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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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637 points robinhouston | 3 comments | 05 Jun 23 07:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.628s | source
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codeflo ◴[06 Jun 23 10:39 UTC] No.36210706[source]▶
All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.)

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.

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thumbuddy ◴[06 Jun 23 11:18 UTC] No.36210999[source]▶
You know, according to people who have done buckets of psychedelics, there's an awful lot more to the psychedelic experience than 2.5-4x slower processing speed. I recall reading of numerous people who found they could collectively slow down a wall clock to the point were it didn't move any longer, and people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.

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.

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causi ◴[06 Jun 23 11:28 UTC] No.36211075[source]▶
people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.

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.

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LoganDark ◴[06 Jun 23 11:44 UTC] No.36211209[source]▶
> These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.

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.

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jabbany ◴[06 Jun 23 12:03 UTC] No.36211375[source]▶
The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".

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).

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LoganDark ◴[06 Jun 23 12:24 UTC] No.36211562[source]▶
> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".

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).

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1. causi ◴[06 Jun 23 14:10 UTC] No.36213063[source]▶
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.

Sounds identical to me on a bad ADHD day.

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2. LoganDark ◴[06 Jun 23 17:51 UTC] No.36216567[source]▶
My thoughts would expand like a fractal and it would take active effort to make it all the way back out. I probably can't really communicate it to someone who hasn't experienced psychedelics before, but it makes me feel like I am conscious of every bit of mental effort I am spending. Pulling myself out of deep thought feels like a long, manual process, even if it's actually instant. An analogy I liked to use is having to arrange all the neurons manually or something.

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.

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3. mrguyorama ◴[06 Jun 23 19:19 UTC] No.36217769[source]▶
This happened to uh a friend the first time they got really high on weed.

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.