Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely | Hacker News Reader

Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely

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231 pointspelt180 comments

I'm the one who provided the third quoted anecdote in the article. What I didn't mention was the HPPD coincided with a sort of depersonalization/derealization effect. Basically I got very checked out from my own life. I felt as if I was a spectator watching my life happen and I didn't really feel any connection or agency towards anything coming into my sensorium. It was a really weird and hard time for me. Those feelings as well as the hallucinations came and went together for me. After about 1-2 years I was completely back to normal. During that time I still microdosed occasionally, but that didn't seem to have any effect on those symptoms either way. I didn't have experience anything like that until I took pretty large doses (>200ug). I was taking 100ug doses on a regular basis without having any lasting effects, it appeared to me that the high doses came with the aftereffects. I also didn't experience anything like that with psilocin (mushrooms). I'm willing to answer any questions about my experience if anyone has any

did you read any Franz Kafka novels at any point?

DP/DR is like that.

Psychedelics are a tool that can be used to remove psychological disorders, but in the same vain can be used to create psychological disorders.

In an ideal world, if psychedelics were legal, they'd come with an instruction manual.

How would an instruction manual have helped improv32?

A manual for a trip sitter would have helped more than anything imho.

A trip is steered through belief. It was a belief that gave improv32 DP/DR. (Though there is always edge cases, like toxicity from being a black market drug.) A trip sitter can clarify the faulty belief steering them back in a healthy direction. There are certain techniques to identify this. On the tripper's side of things, they have to be comfortable enough with the trip sitter to openly talk about things, and ofc have a good set and setting, which is also in part the trip sitters job.

I think an argument could be made that the sense of self is a psychological disorder.

Not if it is the baseline we measure against (which it is).

Or if it has survival/performative utility (which it does).

How does it have a survival / performative advantage?

You can, eg, protect the body from harm, without having a sense of self, which ties into survival.

Basically allowing societies to function (people assuming roles, shame, and whatever). It should be of no surprise that a damaged sense of self often correlates with poor integration into a society.

Roles, shame, and whatever doesn't sound like self. It sounds like cultural taboos and status within society. Neither of those are a sense of self.

Also, countries that are more Buddhist (ones that have less sense of self) tend to be more community based cultures, so that doesn't correlate.

If status is not tied to a sense of self then I don't know what is.

You mentioned in another comment that the skills you've learned are not you (roles?). They are just things you have. You've just said that identifying these roles as an abstraction is an essential part of understanding the self.

All of these things increase order in a society, and therefore, survival value. This is what I was responding to.

I didn't say that more of a sense of self, whatever that means, makes more community based cultures.

Please make that argument! I'd say disorder would refer to something unusual, whereas sense of self is very common among humans across different cultures. Am I misinformed?

It’s not a binary thing, to have or not have a sense of self. It’s the strength of that sensation that matters: can you let go of your own shortsighted selfishness to let something else grow? Unusually strong sense of self has been argued to be a cause of longterm depression. Comparison is the thief of joy after all.

You can grow past having a sense of self and still be depressed.

A closer overly simplified cause for many kinds of long term depression is pessimism and doubt. eg, "It will not work [so no need to consider trying]." It will not work is pessimism and not considering trying is doubt. Another terminology to describe this is learned helplessness.

But depression is far more complicated than just that. There is memory compartmentalization in a handful of types of depression, mostly episodic depression.

Sometimes it can be as subtle as not learning to note when you're having a good time. Someone who is depressed may, for example, have fun at an event, but the next time the same event pops up they may be hesitant to go again, because they didn't record when they were happy.

Some senses of self are definitely less wrong than others, though.

It's not that simple.

All of perception comes from noticing patterns. Labeling a thing, eg an apple, initially happens because you've seen multiple apples, or you've had it explained to you, which is using previous patterns (turned into words) you've already learned to manufacture a new pattern. Without pattern matching we wouldn't be able to identify or perceive things.

The mind pattern matches things. It's how we learn. We build abstractions, even when we don't know we're doing it.

The sense of self is an abstraction. Without abstractions we wouldn't be able to perceive anything.

(If you're talking about the sense of self as a negative, I'm going to assume here you're coming from a Theravada Buddhist perspective, but if not, I can adjust teaching/explanation style and terminology accordingly. Just let me know.)

The first fetter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetter_(Buddhism)#Lists_of_fet... ie identity view / non-self / anatta, is being able to fully identify all of the details that build the abstraction of self, which can only be done during high levels of mindfulness from deep meditation. You'll find many of the things people attribute to self, are things they have, not things they are. eg, the skills you've learned isn't you. It's the skills you have. Though, can an abstraction really -have- things? (It's a failing of English, as this doesn't translate into English properly.)

So, you go through first path and identify all the things you think you are: body, mind, psychology, cultural beliefs, and so on, examining each thing, recursively breaking those things down, and identifying how they are not you, but how the idea of self is built off of it. Eventually you get to see how your identity isn't you, and the freedom of not identifying with things, as well as the suffering that is caused from identifying with things.

Anyways, you'll not see an arhat or zen master wondering around unable to interpret things. They just have fully mapped out what self is and isn't, as well as the other causes of suffering. They're not brain dead.

So is the sense of self a psychological disorder? Self is a delusion, not an illusion, so no. Sense of self (identity view, that is) just causes unnecessary stress.

How does language play into this? Is it a skill you have or is it part of the self too? Do you use language while you deliberate on these things?

Language, or more words, is like pointers to concepts.

DP/DR = depersonalization/derealization disorder (I assume)

Alan Watts wrote:

> “Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”

What message, if any, were you looking for during your psychedelic explorations? Did you receive it?

>What message, if any, were you looking for during your psychedelic explorations?

I just wanted to get stoned out of my head, and see some weird colors and shit man.

>Did you receive it?

Oh, yeah.

(I'm a little snarky here about the whole coming into psychedelics looking for some "message", and seeing that you receive it too).

The experience of ego-softening, or even complete ego-death, is something that some psychedelics bring to their users. LSD, mushrooms and especially DMT does this.

Many normal humans will not know that this experience is even possible, or might dismiss it straight off as humbo jumbo. (Many drug users that did the drugs just for fun will get this as a sort of surprise gift. Sometimes they dismiss it despite having experienced it, sadly.)

Once one have experienced this a couple of times, it is possible to learn whereto steer the mind during normal meditation. It is possible, although it requires skill, to come there with normal sober meditation.

Have you read Scott's recent article on what people report "enlightenment" feels like? If so, how did you relate to it?

Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.

I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.

I did some research and found out that there is a common effect with meditators that they can meditate while on drugs in order to mitigate or in some cases even deactivate some of the effects. So if you want to experiment it might be good to learn a bit so you have an extra tool to work with your mind while you're altering it.

YMMV of course.

Fascinating thank you for sharing . Never heard of this

This came naturally for me although I'm sure the technique is not as refined as someone who practices it a lot.

When I first tried this I noticed that the hallucinations were very similar to those old magic eye books.

https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Eye-New-Looking-World/dp/083627...

In those books you relax and are able to see the image through the chaos.

The same can be said for when you are on these types of drugs, or at least for me personally. When I was able to relax and let my mind go, the hallucinations and visuals would come at a greater intensity. If I needed to, I was able to snap out of it by focusing my mind on the moment and tangible reality in front of me.

When I was leading a few people on their first experience I explained this to them, that if they are unable to relax and let go, the visuals would not come as quickly or be as intense. Do not be afraid, relax and let go and if needed you can ground yourself back if you have a decent mind and didn't take an amount larger than you can handle.

I honestly don't remember exactly where, but I was reading a wiki for psychonauts once and it provided a scale for the potency of a dose (e.g. No effect, threshold, etc) and the metric they used was the observer's ability to consciously resist the effects of the drug - kind of like when you're drunk or stoned and try to "force" yourself to sober up.

