In college I lived with artists. A few of their artist friends come over with big sketch pads, pencils and whatever else artists use. They all drop acid while telling me they can't wait to see their amazing creations once their minds are opened. I went out for a few hours and came back to find them all sitting around the living room.
One sketch pad had a long black squiggle on it, the same design you'd make if you fell asleep while holding a pen to paper, and the rest had even less (One was literally two 1" lines forming a 90 degree angle). The next day they described the night as a huge success even though they never really attained any of their stated goals.
I don't doubt they had a good time, but seeing them utterly fail to use the drug as a tool kinda makes me skeptical of the productive benefits.
As a side note, if you want your ego stroked then ask a student artist for his opinion of your work. In the two years I lived with artists not a single negative comment was spoken by a student of anyone else's work. It was a guaranteed self-congratulatory feedback loop.
I have several drawings and paintings that I did under the influence that still amaze me today. I could never reproduce the techniques or forms. There were many times that I wouldn't spend the entire duration drawing/painting, but I had several marathon creation sessions under the influence of LSD.
We would always make sure to have plenty of supplies. Art or otherwise. Pen and paper was probably the most difficult. The effects on your vision are pronounced and drawing can be... hard. I always enjoyed oil pastels the most. Thick and flowing pools of color. Man those were good times.
I was in art school at the time, and critique (the ability to give and receive) was one of the greatest things I walked away with. We would formerly critique on a regular basis in class.
> I don't doubt they had a good time, but seeing them utterly fail to use the drug as a tool kinda makes me skeptical of the productive benefits.
This is akin to coming onto a software project, seeing a huge tangle of grotesque code produced by some other programmer(s), and determining that the tools were at fault. In both cases it is not necessarily the wand, but perhaps the magician.
A friend of mine tried to program while on Salvia (I gave him the programming problem to solve: basically implement Solomon Golombs self-describing sequence) and as he scribbled notes on paper, he kept muttering phrases like "what is she saying to me now". We didn't check the results until the next morning, but it turned out he had figured out an O(1) closed form for the sequence - it was very simple and very fast. He claimed a woman told him the answer.
I have since searched for good solutions to the same problem and the only thing I could find that is better than O(n) is a 70's paper on the sequence. The solution in the paper was complex (I didn't understand it - actually, I don't know if it even came up with a closed form or not...), certainly not as short and simple as the one my friend came up with. Sadly, we didn't think much of it and didn't write it down - which, of course, means I have no proof to back this story up[1]. Still, it was a pretty strange and interesting thing to witness.
[1] We also only tested it with a handful of numbers and did not make any attempt to formally prove its correctness, so its not impossible that it was just coincidence that it worked for the test inputs (we only verified low input numbers against the naive implementation). Still, I like to think it was a full solution.
In the case of this story, it's not what they drew while they were in a clinically insane state, but what doors that state opened for later sober pondering. Which may or may not have been productive.
To add balance to the statement about asking an art student to give an opinion of your work to get your ego stroked, I had a far different experience. I went to art school, and from foundation year (where you learn a smattering of everything: drawing, painting, sculpting, etc.) to senior year (when I focused on film and animation) I constantly had my work reviewed. Sometimes I got effusive praise, and sometimes I left class devastated. Usually, the feedback was right-on, usually honest, and usually came from a good place. Learning how to express criticism of another's work, and learning how to accept constructive criticism of my own, was one of the most valuable skills I learned from school.
To make this germane to hacking: I'm kind of baffled that peer code review isn't the cornerstone of this industry. No one works best in a bubble, and everyone has something to teach and to learn.
One last thought -- context for feedback matters. It's a helpful, kind, human thing to do to give someone some helpful encouragement, even when it hasn't been earned yet.
There's a major difference in the way the mind of a scientist or engineer works versus the mind of an art student. Whenever I take mushrooms, I usually follow a "schedule" of things to do and try. Others I know will literally lay on a couch for 10 hrs.
I did shrooms a few dozen times throughout my college years. Most of the time it was in a group environment just for fun. Sometimes we would try things like the artists you mentioned, but as we were all bio/engineer types it was never serious.
That said, I did perform a handful of solitary experiments where I would lock myself in my room with a programming assignment working non-stop for some 5-7 hours. The output was remarkable. But the drug was rough on my system and would take me days to recover.. so no more than once a month. Eventually stopped doing it altogether after a bad experience.
I took a pottery class last winter and I observed the positive feedback loop in action. As someone who is not used to constantly bullshitting, it really threw off my chi to listen to an overly peppy woman tell me how amazing my work was even though we both knew it was garbage.
That's hilarious, the exact same thing happened to me. I used to draw some pretty interesting stuff while in college.
Then I took some mushrooms with a pen and paper in hand. All I could draw was stupid smiley faces. It was just inane gibberish.
So yeah, I guess there is a bit of a myth about LSD and creativity... at least anything that involves fine motor skills and concentration. In this context it was a creativity killer.
I can certainly believe this - LSD is screwy like this.
On one of the very few occasions I used it, I had what I thought was a profound understanding of how everything in the universe was connected together. I couldn't recall what the big idea was afterwards (or to this day), but I'm quite certain it was just my brain making up nonsense.
It was not functioning as a tool... immediately? It's a interesting experience, if they couldn't produce it while it was happening it that doesn't mean it didn't influence them in the long run.
If you have any predisposition towards psychosis, in family history or personally, please avoid LSD.
For those firmly rooted, it might be pleasurable or productive to become a little less so. If you're already sometimes on the edge, LSD can push you over.
This happened to one of my best friends. Growing up he was crazy, creative, always saw things a little differently, prone to manic behavior. After a year of regular LSD use he was unable to form a coherent sentence. Please be careful.
I'm very positive on LSD in general, but even to me, "a year of regular LSD use", or any kind of "regular" use sounds extreme and dangerous. I guess I take it for granted that something so intense should be approached with a great deal of respect and caution. I do find it odd that people naturally "get" this for things like driving a car, hang-gliding, back-country skiing, skateboarding, parkour.... but often shut down mentally when the subject is illegal drugs.
