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Do you think psychedelics are a valuable tool in the field of science?

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washingtonbound

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Aug 19, 2013
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Do you think psychedelics help people think scientifically, or does it hinder it? I was reading that Neil Degrasse Tyson sees no value of drugs such as lsd with making scientific progress, and the list of notable scientists who are also psychonauts is pretty small. My belief is that while certain drugs might aid people creatively, it ultimately delineates ones thought process to the point where it is difficult to perform intellectually. I have used plenty of acid and ketamine and they have not helped me with my studies in any way. I read a little on how john c Lilly experimented with ketamine a lot but I noticed that towards the end his theories got more and more whacky. Here is a link to the reddit thread on Tyson:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.re.../neil_degrasse_tyson_on_hallucinogenic_drugs/
Thoughts?
 
Wasn't the DNA helix discovered after an LSD trip?

Psychedelics force you to question things. They should go hand in hand:)
 
Neil Degrasse Tyson may have worldly smarts and a physics degree or whatever, but as far as true wisdom he is a fool in my opinion.

I read a little on how john c Lilly experimented with ketamine a lot but I noticed that towards the end his theories got more and more whacky
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That tends to happen because psychedelics, if you keep going wit them, eventually take you outside of consensus reality. You come to a point where your understanding of reality is so different from that of an average person, that you will sound wacky or insane if you talk about your theories of how things work. The hard part is determining whether someone like that is actually just so much more advanced than you that they sound insane, or if they are actually insane. In the case of John Lily it may have been a little of both.
 
He is an astrophysicist.
I would outright discount his ability to determine significance in the domains of neurological and psychological sciences without an additional 3 years minimum of focused post secondary immersion in the relevant field.
You could get a similar answer if you ask a random fast food server, or a random Taxi driver or airline pilot.
 
John C Lilly is probably part of the reason that some other scientists denigrate psychedelics (even though he was using a dissociative), because he went really out there pretty quickly and to be honest his work moved outside the realm of the scientific process. But yes I absolutely think psychedelics can be useful in the field of science. I think a variety of scientists would agree. The fact that research is beginning again with them really speaks volumes since there is still stigma. How could something that manifests the mind be useless in understanding the mind? What greater puzzle is there for science than understanding the mind? I respect ND Tyson, but it's hogwash and poppycock to suggest that there is no value in psychedelics. It speaks to the prejudice and bias surrounding them that was the result of the drug war. Before they became "drugs of abuse", researchers were absolutely fascinated and excited by them and a lot of scientific research was done. It only stopped when the government decided they needed to make them illegal because the hippies were using them for fun and mind exploration.
 
Xorkoth: You make some good points in your post, and I would agree that it is very ignorant to state that psychedelics have no value in the field we're describing. But I would say that in my experience, drugs like lsd and ketamine may have been helpful for me on a personal level, perhaps psychologically like someone else mentioned; but when it comes down to applying them as intellectual tools it is difficult. My main areas of interest scientifically are astronomy, biochemistry, and neuroscience and all of those fields require extensive technical knowledge to become proficient. How would you be able to understand the complexity of different neurotransmitters, differet components of chemical reactions in the body, or any advanced theories on space if you're tripping? Perhaps you may gain some ideas to explore again while your sober; I guess my point is that the demand for linear and detail oriented thought is so significant that it makes it very difficult to make progress while altered.
 
Ahh, well I think you and I are talking about slightly different things. I'm talking about the use of psychedelics in studying brain processes. The researchers would not be tripping, but rather they would be giving subjects the drugs and then studying the results. Perhaps radiolabeling of drugs could help to understand how different processes in the brain work. In fact Shulgin mentions radiolabeling of the DOXs to study brain and body processes in PIHKAL.

Regarding your point though, I find it interesting that some silicon valley tech people are touting LSD microdosing as being extremely helpful to them in coming up with new ideas and accomplishing work. Of course, microdosing is not tripping, but it's still using psychedelics to aid in the creative/technical process.
 
Washingtonbound why would tripping hinder your ability to comprehend these things? Honestly I don't have very much psych experience but have taken a half dozen 2g shroom trips and it's helped me to see the bigger picture and to pluck out details of that picture and examine them.


My everyday life is very unfocused so maybe the improvement im seeing is larger then someone with regularly good focus. Either way it seems to me like a useful state of mind for someone needing to think outside the box.
 
There are several big named (not as big as neil of course) academics researching drugs (or more specifically the brain systems that allow them to work) that admit to using or having used psychedelics. David Nichols is probably the most well known example.

Does being on drugs help them make discoveries? No, but would they be researching these fields had they never tried drugs? No, they would probaly be researching astrophysics.
 
Does being on drugs help them make discoveries? No, but would they be researching these fields had they never tried drugs? No, they would probaly be researching astrophysics.
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Exactly. LSD is a "key" that allows one to access a part of one's self. Sometimes that spark of interest is something that ordinarily been passed over in normal consciousness.

Sometimes it's an abstract concept that presents itself and leads to a new view.

After the inspiration comes the hard part of all the work required to follow up on that moment of inspiration. That's the difficult part.
 
I would like to direct you to this talk, if you hadn't encountered it already:

<br>-

Fadiman has done, in my opinion, the most meaningful work in trying to answer this question you proposed us.
 
dreamflyer said:
I remember reading somewhere that James Watson (one of the folks that worked on it) said at the 2005 TED Conference that he stumbled upon the double helix concept after dreaming about a spiral staircase.
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Yeah, Watson and Crick discovered the double helix between 1951 and 1953... I'd be surprised if either of them had taken LSD at that point (Sandoz had recently begun selling it under the name "Delysid", but they probably didn't expect there to be a market for it outside of psychiatrists trying to gain a better understanding of psychotic thinking).

One should also keep in mind that Watson and Crick didn't come up with the double helix structure completely out of the blue. They built on the work of Chargaff (who noted that DNA contained equal amounts of adenine/thymine and guanine/cytosine, implying the existence of base pairs) and X-Ray crystallography photos of DNA by Rosalind Franklin. They weren't Terrence McKenna who would formulate theories about "self-transforming machine elves" based solely on things he saw after chugging Ayahuasca.

That said, Kary Mullis did attríbute the discovery of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (a method for exponentionally copying DNA sequences for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1993) to his use of LSD.
 
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