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

What do psychedelics do to your thinking?

^Of course, and whose saying otherwise?
 
Filkins said:
I am however putting some space between my trips but I feel as though the concepts and ideas may no be helpful, but the style of thinking/analyzing things is, and it allows me to really understand who I am, maybe not as to what I do and act, but that I am me, and you are you, but what matters is can we both achive happiness without hurting one another.

yes. um, what you say when you trip has little significance, actions speak louder than words. lifes a trip remember;) what you do and how you act are who you are, what you think can become that but dont go and say i am me until you can say i am. catch my drift?
youve got a great mind
 
Bit of an old thread, but i didn't really want too start a new one based off the same topic, i had been thinking lately about my experience and wanted to share how i understand why/how the mind process's thought (Just my perspective on it.)

Ever since my last trip, which had a big impact on my mind in terms of 'thought process' I've been trying to understand how/why it happened.. how my brain processed thoughts.. why it seemed like i could read minds, and why paranoia set in.

I don't think i figured it out.. but have a better understanding.. its like our minds are made up of 1 giant 'grid' that the thoughts run on. When two people have similar thoughts they move up closer too the same grid line.. when there on that same grid line.. there able to communicate mentally, because there sharing the same thoughts, but if there to think of something personal/secret.. they drop way down the grid onto a different line.. (or in my case wind backwards through a series of intertwined thought lines/patterns, it didn't have to be something personal.. it was VERY sensitive too any shift in thought pattern, so it was almost impossible too maintain that thought gridline connection between someone else longer then 5 seconds). Paranoia occurred because if you can read each others thoughts, you feel like they can read your secrets too.. but its impossible, because its too far away from the mutual grid line/thought pattern. (I've seen people describe people reading there dark secrets, so i dunno.. just my interpretation of this so far)

This got me thinking about how this is used when your sober. When people get along really well.. have similar interests, stuff in common.. and are almost able to finish each others sentences off.. as a direct result of how the minds thought process works, it gets closer too the 'exact' same thought line, but never does, hence why you cant READ minds. People who think completely different things are further apart on this grid.. and evidently don't get along as well. LSD just reveals this too us, and makes it known.

It really did feel like this too me when i was tripping, that if we were closer too that same grid line.. we would be happier and more comfortable, and once we got onto the grid line, sharing the exact same thoughts, was where mind-reading became real. But if we were further apart.. we would get paranoid and skeptical of people around us.. almost like it was the deciding factor between been comfortable and been paranoid. [For example: my friend became incredibly paranoid muttering about us thinking he was gay.. thinking about it now, it could of been a secret or a worry of his, and he thought we were able too read his thoughts, so it set in a motion of extreme paranoia.]

But as stonerfromohio said, language cannot re-create/explain what was experienced. Hence why this may just sound crazy lol. ;)
 
^Part of generally "reading" people, if not most, occurrs subconciously. Who knows what parameters we use in that "reading"- I'm open to anything really- but seeing as psychedelics can reveal the subconcious as such, the knowledge of what peoples behaviour should and will be is no longer simply provcessed behind the scenes per se, but upfront and in your head.

Psychedelic paranoia- between people- is fucking weird. I had a moment not so long ago when I was preahing absolute gibberish with my friends, when a close friend determined I was god. I ran with this for a moment or two, actually almost believeing it- until we both realised usddenly how odd that sudden belief was....and couldn't really look at each other straight for a while. It was as if there was a wall between us that we both could feel, understood why it was there, yet couldn't break through it. Luckily, something happened and we forgot.
 
sometimes i find my thoughts will be racking at my brain with no break. I think i'd be so much happier and peaceful if i could just quit thinking so much. Its frustrating because the second i have a thought on some trips, it will be erased from my memory. Its hard to have connected thoughts because of this. i've also seen "energy ghosts" returning to a place ive already been to. i won't actually hallucinate and think im seeing myself and whoever else there again, but i picture it, and it seems like i can feel their energy. its like in a book, even after you've read that jimmy's dead, on page 73 he will be eternally climbing that tree.
 
ebola? said:
>>It's like looking at the universe as an audience member rather than an actor on stage.>>

This is how I feel sober. :/

Me too... me too. Psychedelics make me feel more connected to my part in things, actually.

