"There is, of course, a catch. For mice, having a critical period open for too long causes neural disruptions. Some experts fear that, for people, carelessly flinging wide the doors of personal development could put the very core of their identity in jeopardy by erasing the habits and memories that make them them. A critical period is also a time of vulnerability. While childhood can be filled with wonder and magic, children are also more impressionable. “We can really screw kids up much more than we can adults,” she says. This is why responsible adults intuitively know to protect children from exposure to potentially scary or disturbing material. Or, as Dölen puts it, “You want to teach children new things, but you don’t want them to learn Japanese from Japanese porn.”
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."
> An adult who undergoes this kind of treatment to heal PTSD could, in the wrong hands, end up traumatized further.
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.
DISCLAIMER: all advice given here is given under the assumption that you did your research, and that you have good reasons why you're interested in psychedelics as a tool. They're a powerful tool, and powerful tools cut both ways. Turning into a new age woo head is a real risk, I've seen it happen to the staunchest of sceptics, no one is immune. Do your research, people, test your drugs, and be careful.
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.
>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 usually 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.
> I felt smarter, and overall pretty great. I felt like I was making all these brilliant connections.
And here I thought the whole point of micro-dosing is the dose is too small to feelanything 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.
Interesting factoid in the preamble: the biochemical basis of the addictive nature of social media?
> "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.
> "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."
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.)
Beginning of my MD PhD program a guy who was big in that field and tried small scale trials gave a whole schpill about how big pharma was unfairly blocking this. Then I spent over an hour talking to him about it. This field has a huge challenge finding a consistent and reproducible outcome to aim for. When I pressed the guy he was pretty clear that there were participants in these studies that has pretty bad outcomes and would have been in bad shape if there wasnt a medical team on hand.
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.
Most of the psychedelic research I've seen boils down to "take psychedelics and do stuff to get a result, here's why you get the result".
You can absolutely take psychedelics and do stuff yourself.
I just acquire mushrooms on my own and discuss the trips with my psychiatrist. He’s always quite enthusiastic about it and I’ve found them to be very helpful.
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley is pretty accessible and although not scientifically rigorous, provides an ahem ergonomic framework for thinking about psychonautics (which I have, of course, never engaged in)
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).
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.
Her interview on the Psychoactice podcast was really good if you want more than this article delivers.
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.
Research seems to prove that psychedelics can be a tool for opening up the so called critical periods. Critical periods are, in my understanding, the highly receptive periods of learning - brain wiring and rewiring.
Childhood is abundant in these periods, but they open up in adulthood naturally after trauma, e.g. stroke as high plasticity periods, which go away quickly and possibly are too short.
Totally subjective take: future result might be able to explain /why/ psychedelics have profound effect. Interestingly the life-changing traumatic experiences have similar effect, creating these critical periods - body responds to extreme conditions with risky high brain plasticity periods.
[+] [-] rendx|2 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] kodah|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randomopining|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pengaru|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] randomopining|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
> "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.
[+] [-] LoganDark|2 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] unstatusthequo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funnym0nk3y|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NeuroCoder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mtizim|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobotToaster|2 years ago|reply
Exactly like happened with ketamine as esketamine.
[+] [-] kcrwfrd_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Solvency|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themagician|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] az226|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikrl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] more_corn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDresden|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] JPLeRouzic|2 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] avodonosov|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xen9|2 years ago|reply
I actually ordered a lifetime supply of acid and got into big trouble from that.
Really good stuff, makes me joyous.
[+] [-] bakedoatmeal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pizzafeelsright|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edem|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mouthfeel|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] krrrh|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nanidin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friend_and_foe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nevertoolate|2 years ago|reply