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Comment by NotSuspicious | Hacker News Reader

I (and many people I have talked to) have come to a similar conclusion. What's really interesting is that going on a weeklong or so meditation retreat where you are meditating for 10 hours a day feels phenomenologically equivalent to microdosing LSD or (if you can remember) generally how you felt when you were happy as a child. This makes me think that the "trippiness" is a side effect of neurogenesis. Speaking with other people in the retreat-junkie/psychonaut/happy-childhood community agree only has helped me be more sure that this is the case.

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Neurogenesis gets thrown around a lot in this community. I have had success with ketamine treatments. The basic science research is there, but the clinical evidence so far remains pretty vague.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6082376/

On the “I feel it so it works,” thing… yeah but it makes me uncomfortable to believe in it like a faith.

Something like neurogenesis feels anecdotally correct, but can anyone accurately describe their own brain function based on sensation from inside their brain?

Without data, it could equally be the feeling of brain cells (that made you feel unpleasant) dying forever. Would that be a worse treatment?

I don’t know, but more research is needed. Sign me up ;p

Research in mice actually showed psilocybin reduces the rate of new neurons appearing.

> or (if you can remember) generally how you felt when you were happy as a child.

Is this common? I mostly remember feeling frustrated as a child.

Here's how I'd describe what I think they are getting at.

At least for me, psychedelic drugs create a feeling of novelty and wonder surrounding everything I experience when I take them, as if they flip some kind of lightswitch of novelty which makes every experience appear novel again.

This is similar to memories of my childhood, where the most fond memories are those where I felt the novelty of experiencing things for the first time. Psychedelic drugs seem to recreate that effect.

Maybe you haven’t taken them enough. Of course everything seems different and novel the first couple dozen trips. You’re feeling new sensations and seeing things in a new way, sort of a “hello world” for your psyche. But after a few hundred, the novelty may wear off and the experience may be more somatic.

It's possible, but I like to think I'm a pretty experienced drug user (I estimate that I've tried maybe 10-20 different psychedelics, maybe 30-40 times in total) and this has been a consistent hallmark effect of all psychedelics for me.

I personally had no desire to continue with any of them after a handful of times? Things like LSD especially just got completely redundant, and annoying, and deeply deeply fatiguing. I could never understand people who had done it more than 5-10 or so times?

Pleasure-hedonism drugs like MDMA, sure, I get it. Though I have seen how it can ruin lives, too.

I think people that do psychedelics to an extreme degree, like Cary Grant it seems, are probably self treating or self medicating in some way. That’s different from experimentation, or recreation. Makes me wonder about shamans, and the cliche that psychiatrists have more mental health problems than the average person.

It's also similar on a qualia level though. That's what I was getting at. In the same way how something may taste spicy or something looks blue there is a certain distinct set of feelings/mode-of-consciousness I have only ever felt in childhood, during retreat, and when on LSD.

I was very unhappy as a child, which may have to do with why I find hallucinogenics very anxiety-inducing.

I think "happy as a child" here really refers to awe and excitement around experiencing things for the first time. It is certainly not referring to reliving one's literal feelings from their personal youth.

That is an interesting hypothesis. I hope you are much happier as an adult.

Don't do them unless with very good person managing the whole set of the trip, better sober. The risks are not worth potential gains. Its kind of self-feeding - once you got paranoid/uncomfortable, it gets much easier to get into that place on further trips, since its usually just one mental muscle 'move'.

In contrary if you would manage to find a reliable good setter, you could move from that anxiety. But I don't know your details so take this with a massive pinch of salt, very unhappy childhood can mean many things including those that probably don't work well with psychedelics, ever.

No disrespect, but you speak of it like a fact when in fact it's a nice anecdote.

> This makes me think that the "trippiness" is a side effect of neurogenesis

It doesn't have to be either/or. Tripping could also be forcing your brain to adapt to correct the distorted senses. If that's true, psychedelics without the trip could induce neurogenesis by other means, but not as much as ones with the trip.

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