I've always felt like an observer, to the point where I forget that I am involved in situations sometimes.

Psychedelics seem to work in my mind in a similar way as in yours, ebola... my thoughts will consist of concepts or conceptual packages rather than as a dialogue or systematic thought process. It makes comparing of concepts much more intuitive and easy, but it makes describing things in words harder. It has done so much to quiet my mental dialogue that I find it extremely easy to be silent in my mind... in fact at any given time my mind is probably not occupied with any sort of language-based thought. I can turn my mind off pretty easily; for example, I can fall asleep in about 20 seconds. This has advantages but also disadvantages... it can make me feel less alive at times, although I think this is mainly because my wife is a very active mental dialogue type of person whose mind is never at rest and it's such a sharp contrast between us.
 
Last edited:
Gaian Planes said:
interesting, do you mean the actual structure of your thought becomes visible to you? That's really interesting.

Expand if you will, I'm curious (or I'll wait to read about it in a TR of yours :D).

peace,
andy

You don't have your own thoughts visible to you? That's not right. I have the actual structure of my thought visible to myself sober.
 
I'd like to point anyone interested in how psychedelics affect your thinking to a research paper I found on erowid.

http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v07n1/07110bag.html

The experiment proves that psychedelics increase creativity and allow us to connect ideas/thoughts/words to each other which are increasingly unrelated.

Think of your sober brain with just a single pulse of energy tracing through it's labyrinth of channels. This pulse or "thought" can only jump to other thoughts which lie in neighboring channels. eg. from "orange" to "fruit"

Under the influence of a psychedelic, you can easily jump from one channel to another a few hops away. Instead of simply associating orange with fruit, you may unconsciously make the jump from "orange" to "fruit" to "florida" to "disney world". All the while you are left wondering why old walt disney was such a dick, then promptly wolf down your sweet sweet clementine.

This type of thinking increases your ability to come to unique conclusions and find novel solutions to your problems. Remember that the DNA helix was discovered by a scientist on LSD, before they had the technology which enabled them to see the molecule directly.

Psychedelics scatter your brain, reducing your ability to solve problems and act in a manner conductive to eating, working, finding a mate. Our brains are the way they are because it makes evolutionary sense.
 
I somewhat agree with you skatardude10.. i've often treated tripping as the 'reality' that was hidden from me. The psych's open my mind too the real world..

I still don't understand it enough too put it into words, and im not sure i will ever be able to convey it into words lol.
 
I've been substituting my answers to old threads for answers to new threads a lot lately. If you don't think that what follows properly addresses your current question let me know.
ebola? in the old "What IS a psychedelic?" thread said:
For me, the answer is that psychedelics affect abstract throught in a particular way: Chains of thought develop that are linked by levels of abstraction, each thought subsuming those prior. This may be contrasted with linear thinking, whereby the thinker traces a chain of causation. At the same time, this very process of jumping levels of abstraction becomes subsumed. And so on.
My response to ebola? said:
So by this do you mean that in the psychedelic state there is an increased tendency toward bottom to top thinking over left to right thinking i.e. moving from an example of a concrete criminal punishment to the concept of justice over moving from one example of concrete criminal punishment to a concrete example of reform? Maybe you could provide an example?

