Euphoric DMT Trip Report by Anonymous Reader: Psychedelic Annealing, Smooth Geometry, and Gender Transitioning Qualia

DMT Experience Report — Learning the Nonlinear Wave Computing theory of subjective experience and internalizing the Symmetry Theory of Valence (originally posted in r/rationalpsychonaut by ClarifyingCard).

Meta Info

This was a sub-breakthrough experience with firmly-set “intellectual” (integrative) intentions. So I wouldn’t really call this a trip report, but an experience report. It’s a little more in the direction of a freeform essay. Working through this experience to translate it into written word is proving very fruitful for annealing what I’ve learned, so I hope it can provide some insight to others. Contents include my real-time integration of QRI’s “nonlinear wave computing” model of subjective experience, and some explanatory applications. I also firmed up my epistemological relationship to the Symmetry Theory of Valence during this experience, so there are some insights integrating these with technical meditation & gender transition.

I hope the length doesn’t render this inaccessible, as I feel that there are many genuinely deep insights here. I’m not the type to typically write reports on experiences, but consuming lots of QRI content has seriously energized me! There’s this feeling of “Finally! People are doing the top-down neuroscience that I’ve been quietly building for years in isolation! People are seeing psychedelic experiences as legitimate tools for investigating the nature of the mind!” So, I’m feeling a drive I haven’t felt in a while, a drive not just to consume information & integrate it acausally, but to contribute & collaborate.

Context

Last night I sipped on a sizeable amount of DMT over the course of a few hours. I probably took over 20 hits from the vape overall, paced gently. I wasn’t specifically striving for a breakthrough, though I left open the possibility, and in fact I was deliberate to keep it sub-breakthrough for the first phase of the trip, since I was trying to use DMT to integrate information content from a video.

To me, coming to DMT fixated on a breakthrough feels like entering a relationship with a striving fixation on sex, or entering sex with a striving fixation on orgasm. So, much like taking your time to get to know someone intimately, or moving through a sexual experience without pushing or striving to let it blossom on its own terms, I’ve been flirting with & getting to know DMT on an increasingly deep level over time. This was the first time I’ve really leaned in & let it show me where it wants to take me.

(“wants” in terms of descending energy gradients, not in anthropomorphizing way. This is a central thread of this experience, so more on this below.)

So, I have not broken through yet; this definitely fell on the side of profound insight & bliss. I’m a deep subscriber to the theory of Neural Annealing, and DMT is so high-energy that metaphorically speaking it felt like pure, elemental annealing; anything my mind turned to, I could understand so crisply, with ease & immediacy, like I’m just letting my representations fall into parsimonious (low-entropy) resonant modes, the local minima that my conceptions have already been swirling around.

I also subscribe to the Symmetry Theory of Valence — well, my epistemological relationship to it has been a little fuzzy or hesitant, being sympathetic to it but not yet feeling like it deeply “clicked”, but after this experience, I not only “get it”, but I’ve felt, intimately, what it’s like to watch it play out in real-time. So that process of “spontaneous understanding” of the above paragraph, the symmetrization/entropy minimization felt really, really good. A truly profound bliss of methodically massaging out any point of tension in my representation field that my attention happened to rest upon.

I also want to point out that it didn’t really quite feel like the positive (additive) happiness of e.g. eating the candy bar you went to the store for, it felt like a negative (subtractive) happiness — in other words, relief from suffering. Very Buddhist in flavor, even at just the most basic level of Buddhist theory, the Four Noble Truths. In other words, the dukkha of the Three Characteristics. I’ve now got this idea in my head of maybe identifying dukkha with the mental tension that’s smoothed by annealing, to some degree at least. That correspondence is a space I’ll be playing in for a while, I can see.

So, here’s the actual report.

Demographic Information

  • Age: 29
  • Height: 5’9″
  • Genetic heritage: 39% Scotland, 33% England, &c.
  • Sex/gender: Trans female (late-stage, meaning enough years of estrogen & social transition to have largely reached mental & physical equilibrium in terms of gender/sex characteristics)

Personal Background

Tremendous experience over 8 years with 80+ different psychedelic/dissociative/otherwise acutely psychoactive substances, with a heavy focus on dissociatives. Sizeable understanding of contemporary technical meditation and Buddhism (my understanding is significantly stronger than my actual practice hygiene). Avid consumer of QRI content. History of engagement with Less Wrong-style rationality. Undergraduate education in math & physics, supplemental education in technical writing, linguistics, analytic philosophy (formal logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, &c.).

Despite my drug experience, I haven’t used DMT proper before. Before this XP, I dipped my toes in the water with 3-4 puffs of this cart over a few hours about 2 weeks before. A few times over the next 2 weeks, I took a few intermittent puffs to continue feeling it out & acclimating.

The Experience

Two phases here: first on my couch processing a QRI video, 1 on my bed in a mindset of play & exploration.

XP Phase I

Setting: ~930p. On my couch, comfortable. Full lighting. No music.

For a few months, I’ve been ramping up my consumption of QRI content, technical meditation dharma, info about/reports on psychedelics, etc. Aside from general interest, I’ve been mentally preparing myself for a DMT breakthrough (my psychedelic experiences having waned in the past few years, and DMT being such a crown jewel of psychedelic strength/power).

I’ve had the idea to take solid but sub-breakthrough hits of DMT while attempting to integrate some QRI content. The video I chose was this:

Non-Linear Wave Computing: Vibes, Gestalts, and Realms by Andrés Gómez Emilsson, President + Director of Research for QRI (Qualia Research Institute).