I didn’t realize this was a thing! I’m generally able to do this too, especially when meditating. It started after trying psychedelics in college, which probably ‘activated’ something in my brain that said “you can make the carpet swirl”. It’s sort of like looking at a Magic Eye photo. I just tried to do it now, but having just woke up, I don’t think I can concentrate enough to do it.

How early did your parents start you on meditation?

When you grow up in a buddhist family it's more like something that's always there. My parents were heavy meditators (1 hour+/day) so I would often just hang out with them. They probably half taught me a few dozen times when I was young, it's a culture thing. Kinda like growing up a Christian household I'm sure you accumulate random knowledge about the bible, god and jesus. When I was older I went through some more official training but it was purely an interest thing, they let me pick my own path. These days I meditate but I do it in a purely secular non religious way.

That’s really cool. Appreciate you sharing.

>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.

>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.

There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]

I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]

I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]

In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ...

[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b...

[5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts

Extrapolating from the article and associated research, what you're describing as a mental "flex" may be an ability to consciously weight higher-level models over lower-level ones, and vice-versa. I'd be interested to see the fMRI results of a bunch of people who can do that "flex."

I have a similar experience with HPPD...the ability to "flex" the mind to either increase or decrease the degree to which I was experiencing the visual pattern distortions. it was mostly just a matter of directing attention into the experience vs. pulling out of it. anyway, fascinating thread on HN this morning.

> I also didn't experience anything like that with psilocin (mushrooms).

A guy once told me that he was suffering from a severe form of HPPD for months. It was slowly driving him crazy, but the symptoms disappeared immediately after he consumed psilocybin.

Derealization/depersonalization (known as DPDR) is a defense mechanism against painful sensory input - typically fear and/or anxiety. You brain sort of attenuates the external world and goes inside itself like a turtle that thinks it’s in danger. The state normally occurs in response to dangerous or traumatic situations (you often hear about out of body experiences in these situations), but particularly traumatic experiences (often from hallucinogens, abuse, war, etc) can cause a sort of sensitization that makes DPDR chronic.

So I wonder: psychedelics make you more likely to believe woo, and more likely to have certain classes of visual hallucinations. But some people believe woo without taking psychedelics, and some people have those same visual hallucinations without taking psychedelics.

Interesting, I believe it and have always wondered about this. I think people's sensory experiences vary wildly by nature, but we have no access to them so can't really prove anything.

Some people are audiophiles, others foodies, others fashionistas, etc.

Your athletic ability can vary from Usain Bolt to completely uncoordinated; some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).

Some people are prediposed to like drugs and others don't. (e.g. reading a lot of rock n' roll biographies it becomes apparent that the alcohol and heroin addictions aren't randomly distributed; it's somewhat "innate")

It would be surprising if our sensory experiences did NOT vary widely.

This sounds silly and is totally unsubstantiated, but I always believed my senses are "accurate". I told a friend in high school this and he said it was stupid and impossible :)

----

Although I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep. I imagine that's pretty normal/common since low light is sort of like sensory deprivation.

But they are very elaborate hallucations with all sorts of geometric forms and motion. Elaborate but not intense, if that makes sense.

Iirc those symbols in your vision with your eyes closed aren’t hallucinations. They’re reflective of the blood pressure and flow around your eye/eye lid. Though I definitely have an ability to relax by paying attention to them. I can’t offer a source for this though.

The phenomenon you describe affects the phenomenon GP describes, but they are different phenomenon. Also, if you have relatively strong bloodflow you can see these fluctuations while staring at a white wall.

The colors themselves aren’t. However if you have even mild HPPD they take more complex forms (esp faces) and switch rapidly, like one face morphing into another

I think everybody has the blood flow thing.

But the degree to which they turn into "hallucinations" varies.

By that I mean very elaborate geometric shapes with a lot of motion and rotation. Sort of like a Persian rug in 3D and 4D (time), with a lot of scale. Fractals, etc.

I suspect there is some common physiological reason why people find fractals "trippy" and say pictures of cars in traffic are not "trippy".

Drugs tickle your brain in a certain ways, but as the OP suggests, they're not the only way your brain can be tickled like that. And some brains are more predisposed to such hallucinations than others.

> Although I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep. I imagine that's pretty normal/common since low light is sort of like sensory deprivation.

Me too, and it's definitely a result of taking psychedelics. I quite like it. I suspect that I could have always made those CEVs appear, but I didn't "know how" until taking psychedelics.

In other words, I have the distinct impression that it's a new skill I learned by psychedelics, but not a forced change caused by the drugs. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what it feels like.

When I'm falling asleep, I know if I'm fully relaxed and ready to drift off to sleep when I can just "accept" the visuals without trying to process them. Somehow "letting go" of psychedelic visuals makes them more prominent, and for some reason, that leads to good sleep.

I also notice floaters way more, and I know those were always there, but now I notice them.

And I need way less weed to get as high as I want to be. I think before taking psychedelics, I felt like I was smoking weed to try to achieve something. After achieving whatever that mental goal was on psychedelics, I just don't need to smoke as much anymore.

Weird drugs for sure, but I don't regret taking them.

> Me too, and it's definitely a result of taking psychedelics. I quite like it. I suspect that I could have always made those CEVs appear, but I didn't "know how" until taking psychedelics.

Me too and it's probably not a result of taking psychedelics; as I've never tried them recreationally. I did, however, have vivid hallucinations as a result of Nitrous oxide at the dentist office as a child.

I don't think I see floaters, as my vision doesn't require correction. They also seem unrelated to afterimage.

I thought these were more common, but after some research, most people only see these after applying some pressure, such as rubbing their eyes. Interesting stuff.

N2O is culturally related to psychedelics for good reason, as it can produce/amplify those effects, so that makes sense.

The eye pressure one is a different effect though. What I'm talking about are geometric effects like gears or fractals with definite edges. The eye pressure thing is more of a blob.

Further searching the web seems to suggest that Nitrous oxide doesn't cause hallucinations, but I remember them pretty vividly. It's also pretty well documented that we can't rely on our memories. Makes me wonder.

Mine are definitely not the same as the ones you get from rubbing your eyes. Mine happen only occasionally in a very dark room and look more like a red/orange on a black background in a kaleidoscope.

Most disassociatives like nitrous can cause hallucinations but they are more of an intense dreamlike state than what lsd causes.

With LSD hallucinations you are very much still present in the world even if you interpret things in a strange way.

With the kinds of hallucinations you have with disassociatives you may be partially conscious but you aren’t present in a meaningful way.

I have a vivid memory of a ketamine trip where I was physically in a hotel room but mentally I was flying through some alien crystalline planet. I was awake and apparently talking to people but it was definitely not the same as a psychedelic hallucination.

LSD hallucinations are more like the deep dream images where you have more or less correct sensory input, but anything that looks vaguely eye-like, for example, your brain can’t help interpreting it like an actual eye. The way your brain builds a model of reality just becomes broken and you make all these connections between things that are not normally connected.

In Denmark back in the 90s it was pretty normal to give kids (and often adults) nitrous as a sedative at dentists. I had it a dozen of times as a kid, but only once did I hallucinate anything.

I was awake and fully aware every time, but the one time my dentist voice was very boomy and reverberating and everything was black except for some animals and shapes I saw in multiple rows scrolling left and right and I remember thinking that my dentist was a big frog.

I don't know why that one time was so weird out of all the other regular ones, but I know I was still awake and I was addressed and I could reply, but I was still tripping my balls off.

If you apply pressure to your eyes, you'll see phosphenes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene).

You can also see them during meditation, and as hypnagogic hallucinations while you're falling asleep (but you might not remember this).

Hang on... so people normally DON'T see these moving colors and shapes whenever their eyes are closed?