Thanks for posting this. I've had two friends profoundly affected by the drug. One is now schizophrenic after taking a large dose and will have a lifelong struggle. Thankfully he is supported by his family and his mom is a psychiatrist.
The second took a large dose about a decade ago and after being a very conservative straight guy. Mormon. Straight A's. Didn't take drugs or drink. He immediately dropped out of school, moved in with a prostitute and decided he wanted a sex change. That was 10 years ago. Last year he had sex reassignment surgery in Thailand.
In both cases I suspect the drug opened pathways that were suppressed. I see LSD as a truly mind altering drug. In rare cases it alters minds for the better. In many cases it exposes latent problems that can be debilitating and life-destroying.
I've lost two good friends to this. Definitely be careful. A lot of government drug propaganda may be bullshit but it doesn't mean there aren't dangers.
I don't want to disagree with your opinion of the cause of your friend's psychosis, as you observed the process and I didn't, but as a general statement I'd like to put out there that the time of life when schizophrenia presents (late teens, twenties, early thirties) correlates with the years when people usually experiment with drugs. This has been true since before LSD existed.
I have no idea if this is rooted in scientific fact, but I've had such a similar experience I almost wonder if we are talking about the same guy. The sad thing is that we almost certainly aren't.
Note though that his experiences were relatively minor compared to what some other people go through. Here are a couple songs about the same basic experience:
There's no question that people with a family history or other predisposition toward mental illness shouldn't use LSD. In general shrooms seem to be somewhat safer, probably because they last only a third as long. They're still not safe for someone with mental illness or a predisposition toward it, but they seem to be mostly safe for everyone else as long as those partaking take the time to learn and follow all of the relevant best practices. (Including being old enough; you always hear about all the psychedelic researchers who lived until old age, but what you don't hear is that none of them discovered drugs until their 30s.)
Yeah, you're not kidding. I took shrooms, A (LSD), E, smoked some marijuana (not much), tried cat a few times and generally partied it up for maybe a decade. At some point I found out that my mother had suffered from schizophrenia, which would explain why I got my money's worth out of marijuana, shrooms and A. I had a pretty hard time working out what was real.
Bad trips were something else. We're talking about seeing everything bad about myself and humanity, which considering the basically selfish nature of a human is quite something. Very black-and-white, good-and-evil thinking, alternating between extremes. Synthesizing sounds, colors, physical things around me. When I read about people going nuts or harming themselves, I'm not surprised. Very black-and-white thinking can lead to some alarming thoughts.
I'd find that if I spent a few hours spiralling on that I could lose the ego totally and emerge with a very objective sense of the world. A world in balance, things as they should be, personal and friends' faults accepted, insights into myself and others. I definitely made some amazing self-discoveries, but at significant risk.
Reminds me of Paul Erdős, who used amphetamines (think Adderall) for a similar purpose.
After 1971 Erdős also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.
The difference is that amphetamines, though potentially addictive and dangerous, can actually help you do math or programming. I'm skeptical that people can code better (if at all) while on LSD.
I've taken enormous (read: irresponsible) quantities of psychotropics over the course of my life: psilocybin in particular, but I've had experiences with everything from pure LSD to exotic molecules without names.
The intensity and resonance of those experiences are such that it's sometimes hard to reconcile with the small fraction of the population who have known them. It's an essential part, to me, of the human experience.
That said, when I was younger I didn't always treat them with the respect they deserve, and it's difficult to determine in retrospect the effects they've had on my life - in part because I was still not yet fully formed when I began. I don't regret the path I've taken, but in retrospect it seems a fluke that I've arrived where I am with my sanity (arguably) intact; or even that I've arrived at this age at all.
To me, these are incredibly powerful tools, with amazing potential for both creation and destruction - but the infrastructure to support their responsible use didn't evolve at a pace to match their sudden explosion into mainstream awareness in the 60's, and the results were terrifying to many; alcohol can be an amazingly destructive drug, but societies have had thousands of years to grow comfortable with its effects, and to learn to mitigate its worst excesses.
As a result of this (perhaps rightly deserved) fear and confusion, we've collectively overreacted, not only banning them outright, but elevating their status to one of our most fiercely prosecuted taboos. I sincerely hope that this will change at some point, and that it will coincide with an evolution of the knowledge and wisdom required to use them responsibly.
To me it's evident that there are strong positive outcomes to be gained, from personal and artistic growth to effective treatment for psychiatric afflictions - but more than any other substances I know of, these drugs are chameleons that can change form entirely in response to one's approach to them. They rarely reward foolishness or irresponsibility.
Now, as ever, cultists are everywhere; I put my trust in science. And I hope that as the stigmas attached to these substances subside, our governments have the sense to entrust the exploration of this potential to scientists.
There are probably some people reading these discussions and considering taking an "hallucinogen" for the first time.
If you're thinking about it, please, do your homework. Thoroughly. As others have cautioned, drug use can catalyze psychosis, the permanent emergence of bipolar disorder, etc. Consider these risks as they relate to you in particular (your family history, etc) very carefully, and if you decide to go ahead, be sure you prepare with as much care, consideration and thoroughness as it deserves.
And if you do, I'd consider avoiding LSD unless you can guarantee its legitimacy and purity. Mescaline is readily producible from common cacti (San Pedro, et al), has a long history of safe use by e.g. native americans §, and will likely provide you with a more helpful experience. It's also much harder to take too much of than e.g. psilocybin or LSD, which are very easy to consume a psychiatrically dangerous dose of.
There is a wealth of information out there - some of it spurious, but much of it helpful. I would encourage wider use of psychedelics, but I strongly qualify this encouragement. Not everyone should try them: some people are irreparably damaged by their first trip, and I don't claim to be able to say why; nor will they reward being treated without the utmost respect.
That said, after almost a decade of abstinence from tripping, I discovered mescaline, and I intend to continue to use it up to a few times a year. Thus far I've found it to be an extremely rewarding and positive force in my life; I'm an atheist, but you could say it's my replacement for religion.
I am very grateful for my experiences with LSD, and wouldn't trade them for anything in the world.
