High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain, say researchers | Hacker News Reader

High doses of ketamine can temporarily switch off the brain, say researchers

cam.ac.uk

131 pointshhs145 comments

My experience with Ketamine was that it was simply too much fun, too weird, and felt too good -- I had to distance myself from it, regarding it like some kind of psychedelic heroin. I can understand why it's addictive.

However, it does have its purpose. I've heard of a lot of people cleaning up their lives through its application.

And reading about it is always fascinating -- Stanislav Grof: https://realitysandwich.com/321100/my-ketamine-journeys-or-k...

Well, I honestly can say, that a hole dose of ketamine might change you in ways you can't comprehend before you go into it. It made me view consciousness as something special, not entirely captured by physical laws.

It is hard to explain, but beware before you enter. It changes you.

It is not bad though, I feel happier now, more complete as person.

I was shocked when I dislocated my shoulder and they gave me IV Ketamine. I got that same experience, right there in the emergency room, sanctioned by the medical professionals.

I also received a dose when I broke and dislocated my ankle. The experience was incredible, quite enlightening, despite the fact that most of what I could see was my pain as a sore spot on a multicoloured "wall". To sum up the experience, I felt like "I" was a disassembled geometric form, and my external point of view looked at the form and coldly contemplated, mostly, the pain visible on the wall.

It left a profound effect on me. Gave me a perspective about myself that I can't forget.

If it was legal and there was a safe way to do this again, I'd like to see how it's like when you're not in atrocious pain.

That is the keypoint, it gives you a perspective you can't forget.

I believe it was exposing you to the underlying geometric shapes (including more complex ones that form screens and mapping references) that exist or form relating to fundamental physics, which our brain's have evolved to not pay attention to or perceive - at least for most people because seeing visually that level of detail would take away from your vision or perception of the present surroundings which arguably is more important for survival; in essence the mind is paying attention to it, however it is overshadowed by the stimuli coming and being analyzed from the physical body - I think this is also why ketamine is finding psychiatric use, as it can clear or remove physical blocks to allow people to see and process underlying energy that they're otherwise blocked from feeling (enough) to process them.

I had a similar experience during the beginning of a ketamine IV infusion that I was doing to see if I could treat central sensitization that I have: as I was disconnecting from feeling my body, I could visualize feelings in my body - literally seeing certain shapes. At one point a fear came to mind and then I could feel and experienced that fear-memory in a perfect sphere traveling down my body until it reached my root (root chakra, groin area) and presumably disappeared or dissipated, as did the actual feeling of fear contained in the sphere along with the memory associated with it.

Ketamine IV infusions are legal and paid for in Canada for pain, and it's legal for psychiatric diagnosis if referred by your doctor - however not covered by our health system. Arguably the health system, practitioners, and regulators don't know enough and so need to move forward slowly until there's time for proper research and guidance.

I don't relate to the description you provide, this isn't what happened.

'I could see was my pain as a sore spot on a multicoloured "wall".'

All other stimuli forming you dissipated, so then you were seeing a flat representation, or screen, a map of your body and then perceived the spot radiating pain as a multicoloured spot on the wall/screen? That's what I took from that description.

>If it was legal and there was a safe way to do this again, I'd like to see how it's like when you're not in atrocious pain.

Maybe it has to be a combination of excruciating pain (endorphins) and ketamine.

There are RC's that are supposedly ketamine analogues that are legal depending on where you live.

If you IV a single 24mg/kg dose like the sheep in the study, I suspect you won't be experiencing anything at all before you lose consciousness.

Concur. Standard IV dose in humans for general anesthesia is 0.5-1.0 mg/kg. (I'm a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist who used ketamine for GA in around 500 patients over 38 years, and smaller IV/IM doses in perhaps 1,000 more individuals)

I was confused by how low that was until I realized you meant per minute. I assume you use a higher dose at first to actually induce unconsciousness?

No, I did NOT mean per minute. Ketamine dose for induction of unconsciousness/general anesthesia is 0.5-1.0 mg/kg as a bolus push over a few seconds. Ketamine comes as 100mg/cc and 10mg/cc: I always used the 10mg/cc formulation IV because it was easier to draw up the precise dose I wanted. Loss of consciousness takes 30 seconds to 1 minute for most people. I never used ketamine drips during anesthesia because it was just one more thing to have to track. Boluses every 30-60 minutes sufficed.

For IM use in children and patients with no venous access, induction of general anesthesia is achieved with a dose of 5-10mg/kg. Here, the 100mg/cc formulation is superior since the volume to be injected is 1/10 that required with the 10mg/cc version.

Ah, I see. I was conflating the IM and IV dosages; 0.5mg/kg seemed much too low to induce general anesthesia from what I vaguely remembered of IM dosages. Thank you for elaborating.

