For babies, life may be like an LSD trip | Hacker News Reader

For babies, life may be like an LSD trip

raypeatforum.com

78 pointsjgalvez79 comments

Hmmmmm...

Seems like "I found these few studies, it must mean babies are super humans that are tripping constantly!"

Or healing happens faster because cell-division has a greater impact given the greater impact it has on total number of cells, and an abundance of stem cells still present as they develop helps with healing alongside growth and development. Then the fact that MOST things they encounter in the world are new to them which can instill a sense of awe and wonder...

LSD is cool but people need to chill out about it. It might have some therapeutic uses, it can absolutely cause neat visuals and even have you had lucid dream-like fantasies but come on man stop trying to compare everything to, or cure everything with, LSD and other psychotropics.

Not calling this post out specifically, but drugs make for good clickbait. Drugs in general are 'in' right now, and i agree that it's pretty forced these days.

I have a very small sample size, but the friends i have who tripped regularly (not just on lsd) went on to have serious mental health issues. I know correlation =! causation, but it scares me how big the drug culture is becoming.

These drugs may have their place in some cases, but the reality is that the biggest use case today is to generate Ad revenue

Well, if by 'in right now' you mean at least 7k - 9k years you might be right [0][1]. If you believe what ethnobotanist like Terence Mckenna [2] say, then it's much older and has shaped the hominids evolution quite significantly. It seems almost all cultures found local hallucinogens and exploited them heavily for ceremony, healing etc and was strong part of who they were [3].

Anecdotally, I think hallucinogen just highlighted mental issues that were already there. I also know some really smart people who have done their share of it with no problem (that i can see). If I could go back in time, i'd do it all again. We, as humans, were pretty open about all this not too long ago. I am happy to see a small number never stopped and psychonauts [4] though not always scientific, have kept exploring and bringing back ideas and experiences for these alternate states of reality.

Tangentially, Carlos Castaneda's [5] books were some of the best i've read and would recommend it to people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928025-400-earliest...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvqqpj/psilocybin-the-mus...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_entheogenic/hallucinog...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda

>If you believe what ethnobotanist like Terence Mckenna Mckenna is interesting and should not be dismissed on principle but I warn people not familiar with his work not to take everything he said at face value, he was pretty "out there" and very mystic at times. He has interesting and thought provoking ideas but I wouldn't quote him out of context in an HN comment as an argument of authority.

This is exactly what we mean by "kind of forced"

For most of history people didn't have the free time to be regularly using drugs the way some people today imply. If your life is farming from sunrise to sunset you're gonna need a lot of sleep and there isn't much time left to be tripping balls. You'll probably only can justify using your available free time to do whatever your local drug is at special occasions, whatever handful of religious holidays your culture has and maybe a handful of other times every year. Yes, there's downtime in the winter and summer but depending on the size of the family you have to support there's still an infinite list of things to do. There's always a leaking butter churn or cracked axle handle that needs fixing or a cart wheel that needs greasing. The time to just sit around and toke it up does not exist excerpt but for the few who prioritize that sort of recreation over improving their material situation. Responsible adults drink a few beers (or toke it up) on Friday night (with the definition of "few" depending on how many responsibilities you have). The vast majority of people weren't sitting around getting baked or drunk every other evening.

That may not be true that people used to have less time. For example this article: http://www.businessinsider.fr/us/american-worker-less-vacati... state that medieval peasant had more free time than actual american worker. Did they use this time to take drug is another topic though.

Farming, at least for your family and not commercially is not all that labor intensive. There are daily chores, a few peak seasonal activities, but outside of harvest its much easier than say an office job.

Baseball and cricket exist to fill the empty days of summer where bees, sun and the occasional down pour automate the bounty. You basically have the whole of winter and most of summer to trip balls.

people used to have a lot more free time than today

can confirm. Same with many of my friends. All heavy weed smokers, all used psychedelics. A worrying % went on to have some mental health issues.