I’m thrilled to say this was a great choice & fruitful exercise. I’m going to talk a lot about Andrés himself & his video style; I hope it’s not too effusive & doesn’t come across in a parasocial sort of way. It’s more like a walk-through of the subjective experience of what I happened to be doing, a snapshot of how it felt for my brain to process & operate in this state. It was very easy to feel what facets of experience were positive or negative, like my mental model of my valence system was in crystal clarity & intuited with immediacy. This is why this experience also had such an annealing effect for STV on me.

First of all, I was struck by how crystal-clear his vibe comes through in these videos where it’s just a single take of him talking into the camera for an hour! For the record, I’m saying nothing teleological here; no clue how much of this has been thought through explicitly. When I first started watching them, I was like, this could benefit from some cuts or superimposed visuals &c., but over time I’ve grown to deeply appreciate the style. The exact reasons why crystallized during this experience. It’s because it’s an extremely directed, one-pointed style, and it’s also more faithful to real life. For these reasons you can synchronize your mental representation of the content very deeply with the content itself (i.e. you can model Andrés’s attention with high fidelity, so as he goes through the material clearly & methodically, so are you). There’s no echoes of practice or rehearsal like an academic lecture, and there’s no attentional context-shifting that would be demanded by video cuts or superimposed visuals (though having experience with physics simulations & wave dynamics, I’d love to see some simulation visualizations of toy models exhibiting some of the wave dynamics in play here sometime). Instead, it feels more intimate in a way, like the feeling of someone in real life patiently teaching you a complicated concept 1-on-1. You’re watching Andrés think through material he’s familiar with in real-time. You can even see him spontaneously understand & explain new connections as he works through the existing material, and since your attentions are so synchronized, by watching him demonstrating the explanatory power of these models, you’re learning what it feels like to wield these concepts to refine something else into a simpler representation.

It’s not just the DMT that helped me understand this I think; poetically, the content of this specific video was very relevant. Later on in the video, he mentions the notions of “Metronome Quotient” & “Entrainment Quotient”, which could be seen as a kind of schematic for understanding the general process of one person transfering information, emotion, or other mental “vibe” complices to another. Knowing what I know about harmonic dynamics from physics, this is very intuitive. When conditions are right (person A is a suitable transmitter, person B is a suitable receiver, attention is localized favorably) — i.e. when the process works — it feels very similar to something like orbital resonance (which is why Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, & Ganymede have orbital periods in the ratio 4:2:1 — here’s a Steve Mould video explaining this phenomenon). It’s an application of the “soap-bubble” energy-minimization principle: deviations from harmonic equilibrium inducing restoring forces to drag the system into low-entropy resonant modes.

By the way, you can also see this in an array of literal metronomes.

Something else I noticed is Andrés’s emotional/hedonic vibe. He’s always got a smile, on his mouth & in his voice, you can tell that he’s just thrilled to understand this stuff & thrilled to be able to break it down for a willing audience. First of all, obviously this affects the valence of the experience of watching the video, just like smiling when you’re on the phone eases social friction. I think this emotional entrainment can bootstrap informational entrainment as well, by kindling or contributing to overall synchronization, which is neat. It’s intuitive to me; I already “knew” this because walking people through conceptual understanding, processing difficult experiences, &c. is a general passion of mine, and emotion sync is a big part of doing that effectively.

This power to deeply synchronize attention (acausally!) seems like really powerful way to integrate information. It’d have to be in favorable conditions — written word is right out, most likely. Low-stimulus density is important; you want the extraneous setting details/audiovisual landscape to be easy to ignore (to let fade from salience). I think being able to see facial expressions, posture changes, gestural communication, &c. is crucial to be able to really settle in to the entrainment (this is also true in real life — I have no idea why so many people seem almost blind to body language!). Then, by walking through the content in a deeply synchronized way, you know what it feels like to believe it, to synthesize with or wield it against other concepts. That little harmonic signature, that vibe, is there in your mind, ready to be cultivated or dampened by whatever other representations brush against it.

I should also say, I had lots of visual effects during this time of course. Strong tracers, lots of symmetry extrapolation on surfaces. Tons of shimmering on the edges of objects. When I was especially high, I noticed this really cool effect of lowering visual resolution, like a pixelation effect, but overlapping circular blobs of color & texture. They would resolve if I attended to the region. It felt like the corresponding regions of the visual cortex architecture were too energized to be localized properly, blurring/fuzzing of the wave activity translating to decreased specificity in the encoded content. Really neat. The visuals weren’t something I wanted to work with for the moment, so I let myself just enjoy them instead of striving to analyze or categorize.

PsychonautWiki seems to catalog this as environmental orbism. Interesting that they associate it primarily with dissociatives — I have not experienced it on dissos (or anything else). I wonder if there’s something Fourier transform-ish happening with the visual cortex activity, like higher-frequency activity dominating the encoding — if so, it could be thought of as a sort of inverse of symmetrization. No idea, will think about it.

Anyway, I watched the video for a while, frequently backtracking to process content carefully. Eventually it started feeling laborious, so I moved to my bedroom.

XP Phase II

Setting: ~11p. On my bed, very comfortable. Low purple mood lighting. No music.

CW: Some light talk of sexuality.

I wanted to make some time to play with the drug in a very soft, low-stimulus environment. So I just cleared my bed & spread out the top sheet layer, a lush fleece blanket, flat across the top. The space is full of pleasant, comfortable-vibe stuff, so on one side I was enveloped by super-soft blankets & pillows & stuffed animals, very pleasurable. Very deliberately setting an easygoing, pleasurable, sensual vibe for the drug to energize & amplify.