That seems kinda low. I've personally never seen anyone get knocked out by a single bolus < 1mg/kg. The only citation I can find is 0,5-2,0 mg/kg if primed with midazolam which sounds more reasonable but is still a big caveat.

A lot of doses < 1 mg/kg are used in e.g. caudal blocks https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4258981/

How many people have you personally never seen get knocked out by a single bolus < 1mg/kg?

Addendum: one of ketamine's most common uses is in the Burn Unit, as the general anesthetic of choice for daily burn dressing changes, which often require daily doses for weeks. Most people receiving daily doses become tolerant within a few days, such that the dose has to steadily be increased over the period of treatment. A log book of dates and doses is kept at the patient's bedside because different people will be doing the dressing changes on different days.

For example, if on the first day the dose was a bolus of 1.0 mg/kg IV, and by the fourth or fifth day the patient wasn't rendered unconscious by this dose, a supplemental dose of perhaps 0.5 mg/kg IV would be given there and then, and the next day's starting dose would be 1.5 mg/kg. Sometimes patients would end up receiving 2-3 times their starting dose by the time the series of dressing changes was complete.

Have you heard of ketamine making people "immune" to alcohol and other drugs like hallucinogens?

If you want to geek out over the pharmacology, ketamine is mainly an NMDA antagonist, same as the other dissociative hallucinogens, and apparently that's one of the mechanisms of ethanol too, though anecdotally I've only heard complaints about alcohol cross-tolerance issues with GABA agonists.

This whole subject is really interesting and you should at least check out some Wikipedia articles:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_(drug)#Pharmacology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_(biochemistry)

Thank you, also to bookofjoe for the answers.

I had found the NMDA receptor connection, but so far not any mention of long term (four to six months) of alcohol insensitivity after ketamine use. If there is one, I'm unable to find it.

Some new information in those Wikipedia links, about other neuroreceptors.

Let me try to explain. Ketamine does something with your morals it seems. It does a remoralization in a way. E.g. it won't turn you into something you aren't. It is a relative process. It gives you a space to watch yourself from an neutral judgement free observer point of view.

It is really weird.

You somehow find out what is really important to you and what is not and see that really clearly.

That is what happened to me after a couple of experiences. And I acted on it and I am not sad about it. Now, I don't do it that often. But if you choose to do ketamine, you are in for a ride.

Is this same/similar to DMT?

Never did DMT, so can't really say. Sorry :) It is a highly personal experience, which is difficult to share with others though. I think it is similar in the sense, that you can't dismiss it. It is very real for you personally.

I am not a spiritual guy, you know? I think that makes it a bit hard to think about it. It didn't make my spiritual or anything or less grounded in my life.

I eventually hope to write a book detailing the differences, among other things, however it will likely be years (time doesn't really exist though eh) - but if interested once I finally release it then you can email me matt@engn.com. Contemplating doing a pay-what-you-want model for it or refund provided if you've read it.

No. Nothing is like ketamine.

I mean nothing is like DMT but you can see some parallels with acid is mushrooms.

But ketamine is utterly different to anything else I've tried.

DXM is very much like ketamine at least at normal recreational doses (not sure about K hole)

Ive read that while they're all disassociatives, DXM is still a pretty different experience from ketamine. I personally havent tried the latter though, so this just secondhand information.

I would expect PCP to be very similar also, though I have never tried it.

It is similar, but you won't go down like with ketamine. So while you are in fantasy land, you can walk, talk and interact.

It is a fun drug to do in nature far away from the city, talk to elves, clouds and trees. Just lie down, think about silly things and watch the clouds go by, it is very peaceful, almost child like. That is the good side of pcp.

In cities I can imagine it is hellish, but perhaps also adventurous if it is an quite old city with dark alleys. I never dared to do it in cities.

And when you are back, you know it was just fantasy. It is like walking into a book of Neil Gaiman. It stimulates the fantasy and makes you more open to whatever comes up. It lowers your shields of critical thinking. (And that is where the danger lies too btw, so keep notice of that)

In a hectic city that goes wrong, but in a nice safe place in nature. Even if you meet a stranger and have a talk with him, he tells you his story and you marvel in it, it is fine, it is very friendly. Almost magical.

It can be fun, but it can also bite you seriously. Be safe and watch out :) It is not as safe as ketamine and not as safe as LSD. Too much makes you look like some futuristic drunk, so you really need the get the dosage right. It is on par with alcohol (society's favourite NMDA antagonist) with the stupid things you can do on it. Only alcohol puts you down at a certain moment, so it limits the damage. PCP does not, well not enough.

I have thought a bit about this. I think the difference is this:

Ketamine leaves you in a space where you are alone, in your own universe. And classical psychedelics lead you to a space where you with others. I haven't done DMT, but I did other psychedelics in high dosages. In the end they are similar in a way.

