Psychedelic scientist sends brains back to childhood
wired.com
wired.com
An adult who undergoes this kind of treatment to heal PTSD could, in the wrong hands, end up traumatized further. In the worst scenarios, patients could be vulnerable to abuse. Unscrupulous therapists or other predators could try to use psychedelics to manipulate others, Dölen says. This is more than paranoid speculation. Quite a few experts, Dölen included, think that Charles Manson’s ability to completely brainwash his followers relied on the high doses of LSD he regularly gave them prior to bombarding their minds with hate-filled lectures and murderous orders."
Except there's no science to back this up. All the scientific articles I've ever seen on the topic of gender and sexuality seem to indicate that the critical period for those attributes develop in the womb and not during childhood.
The most likely reason for such deviations from what conservatives would consider, "normal sexuality" is endocrine-distrupting pollution. The kind that causes amphibians to change their sex, for example.
Ironically, conservatives as a voting bloc will be the first to vote to reduce environmental protections and regulations attempting to reduce this (or any) pollution.
My personal belief is that the exposure/normalization is good because it helps people discover themselves. And I read that comment somewhat differently: exposure to these concepts might be controversial because parents have such different impressions of what is "right", so they might end up accidentally brainwashing their child. It already happens a lot, and people obviously don't want more of it.
We pretend like people don't get turned on by their own hand.
On one side, you see adults who believe that sexuality and cross-gender identification are immutable, or at least practically immutable. Their goal is to expose e.g. heterosexual kids to the idea that some of their peers will be different from them so that they aren't shocked and scandalized by it later, then lash out unfairly as a result of prejudice against the unknown.
On the other side, you see adults who equate deviations from acceptable expressions of sexuality and gender - you don't see many conservatives boycotting national brands over young boys at hooters or child beauty pageants featuring little girls - as being inherently obscene. They naturally want to protect children from what they see as obscene and abnormal.
They both believe that they have children's best interests at heart.
That said, based on all available data, it seems like sexuality and gender identification are mostly immutable and that truth will slowly win out in the end. For example, nearly every conservative has met a little boy who acted remarkably girlish since toddlerhood and grew up to be gay unsurprisingly. Seeing that process play out, then claiming that gayness is a social contagion requires cognitive dissonance.
It's a part of the process of social change.... The last huge wave of homophobia that had legal consequences was in the 1970's and was led by a group called "Save the Children" -- it's all just the same dynamics repeating, except today it's more-so around broader gender norms, as opposed to a narrow focus on "men sleep with women". This video does a great job of laying it out through that sort of lens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6qUxa30SFA
You must have one heck of a filter bubble of what you're seeing in the world if you're not seeing conservatives complain about child beauty pageants. There was a massive conservative backlash to a Netflix documentary about child beauty pageants and the conservative internet meme landscape is full of content against "groomers" and anything that involves sexuality and children.
for a good illustration of this, examine the politics of people who organize, attend, and participate in actual underage beauty pageants in the US -- the last US president, for example
it's not surprising, because the point of beauty pageants is to reinforce the conservative stereotype that a woman's job is to stand there and look pretty
you'll also note that, as mentioned above, conservatives don't apply the term to breastaurants when children are present there -- I didn't see a response to that, and it bears repeating
These latest "topics in the culture wars" are simply that, the latest usable tools that can be used, along with exaggerating and flat-out lying about the topics, to maximize the outrage of their voter base to drive turnout.
Meanwhile, it also helps the authoritarian causes to maximize the demonization of these same "other" minority groups, and trans groups are both easy and fresh targets. (Nevermind the facts: there are essentially zero cases of people in drag being any kind of threat to children, while there are literally thousands of cases of religious 'leaders' from the very same sects, sexually abusing children, with new cases every day.)
Stop trying to normalize marginalizing people.
Fear of a concerted effort to remove rights to everything from free speech, to reading books, to healthcare, to voting and actively destroying the independence of institutions whose independence is required to maintain democracy is exactly the same as fabricated fear ginned up with lies about minorities such as trans, Jews, and blacks.