I started taking more hits, just resting comfortably on the blanket to see where it would take me. I just let myself frolick, enjoying the pleasurable touch sensations of my environment, rubbing my hands & legs against the soft surfaces, massaging my inner thighs, feeling out the effects it had on my muscles & sensory processing. I noticed the way my muscles subconsciously started to tense & tighten in anticipation of a hit, and then as the DMT washed through my mind, noticed how it smoothed & blurred & dissipated that tension & the angular mental prickles associated with it. I did a lot of rhythmic contraction & release for various muscles, just letting myself enjoy how relaxing it felt to let it go. I carry a lot of tension in my inner thighs (especially common for girls), so getting deep into the tissue & massaging it out was immensely pleasurable, almost orgasmic at times.

This made me think a lot about the distinction I was drawing earlier, of what I guess I’ll call “positive” vs. “negative”, or “additive” vs. “subtractive” pleasure. This was very much subtractive pleasure, which could maybe be accurately characterized better as “relief”. In other words, nirvana-wards.

I decided that I was in a good state for a breakthrough. I wasn’t sure whether it would happen, since my acute tolerance was probably increasing, so I set the intention that I wasn’t striving for it to happen and that it would continue being a wonderful XP if it didn’t. So I took several (3-4) puffs in succession and lay back to watch.

Here, I noticed a some decoupling of drug effects. I was still getting visuals from each hit, though the open-eye effects were a little less intense, and the CEVs perhaps more. I was still getting positive-valence mental effects — bliss, equanimity, parsimony, &c. However there was a dramatically lowering of that “roller-coaster” feeling, the overwhelming-ness, the sense a drug has seized your experiential field & is now in charge. It’s possible that this was due to me simply becoming more comfortable.

However, the missing qualia is a pretty somatic one, so I think it’s probably acute tolerance attenuating different effects at different rates. Is DMT norepinephrinergic at all? Or is this an endogenous NE effect, or not related at all? Unsure, will research later. That’s a neurochemical I don’t have as much of an intuitive feel for as much as serotonin/dopamine/GABA. Also I should get to know glutamate sometime. Maybe it’s more of a “roller-coaster” feeling because you’re feeling the pull of a novel attractor.

So, a breakthrough didn’t happen; I think that feeling is probably integral to a breakthrough (though I’m speaking from ignorance for now). But I did get huge waves of bliss & felt my all of my mental representations get highly energized. This felt “hyperbolic” in the sense of there being “too much” to fit neatly in onto the mental workspace, so things start jumbling & intersecting and “space” itself expands into itself to accomodate. This is on the level of conceptual representations, so what exactly “intersecting” and “space” mean is left unspecified.

Here’s 2 tangential paragraphs about this. I’ve had this effect before, especially on 4-AcO-DMT and other 4-subbed tryptamines — most extremely, on a truly stupid dose of 160 4-AcO-DMT several years ago, combined with a heavy dissociative I don’t recall (perhaps diphenidine). Never do this! This was many, many years ago, before I had my relationships/career/gender transition/life together, when my thirst for spiritual revelation & relief was matched by my thirst for annihilation & urge to self-harm. Every mental concept just got hopelessly jumbled together and I couldn’t parse a single aspect of my experiential field. It overtook [my model of] my body & external reality, violently smashing together and shredding them and blending them into uncountably many infinitely thin, infinitely long threads all furiously tangling and colliding. There was a sensation of being flung & pulled along this sharp, fast stream along with all the other shreds of my world. As high-entropy a state as I can imagine.

In other words, the entire modeling mechanism of reality, inside & out, underwent a catastrophic system crash. It was immensely physically painful — I felt every bit of physical reality smashing through each other — and it collapsed into this extremely dissonant state with very few experiential components: a 1-frame flashing of pale green & red, an unbearably loud Hypnotoad-esque droning, and sheer unimaginable physical pain. This went on for subjective eternity — to abuse some math notation, I had this intuitive, unshakeable knowledge that S(t + Δt) = S(t), period. I realize now that I was deep, deep in a hellish & steep local minimum. Perhaps you could consider this a “hell realm”. Combined with the “holing” effect of the dissociative, I think this could fairly be considered a seizure-like state. I’m not sure if I was physically moving in reality, as I didn’t have any thrashing marks & I was alone (don’t do that!!), but I do think I wet myself a little. It was one of the worst eternal moments of my life. Walking through this experience with ~5 years of learning & growth behind me, writing this out has actually helped me understand the experience a lot better, so forgive the tangent. Come to think of it, STV has a lot of explanatory power w.r.t. why this was so dysphoric & traumatic, lots of little clues sprinkled in here — my representation system smashed into a catastrophically high-entropy, short-term-unrecoverable state of unfathomable dissonance, inducing physical & psychic agony.

Anyway, back to DMT.

After those 3-4 hits, maybe another part of why it wasn’t overwhelming was related to the notion of “entropy sinks” mentioned in the DMT + hyperbolization video above. I was getting enormous energization of all my representations, but I had no difficulty in skillfully directing them, in applying them to existing mental & physical tension points & smoothing them out, so there was no runaway accumulation. Symmetrization was also very dramatic in CEVs, planar hyperbolic geometries all interweaving at different angles, and the experience of this geometry was itself immensely blissful & high-valence, another strong point in favor of STV. I’d like to strive for brighter, more defined CEVs soon — if I had looked for them earlier, I think they’d’ve presented.

I then took some time to play around with & appreciate my body some more. I let myself explore my body & just revel in my love for it. Lots of transition-centric thoughts here. I played with my breasts, just lightly rubbing & poking them, feeling them jiggle, reveling in how good & right it felt that I had finally grown them after all this time. I felt along the curves of my hips, groping & squeezing, reveling in how good & right it felt that I have this deeply estrogenic body & mind. How, like, over these years I’ve finally found myself falling into the attractor of this cute, bubbly, exciteable, empathic girl I’ve always been meant to become.

