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I doubt they actually increase the quality of perception, they just make you feel like you can see more clearly. That would be an interesting study to do, thoug

I doubt they actually increase the quality of perception, they just make you feel like you can see more clearly. That would be an interesting study to do, though, whether people on psychedelics can see things differently in an externally measurable way. A different sort of study has been performed that measured that people who had used psychedelics in the past were less able to see strobe lights at certain frequencies than people who had never used them, with people who suffered from HPPD being even more impaired.

Covzire 4y ago
Apparently there have been no documented cases of schizophrenia found in people who've been blind since birth. It would be interesting if someone explored the relationships between the effects of psychedelics and those with another kind of blindness, Aphantasia and those without.
r2_pilot 4y ago
This reminds me of a site I came across that uses the properties of a trip to show psychonauts messages that sober humans would find more difficult to interpret: https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/05/22/how-to-secretly-communicate-with-people-on-lsd/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/05/22/how-to-secretly-commu...
- fluoridation 4y ago
  One thing I noticed one time on mushrooms was that certain scenes in video became absolutely incomprehensible. Modern codecs save space by basically "smearing" pixels into areas of similar color. On mushrooms, I was only able to perceive this smearing, and so a scene of a character walking down a hall just looked like an amorphous blob floating across a pool of paint and leaving a wake of color turbulence behind it. I could only tell what was going on by really concentrating and inferring from context. I can't remember if pausing made any difference. I doubt it, but I wonder if it would be possible to perceive a merely audibly compressed audio stream as being completely garbled.
  - NoToP 4y ago
    Don't blame the video codec. You can observe similar artifacts on non video stimuli. Psychedelics reveal how the brain works, and the brain probably compresses information similar to a video codec.
    - fluoridation 4y ago
      I completely agree that psychedelics make the functioning of the brain (and I would argue the whole nervous system) more obvious. Given that they cause subnetworks that don't normally communicate, to communicate, and vice versa, I interpreted it as two steps in the visual pipeline talking directly to each other when they would normally have to go through a separate network that processes motion. Or perhaps signals from an unrelated network filtering into the pipeline and messing with the interpretation of the visual input. Obviously video codecs should be optimized for sober psychovisuals. It would be wasteful and impractical to do otherwise.
      - NoToP 4y ago
        I think discrete pipelines is the wrong paradigm. I surmise what is happening is the incoming information is being changed to the frequency domain for much the same reason that many visual and audio filters are implemented in the frequency domain. It's just a convenient basis for signal processing. It also so happens that compression codecs work largely by also converting to frequency space and then throwing out all the terms with negligible amplitude. So obviously when you poke at the part of the brain that does visual signal processing, you get something that looks a lot like a Photoshop filter or a compression artifact.
        fluoridation 4y ago
        Unlike hearing, I don't think the visual system works in the frequency domain. Common psychedelic visual hallucinations are better explained as either transformations in the space domain, or stages of a pipeline being reconnected in odd ways. As an example of the former, a sharpen filter can be implemented as a simple convolution, which would be compatible with crosstalk in the neurons processing the "pixels" of the visual input. Of the latter, fractals are a common theme in hallucinations; they can be explained as feedback loops in a pipeline, where the signal ends up making several loops through a few processing stages. The sharpen hallucination might also be caused like this. Perhaps the brain already applies a sharpen filter and what happens is that it's applied multiple times to the signal.
WASDx 4y ago
I share your doubt, but one thing I dare say is that they make you more likely to spot things in your peripheral vision that would otherwise go unnoticed. Things stand out more, small differences are enhanced. Also looking at a paper I could see the fibers it was made up of, not sure if that was real though.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  They do apply a subjective sharpening (literally like an image processing sharpen filter) to the entire field of vision, and they also enhance pattern recognition, and so details that might be more difficult to see stand out. But on the other hand, they also make it more difficult to concentrate, and they also make you see patterns that don't actually exist. So it's difficult for me to imagine anyone using them for immediately practical purposes successfully.
GuB-42 4y ago
So they are essentially like a "sharpen" image filters. Sharpening filters don't actually sharpen an image, you would need deconvolution for that and it is really hard to do and require accurate knowledge of the process that made the image blurry. And even the best algorithms can't recover information that wasn't here in the first place. What sharpening filters do is that they increase contrast locally, so instead of having light grey -> dark grey, you have light grey -> white -> black -> dark grey. The sharp "white -> black" transition gives off the illusion that the image is more detailed than it really is. In fact, since it is generally a type of convolution filter, you are actually destroying data. Overdo it and you get a noisy mess.
- NoToP 4y ago
  Thats exactly right, except at least you don't get people walking around saying the sharpen filter "shows you reality like it really is" or "elevates your state of consciousness."
yarg 4y ago
Anecdotally, they do something. I'm terrible at basketball, totally shit, can't sink a fucking thing. Walking around on shrooms one night (so not a collosal dose), and I somehow ended up messing around on a court. Somehow I was sinking ~3/4 of the shots that I took.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Do note that throwing a basketball is not a purely, or even mainly, perceptual task. But I'm amazed you were able to do that. My coordination gets shot to shit when I'm on psychs.
  - yarg 4y ago
    It was weird. The dudes invited me back, but I have no idea when or where I was.
archibaldJ 4y ago
I think it operates more on the attention mechanism, as well as exploring different (and often unbeknownst) search space in the processing (the long-term effect of which can be biological in ways we don't understand). And if taken regularly and had a certain training for a prolong peroid of time, they should be able to "increase the quality" of perception the same way when you play tennis regularly and with enough time you will develop the motor skills and can finally "feel" and effortlessly hit the ball at the center of the racket while swinging your hand in a way the racket travels straight. Or the same way one becomes less tone-deaf or more sensitive to sounds, etc, (of course, it may go the other direction too - but I think the computational cost is quite different (acquiring vs losing) - still, it's definitely possible, eg, for one to 'unlearn' their mother tongue, etc).