Another way to see it: I feel dissociatives are more suitable for people who make their own values and psychedelics are more suitable for people who follow external values. I think both positions are valid and needed btw, one is just more dangerous than the other. It is easier to stray.

Classical psychedelics feel strange to me, not unwelcome, but I am in alien territory. But dissociatives feel more like home coming.

EDIT: Or perhaps they pull you to those sides. If I need to associate a term pair to the two, then chaos and order are coming to mind. Chaos is dissociatives, and order is psychedelics. But I might be wrong here, who knows. It is very subjective.

> And I acted on it and I am not sad about it.

That sounds like a story. Can we hear a bit of it?

Well, it is not an exciting story really. I started from dropping out of university because I got children really early. I wasn't a bad student, but not the top 10 either. I studied physics (EDIT: dunno why I wrote psychology).

I got my first child, second. Then both my parents died, I found out my brother was a pedophile at the same time. He touched my child, I was truly alone now. That was the moment something broke into me. Like crack goes the clock work. I then decided to start a startup right in economical crash, I build an instagram like application. I got hooked on GHB during that time to deal with the pressure. I got my third child. The startup got funded, 1.5 million euros. I broke down, withdrawn and had to sober up within two weeks. I kept going on. The company went down, instagram was first and we lost the race. We even had some Russian oligarch visiting us to buy us, but oh well. Missed that boat. I was left with quite a debt and some problems with the tax office.

So I wrote myself out of my country, I went of the grid. If you write yourself out of the registers, they can't find you here. And it is not illegal. I also had a hash dealer invested in my company. So it was better to hide out.

Then I started up another company, a small game company, which blew up right into my face later on, while getting addicted to opiates and another child. I wisely switched to kratom, but I was clearly broken. I also picked up some bad other habits, like running a small designer drug thing. Well, I don't want to say to much about that.

Then I started to experiment with ketamine. Fun times, stopped the kratom and got a real job for once in my life instead of the cowboy behaviour. I was building search engines, it was not that hard actually and I learned the practicality of knowing how to read and apply papers. University still got something good into me, it learned me how to learn.

Fast forward a couple of years. I had stopped doing drugs altogether, except for snuff. My life was relatively peaceful, but boring. I still had some shadows of the past haunting me, like the taxes. I started doing ketamine once in a while again. It was fun. Then I had the first K-hole.

I stopped snuff and I started working out the next day. I dealt with the tax problem.

I am pretty fit now. I do ketamine once in the three months. And every time, I fix up a new problem I find out in my life. I am now working out the thing with my brother, what happened there.

See, I found the moment that happened I felt truly alone and simply stopped processing emotions and then my life devolved into utter chaos. I just soldiered on without feeling, marching and marching.

Now I am on my way to the top of the company I am in now and even if I fall out of it, I have a pretty good perspective. I am handling a complex merger of multiple platforms. I have time for my family, I learn my kids to shoot with a bow and do little projects with them.

Life is less hard and more fun. I am now planning to study again. And I care for both my nieces every week. So I even have some surrogate daughters too now. What can a man wish for? I only got boys to my dismay. And now I have to stop, because that is too much personal details and some people might pin me down. ^_^

That's it, ups and downs. I think ketamine normalized me, gave me a change to be in society instead of on the edge of it. It is a weird thing. And I don't use it all anymore. It is not needed.

I didn't have real structure inside me. It sounds perhaps weird to you, but that was how it felt. Like I was some sort of chameleon, just going with whatever came upon my path. Life felt as a fast paced river with shit loads of debris in it and I had to try to not drown by grabbing things around me.

That was because I had a relative safe and warm childhood and suddenly when my parents died, I still had my brother. But when my brother went suddenly bad, that was gone too. There was no base to stand on. I just had a child, no papers, no parents and no family I could stand one. Desolated, nobody to lean against and with that the inner structure was gone.

I am grateful I can give my kids a safe childhood now and can restore what I have broken. Now story time is over, I have been far to honest with strangers on the internet. A bad habit :)

If you do not mind me asking, did you to intend to have the children at the time that you had. Its not very clear from your comment and was just curious. If its too personal, my apologies and please ignore.

No problem. I consider this part of my therapy session now, part of writing a letter to a fictional friend, so lets go personal.

Well, I always wanted children, but not at that moment, I was not ready. I just didn't have the heart to go for an abortion. I did consider it though and that still hurts. It still burns, I never would have forgiven myself. Only in the darkest of hours you should consider that.

We still together and have 4 kids now. I am happy how it all worked out. Could have been worse.

It helps to write, so thank you for asking :)

TBH, I think no one is ever ready to have a child. No matter if it's a first one or not.

Yeah, I think that's true. I consider myself utterly incompetent for this task, and yet I've ended up with eight step-children over the years. It sucks for all concerned, but something is usually better than nothing.

Very glad for you that it worked out. An abortion one regrets … that would be a dark place. Thanks for responding.