I remembered feeling the slightest inscrutable tugs towards it, all those years ago. I remembered blundering around in the dark trying to interpret those gradient descents towards peace with my identity & body. I remembered starting to discover, reveal, & construct this second “persona attractor”, finding this spark of hope & understanding & rightness that I would kindle & cultivate over the coming years. And I remembered the moment I felt myself at the inflection point between the two local minima, the realization that the I could just let myself fall into it, and the immeasurable relief washing over me. I’m nearly in tears recounting this to you, contextualizing this deep consonance & harmony I feel, realizing just how much literal blood, sweat, & tears were demanded of me to achieve it.

I think I annealed a deep understanding of the nature & valence structure of gender transition (at least for my personal case study). It’s not like this isn’t something I’ve thought about in intricate detail for years, so I’ve already earned a very clear picture for myself, but it’s even crisper now, such a simple story once it clicks. STV honestly seems to have tremendous explanatory power w.r.t. gender transition, something I’d like to think & write about more in the future.

I also played around a lot with my representation/experience of sexual pleasure, which I don’t need to get into toooo much detail about, but it was incredible playing around in that space. One weird thing about my mind is that I kind of have a mental “button” wired up for sensual, sexual, submissive pleasure. In other words, I can just push the button whenever I want (I have dissociatives to thank for getting this circuitry wired correctly) — I can feel this submissive pleasure at will. It’s especially effective if I fantasize, so I spent some time letting myself revel in fantasies about various partners of mine doing various things to me, letting the vividity of the feelings wash over me. This wasn’t especially, ah, “intellectual” work, so I’ll leave it at that.

(Side note: I theorize a lot of the “attainments” of technical meditation essentially come down to programming buttons like this. I’m thinking particularly of the brahmavihara (“divine/sublime abodes”). They’ve been conveyed to me as like finding a housekey, so that you can enter anytime.)

Here’s another phenomenon I noticed during this period. A few times I felt a different piece of neural machinery start to whir up — specifically this notion of “self-consciousness”, what I would conceptualize as the submodule of your reality model responsible for modeling the way others would model you back. In other words, I felt this tugging from my self-consciousness engine, nagging with questions like “Don’t you look ridiculous, writhing around alone in your panties? Aren’t you being frivolous, frolicking in pleasure without any thought to intellectual work? What would <Person X> think if they saw you like this? Do you really deserve to consider yourself cute?”

What I’m trying to point out with this is that I found it extremely easy not to engage with this submodule. I could simply fail to regard it, not energizing that representation. Politely say “no thank you” to that mechanism & gingerly place its suggestions on the ground. In the language of NLWV, I noticed this perturbation, but I let it play out & be gone instead of batting down the ripples of the pond. Very anicca-flavored protocol, very familiar to me from meditative experience.

I found I had this ability with all sorts of mental mechanisms. I’m generally mindful of & moderately good at this, but it was cranked up to 11. I had great control over which facets of experience I did or didn’t engage with. If I had a thought about work-related stress, or guilt over lapses in my exercise hygiene, or anxiety about my thumb (which has a damaged ligament), I could so easily say “It’s not skillful for me to engage with & feed this story right now. Now’s not the time.” Strong equanimity. In this sense, I felt ease with & authority over which representations composed how much of my awareness. This is one sort of skill that samatha meditation cultivates, I think. It makes me realize how much I’ve slipped w.r.t. this skill over the past few years, once my life started going well & started growing more complacent.

So, in that moment, I found it easy to cold-shoulder those nagging feelings tugging me out of animal-pleasure-mind. I was able to let myself indulge in the luxuries I’ve cultivated for myself, without shame, which is actually really hard for me usually. I struggle with strong guilt about deserving any success or happiness I achieve. This is something I know I need to work on — being blissful when it is skillful to feel bliss; suffering when it is skillful to suffer.

Speaking of that equanimity, I’ve made a lot of progress towards “skillful sex” (lol), sexual dysphoria being a central theme of my journey from androgenic to estrogenic libido. Allowing your mind to cloud is always a great way to derail sexual pleasure or orgasm, so I’m happy to pick up more skills here.

Anyway, after a while of this, it felt like a good time to pack it up & let the afterglow run its course, starting to integrate the experience. So I put on some music (Strange Diary by Psychic Twin), lay down, & chilled for a while, eventually turning on a light-complexity video & eating some snacky food (which I typically avoid). I took 0.5 mg clonazepam to help still my mind. This XP kept me up till about 2am, but once I lay down to sleep, it didn’t take too long.

[T + 1 day]

I awoke & got up with ease, which is unusual for me. Perhaps residual stimulation combined with the benzo wearing off during the night, but this is also a known fruit of metta meditation which I’ve cultivated for long periods in the past, so this is something I’ll keep an eye on next time. Metta is something that I’ve practiced skillfully before and it’s at the top of my priority list for improving my meditation hygiene.

Mentally, I feel good. I took my standard 10 mg adderall & 300 mg gabapentin after waking, and I’ve had the energy & focus (and desire!) to write this report, which has taken several hours lol.

I do also have this sensation of being drained, too. It’s hard to explain because it’s not really valence-negative or preventing me from action. It kind of feels like a flatness; my closest approximation is not a recreational drug or crash but how I feel if I’m late with my estrogen injection. But in any case, I do know I need to have patience with & take care of myself today.

Conclusion

Damn! This bliss-stick is extremely powerful — not just in terms of how powerful its psychedelic grasp is, but in terms of the applicability of that power. I can see DMT helping me smooth out all sorts of specific (tactics-level) things about my life, and deliberately integrate all sorts of content, in addition to the sheer spiritual blastoff effects. A central theme in this XP is that feel of rounding out “angular” points of tension in mental representations, slipping down those parsimony gradients, massaging the joints of your mind.

