There are also compounds that are toxic to basically every animal species for low-level common-animal-ancestor reasons, but which exist in the plants/fungi they exist in, in concentrations dictated by what’s required to kill/ward off the particular predators that plant/fungus had in its evolutionary environment. Aspirin, caffeine, nicotine, cocaine — these are all effective pesticides. They kill or severely harm insects. But we’re orders of magnitude larger than insects, so they have orders-of-magnitude less effect on us (unless we make orders-of-magnitude more concentrated doses of them, of course). That change in quantity, is reflected by a change in quality — i.e. having “a little bit” of caffeine does very different things to a body than having a lethal dose of caffeine.
While there is plenty of anecdotal support for the longer term benefits of etheogens, the road to a better understanding of yourself and place in the universe is strewn with people hiding in their beds or under a table. The psychonaughts experience isn't exactly a piece of cake and shouldn't be taken lightly. Likewise, the 'why' of why these things help with issues like depression are obvious to any one who has taken the trip. These kinds of altered states force you to confront demons. They help you because they are >hard< and you have to deal with things. The experience helps with depression because it specifically brings to light the issues and causes of ones depression and you have to deal with them.
I'm concerned about the idea of boiling the positive benefits of something like mushrooms into a single compound.
But as earlier post pointed out, we don't really know why they do these things, why should they be so beneficial to us?. Let's say they are poison to thwart off plant-eaters. Then why do they work towards GOOD in small doses? Have humans evolved the capability for psychedelic experiences meaning experiences of unity which is a trait that helps survival of the specific species which experiences it?
Like humans can be outright killed by touching some jellyfish, while turtles just eat them. I wonder if to turtles, jellyfish taste pleasurably spicy due to what chemical poisons us, like onions taste for us, which poisons insects. Overall, they're still good deals for the jellyfish and onions, since the traits are preserved.
Why does St. John’s Wort, passionflower etc have antidepressant effects? Why does penicillin mold produce an antibiotic? Why does gingerols act as anti-emetics? Why do coca leaves, coffee beans give a buzz?
There is nothing magical with an active compound to have a specific dose-response curve either.
I don't know what listing a bunch of similar mysteries does to make the question less mysterious. Are you implying that these questions can't have answers and everything is unknowable? Is this one of the arguments where someone says that we can't answer your question until we answer every other question first? I don't get it.
The question is why do psychedelic drugs hit our brains in the peculiar way they do, which also has a therapeutic effect.
First why do they cause the experience that they do, and secondly why is that experience therapeutic? I think these are interesting questions without clear answers as of yet.
It has been speculated that mushrooms caused religion. Religion is spread all over the world so there must be something "fit" about it. It is as if mushrooms and human societies are in some kind of symbiotic relationship.
Those are the easier effects to explain. Much harder is why these compounds cure/treat depression or addiction, make people see infinite beauty or god, enhance their creativity, etc... Not much analogy to poison there.
Psychedelics in that sense may be distracting poisons rather than harmful poisons
Nevertheless, it still seems quite remarkable that such a molecule could coincidentally send a big mammal on a trip through the doors of perception.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175450481...
Perhaps at first thought, yes, because mammals, insects and mushrooms are such different things.
To put it in perspective though, they share more than 2 billion years of evolutionary history when you look past their last common ancestor.
That M1 CPU in your new MacBook is a much mightier beast than the little black ICs in your grandfathers transistor radio, but they both rely on the same fundamental NPN silicone junction property. And that’s only 60 years of evolution.
Capsaicin triggers the heat-sensing nerves in mammals specifically. Scientists think this is because birds disperse the seeds well after consumption, while us mammals tend to crush the seeds with our grinding teeth. Peppers don't want to kill us, they just want to hurt as real bad ;)
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Gods-Original-Knowledge-Evolutio...
Mechanistically it just doesn’t make any sense. The reason mushrooms make us trip is because there’s already a network there that they “talk” to (the 5ht_2a receptor system)
And how exactly would non-linguistic animals suddenly gain linguistic ability? They better hope everyone around them is tripping on the perfect dose too otherwise they’re just gonna perceive it as meaningless babblimg
But how does binding to the 5-HT[2A] receptor lead to, say, communing with one's dead mother, or to forgiveness of oneself or one's abusive father, or to a creative breakthrough on a problem you've been struggling with for months or years, or to an encounter with one's god, or to the realization that you/we are god, or to curing/treating depression or addiction, etc?
These are open questions that science doesn't have very satisfying answers to yet.