The best way I could describe its practical long-term effects, (once you've come down and realized you haven't broken your brain) is that your previous knowledge has been helpfully flagged as invalid, allowing you to acquire new knowledge in a less stupid, more nuanced manner. Everything you knew about groups of people, genders, categories of objects, in short all the knowledge that allows you to assess a situation and make sense of the world is marked as fallacious, and your mind is now freed to learn how the world works in a more sophisticated manner.
I think everyone should take the opportunity to try it out, if given the chance to do so in a comfortable setting (comfortable socially - roughing it in the wild is fine, maybe even encouraged).
The best way I could describe its practical long-term effects, (once you've come down and realized you haven't broken your brain) is that your previous knowledge has been helpfully flagged as invalid, allowing you to acquire new knowledge in a less stupid, more nuanced manner.
I am curious about whether or not you have ever tried living in another country with a different language and culture for an extended period of time, and then returning to live in a more familiar culture. That too can have the effect of flagging previous knowledge as invalid, allowing you to acquire new knowledge. Perhaps you have done this as well, but I'm not sure about that from what you say about yourself here. As G.K. Chesterton put it, "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
My tuppence: I was an average student, perhaps an underachiever - I was the youngest in my class... Anyway around about the closing years of high school I discovered the recreational joy of LSD, which I took despite superman comics warning me of the dangers. For a while I dropped out (3 years) and enjoyed a life that was devoid of computers (until that point I had spent all my time on 8bit then 16bit computers, leading up to an 8086 pc). I lived in a bedsit and had no outlook or any desire to "get a life". At some point during an acid trip, I found myself alone and spent a long time in introspection about where I was and where I would like to be. Long story short, fast forward 20 years, I'm married with a beautiful daughter, a great senior technical job with a very public FTSE 100 media company, a couple of irons in the fire with personal software projects I'm writing (in fact, I'm actually procrastinating here, I should be coding!) and a generally great life. If I had continued on my "wastrel" route those years ago, my life wouldn't have been as rosy (though perhaps less stressful). I attribute my conversion from waster to nerd entirely to my experiences with LSD. I thoroughly recommend it to others (though I will caution that I have seen downsides in some of my comrades, not deaths you understand, but longer lead-times to achieving their goals). This article (though lacking in specifics) does resonate very strongly with my life experience. Final question (to myself) would I use LSD again? Answer... not sure, I've done a whole lot of living in the last 20 years, not sure I want to reprogram the grey matter at this stage - maybe again in 10 years...
I've had a relatively drug-free life, although I've often volunteered to be the sober friend while everyone else imbibes. I've never regretted it, I've had some great times not on drugs.
But if you've ever seen Little Miss Sunshine, the grandfather has a perspective on drug use that I've adopted wholeheartedly:
Don't you start taking that shit. When you're young, you're crazy to do that stuff.
What about you?
I'm old! When you're old, you're crazy not to do it.
I predict that LSD will become much more popular in the near future due to services like The Silk Road and Bitcoins. While other drugs can be detected quite easily in mail with scanners and such, LSD in plotter form can't be detected without actually opening every letter.
For people like me, who didn't know what "Silk Road" was in this context:
It's an anonymous market for drugs using Tor. [1] Bitcoins are used for paying.
My sole, true goal in life has been to attain deepest levels of consciousness, connectedness with the being, and crystal clear clarity and to do so without external dependencies like drugs.
I have struggled a lot with the odds and gotten only a few moments of what I am after. But I realized one thing in the process that it requires quite a bit of unlearning, forgiving, accepting, non-reacting and seeing it as it is.
I still haven't lost any amount of belief in the feasibility of my experiment as I have gone closer to it - the fact that the degree and duration of my experience can be controlled by me alone is a powerful realization.
Out of curiosity - do you ever drink wine with a meal? Have a beer with friends? Sip coffee discussing exciting new projects or dissecting a problem?
These are all "drugs". Anything we put into our body, food or otherwise, is a "drug" and serves to alter us in some way.
You will always have "external dependencies". You are dependent on food and water to live, social interaction to love and to feel friendship, and other humans to make your life possible through manufacture, farming, and medical care, among other things.
We all have external dependencies. One of the beauties of ingesting hallucinogens is that this is the first realization you will likely have.
Most drugs are not mind expanders, but blockage solvers. We care a lot about what others say and think. This is blocking our creativity. But you don't need drugs to solve this blockage. You can train yourself letting creativity flow and don't care about what other people say.
A simple method is to start extreme. I think this applies to both graphic creativity as for programming creativity.
There's no reason to attempt to prove (because you can't) or even speculate (because it doesn't matter) whether any of the "best" programmers anyone has or could suggest have done LSD or still do on a regular basis. However, I find it odd when people seem to insist that LSD is completely unnecessary or necessary to do things. Like it has been brought up before, Steve Jobs cites LSD as one of the most important experiences of his life. To rate it that highly would imply that he feels it somehow changed his psyche in such a way that it impacted who he is today. If that's the case, then you could (not concretely, but with good certainty) argue that LSD can have a positive effect on people's creativity. In fact, it does not actually matter whether it does or not so much as whether people perceive that it does (this could all be a placebo effect). Thus, the worst arguments that can be made on each end of the spectrum are that a) LSD is always unnecessary to foster innovation (Steve Jobs would argue it fostered his innovation in a way that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't tripped) and b) that everyone should do LSD at least once because it will enable them to accomplish more than otherwise possible. The choice is obviously personal and would work out beneficially for some and be fruitful for others. The important part is to remove the stigma of doing illicit drugs and to recognize that they can provide psychological benefits that are otherwise unrealizable OR acid can give you the best time you've ever had sitting on a couch. Most people that do it develop personal realizations that don't extend beyond themselves and that's all. It would be nice if people stopped passing judgment on those who belong to the other camp and instead offered their insights into why they have or haven't felt compelled to do acid. (Full disclosure: I've tripped about a dozen times over the last four years)
Let me chime in here with some personal experience. I am pretty much addicted to marijuana in terms of working and enjoying it.