Not all moving colors and shapes you see with eyes closes are the ones the parent describes.

There are different kinds of them... (the ones described are pressure based "phosphenes"). You describe another.

And if you close your eyes in a lit place (outside in the sun, etc), you probably don't see phosphenes at all, just various shapes and colors caused by small leakage of light through the eyelid skin).

I see them every time I close my eyes, whether in a lit place or not. The only difference is that they're always tinted red/orange/yellow, and very rarely green when I'm in a lit place (and they seem a lot more muted because they're overpowered by the outside light).

Aside:

I bet you "a signed dollar" that Le Bron James is not the first verifiably recorded case of an adult posessing a photographic (eidetic) memory. [1]

Without singling out Mr James it is reasonable to very, very skeptical about any strong claims of ability of any famous person outside the field for which they are famous. Hype is a thing pushed by entourages if not the famous person themselves. Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.

But hey, he can submit to testing and put it on a video sharing site. Walk into a room with a table with N (N=80?) objects on it, under a sheet. Remove the sheet for 3 seconds. Put it back. See how many he can list from memory alone. That's actually not definitive for Eidetic (I believe - I'm not the expert) but it is pretty impressive nonetheless. If he can do that ask him for a book and edition that he has read then pick a geniunely random page (eg roll dice) and ask him to read it to you from memory alone. If he did it on the modern Johnny Carson show (where Uri Geller failed abysmally all those years ago, for example) it would be super-impressive, as it would if literally any human did it.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory

[2] James Randii at 91 may not be available to advise the fraud busting setup as he did for Mr Carson but at a pinch I bet Penn Jilette, Teller, Derryn Brown or someone of similar advanced deception skills could do the job. How exciting would it be if someone convincingly displayed it?

I didn't claim he was the first case? That would be ridiculous.

And this is a tangent, but I used that example to subtly poke at this kind of "common wisdom":

Mr James' proficiency is basketball is super-human and impressive enough by itself. It is very unlikely that he is also super-human in other dimensions.

Why do you think that an exceptional memory would not contribute to exceptional basketball playing? Are those two things completely unrelated?

In other words, you're probably underestimating the cognitive skill it takes to win at high levels. Of course I can't know for sure, because I haven't done it, but you haven't either.

I don't remember what the best sources for his memory were, but they seemed credible to me at the time, e.g.:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44106321

https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-turnovers-photographi...

There are also some video of him recalling games that seem credible too.

Yep. Looking at those links in particular Le Bron James has made no claims that he has a photographic memory and it seems he does not have one. Maybe he's deliberately hiding it but that seems unlikely.

Precise recollection of detail is not a photographic memory by any of the usual definitions of that term. Photographic memory != impressive memory display. The BBC link you provide suggests there isn't anything especially remarkable about his impressive memory for detail in a just played match and that such is quite common among highly trained athletes. I'm told it's common for cricketers to be able to recall the detail every single ball they faced in a score of over 200. ie facing more than 500 separate deliveries. I'm impressed by it, it's great. It isn't photographic memory.

I'm not belittling him, the levels of training and skill he has attained are utterly amazing. If a very famous person is also a decent human being through it all and uses their fame for a positive impact on the world that is far more impressive to me than claims of additional genius outside their field of expertise.

> Your athletic ability can vary from Usain Bolt to completely uncoordinated; some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).

I'm going to quibble with you. When you say that individual humans vary widely, you're mostly assuming a baseline scale of typical human variation. Which is basically begging the question. Of course the fastest or smartest people look very extreme, when you're implicitly comparing them to typical people.

Usain Bolt is very fast for a human. But he's slower than the average housecat. On the flip side some people have really good memories. But even the dumbest humans manage to remember a huge number of symbols compared to what a chimp's capable of. Same for virtually everything else you listed. Food taste, aesthetic preferences, auditory capabilities, intoxicant consumption, etc.

Normal human variance is swamped by variance between different animal species. This is mostly invisible to us, because most of our day-to-day interactions are with other people. Not exotic organisms.

So I would guess just the opposite. I believe that sensory experiences across different people are very likely to be substantially similar. At least compared to an alien species, or AI, or even just an intelligence from a distant evolutionary branch (like an octopus).

I see what you're saying, but he is claiming that some people might literally see auras around other people.

Or the other person sees a literal grid in her visual field all the time and projects meaning onto it.

And that's within normal human variation. Sure you can imagine that bats or octopuses have much weirder subjective experiences.

But it's still not something that's widely recognized. They would likely say if you literally see auras then you must be a crazy, non-functioning person, when really it's just a quirk of your perception that is invisible to everyone else.

> I can also conjure some low-level hallucinations when "looking at the back of my eyelids" when falling asleep.

Sounds like a closed-eye hallucination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination) caused by the Ganzfeld effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect). I get these too, usually just if I concentrate. I think they've been easier to get since I tried mushrooms a couple of times, but I did get them before as well.

Wow, good find. I had no idea that there was a name for it.

One hop away from that page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema

> Others have noted a connection between the form the lights take and neolithic cave paintings.

That's a really great way to explain it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting#/media/File:(1)J... is pretty accurate for me

This is absolutely fascinating. Not too long ago I thought that everyone experienced level 3, and occasionally level 4 effects, but I learned that my friends did not. The first link says that it's rare without psychedelic drugs. I've never tried any psychedelics, but I regularly experience level 3 effects, and occasionally level 4 ones too. I can't remember a time when I didn't.

I also frequently experience/remember hypnagogia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia), which I previously did not know the name of. I absolutely love experiencing it, as it's often euphoric, although it can sometimes be terrifying and stressful.

I can conjure 4 when I want (and I do when I cannot fall asleep); I would say that is because I did try psychedelics a few times decades ago and the trick to ‘see things’ still works like that.

Some people hallucinate without drugs. There's a range of this, in terms of intensity and type.

Some people take drugs.

They tend to onset around the same age (adolescence to early adulthood).

Ergo, by base rates, some will start around the same time completely by chance.

Also, I get the sense that some hallucinations are "amplifications" of various types of pre-existing sensory experiences. I wouldn't be surprised if some people just started noticing certain things they were doing already but hadn't noticed before.

Not really arguing against the idea/phenomenon of [semi-]permanent drug-induced hallucinations. Just suggesting that it's hard to interpret the data in some cases because of various alternative explanations.

These are hypnagogic hallucinations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia . People experience them while falling asleep.

> I think people's sensory experiences vary wildly by nature, but we have no access to them so can't really prove anything.

> ... some people have photographic memories (e.g. Lebron James apparently); some people can factor large numbers in their heads (computation), or recite huge strings of digits (non-episodic memory).

Many of these sensory experiences can be empirically and objectively analyzed. For example, photographic memory is not a real thing. Nobody has ever shown the ability to recall particular details of a scene which they hadn't already focused or been cued on. There's been considerable, sincere effort invested in testing these claims, both in claimants and random individuals. (There are people who remember endless amounts of seemingly non-episodic daily trivia of their everyday life for literally every day of their life, but this isn't photographic memory and definitely doesn't describe LeBron James.)

Large number mental arithmetic and recitation of long strings (or other trivia) is a learnable skill, though many people develop the skill independently, many of whom describe their techniques in a manner that comports with well-known techniques.

Sources: "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by an American journalist who became the American Memory Champion as part of his research; "Your memory: how it works and how to improve it" by Kenneth L. Higbee, a professor of psychology who has a personal interest in mnemonics techniques; and "The Art of Memory" by Frances A. Yates who traces the historical practice of the Method of Loci from Ancient Greece and its transformation into esotericism by the time of the Renaissance.

Of course, there's no accounting for people who believe and feel they have a photographic memory[1], just like there can be no accounting for people who believe they're being personally surveilled 24/7 by hidden cameras everywhere. But that doesn't mean I have to accept that there are some people who are actually inexplicably and secretly being surveilled; left to wonder why I'm so lucky/unlucky.

