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What do psychedelics do to your thinking?

ebola?

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Joined
Sep 21, 2001
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For me, the essence is an increasing play of abstract concepts in a very specific way. I find myself encapsulating seeming conceptual oppositions in "high level" concepts that reconcile yet preserve these oppositions, casting them on a "higher-level", generating new oppositions. This is eerily like experiencing the Hegelian dialectic directly (see my avatar).

My sober (and stimulant-driven) mode of thinking is very different. I try to tinker with logical systems, building up from first principles. Psychedelics are far more "intuitive".

Somehow, the sensory effects are analogous/part of the same thing.

I get this from THC, dissociatives (very much including nitrous), 5ht psychedelics, and to a far lesser extent MD(M)A.
 
It makes me much more prone to intuitive thought as opposed to analytical thought. Although my capacity for analytical thought has been enhanced as well. And odd, random, ecstatic states can be caused by simple things like observing a grasshopper. Colors are permanently enhanced. I feel more empathetic towards others. I could go on and on...

Not to say I haven't experienced any negatives either. But honestly, not too many. Certainly I'm far more "out there" than I used to be, which could be considered good or bad, depending on your viewpoint.

I have experienced many more negatives from daily prescribed adderall use, which tends to turn me into a very productive zombie. I sometimes use low dose cannabis (a single hit) along with my adderall to stimulate creativity while working on chemistry, physics, and maths. It makes me a bit "slower" in a sense, but that certainly doesn't equate to being worse.
 
>>it makes my conscious and subconscious banter more obvious to my id.>>

Mmmmm...if you mean this in the strict Freudian sense, the id cannot perceive anything, for the id is just a collection of unconscious drives. These drives react to how other parts of the mind try to control the id, but the material of the drives remains constant. The unconscious is timeless, but bears the mark of all past experience.

>>It makes me much more prone to intuitive thought as opposed to analytical thought. Although my capacity for analytical thought has been enhanced as well.>>

Me too. I make more intuitive leaps, but they are usually centered on conceptual analysis.

>>
I have experienced many more negatives from daily prescribed adderall use, which tends to turn me into a very productive zombie. I sometimes use low dose cannabis (a single hit) along with my adderall to stimulate creativity while working on chemistry, physics, and maths. It makes me a bit "slower" in a sense, but that certainly doesn't equate to being worse.>>

I think that most of the slowness is from short term memory errors, and this may be worked around.

I can't read or write (academically) stoned. Stimulants can compensate enough to make it workable, and it makes the material more interesting.

Stimulants tend to leave my style of thought intact but make my thinking more rapid, thorough, and optimistic. I don't think that they actually make me more productive...it just seems like it while high.

ebola
 
to causes be rather mixed thinking up It my
That was pretty funny man...props =D

Psychedelics change the way I think about everything completely, especially while under the influence of them.
 
Psychedelics tend to scramble my sense of meaning. A blade of glass can veritably overflow with profundity and significance bordering on the mystical while a book on a table can strike me as an absurd and profane artifact. Pronouns take on meaning in and of themselves, their antecedents becoming unnecessary. Metaphors become increasingly insane and colorful, with completely unrelated concepts and objects suddenly fitting together perfectly in comparison. The experience has really opened me up to how arbitrarily assigned meaning seems to be in my mind.
 
They give me a massive change of prospective and thought pattern. It's like looking at the universe as an audience member rather than an actor on stage.
 
>>It's like looking at the universe as an audience member rather than an actor on stage.>>

This is how I feel sober. :/
 
in my opinion, on a trip, you "loose" yourself and get in contact whit what fulfills you with life.
By loosing yourself I mean you loose all worldly desires, which normally not only fulfill your life, but in reality is your life, and whilst being on a psychedelic drug you are able to judge upon yourself like you would do with every other normal human being whilst sober.
During thinking on psychedelic drugs you are not able to think of yourself in a normal context, because for the duration of the trip, you don't exist no more(at least for you it seems that way), but exactly that is what enables you to think in new dimensions
 
My thoughts, for as long as I am able to trace them, become more visual (ie, in my head I can see the track that they are running along as they connect to each other). Different psychedelics just put different turns/curves/flips in the track- for example, DXM makes my thoughts become like fireworks or bombs- I see the start of the idea go up (or down), explode once it conveys its meaning/intention, and then the fall-out re-enacts that pattern with a new thought.
 
nikol said:
My thoughts, for as long as I am able to trace them, become more visual (ie, in my head I can see the track that they are running along as they connect to each other).

Yeah, definitely man, you nailed it.