That is, I don't really enjoy programming nearly as much compared to when I am a bit baked. Mind you, I can work.. but it feels like such a chore (not always but I'm talking typically). There are a lot of us like this.
As for LSD.. I have had many revelations while tripping, some I've had to later reject (which is a difficult process) and probably some that I should but have not yet. However, have learned a tremendous amount from whatever it is that is happening while tripping.
I really think most people should trip their face off at least once. What it feels like is that you are tapping into something truer and deeper (when you are tripping, the hallucinating reality is the 'real' reality, that is how you experience it). I don't know what is actually happening, but it can be just absolutely amazing, or absolutely devestating.
Take for instance, having an intellectual idea of the universe; like what it actually is. Some people are fascinated by thinking about these things anyway, others can't be bothered.
Now imagine, instead of having some mathematical and intuitive understanding of the 'building blocks' of the universe.. you were thrown into hyperspace and pulled of your body and shown what the universe is, and what your place in it is. And it's a truly beautiful, elegant thing. And many many people have seen the same thing (it's the universal 'mystical experience').
It's like you were pulled out of the matrix, if just for a bit, and you can actually talk to other people about it, because it happens to lots of people who trip.
Whether it is actually giving insight or not (it could definitely be some idiosyncratic interaction that lsd is having with your brain to make you see things in a certain way); it's at the very least fun, and can have a drastic effect on the way you oritent yourself toward reality.
It can also affect your mental processes--LSD has the effect (at least in me) of continually changing the level of abstraction I am thinking in. You see a situation, then you see the bigger picture of that situation, and on and on until your mind can't even fathom any thing anymore.
You set out to write a bash script to move some files, you suddenly realize an amazingly better way to do bash scripting, which makes you realize some basic change in the OS that would make UI 1000% friendlier, then you realize we shouldn't be using computers at all, then you realize you are here on earth for a purpose and you are wasting your life then your buddy is like--YO you're spacing off and the chain of thinking starts over.
> You set out to write a bash script to move some files, you suddenly realize an amazingly better way to do bash scripting, which makes you realize some basic change in the OS that would make UI 1000% friendlier, then you realize we shouldn't be using computers at all, then you realize you are here on earth for a purpose and you are wasting your life then your buddy is like--YO you're spacing off and the chain of thinking starts over.
But let's be honest here: If your goal was to write the script, that sounds horribly unproductive.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Except for me, weed keeps pushing up the levels of abstraction (good for architecting software), but LSD makes things hypperreal. IMO, LSD should only be taken on a desolate beach at night, with people who are dear to you.
What in the name of Albert Hoffman has the title got to do with the actual article? They talk about a couple scientists and a symposium on LSD.
How is this a 'geek wonder drug'? CAFFEINE is the geek wonder drug. LSD probably contributes less than 5% of the world's drug-induced geek accomplishments.
This article doesn't do a very good job explaining what it is that makes psychedelic drugs so intellectually interesting. I'd recommend listening to Terence McKenna talking about his childhood and how he discovered psychedelics.
It is amazing what psychedelics can bring to the table. Once you step outside of the stream of consciousness society creates for us, it's tough to want to be apart of it again. You feel free. No longer a cog in the machine, but perhaps more an observer or tinkerer. I realized for myself that I no longer have to be a part of that. It is truly out of the box thinking. I find myself outside of the box and generally I'm trying to find the boundaries. This may or may not effect my programming abilities, but it definitely puts the time I have in this world into perspective. The ability to abstract and visualize connections between objects has most definitely increased since experimentation, but I'm not sure if that's a bi-product of myself programming more, or the drugs themselves. All I know is that I would never take those moments back, the bad and the good, as they have shaped who I am and what I strive to be.
I offer some of the highlights of my personal experience with LSD, anonymously, due to the very unfortunate stigma. I'm very positive on its ability to unlock potential, trigger insights, expand perspective, and facilitate learning, even in spite of having experienced a few bad trips. Although the experience is deeply personal, I'll try to offer the most concrete accounts I can.
First, of all the hundreds of little insights, interesting trains of thought, and connections made between previously unrelated ideas, there is one revelation in particular that floats to the top of my mind. It's this: LSD confronts you, in an extremely visceral way, with the fact that the entire universe that you perceive and interact with, the whole world and everybody in it, is entirely in your own mind at all times. Sure, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that it's all derived from an objective, external world - but you've never interacted directly with that one, and in fact you can't.
Now, you might say that you already "know" this, philosophically. You can even do the smug, Internet know-it-all thing and say this is completely pedestrian, name-drop Descartes and a bunch of other philosophers, and hit me with a zinger about how this is about as deep as "The Matrix". But I'm not claiming that LSD leads you to the philosophical idea; I'm saying that it slaps you right in the face with it, viscerally. It doesn't tell you, so that you have to think about it in the abstract; it shows you, literally with your own eyes. It's the difference between knowing what the Grand Canyon looks like from pictures, and standing on the edge of it.
It is very common for people to describe the onset of their first trip in terms of waking up, for the first time, ever. I'd describe it this way, too. It feels like waking up for the first time, and realizing that you'd been dreaming your whole life. Of course, this is really just an analogy, and it's more than just a feeling. It's a sudden shift in your actual perceptual processes, which are largely chemical, and have now been altered. But by the mere fact of them being altered, you realize that the default way of perceiving is just that - just a default. It isn't more "true" or more "real" - it's a default, it's massively culturally constructed, and it's characterized by a certain amount of non-questioning of assumptions. What's a color? What's a country? What's a "week"? What's a leader? What is solid? Which way is up? What's a job? Your brain starts trying to decompose every concept into basic principles, and you realize that for a lot of things in the human world, there are none. Just made-up, widespread beliefs that cause lots of people to act as-if, and in so doing, make them "real". Again, there is a difference between merely realizing this philosophically, and being transported outside of the web of culturally-reinforced beliefs and observing it from the outside.
