11 ms·
LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
- akomtu 5y agoLSD also increases activity of that fractal dimension.
- bronzeage 5y agoWhy is it even legal to conduct LSD experiments? There was some animal testing post earlier, but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse.
- _Microft 5y agoI'll take the bait. A drug being regulated by narcotics regulation does not mean that its use has to be completely forbidden. Just because Average Joe is not allowed to do something does not mean that there might not be professionals who are. Opiates for example are both regulated and used for pain treatment. Any study with human participants has to go through an ethics review and the participants have to be both informed about the goals of the study, possible risks and consequences of the procedures and also have to take part voluntarily. (Regarding "consequences": a brain scan could e.g. show a medical condition and having knowledge of that condition would mean that the participant would have to state this as existing condition in the future whenever they wanted to sign up for health insurance for example. So: it is complicated!). The Helsinki Declaration contains ethical principles on human experimentation if you want to have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Helsinki
- fredgrott 5y agoYou have to understand that because animals borrowed cell signaling form plants that most transmitter blockers and analogues can be found plant cell signal chemicals Or to put in broad terms our brains are powered by degrees of getting high. Its more of the degree and method that produces bad social results
- _Microft 5y agoThe similarities between very different species are absolutely mind-blowing indeed. Anesthesia works on plants for example! Jellyfish have to sleep, despite having no brain at all. They even suffer from disorientation when being sleep-deprived (afaik researchers frequently poked or otherwise disturbed them in their tank during their normal sleep-phase. On the "next day" they showed signs of sleep deprivation).
- thatswrong0 5y agoWhy are they illegal to begin with?
- baq 5y agoPeople have a choice.
- elliekelly 5y agoI would assume the people taking these drugs in a modern study would be participating having given their consent and under the supervision of an ethics review board. I’ve never taken LSD in my life but I would be willing to participate in a study like this and I can’t imagine I’m alone.
- plutonorm 5y agoPsychedelics are a tool. You don’t ban powerful lasers because someone might get hurt. You regulate and prescribe how they may be used safely. And they are a very powerful tool, not only as a medicine to treat addiction and depression but also as a lens to inspect the nature of consciousness.
- GuB-42 5y agoIt is all explained in the paper, they had all the necessary licences. One noteworthy point is that they only took sane adults with experience in psychedelics (that's the tl;dr).
- unparagoned 5y agoThere is lots of potential benefits that far outweigh any downsides,so it's worth investigating. They were made illegal for political reasons rather than for scientific or evidence based reasons
- vkomega 5y agoSources for benefits (plural) vs. downsides? Source for politically-motivated criminalization?
- ljf 5y agoNot lsd but the reason behind the banning of cannabis and heroin is a pretty well known story https://www.unharm.org/the-racist-truth-behind-the-war-on-drugs/ https://www.unharm.org/the-racist-truth-behind-the-war-on-dr... They were criminalised to criminalise part of society. Lsd was similar - the govt was worried about losing control of people and their desires. Lsd has never been an interest of mine, but I am aware many people find the experiences they have truly profound. there was some excellent work in curing alcoholism that used Lsd and proved very successful prior to it being banned; BBC News - LSD 'helps alcoholics to give up drinking' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17297714 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17297714
- acid_enthusiast 5y agoLots (hundreds? thousands? a large cross section of the population of every music music festival on the planet for the last 50 years) of human beings report them encouraging a good time with increased enjoyment, openness, creativity, ability to do things, and they where praised by the creators of AA to be helpful in the treatment of alcholism. Very few of the doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, support workers, shop keepers, crafters, farmers, scientists who attend these events and lie about their participation go on to develop serious social or medical problems or they wouldn't have the money to go back year on year for more illegal fun. Unfortunately the majority of these positive experiences are not recorded by government backed science, since reporting LSD use to the government results in the loss of jobs, driving privileges, children and ultimately homes and freedom. Users complained about the war, lsd was banned (- over simplification for brevity.). Laughter has no accepted medical use and trying to prove otherwise is a crime
- pmoriarty 5y ago"giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse" It would be interesting to learn why you think it would be so bad.
- totony 5y ago>but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse. Why do you think so?
- haswell 5y agoOut of curiosity, which part bothers you? 1. That the drugs are illegal 2. That the drugs alter consciousness What’s your stance on cannabis?
- modmans2nd 5y ago…..
- type0 5y agoI find the concept of "illegal consciousness" fascinating
- josephcsible 5y agoYou misparsed the sentence. "illegal" and "consciousness altering" both modify "drugs". "illegal" doesn't modify "consciousness".
- danwills 5y agoI agree that's the intended sense of what was said, but what a fascinating side-track! I can readily imagine the idea of illegal "states of mind" (1984/Orwell style: simply things the state made a law stating that it's illegal to think or whatever) but the idea of illegal consciousness is much more bizarre!
- Animats 5y agoWell, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
- TenJack 5y agoInteresting. What do you mean by zip file?
