Here are some of my thoughts on the functioning of psychedelics, notably LSD, and how that functioning gives rise to the fantastic effects these substances produce. I was under the influence of said substance at the time I wrote this a while ago. LSD in effect increases the "bandwidth" of your nervous system while simultaneously "relaxing" or expanding the criteria by which the input as well as output of our nervous systems is organized and routed for processing. 1) It decreases the filtering and censoring of information being relayed to your cognitive mind. That results in more sensory stimuli reaching your awareness, both external and internal stimuli. 2) It causes information to be "leaked" or "broadcast" across the entire cortex, That is what accounts for synthesia, but can also happen with emotions and physical sensations as well. 3) It causes the locus coeruleus to increase its rate of fire. That is the part of the brain that is responsible for alerting us to anything new or novel in our environment. It accounts for the feeling of "seeing everything for the first time" with psychedelics. So with LSD or similar substances you are literally processing more information, that is why you see colors more vividly and hearing is so enhanced for example. But due to the changes in how and in what part of the brain the information is processed, more of your brain is involved in the processing of the information that wouldn't in normal consciousness be involved with certain functions That is the reason it is possible to experience synthesia, the "seeing music" or "tasting colors". Areas of the brain that don't normally process that sensory input are being utilized as well. This can be beautiful for some or a chaotic maelstrom of information overload for others. The brain tries to fill in the gaps in our sensory input with pieces from memory. These "fragments" are usually not noticeable due to the filtering, but as the brain tries to process and direct the flood of input, these tricks of the mind become more apparent. It has been reported that there are visual "archetypes" hardwired into the brain. These geometric shapes and constructs are the same type of patterns that comprise much of the visual phenomena of psychedelics. That makes perfect sense as the visual cortex is trying to process all this extra input it just fires these hardwired sequences, that is why often the flowing and morphing of patterns is in conjunction with music or other auditory stimuli. It's like your brain is saying ; "Ok there is the sky and clouds and birds all sent to the visual cortex, but what about all this extra info I have left over? Here I'll just assign it the standard geometric grid and morph it through different color and shape parameters if the input changes. Solves that problem. Now to go deal with all that auditory stimuli." This occurs all throughout the cortex as stimuli is processed. As a person becomes familiar with the effects of psychedelics, often these "patterns" also begin to fade into the background "noise" except on high doses. One of the more amazing effects of LSD is its ability to increase the rate and manner in which thought is processed. Ideas are not just "thought about", they are met with an instantaneous flood of all knowledge available to the person in a "Gestalt" presentation. It is as though your mind no longer has to go through certain "learned" sequences for information retrieval and processing. Because information isn't retrieved and processed in the linear sequential time delineated modality but rather a more subliminal ineffable knowing of a topic without consciously considering all facets of said topic, although any detail can be focused upon with outstanding clarity and concentration if desired. I feel it's as if all the information you have ever learned consciously or subliminally is instantly accessed, reviewed, and submitted to your conscious mind instantly. This also has the net subjective effect of time dilation or slowing the subjective passage of time. Decentralized, shared processing among the different systems in the brain. SUPERSATURATION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM = ALL STIMULI, BOTH EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL, IS BEING PROCESSED BY ALL BRAIN CENTERS AND "BANDWIDTH" IS AT IT'S MAXIMUM. Could this be what happens on high dose experiences? If all areas of the cortex are processing all stimuli, both external and internal, then there is a loss of the ability to accurately place such stimuli within your environment. Your brain can no longer process stimuli based on the brain area it was routed to. For example if impulses are routed to the Occipital lobe, your brain recognizes and process's the input as visual. Signals meant for the Occipital lobe but sent to all brain areas would make it difficult to differentiate between the origin and type of stimuli, synthesia is the most common example of this. Because there is no longer any clear distinction between the origin of a stimulus and its destination in the nervous system, could that be the source of the sense of "oneness" with the universe, "Ego-Death", and related spiritual phenomenon? In this scenario your brain literally can no longer make the distinction between "I" and "Other than I" Does this translate into the subjective experience of merging with everything. Could this flood of information with no clear definition account for the "white out" phenomenon, all color and visual stimuli blend until one is just experiencing "whiteness" in there visual field? All this doesn't diminish one bit the subjective beauty and life altering significance of the experience. What psychedelics do, primarily LSD, is they literally expose our cognitive mind and awareness to more of what is and always has been there, externally and internally. That is part of the wonder and majesty of these substances as well as the hell and torment they can also show us. Psychedelics are not magic, not God in a pill, not the answer to all the world's problems. All they are is substances that allow us an unadulterated, honest look into ourselves and the reality we exist in. Nothing more, nothing less. What more is needed.
Fascinating stuff. I think that it alters how neuropathways are shut off, that instead of sharply turning off a neural net or refreshing it to basal state, activation is held in an intermediate state that then superimposes with itself a moment later. These partials modulate the unified neural net module which we experience as consciousness.