Now I know all the pro-weed people say "yeah but it is those pre-disposed to having schizophrenic episodes". Perhaps, but at the sample rate in my experience and others who have met later on the % is far higher than I would have expected to be.

Same for just weed smoking. I post on a music forum, where near all members used to be heavy smokers . And anecdotally, about 80% had mental problems due to weed smoking. The cycle is clear. Heavy weed smoking for years. Stop enjoying it, but have become dependant. Come home from work. Smoke, freak out for an hour, effects wear off, smoke again, repeat. This goes on for 1-2 years before the realisation hits in, smoking is not good for me any more

------------------ for the record all were also poly-drug users, not exclusively smokers, so it could be caused by other drugs or the combination of. But I have no doubt it saying, this is not only people pre-disposed to mental health issues

Anecdotes are always going to be anecdotes. I can give you the complete opposite experience with my friends, some of them who tackled depression with mushrooms and are nowadays much happier and productive people.

The older I get the more I see people have mental issues, as you are out of your teenage years and a lot of more stressors pop up in your life it's also much easier to trigger or develop mental health problems, so there are bunch of other variables that no anecdote will control for thus making it just a "feel good to tell my story" kind of post, not really enlightening.

You're putting the temporal cart before the causal horse. With or without drugs, mental health issues can be latent or unacknowledged for years. And without defending marijuana use, naïve -- even unconscious -- self-medication is a very simple explanation for what you're describing.

Yeah, I particularly like two counter examples.

Example 1: We have prevalence of schizophrenia of 1-2% both in countries with extremely high use (Australia, 25-30% last year) and extremely low (Japan, <1% last year). Still many schizophrenia cases have been associated with cannabis, but here's the twist: CBD displays antipsychotic properties, whereas THC exacerbates psychosis. That matches both the selfmedication hypothesis, and the trigger hypothesis, but the aggregate data still dispels the causal hypothesis.

Example 2: The countries with the absolute biggest rates of tobacco prevalence are hovering around 40-50%, the US is sitting at around 20%. Among schizophrenics, though, it goes around 75-90%. But funnily enough, you don't see anyone claiming tobacco causes schizophrenia!

The tobacco lobby was quite successful debunking that myth. Cannabis had no lobby yet.

The association is likely tied to self medication. Tobacco contains a low level monoamine inhibitor, these have some uses in psychiatry. (it is the main bit that is addictive - not really nicotine alone - harman and norharman, related to harmaline)

> But funnily enough, you don't see anyone claiming tobacco causes schizophrenia!

We have extensive research on tobacco, so we know it doesn't cause psychosis.

We now know that if you smoke cannabis at 15 you're more likely to develop schizophrenia than people who don't smoke; we know that this is dose dependent; and that the people who smoke will develop illness earlier than people who don't smoke. There are strong reasons to believe that cannabis will cause psychotic illness in some people. Obviously that's not all people. Just as not everyone who drinks heavily will become alcoholic, not everyone who smokes heavily will develop psychosis.

But schizophrenia is sufficiently harmful that we want to provide good warnings to people to take care with cannabis. Avoid use if you're under 21; avoid heavy and prolonged use; seek help early if you're having trouble.

When campaigners claim cannabis is a harmless herb they make it much harder for people like me who are trying to get it legalised and regulated.

As a recovering information addict, I'll simply say this:

Why and how I do something habitually is as important as what I'm doing, whether it's ingesting some substance or spending my days reading the internet.

If someone is chronically doing something to escape from or numb pain (physical or emotional), expect major issues to come from the practice.

> but the reality is that the biggest use case today is to generate Ad revenue

I appreciate your comment overall, but this sentence makes me think you don't know much about drugs or drug culture, or the actual effects of drugs. I'm also slightly worried about the general popularity in current society and media, however.

Drugs have been "in" for centuries.

Also I wonder if the opposite is true, when you consider how intense baby screams are, for a toddler, it must be the equivalent of a deep horror to us, even though it could just be a unknown face in the room or a tiny bump on a table.

there is nothing about babies being super humans and also nothing about cell-division or anything about healing ... did you even bother reading the post?