I do get the strong intuition that this is a substance to be taken seriously. I won’t be using it casually… (well, for the most part. We’ll see). It’s funny to me that I tried so many drugs so many years ago before finally trying DMT, but I’m honestly glad I’m getting to know the crown jewel at this point in my life, with many different avenues of life experience to synthesize for interpretation & integration.

My cart is running fairly low. I’ll be getting more. I think if I had really gone for it right away, I would have had a breakthrough, so I’ll probably go for it soon 😊

Peace! 💜


Related trip report by Cube Flipper (pseudonym of an anonymous reader):

Vaping the Genderfluid: Exploring Gender Identity on DMT

Some background on me: I’m in my early thirties, AMAB, somewhere on the autism spectrum (which mostly manifests as skin sensory issues), and a long time Qualia Computing reader.

Sometime last year, my “egg cracked”, to use the parlance of our day. I’d read in the past how autism and gender dysphoria were heavily correlated. I revisited events from my past and decided it was worth exploring whether or not some of my experiences could be explained by gender dysphoria. I suspected that leaning into a more feminine gender identity might feel more comfortable and help me to “vibe” better.

I shaved my legs, got my ears pierced, and started adopting a more feminine identity internally. This felt not unlike flipping a Necker cube on myself from masculine to feminine. I figured out how to see a more female face in the mirror. I started to move differently. I experimented with my voice. I would mostly do this in social settings, though I’m not sure how noticeable it was from the outside.

I even spent three months on estrogen at one point, hoping that its use would help with my sensory issues (it did), before discontinuing its use for a number of unrelated reasons. The phenomenological effects were too numerous to go into detail here; I hope to write up a detailed “HRT trip report” at a later date. Long story short, I found estrogen to be anti-dissociative – like the opposite of ketamine (this assessment is informed by Zinnia Jones’ writeup comparing the effects of HRT with Lamotrigine). My senses felt more tightly integrated – less skin sensitivity, less “noise”, less annoying prediction errors – it was euphoric.

However, my gender identity still felt in flux, unstable. I wasn’t even sure ‘identity’ was a real thing – what is the qualia of identity?

Anyway, I recently gained access to a DMT vape pen, and have been using it on a daily basis to perform a low level annealing on myself, usually in the mornings after a bit of exercise.

I should describe my practice: I lie down, remove any uncomfortable clothing, and ensure my body is relaxed and in a symmetrical position with no muscles under tension. I take one or two puffs on the vape pen – not enough to see more than faint visuals – but enough to feel the bodily vibrations arise, settle, and crystallise throughout my body. I should be clear that my gender identity was not the focus of these experiences, high valence and annealing was.

Source: Lehar’s 2003 Cartoon Epistemology

I am a believer in Leharian force fields: Our sense of touch, bodily awareness, and space is embedded in something like a three-dimensional vector field. As we experience various stressors throughout our daily lives, various contractions, foldings, and distortions can work their way into the “force fields” which guide the way we move and the way we direct our attention. When I smoke DMT like this, I sometimes feel these contractions unfold themselves. This can be kind of unsettling at the time, but in the wake of these experiences I notice my awareness is more expanded and I feel I am navigating a much smoother, less crumpled “possibility space” as I go about my life. Notably, these “unfoldings” don’t tend to happen a second time after vaping DMT again afterwards.

Additionally, colours felt more vivid, and my senses felt brighter – not unlike how I felt on estrogen!

I continued this practice for perhaps a couple of weeks. Something I began to notice was that I was no longer flipping the Necker cube on myself; I was no longer bothering to lean into the feminine identity I had been experimenting with in social settings.

I theorise that the annealing process had drawn my self-model – a giant tree of priors – back towards the stable attractor of my pre-existing masculine identity. Imagine tuning the parameters on a slightly distorted Sierpinski pyramid, bringing it into alignment with itself. I felt comfortable with my masculinity again.

I hope nobody misunderstands me, I don’t mean to say that if you are transgender DMT can draw you back to a pre-transition identity. Quite the contrary, I think DMT can grant you the bandwidth necessary to assess which identity feels most internally robust to you. It’s quite likely that estrogen also can give you the boost required to explore and stabilise your sense of identity.

I had fun exploring my feminine side, and there’s parts of that experience which still stick with me; I still wear earrings and I still shave my legs (because it feels good… and it helps deal with sensory issues). I may yet return to these experiences someday.

I’d discussed these experiences with Andrés a couple of days ago, and we both ran across u/ClarifyingCard’s spectacular writeup today. I hope she continues to enjoy the benefits of DMT!


See also:

And other high-quality qualia-rich trip reports:


Featured image source: Topics in nonlinear wave theory by G B Whitham (1979)


Meditation Retreat Report by an Anonymous Reader: Universal Harmony and Oscillatory Complementarity

By an anonymous reader (this was sent by someone who was formerly deeply skeptical of the Symmetry Theory of Valence. The experience described below made them reconsider QRI’s explanatory frameworks and paradigms. In their own words: “[this experience I] recently had made me think “hmm so maybe there _is_ something to the STV”).


There was a sequence of going back into old experiences, each of them somehow positive or negative. The very earliest one that came to mind was a memory of my mother talking to me with love and delight when I was maybe one year old. There was a sense that my mind and body had been in a particular kind of position when that had happened. Ever afterwards, they had been trying to shift themselves back into that same position, on the theory that the same internal configuration would recreate the same external environment and recreate the same experience of being loved.

