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COMMUNITY PROJECT - Creating an "effects profile" for psychedelics

just did it for my first shroom trip. this is a great idea! thanks xorkoth for doing this for the community!
 
uhhm yea i dont wanna plunge too deeply into your doings as they are advanced and welcome, however you could be so kind and consider the following, as you may certainly know the matter you are dealing with is very subjective.. what may heave the subject matter to a more scientific level would be a calling in of observings of a swecond instance that is you gotta compare the findings of the subject him/herself and anoher person and deduce an index rating which tells you how far apart self image and image as seen by others do lie.. doing this you can rate how accurately the person is able see his role as seen by others and isnt that what matters
 
I actually really like your idea. However, I'm not quite sure how I'd actually implement it. I think these results will still tell us quite a bit of interesting stuff, too.
 
I suppose you could encourage people to attempt a blind placebo-controlled trip occasionally for the purposes of this survey. I imagine you'd have to be vaguely enthusiastic about the survey to be willing to do this, but perhaps enough would be willing to give a sense of what baseline is.

Basically, you could assign to two capsules the target chemical and a neutral substance of equivalent mass, randomly take one or the other, record TR and fill in survey, and check which was which afterwards (one method would be to have the two substances be slightly different masses, not humanly perceptible but detectable on your scales.

I do think, anyhow, that this survey can be very interesting and useful even without control trips in the data set.
 
Interesting idea. Glad to see you posting again. :)
 
invert said:
I suppose you could encourage people to attempt a blind placebo-controlled trip occasionally for the purposes of this survey. I imagine you'd have to be vaguely enthusiastic about the survey to be willing to do this, but perhaps enough would be willing to give a sense of what baseline is.

Basically, you could assign to two capsules the target chemical and a neutral substance of equivalent mass, randomly take one or the other, record TR and fill in survey, and check which was which afterwards (one method would be to have the two substances be slightly different masses, not humanly perceptible but detectable on your scales.

I do think, anyhow, that this survey can be very interesting and useful even without control trips in the data set.
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I think that would run afoul of us not encouraging drug use here on BL. People taking drugs of their own volition and reporting their experiences is one thing; telling people to take them in a certain way *so* that they can report back is quite another.

Plus, I can't imagine it would be very hard to distinguish an active dose of most of these chemicals from placebo. Maybe I'm severely underestimating placebo but for things known to be powerfully psychoactive I don't think placebo controls add much meaningful information.
 
It's a psychedelic, that is that it manifests the mind. Whatever lies within the mind is brought to the fore front of consciousness. Best way to describe psychedelics is from the name.
 
uhhm yea i dont wanna plunge too deeply into your doings as they are advanced and welcome, however you could be so kind and consider the following, as you may certainly know the matter you are dealing with is very subjective.. what may heave the subject matter to a more scientific level would be a calling in of observings of a swecond instance that is you gotta compare the findings of the subject him/herself and anoher person and deduce an index rating which tells you how far apart self image and image as seen by others do lie.. doing this you can rate how accurately the person is able see his role as seen by others and isnt that what matters
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Yes, but if we're looking at phenomena that aren't typically behaviorally relevant in terms of their quantified intensity, it becomes impossible to negotiate a cross-subject comparison of this sort. Almost all of the subjective effects present on this survey tend to be of this type. To calibrate these scales, we'd need also run subjects through procedures that assess subject's' rated intensity chosen objective representations of various intensities of various phenomena, per the design of researchers.

ebola
 
it could be aranged so that there are descriptive terms on pages of a survey that the subject may check all that apply with a section for added coments. another thing is to creat a double blind study the researcher might want to wait till after the survey is given to determine if it was the active substance or the controll.
also another way one might go about limiting the placibo effect is to report to the subject that there is the possibility that the substance is "bunk" and instill doubt in the subject's mind then the subject is both looking for something but simultaneously skeptical.
i have been working on a suprise for this project for some time and will hopefully be able to post it for the comunity some time within the next month.
 
Well your ideas would work if this was being done in that way. But it's an internet survey/ There's no possibility for double-blind and there are no researchers supplying the substances in question. :)
 
well duah... i thought we were just thinking up hypothetical ways to get acurate data to create an "effects profile" for different psychadellics.
but if one were to have a group like shulgins and be trying to create the most acurate acumulation of information about said psycadellics, this is one way to create a double blind study- for most controled group trips, there is usualy a "trip sitter." if the substance to betested were to be measured out and there was one placebo amount and all of the subjects randomly chose thier amounts for the night then simultaneosly dosed, it would create one trip sitter/control group that is randomly chosen. if the subjects knew that this was going to happen and it was kind of like designated driver roulette (though no driving would be done to be safe).

another thing is what kindof tests would one do to create a an effects profile? like possibly sensory deprivision, singular sensory stimulation, pain sensativity, pulse rate, pupil dialation/ofsetting, what exact effects are you looking to define?
 