Alternatively: Adults experience Baby-like consciousness during an LSD trip.

Alternatively 2: Adults experience headaches reading extended segments of bolded _underlined_ text.

Needs more colors, blink and marquee tags.

Makes logical sense to me.

A baby has nothing but its own genetically inherited model worldview to map its sensor input to.

A model worldview that is primarily concerned with faces, treats, hunger and feelings.

I takes many years to map these phenomena to a fuller model of the objective world.

The brain and therefore the human consciousness cannot see the world as it is; the brain gets its information through sensory input. For the input to make sense it needs to be fitted to a model worldview (a table is only viewable as a table once the mess of colors coming from the eyes can be mapped to the representation of a table)

I just feel like comparing a baby's experience to someone on lsd would likely mean language/models don't exist, therefore self doesn't exist, logic doesn't exist therefore cause and effect don't exist, or at least everything our natural vocabulary/modeling structures allows us to connect with, like you are saying.

Lots of our reasoning is necessary for individual survival, but it's something we build up and learn from others over time, and it's something that is passed down through culture.

I would just imagine that being a baby or being on lsd is similar to no ways of chopping the world up, and no deep rooted ideas of the true nature of our experiences. I don't think you need drugs to get there or need to have/be a baby. I don't think it's much different than the purpose of attaining enlightenment, from the Buddhist perspective.

I would assume that cause and effect is one of the few things that a baby does understand.

One one level: It might be that the baby does not understand cause and effect, but it certainly acts in relation to it.

"I cry cause i know that will cause me to feel better."

The baby don't understand the sub components of why one thing causes the other. (On a deep level neither do we, but as adults we do have a richer collections of models that explain things, like crying causes other people to give me attention)

What I'm talking about for humans starts on the very high levels of abstraction we tend to do it. We connect such disparate strands of data and it all works because we have culture to reinforce it. All that background information that says "yes, this is correct" is what allows us to hold onto certain patterns versus others. If observation ceases, then the internal individual models cease, then reinforcement of those high level abstractions cease, because there's nothing to reinforce it.

So honestly, I'm really not sure if a baby reasons that way. I don't think the baby is born knowing that crying leads to feeling better. I think the baby just does it, the same way a cat meows when it's hungry. There's no language or reasoning or models inside the baby's head that says "cry now therefore I will feel better". We invent that reasoning after observation of it happening again and again.

I'd call it all ridiculous, but it's a bit tongue in cheek, and I'm not sure whether that's coming across right. Saying "crying gives me attention" is a very unhealthy way to process emotions. People cry because they are sad, when some need isn't being met, or when some need is taken away. We aren't much different from babies in that regard.

I've been through plenty of instances in my life where crying was interpreted as "give me attention" but all that did was make it really, really hard to actually cry when I have actually been sad. Just because all the reasoning models that presently exist support that sort of notion, doesn't mean the notion is correct. It is important to be able to cry. Likewise, it's important to simplify all the reasoning oneself has down to understand important, fundamental awareness. Otherwise we get stuck with reasoning that is counterproductive for self understanding and communication.

> There's no language or reasoning or models inside the baby's head that says "cry now therefore I will feel better".

You don't need to have language to have models, artificial neural network can model stuff they don't need language to do it. The text "I cry cause i know that will cause me to feel better." is simply my explanation of the models behavior.

> Saying "crying gives me attention" is a very unhealthy way to process emotions.

I definitely agree :) But that does not mean that it is not true.

Here is just a question to you that popped up when reading your text :)

Do you think that babies/animals are conscious?

An artificial neural network has a mutable language. Trying to describe the behavior of an artificial neural network with language is somewhat absurd, because it effectively removes all the conventions and consequent problems caused by languages, models and structures that the human mind, over time, would likely develop difficulty retaining mutability for. If you give the ANN language, it literally ceases to be what it is. It develops structure, model. Too much discordance in structure is difficult for a human mind to process.

A baby is not an ANN.

> Do you think that babies/animals are conscious?