Conversely, there are some people with a real, extraordinary sense, like tetrachromats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans), who have a fourth peak in their color spectrum reception. They see the world in much richer color than normal humans, and this has been empirically verified.

[1] Indeed, I'm pretty sure most people (myself included) feel like they can shut their eyes and retain a photographic picture of a scene. I was told I had a photographic memory by many different teachers, going back to at least third grade. But, again, it doesn't stand up to scientific experimentation. And I never believed my teachers as it was always self-evident to me that while I may have remembered more seemingly esoteric facts or events than they did, it was because I had consciously found those things curious, however briefly. (As an adult I was diagnosed with ADHD, which perhaps goes a long way to explaining why so many things caught my attention.)

> They see the world in much richer color than normal humans, and this has been empirically verified.

I am curious as how you could verify that. You can't observe someone else's experience, just their reaction to it.

Not an expert on this by any means, but you know those color blindness tests where there’s a bunch of red and green dots, the red dots form a number, and you can only see the red number if you aren’t (that kind of) colorblind? It seems to be like that.

From an article [1] summarizing work that claimed to identify one such woman:

> Proving that these people actually see the world differently has involved a two-decade journey, however. Although the relevant combination of genes does not seem to be especially rare – perhaps 12% of women might have four distinct cones – many of the people that Jordan tested just didn’t seem to show any differences in their perception. But by 2010, she had found a subject who perfectly acted the part of a tetrachromat. Jordan’s “acid test” involved coloured discs showing different mixtures of pigment, such as a green made of yellow and blue. The mixtures were too subtle for most people to notice: almost all people would see the same shade of olive green, but each combination should give out a subtly different spectrum of light that would be perceptible to someone with a fourth cone. Sure enough, Jordan’s subject was able to differentiate between the different mixtures each time. “When you ask them to discriminate between the two mixtures, a tetrachromat can do it very quickly. They don’t hesitate,” says Jordan.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-s...

The article alludes to it, but understates how difficult it is to ask questions about things similar to psychosis with no frame of reference.

For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people. Upstream of the visual input, so to speak. But it's triggered by seeing.

Or one can see something as being in motion, without actually seeing it move. Like, things look normal, but seem to squirm. Again, the mind can separate qualities which are normally inherently connected. Every aspect of physical reality is interpreted by a module that can more or less go haywire separately.

So when someone depicts by illustration what hallucination is like, that is a subset, possibly a small subset of the possibilities, whether drug induced or otherwise.

And there's also the limitations and unpredictability of memory. Who knows whether the memories people have of hallucinations are complete or accurate?

> For instance, it is possible to look at a person, see someone else, and be kind of aware of the discrepancy, but not to experience as a visual disturbance but more of a disturbance in the part of the mind that identifies people.

Yes. I've had a psychotic break and saw my hands as animal paws. At the same time, some part of my brain was vaguely away something was very wrong and as a result, I successfully hid these symptoms for 4 months until they cleared up. For that time, I was an animal pretending to be human.

The memories from my animal self are as real as anything I've experienced as a human. None of it feels abnormal to me.

This isn't just an experience I've had. I've talked to other people in my support group who are bipolar or schizoaffective (bipolar type). They have similar experiences.

My theory is, there's some part of the brain where reality and imagination cross. In me, they merged for a time. So far, antipsychotics have kept this from repeating.

I'd love to hear more about your experience. What else was different from your normal self?

Let's see... I had a tail no one could see but I could feel it. I also the life memories from the other person I was. It's like I've lived two lives.

It's easy to tell which memories are real because I'm human in the real ones.

I'll send you an email. The full story isn't something I want to go into here.

Alright, I'll bite.

I developed HPPD in 2017, and I've been seeing unusual things for a bit over 2 years. The HPPD was triggered by dropping on the order of 1000-1400 micrograms of LSD - and for context a reasonable dose was 50 micrograms. This was way too much, and I fried for a few days. I'm not sure when I came down because HPPD decided to show up and it took me a while to realize that the HPPD was, well, persistent.

The effect is pretty minimal - I see faint geometric shapes in the sky, blank walls, monochromatic screens, such like that. When I look at things like pine trees or complex shapes the patterns vanish. The patterns are actually quite pretty, though it gets irritating at times. It's hardly crippling, but maybe I've gotten lucky.

A few months before I developed HPPD, I also developed tinnitus due to a combination of incredibly severe stress, severe life-long depression, and a doctor prescribed high dosage of Zoloft. I got my ears tested and I have perfect hearing in my left and near perfect in my right, so this isn't auditory damage. In contrast to HPPD, tinnitus can be crippling. Tinnitus is a neurological condition so there's no limit on how bad it can get - and when it gets so loud that you can't hear people over the tin, you get pretty desperate.

With both HPPD and tinnitus, the only real treatment is to learn to not let it get to you. As you become more stressed and anxious the symptoms worsen, so if you fixate on it then you'll quite literally drive yourself mad.

HPPD is vaguely frustrating, but I know that it was my actions that caused this. However I'm livid about the tinnitus because it was most likely a legally prescribed drug with known side effects, and doctors hand out scripts for that stuff like it's candy. It's easy to say "oh no, the psychedelics are going to break our brains!" - but doctors regularly prescribe ototoxic drugs, SSRIs that are _incredibly_ habit forming and aren't effective in the long run.

If you don't want HPPD, maybe take it easy on the drugs, but in the grand scheme of thing there are numerous medical practices that are dramatically more damaging than seeing some mildly weird shit.

Happy to answer questions if that would help anyone here.

I have never heard Tinnitus described as a neurological condition. I had pretty bad Tinnitus as a result of a jaw injury. It has gradually faded but it made sleeping difficult for a very long time.

I'm on the run so can't respond in depth, but check out ototoxic drugs which attack the auditory nerve. SSRIs may not be directly ototoxic but numerous studies have shown that sertraline can cause tinnitus, due to the role that serotonin plays in filtering audio signals. So there are multiple causes of tinnitus, and the impact of SSRIs is partially known but not fully understood.

Seconding you're point on SSRIs. I'm currently reading Ed Bullmore's Inflamed Mind, and he makes the point forcefully that there's no way of measuring SSRI levels in regular clinical practice, they way blood pressue, cholosterol or white/red blood cell levels are tested.

Perhaps I’m the exception but on the off chance it can help someone else I had tinnitus for my entire adult life and it disappeared almost overnight when I started getting botox injections for migraines.

I was surprised to have my new audiologist describe it as neurological, and it can be the result of the brain trying to fill in "missing gaps" of auditory signals- like the static on analog TVs. Then said new studies show hearing aids can reduce the severity of tinnitus, even when hearing loss is moderate.

She's fairly fresh out of school, and I haven't been able to filter out yet whether there is any new science, or if it's more of a trendy academic topic included in new textbooks, or even a new sales tactic by the hearing aid companies.

50 mcg is a pretty small dose. Not as small as micro-dosing, but like first timer being extra cautious sized.

1000-1400 mcg is like 5-7 solid doses, which is no joke, but it's not 20-30 doses like you sort of imply.

To be fair it was tabs of acid rather than anything precisely measured, but it was enough to keep me going for 48 hours. Might have been more, might have been less, but that's really a bit too much.

100 mcg is to me a standard dose, and having done 1000+ mcg a couple times myself I can say that's a lot! I also had HPPD after a year or so of heavy psychedelic use.

It's a gigantic amount. For context Hoffman took around 300mcg and was clearly tripping very hard (based on his account); that's around 4X street acid at 75mcg per tab.

Even if you were to measure a single tab as 150mcg the OP is claiming they took nearly 10 tabs, which is a massive amount, you'd be out of your mind for days.

