Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd:

> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.

LSD fans might hate this conclusion, but there's no "computational advantage" to having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed, which his the only thing actually being shown here.

Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes.

Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: maybe they are perceiving something that we ignore during normal processing modes.

If you believe that our perceptive filters, evolved over millennia of survival requirements, is the only or even best way to perceive our reality, I would invite you to consider that hummingbirds will never enjoy Mozart, and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.

Also what is being done here isn't simply slower processing speed. It's more like the information from old states persists into new ones. My understanding is that this would be considered low dose territory.

There's more to the story here, and I don't think this test, is even scratching the surface. It is neat though.

They didn't "experience an eternity". They experienced an emotional feeling they likened to an eternity. This is the difference between your computer running a program for a thousand years and you changing the date settings. These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.

There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". It is actually within the realm of possibility that they did experience an eternity-scale (but sub-infinite, natch) amount of experiences.

No, psychedelics really can speed up thought. It's not uncommon to experience a lot more in a much shorter amount of time than normal. For example, I've experienced this first-hand where I could not even finish a single sentence before I was so far ahead in thought that I completely forgot what I was originally trying to say.

I used to call it "an entire universe happening between each instant" which, while inaccurate, is an apt enough description of how it feels, but also how it actually is, because the volume of thought is still much higher than normal.

Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought. Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? There is no difference between this and hypnotizing someone to believe they've lived an eternity.

Under mushroom, food tastes amazing, because you can suddenly perceived a lot more details.

Also, I think if you'd ever used LSD, you would never think it was "slowing your thoughts down".

> and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.

Also FWIW, does the sloth also consider itself to be relaxed or rather just "normal" ;-)

Isn't the perception of being relaxed itself exactly reflective of how artificial* the experience actually is.

*: With the context that I have no intention of prescribing whether it is positive or enjoyable.

Perception is always, always false, the same way that our internal reality is imperfect. The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science.

Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists. The worst deceit from those heuristics being our conviction that there is any kind of truth in what we think, preventing the whole thing to fall appart.

To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".

IIRC earlier papers (that I am too lazy to find) shared on HN that have done this seem to show the opposite, that there is no measurable difference on the task yet the participants reported a difference in their label of the experience. (I think the paper then was related to some form of creativity and showed that there was no post-hoc measured difference despite a significant reported experiential difference).

It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.

> To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".

LSD probably doesn't make it faster for me to process things. It just makes me jump between things more quickly so I have more distinct experiences at any given time. I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed. In that scenario the other person is my time reference but I've also checked actual clocks and observed that effect.

I don't think LSD makes me better at computation at all (in fact, it probably makes me a bit worse at computation).

OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster.

In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.

If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too. Given the right kind of task and measurement. My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.

As an anecdote there's nothing wrong --- subjective experiences aren't any less "real" to the experiencer --- just that claims about the mechanism and effect are probably not generalizable.

> As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.

There's also lots of metaphysical questions about whether indescribable experiences are "real" or not that are probably too long to get into on HN :)

Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs.

E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal.

We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature.

A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.

This can honestly be applied to basically anything about thought. I sort of get it though, because claiming a difference implies "citation needed". I would just feel weird if I wasn't really having all the thoughts that I thought I had.

It's not exactly possible to communicate exactly what validation I've done over those memories, especially since my brain could have fixed stuff after the fact (as brains do). I just can't find anything that would suggest it was modified after the fact, since even my behavior at the time would support the theory.

Worth noting that I have a lot of experience with things that my brain simply makes me think are happening, because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and that happens with all sorts of things all the time. (That's not to say I can completely rule it out, rather that I know it happens and roughly how un-rule-out-able it can be.)

My brain will simulate something happening and then also create the memory of it happening, which becomes almost indistinguishable from it actually having happened. I would say I can usually tell those memories apart if I really study them, but whether I am correct or not, it is objectively impossible to know or say for sure, because if I missed something it would simply be missing from my knowledge (to the point where I wouldn't know something was missed).

