4 ms·

“ Psychedelics act on certain kinds of neurotransmitters called neuromodulators and literally disintegrate your belief-updating, freeing this neural population

“ Psychedelics act on certain kinds of neurotransmitters called neuromodulators and literally disintegrate your belief-updating, freeing this neural population from the evidence and the influences of this population. You’ll now be unable to call on high-level representations of selfhood to constrain your qualitative experience at a lower level of abstraction. You may experience a lower-level disillusion of the ego, literally the “self” representation may now not be able to influence experience. You might be attending to vivid sensations that would now have other interpretations that are not glued together by a self-centered, egocentric narrative. You will have alternative explanations for what caused this sensation and what caused that sensation. All of this is perfectly sensible under a generative model where we remove the constraints of one level of processing from another. If that’s going on, you now have the hypothesis that if I am me, there’s another hypothesis, I’m not me. If you start to remove the evidence of these two hypotheses, then you create an enormous uncertainty about me-hood. You’ll get depersonalization and possibly a bad trip.” I’ve done some so-called heroic doses that dissolved my ego, what he calls depersonalization. If one is not prepared for that sort of thing to happen and/or doesn’t have the appropriate setting or people around to make sure you don’t hurt yourself or others then yeah it can certainly turn into a bad trip.

diffrinse 6y ago
Really not seeing people go in on this, trips aren't free lunch. If not for friends, I would have had a real bad trip at an Amon Tobin concert. Some of us, our brain wants to defend itself against the disintegration and it doesn't get pretty.
yters 6y ago
What do you see and feel during a bad trip?
- suifbwish 6y ago
  Spiders everywhere
- shoes_for_thee 6y ago
  "I was given this drug in order to pull myself out of my previous extremely low-level of consciousness. The people who are with me seemed to be friends but I now realize they are therapists who are struggling to put me into a place where I can properly express myself, which has heretofore been impossible. I seem to be relearning how to speak. Facial expressions and crying are more effective. When this is over I will go back to my previous state but be entirely unaware that I am essentially disabled. Maybe my therapists are my parents and they are teaching me the meaning of basic words." it's complicated. i haven't taken acid in a decade or more.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    This one hurts. You're not alone in having experienced it.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  Not from personal experience, just from what I've read... One kind of bad trip is where you are aware you have taken a drug, but you are convinced you screwed up the dose this time and you are dying, and are filled with regret and fear that won't abate for hours. Or you 100% believe you are stuck in this new state and there is no way to get back to normal. Some people can have PTSD from it. Another is you are confused enough that you have forgotten you have even taken a drug and might not even remember the stuff you were doing after the fact. But when you come around you find yourself in a jail cell or a hospital bed and realize that oh, crap, things must have gone horribly wrong. That's when you find out your roommate tried to calm you down but you apparently thought they were trying to take your soul so you ran into the street and stripped off your clothes to make it harder for the soul-stealers to grab you, then the police were called and wrestled your sweaty body to the ground and then you peed in the back seat of the police car. That kind of stuff.
- nefitty 6y ago
  I took mushrooms once at a strange house. I didn’t correctly anticipate how strong they were. The kitchen table had violent police tabloid magazines that I skimmed before my trip. Insanely terrible idea. I ended up staying up for hours hallucinating that the world was covered in undercover police. A car would drive by and I would see the police. It was just a barrage of bad thoughts stacking on each other. Reality got lost somewhere and I forgot that I was tripping. I basically thought I was in a modern 1984-style society. I could have probably kicked myself out of that with some logical thoughts: “How does the government afford to make 80% of the population a cop?” The feelings were too overwhelming for me to get there, and I don’t think my friends realized how bad of a time I was having.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Many things can happen, and it's hard to be exhaustive when the stories are so subjective and not a lot of research can be done on psychedelics yet. First, for some people, psychedelics can trigger things they were not aware of (but likely in their family history or personal history) such as schizophrenia or episodes of past trauma. This is not really the norm, but is sometimes not mentioned by people who are afraid of the "demonization" of those drugs. Depending on the dose, the drug, and the susceptibility of the person, one can also experience gaps in memory which create confusion in the moment (and in some cases after the trip), or a psychotic state (which can end up being manageable with knowledge and support for some, and a trip to sleep through the night in a hospital for others). If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. For example: seeing horrific visions (when closing your eyes most often, sometimes even with eyes open), having a "body feeling" that just doesn't feel quite right (messed up proprioception, nausea), having thought patterns that take you down a negative spiral.. Examples of horrific visions: fractals of upsetting images that may or may not be related to experiences you've had (from past traumas to movies, or even random bits of your perception you weren't quite aware of). Examples of body feeling issues: feeling like parts of the body aren't where they are ("my nose is a few centimeters off"), speech impediment/slurring, losing control of limbs temporarily (which can create a lot of fear and confusion) Examples of thought patterns that create panic/anxiety/fear: thinking that the current state will last forever (forgetting that the psychedelic effect will wear off), feeling a lot of emotions without understanding the specific cause, perceiving some past trauma and not being resilient against it, heightened empathy being overwhelming, forgetting that perceptions are altered which affects behaviour ("I can't walk this path because it's too steep" on a flat path). There's so much more to say about that, and also so much to say about proper preparation (set, setting, support) which can prevent almost all the problems listed, but it's important to remember that psychedelics are not a joke. Particularly so when getting into high doses, "research chemicals", or simply powerful ones (DMT comes to mind for intensity, or STP/DOM for length)
  - diegoperini 6y ago