If you want to play at the pot-kettle game level, I'd point out that your statement is mere spouting of the standard line of the deluded herd. Not suitable for this forum. Please bring some facts next time.
There's a lot of variables there. I can only speak to my experience. I started seeing psychedelics getting talked about in veterans circles and was curious about them. My trauma stems from many sources, but what's common is a lost of innate trust, and the end result is that trust is easier to tear down quickly than build up. Not great for healthy relationships, communication, and a number of life's necessities. I decided to wait on trying them and went about doing things like CBT to change my behavior and focus on getting out of this anxiety riddled loop I was in.
Fast forward a decade and I was really at a point where I just needed help letting go of my trauma. I'd dealt with it, there was nothing more to be done, yet still the door would not shut. If you're at a place where the metaphorical door won't shut, psychedelics can be a helpful tool. You're really going to already need to be in a place where you can be mindful (present) and focus on what you want to change. After you've tripped you really need to unpack where your mind went and why; that's to say separate the garbage from the work to be done.
Not everyone should do psychedelics just because they're seeking healing. They can provide that, but you need to be in the right place and willing to do the work. Being triggered in the middle of a trip is a good way to really re-traumatize yourself in the way that reading about trauma identical to yours can be traumatizing.
I think this research sort of puts the kibosh on microdosing as a paradigm, which has been my intuition all along. If you really want the potential from psychedelics, microdosing is sort of the wrong approach I always thought.
What you want to do instead is take them maybe once a year at most, though just one trip in a lifetime can be sufficient depending on your situation, then spend the following period of plasticity putting a lot of effort into changing your life the way you want to, establish habits, pick up new techniques, whatever it is you want to accomplish. You will learn faster, be more able to establish habits. And that learning is forever. You can reap the benefits for the rest of your life, completely sober.
I have done extensive self experimentation with microdosing of various psychedelics and the results were fairly clear to me. I felt smarter, and overall pretty great. I felt like I was making all these brilliant connections. But whenever there was an objective source of truth available, it became clear this was all an illusion, I was struggling to make connections that would otherwise be obvious to me, and that made it feel more significant than it was.
Chess, for instance, was one such source of truth. Played a couple long games against evenly matched opponent(rated and everything). Made a complete ass of myself. Played easily 3-400 elo points below my usual level. And all the while thinking I was playing brilliantly and calculating deep lines, I was really just imagining lines that never worked. My working memory was terrible. Time management completely off.
As a supplemental anecdote, I won my first chess tournament at Manhattan Chess club in the early 1990s while dosed on a significant amount of mushrooms. Certainly the perception of time is an issue and I'm certain the results would have been different if the game had been shorter (as most games are these days), but in a 120 + 60 it wasn't an issue.
Tried microdosing for a month once hoping it would make me smarter but seemed to have little effect.
And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feel anything at all.
AIUI what you're calling microdosing is still in the realm of macrodosing, and no shit your working memory and time management was affected. What you were feeling were low-key hallucinations.
I do agree with the GP though, sometimes the thing you need is to just jump into a full on 100-150ug trip and hang out in it for the day. Let yourself regain some of that open state and change up the habitual patterns you may not know you're locked into over the course of the next days and weeks. I personally end up doing it about once a year, give or take, and it always ends up being a positive experience (if sometimes difficult).
That is not the point of micro-dosing. What would be the purpose of taking it, if it does absolutely nothing at all?
The idea is that you are taking a very small dose, to cause a mild effect, and not so much that you trip out and start hallucinating.
This nonsense can be said of vitamins/supplements.
Microdosing psychedelics is basically treating them similarly AIUI. As with vitamins/supplements, just because you can't detect any acute effects doesn't mean they're not having any impact, especially long-term.
My own limited experience microdosing psilocybin for a couple weeks was that despite not feeling any acute effects at all, upon reflection post-facto my overall behavior was changed in interesting ways. Mostly related to priorities and paying attention to things I had long forgotten/ignored.
That is a silly comparison. Vitamins are essential to life and prevent disease. They are not psychoactive substances.