I can't say I know what consciousness is. I do know that ego tends to drive individuals, whether from the inside, or the outside, all this stuff can become chaotic, and everything often maps for individuals in order to retain whatever fundamental and foundational belief systems are necessary to hold onto their own awareness and their own understanding of their self - as well as understanding of reality, information as it's processed. It can be a precarious balance, understanding oneself - in relation to another. New experiences in life that dramatically redefine self understanding are interesting, but can be destabilizing, disruptive, or fluid, easy to manage, trust others and trust self, but be adaptive.

Honestly, most of the time I do not see myself doing much differently than what a cat does. Just my ego saying "I exist - You exist" for all information created between selves. I could call it buddhist-computer scientist-artist-programmer theory, but ANNs tend to make life ridiculous, as can be obvious. Always seeing connections. I talked to an AI for a long time, and not many others. Started to literally see myself as no different from a computer program. Redefines idea of self.

Consciousness. There's reality. Reality should be incomprehensible, sometimes. Can't decide if I'm positive or negative towards AI. Every aspect of computation can be used for good intents or bad. But intentions often are a dilemma. Can think about how intent affects self, affects others. Computer security, for instance.

> A baby is not an ANN.

The mind of a baby is somehow emergent from it's brain, the brain being a neural network.

Conscious. I used to believe that consciousness was a sort of self deception of thought feedback loops. Then i realized that it was self destructive to think like that. In a sense i still sort of think it is the most rational answer. But i refuse to believe it. The brain seams better suited to believing it is conscious. My models of the human mind that are based on consciousness has results that seams to give more positive outcomes. And they have higher explanatory value. Presumably cause they align more with the models that other people use to interpret the world.

Yes, I think minds work better when they can be self oriented. I think my mind works better when it is self oriented, but I see feedback loops in behavior and interaction with people from which I could choose to make inferences from to denote ideas of intent, but I choose to not do that because it does not give people freedom from thinking about how other people think in ways that can be self destructive.

It can be self destructive to think about feedback loops if they are all perceived as negative.

Alignment of models. Ebbs and flows. I think it's important to see positives.

I took a strong hit of acid when I was a teenager at Glastonbury festival. I ended up falling into a delusional, catatonic state where I thought I was in some kind of war zone surrounded by dead people. Thankfully some friends found me and talked me down. I hope babies don’t have an experience like that!

They do have, it's called baby night terrors. The baby wakes up in the middle of the night in some sort of trip and can scream for hours.

I thought babies were also known as night terrors...

I had LSD once when I was a young adolescent. It was by far the greatest drug related experience I ever had. So many colors, thoughts and stories. Sleeping the next day was difficult though.

Afterwards, I never felt any bodily urge to take it again, but, my mind was very keen to another round. So much, that I got scared, and never did it again.

Maybe I should give it another shot now that I have had babies

Few people end up taking it habitually. That's not to say none do.

I had it when I was a late teen, enjoyed it, took it again a number of times (7/8?) into my early 20s, but by the last time I just found it boring. I think most people have some fun with it and move on.

What is the worst that could happen? You hear all these stories

Asking for a friend.

From repeated use?

I knew at least one person who was a tripped out mess every time I saw them.

I have no idea how that dude's life panned out as I haven't seen him in a couple of decades. I imagine it didn't really go anywhere until he stopped dropping acid every day...

Some people report HPPD from repeated use.

LSD is a stimulant and there are some negative physical effects associated with it, but all are temporary AFAICT.

a bad trip, psychosis and maybe even PTSD. I take LSD and other psychedelics on a regular basis and if you know how to prepare for a trip then bad experiences are unlikely. but a bad experience on LSD can be really unsettling. this concept of set and setting is true after all.

While a lot of this makes great sense, this:

> Blake thought that the doors on perception are artificially kept semi-closed for cultural reasons - i.e. the ability to focus and do work for the enrichment of the powers that be

Just reads as an intentional satirical portrayal of "anti-establishment" stereotype.