My response to this thread:

I think the way that psychedelics (LSD anyway) enable you to think, is that they really lay out the visual "grid" of logic almost before your very eyes, so that you can really see why something makes sense, or why it doesn't... it's like you can see the electrical impulses of thought going through the maze of neurological pathways that is your brain.

I always imagine a beam of light, or energy, finding its way through a square maze. The exit of the maze (the Truth) is at a corner of the square maze, so that as the beam of light finds its way through the pathways of the maze, closer and closer to the exit at the corner, the distances between the light and the edges of the walls of the maze become less and less, until the light touches the the point where the two edges meet (the corner) and the Truth is seen.
 
nikol said:
My thoughts, for as long as I am able to trace them, become more visual (ie, in my head I can see the track that they are running along as they connect to each other). Different psychedelics just put different turns/curves/flips in the track- for example, DXM makes my thoughts become like fireworks or bombs- I see the start of the idea go up (or down), explode once it conveys its meaning/intention, and then the fall-out re-enacts that pattern with a new thought.
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
 
Interesting. I don't really THINK visually on psychedelics. Its the same old verbal stream, but way fast and coming out of nowhere.
 
yeah i'm struggling to describe the tryptamine stream of thought phenomenology. I tried to do this for a friend, but failed...its really hard to grasp, but the thoughts definitely come from somewhere else, almost out of nowhere like you said ebola.
 
It's kind of hard to explain. My thoughts are always visual, sober or not. I can't quite describe the way they are visual, it's mostly due to synesthesia I've had present since I was a kid that has morphed into new forms through the increase of drug use in the past few years.
My thoughts, normally visual, have a certain place and form that the progression of them manifests in. It's as if there is a mental picture-in-picture function taking place, in which the inset picture is the now familiar subconcious processing of my thoughts, that is visual in that inset field. Different psychedelics either move the location of that picture-in-picture, change what shows up on that screen, or (as is the case with dissociatives, and for some reason LSA) integrate that field into my over-all visual field, so that the activity of my forming thoughts finds different points of correlation in what I'm actually seeing. The part of my mind that is aware of the development and tracking of thoughts as they happen (ie, the inner eye that is always keeping a watch on the picture-in-picture) is usually forced to adopt a new approach to interpreting because the pattern of pregression is different.
There's probably still some things in there that don't quite make sense, but I don't want to try to tease it apart any further without a direction because it could get really messy and confusing.
 
Nikol, i know exactly what your talking about. I experienced something very similar the last time i tripped on LSD.. i could see my thoughts as they would come too me, or go around the corner in my mind.. even when my eyes were open.

It was almost like i could see the thought before my mind processed it? You explanation is a really good example of what i experienced.. i couldn't of said it better myself, i still dont fully understand it really.

This was also the same time where, i swear that myself and a friend were able to read each others minds based off the connection of our thoughts, and i could visually see a line connected from the back of my brain too the back of his.. whenever this connection occured i could feel a pulsing pain on my brain at the back. If someone walked in the room, the visual line would branch off to that persons. I cant really comprehend it, i tried to explain it in a TR.. but its incredibly hard to explain. :(
 
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Psychedelics make my thinking "real", and not just thought.
 
samadhi_smiles said:
the actual structure of your thought becomes visible to you

Can't speak for nikol, but this is exactly my experience...


malakaix said:
i could see my thoughts as they would come too me, or go around the corner in my mind.. even when my eyes were open.

It was almost like i could see the thought before my mind processed it?

Yup yup yup! :D

Think of the train of thought as a mathematical procession - based on the previous thought, and the conditions of your brain, a new thought is calculated (steam is hot + my soup is steaming = my soup is hot (lol, couldn't think of anything better)). In sobriety, a train of thought occurs, but you don't exactly know how. When you know the mathematical formula of "thought" you can pre-calculate what the train of thought will look like into the future.


Aside from visual thought synaesthesia, I've also experience hearing my thoughts as music (by far the most vivid sensory effect LSD gives me), and more recently hearing them as a babbling gibberish (sort of a half-english half-Gnome sentence fragments). I still get that a little bit, my mind speaking me my thoughts in gibberish, when something strikes me as nonsensical or ridiculous.

Fascinating stuff... I'm starting to think it's time to take another trip with my buddies, the Little Silly Dinosaurs. ;)
 
swilow said:
Psychedelics make my thinking "real", and not just thought.

I also find myself experiencing this phenomenon.

it gets really interesting when you find your thoughts shaping the reality around you in real time! (and can observe the same thing happening with other people )
 
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