I think I agree with you, though on a more general level I think the idea can itself be subsumed within an understanding of the psychedelic state as a loosening of conceptual boundaries, including our self-concept. If we tend to think linearly, in a firm, successive, and stepwise fashion, then a loosening of our conceptual boundaries would entail the simultaneous activation of whole networks of thoughts and more holistic thinking. The thoughts within these holistic networks would tend to be reasonably associated with one another but not necessarily. Psychedelic’s activation both within networks coherently interassociated and between networks reasonably disconnected could explain both the tendency of the psychedelics user to discern plausible higher order connections between ideas (insights typically signified by by the eureka feeling) and their tendency to draw entirely nonsensical parallels between thoughts that no intelligent person can relate to. If the eureka feeling is merely the feeling of a network of thoughts fusing together—which usually occurs in a sensible and fairly reliable way when we’re sober—a psychedelic loosening of conceptual boundaries would increase the incidence of the proper conjoining and subsumption of thoughts into higher order abstractions as well as the incidence of “misconjoinments” due to leeching of reasonably disconnected networks into otherwise coherent networks via liberal application of our favorite psychedelic solvents. Additionally, its possible that the presence of a psychedelic could even amplify the experience of mendacious insight, thereby overpowering our inhibitions and second guesses with an all-consuming feeling of certainty. In dissociative use this loosening of conceptual boundaries might happen when certain brain systems are isolated from others that influence or inhibit (or inhibit the inhibition of) them or the activity of the normally antecedent or successive systems to the isolated system, thereby freeing up networks of thought to make unusual or higher order associations via a breakdown in the usual chain of neural systems that might underpin some forms of linear thought.

I don't think this idea helps us understand the visionary state that characterizes salvia (esp. salvia!) and peak experiences with 5HT hallucinogens and dissociatives very well though, which suggests the concept of a psychedelic is partially just pragmatic.

I think this view is helpful in explaining why thoughts and insights seem to come from nowhere under the influence of psychedelics. The drugs make our conscious thought chains more permeable to parallel thought chains that are normally unconscious. With our minds flooded by psychedelics, these loosely associated streams of unconscious thought overflow and become subsumed within the main flow of our recognition.
 
Last edited:
What is called thinking?

What is most thought provoking in this thought provoking time is that we still are not thinking.

The wasteland grows; woe to those who hide wastelands within.
 
For me my "thoughts"(visual/abstract conceptual/intuitive) seem to arise uncluttered with words from the pool(?) in which prethought is birthed from.
 
I've taken EEG (brainwave) measurements on many different psychedelics and there seems to be a very noticable increase in brain activity. The ratios of brain wave activity are vary greatly from the waking state. I took two hits of acid on monday and noticed my theta and alpha wave amplitube was markedly increased. Coherence between the two hemispheres is also much, much higher on psychedelics which makes sense as my thoughts while tripping tend to be much more 'holistic'.

Most importantly I feel though was an increase in gamma wave frequencies (http://4mind4life.com/blog/2008/04/11/understanding-the-gamma-brainwave/ , http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html). I also had much more control over my brainwaves. Over a period of about 5 minutes I was able to more than double my gamma wave amplitude until it started to go off the chart! My brain started to vibrate and my perception changed rapidly, it was like I was going into hyperdrive. I became concerned as I was entering into some uncharted territory, so decided to halt the experiment.

Interesting for sure. I'm quite convinced of the power of both psychdelics and neurofeedack and I think together the potential is even greater...
 
ebola? said:
>>It causes me to no longer think. At all.>>

I get the exact opposite (well, unless i get so far down the rabbit hole that thinking and not-thinking, isness and oneness, etc. are somehow collapsed into one (that is also none and also many).

Exactly! At least on LSD, my thinking becomes cyclical. That is, I think in circles. I don't mean this in a negative sense-- usually when people say they think in circles they mean that they are getting nowhere. No, instead, the kind of cyclical thinking I'm talking about is a productive kind.

For example, I recently took acid and had a very deep trip where I came to the realization that everything, in its fundamental state is energy. Everything I thought of, from God, matter, the cosmos, and our three-dimensional reality, all came back to the idea of energy. Matter is merely energy condensed (as Einstein taught us), and this fact became so much more clear and immediate while tripping. Further, I realized that while there might be a more fundamental aspect of reality other than energy, we, living in a 3-dimensional universe, will never be able to know it, because energy is at the fringe of our reality. Whenever energy is expended in our dimension, something gets "used up", however where does this energy come from? I came to the conclusion that energy comes from another dimension that we can't observe, and that we really can't see energy for what it really is, only the effects of it. Whether this conclusion is right or wrong, that trip was a complete blast. Whoever said that cyclical thinking never got anyone anywhere?