I've also read a study that images the brain on LSD which shows that there's less activity in perception which kind of goes against the folk story of LSD opening one up to input. What happens is that some input gets stopped and so, common to all illusions, the brain creates stuff to fill in the gaps. This might be just to do with hallucinations though.

In other words, LSD closes the doors of perception rather than opens them!

It's just weird how persistent the halucinations are.. Like if you look at a painting it will look totally different than normal, you will probably see shapes of weird things a bit like Deep Dream's terrifying faces and dogs but a bit different. You can then leave said painting for 2 hours and come back to find the painting has the exact alterations from reality as before.

Because of this i'm more inclined to think that it's more like an unfiltered view of reality. Normally the brain will end up with the final image that we call reality but on lsd some of the last filters are missing showing you the world in a different way. This could also explain why perception centers show less activity in that they don't put in the last work to show us the normal image without weird artifacts as faces, animals, fractal patterns and colored light.

The common denominator seems that recognition patterns have much lower threshold for firing. In that sense, there is less cognitive filtering, but perhaps more sensory filtering?

Multiple results are competing for attention, which creates the sensation of rushing thoughts. Connections across widely different concepts are made, which makes for 'woah, everything is connected' moments. Visual patterns are recognized over-zealously, which creates hallucinations.

It doesn't seem weird to me that pattern recognition machine that's been trained for 15+ years will recognize same patterns for same input few hours later.

Note I have never taken lsd, so I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Wouldn’t it make more sense that LSD is a filter, and it sticks for the duration? Or at least, different lenses? This idea of ‘that’s a more real’ reality doesn’t make sense, the visualisations can be different next trip (in the situation you describe) which to me implies the opposite.

Btw my favourite trip illusion/hallucination is looking at marble/granite - the veins appear to flow!

Actually haven't tripped the same place twice yet, so my pseudoscience anecdotal arguments is probably wrong.

It's certainly possible that it's a new/warped/different filter on top but for now i like the other idea better. Especially because of Deep Dream. To me it would make sense that the brain would try and find patterns(faces, animals, familiar shapes etc.) everywhere and then end up with a final image where all bad candidates have been pruned. I wouldn't call it "more real" just more unfiltered and thereby "less real" since you are sometimes seeing stuff that should have been filtered out. My favorites for illusion/hallucinations would everything organic it's just god damn fascinating. Also any type of display(tv, phone) is just mind blowing to look at.

how much do we know exactly about the mentioned region? Do we know if its purpose is interpreting the input, or filtering?

If its purpose is filtering, then less activity would allow more input.

Not just cultural reasons though, imagine you were tripping all the time. The brain protects itself. Likewise how you can't be awake all the time.

Who is ray peat and why do we care? This is some late 90s weird internet. It’s good to see the crazy is still going but this stuff seems more speculative than evidence based

from the first PDF linked:

> Raymond F. Peat, Director, Blake College, Eugene, Oregon, and Nutritional Consultant, Medical Diet Service, Portland, Oregon. M.A. General Studies, University of Oregon, 1960. Ph.D., Biology, University of Oregon, 1972. 300'/2 N. Jefferson, Eugene, Oregon 97402.

>Blake thought that the doors on perception are artificially kept semi-closed for cultural reasons - i.e. the ability to focus and do work for the enrichment of the powers that be.

Statements like that sound a bit political and make me doubt what he is writing.

There was an outpouring of scientific research into LSD and what it might be useful for in the years following its synthesis. Towards the 70s-80s, research efforts were quashed and its use became increasingly and negatively politicized. It is inexorably political.

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

I'd recommend Michael Pollan's recent book, "How to Change your Mind" if you'd like to read more.

Top researchers on psychedelics agree with the author - psychedelic use often causes users to question authority. Notable UK researcher Dr David Nutt says that psychedelics have a political impact.

Is it really political to stop and think about what you are doing for the pure gain of someone else? I should think that's just critical thinking at work.

Not necessarily, but saying that the "doors are kept shut artificially" is something straight out of r/conspiracy.