In addition to letters to a fictional friend you could also think of writing a journal for your very non-fictional children. I am sure they would appreciate that when they grow up into adults.

I failed with the startup race, but I do enjoy seeing others succeed, so that is why I started to linger around here again.

"write yourself out of the registers" what does that mean?

It is about the central municipality citizen registration. Something you have in certain countries of Europe. You ought to be registered in some municipality, but if you write yourself out and never register in another municipality. You are untraceable, you are gone for the system. They call it "ghost citizens".

There is a catch, you will get less pension for example and lose some rights during the time you are not registered. And renewing your passport is not trivial.

You can have a company, but not a regular job. You are in a weird twilight zone then.

What countries are these? You just tell some municipality to delete you from their books and they do?

Netherlands, keyword: Spookburger

Google translate is pretty accurate for Dutch these days. It is an interesting read in how we are organized here. In the nineties the decentralization was even bigger.

And I think you can do the same trick in Belgium, not sure though. I wanted to be vague to hide my location a bit, but oh well.

Thanks for sharing this

No probs and thanks for reading. It is good to write for me.

Thanks for that. It's certainly anything but a dull story, or at least, mine is quite dull by comparison.

I've tried kratom a few times, but doesn't seem to work for me. Nor pot, for that matter. Ethanol is pretty good, for now, aside from the health effects, though they say it interferes with memory formation, and I think that's true.

Hard to say whether trying ketamine would be worth it or not, though if it becomes a legal treatment, would probably go for it.

Well, the end is anti-climatic. I haven't become a big shot entrepreneur or anything like some of you guys. That being said, I am happy anyway and the story isn't over.

Some critical notes, I see some people find my story exciting, but don't take this as a manual. I want to temper things a bit.

I am very, very chaotic. I thrive where inequalities are and think they are necessary, it is a necessary evil, we need them as human race to progress in my view. The people I look up to are for example John Mcaffee, Elon Musk even Trump. And I have mixed sympathies with the BLM movement and the alt-right. I like conflict, I will search actively for it and if I get bored I will create it.

I don't want a static one world government. I want diversity of cultures, different views on things, ideas that smash together. I don't want America to become Europe. I want to enjoy the wonderfully weird Japanese as they are, although I never really will get them or can become them. I like to work with others that are truly different from me, not some mirror of western values. I want people to have a place which they can call their own, which is very different from other places. I want the west to protect itself, but not impose it values on others. That is how I view life and that is what I want.

It is good that I found peace of mind for myself and my environment now. I will stop the therapy session now. This is what I want to write to my fictional friend. I feel sad and happy now. It is weird. :) And I burned another account and I went a bit in overdrive. That happens when I get in touched with the emotional side of things. I find emotions hard. Sorry for the blog post.

Would it have any therapeutic effect for people convicted of violent crimes? Even white collar crimes like embezzlement?

Obviously they’d have to volunteer for something like that but it’d be interesting to see if it changes them for he better or worse...

I think you need to be really careful with that.

It would probably be a bad idea to apply the criminal justice theory from A Clockwork Orange to the real world.

Clockwork orange is exactly what I thought as well.

I think more conventional entheogens and empathogens like LSD, psilocybin, 2CB and MDMA are far more promising. Bear in mind that violent criminals are highly likely to be mentally ill.

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

That study looks interesting though some question methods. It’d be interesting to have a thorough follow up and see if it tracks closely with the really positive results of the Concord study.

I'd be worried about the state endorsing or experimenting with this, even as a voluntary measure. Coming withing even an AU of normalizing pharmacologically 'correcting' asocial behavior could put us on a very dark path.

True, but on the other hand, what if it is an option and we're depriving some people of a normal, happy life by not researching and making available a simple medication to regulate e.g. their thresholds for violence, aggression, empathy, self-discipline, motivation or wakefulness?

We have similar ethical concerns with regard to e.g. cochlear implants. We don't force people to have them implanted, but it would seem cruel to not make them available because the availability may, at some point in the future, make them semi-mandatory.

For better or worse, we're very much already on this path. We chemically 'corrected' 'asocial' behavior by chemically castrating homosexuals, the most high profile case being Alan Turing in the 1950's. He is believed to have later committed suicide.

Society's views on homosexuality have progressed since then, but there is a bar for being gainfully employed and housed in the US. Unmediated, some mentally ill people are not able to meet that bar. Too asocial to hold down a job and thus too poor to afford housing. Medicated, they are. If the alternative to being medicated and a productive member of society is to be homeless or in prison, aren't we already there?

For those that are able to finding the right medication, it's life-changing. We should be very very cautious about what the state can force people to do, but we should all strive for a society that's better equipped to handle and treat mental illness and the problems that stem from that.

