Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Articles about psychedelics tend to be either dismissive or full of woo and this takes them seriously as tools to better understand the physical basis of human consciousness.
A major thing I took away from my experience with lsd and mdma was how impossible it seemed that such a small amount of material could so utterly transform my experience of the world.
Anything that does that seems like it must be a powerful tool for understanding what the brain does. I’m glad that scientists and the establishment are finally taking it seriously.
I think the first and second waves of scientific research (as he calls them) ran aground after the early pioneers couldn’t resist evangelizing. The current generation seems to have learned the dangers of becoming another Timothy Leary and have remained clinical and detached in their descriptions.
Most drugs have an active dose in the <100 mg dose, LSD is particularly low, at <100µg.
I suspect that my first time “rolling” permanently changed pathways in my brain in one of the best ways possible; on MDMA, I experienced what it felt like to feel unconditional love for complete strangers around me. I genuinely felt like I cared and wanted to connect with everyone. I saw beauty in people I wouldn’t even notice in my normal, routine life. This, of course, was an artificially created and temporary feeling, but 6 months later, I still feel the affects from that night.
After trying MDMA, I’m convinced that the fastest way to change yourself is through drugs. Neuroplasticity goes down as you get older, but it seems like certain drugs can accelerate changes to your brain anyways. I have yet to try psychedelics, but can understand how they would have similar, mind altering affects.
I recognize a lot of this is pseudoscience and needs to be better understood, so I’m happy to see research is being done. Drugs can be a very dangerous thing, but they can also have some extremely positive affects. Figuring out how to maximize benefits while reducing risk is something that I believe will benefit many people.
The hypocrisy is infuriating
What I was surprised to learn was most research in this domain clearly distinguish adult and non-adult, and the filtration theory implies that kids or younger adults are more creative, have more imaginary freedom, and less emotionally stable - meaning they're naturally more "on drug" - make me wonder if 1 year old really feel like sky-high everyday.
Having smoked way too much marijuana in my early life, it seems fairly obvious that regular drug use is potentially damaging to the developing brain (or any brain for that matter), independent of how interesting or intense the experiences while under the influence may be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug
That's what I mean by its not generally considered a psychedelic. I am aware some people class it as one.
Personally I have never experienced psychedelic effects from it.
The "filtration system" that is talked about here is not comparable to a root system, or, in other words, any life-sustaining or life-promoting system.
Rather, a malignantly overgrown filtration system is the root cause of feelings of disconnectedness, deprivation, and subsequent depression, that are so common nowadays.
A societal tendency to bulk up the "filtration system" to pathological dimensions is the reason why there is an opioid epidemic in North America right now. Thanks to our massive filtration systems we have filtered out most that is good about the human race, and have managed to build a civilization/economic system that is so dehumanized, cutthroat, unfair, lifeless and ultimately unfulfilling and meaningless, that most of us subjects walk around in a daze, in states of deep emotional deprivation, just looking for something, anything, to either anesthetize those painful feelings (opioids and other downers), or distract us from them (social media, porn, television, VR..."entertainment").
Like everywhere in nature, balance is the key to a healthy state. We have erred, for centuries, on the side of boosting the filtration system through whatever means were available, and have managed to build very effective and tall walls within ourselves that separate us from our fellow men, from the environment, and even from deeper strata of our own consciousness. Now, we are reaping the harvest of that - a mankind that is plagued by mental illness, carrying out environmental destruction wherever you look.
But I digress. What I really wanted to say is - please, don't draw parallels between the "filtration system" and a root system. Really, most of us would benefit from downsizing the filtration system a notch or twenty...unlike plants, where cutting away roots would be of little benefit.
My mother-in-law high on psylocibin paints pictures in a manner not too dissimilar to how my toddlers approach it. The things they say, the way they use colour, the concepts being expressed, and how it becomes play...
Make of that what you will.
I am sorry that you are only interested in the professional artists on psychedelics; I think looking at its effect on all artists novice or otherwise is interesting.
Granted, a sibling comment to yours made me see how the person I responded to could formulate a reasonable argument. Whereas previously I could only see bourgeois academic snobbery. So, like you, I thought there was only one way to interpret it. But now, I have been enlightened.
I am indeed sorry.
“Brain damage” usually means gross structural damage, while psychedelics seem to operate at the neurotransmitter level.
Yes we do. For quite some effects seen in patients in psychiatry it's not too hard to come up with a drug which induces similar experiences. Take paranoia for instance. And hallucinations of course. Or, to mention an extreme and very rare example: there are people lacking a certain connection between the low-level visual processing and the parts translating that to known objects (sorry, don't remember exact terminology). It's extremely hard to imagine, but such people have normal vision yet they do not recognize based on what they see. E.g. they see a chair, but don't know it is a 'chair'. However when they touch the chair they know 'aha, chair'. Someone I know described that exactly once when on psychdelics; psilocybin IIRC.
I don't rule anything out, but the filter hypothesis seems a lot less likely to me given the evidence, than the simpler explanation: That psychedelics just mess up the normal functioning of the brain to create a different experience. This requires less assumptions than the filter hypothesis, which is akin to suggesting that the brain is actually drunk all the time, but alcohol merely removes the filter to allow us to experience the drunk phenomenology.
However, fever lack of sleep and other non localized effects can produce a wide range of Hallucinations.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer.
Why 'reliably'? Not all brain damage is the same. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the theory but I don't think it argues that, nor is it what happens in reality.
Also, why at all? Why would certain brain damage not be able to create a less rich experience? The theory doesn't say that is impossible I think?
Which brings us to why I tried to make the point about brain damage. Since we are working with the idea that psychedelic experience is the default but that the brain is filtering out most of it, it seems to follow that strategically damaging the filter should allow psychedelic experiences to flow through. You're right, not all brain damage is the same, but enough people suffer similar brain damage that I believe we ought to have seen by now some subset of patients with certain types of trauma reliably report psychedelic experiences as part of their symptoms. If such a subset exists, then I stand corrected.
Problem is that is quite hard to assess if it is sufficiently similar. That alone warrants an entire range of experiments. Also I don't know the literature enough to figure out if certain types of trauma reliably lead to similar experiences but I do think that is the case. For example electrical stimulation (not 'damage' per se but definitely altering the normal brain operation in subjects) has been repeatedly used to treat a myriad of problems like tinitus, tremors, ... And I know for a fact that during surgery, when attempting to find the right position for the electorde, it is not uncommon for patients to experience hallucinations/strong feelings of disgust/... because stimulating in the 'wrong' area instead of the proper target area. Also look at lobotomy for instance: quite a lot of similar symptoms in the unlucky subjects. Again: doesn't really prove filtration, but does indicate what you think doesn't happen (ie.strategical damage causing similar experiences) does in fact happen so it's imo not a good measure to reject the hypothesis.
"It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and that is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. We provide the first evidence for this infant-synaesthesia hypothesis by showing that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical 2- and 3-month-olds, but not in 8-month-olds or adults."
From "Synaesthetic Associations Decrease During Infancy" by Katie Wagner and Karen R. Dobkins
That said, overall, I think this is a fascinating approach to reverse-engineering the most impressive machine in existence: the human brain.
This particular article though feels hand-waivy by the end. Until we can validate these theories of mechanics [e.g. entropic brain theory] (e.g. by stimulating certain brain networks directly), they seem beyond speculative.