Agreed.
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It’s nowhere near complete but one place to start is psychedelic (a) increase communication across/between disparate brain regions, (b) synchronize the various waves of brain activity into a single vibration, and (c) reduces the threshold at which pattern matching / classifier networks will fire (thus the increased visual acuity at small doses and pareidolia and other visual effects at high doses)
I remember a study that explained (b), can’t remember anything else about it though :/
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EDIT: https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-... is also great to think about. DeepDream produces very psychedelic images and the bit about reversing the network and having it recurse on pattern matching its on output to “massage” the raw input into alignment with a schema (akin to feeding output back into input) is very relevant
you are not communicating with your dead mother or you are not being a god.
it works for depression because it allows the brain to exercise and form neural pathways that are not normally allowed. even if we think about the brain as one organ, in reality there are a lot of interconnected neural nets that are regulated by a central supervisory net called the DMN. Under psychedelics, the DMN shuts down while the other networks increase activity.
I don't think this has to be an sudden event? Apes are already communicating with each other and have the relevant structures for communication in place. It isn't impossible for me to imagine that mushrooms with their creativity-heightening effects might offer insights to an ape on how to improve the utilization of that which is already there, making their communication more refined, precise and expressive. It also isn't impossible to imagine that in a group of social animals better communication would likely increase the probability of survival and leaving offspring, thus influencing evolution.
Look, I seriously love shrooms. I stopped everything else, especially weed with all of its subtly negative effects which creep up over time, and do frequent mushroom trips and occasional light dose of alcohol. That said, I find it funny when people do a drug that alters their thinking and perceptions on such a deep level but draw a line at where they think those effects begin and end as if the brain/mind was ever that clearly compartmentalized.
> And also how do they produce such dramatic effects (generally beneficial when used judiciously) in humans with seemingly very little toxicity?
While toxicity may be low, it's very unlikely we'll find few side effects. The reason we don't know many ill effects of the drugs used in small doses is that we haven't studied them properly yet (meaning at a population level over time).
I think it would be fascinating to know more about the anabolic/metabolic pathways that create these molecules. Could it be we are seeing similar products created as mutations of core synthetic pathways?
It's important to understand that the venom of Bufo alvarius (the Colorado River toad)[1] contains 5-MeO-DMT, not NN-DMT. It is NN-DMT that is colloquially known as "DMT", and the two substances should NOT be confused.
They are very different in effect, though closely related chemically.
5-MeO-DMT is widely considered to be by far the most powerful psychedelic on the planet. NN-DMT is considered to be much more powerful than traditional psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin, but still a pale shadow compared to 5-MeO-DMT. NN-DMT is a lot more visual than 5-MeO-DMT, while the latter is considered to be much more likely to lead to states of non-dual awareness and ego-death.
For more information on 5-MeO-DMT see: [2]
Something else to note about the bufo alvarius venom: these toads are under threat and might well go extinct because they're being recklessly exploited for their venom.[3]
Furthermore, their venom contains a lot of other compounds apart from 5-MeO-DMT, some of which are known to be toxic when ingested. So it should always be smoked, never ingested! Even when smoked the venom could cause health problems for people with heart conditions. The synthetic form of 5-MeO-DMT only consists of 5-MeO-DMT itself, so has none of these problems, though people with heart conditions should probably still avoid even the synthetic version.
Finally, some people who style themselves "DMT shamans" use very dangerous practices like pouring water in the mouths of people who are essentially unconscious under the influence of 5-MeO-DMT, mixing drugs, slapping and kicking people under the influence, and covering their mouth and nose... fatalities have resulted from these dangerous practices.[4] So if you are considering trying this substance very carefully vet who you do it with!
I strongly recommend reading and following the guidelines from The Conclave.[5]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_toad
[2] - https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/5-meo-dmt
[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcarpenter/2021/02/02/psych...
[4] - https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=86872
How are you determining your own behaviour during your experience? Is it purely from your own recollections or is it from a third person viewpoint (video evidence, a sober trip sitter etc.)?
These are some of the most important and fascinating open questions regarding these substances, the answers to which have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the mind and mental health. Unfortunately, at the glacial pace that human studies in to psychedelics are proceeding[1], we will probably have to wait a very long time to find out.
Meanwhile, there are religious answers to these questions, as many psychedelic users consider these substances, plants, and animals sacred or even divine. Other theories, regarding psilocybin mushrooms, for instance, have been that they are some sort of alien beings who are trying to communicate vast amounts of information to humans or trying to influence human evolution. Similarly, I've heard theories that nature or "Mother Earth" is communicating through these substances, plants, and animals to humans to try to stop the environmental destruction they are causing, etc.
