• Psychedelic Drugs Welcome Guest
    View threads about
    Posting RulesBluelight Rules
    PD's Best Threads Index
    Social ThreadSupport Bluelight
    Psychedelic Beginner's FAQ

Critical Deconstruction of Psychedelic Neuroscience

max_freakout

max_freakout

Bluelighter
Joined
Nov 28, 2005
Messages
560
Listen here: youtube.com/watch?v=UDCNo3URuhA

In this podcast Max and Cyb offer a sharp critique of neuroscientific research into psychedelic drugs, arguing that this research project lacks explanatory power and practical (ie altered state) relevance.

In particular the recent neuroscientific research from Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College London.

Topics covered include: Materialist assumptions behind neuroscience, The prominence of materialism, Methodological limitations of neuroscience (MRI scanners) in light of the sheer complexity of brain matter, Explanatory power of neuroscience - claims vs. reality, Neuroscience compared to cognitive science, De-emphasis of subjective phenomenology by neuroscience, objectivity of scientific theories, Misleading conflation of neurophysics with cognitive phenomenology in Carhart-Harris' research, Comparing blobs of colour on images of brains, The explanatory role of the 'Default-Mode-Network' in Carhart-Harris research, Literal (physical) instantiation of cognitive models (materialist literalism), Overlap of neuroscience research with psychotherapeutic concerns (such as treating depression), Negative attitudes towards "recreational" drug use among scientific researchers, Amanda Fielding's involvement with psychedelic research, and her negative attitudes towards Tim Leary and drug users in the 1960's, Professor David Nutt's role in neuroscience research and his previous work with the British government, Lack of practical (altered-state) relevance of psychedelic neuroscience, Static rudimentary nature of neuroscience, research, lack of consideration for transforming mental worldmodels over multiple psychedelic sessions, Serotonergism of psychedelic drugs (affinity for 5-HT2 receptors), Complications of legal scientific access to otherwise illegal substances, Marketable pop-gloss of current neuroscience research.
 
I looked forward to this podcast as it sounded very interesting but I stopped hearing this at the 13 minutes mark. Honestly, how can you claim that an MRI is not able to give you insight into the brain when you do not know how an MRI works and what it's limits are? You will not learn much about a brain by cutting it open and looking at it. If that were the case, the research would have been done many years ago.
 
drseltsam said:
how can you claim that an MRI is not able to give you insight into the brain
Click to expand...


I didn't make this ^ claim, MRI scanners do offer some insight into the brain

However the results of MRI scans have no practical relevance to exploration of the altered state
 
They do, results from an LSD study that only recently became allowed again teach us that LSD causes a loss of boundaries between various brain regions / circuits by causing less distinct functional patterns and more synchronization. This kind of activity explains many kinds of phenomena like synaesthesia. It also showed the region that normally governs higher brain activity more becomes suppressed so that the brain can do its own thing more. Which in turn helps explain other kinds of chatter, or spill-over where brain activity that is basically irrelevant to other activity can influence it and 'spontaneously' cause us to detect things without a sensory stimulus like faces, entities colors, etc etc.

And we haven't even addressed experiencing awareness and presence when all else becomes a unified haze and the implied mystical states.

No, we cannot really investigate the more intricate experiences our stream of consciousness conjures up, there are definitely limits to it... but to say that they have no practical relevance is surprisingly closed-minded.
 
Solipsis said:
They do, results from an LSD study that only recently became allowed again teach us that LSD causes a loss of boundaries between various brain regions / circuits by causing less distinct functional patterns and more synchronization. This kind of activity explains many kinds of phenomena like synaesthesia. It also showed the region that normally governs higher brain activity more becomes suppressed so that the brain can do its own thing more. Which in turn helps explain other kinds of chatter, or spill-over where brain activity that is basically irrelevant to other activity can influence it and 'spontaneously' cause us to detect things without a sensory stimulus like faces, entities colors, etc etc.
Click to expand...

This ^ demonstrates exactly what the problem is with this neuroscience research, - it misleadingly conflates cognitive modelling with neural modelling.