Covzire 4y ago

Apparently there have been no documented cases of schizophrenia found in people who've been blind since birth. It would be interesting if someone explored the relationships between the effects of psychedelics and those with another kind of blindness, Aphantasia and those without.

r2_pilot 4y ago

This reminds me of a site I came across that uses the properties of a trip to show psychonauts messages that sober humans would find more difficult to interpret: https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/05/22/how-to-secretly-communicate-with-people-on-lsd/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/05/22/how-to-secretly-commu...

fluoridation 4y ago
One thing I noticed one time on mushrooms was that certain scenes in video became absolutely incomprehensible. Modern codecs save space by basically "smearing" pixels into areas of similar color. On mushrooms, I was only able to perceive this smearing, and so a scene of a character walking down a hall just looked like an amorphous blob floating across a pool of paint and leaving a wake of color turbulence behind it. I could only tell what was going on by really concentrating and inferring from context. I can't remember if pausing made any difference. I doubt it, but I wonder if it would be possible to perceive a merely audibly compressed audio stream as being completely garbled.
- NoToP 4y ago
  Don't blame the video codec. You can observe similar artifacts on non video stimuli. Psychedelics reveal how the brain works, and the brain probably compresses information similar to a video codec.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    I completely agree that psychedelics make the functioning of the brain (and I would argue the whole nervous system) more obvious. Given that they cause subnetworks that don't normally communicate, to communicate, and vice versa, I interpreted it as two steps in the visual pipeline talking directly to each other when they would normally have to go through a separate network that processes motion. Or perhaps signals from an unrelated network filtering into the pipeline and messing with the interpretation of the visual input. Obviously video codecs should be optimized for sober psychovisuals. It would be wasteful and impractical to do otherwise.
    - NoToP 4y ago
      I think discrete pipelines is the wrong paradigm. I surmise what is happening is the incoming information is being changed to the frequency domain for much the same reason that many visual and audio filters are implemented in the frequency domain. It's just a convenient basis for signal processing. It also so happens that compression codecs work largely by also converting to frequency space and then throwing out all the terms with negligible amplitude. So obviously when you poke at the part of the brain that does visual signal processing, you get something that looks a lot like a Photoshop filter or a compression artifact.
      - fluoridation 4y ago
        Unlike hearing, I don't think the visual system works in the frequency domain. Common psychedelic visual hallucinations are better explained as either transformations in the space domain, or stages of a pipeline being reconnected in odd ways. As an example of the former, a sharpen filter can be implemented as a simple convolution, which would be compatible with crosstalk in the neurons processing the "pixels" of the visual input. Of the latter, fractals are a common theme in hallucinations; they can be explained as feedback loops in a pipeline, where the signal ends up making several loops through a few processing stages. The sharpen hallucination might also be caused like this. Perhaps the brain already applies a sharpen filter and what happens is that it's applied multiple times to the signal.

WASDx 4y ago

I share your doubt, but one thing I dare say is that they make you more likely to spot things in your peripheral vision that would otherwise go unnoticed. Things stand out more, small differences are enhanced. Also looking at a paper I could see the fibers it was made up of, not sure if that was real though.

fluoridation 4y ago
They do apply a subjective sharpening (literally like an image processing sharpen filter) to the entire field of vision, and they also enhance pattern recognition, and so details that might be more difficult to see stand out. But on the other hand, they also make it more difficult to concentrate, and they also make you see patterns that don't actually exist. So it's difficult for me to imagine anyone using them for immediately practical purposes successfully.

GuB-42 4y ago

So they are essentially like a "sharpen" image filters. Sharpening filters don't actually sharpen an image, you would need deconvolution for that and it is really hard to do and require accurate knowledge of the process that made the image blurry. And even the best algorithms can't recover information that wasn't here in the first place. What sharpening filters do is that they increase contrast locally, so instead of having light grey -> dark grey, you have light grey -> white -> black -> dark grey. The sharp "white -> black" transition gives off the illusion that the image is more detailed than it really is. In fact, since it is generally a type of convolution filter, you are actually destroying data. Overdo it and you get a noisy mess.

NoToP 4y ago
Thats exactly right, except at least you don't get people walking around saying the sharpen filter "shows you reality like it really is" or "elevates your state of consciousness."

yarg 4y ago

Anecdotally, they do something. I'm terrible at basketball, totally shit, can't sink a fucking thing. Walking around on shrooms one night (so not a collosal dose), and I somehow ended up messing around on a court. Somehow I was sinking ~3/4 of the shots that I took.

fluoridation 4y ago
Do note that throwing a basketball is not a purely, or even mainly, perceptual task. But I'm amazed you were able to do that. My coordination gets shot to shit when I'm on psychs.
- yarg 4y ago
  It was weird. The dudes invited me back, but I have no idea when or where I was.

archibaldJ 4y ago

I think it operates more on the attention mechanism, as well as exploring different (and often unbeknownst) search space in the processing (the long-term effect of which can be biological in ways we don't understand). And if taken regularly and had a certain training for a prolong peroid of time, they should be able to "increase the quality" of perception the same way when you play tennis regularly and with enough time you will develop the motor skills and can finally "feel" and effortlessly hit the ball at the center of the racket while swinging your hand in a way the racket travels straight. Or the same way one becomes less tone-deaf or more sensitive to sounds, etc, (of course, it may go the other direction too - but I think the computational cost is quite different (acquiring vs losing) - still, it's definitely possible, eg, for one to 'unlearn' their mother tongue, etc).