Oh, BTW, if you haven't picked this up, I've been dabbling in quantum physics. I doubt I'm smart enough to come up with these ideas all on my own. But still, tripping greatly facilitated my understanding of concepts that were just out of reach when sober.
 
ive only taken acid 5 times, two of which were lsd and three that were lsa. when im peaking, i cant seem to connect my thoughts enough to make sentences... i cant communicate at all. i babble if i talk at all, but mostly i giggle, bc all of my thoughts are so happy. the fourth time i tripped, i candyflipped, and that was the most ive ever been able to communicate. there was a girl with us that hadnt tripped in a long time, and she couldnt seem to get comfortable. i was trying to help her, and once the roll kicked in it was like... everything i said made her feel so much better, and she didnt want to be away from me the rest of the night. i didnt think anything i said was very profound, bc i couldnt really get out everything i meant, but at one point i told her, relax. youre allowed to feel what youre feeling. just feel it. she smiled rainbows and spent an hour playing with the StringN'It. after that everytime she felt funny she would come and ask me to talk to her and tell her what i was thinking.. which i had a hard time doing untill about six hours into it when i started to even out. once i get past the peak, its like my head opens up and everything i know about anything spills out and i can look at it. my first trip i realized i didnt know anything at all, which was much more comforting to me that you'd think. my most recent trip i took four hits of some pretty good liquid lsd and after the visuals slowed down, i had a moment where i felt i could do absolutely anything i wanted to and noone could stop me. i felt enormous. i was at a point in my life where i didnt have a place to live, i had no money, my best friend found out she has cancer, and my mom told me point blank that she wanted nothing to do with me. now, for a nineteen year old, thats alot to deal with. but i felt... invincible. because i had no ties to anyone or anything and there wasnt anyone who would take responsibility for me, i realized that i wasnt vital to anyone else but me, and that gives me the power to do anything i want.... anyway, what it boils down to is this: in school, i had a hard time learning. but with acid, i learn something new every single time. stuff ill actually use in my realtime life. its amazing. i think the entire world should have a dose and a bean every saturday for breakfast, recover on sunday (sleep, eat well, rest up) and we would all have better mondays. and tuesdays, and wednesdays, etc.... the world needs acid. and mdma to help us love more. haha
 
LacieJae said:
when im peaking, i cant seem to connect my thoughts enough to make sentences... i cant communicate at all.
That's interesting that you say that, because on acid I seem to think much more lucidly, yet I still experience problems communicating as you've described. I've always heard from teachers that if you can't express something clearly, then obviously you don't know what you're talking about. But after acid, I've come to disagree with that doctrine. I understand fully the realizations I have made on psychedelics, but they are always hard to express, especially while tripping. On a brighter note I can usually express my tripping thoughts much better once I'm sober, but there is not the immediacy and the excitement there as when I'm tripping.

LacieJae said:
.... the world needs acid. and mdma to help us love more. haha
Just because a certain drugs have done great good for you, doesn't mean that they will for everyone. Call me a cynic.
 
They fix broken mind mechanisms, delete harmful patterns, defragment associations and clean up bad sectors.

This is the best case scenario though, if you misuse them they'll just replace harmful patterns with new harmful patterns.

I'm not sure if I'm making any sense. I just can't explain it otherwise...
 
listerbean said:
That's interesting that you say that, because on acid I seem to think much more lucidly, yet I still experience problems communicating as you've described. I've always heard from teachers that if you can't express something clearly, then obviously you don't know what you're talking about. But after acid, I've come to disagree with that doctrine. I understand fully the realizations I have made on psychedelics, but they are always hard to express, especially while tripping. On a brighter note I can usually express my tripping thoughts much better once I'm sober, but there is not the immediacy and the excitement there as when I'm tripping.

Just because a certain drugs have done great good for you, doesn't mean that they will for everyone. Call me a cynic.


well, thats waht i mean... i know exactly what im thinking, but i cant make the thoughts join up to make full sentences come out of my mouth. afterwards, though, i write everything down and share what i learned with people i know will understand me.
also, i realize the drugs that i love and do well for me arent right for everyone else... its just that i know how it makes me feel and if there was a way for it to do that for everyone else, the world in my opinion would be so much better.
 
Top