That being said, I can't imagine having to hunt while on a lot of psychedelics

There are still theraputic uses for this impairment, and definitely a lot of recreational ones that allow you to discover things about yourself like any other testing or resistance, but hallucinogens are at best biohacking via chemical glitching, not spiritual gateways.

Perception Isn't false, it's subjective. It's real in its own domain, but that domain may not generalize or overlap with a shared physical reality or perceptions made by other people.

> having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed

I'm confused. Wouldn't this imply a 2.5x to 4x faster processing speed?

I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and doing work. So it’s like being given a superpower to “slow” time.

(Obviously time hasn’t slowed down only for me. It’s just how I personally perceive it now.)

Which if true, sounds like an artifact from less processing power to me.

Sounds identical to me on a bad ADHD day.

Every electronic device you use requires low pass signal processing to function and transfer information.

It isn't just about speed. A clear image on your TV is a clear advantage over static.

Similarly, there is a clear "computational advantage" to processing data at the right rate it is being transmitted. You can process a binary signal at faster rate than transmission, but 100% of your data will be lost.

Especially for something like spirituality, which is almost by definition something experienced within.

Is this claim not self-referential? Did you apply its ~~recommended~~ necessary methodology to itself?

> Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists.

This too...plus, who will be performing these experiments if scientists are not trustworthy?

Maybe this is brand new territory and we need new theories (&/or revisit old ones) and techniques.

Because first-hand observation just isn't good enough.

I swear, you people turn science into a religious ritual.

First-hand observation (which we have here) is the gold standard for knowledge-derivation. Science is just a method for ensuring that our models hew close to that.

What you assert here is mere convention.

For the processing, the subjective part of the perception, lot of things falls appart, attaching any notion of reality and trustiness looks like a choice to enable some lines of reflection. A choice heavily oriented by our own experience of existence, nobody wants to see themselves as a bag of more or less working heuristics with conscience as meta processing and data acquisition for self-correction mechanism.

But if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.

I believe, the slowing down of the "clock" can be said for meditation as well in some sense. Because even in a deep meditation you lose a sense of "time" and that's when it gets slightly "psychedelic", for a lack of a better word.

One thing that is different with meditation is that the senses are somewhat rendered inactive. So that means, the feedback artifacts are generated on our internal networks, i.e. consciousness and not from external stimuli ?

What problem exactly? This seems like a dismissive take on someone's positive experience.

Are your referring to the scientific problem of studying cause & effect of the psychedelic experience? Science is figuring that out.

I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough. The heuristics are quite reliable. It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.

> if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.

The best example I can think of is a dream. Dreams are real experiences despite not being shared with any other human. It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people. The same holds true for thoughts and feelings.

People don't get sent into an existential crisis because they feel happy while someone somewhere is unhappy. Having a feeling is a real experience, despite being personal and subjective.

Spiritual experiences have been about recreation, understanding others, the self, personal growth, coming of age, etc…

I feel like your post in general is full of acknowledgment of these drugs capabilities followed by attempts to downplay it with pejoratives like “chemical glitching” or “lower dimension”. It’s quiet confusing that you seem to think positively of the drugs but then dunk on them in the same breath.

I don’t think being able to explain, categorize and describe phenomena needs to make them less significant or impact. The mechanism of action being non mystical doesn’t need to change the significance of the experience.

This reminds me of a quote from Margaret Boden about her work on understanding creativity in a academic context.

> A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.

It's not the only tool available though. You could also use other tools like coercion, intimidation, violence, negotiation, etc. to also arrive at a single conclusion. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The radical changes in mentality from psychedelics is well documented. Not understood but documented.

And if you have all that you don't need to be doing mind altering drugs anymore.

How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?

It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.

Humans do all the time. A person does very seldomly.

The way you are doing it, could maybe be improved.

"The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change"

You clearly judged here based on little information. How do you know, that he cannot know?

(Unless you argue about philosophical limits of "knowing")

When till time X there was behavior Y and at time X there was a strong trip - and afterwards differences,then it seems pretty linked to me.