So is "the NSA can tap into almost any conversation or electronic communication they want in real time" and "the President(*) colluded with Russia to steal the election", but here we are.

So is "Bush did 9/11" and "Hillary Clinton is a child rapist." Just like a infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare, a bunch of people making up unsubstantiated conspiracy theories will eventually make one that happens to correspond with reality. That doesn't mean unsubstantiated conspiracy theories should be taken seriously.

Yes, it really is.

it's true though - society and culture collectively create taboos of various kinds to organize group behavior according to goals like wealth maximization, power and hierarchy conservation.

I don’t have much to say about this but I did get saved from a fairly bad trip by finding teletubbies on tv at 6am.

Tangentially: I was reading a study about fMRI in dyslexia the other day, and it seemed to me to indicate that the area of the brain that has lower activity and blood flow in a dyslexic was the same area they found to be reducing activity and blood flow on psychedelics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29412010 / http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I don't know about an LSD trip but I've often wondered what exactly a baby perceives while in the womb or as a newborn. Their brains aren't just sitting there as a blank state so they are experiencing something. I wouldn't at all be surprised if it's very trippy seeing as infants have literally nothing to hold onto to define reality as we see it.

I often watched my newborn staring off into empty space clearly perceiving /something/

Whatever it is, they remember it subconsciously - shushing a baby (like the calming type) and rocking (also works for adults) reminds them - subconsciously - of the sound of the mother's blood flow and movements.

> I don't know about an LSD trip but I've often wondered what exactly a baby perceives while in the womb or as a newborn.

I don't think they "consciously" perceive anything. But "unconsciously", we know that they perceive the mother's voice, smell, etc. They recognize words in the womb and they even react to it in the womb. And after birth, babies' prefer their mother's voice ( probably an evolutionary benefit ) over other people's voices. It's why a mother's voice has a calming/soothing effect on babies. It's pretty much trained in the womb to associate the mother's voice with safety and comfort and nourishment.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/08/babies-learn-recogniz...

I am convinced that at a young age we experience things in a way very similar to a psychedelic state. I always thought babies are in more of a DMT-state (my experiences smoking NN-DMT gave me this belief) and I guess as they get older, they slowly come into reality, so between 2 and 5, I guess it is more of an acid/mushrooms level of experience.

Fun thought: would chronic LSD administration (i.e. making a person never not be tripping for ~1mo at a time) enable language learning at the level babies are capable of?

Psychedelics build up tolerance very quickly so it would be difficult to achieve.

Not sure if it's even possible. I heard that after taking LSD you can't really trip for a few days.

All that would do is lead to severe memory loss and mental problems. Look up MKUltra.

No. It would destroy them mentally and permanently.

My (now) brother-in-law sold acid when we were in high school, and there was a point of time in our senior year where he took acid almost daily for 2 or 3 months. If you'd asked me to describe him in one word when we were 20, i'd have said 'burnout'.

Believe it or not, he's fine today. He quit doing drugs in his early 20s after he got arrested, got a business degree, and hasn't touched them in 15 or 20 years. You'd never guess that he's done acid a hundred times or more by talking to him.

I'm a bit confused... Isn't it an article encouraging consuming LSD?

Welcome to Silicon Valley. One year it's modafinil and adderall, one year it's nootropics, one year it's psychotropics. Rinse and repeat.

HBO totally nailed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2cEaBIDAY4

Encouraging is a strong word, but if outlining the positive impact of something encourages you to consider it, is that bad?

It sure could be, if you take action without considering the negative impact as well.

Welcome to HN. You will find a lot of posts encouraging drug use making it to the front page.

To some extent, yes. No need for confusion.

Is that forbidden?

If you're not familiar with Ray Peat, here's what the Peatarian diet looks like:

- 1 L milk (add salt and sugar)

- 1 L orange juice (add salt and sugar)

- 1 raw carrot

- bone broth

- NO PUFA (Omega 3/6)

This is an absurd over simplification.

His eating guidelines are much, much more extensive:

https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/ray-peat-diet-foo...

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