Wait, you may be unaware of the fact that this project was already created. There's an online survey that has about 240 responses so far. The link is on the first post of this thread. :)

It's not a hypothetical anymore. Although it's still worth talking about hypotheticals.

We've already got data for pupil dilation and physical symptoms, at least for a lot of substances, from trials in existing studies in both animals and humans. What I'm trying to gather here is information about the subjective effects. A self-reported survey on a specific experience with a single psychedelic (you could take it once for each drug you've taken) where people evaluate on a 5-point scale (or select that you did not experience the effect at all) a list of many different effects. Take the survey and see what I mean. I'm interested in your feedback after you see it.

Although of course you can't quantify the psychedelic experience, my hope is that, through a large sample size (hundreds or even thousands of responses for each substance), you could determine statistically the rate of the general population experiencing each particular effect defined by the survey (as well as numerous places to fill in your own effects not listed and rate them in the same way). You'd also be able to determine the average rating given by those experiencing an effect. In this way data is being gathered about each individual substance and conclusions could be drawn about the general nature of the effects of each drug, especially compared to others. When the project is complete, you'll be able to interact with the database, and do stuff like apply filters (maybe you want to see the reported numbers for males aged 27 for example, or for married people whose spouses are not into psychedelics, or any number of similar filters).
 
Although of course you can't quantify the psychedelic experience
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I would say that it's as quantifiable as other items at the same level of intersubjective sharing. The problem is, because psychedelics are marginalized in our society, there are insufficient collaborative rituals surrounding them, and thus there is a poverty of concepts to point toward analyzable aspects of the psychedelic experience.

The procedure that I introduced for calibrating survey scales is an attempt to mitigate this issue, however, flawed.

ebola
 
also when dealing with psychedelics, you inevitably end up dealing with mystical experiences, which by definition transcend language and are to a certain degree "ineffable," at least according to standardized psychological measures. So you almost have to measure some things by inference as one of the qualifying factors is an inability to accurately describe it with language.
 
Have you guys taken the survey? If so, what do you think about it? I've tried to create an exhaustive list of effects that are just general enough to describe a particular type of experience without trying to get into every minute detail of your own personal experience. I'm finding it kind of hard at the moment to fully explain what I mean but if you're familiar with the survey I'd love to know if you think it accomplishes what I intended*, and if you think it might provide a meaningful result/tool, and also if you think you could draw some conclusions about the types of effects experienced by the "average" user if using the tool, and if so, would you consider that valuable in some way to you or at least interesting.


*If you do understand what I mean that is
 
To be sure, the best way for a researcher to determine an effects profile for LSD is to take LSD and quit being so goddamned objective. lol
 
Astrobee said:
To be sure, the best way for a researcher to determine an effects profile for LSD is to take LSD and quit being so goddamned objective. lol
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I really doubt it. A researcher's introspection alone (the typical approach of some of the earliest - pre-twentieth-century - psychologists) is a highly biased and uninformative way of discovering the psychological effects of anything, whether it be LSD or anything else, as has been demonstrated countless times in psychology. Our introspective judgments are clouded by our personal expectations and circumstances, and individual differences among different people would make a single researcher's experience pretty much useless on its own. A large survey of many people's introspective judgments, structured by a questionnaire, leaves some room for being biased by shared expectations (unless combined with a placebo-control condition or, better perhaps, an active control condition to mimic typical physical side effects), but does much to address the other issues. :)

On the other hand, yes, personal expeience with a phenomenon (psychedelics, in this case) is useful in giving one ideas for how to study it more rigorously. And I have no doubt Xorkoth has such experience!

ETA: I'm ashamed to say, Xorkorth, that - for all my enthusiasm for this project - I have yet to fill in the survey. I shall bloody well do so in the near future. This is an important and exciting piece of work.
 
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Well, and Astrobee, what you say is true. The only way for an individual researcher to discover what a psychedelic experience is like for them is to just take one. I agree. This tool though is for producing a body of work that everyone can view and utilize, regardless of whether or not they've tripped before. Something like this could lead to actual researchers (not people wanting to experience a new psychedelic who call themselves researchers - and who also can be by the way - but real researchers for medicine and so forth) observing what the "average" person has to say about their perceived effects from psychedelics via a self-administered evaluation (my survey). This could lead to people seeing such a body of work being done BY a psychedelic user (an avid one at that), and that perhaps they don't just mimic the effects of schizophrenia after all.

That was just an example. The possibilities are whatever people see it in and make of those insights. My point is just that yeah, any individual person who wishes to experience psychedelics should make sure they're ready and then just take the plunge, because the core of what psychedelics offer cannot be described except to experience it yourself. But that does not, in my opinion, detract at all from the usefulness of this project.
 
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