mind, serotonin syndrome, all sorts of possibilities that do not necessitate it being caused by another substance.

HPPD can cause a variety of visual phenomenon. That is not the same thing as having a 3 week long headache. SS is a possibility but now you're into multi-drug interactions, and I'd argue the blame is more on the MAOI or SSRI - those things interact with everything. But even still, the majority of SS cases subside in <24 hours... and the literature isn't exactly favorable to the idea that psilocybin is even a good candidate for causing SS in these cases. https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/assessing-risk-for-seroto... (Thomas has done several meta-analysis on this subject so he's about as informed on this topic as you can be.)

When something doesn't fit the current model of something, you ask questions about it - that's the starting point to pretty much any investigation. I'm unsure why you find this so egregious.

[newzisforsukas]

I will try to be more charitable in the future with my interpretations.

But as for mechanism, maybe up/down regulation of sertogenic systems, individual specific conditions (kidney disease, liver disease), etc?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03768...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6322052/