http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_decharms_scans_the_brain_in_real_time.html I know this isn't really too related to psychedelics - but I was thinking, if you can apply that same logic to tripping and like an mdma high, you could theoretically trip forever. Think about seeing your brain on ecstasy or lsd, and then "controlling" your brain and teaching it to resurrect the effect after it's worn off. Maybe this even has something to do with flashbacks.
wow thats so crazy how much tech we really hav.. if only we used it all to help each other instead of kill each other for profits
you can control what you feel by "learning" how to control your brain. imagine your on shrooms and some lobes in your brain light up, and you see them light up. You can control that feeling because you can see how your thoughts affect those lobes. Which means, once you learn how to control your trip, you can repeat it outside of your shroom trip. It's just my theory though. there's not much info in the video
The visual representation is only showing what you are already feeling anyways. Why would a screen with a brain and sections lighting up allow you to "control" your brain? You aren't really "seeing" anything other than a representation of activity. I mean, I could easily do all of this without the screen, and just visualize the same thing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be able to launch into a trip because I pretend that my frontal lobe looks blue when I'm sad.
Yeah, I don't get it... I see what parts of my brain are active when I flex my muscle. Now I can flex my muscle by thinking "flex your muscle"........ Oh yeah, its this little quarter size piece of my brain on the left side that did that BTW, I have total control now that I know what part of my brain did that? Didn't I have control before? We know the frontal lobe controls though processes. Why can't I stop my natural thought process? I am confused, please explain. I am not trying to be a smart ass either.
I have also had that same thought. Wondering "Is there someway I can bring myself into a mental state to set off a 'trip' without taking drugs. A trip is just a change in perception, that happens to me all the fucking time. Daily and hourly and circumstantially. I'm sure you can (probably with deep meditation, which I don't do) take yourself to a strange mental state, but I really doubt you can replicate a drug induced experience on a whim.
That's the whole point of the technology, with visual feedback, you can see how what you think changes which parts of the brain. For instance, you can be like "if I think about this, that lobe lights up" and then with enough experience you can match the lighting the shrooms (although I know it's not just a matter of 'lighting' - but it's the just of it). The visual feedback guides you in the right direction. It's a fact that you can control your brain activity by thinking of different things - you can't "control" a brain tumour to begin with
You don't control the brain, it controls you. While bio-feedback studies have shown that people can do simple things like slightly increase or decrease heart rate (of course we knew that this was possible before bio-feedback was thought up) it is a long stretch to take this data and suggest that one could induce all of the mental events involved in a psychedelic experience. Anyway millions of different thoughts and activities will light up the same areas of the brain, so it seems that the quality of the feedback is nowhere near precise enough to use it to consciously manipulate the state of the brain in any particular direction for any particular purpose.
That is what I was getting at. It is not as if there is a ghost in the machine that can utilize the brain in the way that I can sit in front of my computer and utilize it from outside. Everything that we refer to as ourselves, all of the things usually attributed to the soul arises from the computational capacities of the brain. I chose the words "the brain controls you" to point out that consciousness is a small part of the brain, and that the conscious parts of the brain do not have dominion over the rest of the brain. All that we are arises from the brain, and since we do not exist apart from the brain, and since we cannot therefor "step outside" the brain and commandeer it, I think it is appropriate to say that "the brain controls you" because "you" are just something that the brain is doing.
I can induce some euphoria if I am in bed, and if I want to. Ironically, I feel like I am coming down when I stop.
Well said. There is room for movement in that logic though. Through meditation people have drastically slowed their heart rate. That has to count for something.
Sam_stoned if you read my earlier post in this thread you will see that I gave mention to the fact that people, even without meditating, can raise or lower their heart rates. We knew this before bio-feedback. The question is: so what? As it relates to this thread that fact doesn't count for much, as the original poster was talking about the possibility of recreating psychedelic experiences with the help of biofeedback. Clearly there is a huge difference between altering one's heart rate and bringing about the huge number of events which are involved in psychedelic experiences. Also, even if it were possible to reliably bring about psychedelic experiences without using drugs it is clear that the current state of biofeedback technology could not accomplish this task because it is much too imprecise. Millions of different thoughts and activities will cause the same parts of the brain to "light up" during a scan. There is no one to one correlation. Also, I'm not sure what you (sam_stoned) mean by "room for movement in that logic." Could you clarify?