    > If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. This is a very important observation. Unlike mental components, physical ones are much harder to overcome by will power. Unbearable excitement or alertness fogs the mind in a way that also makes them invisible to logical thinking. The bodily distress takes control of the mind. I'd suggest people with such tendencies for having physically exhausting trips keep real life reminders around during the recreational substance use. For example, have a friend who didn't take the drug sit close to you and ask them to be caring, calm and providing during the trip. Watch unstressful TV shows such as nature documentaries instead of "the news". Don't mix different substances during the same trip. Drink water and have a bottle around, always! Most importantly, don't do new drugs in places where you've never been before (i.e a party) or with people you barely know! On the occasion of a bad trip, make sure you note down the bad moments after you wake up from it. Keep those notes close to you in case you need remembering them during another bad trip. During a paranoid moment -a moment of distrust towards people around you-, those notes will help you recover since reading your own notes doesn't require trust towards others.
- obiefernandez 6y ago
  I've had a few, and one in particular was very useful in the long run. This was about 20 years ago, one of the first times I took mushrooms. It was at an "afterparty" and I had already been awake for at least 24 hours. Someone gave me a handful of mushrooms and I ate them. She came back an hour later and asked me if I felt anything yet. I didn't, so she gave me another handful and I ate them too. Typical newbie mistake--I began tripping very hard a few minutes later. Within some hours I think the psychedelic fireworks had subsided enough that I was no longer catatonic, but then the real internal drama began. I was with a bunch of other people in altered states, many of them complete strangers, physically exhausted but unable to sleep. What people would refer to as a "sketchy situation". I got very paranoid. No matter where I sat or what I did, I had the sensation that people were talking about me, and mostly in a not nice way. There were turntables and records, so I tried to DJ. The challenge was enjoyable, but I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone was complaining about it and making accusations. I confronted some of them and they denied it--here was where it became both scary and later educational--I had enough rational mind left to understand that they were telling the truth, in reality it was a party and people were mostly having a good time and having conversations amongst themselves NOT ABOUT ME. I knew it without a doubt to be true, but I could not control the paranoia. I would go back to DJing or whatever else I was doing and my mind would imagine the worst about whoever was near me. A little voice told me "this is what it's like to be crazy" and from there I spiraled into a delusion of "I'm not coming out of this. I've gone and broken my brain. This is how crazy people become crazy." At the same time a rational voice would tell me, nevermind that, you'll be fine once this wears off. I could go on and on but the bottom line is that yes it did eventually wear off and I was fine, but left with a lasting, visceral sense of empathy for the plight of mentally ill people.
  - ianai 6y ago
    And that’s just one of the ways to experience what other people experience with mental disorders. Another is how they simulate schizophrenia. They give you headphones to wear connected to a recording. The recording has several different voices telling you all sorts of nasty things. Like bullying you and worse. Empathy and humility are needed in all walks of life.
- lux 6y ago
  In my worst trip (LSD), I started vividly experiencing other people's lives, including seeing through the eyes of a child, a heroin addict, and a dying old man among several others, and I was convinced this reality was just one of them and not the one I was supposed to be in, and that if I didn't figure out a way to end up in the right one by the end I'd be stuck in whichever I was in last. I definitely had a panicked feeling towards those around me trying to help, and felt they were trying to deceive me and trap me in their reality, with one friend in particular being the orchestrator of the deceipt. Thankfully, I have good friends who worked through it with me and who were experienced in psychedelic use. That said, I've done acid several times since, as well as mushrooms, and I do plan on doing them again. I feel like every time I do, there's new work for me to do on myself that they bring to the forefront whether I want to look at it or not, and that's been overall quite helpful for me. Psychedelics are no "party drug", but rather a serious thing undertaken for the purpose of exploring ideas like identity and meaning, and to be done in the right setting and with the right supports. I'm also quite interested in trying DMT for the same reasons, if I could find any around here...
shoes_for_thee 6y ago
I believe depersonalization is distinct from ego death, where ego death is the dissolution of boundaries between self/non-self but an observer exists and sensations are experienced (but by whom?) And depersonalization is the inability to identify sensations as belonging to the observer: "Stuff is happening 'out there'", like watching a movie. I could be wrong. This is just my understanding.
- dqpb 6y ago
  My take is that Karl Friston's description of depersonalization is a technical description of the partition that occurs in the neural communication graph, along with some hints of the qualitative experience of that partition. Ego-death on the other hand is a name that the community of connoisseurs have given to a common qualitative experience, which does not attempt to explain the underlying physical process that causes it.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
What would be fascinating is to reconcile how dissociatives (Ketamine, Salvia, etc) and psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc) produce a similar end-states, despite operating primarily on different classes receptors, and most fascinatingly, having the _opposite_ "high-level" effects on the brain! Psychedelics operate primarily on serotonin (5HT2A) receptors, and are said to "increase connectivity" and brain activity when measured via fMRI. Dissociatives, on the other hand, operate on NMDA receptors, and _decrease_ brain activity when studied. While the actual qualitative experience may differ, it's fascinating how "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" both lead to the same place - ego death, depersonalization, feelings of connectivity and one-ness, experiences of seeing gods/aliens/the universe, etc.
- type0 6y ago
  > "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" It's not "more/less connectivity". It's likely just dis-inhibition of negative feeback loops that leads to the same result. Interesting question is what pharmacology would be best to study consciousness, if or when one could define it.
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    I'm not sure that is correct. Psilocybin: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920304663 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... Ketamine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 It is well known that dissociative anaesthetics reduce brain activity and communication between brain regions. Classical psychedelics on the other hand tend to increase global brain activity, including that between regions (i.e. connectivity)