There was a sense of the bodymind holding a pattern that was a snapshot of that moment of love, and that the bodymind had been trying to also align the external world into the same kind of a position, out of an understanding that the pattern could only be completed – the puzzle piece matching the rest of the puzzle – if the external world provided the right fit for the bodymind’s internal configuration, letting them interlock in the way that would recreate the old pattern.

In the moment of completely seeing this, there was an understanding of the wisdom that the stuck pattern held – it had correctly seen and recorded a facet of reality, of what I had been like and how that had gotten me love – and also of the fact that its vision had only captured an incomplete facet, with it being impossible to go back to being a baby and replay the same experiences. 

As this was seen, seeing the pattern that the stuck energy had been trying to complete caused it to be completed, the parts interlocking once more. There was a sense of the stuck energy pattern being released and melding back into a pattern of universal harmony and love that could be felt in the body. There was an understanding that the stuck pattern had previously acted as a constraint, trying to repeatedly pull the bodymind into a particular configuration whenever possible in order to recreate the original harmonic pattern, when the harmonic pattern had actually been available all along.

Something shifted and the legs felt like they opened and spread out, a pull relaxing that the mind hadn’t even known was there.

There was a sense of tapping into the universal harmony that could now be felt in the body, as a stream of energy trying to run up from the root chakra to the top of the head. As the body tried to upright itself to align with the energy, it found more stuck patterns interrupting the flow, each of them associated with a past experience and a particular configuration of the bodymind that was at odds with the one that the stream was trying to upright the body to.

There was a seeing that the bodymind’s configuration would affect the bodyminds of the people around it, all other people also moving in a constant process of trying to recapture particular configurations, trying to pull their environment into shapes that would complete specific patterns. In seeing this, there was a sense of testing possibilities.  If this bodymind wanted to upright itself, what positions would that pull the bodies of others into? How would those positions constrain this body’s positions, and what was the shape that it would be pulled towards in turn?

Each of those considerations brought up a new pattern of stuck energy, a time when the bodyminds of others had been in a particular position, and this bodymind had learned to adapt or avoid a particular position in response. Whenever such patterns were found, they temporarily turned into reality, with the bodymind reliving the experience and seeing both how the pattern held within a piece of wisdom – a true fact about what reality had been like – and how that pattern was at the same time incomplete and unintegrated with the rest of the bodymind’s knowing.

Sometimes that lack of integration caused the pattern’s understanding to be a mistake overall. There were situations when an energy pattern had been scanning for signs of others reacting negatively and stored that as the primary interpretation of the experience, seeing only that and missing out on the way that the thing had been too minor to matter, or missing out on the way that others had been able to see the positive aspects as well.

There was a sense that the act of trying to assume specific configurations required selectively taking in information, so as to not see things that would destabilize the desired postures. There was a sense that the content of consciousness gets selectively filtered so as to create particular mindstates, to allow certain configurations to be reliably recreated.

There were fears around the possibility of being seen, a sense that others would not necessarily take well to a bodymind that was standing upright, and would try to bring it back down. There was a sense that the configurations of their bodyminds had constantly been pulling this bodymind back into more cramped positions, as a way for it to stay safe.

There was a sense that many of the configurations the bodymind has been trying to contort itself into have been physically impossible, different people requiring different physical positions that have been impossible to satisfy at once. There was a thought that it’s no wonder that this bodymind has been grinding teeth at night, given all the contradictory expressions that the jaw and the face have been trying to take at once. 

There was also a sense of how some other people’s erratic behavior had been a result of them trying to twist themselves into impossible sets of overlapping configurations. There was a sense that bodyminds will allow the tension of the physically incompatible postures to tear themselves apart, so that different parts of the whole can get split off to adopt different postures at once.

There was a sense of people occasionally catching from the corner of their eye a glimpse of something that a part of them thinks they absolutely cannot be allowed to see, their bodymind instantly making a sharp angle to rotate away from the sight of it and blocking all line of vision, in a single movement of pure terror.

There was a perception that despite everything, the positions of other people didn’t need to matter, and that if this bodymind could tap into the universal resonance of harmonious energy, then that resonance would pull at the body stronger than any other bodyminds can. 

There was a sense that if the bodymind tapped into the universal resonance, it wouldn’t need to contort itself to others, but would rather dance together with others who were part of the same resonance, standing effortlessly upright at all times if it so desired.

The bodymind tries again to align with the resonance, to find a stable flow of energy going up from the pelvis through the body. 

As stuck energies stored in different parts of the body are released, those parts test whether the rest of the body is capable of holding their full energy. The body parts trash against their restraints, then relax as they become assured that it is safe to do so. Waves of laughter and contented sighs bubble up through the system, a flavor like warm pleasant honey. 

There’s a seeing that all the different holds and stuck energies have been attempts to capture the universal resonance and that the way to relax them is to lean into them until they meld back into the resonance, each of their energies containing a fragment of home that shows the way back. 

As one leans into them they each become more like reality, are reality, and then there is a recollection and recognition of their essential truth as it’s merged into the whole. Each such merging allows one constraint to be released, for the dynamic system that is the bodymind to move more fluidly between positions, no longer forced to twist and contort itself into a particular rigid shape whenever it comes near to that region of configuration space. 

Rather it can do what bodyminds exist to do, weave a smooth and graceful path between configurations that make sense in any given situation, dancing in a way that still repeats specific configurations but with a fluidness that is every human’s birthright. 

To have too many constraints is to be torn apart; to have no constraints is to be a newborn incapable of action; to have just the right amount of constraints, pulling the bodymind into configurations that are the right expressions of its essential self, is to be a mature and competent adult.