*Looks at SSRI, DRI, and NRI drugs...looks at your comment...confused

Yes, lets experiment on prisoners. That seems morally justified as long as you ask nicely. For real, scientific experimentation has to be done with unbiased groups AND a control group. After getting that out of the way then you can include targeted groups. Which prisoners should never belong to, this is how the criminal psychopath stereotype began. also, every country classifies crime and punishment differently making any observation useless. Their status as criminal might be the same but their pathology is as diverse as you can expect. prisoners might be the most violent group you can find but you're still better off targeting violent people in a population.

Unless you are researching criminals

There's more than a few clues that at least some depressions, or rather - depression like states - on short timescales are closely related to our brains dynamic "electrochemical" state than of anything else, as disrupting the dynamics in different ways appear to - sometimes - profoundly affect depressed states.

On longer timescales it seems even more complex. Similarly to ECT, some people revert to a depressive state somewhat quickly after being affected by various drugs, while others do not.

I sometimes think that when we start understanding depression, we'll have to reevaluate our perspectives on both ourselves, society, and humanity as such much more than most are comfortable with.

Not in any mysterious sense, but more in the sense that depression on an individual level might very well be a symptom of society level issues, as well as it is an extremely debilitating psychiatric condition.

While there are markers for depression in individuals, I can't escape the feeling that to some extent, it's nothing but a convoluted way to encode tolerance levels to what is in reality a "toxic" surrounding. Exactly what the toxicity could be is not at all clear, but I don't expect it'll have a high compatibility with eg economic interests in any way, shape, or form.

This seems very interesting, could you point at some sources for this? Thanks!

I get super depression on the day after I exercise way too much. Especially jogging or sprinting and pushing myself. Too much weight lifting too.

I’ve always found it to be the strangest thing and it was quite a shock when I realized the cause.

It clears up completely the third day.

This happens to me as well! My working theory is the that I deplete all the dopamine during the run. I'll usually feel total contentment for awhile before it settles in. Since I don't have anything to be depressed about in general, its easy to see it for what it is and wait it out with some nutritious food and sleep.

Eat fish after exercise. It helps

Wow. Neat to hear it’s not just me! I wish someone would study it. I couldn’t find anything last time I searched for it. I’ll try fish next time.

> Since I don't have anything to be depressed about

I think this is a case where a word is used in two different ways and it is important to be clear to keep the intended meaning clear.

"I'm depressed that she turned me down" is a very different kind of depression than clinical depression. There doesn't have to be any external negative condition to cause someone to have clinical depression.

As far as I know, when people talk about using ketamine to help depressed people, they are talking about hard to treat clinical depression, not the short term state of disappointment or sadness that people also call depression.

Sounds like depletion of something, perhaps in the energy metabolism pathway, such as thyroxine.

There are some links between inflammation and depression. Perhaps taking an anti inflammatory the day after working out would be helpful.

Or instead of training to failure, do one of the work out protocols that specify maintaining control and staying out of injury and inflammation territory, such as the Quick and the Dead, kettle bell protocol.

Routine use of anti-inflammatory medication isn't a good idea for most people. Inflammation isn't a bad thing, most of the time. It's actually a critical part of the body's repair mechanisms.

From the article

>“It’s likely that the brain oscillations caused by the drug may prevent information from the outside world being processed normally.

It sounds like the parts of your brain that understand physical laws was not correctly communicating with the part that controls consciousness.

I’ve done doses of ketamine like that before and just sort of entered a dreamlike state where I was floating though crystals or something like that. I didn’t have any sort of profound revelation from it at all.

On the other hand the night I did LSD and ketamine at the same time— woah boy. I came out of it saying to someone that we were eternal pure beings trapped in monkey bodies by a cruel and malicious god. I don’t remember saying that, but they told me about it afterwards. It was especially awkward because i was A) making out with her at the time and B) I had just met her at a rave. How I managed to make out with a complete stranger while on a cosmic journey of discovery in another dimension, I have no idea, given that I usually couldn’t accomplish it when I was fully on planet earth. We’re still friends, funnily enough.

depression: have you tried turning it off and then back on again?

tongue in cheek, but i think the more we learn about mechanism of action the more it’s not the worst 1st order approximation.

Ketamine, psilocybin and electro conclusive therapy are all similar in that regards.

Ect is the definitive treatment of resistant depression, but if you can get the same effect without requiring a psychiatrist, anesthesiologist, cna, respiratory, and nursing, why wouldn't you?

I was lucky / unlucky enough to have one ketamine experience due to a shoulder dislocation. I cannot stress highly enough that I would not recommend it unless you are highly tolerant of some disturbing stuff. It was a very short (under 15 seconds), very intense, forced experience of being in essentially an insect mind that was shunted along a path of thought and movement in a 2D maze with no options whatsoever. It led to a very dark place with a surprise ending that felt hopeless beyond anything I could have imagined. The punchline was I learned in real time that not only was I dying (in the trip, not in real life) but also that the entire universe did not actually exist and never had; it had all been an illusion and a lie. And as I was learning this everything shrank down to a point and blinked out, no time for questioning, all gone.