The results from the LSD study only consists of some indistinct blobs on some pictures of brains (the MRI scan images), none of what you say here ^ can be deduced from those blobs because you are talking about cognition not neurochemistry
 
It's not only blobs, it's also graphs that you can compare showing either distinct activity or more aligned activity - and significantly so (significance can of course be calculated). I agree with the above poster that you being baffled about how such imaging can be interpreted says nothing about how much can actually be interpreted. I mean explain and prove why then, why not only with LSD but on many topics people do MRI and fMRI research, I refuse to believe that fortunes are wasted on guesswork from blobs - there is such a thing as peer review in the community. It wouldn't be easy to

Neither imaging techniques or study of the psychopharmacology (via radioligands, receptor screening, checking where those receptors are prevalent etc) can provide us a complete picture and that was never claimed. But they do help a lot to step by step piece the puzzle together and plenty of it shows consistency. The next step would certainly be to investigate where e.g. 5-HT2a is prevalent and how binding in those regions in the cortex has such an effect on coherence.
Why you think it has to involve chemistry is a mystery to me, since focussing on mere neurochemistry has as least such limits if not more if you try to deduce too much from it. It as to be pieced together and built on top of other models so say something sensible about it.

Reports and self-analysis do also help - it is specific phenomena that are sometimes also seen separately in neurological disease or congenitally, that can be linked with our understanding of certain (sometimes highly specialized) brain regions and brain functions. Trying to bring these into agreement is elucidating. Finding fault in the provisional nature of science is absolutely no reason to be as dismissive as you are being.

Maybe the popgloss factor can be a bit much but that is pop science for you, reporting on it has to appeal to a wider audience and even if some of the results are more tentative than the enthousiastic explanations which can be pushing it and go a step ahead... and there are a number of biases at work in scientific research. It's not bad if we all remind each other of that, and this research is still young but it provides some provisional models (you don't discourage science because they work with provisional models?).

Compared to the assumptions people make purely on their experiences the above flaws are minor. Yes experiences of course often bear a lot of personal value, but people are terrible at admitting some of the illusions in a dysregulated brain, especially if they are impressed by those illusions. Very well illustrated - again - by the fact that some of them also occur in neurological disease of the brain, a context people will certainly find less 'profoundly revelating'.
Psychedelic experience should not be attempted to deconstruct, demystify and reduced until the bitter end! But it should be partially, so that the undeniable transformative power and fascinating nature of the more extremely altered states can be complemented with some understanding and skepticism about what is merely distortion.
A trip is not all magic and it is not all distortion, often there are many different things going on that we can approach on their own merits.
 
Last edited:
max_freakout said:
However the results of MRI scans have no practical relevance to exploration of the altered state
Click to expand...

Please present a peer reviewed paper or at least an assay from someone who understands how an fMRT works to back up this claim. Otherwise I consider this discussion pointless.
 
Speaking as a former philosophy student, this is a good conversation. I think it's quite natural that university trained scientists will not react very well to this kind of talk. I'm enjoying it though.
 
strangel00p said:
Speaking as a former philosophy student, this is a good conversation. I think it's quite natural that university trained scientists will not react very well to this kind of talk. I'm enjoying it though.
Click to expand...

as a general principle of Transcendent Knowledge, the entire edifice of "university training" can be equated with "official prohibitionist anti-drugs cluelessness"

Stay tuned for the next episode where we analyse academic philosophy's treatment of the mind/body issue (metaphysical dualism) via Frank Jackson's seminal paper "epiphenomenal qualia"
 
Solipsis said:
mean explain and prove why then, why not only with LSD but on many topics people do MRI and fMRI research
Click to expand...


You are missing the main point of the criticism, which is the misleading conflation of cognitive modelling with neural mapping, which leads the layperson to falsely conclude that they are the same thing

Professor Nutt's Cognitive Neurophrenology ego dissolution photography is the green-light wish for a theory, currently held together with bubble gum and Scotch tape, the promise of a theory having something to do with filters, hubs, networks, dissolution, and oneness, just missing how this all coheres.
 
Researching psychedelics we are making progress.

