Here are some helpful books on similar topics that I have enjoyed:
Cognitive Neuroscience, the Prefrontal Cortex, Artificial Intelligence, & the Unconscious
Friday, December 13, 2013
Relieving Subvocal Tension in the Vocal Cords by Muting the Internal Monologue
Here are some helpful books on similar topics that I have enjoyed:
Monday, December 9, 2013
Temporarily Forgetting what it is You are Excited About
I believe that illegal
drugs hurt us in three major ways: 1) they force our brain to run under
unfamiliar chemical circumstances, and during this time the brain rewires
plastically to compensate. I fully expect that these compensatory changes are
unhelpful once the person becomes sober again and have deleterious effects on
processing and memory, 2) they overexcite dopaminergic systems making real life
feel shallow, empty and uninteresting, 3) they force our sympathetic system
into overdrive and can cause new forms of bracing, shallow breathing, and
tachycardia that create deep-seated trauma, sympathetic upregulation, and
increased susceptibility to stress. In other words, sorry for posting the
following, and don’t do drugs.
8/30/2014
My Experience with Dimethyltryptamine
I went first. We stood in the backyard after midnight with a lighter held under the tin foil. My friend had convinced us that it was best to use the Terence McKenna method for smoking it. They handed the Canada Dry bottle over to me, removed the foil and told me to inhale. I took a slow, voluminous breath and held it for at least 15 seconds. The smoke was harsh, but I could tell that it wouldn’t create a lasting burn. It felt good to exhale. As soon as I started to exhale the second time, I could feel that the substance was already psychoactive. The world seemed to inflate and my two buddies took on a cartoonish appearance. I felt like I was a naïve five year old again, and my two friends were “cool” teenagers that I was looking up to literally and figuratively. As I looked around wide eyed I felt that I had recovered some of the perceptual innocence of childhood. Everything looked brand new. I looked at my friends’ dark silhouettes and felt a powerful pressure in my head. It felt like I had been submerged in an extremely dense gas. It was much like blacking out, and I felt the tingling and surreal headiness associated with syncope. I also had the scary feeling that I was putting my life in the hands of someone or something I don’t know. The effects were incapacitating and it seemed like it might be extremely difficult to stand up or walk around. The pressure that passed from my head into my chest was severe enough to cause consternation, but I was confident that the experience would eventually resolve positively. I said the words: “wow guys.” The sound of my voice felt like it came from somewhere else. Saying those two words felt effortless, as if I hadn’t said them. They were full of helium. Bar-shaped phosphenes in red and orange intruded into my field of vision. My friends told me to lay back onto the trampoline. Before I could settle my head and close my eyes the hallucinations burst into my mind’s eye.
I was disembodied, hurling through space-time. There were
purple and black splotches everywhere. They were similar to what one might see
in the dark after rubbing their eyes. Upon closer inspection though they were
graphic and animated enough to constitute “simple hallucinations.” From what I could tell this was a more
compelling and lively version of phosphene activity. Within two seconds these
amorphous, out-of-focus splotches transformed into a vibrant and crystal-clear
checkerboard room. There was a phantasmagorical female figure standing in the
room. She was looking right at me. She was very crudely shaped and had the
appearance of a fertility figure. The room felt like it could be the dark hut
of a witch doctor, yet at the same time, the interior of a brightly lit mansion
during a party. She was silent, and her head was above my field of view, so I was
looking at her torso. My perspective on the distorted room was slowly panning
to the right as the walls danced.
The female figure was a giant. Her arms and legs were very
thick and shaped like macaroni. She had no clothes and no skin. Her surface was
continuous with the wall/background, as with everything else in the room.
Everything I could see was a single layer made up of square tiles that each had
moving patterns inside. The patterns were all morphing/evolving at the exact
same rate and shared some of the same motifs. Their patterns expanded,
retracted and flowed into one another kaleidoscopically. I could try to close
my eyes and imagine this now, but I could never visualize this much detail,
with this much clarity and this many moving parts. As Terrance McKennna noted:
“everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy.” I had seen
the “astral plane” depicted in science fiction and comic books since I was a
child, and I felt that now I was within it.
I became aware of crushing pain in my body from my face to my heart, to my diaphragm. I felt that if I didn’t carefully monitor my breathing that I could die. I recognized the pain that I was in as my “pain body,” the same pain that I carry with me every day. In fact, I was nervous before administration so I was experiencing this nervousness magnified, and accelerated. My throat was tight, each heart beat hurt, and all of my facial musculature ached. My breathing was very shallow and heavily labored. I knew that this was not the DMT itself, but rather the DMT amplifying or perhaps just unmasked my preexisting condition. I could feel my familiar angst and anxiety in the tension within each muscle of my body. On the occasions that I have smoked weed I usually feel simmering, diffuse discomfort, but on DMT this same discomfort was so agonizing that I concluded that I was going through an experience more intense than death. At the point in time where this pain was the most accentuated, an eerie skull appeared in the hands of the female figure. The skull was slender and seemingly alive with an evil looking face. Its face shined iridescently with pastel colors and its sinister expression changed suddenly. As it changed I recognized the skull as my own, it was a simulacrum of an x-ray taken a week before. At that second I felt that I could feel my life as the side of a coin opposite death.