People microdose hallucinogens to "improve productivity, creativity and mood". That is an obvious detectable effect. These are potent psychoactive substances. Microdosing is comparable to caffeine and nicotine, not vitamins.
> My own limited experience microdosing psilocybin
Not a typical experience. Sounds like you nano-dosed on weak shrooms.
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
If you can tell a difference when you take it then it's a small dose, not a microdose.
Objectively scientifically measurably false. Typical microdoses have a noticeable effect.
https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
> "Oxytocin and serotonin, she found, work together in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens to produce the good feelings that come from social interaction."
LSD and similar drugs can definitely improve one's 3D-visualization capabilities, but I think this requires putting in a fair amount of work on the concepts beforehand. It's reminiscent of the saying, 'chance favors the prepared mind', so if you spend say a month working extensively with 3D models of molecules, proteins, platonic solids and what not and then (under controlled conditions) ingest a psychedelic, a cognitive breakthrough is possible, such as gaining the ability to visualize what a 3D object looks like after successive x-, y-, z- axis rotations and so on, which is useful skill in many fields, from auto mechanic to protein chemist to structural architect.
Nice to see this subject finally being studied in a rigorous manner, at least.
Well, this supports my hypothesis on why talking to people was a really good coping mechanism for ADHD. As far as I can tell, oxytocin isn't dampened(?) like dopamine presumably is.
(I say presumably because of the specific symptoms I had and also the specific ways in which stimulants help with them, but I've never had my brain dissected or anything to confirm, seeing as I'm still alive and all.)
I dream of a science based medical system in the future.
Modern science has put all those dumb ideas to rest!
Now we know that the true model is: `health = fn(bigPharmaMed1, bigPharmaMed2, bigPharmaMed3)`.
At 21, I did a 6 month sabbatical from college just to experiment with psychedelics.
Here's a few things I did while tripping: - Took a hike - Danced in nature at the sunset - Listened to music (1st time listening Pink Floyd, the TDSOTM is a must!) - Took a swim in my hometown cold river - Experienced the "yin-yang" almost as an emotion-like feeling. Observing on top of my hometown mountains the greenery growing up on top of the charcoal again, after 2 years, when wildfires took 80% out. The moon and sun being present helped. - Walked around and explored a new city with music on (I was with friends, they were sober) - Painted and did drawings (I suck at it, it was incredible just seeing the ink flow out of the pen) - I meditated - I wrote about stuff - I explored the online content people make (r/LSD has a list of links + a lot of people on these communities provide a lot of interesting content) - felt like a Neanderthal eating a very juicy peach for the first time by doing exactly the same - masturbation (as demisexual, I wish I could had met someone who I could have sex with) - I played computer and felt like a god (usually I'm a noob, on that day I was truly overpowered) - I went to the beach - To the raves (I hated it!) - I observed animals - I climbed some trees - I spent time with friends
So... ye. You can literally do anything and you'll have a radically different experience from what you would normally feel. Just seek out information first how to do it carefully. I would also not advise leaving to far from home until you understand the dosages and the impact it has on you.
Im sure we will find a use for this someday but research has to do more than prove it is sometimes good for people. We need to know how to consistently identify those people who need it and the outcome desired.
Are you aware of source-able examples of this?
I’ve been paying attention to the field for awhile, and I was under the impression that between pre-screening (people at risk for psychosis and a few other specific psychiatric issues should not participate), and proper set/setting, negative outcomes have been rare, and there is a high percentage of extremely positive outcomes.
The only time you can expect a drug will get approval without large reproduction of quantifiable outcomes is treating some aspect of a rare disease.
Honestly this sounds like an incredibly small amount of work when considering the work involved in traditional therapy and/or psychiatric treatment, which plays out on a timescale of years if not an entire lifetime for some, and collectively requires a “medical team” numerous times.
And when the outcomes involve radical (lasting) improvement to everyday experience for individuals with treatment-resistant depression, I strongly question the urge to trivialize this with scare quotes about “good” experiences and their apparent cost.
> The only time you can expect a drug will get approval without large reproduction of quantifiable outcomes is treating some aspect of a rare disease
The good news is that there’s been quite a bit of progress, and growing interest in medical circles due to the positive outcomes. I’d strongly recommend looking at the latest studies/results; it sounds like you may be operating on some very dated information.
