Early State-Sanctioned LSD Experiments in Communist Bulgaria | Hacker News Reader

Early State-Sanctioned LSD Experiments in Communist Bulgaria

atlasobscura.com

62 pointsHooke15 comments

Reminds me of a story I heard on the radio with a DJ reminiscing about his pot days. He and his friends decided that the stuff came up with while high was comedy gold and decided to write it down so they could remember it.

He looks at it the next day to see what they were rolling on the floor about, and there was one word: "Fart."

Some of the paintings here made me think of that. Perceived creativity while in an altered state of mind, vs actual creativity.

I remember someone describing a shroom experience where they felt like they understood life, the universe, everything, and were at peace with it. At least I think it was shrooms... maybe MDMA or something, I don't remember.

I was intrigued by this because it was a change in the way they felt that was the life altering experience. Something very intangible. Having dealt with depression for a long time, I see how this can be, and yet it really struck me as interesting. Perspective matters.

There is a theory about epilepsy that systems that compare actual perceived state with projected state break down. Psychedelic experience might be similar.

So my interpretation: Instead of perceiving something happening to you (in time), you perceive everything to "be you". Instead of critically thinking about if and why something makes you laugh the thing itself because the laugh.

http://www.epi.ch/_files/Artikel_Epileptologie/Picard_2_14.p...

*becomes the laugh.

Reminds me of that South Park episode where they take cough medicine to get great ideas, decide to write it down, then when they get conscious again they find out all they had written were some squiggly lines. Could be an urban legend of some sort?

I tried coding on pot a long time ago and had a similar experience. I had written something so profound, but couldn't quite get it to compile: an endless loop.

But with light amounts of LSD (under 100ug) I've found studying compsci ideas to be useful. Not that I get any mystical insight but that they're so important, they stay in my mind forever.

This is also supported by LSD fMRI imaging studies

https://www.google.com/search?q=LSD+fMRI&tbm=isch

That's in line with the purported "microdosing" phenomenon making its rounds in Silicon Valley: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/how-lsd-microdo...

I have to concur on this one - the effects it had on me could be more usable in real life. I was reconstructing an apartment, doing design of places like bathrooms by myself - the ideas coming in random & semi-continuous stream very very usable, it was just hard write them down fast enough to not forget some.

Same for some ideas for work that come when home. Also, "processing" some harder moments and making some tougher decisions in life worked very, very well with this substance.

I think truth might be somewhere in between - we perceive things as better/easier/less while high, but it's an altered state of mind with different perspective, and it's up to us if we make a fart out of it, or something more meaningful.

I can see that this sort of sense of profound change and understanding can affect someone's state of mind, indeed I was convinced it had helped me learn a little about myself in my 20s when I experimented with the stuff.

But the perceived creativity and perceived sense of profound discovery often is exactly that AFAICT, where it is applied outwards rather than inwards.

Most discussions of LSD, even here, eventually attract someone who just knows that it is the key to changing the world, that if everyone just took it (I'm not sure if once or continuously) then somehow the scales would drop from our eyes and the people would rise as one to fix the whole world.

When quizzed, nobody I've encountered so far has been able to explain how they think the world will change, or what it is we're not seeing right now. So I tend to think that a lot of the insight from psychedlics is false, and that they provoke a false or inflated sense of the profound.

I never considered it to be "the answer" to everything by any means but the way it seemed to temporarily "scramble" my usual, established thought patterns and perceptions made it very easy to look at and consider things as if from a different angle or perspective.

I think our natural mechanisms for filtering out stimuli so we can focus on the things deemed important are useful as a whole. They're the result of millennia of evolution. But at the same time, I wonder if occasionally, those same mechanisms make it easy to miss things.

I don't think LSD and friends are the only way around this nor do they guarantee any "useful" results from the temporary state they induce. At the same time, I think it can be rewarding or at least interesting to look at everything as if for the first time at least once or twice in your life if that's something that sounds appealing to you.

I was never interested in taking large doses like some people I knew back in college. Those dudes who would eat like 5 or 10 hits of acid and "trip balls" seemed nuts to me. I was cool with taking 1 or 1.5 a few times in my early 20's and found it interesting with little of the anxiety that seemed to constitute the dreaded "bad trip" I'd heard so much about.

Never had a 'bad trip' myself. I did find it boring the last couple of times I tried it, so that's when I stopped.

I think your interpretations of the subjective effects are spot on, and I'm pretty sure that's how I felt back then too. I'm sure it is useful, introspectively and subjectively.

I'm just not convinced it's going to save the world :)

In fairness, if I was handed a piece of paper with the expectation that it held some amazing comedy only to find the word "fart"...I think that would be pretty funny.

Look at the Merry Pranksters bus Furthur specifically and the San Francisco psychedelic scene in general. The early rainbow colored crazy stuff was rough, almost ugly but toward the end of the sixties had become refined to the point it approached Art Nouveau.

I always found myself to not be that creative while tripping but quite creative later with what I had experienced/learned during the trip...

They leave out that Ken Kesey was participating in the Menlo Park CIA sponsored LSD tests in 1959.

I really enjoyed the "write your name" test. It's too bad they stopped at 3.5 hours...

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