Sure, more research on these valuable medicines is necessary and desirable. Psychedelic psychotherapy has significant benefits. The benefits of MDMA assisted psychotherapy have saved the lives of multiple veterans, police officers, and other people with PTSD thanks to MAPS.

I agree our society should expand research. This is the beginning. Psychedelic research was impossible ~50 years. With any legitimate peer reviewed research on psychedelic medicines happening now, I am grateful.
 
TheBlackPirate said:
Sure, more research on these valuable medicines is necessary and desirable. Psychedelic psychotherapy has significant benefits. The benefits of MDMA assisted psychotherapy have saved the lives of multiple veterans, police officers, and other people with PTSD thanks to MAPS.

I agree our society should expand research. This is the beginning. Psychedelic research was impossible ~50 years. With any legitimate peer reviewed research on psychedelic medicines happening now, I am grateful.
Click to expand...

Yes it is, and the 'theories' there are now are only weak in absolute terms. But relatively it's a fair "beginning". You can't really compare theories we can base on the present data with other kinds of theories we can base on huge piles of data. Obviously, because the data is limited. But it's not really pointless at all. I don't care about the public - of course there are many problems with the translation of scientific research to the public, there is a lot of subtlety lost including significance and 'certainty'.
Right now the world needs to be encouraged to continue with lots more research. The data we do have is suggestive, there are only so many times I'm interested in underlining the provisional nature of scientific theory.

Bitching a lot about this stuff tastes like an admission of weakness to me at some point. However it's good to keep the limitations in mind.
 
to get funded they have to put slants on things, its how the world works but we can make our own interpretations
 
Like taking it with a grain of salt, but not throwing away the baby with the bathwater?

I personally find it promising that there are signs of increased synchronization between distinctly operating brain regions (compared to sober of course), it is by all means not at all watertight evidence but it is consistent with what you would expect with phenomena a la synaesthesia. I would hope that it can be compared with congenital (sober) synaesthesia for added consistency. Consistent theories, however weak-founded, are a good path to continue on and eliminate, narrow down bit by bit.

I can't imagine that anyone would leave it like this and assume that we understand now, on the other hand promise can be very encouraging. So where is the constructive criticism?

Saying things about conflation repeatedly is not half as helpful as just putting this in perspective but moving on nonetheless. I wouldn't normally be so annoyed if it wasn't so easy but lame to attack research that is still so early.
 
max_freakout said:
If you're interested in Professor Nutt's Psychedelic Neurophrenology fMRI brain-scamming photographs, you'll also be interested in these related, more established spiritual technologies.
Click to expand...

I think underling this tread there is a debate about consciousness (spirit or mind or whatever you want to call it) being a product of the brain versus the brain being only an interface between consciousness and the body.

Personally, being an atheist and a big bad scientific reductionist, I’m convinced mind is a product of the brain or elaborate neuronal circuit. For me what is called spirituality is, to a certain extent, a collection of nonsensical irrational beliefs. These are very useful to ease existential or ontological vertigo, but I’m very comfortable having no answers to big questions.

So, I will go on with my responsible recreational/medical use of psychedelics and reading of irrelevant neuroscience papers and glossy thick textbooks. I’m leaving to you double exposed photographs, cranial bumps measurements and interpretation of corona plasma discharge.

Sorry Max, I can’t help being sarcastic…
 
It's interesting how instead of engaging in discussion you prefer to just either prefer to repeat one-line throws or attempt to categorically discredit and debunk without doing some of the work of argumentation.

So don't mind me if in turn I get off at this exit and ignore you for life, because you're just kind of boring me to death now. Bye.
 
Man, I got a little bit excited when I read the topic title. Then I read the actual posts by the OP and realized that not only did he have no actual experience with, or real knowledge of neuroscience (not that I claim to myself - I was hoping to learn something from someone more erudite in these matters than myself), but in fact the entirety of his position basically boils down to metaphysical dualism. As a former philosophy student, let's be real - do we really need to have a debate here about metaphysical dualism vs. physicalism? No, we don't. That sort of debate belongs in the philosophy and spirituality forum, and it certainly has its own value, but not in this forum, since it offers absolutely no objective or novel understanding of psychedelic drugs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top