I went from drinking a consistent 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day (very rarely getting drunk tho, just loved homebrewing and craft beer), being nearly obese, with little cardiovascular/muscular fitness to being in a much better place. I now exercise regularly, have a resting heart rate of 54 bpm, lost 30 pounds, meditate every day, eat much more healthfully, rarely consume alcohol, and I am more patient and listen to my partner better.

The increased neuroplasticity caused by physcadelics when combined with a desire to improve habits is a very powerful combination.

There is also a legal, mushroom based therapy for anxiety and depression that has shown great results, available in Oregon.

I really do believe society is much too welcoming of alcohol consumption, and much too resistant to physcadelics. We got this one so wrong.

I'm assuming this discussion is all within the context of the original article "Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics" --- in which case understanding these specific messages actually don't require psychedelics.

Not implying psychedelics have no utility, just that whatever utility they have probably doesn't lie in interpreting these "slowed down scan" animations.

That's a bold claim. You can try multiple different substances, the test subjects know they ingest a psychedelic, but don't know which, which allows you to have a control group.

Clinical trials would face other issues, but not this one.

Sure, "person ready to take drugs to have epiphany" might mean they were on the cusp of one anyway, but it doesn't really matter.

Just because I'm smart doesn't mean I stop reading. Just because I am fit doesn't mean I stop running. Just because I'm happy doesn't mean I can't dabble with new mental models.

And finally, to clarify the OP's statement: "Mind in the right place" doesn't mean being perfectly happy or without stressors/depression. To me it suggests someone doesn't have mental illness or suicidal tendencies.

or for a narrower slice this paper is reference [6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11500666_What_Geome...

The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex. Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)

So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.

anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.

What if the only thing it's capable of doing is perceiving the passage of time? If the biological clock is the only measure of perceived time, then it feels like more time is elapsing. If the brain measures and feels time as sand slowly falling into a bucket, what happens when you dump a truckload of sand into the bucket? That doesn't mean that you're necessarily capable of doing more work in that time, but maybe you still feel the additional passage of time.

Persistence of vision type of tricks/effects have always been a favorite of mine. Even without LSD, I still enjoy finding ways to "trip" the mind. I have a ceiling fan with dark tone blades hanging from a white ceiling. When laying down in bed, I can stare at the ceiling fan for a couple of seconds, and then when I close my eyes, I still "see" the ceiling fan but in a negative view where the ceiling is now dark and the blades are light color. Cheap LEDs and fluorescent lights with cheap ballasts also cause me to see weird flickering when using averted vision or by turning my head back and forth in a rapid manner.

Maybe it's because of the training my brain has undergone from using psychedelics, but I've tried to get other people that have never used psychedelics to see the same things without success.

After every instance of that, it felt like I had spent so much time in that fractal that it was difficult to recall what had happened previously. It's not like ADHD where I get distracted and lose something from my short-term memory—it's that I had so many other thoughts that it was difficult to backtrack past them all.

Since we're talking about things that happened inside my own head, how can I know whether I actually experienced a certain period of time, or only created a memory of having experienced that time? My own recollection of it may be flawed, so it logically follows that in order to know for sure, I have to find some way to objectively quantify it. I don't know how I'd objectively quantify the number of thoughts I'm having, though, lol.

Sometimes I could recall the thing after spending a lot of time backtracking, but sometimes not.

For more information, see this paper for instance – Psychedelics and Immunomodulation by Dr. Attila Szabo of the University of Norway, published in 2015: https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffimmu.2015.00358

Well no, it is not. If you spot an UFO, chances are your "first-hand observation" is lying to you.

No, there's no problem. It doesn't change the fact that the dose is when it happened.

It's just a trick your brain is playing on you man. I was playing Rainbow Six Siege with friends, and during the 30 second setup phase I played for what was surely several minutes doing all the things you do with the drone and looking everywhere and planning all sorts of things, and then I looked at the timer and only 5 seconds had passed.

Your brain's interpretation of time passing is a completely made up fiction for it's own benefit. Police officers report seeing shootings going down in slow motion, watching individual shell casings drop to the floor and reading the numbers stamped on the bottom.

