For me the last time I took a trip I was alone for most of the trip and I cried a lot and my heart felt physically pained. I felt sorry for my heart that it had to keep beating and could not rest. It was a really challenging trip. I haven't been on another trip since.
I am a frequent LSD user and I do it for fun and healing.
I don't know about PTSD (although it did help me after I got hit by a truck, and also after I hit my head and nearly died), but it helps me get through stressful times. It also helps me become productive again when I feel like I'm too burnt out to work. I don't know how exactly this happens, but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties.
>but I assume it's something like giving me enough tunnel vision to forget about background/subconscious anxieties
counterpoint: it might be said that one's "tunnel vision" is made out of anxieties pushed to the background, disrupting the default mode network allows the person to consciously process them. ofc i can't say whether this tracks with your experience
It pushes more than just anxieties to the background. During the peak of an LSD trip, I can be so distractible that I can barely keep more than one thing in my head at a time, and it's incredibly easy for any new thought to overwrite everything prior. I do know that spending some time in that state of mind does tend to help me. With that said, I don't think I can speak much on the default mode network because I haven't developed an intuition on how that affects me.
i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
it completely makes sense that a person with neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis might experience these effects differently (different valence to same phenomenon; or, entirely different phenomenon from same preconditions). either way, imo the important thing (confirmed by what you say about the hyper-distractible state which you experience) is for one to spend as much time as needed in the headspace that is appropriate to their neurobiological makeup, rather than that headspace which other people want one to be in as if it's any of their goddam business.
ofc not to be taken that reaching "the personally good headspace" is trivial; a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place! (the premise of neurotypical supremacy?) hence the utility of altered states which demonstrate the opposite and thus provide the introspector with a basis for comparison
> i do now realize i've been unclear in my previous post; this "tunnel vision" we both speak of (hopefully we're indeed referring to the same phenomenon!) is, in my view, the culturally expected default day-to-day state of the neurotypical mind; as in, one is expected to have acquired these mandatory blinders early on, regardless if they're actually harmful to individual health and collective flourishing
I'm not super sure what "blinders" you're speaking of. I don't think it's expected for a neurotypical person to only be able to keep ~one thought in their head at a time. Although I do notice a lot of the time people find it weird that I remember things that were besides a point; maybe that's what you're talking about.
> neurophysiological parameters that result in adhd diagnosis
Weird trivia, but it's really fucking weird that dysgraphia predicts an ADHD diagnosis. I seem to have dysgraphia, and lo and behold[0]:
> Individuals with dysgraphia often have difficulties in Executive Functions (e.g., planning and organizing).
What the fuck lmao.
> a core part of "the blinders" is the assumption that no other stable non-pathological mind-states exist in the first place!
This is a totally different thing; this is intentional rejection of new ideas, and basically rejection of everyone who isn't the same.
- implicit taboos against things like mental self-modification, metacognition, introspection, empathy (latter two to a lesser degree because of their "glue" function); general abstraction-phobia scaling to sociall anti-intellectualism
- proclivity to pattern-match against acquired linguistic constructs (narratives, ideologies, superstitions) rather than trying to analytically reason about object-level cause-and-effect chains (leads to "shoot the messenger" style symptom-treatments; wireheading scenarios; all the "you can only ever win by being wrong" stuff)
- relatedly, conflating the ethically incorrect, vs the physically impossible, vs the unthinkable (whereas i'd venture there's a definite benefit to being able to tell apart these different modes of putative non-being)
these i view as "architectural patterns" in accordance with which the global "operating system" of "normative being" is constructed; infinite spanners into gearworks coalescing into what from afar might sound as a symphony to someone who has never heard one; poor memory and impaired reasoning skills being either organic side effects - or, scarier still, the very evolutionary pressures that make this whole show viable in the first place
the dysgraphia connection is interesting in its own right; i draw a tentative association with the known educational abuse of forcibly changing people's handedness. where i'm from, this was common up until relatively recently, and it remains folk knowledge that in the long term it can fuck up the developing mind's impulse control and executive function.
i'd conjecture what gets disrupted is the quasi-organic relation to one's "exocortex" (cf. jaynes' hypothesis of the emergence of the ego-as-subject-of-structured-reflection through the invention of writing?) so that one basically gains a self-reinforcing pavlovian "circuit" which fades into the background but disrupts one's cognition and/or motorics every time one approaches the correct conduction of the desired procedure (as in the case of reifying a particular grapheme out of muscle-memory)
sadly, as institutionally legitimized specialists tend to be pre-vetted for strong pro-sociality above all else, mainstream consensus dictates this fascinating and occasionally life-or-death stuff can only be studied on a basis i'd call "the merely actuarial"; but no deeper. conversely, conceptual tools for dealing with directly experienced phenomenological aspects (my "favorite" one being, of course, adversarial impairment of cognition) are few, far between, and rarely if ever from impartial sources.
> Once you've polished the windows, it is fun to go back and look at the view...
I spent a long time trying to decide if you were referencing licking the windows, or something more poetic. I decided to let both interpretations occupy my mind, as it seemed greater than the sum of its parts.