- Animats 5y agoLempel-Ziv compression is used by some file compression utilities.[1] The ratio of original size to compressed size is essentially the Lempel-Ziv complexity. If you compress a file of AAAAAAAA..., you will get a very small file, and a low complexity. If you compress a file of random numbers, the file will not compress much, if at all, and you get a high complexity. "Lempel-Ziv complexity is the number of different sub-strings (or sub-words) encountered as the binary sequence is viewed as a stream (from left to right)"[2] This leads to a compression algorithm. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Wel... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv_complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv_complexity
- dorkmind 5y agoDoes listening to white noise increase the fractal dimension the same way as drugs?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoI thought Shannon entropy described the amount of information content in a message; its uncertainty or surprise. Why would it be noise?
- nabla9 5y agoHere is interesting study lecture and article, maybe somewhat related. The Geometry and objects of things you see in typical to DMT experiences are hyperbolic. Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geomet...
- anigbrowl 5y agoYou should consider submitting that second link as its own story. Excellent content.
- virtualritz 5y agoVery interesting indeed. Thank you for sharing. Why on Earth is this being downvoted?
- fogof 5y agoWell, I'm not a downvoter, but I would disagree with the idea that this is related to the OP. OP is looking at mathematical properties of informational structure of brain scans, whereas this is just describing what people see when they trip. There's no reason the geometry of what you hallucinate should be related to the geometry of cortical activity while you see it.
- ______- 5y agoI don't take downvotes personally. I've learned to accept them as meaningless gestures that make people feel powerful and in control, when infact no-one is really in control here. We're all acting :)
- jb775 5y agoThere's a company called MindMed that's doing clinical trials with Psilocybin/LSD/MDMA and finding that micro-dosing has really positive benefits on human disorders linked to the brain (depression, PTSD, etc). Could be huge to harness the power of these drugs for the benefit of humanity.
- atatatat 5y agohuman disorders linked to the brain (realizing things are seriously messed up)
- throwaway64389 5y agoAnecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip. I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have their own decision trees. Also, we're all the same person or being. Weird day.
- tcmb 5y agoThat sounds like a profound experience, would you say these insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask, in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and some bad emotions later on.
- swayvil 5y agoConsider that you're remarking on his takeaway here. The "insights". The conceptual end-product of all that strange-seeing. But it's the strange-seeing that's the real feast.
- throwaway64389 5y agoI would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing reality, and I can open that door whenever I want, but I don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions I've made. It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details). You can never rest, it's all an infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely distressed, like this fractal nature was some sort of punishment or permanent purgatory.
- pmoriarty 5y ago"It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details)." This echoes Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which he thought would in fact be terrifying to the ordinary man, but the overman could live their life in such a way that the infinite repetition would be fully and unreservedly welcome.
- edem 5y agoCan someone explain this in plain English? What's this fractal structure about? And what's critical state?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yoloyoloyoloa 5y agoI decided to start a career in programming and IT oneday at 21 on a LSD bad trip from hell. It was really an eye opening trip and just realized this would be the best possible career path to take. I have never looked back since.
- fastball 5y agoHow is it a bad trip that set you on a career path you like?
- andyana 5y agoI believe it is possible to have a bad trip in this sense because it typically takes time to integrate the experience. The time spent trying to integrate can be scary, because you don't understand it yet. I had a vision of a blonde child, perhaps six years old, burst out of a tunnel of light during a DMT trip. I still don't know what it means, and because my son is blonde, i can't help but feel that maybe there is a message im not seeing (this is coming from an ex-atheist of twenty years). It was a weird event, but it has made me make positive changes in my life regardless. For example, I try a lot harder to have the time for him. I've decided to stop trying to date because of it (so that I don't have to divide my time more), and that's given me a self esteem boost. It is a complex thing, one that we don't understand. Its a beautiful experience, but one I don't take lightly. It needs respect.
- booerino 5y agoI like LSD quite a lot but have a hard time talking about it. I find it kind of highly embarrassing for some reason. Afraid of being judged a freak (I look and act pretty odd, but it's not because of LSD). I am baffled how open some people are. I guess this is the curse of having conservative family you'd not like to upset.
- mikelevins 5y agoThere's some amount of social stigma associated with LSD and other psychedelics, but it seems to have faded away quite a bit since I used it in the late 1970s. Back then, and for some years afterward, the stigma was pretty strong. Admitting that you had used psychedelics was tantamount to admitting that you were crazy and possibly dangerous in many social circles. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be so much the case anymore. I've personally never minded admitting that I used psychedelics in the late 70s, but at that time I was accustomed to be seen as a weirdo and an outsider. Indeed, I was so accustomed to it that I didn't even realize that's what was happening. I didn't find out what it was like to be treated as someone ordinary until I took a job with Apple and moved to the SF Bay Area. I liked LSD and other psychedelics a lot in the late 70s, and used them a lot--enough to find out how often I could take them without tolerance reducing their effects noticeably. I gave up psychedelics and pretty much all other mind-altering substances in the first half of the 1980s. I never liked anything other than psychedelics as much as I liked them. Of the other substances I experimented with, I liked cannabis best, but I gave it up, too. The best reason I can articulate is that I was no longer getting anything new from them and, as the fellow said, when you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone. I do still drink the odd glass of whiskey or port or champagne once or twice a year, but that's because I like the sensations of drinking them. I try to avoid drinking enough to get tipsy. I never cared all that much for drugs that are supposed to make you feel good.