Fortunately at the same time a small part of me was watching the process from the side (in horror) and somehow at some level I had a distant inkling and ray of hope that it was all a trip. And then it was over and... extremely slow fade back to consciousness over 15 minutes or so. Very not recommended but very interesting.

>> extremely slow fade back to consciousness over 15 minutes or so. Very not recommended but very interesting.

Every been to a vet and heard the dogs waking up from surgery? Ketamine is the go-to drug for animals. They aren't howling because they are in pain.

.. and the part of you that watched all of this and was concious of it happening is the real you

That's my understanding of it as well. All this about the universe ending, never existing, being an illusion and a lie, that's just the collapse of a ego. The lie it tells us so that we fight for its continued existence is that the other side of it is some kind of horrific oblivion. Actually, the other side is a serene wholeness. It is the source of beauty.

The individual ego is a useful way for the universe to experience itself in a subject/object relationship and we should respect it for what it is, but a side-effect of confusing the real self with this flimsy thing is pain and suffering due to the delusion of separation.

I invite anyone who has had this experience, rather than compartmentalizing it as a bad thing, to try and integrate it into life in productive ways. It can lead to some really wonderful things.

Yeah I do try to take the good from it. Thanks for the comment.

Good and bad is simply perspective, my friend.

Go on Youtube and look for:

- Eckhart Tolle - The park bench (and everything else)

- Adyashanti - Enlightenment Unfolding (and everything else)

It takes years, but you'll come to terms with it.

So I'm no scientician, but 24mg/kg is like 1.5g for an average human. I'm pretty sure that this would not only turn of a humans brain, it may cause it to burst into flames as well.

The median lethal dose for people appears to be between 6g and 32g depending on method of administration.

[0] https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml

edit: After investigating, the source for this claim is the Merck Index from 1989, which is not readily available online. Anyone who would use the above information to determine the appropriate ketamine dose for themselves or someone else is a dangerous fool.

Hopefully people will have an open mind reading my comment, however within spiritual circles it is somewhat known that many people can't tolerate doing any type of entheogen too many times; what that amount of times is and dosing where you lose complete connection will be subjective. I'm also not trying to suggest all changes that occur after going through such an experience is the act of "losing your soul or connection to your soul" - however that arguably is possibility at one end of the spectrum of possibilities. Some people seem fine doing Ayahuasca their whole lives, like shamans - whether they are now dependant on it and have regular access to it is another question, however other people through ego mind addiction (entheogens are powerful for breaking physical addictions, however are addictive for the mind) and force themselves into ceremonies or experience that they know they will regularly if not 100% of the time experience pure terror, not listening to their body's fear response for what it doesn't want to experience and is trying to guide them away from experiencing - instead their ego mind maintaining control and tricks them to continue; the body is inherently intelligent and part of the equation that needs to not be ignored to find balance and allowing your body's systems to guide you to optimal health, equilibrium.

> however within spiritual circles it is somewhat known

Writing things like this is really losses credibility for you.

I took that as those people, having had a chance to observe the behavior of these drugs on many occasions, are theorizing a phenomenon. In other words, science, or something like it.

Oh yeah? How else would you define the context of people who gather regularly in community in relation to spirituality or gatherings for ceremony? Curious what preconceptions and prejudices you have of who you classify that are automatically discredited in your mind because they use the term "spiritual circle" - or am I misunderstanding what in that sentence discredits me?

Ever been to an Ayahuasca ceremony or talking circle? Just trying to get an idea of your own experiences.

Last time I had been in a spiritual circle in London there was a guy telling a bunch of single mothers that when he went to India he saw flying meditating yogis.

The funny thing is that the mothers were there for the company (it was a pleasant place to be, that’s why I was visiting too); but the guy’s assumption was that everyone visiting was literally an idiot because he thought they came there for his theories.

I am sorry but most of the time when I hear this another theory of mind (of which there’s a bunch on Shroomery btw - you are not alone) and “spiritual circles” this is what I imagine you are.

That dips one toe into religious flamewar and another into personal attack. We don't allow those things on HN, so please don't post like this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have undergone several ketamine treatments for depression. I have had 1 positive session out of 9 total.

Some trips were 'fun' others were not. My first experience with it was quite rough.

The positive experience went as follows: pure nothingness. (I refer to it internally as `#cat brain >/dev/null`)

It was incredible. Hope that I can silence all the noise in my brain. It was peace. It may have been zen. I've wanted to kill myself just so I can return to that level of peace. I haven't because I shouldn't. But it gives me hope that I won't feel this way forever.

I have tried a variety of audio therapy and cognitive direction while undergoing treatment to assist the process.

