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July 22 - December 25, 2018
Getting older might render the world more predictable (in every sense), yet it also lightens the burden of responsibility, creating a new space for experiment.
Yes
Carhart-Harris reminds us that in the 1960s the psychedelic experience was usually described as “consciousness-expansion”; knowingly or not, Timothy Leary and his colleagues had hit on exactly the right metaphor for the entropic brain.
there is a pronounced sense of contraction when I’m obsessing about things or feeling fearful, defensive, rushed, worried, and regretful. (These last two feelings don’t exist without time travel.)
In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik draws a useful distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children.
Being inexperienced in the way of the world, the mind of the young child has comparatively few priors, or preconceptions, to guide her perceptions down the predictable tracks. Instead, the child approaches reality with the astonishment of an adult on psychedelics.
In teaching computers how to learn and solve problems, AI designers speak in terms of “high temperature” and “low temperature” searches for the answers to questions. A low-temperature search (so-called because it requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand answer,
Gopnik believes that both the young child (five and under) and the adult on a psychedelic have a stronger predilection for the high-temperature search; in their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and most likely but “the entire space of possibilities.”
Broadside
“Children are better learners than adults in many cases when the solutions are nonobvious”
“We have the longest childhood of any species,”
I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.”
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
“You’re in this room, but you’re in the presence of something large. I remember how, after two hours of silence, Patrick began to cry softly and say, twice, ‘Birth and death is a lot of work.’ It’s humbling to sit there. It’s the most rewarding day of your career.”
I wanted to go all in but felt that if I did, I would possibly leave my body permanently . . . death from this life. But it was not a difficult decision . . . I knew there was much more for me here.” Telling his guides about his choice, Patrick explained that he “was not ready to jump off and leave Lisa.”
Is it possible that some of these new connections in the brain manifest in the mind as new meanings or perspectives?
New connections maybe == new meanings literally
[I felt] an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness . . . It wasn’t ‘Them and Us,’ it was ‘That’s me! That’s all of it, it’s one thing.’
Brahman
smoking is one of the most difficult addictions to break—harder, some say, than heroin.
When neuroscientists who study vision use fMRIs to image brain activity, they find that the same regions in the visual cortex light up whether one is seeing an object live—“online”—or merely recalling or imagining it, off-line.
Perhaps this is one of the things psychedelics do: relax the brain’s inhibition on visualizing our thoughts, thereby rendering them more authoritative, memorable, and sticky.
liminal
“Whatever we’re delving into here, it’s in the same realm as the placebo. But a placebo on rocket boosters.”
“It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.”
“The psychedelic journey may not give you what you want,” as more than one guide memorably warned me, “but it will give you what you need.”
The posterior cingulate cortex is a centrally located node within the default mode network involved in self-referential mental processes. Situated in the middle of the brain,
prefrontal cortex—site of our executive function, where we plan and exercise will—with
thoughts and feelings as with “how we relate to our thoughts and feelings.”
Buddhists believe that attachment is at the root of all forms of mental suffering; if the neuroscience is right, a lot of these attachments have their mooring in the PCC, where they are nurtured and sustained.
APRIL 2017, the international psychedelic community gathered in the Oakland Convention Center for Psychedelic Science, an every-few-years-or-so event organized by MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,
“We are not the counterculture,” Doblin told a reporter during the conference. “We are the culture.”
When I asked conferencegoers which session they deemed most memorable, almost invariably they mentioned the plenary panel called “Future of Psychedelic Psychiatry.”
Big Pharma mostly invests in drugs for chronic conditions, the pills you have to take every day. Why would it invest in a pill patients might only need to take once in a lifetime? Psychiatry faces a similar dilemma: it too is wedded to interminable therapies, whether that means the daily antidepressant or the weekly psychotherapy session.
Compass Pathways
hospices,
I found myself thinking about things like death and time and infinity, but less in angst than in wonder.
there are now algorithms that can reliably diagnose depression based on the frequency and context of one’s use of the first-person pronoun.