So there's a lot of shedding of constructed concepts. What's left when all that chaff blows away? Whatever it is, it a) seems a lot more real, and b) is obscured in normal consciousness. I'm not suggesting that it would be desirable to permanently lose the ability to think on the level of appointments, check-writing, stop-lights, prospectuses, and the rest of the "mundane". I am definitely suggesting that what is left of experience after all that is obliterated from consciousness is worth seeing. There are parallels here with Buddhism and enlightenment traditions. It's also extremely common for people to offer meditation as a substitute. It's perfectly fine if you don't want to do illegal drugs - hardly anyone will fault you. But don't fool yourself that you're getting the same effect. I've practiced meditation too, and while it does alter consciousness, there are many meaningfully different altered states - they are in no way equivalent or substitutable. (Think about it - if you can simulate an LSD trip by meditating, do you simulate a K trip by meditating differently? Can you meditate yourself to a heroin high by a different technique? LSD isn't just another interchangeable "enlightened" state - they're all specific in their sets of effects. I have no doubt that I too have missed out on plenty of profound experiences by not taking, doing, seeing, or achieving any number of things. It's a big world.)
Sadly, this is turning into a wall of text, and I could still go on for the rest of the day. So, I'm going to force myself to wrap up with just a few more short highlights:
* I learned OpenGL while tripping. The subjective experience was of the information slipping into my brain effortlessly. Normally, I have to read sentences and paragraphs multiple times for them to "sink in". That time, I just skimmed, and understood. The next day, sober, I wrote a couple of neat height-field/terrain programs in OpenGL. Of course we've all learned dozens of even more complicated topics without any drugs, so this anecdote is meaningless, right? All I'm talking about is what it felt like to learn it. It felt effortless by comparison to the way I normally learn. Placebo? Selective memory? Your other favorite bias? Might be interesting to know definitively - but I still had a really good time that night.
* I once won a game of Mastermind on the first turn, without making any other guesses. This seriously freaked out the other people at the table. I wasn't tripping at the time, but I was in a distinctly "trippy" mentality - so much so that I was having a mini-flashback by the end of the turn. What I had done was to realize that the room was a closed system, containing the information about the winning pattern, and that as part of that system, I might have access to the information via other channels. Basically, I just paid very close attention to the other person's body language as I fingered different colored pegs, and allowed him to inadvertently "tell" me the correct colors and order.
* I once did a drawing of a woman from the neck up, while tripping. When I started drawing her hair, I got lost. I was drawing hair for what seemed like hours. I was hiding dozens of other, nested, drawings inside the texture of the hair. It still looked more or less like hair, but if you really looked at it, it was teeming with a whole bunch of unrelated drawings. Sure, I could do the same thing now, but it had never before occurred to me to try that. There is something about tripping that is inherently amenable to that kind of recursive, fractal thinking.
In short, don't knock subjective experiences. The enjoyment of music is a subjective experience, is it not?
There is a theory that the connection between the right and left hemisphere of the human brain has been diminishing over generations (The ancients used to audibly hear the voice of the gods, which was likely the right hemisphere, but that ability diminished around 4-5000 years ago).
I wonder if all these psychadelic drugs are doing is enhancing the communication between right and left, or perhaps suppressing the left such that the right takes greater charge? The left does, after all, have very narrow focus as opposed to the right, which processes greater but less focused patterns.
Around the world, there are many different patterns of regulation of drugs, and here in the United States, schedule I controlled substances like LSD can be used for legitimate medical research. Research on new drugs is a multibillion dollar industry in several different countries. But there is a dearth of well statistically controlled studies of the safety and effectiveness of LSD for any purpose. Indeed, medical research more often pursues the issue of how to help emergency room patients who appear for treatment of psychotic symptoms triggered by illicit use of LSD.
On the specific issue of programmer or scientist creativity and productivity, that too is a much researched field, but again there are not well controlled studies showing that anyone increases productivity or creativity in any occupation while using LSD. The checkered academic career of Timothy Leary is instructive in this regard. What research shows makes a huge difference in the productivity and work quality of programmers and scientists is steady deliberate practice building up problem-solving skills and growth mindset, along with accumulation of domain-specific knowledge.
[+] [-] parfe|15 years ago|reply
One sketch pad had a long black squiggle on it, the same design you'd make if you fell asleep while holding a pen to paper, and the rest had even less (One was literally two 1" lines forming a 90 degree angle). The next day they described the night as a huge success even though they never really attained any of their stated goals.
I don't doubt they had a good time, but seeing them utterly fail to use the drug as a tool kinda makes me skeptical of the productive benefits.
As a side note, if you want your ego stroked then ask a student artist for his opinion of your work. In the two years I lived with artists not a single negative comment was spoken by a student of anyone else's work. It was a guaranteed self-congratulatory feedback loop.
[+] [-] joelhooks|15 years ago|reply
We would always make sure to have plenty of supplies. Art or otherwise. Pen and paper was probably the most difficult. The effects on your vision are pronounced and drawing can be... hard. I always enjoyed oil pastels the most. Thick and flowing pools of color. Man those were good times.
I was in art school at the time, and critique (the ability to give and receive) was one of the greatest things I walked away with. We would formerly critique on a regular basis in class.
> I don't doubt they had a good time, but seeing them utterly fail to use the drug as a tool kinda makes me skeptical of the productive benefits.
This is akin to coming onto a software project, seeing a huge tangle of grotesque code produced by some other programmer(s), and determining that the tools were at fault. In both cases it is not necessarily the wand, but perhaps the magician.
[+] [-] dkersten|15 years ago|reply
A friend of mine tried to program while on Salvia (I gave him the programming problem to solve: basically implement Solomon Golombs self-describing sequence) and as he scribbled notes on paper, he kept muttering phrases like "what is she saying to me now". We didn't check the results until the next morning, but it turned out he had figured out an O(1) closed form for the sequence - it was very simple and very fast. He claimed a woman told him the answer.
I have since searched for good solutions to the same problem and the only thing I could find that is better than O(n) is a 70's paper on the sequence. The solution in the paper was complex (I didn't understand it - actually, I don't know if it even came up with a closed form or not...), certainly not as short and simple as the one my friend came up with. Sadly, we didn't think much of it and didn't write it down - which, of course, means I have no proof to back this story up[1]. Still, it was a pretty strange and interesting thing to witness.