Interesting. It could suggest that you formed some permanent new connections between some unusual parts of the brain.

My own experience was kind of opposite so far. In the beginning I had pretty apparent visual illusions, like wall corners, patterns breathing, or actually seeings beams of light shaped by different music, even on 100ug.

But over time it seems my brain was somehow adapting to it. On many following trips, the visual illusions become more like 'shaking' a little bit, just some noise.

I started to think that either the acid's gone bad or I had a different kind of sorts.

Some time ago, even on 300ug, i had almost no visual illusions (which was quite disappointing, as I expected the music to still bring it).

Instead, I have a more vivid imagination.. But it's not visual, just more like if you think of some scene from memory.

With HPPD, do you find that you're able to increase/decrease the levels of distortions by mentally moving into it/ pulling out of it? I developed fairly severe HPPD from a large dose of LSD as well. This was about 20 years ago. It eventually waned over the course of a few years and is no longer noticeable though.

I have always steered clear of psychedelics. I know some people are super into legalization, but I wager it's a bit irresponsible considering we barely understand their long (and short, for that matter) -term effects. There's some evidence where psychedelics (particularly LSD) may have triggered schizophrenia in some patients[1].

Musician Daniel Johnston (he passed away a few months ago) is a notable case.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6870484

Latent schizophrenics shouldn't take psychoactive drugs of any kind. Schizophrenics (like other people suffering from mental illness) are prone to self-medicate as well though. And the evidence that someone prone to schizophrenia who develops it because of drug use but wouldn't have otherwise developed schizophrenia is scant or non-existent.

According to the article, it's not just schizophrenics, it's literally everyone who is at risk.

Legalization would be highly irresponsible until we understand why.

He used "latent" for that reason.

> And the evidence that someone prone to schizophrenia who develops it because of drug use but wouldn't have otherwise developed schizophrenia is scant or non-existent.

It's much easier to prove that something happens, than something doesn't happen.

There is a lot of evidence that suggests that taking psychedellics can lead to schizophrenia. To conclusively prove that that person wouldn't have gotten it without those drugs is extremely difficult.

While I 100% agree that we can't conclusively prove causation at this point, we do have solid evidence that there is a correlation, and that shouldn't be discounted given the research into psycheddelics is too immature to have a chance of proving anything past that.

The problem with latent schizophrenia is that it's latent. You don't know that you're a latent schizophrenic until the illness is triggered.

I think the issue is that someone who is predisposed to schizophrenia might not be aware that this is the case.

Also, we already know that drug use can have permanent effects that presumably would not have manifested if the person had not taken drugs, unless you think that people who didn't see hallucinations before LSD and see hallucinations after LSD would have started seeing hallucinations anyway.

So I don't see why it would be unreasonable to think that drug use can trigger an onset of schizophrenia in an already predisposed person that would have not happened otherwise.

Nah I'd flip the complete opposite direction. Responsible use of psychedelics has many strong upsides, and I think the outright ban has done a lot of net harm to society.

At the very least I think doctors and researchers ought to be able to prescribe them and run experiments.

Whose fault is it that we "barely understand the long term effects"? Clearly, the war on drugs is the very reason why scientists have been unable to study the benefits (or side effects) of these drugs for so long. There are signs that is finally changing (with the JH research center), but we've lost decades to something we could've understood so much better by now.

Having not steered clear of psychedelics like yourself, I do not want any ol' joe walking around on psychedelics. I fear if more prevalent more articles like this will be out there: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/california-mma-fighte...

With that said, charging people with felonies for possession is ridiculous. Fine the individual and confiscate for relatively small amounts of psychedelics.

The harm done by criminal penalties exceeds the harm done by any possible bad effects of using psychedelics by a huge margin. To claim otherwise is intellectually dishonest.

This claim isn't obvious at all (let alone its converse being intellectually dishonest). You're acting as if justice and law enforcement is made up of solely either stupid or nefarious people.

It is Congress, which makes the laws, that is made up of stupid/nefarious individuals.

Or well-meaning but with catastrophic, negative effects for some people.

Emergent systems are absolutely a thing; and even when they’re not, some people’s lives can be truly ruined by punishment beyond their measure.

>may have triggered schizophrenia in some patients

The same is true of marijuana, although the key word is triggered, and not necessarily caused. (Obviously some debate about this)

It's not randomly distributed among the general population, which suggests it mainly affects persons already predisposed.

Black American teen boys seem especially at risk, in a population that otherwise sees symptoms present in the early 30's.

But the striking thing to me, is that it typically happens with the very first dose, is acute onset, and is irreversible.

Look up the statistics surrounding schizophrenia related illnesses and cannabis use[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_effects_of_cannabis#...

I’ve used LSD and psilocybin, though not for many years, and have had minor, infrequent, non-disruptive hallucinations.

They usually consist of momentary visual deformations of repeating patterns, e.g., tiles on a BART platform will appear to shift or move. These visual variances are a small taste of a full-on trip, in which everything can shift, move, or dance.

It’s nice to see others have shared this experience.

Related: Psychedelics caused me to have a permanent, positive attitude adjustment. I recommend them highly.

Yeah I have several permanent overhangs from my experiences with psychedelics as well. At one point I did 500+ug of LSD in a single trip and I am still working through PTSD from some of my delusions.

That said, the net effect on my life has been massively positive and has directly contributed to me being comfortable with myself, my body, my mind, my friends, and my place in this world.

Despite the overhangs, I highly recommend psychedelics as well. Though maybe stay under 400ug :)

When you say PTSD, would you mind expanding on how that manifests? Is it a low level constant anxiety, or more akin to sudden anxiety due to a certain trigger, or something else? I understand if it's too personal a topic. I'm very interested in psychedelics, but am worried about the potential negative side effects. Someone I know said LSD caused them anxiety once, and it lasted for a few months but eventually sorted itself out. Is your PTSD sorting itself out slowly? How long ago was your 500+ug experience?

Also you say you have some permanent overhangs; would you mind telling me a bit more so I know what to expect?

Trigger oriented, usually related to existential feelings of emptiness. Asking the question "does my existence have meaning" for a long time would spike my pulse to 150+ and cause me to freeze up. Took maybe 18 months to wear off fully. I can still psyche myself out if I try today.

Other triggers were anything that seemed too unlikely to be reality. Waking up with 11111 karma on Reddit, strangers winking at my like they could read my thoughts, things of that nature.

It honestly wasn't that bad to live with.

After my 4th trip I had really sharp HPPD. That burn in effect you get when you stare at something for a minute plus, that took about 0.5 seconds for me. And then it took about 60 seconds to wear off. For about 2 weeks I had a constant triple or quadrupole or more image burned into my eyes. Eventually I learned to cope by shifting my eyes every 0.5 seconds like a crazy person, but it did stop the after images from accumulating.

That went away after maybe 3 months, hasn't been a problem since.

My advice would be to space out trips 12 weeks or more to avoid hppd, and stay under 400ug to avoid PTSD and crazy delusions. And if you are inexperienced with LSD really you should start at a dose of 150ug or so.

Counterpoint: The YouTube engineer who, over the summer, took LSD and went on a stabbing rampage.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/youtube-engin...

That's probably more related to working for YouTube where the comments are absolute vitriol. Actually reading this article this person was clearly not mentally equipped for a trip, ended up taking 2 additional doses after already "becoming delusional" and then going on a rampage when his friends tried to get him to stop. All because they rented a house on the fourth of July and thought what better thing to use to party with loud explosions than the most introspective and revelatory substance ever discovered by mankind. What? How about a little respect for the aperture in the navel of the Universe? I wouldn't chug a liter of Ayahuasca and go mow the lawn, what sort of world do people think this is? No consequences is the lie that got us here if you ask me. Of course there are consequences. Nurture altruistic intentions.