Examples include: (a) concentrated positive thoughts {thinking of a happy place/directed peaceful imagery} (b) "not thinking" just let the trip take me wherever it goes. {this may be the best course of treatment} (c) soothing sounds {nature sounds, music used while meditating, etc} (d) guided meditation

The most recurrent theme I experienced (the trips would include visual and auditory hallucinations) would be repeating geometric patterns and a techo/dub-step style of music. These were pleasant experiences that I didn't mind, although I felt that they didn't quite do the trick.

Hey there. I hope you’re well on your way to feeling better/happy. Best of luck :)

My personal empirical research agrees with the headline.

> Six of the sheep were given a single higher dose of ketamine, 24mg/kg. This is at the high end of the anaesthetic range. Initially, the same response was seen as with a lower dose. But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes - a phenomenon that has never been seen before.

You have taken 24mg/kg of ketamine before? I find that nearly impossible to believe.

Approximately 15% of that dosage causes mammals to lose consciousness.

What would happen to a human taking such a big dose? Brain damage? Death? Permanent coma? And would the outcome be the same even if monitored by healthcare professionals? Or would they be able to stop the person from taking damage from it?

"Ketamine abusers are known to take doses many times higher than those given to the sheep in this research. It is also likely that progressively higher doses have to be taken to get the same effect. The researchers say that such high doses can cause liver damage, may stop the heart, and be fatal."

It is _really_ hard to find a fatality attributed to ketamine. Recreational users are known to take heroic doses. This sounds like pure speculation.

In one go definitely, but for a 70kg person that's 1.6g, 1g of Ketamine is ~£10 in the United Kingdom, it's really not that out of the ordinary that someone would take 1-3g during the course of an evening.

That would be intranasally - not by IV. You get near 100% bioavailability by the IV route, a lot less by the nasal route.

Also, the bags of ketamine you buy on the street are not 100% ketamine.

And for most people who do a gram of street ket over an evening, they are doing small bumps over a periods of hours, not doing it all in one go.

Not surprised, vets already have been using ketamine to anesthetize reptiles.

It's used to sedate humans, too: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/14/ketamine-sedative-law-...

Ketamine's use as a safe anesthetic for animals was why it was chosen for this experiment.

I've been working for a Ketamine Clinic the past few months, and it's fascinating to learn about (bunch of good resources here: https://www.fargoketamineclinic.com ). While it can be incredibly addicting, it's also opening new research into solving depression. Because it works differently than traditional antidepressants by targeting the NMDA receptors and binding to them to increase glutamate, it could vastly help people with treatment resistant depression. The problem is that with high doses like this article suggests, it can be dangerous. So it's a complicated area.

It feels like most drugs change your mood or appear to change your environment. The thing about k-hole level doses of ketamine is that it feels like it transports you to another place entirely - lot's of people speak of feeling the presence of multiple universes and timelines, and of feeling like they are moving between them.

I have a friend who, after his first k-hole experience, was completely in awe of life and the universe for some time afterwards. He would become emotional and choked up talking about the beauty of it.

He was also half way convinced that ketamine would allow him to travel through space and time to anywhere while in the hole. He couldn't wait to throw himself back into a hole so he could travel the torrent of the universe stream and explore further.

Nobody here has mentioned Erowid yet - I highly recommend it if you want to read more about people's experiences while on ketamine, or indeed any other drug.

The spiritual experiences on ketamine and other arylcyclohexylamine are intense. Far more intense for me than any other drug I've tried. I've had unexplainable experiences as well, where information retrieved in the drug state turned out was accurate.

> where information retrieved in the drug state turned out was accurate.

Can you give an example?

he thought his friend was going to come through the door with a glass of water and he did for some reason

was this verified by a third party? because if it's just himself validating his own "predictions", it's not really surprising. After all, we get deja vu all the time, which also feels like you predicted something.

Unrelated to drugs, but I’ve had one deja vu where I wrote it down, showed it to a coworker, and then we both watched as it came to pass. I have no theory how that could have happened but it did. I do know it’s not just memory order hitting short/long term memory.

I have had this experience as well without drugs.

Two times come to mind. The night I first met my brothers g/f- - I had a vision my brother and I would both have girl children, and shortly after, I would be separated from my child. And in sequence, we both had exactly one female child then I got a divorce.

Another time, an ex of mine, we hadn't spoken in a year or so, nor did I have her number (back then I would throw out numbers frequently to prevent me from contacting them while using drugs). A voice said, "X is in trouble and needs your help." So, with no way to contact her, I posted on the app we had met on (Whisper), and she got in contact within five minutes. She said it was weird because, she hadn't used the app in months but she got bored, installed it, and my post was the first one she saw. And I said, "This is going to sound crazy, but I was doing drugs and got a 'message' that you were in trouble. Are you?" And she said, "I am actually..."