[1] We also only tested it with a handful of numbers and did not make any attempt to formally prove its correctness, so its not impossible that it was just coincidence that it worked for the test inputs (we only verified low input numbers against the naive implementation). Still, I like to think it was a full solution.
[+] [-] jbooth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geraldalewis|15 years ago|reply
To make this germane to hacking: I'm kind of baffled that peer code review isn't the cornerstone of this industry. No one works best in a bubble, and everyone has something to teach and to learn.
One last thought -- context for feedback matters. It's a helpful, kind, human thing to do to give someone some helpful encouragement, even when it hasn't been earned yet.
[+] [-] splitrocket|15 years ago|reply
There is a distinct diregression, regression, and then a peak of intense beauty.
[+] [-] bherms|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandall10|15 years ago|reply
That said, I did perform a handful of solitary experiments where I would lock myself in my room with a programming assignment working non-stop for some 5-7 hours. The output was remarkable. But the drug was rough on my system and would take me days to recover.. so no more than once a month. Eventually stopped doing it altogether after a bad experience.
[+] [-] andywood|15 years ago|reply
http://www.entheology.org/edoto/anmviewer.asp?a=295&z=4
http://www.google.com/search?q=alex%20grey&tbm=isch
[+] [-] droz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|15 years ago|reply
Then I took some mushrooms with a pen and paper in hand. All I could draw was stupid smiley faces. It was just inane gibberish.
So yeah, I guess there is a bit of a myth about LSD and creativity... at least anything that involves fine motor skills and concentration. In this context it was a creativity killer.
[+] [-] rwmj|15 years ago|reply
On one of the very few occasions I used it, I had what I thought was a profound understanding of how everything in the universe was connected together. I couldn't recall what the big idea was afterwards (or to this day), but I'm quite certain it was just my brain making up nonsense.
[+] [-] TheloniusPhunk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napierzaza|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moultano|15 years ago|reply
For those firmly rooted, it might be pleasurable or productive to become a little less so. If you're already sometimes on the edge, LSD can push you over.
This happened to one of my best friends. Growing up he was crazy, creative, always saw things a little differently, prone to manic behavior. After a year of regular LSD use he was unable to form a coherent sentence. Please be careful.
[+] [-] anonLSD|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d2|15 years ago|reply
The second took a large dose about a decade ago and after being a very conservative straight guy. Mormon. Straight A's. Didn't take drugs or drink. He immediately dropped out of school, moved in with a prostitute and decided he wanted a sex change. That was 10 years ago. Last year he had sex reassignment surgery in Thailand.
In both cases I suspect the drug opened pathways that were suppressed. I see LSD as a truly mind altering drug. In rare cases it alters minds for the better. In many cases it exposes latent problems that can be debilitating and life-destroying.
[+] [-] cageface|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|15 years ago|reply
http://schizophrenia.com/photos/szage.onset.gif
from
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8178665?dopt=Abstract
[+] [-] geebee|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
http://vimeo.com/15959433
Note though that his experiences were relatively minor compared to what some other people go through. Here are a couple songs about the same basic experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7HBCSF9nfs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSSmLYAjvRg
There's no question that people with a family history or other predisposition toward mental illness shouldn't use LSD. In general shrooms seem to be somewhat safer, probably because they last only a third as long. They're still not safe for someone with mental illness or a predisposition toward it, but they seem to be mostly safe for everyone else as long as those partaking take the time to learn and follow all of the relevant best practices. (Including being old enough; you always hear about all the psychedelic researchers who lived until old age, but what you don't hear is that none of them discovered drugs until their 30s.)
[+] [-] Zanon|15 years ago|reply
Bad trips were something else. We're talking about seeing everything bad about myself and humanity, which considering the basically selfish nature of a human is quite something. Very black-and-white, good-and-evil thinking, alternating between extremes. Synthesizing sounds, colors, physical things around me. When I read about people going nuts or harming themselves, I'm not surprised. Very black-and-white thinking can lead to some alarming thoughts.
I'd find that if I spent a few hours spiralling on that I could lose the ego totally and emerge with a very objective sense of the world. A world in balance, things as they should be, personal and friends' faults accepted, insights into myself and others. I definitely made some amazing self-discoveries, but at significant risk.
[+] [-] simonsarris|15 years ago|reply
After 1971 Erdős also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use.
[+] [-] nandemo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidiviciveni|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blankslate|15 years ago|reply
The intensity and resonance of those experiences are such that it's sometimes hard to reconcile with the small fraction of the population who have known them. It's an essential part, to me, of the human experience.
That said, when I was younger I didn't always treat them with the respect they deserve, and it's difficult to determine in retrospect the effects they've had on my life - in part because I was still not yet fully formed when I began. I don't regret the path I've taken, but in retrospect it seems a fluke that I've arrived where I am with my sanity (arguably) intact; or even that I've arrived at this age at all.
To me, these are incredibly powerful tools, with amazing potential for both creation and destruction - but the infrastructure to support their responsible use didn't evolve at a pace to match their sudden explosion into mainstream awareness in the 60's, and the results were terrifying to many; alcohol can be an amazingly destructive drug, but societies have had thousands of years to grow comfortable with its effects, and to learn to mitigate its worst excesses.
As a result of this (perhaps rightly deserved) fear and confusion, we've collectively overreacted, not only banning them outright, but elevating their status to one of our most fiercely prosecuted taboos. I sincerely hope that this will change at some point, and that it will coincide with an evolution of the knowledge and wisdom required to use them responsibly.
To me it's evident that there are strong positive outcomes to be gained, from personal and artistic growth to effective treatment for psychiatric afflictions - but more than any other substances I know of, these drugs are chameleons that can change form entirely in response to one's approach to them. They rarely reward foolishness or irresponsibility.
Now, as ever, cultists are everywhere; I put my trust in science. And I hope that as the stigmas attached to these substances subside, our governments have the sense to entrust the exploration of this potential to scientists.
