Is it possible to do mathematics while on such drugs? I am working through a textbook on projective geometry and I feel like those visualization enhancements would be super useful.
After coming down I thought it was probably some nonsense that my brain dreamt up, but I analogized it as a 2D surface of a 3D sphere and it makes complete sense. Drawing a circle on a sphere and calling one side of the line you draw the "inside" is completely subjective—we just tend to call the smaller side inside. If you grow the circle to the greatest meridian of the sphere, which side is now "inside"? Is my brain on the inside and the universe on the outside, or is the universe on the inside and my brain on the outside?
I also kept seeing (when I say "see", it isn't the type of hallucination that appears like a real object in front of you, these all form in my mind's eye but are more vivid than what I can usually visualize) these grid-like, branching "corridors". I'm not sure what the best term for it would be and it may have not been 4 dimensional per se, but I don't think the way it's laid out would work in 3 dimensions. It was like I was floating in an intersection with rows (x), columns (y), and aisles (z) passing through me. A lot of this is hard to visualize when not tripping.
I'm pretty certain I know what you're talking about - your description is so accurate :)
If you still do this, can you verify that you indeed see that clearly? We assume that it's impossible to transfer any thought from the 4d mode into out common 3d mode, simply because our memory in the 3d mode isn't fit for that. Just like a flat pixelated screen can't adequately capture a 3d object. However it's possible to transfer simple forms, like a simple flat drawing or a number. You can imagine some complex 4d form, imagine a section and count something or just remember the shape. Then in the usual 3d mode you can still compute that shape using some equations, although it would take some time, and compare the result with what you've seen.
Personally, I have very limited technical skill when tripping. I'm a semi-professional musician, and I can keep up with folks, but I don't think I sound better or worse. There are a lot of interesting aesthetics that you can pull from that kind of visual hallucination, but IME it's not super "realistic" or "rational".
I've gotten a lot out of psychadelic drugs but the realizations are usually far more poetic than practical.
The longer-term revelations I've found have more to do with realizing that, say, a lot of my relationships have been validated by caring for my partner because I didn't get a certain level of care growing up, and that I've probably worked to find partners who need a certain amount and kind of care... so as long as I keep doing that I will probably keep failing in those relationships.
That's an example of something I realized in my last session, and it holds up well even now that I'm sober. It was also something that I have been working though over the last couple of years, so it's not like big astounding fact... it was just really brought home because it feels (once again, maybe just to me) much more inviting to really examine those kinds of thoughts and conditions in that setting.
On the other hand, I can't program / do calc / do about anything technical... when I look at designs while sober it's all wingnuttery with obvious flaws.
You might have a different experience
In the 1950s, before the term “Silicon Valley” existed, a handful of engineers at the tech pioneer Ampex were approached by Al Hubbard, the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” And with his help, they found that dropping acid could make their jobs easier.
“[Hubbard] wanted to turn on the best and brightest and have the wisdom trickle down to the populace,” Pollan said. “Engineers who were working on chips found LSD very helpful in imagining a structure as complex as a computer chip. Before there were computers, designing a computer chip was much harder! It was a three-dimensional structure, layered, and you had to hold an incredible amount of information in your head.”
The Ampex engineers started a nonprofit called the International Foundation for Advanced Study, giving LSD to people like inventor Doug Engelbart. His first under-the-influence invention was a toy for toilet-training boys, but Pollan pointed out that it was only after this experience that Engelbart did the work he’s most famous for: Inventing the computer mouse, the graphical user interface and key components of the internet.
“Engineers, unlike scientists, deal with irreducible complexity,” Pollan said. “There’s so many variables that, instead of reducing a problem to simplicity like scientists, they have to find patterns in a very complex space. That’s what LSD does — it helps you find patterns.”
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/16/17358484/michael-pollan-how-to...
Insights on LSD also tend to be more durable. “Insights” on other psychoactives were often stanzas of gibberish the next day. No idea what the mechanism here is, but it certainly feels like LSD doesn’t derange the rational centers of thought as quickly. Maybe Johns Hopkins can tell us more in a few years.
(Disclaimer: YMMV. Don’t expect superpowers; respect the drug; dose carefully and low at first; “set and setting.”)