Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

> The present study’s findings significantly advance our understanding of the brain basis of one of the most unusual and intense altered states of consciousness known – previously likened to dreaming...

This study does not "find that DMT produces a dream-like state"; that was already well established. This study identifies the subtle brain activity that differentiates the hallucinations from dreaming.

> This experience is often characterized by a sense of entering into an entirely ‘other’ ... dimension. It is not uncommon for people to describe encounters with sentient ‘entities’ or ‘presences’ within this perceived other world and for the experience to subsequently challenge beliefs about the nature of reality and consciousness.

These effects are what makes this drug so interesting and differentiates it from most hallucinogens and dreaming. It doesn't just leave you with strange memories you know are nonsense. It creates experiences that feel real and invokes thoughts that cause you to question your understanding of reality.

I've tried explaining this to people who've never tried psychedelics. It is unlike any other substance I've ever tried (a lot of them, FWIW) in that it leaves you with lasting impressions. Some things I gleaned tripping have stuck with me to this day. It has changed me for the better.

Is it true that multiple people tripping on it at the same time, in different rooms, see the same things, events and even people in their trip? I've never tried any psychedelics, but if there were any truth to what I have heard, it would be a fascinating topic to study while monitoring brainwave activity.

If you're asking whether DMT facilitates some kind of metaphysical communication, the answer is no.

However, it's possible that a common environment or shared experience before or during the trip could seed similar or related experiences.

The reason I ask is that Graham Hancock in an interview on Joe Rogan was saying that specifically Ayahuasca would allow people to see the same thing, exact same events, whereas DMT would not. Perhaps I misunderstood what he meant. He seemed to imply there was something intrinsically different about the way that was prepared and used traditionally and how it affected people. He seemed to imply it connected people.

Ayahuasca is typically consumed as part of a larger ritual ceremony that steers the participants towards a particular experience (depending on the Shaman you may be told to expect to encounter a certain entity named "Mescalito" for example.)

There is no known mechanism by which DMT can connect people any differently than any other powerful experience that people have similarly had at some point.

It could be suggestion / false memory. Once one participant tries to explain their experience in more concrete terms, the others start to fit the description into their own experience, and since we have similar prior experiences, they "see" the same things.

Try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5sk504Yc94

Poor presentation.

I didn't have "sleep." So now what?

"So we're gonna do a little experiment, memorize these words, then write them down, now I'm gonna read ... oh will you look at the time, it's been almost 2 minutes, that is we're almost at the end of your attention span, so here's the conclusion, bye."

He could have at least read the (supposed) entire list, then tell us which ones weren't actually on the original list, or ask us which ones weren't. Or something.

Yes. This absolutely happens. What was strange for me was looking at clouds while tripping and pointing out all the things I saw in the clouds. My companion saw all the same things. There’s no way a sober person would have seen any of it.

Couldn't they just be following the leader, aka your thought?

But of course this by no means that some sort of unknown communication between your brains was occuring. Having your perception altered in a similar way could simply cause people to see similar patterns.

> It has changed me for the better.

Is that the old you saying that, or the new you?

That's very meta. And an excellent philosophical question!

Assuming you can remember the old you, I think in most cases it's fair to say that it's the new you that has enough knowledge of the old you.

It's just like normal learning really, if you learn something, you become a new you that has knowledge of the old you and the new you might then say "what I learned right now was better."

I know, I'm not the best at philosophy.

If a drug significantly alters your brain to the point that you no longer think the way you did before, how do you know you changed for the better? Maybe the old you, the you that existed before you took the drug, would say this is not better. Maybe the new you only thinks you are now changed for the better. Maybe you didn't change at all! After all, do you even have a way to measure what has changed, and how much better or not-better you've gotten? Do you just feel better? Much like an old dinged-up ball bearing with new grease, it may squeak less, but is the ball actually any different than it was before? And in the context of how we feel about ourselves, which really matters? Is our perception of ourselves more important than reality? If so, the statement "It has changed me for the better" is really just saying "I feel better than before".

Another way to look at the question "how do you know if the change made you 'better'": Say you took a drug, and suddenly you changed from being a liberal, to being a Nazi. (This happens a lot, not with drugs, but with events; an event happens, and suddenly someone turns from very liberal, to very far-right conservative) How do you know if the change has made you better? The new you is perfectly fine with Nazi-hood, and thinks you are better. But the old you would be pretty sure that the new you is the exact opposite of better. How can one tell if a change has made them better? Which version should we listen to? How do we define better, and how do we measure it?