[+] [-] blankslate|15 years ago|reply
If you're thinking about it, please, do your homework. Thoroughly. As others have cautioned, drug use can catalyze psychosis, the permanent emergence of bipolar disorder, etc. Consider these risks as they relate to you in particular (your family history, etc) very carefully, and if you decide to go ahead, be sure you prepare with as much care, consideration and thoroughness as it deserves.
And if you do, I'd consider avoiding LSD unless you can guarantee its legitimacy and purity. Mescaline is readily producible from common cacti (San Pedro, et al), has a long history of safe use by e.g. native americans §, and will likely provide you with a more helpful experience. It's also much harder to take too much of than e.g. psilocybin or LSD, which are very easy to consume a psychiatrically dangerous dose of.
There is a wealth of information out there - some of it spurious, but much of it helpful. I would encourage wider use of psychedelics, but I strongly qualify this encouragement. Not everyone should try them: some people are irreparably damaged by their first trip, and I don't claim to be able to say why; nor will they reward being treated without the utmost respect.
That said, after almost a decade of abstinence from tripping, I discovered mescaline, and I intend to continue to use it up to a few times a year. Thus far I've found it to be an extremely rewarding and positive force in my life; I'm an atheist, but you could say it's my replacement for religion.
§ http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2005/11/69477 - "Peyote won't rot your brain"
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|15 years ago|reply
The best way I could describe its practical long-term effects, (once you've come down and realized you haven't broken your brain) is that your previous knowledge has been helpfully flagged as invalid, allowing you to acquire new knowledge in a less stupid, more nuanced manner. Everything you knew about groups of people, genders, categories of objects, in short all the knowledge that allows you to assess a situation and make sense of the world is marked as fallacious, and your mind is now freed to learn how the world works in a more sophisticated manner.
I think everyone should take the opportunity to try it out, if given the chance to do so in a comfortable setting (comfortable socially - roughing it in the wild is fine, maybe even encouraged).
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
I am curious about whether or not you have ever tried living in another country with a different language and culture for an extended period of time, and then returning to live in a more familiar culture. That too can have the effect of flagging previous knowledge as invalid, allowing you to acquire new knowledge. Perhaps you have done this as well, but I'm not sure about that from what you say about yourself here. As G.K. Chesterton put it, "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
[+] [-] bliss|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelchisari|15 years ago|reply
But if you've ever seen Little Miss Sunshine, the grandfather has a perspective on drug use that I've adopted wholeheartedly:
Don't you start taking that shit. When you're young, you're crazy to do that stuff.
What about you?
I'm old! When you're old, you're crazy not to do it.
[+] [-] kristofferR|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johkra|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=3984.0
[+] [-] blinkingled|15 years ago|reply
I have struggled a lot with the odds and gotten only a few moments of what I am after. But I realized one thing in the process that it requires quite a bit of unlearning, forgiving, accepting, non-reacting and seeing it as it is. I still haven't lost any amount of belief in the feasibility of my experiment as I have gone closer to it - the fact that the degree and duration of my experience can be controlled by me alone is a powerful realization.
Baba Ram Dass' book referenced in one of the comments on the wired site might be worth trying out - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00486UF8Y/ref=s9_simh_gw_p...
[+] [-] cal5k|15 years ago|reply
These are all "drugs". Anything we put into our body, food or otherwise, is a "drug" and serves to alter us in some way.
You will always have "external dependencies". You are dependent on food and water to live, social interaction to love and to feel friendship, and other humans to make your life possible through manufacture, farming, and medical care, among other things.
We all have external dependencies. One of the beauties of ingesting hallucinogens is that this is the first realization you will likely have.
[+] [-] tintin|15 years ago|reply
A simple method is to start extreme. I think this applies to both graphic creativity as for programming creativity.
They also call it "out of the box" thinking.
[+] [-] schmittz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eof|15 years ago|reply
That is, I don't really enjoy programming nearly as much compared to when I am a bit baked. Mind you, I can work.. but it feels like such a chore (not always but I'm talking typically). There are a lot of us like this.
As for LSD.. I have had many revelations while tripping, some I've had to later reject (which is a difficult process) and probably some that I should but have not yet. However, have learned a tremendous amount from whatever it is that is happening while tripping.
I really think most people should trip their face off at least once. What it feels like is that you are tapping into something truer and deeper (when you are tripping, the hallucinating reality is the 'real' reality, that is how you experience it). I don't know what is actually happening, but it can be just absolutely amazing, or absolutely devestating.
Take for instance, having an intellectual idea of the universe; like what it actually is. Some people are fascinated by thinking about these things anyway, others can't be bothered.
Now imagine, instead of having some mathematical and intuitive understanding of the 'building blocks' of the universe.. you were thrown into hyperspace and pulled of your body and shown what the universe is, and what your place in it is. And it's a truly beautiful, elegant thing. And many many people have seen the same thing (it's the universal 'mystical experience').
It's like you were pulled out of the matrix, if just for a bit, and you can actually talk to other people about it, because it happens to lots of people who trip.
Whether it is actually giving insight or not (it could definitely be some idiosyncratic interaction that lsd is having with your brain to make you see things in a certain way); it's at the very least fun, and can have a drastic effect on the way you oritent yourself toward reality.
It can also affect your mental processes--LSD has the effect (at least in me) of continually changing the level of abstraction I am thinking in. You see a situation, then you see the bigger picture of that situation, and on and on until your mind can't even fathom any thing anymore.
You set out to write a bash script to move some files, you suddenly realize an amazingly better way to do bash scripting, which makes you realize some basic change in the OS that would make UI 1000% friendlier, then you realize we shouldn't be using computers at all, then you realize you are here on earth for a purpose and you are wasting your life then your buddy is like--YO you're spacing off and the chain of thinking starts over.
[+] [-] jpk|15 years ago|reply
But let's be honest here: If your goal was to write the script, that sounds horribly unproductive.
[+] [-] parenthesis|15 years ago|reply
It might feel like you are tapping into something truer and deeper, but that doesn't mean that you are.