diffrinse 6y ago

Really not seeing people go in on this, trips aren't free lunch. If not for friends, I would have had a real bad trip at an Amon Tobin concert. Some of us, our brain wants to defend itself against the disintegration and it doesn't get pretty.

yters 6y ago

What do you see and feel during a bad trip?

suifbwish 6y ago
Spiders everywhere
shoes_for_thee 6y ago
"I was given this drug in order to pull myself out of my previous extremely low-level of consciousness. The people who are with me seemed to be friends but I now realize they are therapists who are struggling to put me into a place where I can properly express myself, which has heretofore been impossible. I seem to be relearning how to speak. Facial expressions and crying are more effective. When this is over I will go back to my previous state but be entirely unaware that I am essentially disabled. Maybe my therapists are my parents and they are teaching me the meaning of basic words." it's complicated. i haven't taken acid in a decade or more.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  This one hurts. You're not alone in having experienced it.
tasty_freeze 6y ago
Not from personal experience, just from what I've read... One kind of bad trip is where you are aware you have taken a drug, but you are convinced you screwed up the dose this time and you are dying, and are filled with regret and fear that won't abate for hours. Or you 100% believe you are stuck in this new state and there is no way to get back to normal. Some people can have PTSD from it. Another is you are confused enough that you have forgotten you have even taken a drug and might not even remember the stuff you were doing after the fact. But when you come around you find yourself in a jail cell or a hospital bed and realize that oh, crap, things must have gone horribly wrong. That's when you find out your roommate tried to calm you down but you apparently thought they were trying to take your soul so you ran into the street and stripped off your clothes to make it harder for the soul-stealers to grab you, then the police were called and wrestled your sweaty body to the ground and then you peed in the back seat of the police car. That kind of stuff.
nefitty 6y ago
I took mushrooms once at a strange house. I didn’t correctly anticipate how strong they were. The kitchen table had violent police tabloid magazines that I skimmed before my trip. Insanely terrible idea. I ended up staying up for hours hallucinating that the world was covered in undercover police. A car would drive by and I would see the police. It was just a barrage of bad thoughts stacking on each other. Reality got lost somewhere and I forgot that I was tripping. I basically thought I was in a modern 1984-style society. I could have probably kicked myself out of that with some logical thoughts: “How does the government afford to make 80% of the population a cop?” The feelings were too overwhelming for me to get there, and I don’t think my friends realized how bad of a time I was having.
cmehdy 6y ago
Many things can happen, and it's hard to be exhaustive when the stories are so subjective and not a lot of research can be done on psychedelics yet. First, for some people, psychedelics can trigger things they were not aware of (but likely in their family history or personal history) such as schizophrenia or episodes of past trauma. This is not really the norm, but is sometimes not mentioned by people who are afraid of the "demonization" of those drugs. Depending on the dose, the drug, and the susceptibility of the person, one can also experience gaps in memory which create confusion in the moment (and in some cases after the trip), or a psychotic state (which can end up being manageable with knowledge and support for some, and a trip to sleep through the night in a hospital for others). If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. For example: seeing horrific visions (when closing your eyes most often, sometimes even with eyes open), having a "body feeling" that just doesn't feel quite right (messed up proprioception, nausea), having thought patterns that take you down a negative spiral.. Examples of horrific visions: fractals of upsetting images that may or may not be related to experiences you've had (from past traumas to movies, or even random bits of your perception you weren't quite aware of). Examples of body feeling issues: feeling like parts of the body aren't where they are ("my nose is a few centimeters off"), speech impediment/slurring, losing control of limbs temporarily (which can create a lot of fear and confusion) Examples of thought patterns that create panic/anxiety/fear: thinking that the current state will last forever (forgetting that the psychedelic effect will wear off), feeling a lot of emotions without understanding the specific cause, perceiving some past trauma and not being resilient against it, heightened empathy being overwhelming, forgetting that perceptions are altered which affects behaviour ("I can't walk this path because it's too steep" on a flat path). There's so much more to say about that, and also so much to say about proper preparation (set, setting, support) which can prevent almost all the problems listed, but it's important to remember that psychedelics are not a joke. Particularly so when getting into high doses, "research chemicals", or simply powerful ones (DMT comes to mind for intensity, or STP/DOM for length)