As this happens, it is as if resonance patterns spread across the body, connecting parts that were previously disconnected. The feet start drumming together, remembering that they are brothers who can do their own thing. The throat spontaneously joins the chants and the song of the people around. The pelvis finds more of its energy, though large parts of it still feel blocked off.

As constraints are dropped and the bodymind manages to better tap into the universal harmony, it begins looking for a new shape, one that would be harmonious both with the universal resonance and the bodymind’s own pattern of energy. Parts of the body try tuning themselves into the song and music and try what it’s like to be in harmony with the universal resonance, what it’s like to generate their own resonance patterns that are separate from the universal resonance but harmonious with each other, how to create something of one’s own that combines with that which is not one’s own. The bodymind explores a role and an identity as a bard-shaman of earth, song and myth, sees where parts of that would fit and where they would not.

There is a sense of harmonious delight and love, of everyone in the room being connected to the same universal resonance that is pulling everyone together, each of them also contributing a piece of their own unique essence into the whole. There is an experience of seeing this bodymind from the outside, and a feeling of it being beautiful and lovable. These new patterns are absorbed into the bodymind to act as the foundation for a new way of being. 


See Also:

  • Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing might help explain this quote: “There was a sense that the act of trying to assume specific configurations required selectively taking in information, so as to not see things that would destabilize the desired postures.” In particular, note the proposed duality between physiological dissonance and resisting information discussed in that article (special emphasis on “denial”).
  • Buddhist Annealing: Wireheading Done Right with the Seven Factors of Awakening (video). This might help explain: “As stuck energies stored in different parts of the body are released, those parts test whether the rest of the body is capable of holding their full energy.” Namely, that one key aspect of equanimity is increasing impedance matching between various parts of the nervous system so that one part can process the stress stored in another one.
  • Non-Linear Wave Computing: Vibes, Gestalts, and Realms. This video provides a conceptual framework capable of making sense of “stuck patterns” that “need to be completed by environmental circumstances”. In brief, these are stored non-linear patterns of resonance that require their oscillatory complement in order to become harmonious. Dissolving them allows you to instead rely on the natural harmonics of your nervous system and thus to not be dependent on external circumstances for positive valence.

Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness

Cross-Posted in QRI’s Blog

[Context: This is a guide to writing useful trip reports. If you read the trip report archives of Erowid, Bluelight, and PsychonautWiki, you notice a wide range of styles, interpretative lenses, and focus. We believe that a few relatively simple considerations can drastically improve the usefulness of written reports in ways that can open up novel research directions. This document is meant to extend and complement the Subjective Effect Index of PsychonautWiki in order to maximize the scientific utility of the written reports. If unconvinced of the importance of writing high quality reports, we recommend first reading David Pearce’s “Their Scientific Significance is Hard to Overstate.]

The first few trip reports you write may not be very detailed, but you will improve over time. It is best to adopt a growth mindset when it comes to translating exotic forms of thinking into sober thinking others can understand. If learning to speak takes years and mastering a new human language in adulthood takes just as long, why would competence in translating psychedelic patterns of thought be something you acquire on the first trip? Thus, it is no surprise that practice and patience are essential ingredients to becoming a psychonaut that is capable of sharing scientifically useful information to the world at large.

So how do you write a useful trip report? Let us start with perhaps the single most important instruction.

Focusing on the Phenomenal Character, Rather than on the Intentional Content of the Experience

The first and most important instruction is to focus on the phenomenal character as opposed to the intentional content of the experience. The intentional content of an experience is what the experience is about, whereas its phenomenal character is what it feels like. While it is worthwhile to discuss the content of your thoughts at a narrative level (e.g. you hallucinated being in an art museum where giant ladybugs were performing in a jazz quartet), the narrative alone will not be very useful to anyone. This is because a narrative description of what your trip was about drastically underdetermines what the experience felt like.

Hence, it is critical to enrich any narrative description with an account of the texture and structure of your experience. People often say things such as: “I went to DMT hell” or “I experienced an LSD paradise”. But what if you probe these statements further? What made the “DMT hell” so unpleasant? What made the “LSD paradise” so blissful? Most people, when asked, tend to be overly focused on saying things along the lines of: “Well, I was meeting angels and strange creatures” or “there were people sobbing”, and they think that this explains why the experience was unpleasant or blissful. You have to understand that when explaining why a certain narrative felt a certain way, you cannot ultimately rely on more narrative. At some point, the explanation should be grounded by the texture of the experience rather than the experience’s narrative[1]. Instead of those previous stories, we think a more useful description would be: “There’s this 3D matrix of resonance that created a lot of green-magenta Moiré patterns, and the sense of harmony and bliss seems to have come from that texture of my experience, and that texture is what made me interpret where I was as a kind of Heaven Realm.” The reason why the angels you saw felt so loving and benevolent comes down to the particular texture of your experience expressing that emotional palette. In other words, the angel is an expression of that sense of harmony and not the other way around.

An analogy is that if you’re listening to pleasurable music, you may hear guitar or piano sounds. The specific instruments definitely matter, but the bulk of what’s making the sound so pleasant and comforting may actually be the reverb quality of the music. Think of the angel like the sound of a guitar. The angel, like the guitar sound, has its own specific qualities (a certain vibe). But in addition to seeing an angel, your entire subjective experience contains this reverb pattern of reverberating (phenomenal) space-time. A phenomenal space-time that feels really wonderful will make you feel like you are in heaven.

Image made by Matthew Smith

Thus, we recommend that you pay attention to the nature of the phenomenal space and time you experienced and do two things:

  1. Try to describe it in as much detail as possible in the language of frequency, dimensionality, fractality, reverb, etc.
  2. Explain how the texture of the phenomenal space you inhabited influenced your emotions and semantic interpretations of what was going on.