Also, I didn't say I was unaware of anything in this field recently. I was replying to the specific individuals' research I mentioned earlier. I've seen plenty meta analyses and case studies but you need way more for this to be a viable medical prescription.
Finally, none of what I said is a statement on my opinion about whether this should be adopted or pursued more aggressively in medicine. You'd have a hard time finding anyone that wouldn't agree that prevention would be cheaper in the long run but that's not what you need to prove to a hospital system and the FDA. You need to have multiple phases of clinical trials and then convince a medical system that addition dedicated clinics are worth setting up for this.
There's a certain common form of hostility that often emerges from some circles when this subject comes up, and I may have read into something that's not there.
Yes, this needs trials. Yes, that's what's in progress right now. And the results so far are worthy of attention.
Exactly like happened with ketamine as esketamine.
Psychadelics seem to have the ability to leave the user (after the actual 'trip' has worn off) in a state of heightened receptiveness for a long duration (length is different dependent on the drug, but counts weeks in some cases). This state is called a 'critical period' and is usually experienced in childhood.
This state might allow for easier digestion of new material, forming new habits or skills or allow the user to be taken advantage of (Charles Manson, and his LSD fueled cult, is mentioned in this regard).
But so far it's looking like this is further confirming what us psychonauts have always sort of understood. It's very encouraging to get rigorous science to back the intuition up though. It will obviously help guide future research in clinical applications.
Here's the actual most recent research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3
"Here we demonstrate in mice that the ability to reopen the social reward learning critical period is a shared property across psychedelic drugs."
I actually ordered a lifetime supply of acid and got into big trouble from that.
Really good stuff, makes me joyous.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/1960s-rock-music-s...
The 300 tabs letter was scanned with lights and got caught.
The 50 tabs letter actually arrived but was obviously lost because customs began their investigation.
In Finland, LSD happens to be "an extremely dangerous" substance and 350 tabs gets "offensive / serious drug crime" (349 would not necessarily). I didn't know this; kind of funny.
However, this was all calculated in the sense that with all probability I will not go into prison nevertheless. Simply cannot try again any criminal activity in Finland / ever / for a long while.
LSD will last long time stored properly. Putting those small bags that packages use to remove moisture into airtight plastic bag and that into dark place where tempest doesn't vary lots.
I have thoughts on how it works, at a not physical realm.
What makes you flip bit to joyous? What chemical or physical or physiological change happens? Does it wear off?
I'm not depressed. I was at one point and found the solution. I have extensive joy. Yet I want to try because I think it does something that isn't the same bit flip you're experiencing.
What is does is exactly what the article explains - it unlocks the inner child in you. You will be curious about everything, everyday objects will suddenly become interesting as if you saw them for the first time. Your senses might become connected, some people “see” music with their eyes closed for example. It will make your mind go places that it normally rarely or never visits and you’ll be able to think about stuff from angles you didn’t pay attention to before.
It is a very powerful and useful tool if used correctly.
Also going to toilet feels strange.
Can you please expand on that?
I think, based upon the accounts of others - both what I have read, history, and people who have told me their stories, I think it bridges or removes the brain-to spiritual realm sensors. That is to say, an analogy - like suddenly being able to see infrared light. Something that does exist, but well within another realm of unseen reality, currently undetectable with existing senses. Now, hypothetically, IF there is a spiritual realm, hidden from our natural senses, if those senses were altered in a way, perhaps with natural chemicals found in nature, then suddenly those who were interacting with Angels, Demons, Monsters, Ghosts, etc. are not crazy or mentally ill but simply operating under enhanced or altered states of mind.
Joe/Suzanne describe their trips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn_bfhvoX2c
How can two people experience the exact same "grid effect" when on a trip when what they see is entirely in their mind?
Primarily she’s getting closer to a more appropriate definition of what a psychedelic is, with the more common modern usage including ketamine and MDMA instead of just tryptamines. All of them seem to re-open a critical period of learning through different mechanisms.