- diegoperini 6y ago
  > If we're not talking about these things, then bad trips can have physical components as well as psychological ones. This is a very important observation. Unlike mental components, physical ones are much harder to overcome by will power. Unbearable excitement or alertness fogs the mind in a way that also makes them invisible to logical thinking. The bodily distress takes control of the mind. I'd suggest people with such tendencies for having physically exhausting trips keep real life reminders around during the recreational substance use. For example, have a friend who didn't take the drug sit close to you and ask them to be caring, calm and providing during the trip. Watch unstressful TV shows such as nature documentaries instead of "the news". Don't mix different substances during the same trip. Drink water and have a bottle around, always! Most importantly, don't do new drugs in places where you've never been before (i.e a party) or with people you barely know! On the occasion of a bad trip, make sure you note down the bad moments after you wake up from it. Keep those notes close to you in case you need remembering them during another bad trip. During a paranoid moment -a moment of distrust towards people around you-, those notes will help you recover since reading your own notes doesn't require trust towards others.
obiefernandez 6y ago
I've had a few, and one in particular was very useful in the long run. This was about 20 years ago, one of the first times I took mushrooms. It was at an "afterparty" and I had already been awake for at least 24 hours. Someone gave me a handful of mushrooms and I ate them. She came back an hour later and asked me if I felt anything yet. I didn't, so she gave me another handful and I ate them too. Typical newbie mistake--I began tripping very hard a few minutes later. Within some hours I think the psychedelic fireworks had subsided enough that I was no longer catatonic, but then the real internal drama began. I was with a bunch of other people in altered states, many of them complete strangers, physically exhausted but unable to sleep. What people would refer to as a "sketchy situation". I got very paranoid. No matter where I sat or what I did, I had the sensation that people were talking about me, and mostly in a not nice way. There were turntables and records, so I tried to DJ. The challenge was enjoyable, but I couldn't shake the feeling that everyone was complaining about it and making accusations. I confronted some of them and they denied it--here was where it became both scary and later educational--I had enough rational mind left to understand that they were telling the truth, in reality it was a party and people were mostly having a good time and having conversations amongst themselves NOT ABOUT ME. I knew it without a doubt to be true, but I could not control the paranoia. I would go back to DJing or whatever else I was doing and my mind would imagine the worst about whoever was near me. A little voice told me "this is what it's like to be crazy" and from there I spiraled into a delusion of "I'm not coming out of this. I've gone and broken my brain. This is how crazy people become crazy." At the same time a rational voice would tell me, nevermind that, you'll be fine once this wears off. I could go on and on but the bottom line is that yes it did eventually wear off and I was fine, but left with a lasting, visceral sense of empathy for the plight of mentally ill people.
- ianai 6y ago
  And that’s just one of the ways to experience what other people experience with mental disorders. Another is how they simulate schizophrenia. They give you headphones to wear connected to a recording. The recording has several different voices telling you all sorts of nasty things. Like bullying you and worse. Empathy and humility are needed in all walks of life.
lux 6y ago
In my worst trip (LSD), I started vividly experiencing other people's lives, including seeing through the eyes of a child, a heroin addict, and a dying old man among several others, and I was convinced this reality was just one of them and not the one I was supposed to be in, and that if I didn't figure out a way to end up in the right one by the end I'd be stuck in whichever I was in last. I definitely had a panicked feeling towards those around me trying to help, and felt they were trying to deceive me and trap me in their reality, with one friend in particular being the orchestrator of the deceipt. Thankfully, I have good friends who worked through it with me and who were experienced in psychedelic use. That said, I've done acid several times since, as well as mushrooms, and I do plan on doing them again. I feel like every time I do, there's new work for me to do on myself that they bring to the forefront whether I want to look at it or not, and that's been overall quite helpful for me. Psychedelics are no "party drug", but rather a serious thing undertaken for the purpose of exploring ideas like identity and meaning, and to be done in the right setting and with the right supports. I'm also quite interested in trying DMT for the same reasons, if I could find any around here...

