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First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI
- dovdovdov 9y agoI mean, having science as an excuse to do LSD is a win already.
- biofox 9y agoHaving previously volunteered for an LSD study, it probably isn't as much fun as it sounds. The study I was on was conducted on a cold hospital ward with bright fluorescent lights, and required having vital signs measured throughout -- not an ideal environment to trip in. One participant in my group stood up and walked out mid-briefing. Thankfully I wasn't chosen, though everyone there looked terrified. The research and campaigning done by the Beckley Foundation [1] and MAPS [2] is absolutely fantastic though, and I encourage everyone to check out their work. [1] http://beckleyfoundation.org/ http://beckleyfoundation.org/ [2] http://www.maps.org/ http://www.maps.org/
- dovdovdov 9y agoThanks for your insights, I imagined a somewhat similar situation.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoHmm, that could just have been a poorly-designed study - most sleep studies are not conducted in brightly lit rooms, I assume because researchers can imagine that it wouldn't help anyone sleep; you'd hope that they could bring similar reasoning to bear on hallucinogens.
- adrianN 9y agoGwern did some self-experimentation with LSD and didn't find any significant effects: https://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing https://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing
- wslh 9y agoSince this is a sample with n=1, that doesn't mean there is not significant effects in certain population of people.
- Bartweiss 9y agoYeah, Gwern is pretty explicit about the point that he's interested in what works for him, and makes his data available just in case its interesting. I tend to assume that when he has positive results it's informative (as an existence proof at least), but negative results may not be universal.
- atom-morgan 9y agoI did and I did.
- omginternets 9y agoCan we see the methods and data?
- tribby 9y agothere were a few problems with gwern's methodology IIRC. didn't test a perceptual dose after dissolving it, and also didn't get energy control (spanish lsd-testing lab) to evaluate potency.
- danohu 9y agoAmanda Feilding, who this article is about, is a fascinating person. In the 70s she drilled a hole in her own skull ("trepanation"), then ran for political office to promote the benefits of that operation. She's now Countess of Wemyss and March, married to a similarly-trepanned Earl. http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/turner.php http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/turner.php
- Baeocystin 9y ago'Fascinating' is not the adjective I would use to describe someone enamored with drilling holes through their skull.
- discombobulate 9y agoWhy, does the procedure not work?
- adrianN 9y agoIt works insofar as you have a hole in your skull afterwards. Whether or not the evil spirits in your skull actually get out is disputed.
- Frenchgeek 9y agoIf you go just a bit further, the one who made you drill a hole in your skull does, though...
- eriknstr 9y ago> Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art, but because she believed it would have a life-changing effect on her. She hoped that a hole in her head would increase what she terms "cranial compliance," that alleviating the pressure in her skull would allow the heart to pump more blood to her brain, thereby giving her a new feeling of buoyancy. "If you don’t have that expansibility," she says of the prison of inflexible bone that most of us have for skulls, "then the heartbeat pushes against the brain cells, which isn’t very good." She wasn't doing it to get rid of evil spirits. > Archaeologists have speculated that the operation was performed as a religious rite, an initiation into the priestly caste, or as a treatment for demonic possession—symptoms we might now diagnose as epilepsy, psychosis, or migraine. A hole in the head served as a mouthpiece to the gods, it was thought, or as a window that would allow bad spirits to escape. People might have done it for that reason previously but she wasn't.
- vixen99 9y agoHow frustrating given that the rest of us have no hope of trying anything like this.
- SCHiM 9y agoYou do know that it's trivial to obtain these drugs (and tests) on tor marketplaces right? In case you did not, the alphabay sells both drugs and tests, and certain countries (like the Netherlands) also have labs that test your drugs for a small fee with no chance of prosecution. Alternatively in the Netherlands you can also buy the tests from normal webshops like https://azarius.nl/ https://azarius.nl/.
- slfnflctd 9y agoIt may be what you consider 'trivial', but it is by no means anonymous, unless you are already engaged in some form of elaborate identity theft/falsification. Nearly all transactions are in bitcoin, from what I've read, and it is pretty much impossible at this point to acquire & spend bitcoins in a truly anonymous manner (unless maybe you have an IP address which cannot be tied to you in any possible way, including by security cameras or smartphone data). Law enforcement may not be choosing to do anything about this on a large scale yet, but if you're leaving a trail, they can always decide to make you part of a big dragnet bust in the future. Technology makes this kind of thing easier and easier for them to do as time goes on.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoTumblers are a thing. It doesn't have to be anonymous just make it impossible to trace for about a hundred years.
- root_axis 9y agoThen you have to trust the tumbler
- 9y ago
- ggggtez 9y ago> drilled a hole in her own head Ok, you lost me. Anyone willing to do this is clearly outside of human average, and their anecdata is useless
- metaphorm 9y agoAmanda Fielding is certainly an eccentric person. however, she has a decades long commitment to responsible and scientifically grounded research with psychedelics.