LSD and the Brain

I've been doing lots of research about LSD before doing it; I've read numerous articles online and 2 books, but none of them really go into how LSD effects the brain. Can anyone please explain what it does to your brain and how it differs from other psycadelics.

 

it acts as a false signal so it interrupts the way the brain normal works i think and lsd unfilteres all your sense's thats why i think lsd almost makes yu super human. just watch lsd the beyond within or hoffmann's potion they explain really well everythin about lsd

 

Chemically LSD is very similar to the neurotransmitter seritonin. So under the influence of lsd your body thinks that lsd is really seritonin. But since the lsd isn't exactly like seritonin, it doesn't act exactly like it. So by this it causes a chain reaction of many neurotransmitters to act differently, and go through different passages in the brain. Not just seritonin.

If you want to know more about lsds and the brain just type, lsd and the brain, into google. I'm sure you'll come up with enough info then.

 

I'm watching LSD The Beyong Within. It's a beautiful documentary that explains everything. http://youtube.com/watch?v=f-fDO6-Q2dg is the link for it.

 

No one really knows the exact mechanism of action, last I heard.

 

^ that's true, researchers haven't proven a thing they're just hypothesizing. Grof has a different theory, he believes it's not the LSD it's the body chemicals released in response to this foreign invader that cause the effects.

 

What's been said so far isn't wrong, they know it's the action of the LSD binding to various signal centers where serotonin normally goes, but the cascade that results, and the trip that ensues, isn't totally understood.

The sound on those videos is so poorly done it makes me mad, who the hell thought it would be a good idea to either have two voices that are overlapping be at the same volume or to have the background music at the same volume or louder than the narration track?

 

What about this?
They say LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs tamper with 'filters' that pass images from your eyes to your brain.
Do you think some of the patters and colours we see might actually be there- but under normal circumstances our body/brain filters them out?

Just a theory.

 

There are certainly more "colors" as we only see a fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum. It's hard to imagine how the rest of it might look. I read something just today about how taking a psychedelic drug shows us visually how our mind is working, we see all the complex patterns that mathematics has only begun to describe.

I sorta like the filter idea, but what I like better is how I figured out how to describe it one day when I was trippin and someone asked about what it felt like or if I was able to drive..."it's like your senses have been increased, like taking the sensory volume knob and crankin it up real high."

I definitely think that there's more to the universe than we perceive, if you want to read more about this idea read Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception." Just google the title and it'll come up, it's online for free on a bunch of sites. The title is where The Doors got their name from.

 

what iv always thought is that LSD takes over the serotinin receptors in your brain, and temporarily changes your perception... or something like that idfk

 

i suspect lsd interacts with serotonergic neurons and infiltrates certain functional proteins, changing their shape and ultimately changing their function for however many hours it takes for them to revert back.

but thats just total speculation, ive not even tried lsd

its jsut very perculiar the way lsd is out of your body by the time you start tripping. this suggests that it has nothing to do with your mind thinking it is serotonin. do you know how many drugs are similar to serotonin? yet none of them work like lsd. and lsd is rather complexly different to serotonin.

if only someone would give me the lsd, i believe i could tell you all the answers you seek

 

LSD produces very similar effects to that of other psychedelics, notably like psilocybin mushrooms. However LSD is more potent and the trip lasts far longer. And it does have the potential to do more than even psilocybin mushrooms.

And what do psychedelics do?;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_drug

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_experience

Psychedelics basically expand your senses and your creativity by disabling the filters in your brain that filter the information arriving to your senses. It's not all hallucination, some of it is just info in reality you are not aware of because of your normal filters over your senses. The hallucinations are actually your creativity enhanced and yes you do see your inner mind at work.

LSD is like cannabis on steroids. When you are on cannabis your senses are expanded, but when you are on LSD your senses are expanded to such an overwhelming degree that you can do a lot more with your senses, including seeing music and tasting colors. Your creativity is far more on cannabis but when you are on LSD its expanded to such a overwhelming degree that you see or hear what you are imagining (thus the hallucination). Many hallucinations though are subconscious.

I wonder whether one can ever learn to control their acid trip so that they hallucinate when they want to and can choose what they see, hear touch smell, or taste.

 

When i'm tripping i can slow down or speed up my hallucinations at will. All you have to do to increase them is pay close attention to them. If you try to ignore them there are way less.

 

Not everyone gets synesthesia while tripping, and some people have that happen naturally. There are a number of famous musicians who had this condition.

Like I and maybe some others have said, it's not just the fact that LSD mimicks serotonin, it's that it causes a cascade of effects that take hours and hours to correct. Of course it's a simplified explaination for what happens, obviously it's not just that LSD resembles serotonin - people who study this sort of thing for a living after having aquired a PhD don't have an explaination.

I really don't like this idea of filters, to me it's more like Huxley's idea of the mind as a reducing valve, slowed down to a trickle so as to prevent the drowning of the mind in the deluge of all the information that the universe is made up of.

I also have been able to control what I see to a certain extent, though with the exception of having taken a tenstrip there was never anything SO VISUAL that I didn't want to see it or something.

Potential to do more than psilocybin? Have you ever had similar high doses of both chemicals? Both are really, really different and thus have different effects out of which things can be learned, but do say that one does any more or less is silly. More has happened to me on mushrooms than has on LSD.

I don't see any comparison between cannabis and LSD or any other psychedelic, cannabis may increase your creativity (along with your desire to eat something) but only in one direction, whereas LSD will increase your awareness in many directions at once. One of the common feelings described about an LSD experience is having been able to perceive all that is around one or that one was able to understand everything that is. That doesn't happen on pot, pot just makes you giddy and stoned. Part of the reason I stopped smoking pot after having tripped a bunch was because after having tripped, pot seems to just take me out of it while trippin seemed to put me all the way into it. Pot was vague, hazy; LSD and mushrooms were much more real. But only trippin is never good either; at some point you must learn to apply what you've been shown.

I would disagree to a very large degree that cannabis expands your senses in a way at all remotely like LSD does. Pot is more comparable to beer.

 

Are there any physical changes to the brain after long term use?

 

Well yes cause technically mental changes are physical changes.

 

But I mean like when you look at a post ectasy brain there is a clear differnce, unless all that's propoganda... But a change like that.

 

Experiments in the 60s showed that serotonin levels steadily increased above the predosing baseline for up to 6 months after taking LSD, suggesting it as an agent for treating depression.

A heavy dose of X can damage receptors; a million times the normal dose of LSD has shown not to damage receptors.


Most major colleges carry the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs. Check it out.

 

Yeah, there is no evidence to show that LSD causes any permanent damage. This is why the whole changing protein shape thing shouldn't be true, because the trip lasts longer than the LSD actually affects the brain. CJD changes the shape of proteins in the brain (mad cow disease in humans).

 

proteins can change for a temporary time, for example if the fragile diethlyamide group wedged itself into the protein, thus leaving the lsd to be destroyed, and would eventually be reverted through normal brain maintenance metabolisms and regen, possibly antioxidants and the like can reverse this effect, who knows? not me but this whole 'cascade' of effects business cant just be left at that; what otehr drug causes a 'cascade' effect and pronounces profound changes in the mind long after the drug is out of the body?

mad cow disease is a virus that alters proteins on a large scale and inthe long term, AND most importantly alters what the proteins are made of. not the shape of the protein, which is dependant on the chemicals around it as well as its makeup