[+] [-] yid|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|15 years ago|reply
How is this a 'geek wonder drug'? CAFFEINE is the geek wonder drug. LSD probably contributes less than 5% of the world's drug-induced geek accomplishments.
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
http://matrixmasters.net/archive/TerenceMcKenna/215-McKennaT...
Alternatively, listen to Alicia Danforth's amazing talk on giving psilocybin to terminal cancer patients to ease end of life anxiety:
http://vimeo.com/10931182
[+] [-] Jun8|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] utefan001|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] takameyer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonLSD|15 years ago|reply
First, of all the hundreds of little insights, interesting trains of thought, and connections made between previously unrelated ideas, there is one revelation in particular that floats to the top of my mind. It's this: LSD confronts you, in an extremely visceral way, with the fact that the entire universe that you perceive and interact with, the whole world and everybody in it, is entirely in your own mind at all times. Sure, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that it's all derived from an objective, external world - but you've never interacted directly with that one, and in fact you can't.
Now, you might say that you already "know" this, philosophically. You can even do the smug, Internet know-it-all thing and say this is completely pedestrian, name-drop Descartes and a bunch of other philosophers, and hit me with a zinger about how this is about as deep as "The Matrix". But I'm not claiming that LSD leads you to the philosophical idea; I'm saying that it slaps you right in the face with it, viscerally. It doesn't tell you, so that you have to think about it in the abstract; it shows you, literally with your own eyes. It's the difference between knowing what the Grand Canyon looks like from pictures, and standing on the edge of it.
It is very common for people to describe the onset of their first trip in terms of waking up, for the first time, ever. I'd describe it this way, too. It feels like waking up for the first time, and realizing that you'd been dreaming your whole life. Of course, this is really just an analogy, and it's more than just a feeling. It's a sudden shift in your actual perceptual processes, which are largely chemical, and have now been altered. But by the mere fact of them being altered, you realize that the default way of perceiving is just that - just a default. It isn't more "true" or more "real" - it's a default, it's massively culturally constructed, and it's characterized by a certain amount of non-questioning of assumptions. What's a color? What's a country? What's a "week"? What's a leader? What is solid? Which way is up? What's a job? Your brain starts trying to decompose every concept into basic principles, and you realize that for a lot of things in the human world, there are none. Just made-up, widespread beliefs that cause lots of people to act as-if, and in so doing, make them "real". Again, there is a difference between merely realizing this philosophically, and being transported outside of the web of culturally-reinforced beliefs and observing it from the outside.
So there's a lot of shedding of constructed concepts. What's left when all that chaff blows away? Whatever it is, it a) seems a lot more real, and b) is obscured in normal consciousness. I'm not suggesting that it would be desirable to permanently lose the ability to think on the level of appointments, check-writing, stop-lights, prospectuses, and the rest of the "mundane". I am definitely suggesting that what is left of experience after all that is obliterated from consciousness is worth seeing. There are parallels here with Buddhism and enlightenment traditions. It's also extremely common for people to offer meditation as a substitute. It's perfectly fine if you don't want to do illegal drugs - hardly anyone will fault you. But don't fool yourself that you're getting the same effect. I've practiced meditation too, and while it does alter consciousness, there are many meaningfully different altered states - they are in no way equivalent or substitutable. (Think about it - if you can simulate an LSD trip by meditating, do you simulate a K trip by meditating differently? Can you meditate yourself to a heroin high by a different technique? LSD isn't just another interchangeable "enlightened" state - they're all specific in their sets of effects. I have no doubt that I too have missed out on plenty of profound experiences by not taking, doing, seeing, or achieving any number of things. It's a big world.)
Sadly, this is turning into a wall of text, and I could still go on for the rest of the day. So, I'm going to force myself to wrap up with just a few more short highlights:
* I learned OpenGL while tripping. The subjective experience was of the information slipping into my brain effortlessly. Normally, I have to read sentences and paragraphs multiple times for them to "sink in". That time, I just skimmed, and understood. The next day, sober, I wrote a couple of neat height-field/terrain programs in OpenGL. Of course we've all learned dozens of even more complicated topics without any drugs, so this anecdote is meaningless, right? All I'm talking about is what it felt like to learn it. It felt effortless by comparison to the way I normally learn. Placebo? Selective memory? Your other favorite bias? Might be interesting to know definitively - but I still had a really good time that night.
* I once won a game of Mastermind on the first turn, without making any other guesses. This seriously freaked out the other people at the table. I wasn't tripping at the time, but I was in a distinctly "trippy" mentality - so much so that I was having a mini-flashback by the end of the turn. What I had done was to realize that the room was a closed system, containing the information about the winning pattern, and that as part of that system, I might have access to the information via other channels. Basically, I just paid very close attention to the other person's body language as I fingered different colored pegs, and allowed him to inadvertently "tell" me the correct colors and order.
* I once did a drawing of a woman from the neck up, while tripping. When I started drawing her hair, I got lost. I was drawing hair for what seemed like hours. I was hiding dozens of other, nested, drawings inside the texture of the hair. It still looked more or less like hair, but if you really looked at it, it was teeming with a whole bunch of unrelated drawings. Sure, I could do the same thing now, but it had never before occurred to me to try that. There is something about tripping that is inherently amenable to that kind of recursive, fractal thinking.
In short, don't knock subjective experiences. The enjoyment of music is a subjective experience, is it not?
[+] [-] kstenerud|15 years ago|reply
I wonder if all these psychadelic drugs are doing is enhancing the communication between right and left, or perhaps suppressing the left such that the right takes greater charge? The left does, after all, have very narrow focus as opposed to the right, which processes greater but less focused patterns.
[+] [-] tokenadult|15 years ago|reply
On the specific issue of programmer or scientist creativity and productivity, that too is a much researched field, but again there are not well controlled studies showing that anyone increases productivity or creativity in any occupation while using LSD. The checkered academic career of Timothy Leary is instructive in this regard. What research shows makes a huge difference in the productivity and work quality of programmers and scientists is steady deliberate practice building up problem-solving skills and growth mindset, along with accumulation of domain-specific knowledge.
http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/6/6.055/readings/eric...