Wandering Girl said:
I actually need more than four times the amount of mu-opioid agonists to feel minimal effects compared to almost everyone else I know. I also know someone who needed more than four times the amount of psychedelics that everyone else I know needed for full effects just to get even a body high. He eventually started getting over this with experience, somehow. I've also started becoming slightly more sensitive to opiates. On the other end of things, I've met a few people who can't take more than a hit or two of weed without having strong psychedelic visuals; one even said we would see ghostly entities and it scared him away from weed. So maybe there are more hard heads and lightweights out there than you think?
That aside though, I agree that it does tend to be extremely variable for salvia. And that thread is hilarious. X) That guy must be so frustrated hahaha. Geez, talk about self-centered....
Yeah, there are certainly hard heads when it comes to other drug classes. What I meant to emphasize more earlier is that the difference in response between somebody who's sensitive to the effects and a salvia "hardhead" is so radical. It's the difference between feeling kinda tingly with some wavy sensations and being so in the thrall of an utterly alien experience a person may physically get up and act it out obliviously, even if that means -- if you've seen some of those videos, or read one particular post here on Bluelight -- crawling out a damned open window, or stumbling through a campfire.
No No, i consider Salvia, to trigger the Fight or Flight Defense Mechnanism in the brain.
A lot of things that hit quickly i find trigger the fight or flight defense mechanism
I thought you were maybe theorizing that the experience triggered extreme ego dissociation as a
psychological defense mechanism. I'm not sure how to make sense of your last post in the context of a physical flight or flight response since you referred to salivia "talking" or "not talking" to people, "emotional and physical defense," and people having "bad shit to them" doing "whatever it takes to prove their worth over the top of the experience." I know now you meant an adrenaline fueled fight or flight response, but, and I'm just more really curious than anything, could you explain how that fits into that previous post?
I ask because I find my apparent misunderstanding of your wording incidentally intriguing, and I've had similar thoughts as they've inspired in the past. "Dissociation" is a recognized psychological defense mechanism, and there are many overlaps between it and the salvia "breakthrough" experience, which is, of course, a dissociative breakthrough, albeit a very atypical one (there's a
recent thread questioning how appropriate the classification as dissociatives is for kappa opioid agonists in the Neuroscience and Pharmacology forum).
Description from psychecentral.com:
Dissociation is when a person loses track of time and/or person, and instead finds another representation of their self in order to continue in the moment. A person who dissociates often loses track of time or themselves and their usual thought processes and memories. People who have a history of any kind of childhood abuse often suffer from some form of dissociation. In extreme cases, dissociation can lead to a person believing they have multiple selves (“multiple personality disorder”). People who use dissociation often have a disconnected view of themselves in their world. Time and their own self-image may not flow continuously, as it does for most people. In this manner, a person who dissociates can “disconnect” from the real world for a time, and live in a different world that is not cluttered with thoughts, feelings or memories that are unbearable
The appeal of this interpretation of the salvia experience is pretty obvious if you've read enough trip reports. After all, one of the chief subjective effects reported in academic journals in response to kappa opioid agonism is dysphoria, which we might imagine substituted for "childhood abuse" or some other trauma in the description above. The problem with such a view is that, while the utterly alien nature of the salvia experience is often thought of as a "different world," salvia breakthroughs can be inherently frightening, confusing, and even physically painful for some, and that certainly doesn't sound like a world "not cluttered with thoughts, feelings, or memories that are unbearable." And of course not everyone who experiences salvia breakthroughs finds them dysphoric -- or at least not substantially so -- and even among users who do it's rare for them to experience PTSD-like symptoms in response like the tragic events that evoke the ego dissociation defensive mechanisms can lead to. Still, the overlaps between the two experiences are hard to just ignore.
Perhaps a psychological episode similar to the dissociative episodes triggered as a defense against trauma can be triggered by salvia's particular brand of strange and powerful effects. Clearly it has it's own effects -- such as open eye visuals, skin prickling sensations, and "gravity" effects -- that are independent of the possible contributions that such a hypothetical ingrained psychological defense response might lend to a breakthrough salvia experience, but perhaps if these "purely chemical" effects grow powerful enough some threshold is breached in those psychologically susceptible (and perhaps not breached in "hardheads," or at least not until after many attempts, as has been reported as necessary for some hardheads to breakthrough, have acclimated and primed them to give into it). Maybe a combination of the independent psychoactivity of salvia and the process of the human psyche being
forced to cognitively cobble together the proposed novel species of dissociative psychological defense
in a matter of mere seconds can help explain the bizarre experiences that such a combination of phenomena might evoke. Try to conceive of an alternative identity for yourself, such as those who use the dissociative defense mechanism to deal with trauma reportedly have, but in the amount of time in takes for salvia to take over. That helps me more appreciate the sorts of crazy results that might ensue if salvia really is forcing us to do so subconsciously before we can even begin to anticipate taking on such a task.
It would also be interesting, and of course less speculative, to try to see if we can help explain salvia's subjective effects by analyzing the psychological correlates associated with the functioning and dysfunctioning of the areas of the brain and body where kappa opioid receptors have been found, as well as those areas with which these locations share their most robust connections. Kappa receptors have been found in the hypothalamus, periaquetal gray, and claustrum in the brain, and the substantia gelatinosa of the spinal cord.
I definitely want to experience something like those!![[éS]Infinite](/community/data/avatars/m/98/98112.jpg?1554214550){kind=avatar}