Well written and I agree with everything about how it makes you feel, what it's doing, why you now can do what you can do. I wonder though is it a brain that's temporarily powered up or are you just more aware of it all? Perhaps the auto-programming side of our brain, on LSD, is lifted off. I'm sure pulling a memory right now would be EPIC if I was tripping, but even sober I imagine I would go through a similar process, but just not feel the memory tangents as much... (and then not get as side tracked). if that makes sense. Cool shit, though. I think it's well-written. I really would say LSD rises 'your awareness' and one could argue that is the fullest perception of "Life" you carry. So opening that awareness is going to grant you access to so many more parts of your body/nervous system.... it makes a blend of sense, perhaps.
What a thread! Completely agree, especially about the high dose situation, my strip and a half felt like that PB, like just everything was coming from everywhere, there was no locus or center or processing, there was no "inner me" with "inner thoughts" traveling through a world of "external things" . . . everything outside me was revealed to be actually my internal processing of those 'outside things', and therefore everything 'inside me' was as much a part of the 'outside' stuff as not . . . my emotions determined the color of the moon, which determined the feel of the wind on my skin, which moved my thoughts towards a certain direction, which caused a flood of emotions which smelled like my friend's disappointment in my actions, which tasted like my childhood house, which . . . Watts on lysergic synesthesia: "Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell become a continuous warp, with the feeling that the whole dimension of sensation is a single continuum or field. Crossing the warp is a woof representing the dimension of meaning—moral and aesthetic values, personal or individual uniqueness, logical significance, and expressive form—and the two dimensions interpenetrate so as to make distinguishable shapes seem like ripples in the water of sensation. The warp and the woof stream together, for the weaving is neither flat nor static but a many-directioned cross-flow of impulses filling the whole volume of space. I feel that the world is on something in somewhat the same way that a color photograph is on a film, underlying and connecting the patches of color, though the film here is a dense rain of energy. I see that what it is on is my brain—"that enchanted loom," as Sherrington called it. Brain and world, warp of sense and woof of meaning, seem to interpenetrate inseparably. They hold their boundaries or limits in common in such a way as to define one another and to be impossible without each other. "
interesting. sounds similar to what huxley said about the nervous system filtering out the full spectrum of experience and psychedelics undoing the filter
Quite fascinating but also almost disconcerting with how true it all is. My last acid trip illustrated these things almost too much for me. I feel as though i can't handle the infinity that psychedelics open up for me. Truley fascinating, but almost TOO astonishing. It fucks with me.
When you really psychedellics truly do temporalily cut the cord between inner and outer, your bridge (vision, taste, touch, smell, hearing) to the external world, it can be quite a nerve-racking experience taking a high dose. I now understand the 'whiteness' that you often talk about PB, enveloping your vision. And I further understand a quote from you writer, along the lines of 'taste, is touch, is colour, is music, is thought', inseperable, as they are all one thing in reality, chemical bubblings of the brain, interpretated and seperated by our proccessing. Time for an extended break for me though Found myself in a park, a blank slate, not knowing how i got there, what I was doing or what to do next (at the most sober points!), luckily I had chosen the location (@T-1) reasonably well and it was pretty secluded (though not as far from potential interuptions as would have further relaxed me), as PB says, time (development) will provide new canvas upon which to learn from
so you felt there was not much for the lucy to work with in this case grinners? it became a chemically induced altered state rather than a focus of growth? your trip in the park i mean
I felt at total 'one-ness' with it all, felt like the observer watching the story of life, saw the infinitness, the total lack of anything other than energy needed to create an infinite amount of time/number of universes*, knew that when I sobered up I would doubt the experience, and not believe it really happened, who knows I just realise that one cannot use a substance 'within the system' to learn more about how or why the system came to be. Thought was all that existed, at one point I came to to see a spider and all that I could think was "I know that one of use is supposed to be scared of the other... and one of us is supposed to bite the other, but I'm not sure which is which", truly a moment of one-ness in which I slipped away again in thought staring into its eyes. Having to take the headphones off to throw up kinda put a damper on it all also, not being able to see if it was blood coming up, or whether I had just imagined someone throwing up, or whether throwing up was a normal/safe thing for whatever I happened to be at that time. I did not know such a state of 'blank canvas' was possible, forgetting everything you have ever learnt, every single second... Wish I had just put my headphones back on! Didn't know to and just sat there remembering and then forgetting pieces of the puzzle for the remaining few hours til I sobered up some more... Back to your question though, at this level, I felt that it was less about myself, my ethics, my life, due to it being so abstract in such doses and more about 'it', it all, the universe, however, like has already been said, I take more of a scientific approach to the world, so I acknowledge that 'falling deep within ones psyche' (advanced synthesia?) cannnot teach us anything other than remind us that all that we observe is going on within our heads (and 'probably' out there too). Kinda pondering whether going deeper (internal) can teach me about the outer (external). Maybe I'm just not being blown away as I was, or quite filled with that 'wow' anymore, it made 'the mountains mountains again' for a while, but subsequent doses have not had the same affect, time for a break (plus i didnt like having to call someone up eventually when it started to come together to come get me, they left work early for me, felt a bit bad). Was a constant theme of the experience
It is becoming familiar, and you must forget it again so you can remember it again always the to and fro
Just gonna go ahead and bump this cause I want to read it later and I know I'll forget if I just bookmark it
