First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI | Hacker News Reader

First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI

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Gwern did some self-experimentation with LSD and didn't find any significant effects: https://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing

Since this is a sample with n=1, that doesn't mean there is not significant effects in certain population of people.

Yeah, 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.

I did and I did.

Can we see the methods and data?

there 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.

Amanda 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

'Fascinating' is not the adjective I would use to describe someone enamored with drilling holes through their skull.

Why, does the procedure not work?

It 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.

If you go just a bit further, the one who made you drill a hole in your skull does, though...

> 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.

Her reasoning as quoted is no more based in reality than theirs. Frankly, I would say it's worse, as the people who did this hundreds of years ago did not have the benefit of modern medicine to model why it is a bad idea in the first place.

Blood letting should have a similar effect no?

What makes you so sure your model of reality is more predictive than hers?

What testable predictions has she made?

This would have sounded crazy to me 6 months ago. However I had a friend who had a traumatic brain injury where the doctors had to remove a portion of their skull temporarily (a couple months) to releive pressure on the brain. The doctors told my friend that his brain function and parts of his personality may be different while parts of his skull was off, and sure enough it was. When they put his skull back together a couple months later his personality shifted. The stated reason the doctor gave had to do with differentials in blood pressure in the brain with and with out the skull entact. This was at a top hospital in San Francisco.

A traumatic brain injury that is severe enough to require removal of a portion of the skull to relieve pressure from swelling is a critical medical event that has nothing to do with an otherwise healthy individual drilling a hole through their skull. Blood does not 'press on the brain' in a negative way in normal function. Far from it- being supported from all sides by a bath of CSF is critical to proper function. Remove that support from an unexpected area, and problems are likely, as you saw with your friend. The only reason they do such a radical procedure is to prevent a swelling brain from squeezing itself out through the hole that connects the brain to the spinal cord, as that progresses rapidly to death.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

I hope your friend is recovering well, and I wish them the best of luck in recovery. Brain injuries are frightening and frustrating, but the brain is amazing in its plasticity, too.

[edit] for some reason, I can't reply to the comment below, so I'm posting my answer here, so you don't think I am ignoring your point. Personality change after TBIs is not a good thing. For a representative example: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pr...

You injected the word "problems" because it suited your argument... but OP used the words "different [..] personality"

>Personality change after TBIs is not a good thing.

Reminds me of a documentary I saw recently about snowboarder Kevin Pearce called The Crash Reel (2013) [1]. Kevin Pearce was changed by his TBI also but the one I came to think of when you said this was another person that was affected even worse from a TBI they got from a snowboarding accident.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2499076/

That looks like an interesting documentary. Thanks for the link.

this is prejudicial. Fielding didn't say anything about "evil spirits" nor was that her reason for performing the procedure. you're speaking from ignorance and displaying your own biases.

Her reasoning is nonsensical. It may not be 'evil spirits', but 'the heartbeat pushes on the brain cells, that's bad' is hardly more rational.

If she wants her opinion to be taken seriously, give us something testable instead of new age woo about feelings of buoyancy.

do you know for certain that it's irrational? there are some serious medical conditions caused by swelling of the brain (encephalitis, concussions, etc.) so it doesn't seem completely unfounded. her approach to it was unconventional and she failed to persuade other researchers to pursue the project. that doesn't mean she's crazy. her remarks about "feelings of buoyancy" were in response to a question about what kind of qualitative difference she felt. her answer was appropriate to the question as it was asked. what else do you expect from her?

it's very clear from your remarks that you are ideologically committed to this person being wrong because she offends your sensibilities for some reason. maybe do some introspection and think about why she offends your sensibilities. this seems like tribalism to me. you're reacting like "ewww dirty hippy" and dismissing her because of it.

I'm dismissing her because she has made no testable claims, and the medical conditions that do cause swelling of the brain are orthogonal to the brain in its healthy state. It does not follow that what is appropriate treatment for a pathology would have a similar effect on a non-swollen brain. This is, quite literally, one of the most common logical fallacies there is. By definition, that makes it an irrational belief.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

In addition, there are a vast number of medical cases involving cranial penetration in otherwise healthy adults. Some of them involve the skull only, with no underlying brain trauma. If trepanation has some sort of unsuspected, detectable benefit aside from placebo, it would have been noticed by now. Head trauma is not that uncommon.