Materialists, physicalists, or naturalists[2] might scoff at such explanations (especially if they've never had strong psychedelic experiences, though sometimes even then), but I believe that it's likely that a great religious revival is heralded by the renewed interest and widespread use of psychedelics. Some have argued that psychedelics were the original cause of some if not all the great religions, and plenty of new religions are being inspired by psychedelic use all the time.. so such religious/non-materialistic/supernatural explanations and more are likely to become more and more widespread in the future.
[1] - While the popular view is that psychedelic research is running full steam ahead since we're in the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance, the unfortunate fact is that human studies of psychedelics are still very difficult and time-consuming to get approval for, and there really aren't that many.
[2] - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/
Psychedelics clearly don't inevitably lead people to become believers... but still a lot of people do, especially when they have overwhelmingly powerful mystical experiences (which we know are pretty likely to happen on psychedelics).
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Psychonaut/comments/oa6782/atheist_...
It didn't work for me though—in epistemology class once I said to the lecturer "I don't know anything!"—not being flippant, at the time I really felt I couldn't be 100% certain of anything—and he said instantly, unimpressed, "Don't you know your name?".. (Which didn't seem quite fair. He didn't "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation". Or maybe he did.)
Is it not more likely that these substances just happen to match the knob labeled "profound" in our brains and crank it to 11? I hope these studies move very cautiously but optimistically, because as someone whose life was deeply damaged by a religious upbringing, the prospect of another psychedelic religious revival concerns me. Religion and mysticism tend to diverge over time, leading to conflict. Scientific knowledge tends to converge over time, suggesting science is a more reliable means of acquiring knowledge. So I hope a primarily scientific approach is taken with psychedelic research.
Maybe. But regardless of what the more materialistically minded among us might think, many people are going to interpret these experiences religiously anyway. It's been that way all throughout history, and it's likely going to be many hundreds if not thousands of years until religious interpretations of experience dissappear.. if ever. (My bet is on never)
"I hope these studies move very cautiously but optimistically, because as someone whose life was deeply damaged by a religious upbringing, the prospect of another psychedelic religious revival concerns me."
Me too.. especially when these religions are full of people who have no compunctions on using violence and believe themselves to be the only possessors of The Truth.
Unfortunately, psychedelics don't automatically make their users in to tree-hugging, peace-loving hippies. See Charles Manson or Mike Tyson (sorry, don't mean to imply they're at all in the same category.. but they are both examples of heavy psychedelic users who aren't averse to violence... and Manson started a cult).
Some people are great at deluding themselves and others, and for certain types of people psychedelics can make such persuasion much more effective.
I've had strong psychedelic and dissociative experiences. There's nothing about those experiences that cannot be explained with materialism.
Or with religion. People pick and choose the explanations they like, and neither scientific nor religious explanations are going to be satisfactory for everyone.
It'd be another story if science could at least explain the really big open questions about the mind, consciousness, the mind-body connection, and how psychedelics work.. but we are very, very far from that.
Lure a "pollinator" to protect and spread it. Avocados were the diet of some unknown animal that no longer exists. Avocados shouldn't exist except for humans preserving and exploiting them.
Well, look at capsicum. Birds can't taste it but mammals can. Even so, most deer and some humans sure do like jalapeños.
Some compounds are deadly poisons to particular predators while merely annoyances to others. Beyond deadly poisons, there are deterrents like emetics, anticoagulants, dissociatives, and paralytics aimed at defending from particular predators.
These are evolutionarily-conserved because they add to the fitness of a species.
Nature is a hacker: it reuses (mutations) a lot of pathways and molecules for different purposes. We just hack compounds out of nature intended for other functions that also happen to serve our purposes at therapeutic doses.
Fungi and plants were treated in the same category some thousand years ago, but times changed and now are categorized by biologists as new and very different creatures deserving its entire kingdom. The old concept of 'plants' has split into several unrelated lineages.
Fungi have a easily recognizable and unique cell structure than neither animals, nor plants have, so can't be the origin of our brains.
Bacteria are older.
Nobody knows if that fossil is a fungus. It looks like one, but to me looks much more like a tiny sponge. I could be wrong and could be perfectly a third different thing. Ctenophora are now the oldest animals I think, so there was a lot of old complexity yet from the start that we don't know well.