The only reason I want to do DMT again is so I can remember

[Kaleida]

I certainly did not, but I will accept the compliment anyhow, haha. I think it's just an artifact from Xorkoth merging an earlier identical thread from Trip Reports, but minus the identical opening post.

 

[Xorkoth]

Ah yeah that was it, didn't notice that Kaleida's post is first now. I'll fix that...

 

[Sir Ron Pib]

I think memories are best formed from coherent associations put in a meaningful context, and that these extraordinary states of consciousness lend themselves extremely poorly for any of those requisites of proper and long-term remembrance.

Seems very hard to say: I don't know how delusional nitrous oxide insights are, whether they make sense merely by the virtue of lacking proper critical thinking... or whether there is something to them - don't know about the key to life, but at least by Earth standards... and just impossible to put into context or connect to any sober frame of reference. The mystical frame of reference just doesn't have much at all to do with that.

Dissociatives or GABA modulators messing with cognition or memory surely won't help, but maybe I would also not expect any coherent thought to form when so impaired... and serotonergic psychedelics can still pose these problems while having no clear pharmacological reason to impair cognition or memory, and also some of these profound experiences don't at least *feel* so out of it. I know that feeling of just being blurred into fucking oblivion. The feels say something not way off, but the thoughts say hardly anything at all.

Another possibility is perhaps that something goes wrong with carrying short-term memory into long-term memory. Possibly that doesn't take full-on disruption of cognition and memory but just a disruption of coherence of this kind of processing which is different from memory formation an sich.

Interesting post and well put. Ineffable is the word very commonly associated with some of these profound states via DMT or LSD or whatever - not being communicable through the medium of words or description but it is clear to some degree they are un-rememberable - that is not being communicable to the self via internal vocabulary.
Oft there is some dislodging of the ego structure; maybe less self to directly tie these information sets to - it strikes me as an animal memory is a useful aid to survival; at a basic level where to find food (re live a virtual journey), what danger to avoid and so on. These states of other processing are useful in someway but not directly tied to these needs, perhaps even separated. I am thinking of dream which if recalled at all is very hazy and the total essence gone - only last night I though of an amazing tune, on waking for the toilet some fragment was left; I hadn’t outdone JS Bach, it was mundane. In the disordered world of dream or psychedelia ordinarily separate things can cross - a sense of awe and brilliance with a pretty naff tune - admittedly a lot of peoples taste in music suggest they do this in normal waking hours but you know what I mean…or of course music is actually on the beginning of this scale of altered state. As to Insights validity - sometimes they are and sometimes might seem so by similar linkage to my music example - they are still rewarding in the moment and it might be that this disordered connecting can create really valid useful information as long as you have some ability to process out the more invalid, more random bits. I guess it is instructive to know where people are at who are drown by this noise but really it is useful to be able to quickly snap out of dream, disregarding memory storage time/space and drop into processing useful to an autonomous physical being. So basically I suspect a lot of these states (which can seem to have extraordinary amounts going on at once rather than linear links) are rather incompatible with being remembered.