I won't disagree with you but you have to consider the context of the original comment: use of psychedelics. Their effects, though I'm happy to see more and more research being done, are already widely discussed so when he said "it changed me for the better" we can quite surely rely on the numerous reports of how psychedelics changed peoples lives. Not so sure about new far-right extremists feeling better in their echo bubble... I more often hear about people being more at peace with their lives, overcoming stress or anxiety issues, learning to go with flow after years of fighting it, etc.

>If so, the statement "It has changed me for the better" is really just saying "I feel better than before".

The point is what changed is the perception of your emotions. Instead of feeling stuck following your every negative thought you suddenly realize that you can influence how you feel. You dont just feel better then before, you arent still high, you found a way to influence how you feel. You are no longer stuck to the road, but realized that you can leave the road, turn the autopilot off. The way you deal with emotions has changed fundamentally by leaving the observer role. And who are we if not our actions. I would also say, anything that makes me decide to be a more aware and happier person is a fundamentally positive development as it gives me the opportunity for more meaningful decisions. And with me being happy, these decisions will likely be positive.

At the core of this question is your view on humankind. I dont think happier more self reflective people are a bad development. I think the best way to make the world a better place is by making more people happy. I think you have a higher capacity for doing good things for others if you arent miserable yourself, if you arent just coping with day to day life. And you have better chances to reduce bad unintended consequences if you work on being more self reflective.

I think the examples you bring are more caused by reevaluating ones moral compass then by changing how you function.

A bigger question is what was that 'you'. Was it the ego? Was it my sense of self? We keep changing throughout our lives. But psychedelics are more than just a life changing experience. AFAIK, it's the only way to experience ego death. The dissolution of self can remind you of the transient nature of things and lead you towards spirituality. The good or bad aspect should be judged from that perspective rather than your perspective. The ego is temporary, but the spirit is not.

I have never come close, but the practice of meditation seems to be bring people there, or close.

Meditation and psychedelics affect different areas of the brain, neurologically speaking. I think they are complimentary.

Contrary to popular opinion I haven't found DMT to be that much different than any other psychedelic drug when comparing equivalent doses. Sure it's true that while high on the drug it creates experiences that feel real, but that's true of dreaming too, isn't it? It's not obvious that it wasn't real until it's over. And similarly I have had the same feeling from high doses of "plain old" psychedelics.

The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

Curious what "high" doses of "plain old psychedelics" might be? I've never gone further than 200ug LSD.

Highest I've ever gone was 500ug LSD, and still, it was a more intense experience of the same "quality", not something completely different.

Check out erowid if you want some high dosage lsd stories. In the early 90s I encountered some "mop up" doses that were claimed to be in the 3000 mic range. I tried them twice.. first time during the Rodney king riots in SF (took half a mopup, started out really fun then devolved into a nightmare. Hid in the garden of a high end restaurant, literally inside a bush, watching the mayhem unfold on market Street.. Second time was while backpacking in pt Reyes and that was the best, most transformative drug experience I've ever had. I talked to a mushroom and learned a lot about my self and humanities relationship to nature.. But, at peak, I was completely disassociated. Basically blind/deaf to external reality for about 3-4 hours. I was with 3 other people.. and I think we were just rolling around in a meadow the whole time. Eventually we somehow ended up at the ocean, and the sunset brought us all to tears. In the 90s, the most commonly available doses here on the street were about 150 mics, and cost around 2 to 6 bucks. And the comedown was ugly. I've been told that cheap/old lsd, degrades into strychnine.. which is why the comedown is so harsh. On the high dose ones I did, the comedown was completely different. Nowadays I stick to the occasional couple of shrooms or a hit of molly once or twice a year. I think today I would have too much emotional baggage and ties to my consentual shared hallucination with humanity to do psychs that powerful again.

> The difference is rarely do people wake from a dream and feel they ought to change their life in major ways as a result.

I dunno about a major way, but I've had dreams which took days to properly snap back after, because the experiences felt so real that I felt an emptiness similar to bereavement for the fictional people that I dreamed about. That felt just as real to me as my experiences on DMT. I've also had Ketamine experiences that were similarly profound and have stuck with me since. Once I had a K trip which felt like I was outside of time, watching the cogs of the universe tick past instant by instant for all eternity. That experience snapped me out of a pretty depressive period of my life.

People of course have profound meaningful experiences on DMT, but I don't think its exclusive to it and any strong hallucinogen or dissociative can, in my opinion, have similarly strong impacts for some people.

I've had an experience and ego-death on 500ug. I've done DMT once. That LSD experience produced hallucinations, including 'data' in my field-of-view like I was using an AR app. I was looking into a mirror as it was happening - the 'resolution' of the experience was so high-fidelity it seems impossible to have occurred. I wrote a very detailed report after and even have a video of me describing what I'm seeing only moments after I can back to my 'self' post ego-death. It was every bit as fascinating as DMT. That experience was the most significant of my life.