When this kind of time dilation was scientifically investigated, we found that what actually changed was your MEMORY of that time, not your cognition during the dilation itself. You aren't actually experiencing things quicker, your brain is just timestamping stuff poorly. Your brain's time tracking system just gets out of whack, and that screws with your consciousness because it relies heavily on timestamping of things.

Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.

Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.

We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.

(I did not take part in the conversation before).

So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.

But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.

(I have been there as well)

It's okay to recognize that people consistently claim an effect, and to affirm that it is indeed a possible effect without knowing why.

If not, what do you mean?

For some people that may be true; but for many of us, these drugs only make our brain reel faster and faster until it just goes full blown into fight or flight mode.

I'm with the other posters. I believe people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies (as long as they fully understand what they're doing), but also should absolutely know that panic attacks, and ongoing anxiety disorders could be a side effect.

Source: My anxiety disorder that exists now after recreational hallucinogen use for about a decade.

This isn’t a “both sides” argument wherein some highly unlikely hypothetical is trotted out to debate the consensus. Plenty of people have had bad experiences with long term ill effects.

> The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.

Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.

> It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people.

It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.

You see how that is rather inconsistent.

How about this instead.

We can offer, in addition to our observation, the method by which we arrived at the observation. The method of our "experiment".

We might also compare our observation with that of our "peers".

(And we might also cultivate ourselves, to make better observations. If you think such a thing is possible)

But however you slice it, the validity of the observation stands upon the authority of the observer. There's no getting around that.

>Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.

I agree that evolution is driven by Fitness, and a large part of Fitness is understanding the world around you. That doesn't mean 100% of behavior, or especially experience, serves a purpose of advancing Fitness. Evolution is messy. It has mistakes, byproducts, artifacts, and maladaptive traits. Not everything done is done with a purpose.

>It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.

Really struggle to grasp your meaning on this one. It seems that the existence of belief itself, independent of social truth, and contrary to trust in others, is evidence to the contrary. Are you saying that humans wouldn't have feelings, thoughts, or dreams, unless they have a social expectation to do so?

It's funny. You distrust your eyes but trust your thoughts.

I don't entirely discount the spiritual aspect or disrespect it either, in spite of my original comment. While I've never used DMT, the experiences of friends who have used ayahuasca could not just be feedback and distortion artifacts of impairment, they are a complete break, where the needle on the player of self just lifts off the record entirely. But for milder recreational stuff like lsd and mushrooms, it's nice to just have the self shut up for a little bit by impairing it.

Not sure exactly what point you are trying to make.

Was that not self-evident?

Also, countering a point is itself a point in a conversation.

There is a distance between your experience and the shared reality (a bunch of signals, perception and processing) that we use science to try to overcome

Plenty of people have had that shared effect from psychedelics.

I’m sure what baseless belief you see.

It'd be like if you said 'I had an idea yesterday...' and I responded with 'Did you though? Maybe you just overheard it and thought it was yours! Maybe you just thought of it now and incorrectly associated it with something you did yesterday!' It doesn't add any extra information while dismissing your own conscious experience completely.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194

> Our position contrasts the idea that subjective effects of psychedelics may be irrelevant to their therapeutic effects.

> The meaning and significance attributed to psychedelic experiences has been well established in laboratory settings. Psilocybin administration studies have repeatedly shown that participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives (5,6,8,16−19) and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent. Due to their salience, such experiences may serve as narrative “inflection points” in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

It involves perception, and you believe it despite not having gone through what you claim is necessary to acquire the knowledge.

> the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time.

YOu may have to do this, but I certainly don't - in fact, I believe essentially the opposite of this!

> As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.

That could depend on the nature of your relationship with the people - it's possible, but not guaranteed (and knowing which situation you're in isn't easy).

> I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough.

This is only true if it is actually true though - how do you confirm that it is true?

> The heuristics are quite reliable.

...the heuristic process suggests.

> It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.

It is true that there is value in science, but there is also risk.