shoes_for_thee 6y ago

I believe depersonalization is distinct from ego death, where ego death is the dissolution of boundaries between self/non-self but an observer exists and sensations are experienced (but by whom?) And depersonalization is the inability to identify sensations as belonging to the observer: "Stuff is happening 'out there'", like watching a movie. I could be wrong. This is just my understanding.

dqpb 6y ago
My take is that Karl Friston's description of depersonalization is a technical description of the partition that occurs in the neural communication graph, along with some hints of the qualitative experience of that partition. Ego-death on the other hand is a name that the community of connoisseurs have given to a common qualitative experience, which does not attempt to explain the underlying physical process that causes it.

oarabbus_ 6y ago

What would be fascinating is to reconcile how dissociatives (Ketamine, Salvia, etc) and psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, DMT, etc) produce a similar end-states, despite operating primarily on different classes receptors, and most fascinatingly, having the _opposite_ "high-level" effects on the brain! Psychedelics operate primarily on serotonin (5HT2A) receptors, and are said to "increase connectivity" and brain activity when measured via fMRI. Dissociatives, on the other hand, operate on NMDA receptors, and _decrease_ brain activity when studied. While the actual qualitative experience may differ, it's fascinating how "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" both lead to the same place - ego death, depersonalization, feelings of connectivity and one-ness, experiences of seeing gods/aliens/the universe, etc.

type0 6y ago
> "more connectivity" and "less connectivity" It's not "more/less connectivity". It's likely just dis-inhibition of negative feeback loops that leads to the same result. Interesting question is what pharmacology would be best to study consciousness, if or when one could define it.
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
  I'm not sure that is correct. Psilocybin: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.201... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811920304663 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192... Ketamine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3461985/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24791 It is well known that dissociative anaesthetics reduce brain activity and communication between brain regions. Classical psychedelics on the other hand tend to increase global brain activity, including that between regions (i.e. connectivity)