My mortality became fully apparent and I felt like a worm
that had poisoned itself and first glimpsed its humble plight. I understood
what it meant to feel like a grotesque biological puppet. I realized that life
is simply staving off this incredible pain that we feel in our traumatized tissues.
I saw this pain as a simple reflection of my continually increasing morbidity. Day
in and day out we try to ignore this pain, but this drug had brought to light
all of the features of my corporeal burden that I had previously habituated to.
It was like I was feeling my ordinary discomfort from a new perspective, and it
acquired new significance. What if I could use this experience to meet it and
conquer it head on? Instead of being traumatized by this ordeal, could I make
it into something therapeutic? My breathing was strained and shallow, and my
heart was racing but I decided that if I could just start breathing calmly,
deeply, at a constant rate; if I could stay aware of the tension in my body and
purposefully abate it, that I could come out of this experience better than I
went in.
A wispy male figure appeared to the right of the fertility
figure. He was only partially in the frame of view. He held up a bizarre
playing card for me to see. The playing card had a Rorschach–like face with one
cruel eye that winked and disappeared. I wondered why he wanted me to see the
card. It occurred to me that these figures were likely evil and malicious. But
then I realized that I was projecting my discomfort and fear onto ambivalent figments
of my imagination.
All of the above happened in the first 30 seconds of the
trip. But I was out for something between 5 and 8 minutes. After these first 30
seconds I continued to see visual phenomena similar to what I had seen in the
tiled/checkerboard room. However, after my revelation about them, there were no
more beings, objects or places. Everything was purple and black with bits of
white and green. The subsequent visuals were barely memorable. I think this was
because all of my attention turned to my body and breathing. I think that I
spent the entirety of the rest of the trip trying to breathe calmly, and
diaphragmatically. The visual experience was secondary, because I put trying to
keep my body calm first. This turned the trip from an optical carnival to an
analytical body high. I was glad though because I spent the time analyzing my
breathing, and its tendencies to become shallow, from a totally different vantage
point. The DMT allowed me to visualize my breathing musculature at the same
time that I felt the felt the sensorimotor sensations of breathing. I built
mental imagery of the weaknesses in my breath, the tiny gasps and uneven flows.
For the first time I could not just feel, but also see in my mind’s eye what
smooth, long-interval, high-depth breathing looks like. I could feel the
density, viscosity, pressure, and temperature of the air in my lungs. I could
feel the texture, luminance, reflectivity, color, and fluid properties of
healthy compared to unhealthy breathing.
The visuals were more resplendent than I expected, and more
vivid than any dream or childhood reverie. Even though I was in the dark, the apparitions
were luminous. I finished reading Oliver Sacks’ book “Hallucinations” earlier
in the day and had spent the entire week reading and learning about hallucinations
in preparation for this trip. But I wasn’t prepared for total hallucinatory
immersion. If I had been standing up and acting in my environment, my behaviors
may have been bizarre, and the pain involved would have probably made them
manic, desperate or even psychotic. For this reason, I imagine that the
experience has parallels with schizophrenic states. Was the state I was in
clinically a form of stupor or delirium? At the same time, I could tell that
much of my conscious mind was unaffected and I felt that perhaps my prefrontal
cortex was online much of the time. DMT users report maintaining the ability to
think and reason normally, and I had glimpses of this. But if I couldn’t
remember much of the trip doesn’t that mean that my level of consciousness was
obtunded? We did not use marijuana in the preparation and even though some
facets of my cognitive standing seemed cloudy, others seemed to remain quite
sharp.
What I saw definitely amounted to “scenic” or “panoramic”
hallucinations in the sense that, they was not superimposed over my visual
experience, rather they replaced my entire visual field. I recognized it as a “level
5 psychedelic experience” with total loss of visual connection with reality.
Time became meaningless, my senses blended, and much of what I felt was
ineffable. The arabesque geometric forms were extremely vivid, they progressed
autonomously and had innumerable points of articulation. Transient objects were
melting and flickering into one another. I do not remember noticing any of the
four fundamental “form constants”: lattices, spirals, cobwebs, or tunnels.
Heinrich Kluver regarded all geometrical hallucinations as permutations of
these basic elements. This made sense to me when I had read about it, but it
wasn’t part of my experience. My DMT landscape was mostly like abstract
painting, not cubism or surrealism, but like random daubs and smears of paint.