My worst trip (which I still don't regret) was when I took a strip of acid, and then a friend who was 4 tabs in pulled out some tannerite that he hadn't mentioned beforehand and started shooting at exploding targets. I was totally lost in the swirl of drugs, vaguely aware of the explosions and worrying about the safety of my friends. I think I could've handled it a lot better if I had known about the exploding targets before the entheogens kicked in, but still, the 4th of July probably isn't the best time for those particular drugs :/

Most kinds of drugs, really. Alcohol and explosives are a legal but often unfortunate combination.

As one guru at a random festival once said regarding someone having a bad trip,

>"That is what happens when you try to put a 6 cylinder drug into a 4 cylinder brain."

Some people just aren't ready for what they are about to experience and if you are not in a good place, it isn't like alcohol which masks your feelings and makes you numb. From what I gather it forces you to confront your inner demons and come to terms with the meaning of your existence itself, which not everyone is suitable to handle.

I’ve always thought of this as more of an anxiety attack and possibly a bit of PTSD from what is often an incredibly powerful and upsetting experience.

I think most people experience minor visual disturbances or have what can be loosely defined as ‘trippy’ experiences from time to time and just ignore them or compensate for them, but imagine having recently had a tremendously upsetting experience that began with similar sensations and how that could tweak someone’s anxiety so that they hyper focus and worry about it to the point that it becomes a serious issue for them.

I kind of got this after a heavy meditation session 6 months ago after reading Mindfulness in Plain English and listening to Om (the band.) Never seriously meditated before but after that I became pretty good at meditation and so depending on my mood and whether I meditated in the morning I slip into a meditative state right away when concentrating and see pretty small perceptual abnormalities.

I was seriously ready to kill myself back then so pretty small tradeoff.

> Third, it talks about HPPD-like visual hallucinations in people who have never taken psychedelic drugs. It says many people have them. [...] My only argument that this doesn’t disprove HPPD is how many people – including my survey respondents – describe these oddities starting (or getting much worse) right after they use psychedelics.

This is what I believe, and I think there's a simple reason why people often report the symptoms getting worse after taking psychedelics. They are more noticeable once you've seen the full-blown effects of the drug in comparison. Prior to that, you wouldn't have any reason to pick out those hallucinations and might unconsciously ignore them. But once you've seen the full effect then even mild instances are too obvious to ignore.

Around the mid 1990s I hung out with a few ravers and hippies (different music, similar overall vibe), and several told me they'd done so much acid that they tripped all the time.

I had chalked it up to either exaggeration or the awakened latent schizophrenia thing until now, but maybe there was more to it. Apparently the relevant subreddit has existed for 11 years! I feel out of the loop, but I'm super glad these conversations are happening. As others have pointed out, we could have been so much further along in research on this stuff if it wasn't for the boneheaded War On Drugs.

If you want to scare yourself off psychedelics for life, /r/hppd has some pretty horrifying posts from people reaching out for help. I am grateful that my own extremely minor experience with similar symptoms taught me to stay clear.

I’ve done a bit of psilocybin over my life. The only permanent hallucinatory change I’ve experienced is “seeing stars” occasionally (maybe once a year). I distinctly remember the first time it happened while on mushrooms.

I had shorter semi-permanent hallucinations when I was taking them the most. Breathing walls, halos around lights, etc. All of those effects tended to go away once I stopped.

A stranger permanent change has been my unconscious or dream state. I’ve had full blown psychedelic dreams on occasion since taking psilocybin. Those dreams happen maybe once a year.

For context my peak usage was nearly 20 years ago and I used to do quite a bit. Much more than what I’ve heard as ‘common’ nowadays.

I'll admit it is rather weak sauce, but the one time I smoked salvia was enough to put me off psychadelics forever. The entire room that I was in morphed into a Roadrunner and Coyote canyonland for about five minutes, just as Chuck Jones would have it drawn up. No desire to repeat that kind of disassociation from reality.

Salvia is not weak sauce and is something that very few people enjoy compared to LSD and mushrooms.

That depends on how it is used. Smoking raw and untreated leaves provides a very minor and brief high. A tea (the traditional technique), or treated/fortified leaves, is where it becomes potent.

The parent commenter likely used fortified leaves given that they had such a distressful experience.

I’ve done a bit of psychedelics and a high dosage of salvia can be absolutely terrifying. It’s like peaking on what would be a 10hr trip in 5 minutes. I wouldn’t discredit your experience as “weak sauce”.

I've gone through multiple periods of doing lots of LSD in my life. In my senior year of high school I probably tripped once a week with anywhere from 1-4+ hits, while also smoking pot every day.

After about 3 months I had developed perma-tracers (I could draw shapes in the air with a lit cigarette), after about 6 months I saw after-images at night, usually while driving. (For example, a ghostly day-glow purple stop sign behind the actual stop sign). It wasn't enough to be actually disruptive to my life, besides the slight anxiety about it.

At about 9 months I developed a stutter which increased in frequency over the next few months, until it was an actual speech impediment. I stopped smoking pot and decreased my LSD use to a few times a year and it all went away within 6-9 months and never came back. It has never come back with LSD use, but it /did/ come back during a year in my 30s where I smoked a lot of pot and used no psycehdelics, so take that anecdata as you will.

These days I notice that if I do LSD more than about 4 times within 1 month, I'll develop some tracers and visual distortions that persist very slightly when sober, and more persistently when only stoned on pot. Tiled bathrooms breathe a little, lights sparkle and shimmer. But it always resolves within about a month of abstinence and has never caused me any trouble.

There are no (as far as I can tell) cognitive distortions or anything else while sober, and the visual distortions range from mildly amusing to slightly alarming. I've had tons of panic attacks (unrelated in my life) but none of them had the quality of any sort of "flashback", just plain old anxiety.

There has been a little bit (but not a ton) of research done on HPPD, and bluelight and other harm reduction forums had good discussions with those dealing with it for many years. For many (most) people it resolves on its own.

My completely out of my ass theory is that it basically works like water making a groove in dirt in that some neural pathways get overly "primed" to fire and fall into a habitual pathway.

/Most/ people I know that have either experimented heavily with LSD /or/ with intensive meditation have reported some sort of visual or auditory after effects that persist while sober and resolve on their own, but most people I've talked to haven't been too bothered by it.

That's not to discount the people that have experienced disruption to their life from HPPD, but this definitely seems to be the exception to the rule of either not having any persisting effects or not finding them that bothersome.

edit: typos

I took lsd for the first time two weeks ago and sometimes when I zone out, geometric patterns like carpet appears to morph. I'm not really good at understanding my own thought process, so I can't really tell if it affects me in other areas. From my extremely limited experience however, I would warn against casually taking any psychedelics. For me at least it was a needless experience, with needless aftereffects.

For many people including myself, this is something that goes away over time. If you are concerned about it, avoid psychedelics as well as cannabis.

This could be unrelated, this has happened to me plenty of times in the past and I think it could sometimes be related to either lack of sleep, dehydration, or fluctuations in blood pressure.

It's fairly common to see residual effects and trails for weeks afterwards, particularly when tired. I don't know anyone who hasn't had that to some extent after taking LSD.

I've been interested in taking a guided "tour" into DMT but uhh, maybe not now.

I recommend asking yourself if an idiot would do what you are going to do. Do the opposite. I took lsd by myself, with no one home at 5pm. And only while the effects started to take place did I begin researching the effects. I did not know that you can't sleep when on acid for instance. So maybe don't listen to me. I'm also not so hot mentally, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Hahahaha but also HMM...

You essentially did everything wrong. I'm a bit amazed actually.

I'm sorry but that is funny.

Checklist for a first badtrip.

1) be alone. 2) take it too late to sleep at a reasonable hour. 3) start researching only after taking it.

