| I take psychedelics on a regular basis. Usually a couple of times a month. Although I've done several hundred micrograms (there is really no way of knowing) of LSD at once, I also really enjoy experimenting with smaller doses and casually micro-dosing on work days. I happen to be a software engineer and try to apply my knowledge of "machines" to the psychedelic experience. While I don't believe in anything supernatural, I do think that there might be a chance that psychedelics, especially LSD, help your consciousness tap into some deeper abstractions of the human mind, maybe even the universe. Let me explain that insane claim as best I can: There is a great book on psychology that was published recently called: Thinking Fast and Slow. In summary, it goes into great detail about two systems of the human mind. System 1, the immediate reaction system, and system 2 which is responsible for computing and solving problems. When your brain is in system 2 mode (solve 17 x 54 in your head) your heart rate increases, your pupils dilate, and your brain starts consuming glucose. It's doing work. System 1 is the trained mind that recognizes facial gestures and stuff infinitely more complex than a simple math equation. It reacts to danger before you are consciously aware of danger. I would speculate that LSD turns on System 2 where normally my System 1 brain would give me an immediate response. Your mind starts processing information differently. This cascades into an incredible effect on your emotional awareness, creativity, introspection, insights, and behaviors both physical and cognitive. I wonder if these extreme doses of LSD eliminate your minds ability to process normal sensory input. What you're left with are low level systems. You're self-awareness is turned off, but you are left with cognitive factories still churning away. Imagine something sad that happened to you once. Now imagine the visual component is gone, the memory of language gone. You're left with the actual chemical response of the memory. Now do the inverse for something positive. That's what ego-loss is like. You're swimming in a sea of emotions as your brain randomly wanders off into different states, sometimes many at once, sometimes you get stuck in one. Sometimes that state is incredible panic, sometimes you're crying-laughing for 10 minutes straight. This is a common experience I've had on measly 300-500ug doses. As for the universe claim, as far fetched as it sounds, maybe some of these systems are abstractions of the universal systems. What we are perceiving in these insane states are also little clues into how the universe organizes itself and a peek at something pre-selfawareness. That last paragraph is all bull-shit heresy but even with my lighter doses I've had remarkable insights. Things that have changed my life in incredible ways. It's like a Pi of molecules or some shit. edit: grammar |
As far as I've read, LSD is, surprisingly, just a serotonin agonist, similar to anti-depressants or MDMA. (Technically, it's a non-selective serotonin agonist, and it does this by reversing the chemical reactions that take serotonin apart, to basically "un-use-up" serotonin you've already spent--which might explain its differing experiential effects--but in the end it still means "more serotonin in the brain.")
Now, the two things serotonin has been heavily implicated for in neurology, are pleasure (though not reward; that's dopamine), and neurogenesis: serotonin is basically released when something "feels good" in a sensual way--something looks aesthetically pleasing, something tastes delicious, etc.--as a signal to the rest of your brain to backtrack to what caused this stimulus to happen, and build up the neurons involved. Basically, if I find some tasty berries while foraging, reinforce the memory of the walk I took to get to the berries. [This effect can be harnessed: consume a bit of some fat-saturated food right after you study something, if you want to remember it better.]
But LSD, MDMA, and other drugs that stimulate serotonin release, can have psychedelic effects well beyond what you'd expect from "remembering things better." This is because the reaction to serotonin, neurogenesis, goes way beyond sensible memory formation. It takes any spikes in electrochemical activity that are going on in the brain at the time, and says "that: build up the synapse for that." And, of course, neurons have an underlying level of noise, that usually gets buried under actual cognition--so, when you turn the "gain" up on what "becomes brain cells", suddenly you start forming 'concepts' for ideas that are made of nothing at all--the feeling of seeing shared properties between things that have none. Which would indeed, likely, be best described as "a trip."
Of course, this also informs the other thing people--especially those in creative fields--say about LSD: that it's a life-altering experience, quite foundational for later productive work. This is basically because pushing up the "noise floor," if you have a lot of potential ideas lurking just below the surface as potential connections you haven't made between concepts, ready to be exploited--they'll get wired together by the non-selective flood of serotonin too. But, unlike the nodes for "the purpleness of music" or what-have-you, these nodes will actually self-reinforce once created--that is, they're useful to have, so you'll keep using them--so they'll stick around, whereas the other synapses will just get their reactivity scaled back down when it turns out how purple a song is doesn't have any causal impact on anything else. :)