Five grams of a dried Psilocybe Cubensis strain.

Note: The experience lasts significantly longer than a non-ayahuasca DMT experience.

Did you get to the "break through" level?

Same. In my experience there is one basic "psychedelic state" accessible via all the well-known compounds, which have different characteristics (especially in terms of duration) but aren't qualitatively different in any meaningful way. I suspect that a lot of the differences in reported effects between the major psychedelic compounds comes down to set and setting (i.e., ayahuasca is associated with traditional cultures whereas LSD is not).

Oh, the differences are very very marked. Sure, psilocybin and 4-HO-MET aren't going to be that different (even tho I swear I can tell them apart if I dosed blindly), but giving some examples:

2C-X family gives me some very weird sensation on the chin before I even feel the main effects. Also the visuals tend to be techno-alien-geometric-engineering-architecture themed if that makes any sense. Also, especially 2C-E in high doses, creates time/perceptual distortions I haven't experienced with anything else; as in, I say something to my buddy, go to a different room, and hear what I said with my own voice coming from the original room.

Psilocybin and analogs create a very dreamy, child-like, earth loving mindset, not always very visual, but when visual everything seems to be covered in native-americanesque patterns.

DMT visually is absolutely alien. As in colorful liquid metal moving in very organic ways. The "curtain" for me is basically a sea of colorful alien robot matter. If ayahuasca feels more like psilocybe mushrooms, earthy and human, in terms of visuals, DMT is a supercharged, sharper, edgier, faster, stronger, out of the galaxy and in your face version of such.

After you have oddballs like DiPT, where the mindset doesn't change much, visually there's nothing, but there are loads of audio hallucinations and distortions. My own voice sounds like Barry White on it; most women sound like talking through Coke cans. Slapping a table sounds like drums, and playing drums sounds like dropping cutlery on the sink. Some music sounds better, some worse. Very strange.

LSD and derivatives, my favorites overall, I find them the most malleable by the set and setting in the feelings it can create and the visuals you will see. On the other hand I feel the experience more "on-rails" and even doing large amounts (800µg my max) I felt nowhere near a bad trip. I wouldn't 8x the average dose on mushrooms because the mushrooms have shown me things I wouldn't be able to handle at bigger doses. LSD for me is very, very forgiving.

Hmm. Interesting. Would love your thoughts on near-death experiences and the many world interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. When I had my first trip (400~600µg) I was alone in a room and had a couple of near-death experiences. And then a couple of more trips later (150~250µg on average as I'm not mentally prepared to take high doses again) many weird things happened in ways that I could only describe as synchronicity-ish that have clearly saved my life (during and after the trips), and I'm now convinced I have actually committed suicides or died in an accident (during and after those trips) in many horizontal worlds and my consciousness had somehow floated to a world i.e. this one where I have not yet killed myself (like in a quantum suicide experiment).

Would love your thoughts on near-death experiences and "horizontal worlds". For me what's interesting about psychedelics has always been that it is about death and consciousness. Any sort of hallucinations that could be categorised as "visual" or "audio" were just the side-effect as ultimately all senses converge to a single point, or a zero-dimension singularity if you will, an infinity encapsulated in the void, and that is death itself - or at least that is my interpretation of my experiences.

Also could you describe things that mushroom had shown you that you wouldn't be able to handle at bigger doses? I had only taken mushroom once. I'm always under the impression that mushroom is a weaker psychedelics than acid but perhaps that is inaccurate. Would love to learn more.

It's probably important to remember that most people aren't this rigorous about drug use, in general. If one is not precisely monitoring dosages, let alone trying to compare roughly equivalent doses and effects among a variety of drugs, DMT is waaay easier to ingest a high dose of, accidentally or otherwise, compared to most other psychedelics.

Ok, we've changed the title above from "Ayahuasca alters brain waves to produce waking dream-like state, study finds" to that of the article.

DMT is also naturally released at the time of death. These experiences sound similar to how the afterlife is described by many religions.

What’s your source for this? I hear this often, but I’ve never seen any study that has measured DMT release at death.

This was based on a misconception that was later debunked.

DMT is not known to be produced by the human brain.

And even if it were... the large amounts of monoamine oxidase naturally present in the blood would all too quickly break it all down.

The only way too get enough DMT to temporarily overwhelm the MAO is through exogenous sources.

The type of MAO enzyme that breaks down triptamines is not present on blood, AFAIK.

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