They were colliding and combining. A newly christened psychonaut, I was finally
privy to the McKennian hyperspace and “continually transforming geometries.”
The geometries I saw were nonfractal because the patterns were different from
the ones they were nested within. The cinema in front of me definitely
progressed as if it had a mind or will of its own yet there was very little
narrative continuity. I was taken aback because I did not expect to feel the
hallucinatory experience thrust forcefully upon me. It was violent though and
felt like it was a side effect or symptom of some kind of toxin.
I asked myself: “are these forms I am seeing deriving from
personal memories or innate brain architecture?” I concluded that it was both. The
visages were exotic enough to be unlike anything I had ever seen. But it was
very consistent with what I have read about other people’s psychedelic
experiences. Having never tried any hallucinogenic drug before I concluded that
the psychedelic experience must derive from some fundamental neurological
features common to all humans. For instance, I didn’t expect or will myself to
float through the “chrysanthemum” or be visited by “machine elves.” They just
popped up on their own.
The outrageousness of the visual experience came down a level every few minutes until near the end it felt more like my normal imagination. I felt my proprioceptive awareness coming back as the degree of visual immersion diminished. During this I remembered peoples descriptions of floating back into their bodies and I could see how people could interpret it that way. I reconnected with the real world when I remembered my friends. I became aware of the fact that they could probably hear my strained breathing. I looked up and saw their heads and remembered that they were waiting on me, and I felt obliged to address them. As I propped myself up I said: “Wow guys, that was incredible… I am still there.” The complex hallucinations were gone but the body high remained and some of the visuospatial abberations persisted for at least 30 minutes. I turned on the voice notes application in my phone so that I could record my description of the trip to my friends. My buddy gave me some water. Then I quickly got up to help prepare the next dose for my him. By the time I got up, there was no pain left, and I tried to ensure that my social interactions were calm and dispassionate. We gave each other big hugs, the simple act of which transformed the experience into something much more positive. The three of us laid on the trampoline together for an hour as they partook and I stared at the brightest star in the sky and tried to let my diaphragm guide each breath.
I can understand how such a visual odyssey could make someone feel that they were
transported to a very real place. I could even see how someone might believe
that the “machine elves” that visit them are not simply figments of their
imagination but real beings. However, my scientific knowledge, and even my
genuine intuition told me that all of this was in my mind. The hallucinations
were crystal clear, and my internal/external boundaries were “annihilated” but
it did not, for a second, seem metaphysical. I never felt like any part of me
had left the trampoline. Before and after my experience I ascribed to James
Kent’s interpretation of a DMT trip, that 1) our visual cortex takes internal
brain data and interprets it as external stimuli; and 2) that our natural
affinity for anthropomorphic things predisposes us to see humanoid entities. It
is remarkable though that the humanoid creatures experienced by most DMT users
share many similarities. Mine were not elf like, in some ways were similar to
the descriptions of other users that I have read.
The two beings acted as if they were sentient but I knew
that they were not – just like the characters in a dream. They both engaged me
but because I knew they were not real I ignored them. I looked at the ground
and simply focused on lengthening each breath as if my life depended on it. I
treated them dismissively as the effete figments I took them to be. I did
however, use the intentional stance to infer that they were welcoming me,
observing me, and respecting my wish not to talk or communicate. And pretty
much as soon as I stopped paying attention to them, they disappeared. There
were no other beings for the remainder of the trip.
I assume that even a drug as intense as DMT may not be so
bad for the brain of a user given that it occurs naturally in the brain in
trace amounts, and that it is broken down substantially within only 15 minutes
of use. A psychoactive trip that lasts a day has a lot of time to retune
neurons for the worse, but I believe that a trip that lasts 15 minutes cannot
change the brain neuroplastically to a terribly harmful degree. 20 minutes after the experience I asked
myself what DMT stood for. I mistakenly thought, “there is no way that the word
‘trip’ could be in the chemical name –that would be too much of a coincidence -
so the T could not stand for tryptamine.” This scared me because I could not
think of anything else that the T could stand for. This was strange because I
was very familiar with this chemical name, and had been for years. It was
disconcerting because the drug must have severely altered my declarative,
semantic memory. When I went inside, looked it up, and confirmed the acronym I
concluded that the “trip” had strongly, albeit temporarily affected my
long-term recall. Also, I forgot a lot of the experience very quickly. This may
be because after 8 minutes I sat up and started talking to my friends. I think
that this verbal engagement disrupted my ability to remember what had happened
like when an early morning trip to the sink disrupts the ability to recall a
dream.
Would I do it again? The discomfort would not discourage me,
in fact it was a blessing. If I did do it again I would try to keep even more
calm. I would also try to take better mental notes on what I was seeing. I won’t
do it again though because I am concerned about the long-term effects it could
have on my brain. But was the trip itself worth it? As far as using it to
discover deep truths – I am unsure about what aspects of the experience to
focus on, or how to use it to make inferences or test hypotheses. I do feel
like the experience helped me to better apprehend my own nature, even if I
can’t put my finger on how. I also felt like my ego had diminished. Little
things that I had been concerned about recently no longer seemed consequential.