- dorkmind 5y agoI like LSD too; I wish the government would legalize it. related: https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hypercard/ https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp... Bill Atkinson waited until 2016 to talk about LSD as it related to his work; Steve Jobs has also gone public about LSD. LSD makes you pretty tough. Many people have a hard time digesting that, so they choose to be afraid of LSD instead of recognizing it.
- anm89 5y agoTotally separate from whatever this paper is claiming, I'm already dreading a conversation at some future party in which some person rambles on regarding a very unscientific understanding of this paper and something about burning man.
- okareaman 5y agoYou might get lucky and someone will bend your ear about Terence McKenna and Machine Elves
- warent 5y agoDismissing someone with a mind full of unique and creative ideas is generally a bad idea. It's okay to disagree but it's completely unnecessary for us to stand on an ivory tower staring down on people we don't understand
- okareaman 5y agoAnother case where I didn't get my tone across - I admire McKenna and have listened to quite a bit of his stuff. He's close to being a genius if he isn't one. However, I didn't really sync up with the machine elve threads.
- anm89 5y agoNothing in there says that he's dismissing McKenna in any way. Also you could make this claim about literally any person in any situation. Not all people are worth listening just because what they have to say is "unique". People who think vaccines are being used to implant microchips have quite the "unique" and creative perspective. That doesn't mean they deserve to be taken seriously.
- brailsafe 5y agoI don't know how unique the ideas that people put out in these conversations end up being
- sammalloy 5y ago
- voldacar 5y agoTo increase the "fractal dimension" of anything, just EQ up the high frequency components. White noise has great fractal dimension, lol Can't wait for this to be on joe rogan
- ______- 5y agoI never hallucinated after trying shrooms, even at high doses. I found this odd, since I have read about countless people saying they saw stuff that wasn't there or saw colorful fractal geometry. So my conclusion is that shrooms simply increased my perception and allowed in more information, and that all this fractal geometry is already there, just waiting to be discovered. It's just like tuning into a higher frequency. It's not fake or generated by the brain, simply observed for what it is.
- edgyquant 5y agoI don’t think either LSD or Shrooms causes hallucinations (like seeing a creature that isn’t there.) Mushrooms make me feel strange and see a bit blurry but it’s mostly an internal thing and makes my wind wander. LSD is a bit more intense, visually, like colors become more vibrant and my mind creates detail in even the simplest of items (peeing in the toilet damn near gives me a panic attack.) I’ve only ever heard of people seeing things in movies other than maybe sitting in the dark and seeing “demons” but my mind does that already by trying to give forms to the visual noise of darkness; again just not as intense.
- tracedddd 5y agoTypically “movie” hallucinations like seeing elephants in the room or having strange people visit you or seeing bugs all over you are more typical of deleriants like diphenhydramine or datura, although high dose tryptamines can be so strong that there is no connection to the reality around you - overwhelmingly psychedelic. In that state hallucinations of a different type are possible (talking to entities, being somewhere else entirely, etc.) Movies are a very bad representation of psychedelics generally, though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- GuB-42 5y agoMaybe a stupid question but did you close your eyes? I think you need a really high dose to see more than a bit of distortion when you have your eyes open. But with you eyes closed, your mind can run wild, making colorful visual much more likely in fact, you may not even need drugs for that. Seeing things that aren't here, true hallucinations, don't happen often with psychedelics, and they are mostly caused by deliriants (ex: datura), or body reactions like fever. These are not fun and deliriants are not controlled substance for that reason, being classified as poisons instead. Psychedelics cause pseudohallucinations, it means they alter your perception but you are aware that what you are seeing is not real.
- vkomega 5y agoLSD supporter typical response: * A person had a magnificent, positive life altering experience on LSD. The LSD changed their life for the better * A person wound up developing psychosis and schizophrenia after taking LSD. It wasn't the LSD's fault; they must have been pre disposed. Family medical history, man. My take as an outsider is that if you believe LSD helps some people, then it follows that it hurts others, and that it's difficult to predict such outcomes. It's a mind altering substance, and I'm glad I stayed away from it.
- FriendlyNormie 5y agoIt would be so cool if someone stabbed you to death. Just kept stabbing for hours until there’s nothing left but bloody jelly with pieces of bone sticking out here and there.
- FriendlyNormie 5y agoYeah you should definitely be banned immediately for posting this completely irrelevant insane gibberish.