Point (3) specifically is easily the worst, because you start researching after you get anxious, and what you find will make you even more anxious, because if you are looking for potential side effects and issues, that's exactly what you are going to find. The positive feedback loop with this one is pretty bad.

I also did point (4). I talked to my grandma on the phone. I called her an hour before I took it, but she called back an hour after I took it. The surprising thing is that I actually didn't have a bad trip. It was just pretty meh after I tried everything in the vicinity.

How not to use psychedelics, or any psychoactive substance.

When my friend was younger and more indulgent with psychedelics, he would sometimes get tracers or flashes of light when tired but they went away eventually. He's open-minded about the human sensory experience so it didn't bother him.

> when I zone out, geometric patterns like carpet appears to morph

I have had this happen to me ever since I was a child, is this not just normal?

I take psychedelics once or twice a year, and sometimes I just have these weird moments where, for example, I'll look at a door and go "What the hell is that? We all walk through portals every day!" I think they bring out a sense of wonder in the mundane, which can be amazing but also occasionally disconcerting.

I have this. It used to freak me out sometimes (am I tripping?), but I have grown to accept it, even find fun in it. It's been 5 years since I last took a hallucinogen.

One scary thing about this is that I worry my emotions are permanently changed too, but I just don't notice it as much. Visual's lasting effects are very clear to me because I see them. Emotions are so complicated that I will never know how it permanently affected me. I am definitely a different person from before I started taking them.

I sustained pretty severe HPPD after taking LSD and drinking alcohol at the same time. I had taken a number of hallucinogens before that time. It took two years and went away. I still have tinnitus, however.

I took a 300mg MDMA pill 2 years ago (on accident - I didn't realize pills were this strong - and had no experience with MDMA prior to that), and have permanent low-level anxiety at all times now. The quality of my life has been reduced like 30%.

Strangely enough, a friend of mine who I tripped with in Thailand said that his lifelong tinnitus went away from the mushrooms we took. /anecdote

MDMA had the opposite effect on me, i had mild anxiety all the time and after a couple times dosing it (300mg) it went completely away

For people interested in experiencing closed eye visuals without drugs, try sitting in a dark room with eyes closed facing a strobe light. ~3-10 Hz seems most effective.

(Should go without saying, but this is not recommend for epileptics)

The vague regular input to the whole eye causes your brain to look for patterns in the noise. Tested this on several friends and they all start seeing geometric fractal-ish patterns within 60 seconds.

I've been hoping someone would manufacture affordable "strobe glasses" with a bunch of white leds that pulse at a rate adjustable with a simple knob, but I've looked for years and all of the options I've seen have been pretty pricey and include features of questionable utility. Seems like they could be made for ~$20 if there was enough of a market to make them at scale. I think they would be great for meditation.

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_machine for more info. The turntable-driven Dream Machine was a particularly cool design)

The one thing that that picture of HPPD does not adequately explain is time. In my opinion you should think of the (distorted) square as a superposition of the total time spent, not a snapshot.

Another thing to mention for (some?) people with some sort of psychoactive or hallucinatory experience is that "real" things can complicate matters. An example: If you wear glasses with coloured reflections and are not used to it, then it can compound your paranoia about the other things that are "not real" that you are seeing. A similar thing about streetlights: Foggy or misty nights already do funny things to the lights and you can overexaggerate this effect by confusing real and not real things.

One should be careful about these things. In my case I had these kind of experiences at university and without psychoactive substances. Doing abstract mathematics certainly can complicate matters, but it is not a prerequisite. Also, crazy people may be crazy, but often their fears are logical in the sense that you can't really disprove them. I mean, how do you really prove to someone that they were not kidnapped by aliens? In the end you just need to show the value of Occam's Razor in your own life.

I think the best case scenario is maybe analogous to eventually writing an interesting movie (I think the Twilight Zone was inspired by such experiences) and NOT getting to some super hyper special plane of existence. I do also think that the creative cycle has both a logical and an illogical component. The latter is like training the model, where you cycle through senseless things with funny connections until the logical part takes over and makes it concrete. It's like the difference between "OMG what is this weird static electricity thing OMG it's so weird" (which is a fair observation) and going to "So, what we can say about electricity is that x, y and z. And this is how to build a circuit."

I’m just not sure whether or not some of the things I see were always there, and I just didn’t notice, or just didn’t care.

Like, for example, blurred after images (“trails”) when I wave my hands around.

I see them all the time. I’m just not sure they are new. I suspect I experienced that visual effect prior to doing psychedelics, then when on psychedelics they looked really cool and “trippy” and now I’m just conscious of it as a result of that.

Or else permanent low grade hallucinations.

But it really doesn’t seem so.

I see patterns in the dark visual space that occurs when my eyes are closed. Pretty sure everyone will see something - subtle colors, moving shapes, etc if they stare at the backs of their eyelids for a bit. But you don’t really notice unless you deliberately pay attention to it while meditating, or while on some drug, or even feverish, or go into or out of sleep, or whatever.

I wonder if it’s all just a matter of taking common and inevitable visual distortions a little too seriously.

> I see patterns in the dark visual space that occurs when my eyes are closed.

I never took any psychedelics, but also experience this; it can get a bit trippy sometimes when they coalesce into shapes or patterns.

> mild hallucinations like seeing a flower growing on a person’s face or seeing the legs of a chair walk

Wow, I would have said those are rather substantial hallucinations.

I read a lot of comments about people recommending the use of psychedelics. I don't understand why some people with a healthy mind are so eager to alter (often definitively) their precious mind/self/brain.

> Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder is a condition marked by visual or other perceptual disturbances typical of psychedelic use that continue for weeks and months after coming off the psychedelic, in some cases permanently. Have you ever had this condition?

‘Visual or other perceptual disturbances’ is very different than hallucinating.

HPPD is probably real, but also probably not a big deal for most people. It most likely just results at staring at empty space a bit more from time to time when something odd pops up.

There are bigger risks with psychedelics such as trigger an underlying mental condition or suffering emotional trauma (‘bad trip’).

after drinking ayahuasca a couple of times in large quantities and meditating full time (16 hours a day on average) for a year i also see things. it's not a hallucination though, i'm certain this energy is really there. it doesn't bother me and i hold down a job as a software engineer despite the funky visuals. i also find myself playing with this energy at times. for anybody else with this issue, hopefully you'll just get used to it like i have

One thing that stuck with me is how when you do mushrooms or LSD, everyone experiences their own personal trip so to say.

Ayahuasca on the other hand, although I don't have any personal experience with, I have heard accounts of groups of people experiencing the same visualizations/hallucinations which to me seems pretty trippy!

i'd say an ayahuasca trip is also deeply personal and personal issues will come to the surface like any unresolved issues from the past. there are commonalities experienced too though, like experiencing death (ego death), meeting with/becoming god if you're lucky and a deep feeling of love. it can also be terrifying at times but overall my first ayahuasca experience was the most profound experience of my life and an amazing exploration of consciousness.

I think it's no question that psychedelics are mind opening. But maybe a psychosis is something that happens to an open mind too. Personally I explained some mildly strange visual effects/thoughts (long after my acid trips) to the fact that I know what's possible to happen with my mind and my mind knows it too. And only for that reason that weird place is just a another new option now. If I wouldn't have experienced them, my mind may never come up with them.

>I think it's no question that psychedelics are mind opening.

Having used more than my share: there's plenty of question that psychedelics are mind opening. Just because something feels profound doesn't mean it is. People in the 1800s used to think nitrous and ether sniffing was profound.

You'd think after all these years of people experiencing profundity there would be some great work of art or philosophy that people are able to take back to reality from their drug experiences, but as far as I can tell it's just burn out "trippin balls" stories, people losing their minds in various unedifying ways, and weirdos like Kerry Mullis talking to aliens.