If she wants to explore the potential benefits of trepanation and get it taken seriously, she needs to make testable claims. As she is going uphill against a mountain of pre-existing evidence that holes in the heads of healthy people are not good, she needs to have exceptional evidence, at that. That's how science and knowledge progression works.

Trep-a-na-tion, eh? That's new. Let's have a look at the Wikipedia page then.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning#/media/File:Peter_T...

Nope.

"ran for political office to promote the benefits of that operation"

As if there weren't enough reasons to be afraid of politicians!

> 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

Amanda Fielding is certainly an eccentric person. however, she has a decades long commitment to responsible and scientifically grounded research with psychedelics.

How frustrating given that the rest of us have no hope of trying anything like this.

You 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/.

It 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.

Tumblers are a thing. It doesn't have to be anonymous just make it impossible to trace for about a hundred years.

Then you have to trust the tumbler

The largest dark net marketplace also functions as a free tumbler. One with high volume and reputation at stake, who you have to trust anyway.

The chance of that being the weakest link is insignificant.

Yeah. It's much more likely you blab about it to people you think are your friends, or random strangers on the internet with a pseudo anonymous user name that's trivially linked to your real identity!

It's about having a proper sense of risk. It's more risky to drive to the pharmacy than talk about buying drugs from the dark net online or have your tumbled coins traced back to your identity.

There's a subreddit for this /r/darknetmarketnoobs

Obtaining anonymous bitcoins is easy: use Localbitcoins.com and trade for cash. Some DNMs are starting to use Monero, an anonymous and fungible cryptocurrency.

Booting into Tails on any public network is fairly easy. I don't think that security cameras are a reasonable concern for this, as buyer targeting is rare enough, even for larger buyers. I suppose in theory.

To a certain extent, you must trust the seller. If they are currently under investigation, you could be linked. They may also retain your personal information. There are ways to reduce these risks, but not really eliminate them.

Overall, though, the risks are quite minimal until you start purchasing large amounts with intent to distribute.

> use Localbitcoins.com and trade for cash

You either have to meet someone in person for this, or go to a bank. Either way you are open to having your identity tied to the transaction.

> Booting into Tails on any public network is fairly easy

The vast majority of publicly available WiFi hotspots block Tails/Tor now. There may be some exceptions, but you're also dealing with the fact that network admins can set up alerts to notify them if someone is using Tor, and where. It is likely there are also logs being kept of IP addresses where Tor has been used.

> buyer targeting is rare enough... until you start purchasing large amounts

This is really the only real reason such activities have been able to continue at all. I would not necessarily expect it to stay this way. Also, if records are being kept of this sort of thing, they could be used against anyone at any time if other reasons to target an individual surface.

If you're comfortable with the risk involved in acquiring illegal goods and have made your peace with possible repercussions, none of this is a big deal. Most of this stuff should be legal for independent adults anyway, right? But if you're wondering whether something like this might come back to bite you in the ass... well yeah, it sure as hell could.

Forget the bitcoin angle: let's remember you have to arrange some way for the drugs to get to you. That could mean providing your address for mailing, or arranging a meeting, but regardless it's in no way anonymous and certainly traceable back to you, especially with the resources that law enforcement has.

1P-LSD is a "research chemical" that is not scheduled and available for purchase over the clearnet. You just have to promise not to allow humans to consume it. Apparently its effects are indistinguishable from LSD-25 (traditional LSD).

Even if it's not scheduled that doesn't mean it's not illegal. In the US, it could fall under the Federal Analogue Act,[1] making it illegal despite not being specifically scheduled.

There is debate on r/1P-LSD regarding its legal status.[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_act

[2] - https://www.reddit.com/r/1P_LSD/

So was 25I-NBOMe.

The biggest difference is that 25I-NBOMe can kill you. On the other hand there isn't is single conclusive case of death by LSD poisoning.

With RCs you are essentially a guinea pig. So if you want to do LSD, do LSD, and make sure you test it first. Not only it is one of the safest drug (for the body at least) but if things take an unexpected turn (they will), decades of accumulated knowledge is a good thing.

I mean, having science as an excuse to do LSD is a win already.

Having 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/ [2] http://www.maps.org/

Thanks for your insights, I imagined a somewhat similar situation.

Hmm, 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.

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