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Comment by patrick451 | Hacker News Reader

> or (if you can remember) generally how you felt when you were happy as a child.

Is this common? I mostly remember feeling frustrated as a child.

Here's how I'd describe what I think they are getting at.

At least for me, psychedelic drugs create a feeling of novelty and wonder surrounding everything I experience when I take them, as if they flip some kind of lightswitch of novelty which makes every experience appear novel again.

This is similar to memories of my childhood, where the most fond memories are those where I felt the novelty of experiencing things for the first time. Psychedelic drugs seem to recreate that effect.

Maybe you haven’t taken them enough. Of course everything seems different and novel the first couple dozen trips. You’re feeling new sensations and seeing things in a new way, sort of a “hello world” for your psyche. But after a few hundred, the novelty may wear off and the experience may be more somatic.

It's possible, but I like to think I'm a pretty experienced drug user (I estimate that I've tried maybe 10-20 different psychedelics, maybe 30-40 times in total) and this has been a consistent hallmark effect of all psychedelics for me.

I personally had no desire to continue with any of them after a handful of times? Things like LSD especially just got completely redundant, and annoying, and deeply deeply fatiguing. I could never understand people who had done it more than 5-10 or so times?

Pleasure-hedonism drugs like MDMA, sure, I get it. Though I have seen how it can ruin lives, too.

I think people that do psychedelics to an extreme degree, like Cary Grant it seems, are probably self treating or self medicating in some way. That’s different from experimentation, or recreation. Makes me wonder about shamans, and the cliche that psychiatrists have more mental health problems than the average person.

It's also similar on a qualia level though. That's what I was getting at. In the same way how something may taste spicy or something looks blue there is a certain distinct set of feelings/mode-of-consciousness I have only ever felt in childhood, during retreat, and when on LSD.

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