That’s the wonderful thing about drugs: they trigger the areas of the brain that normally signal an insight or epiphany, but without the hassle of having an actual epiphany. In reality you’re lying motionless on the floor for hours thinking nothing.

You're definitely thinking something, even if it is something banal made salient by the drugs.

That is correct, but it is only half of the story. I think, I have to say it for the lack of a better word for it, but 'spiritual experiences' are worthwhile. They are not void of value.

You shouldn't do it to often. But that is with all drugs.

Ages ago my next older brother told me that when he smoked pot he liked to sit and think because he had deep insights, and the right answer to what he was considering was clearer than in a sober state.

He didn't smoke around me and I hadn't (and still haven't) smoked pot. One Saturday night he came home and it was obvious he was pretty baked. That is when he dropped one of his insight bombshells on me: Stevie Wonder is the Frank Sinatra of our generation.

I had the same though you just made: maybe it wasn't that he had clearer insights, just the perception of it because other thoughts that might contradict the conclusion didn't cross his mind.

"Universal love" said the cactus person...

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

I wonder if this could be used in the treatment of brain injuries. Let's say someone comes into the ER with a brain bleed / stroke - could they induce a brain shutdown to help prevent further damage, while they worked on the injury?

That's an interesting thought. I wonder if there are any parallels with how hypothermia can be induced to preserve brain function (following a period of hypoxia)?

That's exactly the thing that spurred my thinking :)

And people dancing on large doses of Ketamine clearly have little brain intervention.

The K Hole must be the plug hole of one’s mind

Dancing on ketamine is such a foreign concept to me. At low doses, its more like sit quietly because my muscles are so relaxed and at high doses (still low doses compared to the article) its lie on the floor while falling through the void. I couldn’t imagine physical activity in either case.

There are multiple forms: esketamine, arketamine, and a racemic mixture of both of those. Es type is much more effective as anesthetic than other types so user could experience the hallucinogen effects while remaining sort of mobile.

Sort of mobile, sure. I’ve been able to walk around on it. A bit wobbly, but doable. Dancing would be a level of exertion beyond that though.

When combined with a small amount of alcohol, small amounts of ketamine seem to potentiate the alcohol, but in a less "dirty" way than more alcohol would have.

It feels stimulating and energising, almost like amphetamine without any jitters, and also seems to increase sociability. And because you haven't had much alcohol, you feel great the next day!

Note we are talking small ketamine doses here, typically bumps of 25-50mg max.

I have a hypothesis I am developing around this - in that our actual sensory coming from our physical body is how our consciousness actually stays grounded to the here and now; there's more parts and layers to it than that, however my own experiences suggest this is a mostly correct statement. Another part of my understanding logically suggests that you could disconnect from the energy from a historical part of you, thereby returning only to what is strongly imprinted via your brain's biology - but shedding or losing the more subtle energies and vibrations that would other provide more pressure or a higher concentration in the equations-algorithm of your brain/mind. This might not make much sense without more context which will take a book to structure.

according to Ramana Maharshi, disconnecting from the sensory inputs actually causes of the sense of I to disappear entirely.

he offers the challenge to investigate in one’s own lived experience whether it’s possible to even maintain the sense of I except in relation to external sense objects.

fascinating stuff

s/temporarily/permanently

I partied a lot as a kid and this is a lethal dosage for humans.

The median lethal dose for humans appears to be between 6g and 32g depending on the method of administration.[0] Drugs have different median lethal mg/kg dose ratios across species.[1]

[0] https://erowid.org/chemicals/ketamine/ketamine_faq.shtml [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_lethal_dose#Examples

I did too, and let me assure you that it is not.

Is the person still the same person?

loaded question: do you want to be the same person?

There's no such thing. We are different people second by second.

That must be annoying.

Panta rhei

isnt ketamine a horse tranquillizer lol, doesnt seem like a stretch for it to be an anesthetic

It is an anaesthetic, used particularly for children (at least in the UK).

It is indeed a horse tranquilizer; it works across species, in cats, dogs, humans, and probably myriad others.

Why not post the actual source, rather than some second-hand clickbait?

"Characteristic patterns of EEG oscillations in sheep (Ovis aries) induced by ketamine may explain the psychotropic effects seen in humans"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-66023-8?error=coo...

...seems like the official press release of the paper so quite okay.

Enough of anything can permanently switch off the brain.

I really wish scientific reporters would at least attempt to use meaningful language in their headlines.

> But within two minutes of administering the drug, the brain activity of five of these six sheep stopped completely, one of them for several minutes - a phenomenon that has never been seen before.

...

> “A few minutes later their brains were functioning normally again - it was as though they had just been switched off and on.”

Headline seems spot-on to me. What exactly is your gripe?

I think he's had too much ketamine.

We also currently have a poor to non-existent understanding of the mechanisms for how consciousness attaches itself to the body-mind.

I think I had this reading HN one time.

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