this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Putting aside for the moment the fact that psychedelics are essentially just causing your brain to [temporarily] malfunction, this description eerily resembles the post-trip phase of psychedelics. You come back from essentially getting your blindfolds taken from you, seeing the world in ways that make sense only during the psychedelic trip, and even then it's all overwhelming, only to come back and question just about EVERYTHING about reality. It's been 3 years and I'm still going down the quantum physics/cosmology rabbit hole (as well as the philosophy and metaphysics rabbit holes, thanks exurb1a), all due to a strong bad LSD trip. It's beautiful, it's expanded my knowledge of things, but it is, indeed, very much like madness.
Psychedelics definitely aren't causing your brain to malfunction. If anything, most of the research around neuroplasticity and using psychedelics for traumatic brain injuries and dementia and such show that they seemingly kick your brain into an overdrive mode where it is able to form connections at a much higher rate than normal.
Taken in measured, clinically understood doses, sure. Taken to meet Vishnu, I assure you, none of what your brain experiences is normal function. Not to say they cause damage, but your brain definitely operates way out of spec for a while there.
Fair enough, I like the "operate way out of spec" language much more than "malfunction" but you obv have a point.
As someone who has met Vishnu more than a few times though I've very very rarely come back with a Lovecraftian dread (though the rest of the ant metaphor in OP not that bad at all)
Overclocked maybe
I mean, they kind of are...
LSD especially "breaks" pattern recognition and so does mushrooms to a lesser extent.
That's why faces can freak people out, especially your own. Very very few people have faces that are perfectly symmetrical, and our brains do a lot of subconscious processing to make them symmetrical. That's why symmetrical faces are enjoyable to look at. They're literally "easy to look at".
On LSD and mushrooms, that just stops happening.
It's why people gain insight from psychedelics, their "autopilot" stops functioning. It might not seem like a malfunctioning brain because that's the entire reason people choose to do those drugs. But it's still making the brain malfunction
Speaking of broken facial recognition...
Pro tip: if you're experimenting with microdosing shrooms and you're testing your upper limits, under no circumstances should you watch a pirated Nicholas Cage movie with poor, low quality compression. That was a fucking nightmare.
At that dosage, I wasn't hallucinating but the part of my brain responsible for recognizing and making sense of faces and, in particular, facial expressions wasn't working anymore. For example, if my wife smiled, intellectually I knew it was a smile, but instinctually it gave the same feeling you get when you watch badly animated characters smiling or if someone were to make a surprisingly realistic face out of pineapple slices and ham or on a carved pumpkin. It just seemed wrong and made me intensely uncomfortable because I knew it should feel like a person, but instead it had that creepy uncanny valley feeling. Multiplied by 100. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to describe, I hope that conveys it somewhat.
With that in mind, now imagine the faces Nicholas Cage makes.
I've experienced LSD a few times and Mushrooms once. They are subtly different but I like to lean into the difficulty of the experience (when or if it starts to go that way). I feel like I'm being taught something important and doing so has been beneficial. To me it feels like a death and rebirth experience. I'm not foolish enough to think it's the answer to my problems, but boy does it ever shine a light on things! For me, they bring me back to being a kid, experiencing everything with wonder and curiosity. It's a breath of fresh air because I spent my young adult life trying to "grow up" by trying to fit into everyone else's expectation if what adult means. It made me realize I am individual as well as connected to the human race and I should enjoy and embrace that.
Honestly, even bad trips are good trips. The trip I reference in my post (500ug LSD + cannabis during the peak for added mindfuckery) was, by all means, a bad trip that left me with PTSD and on at least one occasion I had a panic attack during a work call, where reality felt a bit too much. Not something I enjoyed, but even then I could appreciate that it had changed me for the better. I got a lot of my shit together after that trip and I appreciate life a lot more than I used to. I was fat, single (and had been all 28 years of my life), had no aim in life, had no hobbies, no appreciation for leaving my room at all or interacting with people in real life. Today I proposed to my girlfriend of two years, I do photography as a hobby and actively try to go out and appreciate the world around me, reached my target body weight, vastly increased my social life, and I am paving the road to a life I desire to live. Not everything is perfect, and maybe I am attributing too much to the trip and not enough to simple aging and maturing through that time, but there was a stark before and after for me. As far as I'm concerned it's been the most positively life changing event in my life that I absolutely cannot recommend anyone in my life to ever try.
My thoughts exactly. I treasure the experience but I could never recommend it to anyone as it hits everyone different. The best I could say to someone considering it is that you better be willing to confront yourself and your most difficult feelings.
I'm happy to hear that it was a net positive for you that's wonderful.
The ego death many experience can really teach us a lot. The self replicating machine elves found by doing DMT offer a totally different perspective too.
Incorrect, it's not a malfunction, it's your thought process in overdrive. You're thinking so fast and so clearly that your brain literally can't keep up. You have overclocked yourself.
I'm not sure if you've tripped before, but that hardly explains the reality-obliterating hallucinations on all sensory inputs. There's feedback loops everywhere at that point. The moment there's hallucinations or synesthesia you could argue the brain is not operating to spec and, at least temporarily, malfunctioning, as in, you probably wouldn't usually be able to use your brain to overcome challenges it's been designed to overcome when operating normally.
Hey I'm all for it, you can argue you learn a lot about reality itself once your senses go out the door and your brain stops processing reality the way we normally process it, but it's still not how the brain has been designed to sense and respond to reality.
My experiences with it leave me lamenting my humanity and finding it way too limiting
Ayyyyy, exurb1a fans rejoice!
I used to love his video's too, too bad I can't enjoy them anymore, knowing he's a rapist.
Huh??? That's news to me, what's the context/source?
Here's a snippet from a regional newspaper