I really hoped that the experience would allow me to
understand, or even glimpse some foundational principles about the cognitive
mechanics of the brain’s visual and perceptual systems. Days later, after
replaying what I saw over and over in my mind, I haven’t been able to glean
anything revelatory from the experience. I still believe what I believed before
taking the drug: that the DMT experience is like a waking dream where chaotic
inputs from the subcortex (such as the reticular activating system) and
association cortex are interpreted intelligently by the visual cortex. The
visual cortex is where we see our environment and also where our theatre of imagination
takes place. For example, in a fMRI scanner the same pattern of neural activity
will light up in the visual cortex whether you are looking at a specific scene
or simply imagining it. DMT somehow makes the imagination so vivid that it seems
real.
Most hallucinations are short lived and do not recruit large
areas of visual cortex. The more complex a hallucination is (involving objects,
and colors and motion…) the more brain areas need to cooperate to render the
scene. In a DMT trance, very large areas of the visual cortex must be recruited
because these hallucinations are extremely complex and must necessitate the
cooperation of several functional, visual modules. In fact, to have stable
constructs and anthropomorphic creatures, there must be sustained reverberating
activity all the way across the ventral visual pathways. The sense of depth and
personal space must have involved the parietal cortical pathway as well. What
about the PFC and its role in modulating all of this? It seemed that my PFC and
higher association cortices were not part of the trip as there was very little
continuity between consecutive scenes. Taking the drug did help me appreciate
how much raw, latent power our sensory cortices have and influenced me to pay
more attention to and savor my dreams. On the other hand though, for several
months after my experience I noticed that I had recurring side effects as I
drifted off to sleep at night. Most people experience some level of “hypnagogic
hallucinations” during the onset of sleep. This hypnagogia was highly pronounced
for me for a very long time. Despite the fact that it was somewhat pleasurable,
having lasting effects like that was somewhat worrisome.
The experience hasn’t changed the way I feel about
consciousness or visual perception, at least not yet. But it has changed the
way I feel about myself and my friends. One of my buddies said that he felt
closer to me after the experience. I think this is because he saw me open up a
little more than usual. The sad truth is that it is my anxiety that keeps me
from being able to open up to him and others. The pain in my vocal cords and
the shallowness of my breathing stops me from really communing with them. I
want to take the opportunity that the experience afforded to tell him this. I often
dismiss my friends in the same way that I dismissed the DMT visitors. Even
though I don’t say anything rude or do anything hurtful to my friends, my
social reservations sometimes make me appear aloof or disinterested. The trip definitely
helped me better see how I come across to others and why. It also helped me get
a little closer to the root of all my problems…
The DMT experience fortified a previous belief that I had. I
had come to the conclusion that smoking weed without breathing along to a
breath metronome was traumatizing and over time would result in shallower and
shallower breathing. The DMT took my breath away and made me want to breathe
incredibly shallowly. This provided me with a respiratory challenge to
overcome. Instead of breathing at 2 to 3 second gasps I ensured that each
inhale and exhale was at least 8 seconds. This caused the incredible pain at
the beginning of the experience to subside and even disappear. If I hadn’t done
this I would have come out of the experience worse rather than better. It
turned a bad trip into a good trip. In fact, I believe that the experience
allowed me to breathe through, and smooth out rough edges in my breathing
musculature. I am now convinced that all entheogenic experiences (healing with
illicit drugs) should be accompanied by diaphragmatic breathing. If you are
allowing yourself to breathe shallowly while doing drugs, it is much more
likely to be a traumatic experience rather than spiritual one. I am trying to
frame this in an optimistic way… I would like to think that this one encounter
with DMT retuned my sympathetic nervous system in ways that will help me
breathe easier, and be more loving for time to come. But because of the risks involved
I don’t necessarily recommend it.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Controlling Our Negative Thinking
The Costs of Workplace Incivility
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Psychological State
|
Implications for Foragers
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Implications for Modern Societies
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Anger
|
Healthy self-promotion and protection
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Social isolation and negative relationships
|
Competitiveness
|
Drive to attain food and mates at the expense of
others
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With little competition for food and mates,
competition with coworkers is unnecessary
|
Defensiveness
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Self-protection and healthy suspicion of others
|
Unnecessarily high paranoia or fear of others
intentions
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Impulsivity
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Drive to quickly attain food and resources
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Diminished capacity for patience and reflection
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Stress and Anxiety
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Healthy caution. Motivation to struggle, fight and
survive
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Unhealthy bodily effects and unnecessary
psychological discomfort
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