Isn't there some great deal of art coming from psychedelic experiences. Many bands of the sixties and seventies or art of Alex Grey. Shamans had an very important role in groups and tribes for a long time. Religious revelations could have been results of altered states of consciousness (eg moses 10 commandments).

On a more personal and emotional note I always had the feeling when tripping of great profundity but being unable to take the wisdom to the other side. I guess I would make be a bad shaman.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. Alex Gray and Deep Purple aren't exactly Vermeer and Mozart.

If psychedelics are all that profound, rather than just a drug producing chemical simulacrums of profundity, you'd have better examples than these.

Aren't they in a way the Mozarts of their time? I'm not sure what you expect and demand of psychedelics. When will be something profound enough for you? For many it was and is.

>Aren't they in a way the Mozarts of their time?

Absolutely not. Avro Part and György Ligeti are the Mozarts of their time. And they were very, very far from being Mozart.

I expect and demand that drugs which people tout as some amazing breakthrough in human consciousness demonstrate something beyond "I thought it was cool." If something you can buy for $4 in pill form really creates higher states of consciousness, and the words "higher states of consciousness" actually means something, you'd expect there to be 1000 Mozarts by now, rather than ... dipshits saying Iron Butterfly's drum solo is, like, totally cool man.

It's all very subjective what you state.

I have heard several people with massive audiences discussing positive effects of psychedelics.

However, I don't recall any of them discussing potential negative side effects, except for briefly mentioning a possibility of having a bad trip that might cause PTSD.

It would be great if they would mention that there's a possibility of permanently altering your perception, to the point of seeing severe hallucinations for the rest of your life.

I'd also like to see them discuss the risk of inducing an onset of schizophrenia that someone mentioned in this thread.

Sure, maybe people who developed schizophrenia after taking psychedelics were predisposed to it already, but what if they could have avoided an onset if they had not taken the drugs? Wouldn't it make sense to warn people about this?

It just seems extremely irresponsible to talk about the potential positive effects without addressing the potential negative effects.

Especially considering that the main potential positive effect, resolving psychological issues that the person isn't able to resolve on their own, is likely to appeal to people who I'd guess are at a higher risk of the potential negative side effects due to already being mentally unstable.

Somewhere I read the theory that persisting trips might be a learned thing. Very simplified example: everyday experience makes us convinced that walls can not warp. The experience during a trip might show one otherwise. Now the brain can accept the concept of warping walls in even in everyday life.

A very quick search did not turn up anything useful. Anyone knows what theory I am talking about?

It might have been in the comment section of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/06/hppd-and-the-specter-o...

Psychedelics effect is very dependent on your mind state. I would never advise psychedelics to someone who's not stable, or predisposed to schyzophrenia, or in general to anyone under 25 - but for me personally, using LSD and shrooms have had very significant and long-lasting positive effects on my life.

I do see patterns sometimes, and one time when I was posing for a artist and have stared at the same trees outside the apartment for 3 hours straight, I have gone into a very heavy trip state, but it's never disrupted my life in any way. The key is, every time I saw hallucinations unders psychedelics (or without) I could easily "feel" my imagination creating them, and just allowed it. Now I'm so used to the tripping state that I even take LSD when I go out clubbing and dancing - I've stopped taking all other "club culture" drugs (alcohol, cocaine, MDMA, mephedrone) because of their health effects, and LSD has very gentle stimulating effect, and you don't have any kind of hangover afterwards.

Having experienced both microdoses and full blown hallucinatory trip doses, I've arrived at the conclusion that hallucinatory doses are arguably overdoses of these substances.

They're both active and useful at micro dose levels, I highly doubt anyone has ever experienced HPPD from a psilocybin microdose in their breakfast smoothy.

As with any powerful drug, dosage matters more than anything.

Ever since I did LSD I see strange ripples sometimes when I watch moving water. I ended up coming down watching the waves as the tide came in. Every time a wave crashed the water would ripple strangely in all directions. I don't know really how else to describe it, but it's been years now and it'll still happen. Not always, but still sometimes.

Ate a couple tabs a day for a couple months in high school. It will stick for a couple years. When I say stick. If you look at wallpaper, it would slightly swirl.

Take everything said about these thing with a massive grain of salt. The entire point is exploring how you are an individual from the rest of a time churning universe.

I'm tempted to do some unpublished science with a sample size of one on that. Given the ridiculously rapid tolerance one builds to LSD, I'm a bit skeptical and taking the claim with the grain of salt you prescribed ;)

Assuming good faith, do you regret eating all that acid?

I'm not sure you can draw that kind of conclusion from a survey administered to a self-selected group of people, and I'm pretty sure that talking about it like that to the group of people who will be filling out the next survey will tend to shape the responses. Interesting topic, though.

Really interesting to see this on HN!

I got HPD from a fairly large dose of 4FA once. I had persisting light sparkles pretty much exactly like the first image in the article.

I researched online and discovered the term HPPD but information was extremely sparse then. I see there's a fair amount more now which is encouraging.

From the advice I found I got myself some Lion's Mane supplement, meditated and exercised a few times a week. A few weeks later I just kind of forgot about it and noticed one day that the HPPD had disappeared.

The effect wasn't hugely detrimental on a practical level, but it was very strange coming to terms with the fact that this may well be a permanent change.

Some people have "Profound Life-changing spiritual experiences" and it would be nice if those stuck around for longer than the week or two afterward. IME they seem to fade as you get wound back up in the culture and everyday grind.

IME, this.. however, not everyone who experiments with psychedelics is fortunate enough to experience them. I know it's cliché, but integration is key. Our work is here, so you have to make use of those lessons as best you can.

There's evidence that classical (5-HT2a agonist) psychedelics can have a permanent impact on a person's openness score (as part of the Big 5): https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/unique-everybody-els...

Perhaps similar (I had this for months): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mal_de_debarquement

Dang, perhaps change the title on this to reflect the title of the post? That said, HPPD is an important topic.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

As I don’t have a direct contact for the author, I’m noting here that I added this to a Kialo argument about differences in human experience: https://www.kialo.com/some-people-may-be-experiencing-a-perm...

I thought that there was just one clinic that had most of the HPPD cases and that was in Israel and specialized in giving people a way to get out of the IDF.

Limmy ...still trippin'....https://youtu.be/BHbZD68SGoE

> A Reddit user helpfully illustrated what his (particularly severe) HPPD looked like (note especially the subtle square grid in left picture):

I have always seen artifacts around light, even before psychedelic use. Ordinary things would have an aura. This is probably due to how visual information is processed by your optic nerve.

Astigmatism can potentially contribute significantly to that, depending on the pattern seen. Mine causes it and it's particularly noticeable at night with street lights.

That definitely could explain it. Having taken LSD a few times in my life, I sometimes wake up and see form constants and tracers. But it’s only immediately after waking; then it disappears. This too is a rare occurrence, maybe once every 100 days or so.

Anyone sees halos or starbursts around lights? I've developed that and a bit of visual snow. It freaked me out in the beginning, but now it's like meh. Vision is fine, I had it checked.

That’s a terriblY misleading headline. Did you even read the article?

>Many people reported that if they stared at a textured area like a carpet long enough, illusory geometric patterns would start to form.

I have always had this, is this not normal?

This sounds quite in tune with some of Daniel Dennett's ideas also, especially from 'Consciousness Explained'.

The gist is that our consciousness is only, and all, that we can say, or in any other way act on the world. So if people really believe in the things they say, those things must be quite real to them.

And perhaps visual hallucination come from some incomplete separation of the 'inner' visual loop - thoughts, memories - from the outside visual information.

psychedelics are not toys.

neural systems are prone to hysterisis. past experiential history modulates present response. It Is Possible To entrain your wetware to respond in very inconvenient ways, if you delve to deeply[HPPD]

Now I know there is a name (HPPD) for this.

Free rounds!

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