Numbers and images taken from: List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension

Try to reverse-engineer the generators of your experience.

A very simple example would be if you were experiencing some kind of strobing effect, like seeing flickering lights. If so, it would be ideal to figure out the frequency of those lights. QRI developed a psychophysics tool to help people quantitatively measure the visual effects of psychoactive substances. Ideally, you can use this tool while experiencing exotic state of consciousness (such as DMT or the states induced by a Fire Kasina retreat), so that you can confidently report (for example) that you experienced a 20 Hz strobing effect.

Left: 10hz replay. Right: 7hz strobe.

Likewise, if you are experiencing replay effects and you enter a thought loop (cf. short-term memory tracers), it’s very helpful if you can tell how big the loop is instead of saying “I was stuck in a loop”. Was the loop a fraction of a second or was it an elaborate narrative that you were circling around over the course of minutes? Those feel very different even though they are both technically thought loops.

Here is a very concrete example: imagine that your DMT trip looked like this lightshow from 2:27 to 5:12[2].

What would you say about it? A lot of people would become overly focused on explaining that at around 4:20, amazing lights felt like an angel, or that it was “richly colored and bright”. But the sort of information we believe is more helpful comes when you can point out simple and plausible ways the experience might have been constructed out of elementary building blocks. In this case, we refer you to one of the Youtube comments: “It is unbelievable that such a magnificent show could be made with just 5 lasers!”. Indeed! Most people would be mesmerized by the light show, come up with some elaborate narrative for “what happened” and go about their day without ever realizing that the entirety of the visual content was generated by just five sources of light fixed in place the whole time! Now that is the sort of obvious-in-retrospect observation that can help us make tangible progress. For instance, it only took one clever math student to notice “oh dear, the walls of the DMT palace I’m in are tessellated by heptagons” to kick-start the explanation space where DMT’s odd effects involve an alteration to the curvature of phenomenal space and time (see: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences). A lot of big insights start with seemingly innocent observations that are obvious in retrospect.

Examples of Statements That Do a Good Job Describing Phenomenal Character

The tracer effects clearly had replays equally spaced apart, calculated around 14hz with the tracer tool. I could make out three replays with precision, but there might have been four or five counting faint ones I couldn’t always see.
Whenever I would focus on my breath my visual field seemed to express a Kelvin–Helmholtz instability: thanks to tactile-visual synesthesia, the sensation of each breath would manifest as disturbances in my visual field, which in turn seemed to have a higher density than their surroundings, and this would give rise to turbulent flow very similar to the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability simulations I’ve seen online.
The left part of my visual field had a vertical wall I was attending to with peripheral vision. The wall felt like it was about 1 meter to my left and at a right angle. This hallucinated wall was vibrating at around 8hz and it had two alternating layers that looked about 1cm apart[3], one blue and one yellow. Their colors were alternating at about half the speed at which the wall was vibrating.
The ceiling was tessellated with a highly detailed texture organized along the 632 wallpaper symmetry group. More so, this tessellation was dynamic, in that all of the shapes were shifting and morphing. In sequence, a symmetry element type would be selected by attention (such as all of the copies of the 6-rotational symmetry element) and each repeating region of the texture in the entire ceiling would change by the rotation around the copy of the symmetry element that corresponds to it (example). Then another symmetry element would be selected and the pattern would morph by rotation around that new symmetry element, and so on. This lasted for about 1 minute and it faded as soon as I turned on some music.
By selecting features of my hallucinatory environment and attending to them, I could make them grow and in a way “reify them”, meaning that they would feel more and more real and vibrant the more I paid attention to them. I noticed that I could transform the walls of the hallucinated environment into glass walls with a peculiar property: when light goes through the wall in one direction it becomes lighter and when it goes in the other direction it becomes darker. This resulted in the room being filled with what I later recognized to be cohomology fractals
I was able to more easily separate the various “facets” of essential oils. In particular, rather than experiencing lemongrass as just a “unified block” (a single feeling of “herbal citrus scent”), I could break it down into three independent facets: a sharp citrus scent with peaks of sensation (probably citral or d-limonene), a soft and smooth alcoholic character impact background (probably neral and linalool), and an earthy almost clove-like spice facet (probably centered around myrcene). It was noteworthy that these facets were far more cleanly separate than normal yet by focusing on any two of them at once I could blend them independently in a sort of “qualia chemistry”. It felt like each perfume in turn could be used to experience 5 or 6 different compositions depending on how I would attend and try to merge its different facets all inside of my mind!
My sense of time passing seemed to be constructed out of three distinct elements interacting with one another. One was based on the rate at which the color scheme evolved. The other two were based on the pulsing of visual sensations, which constructed the scene in a manner consistent with a temporal raster plot. The “vertical time” would take about two seconds to complete a cycle, whereas the “horizontal time” would be incredibly fast, doing perhaps a hundred cycles per second. The raster plot had adjustable height and width and this allowed me to visualize (much akin to an actual raster plot) how rhythms in my mind were coupled despite having frequencies at different orders of magnitude: the vertical direction would represent changes across hundreds of milliseconds whereas the horizontal direction would visualize rhythms going on at just a few milliseconds as long as they repeated for long enough.
The auralization of the sound loops I hallucinated would continuously and coherently transform in tandem with the 3-dimensional space group I found myself in. This led me to interpret the auditory reverb effects as being consistent with the aggregate echo reflections inside a polygon in 3D hyperbolic spaces.

Personal Matters

Of course, psychedelic trips are intensely personal experiences. It is in the nature of psychedelic states to connect intellectual content with deep personal emotional processing. Nonetheless, when it comes to contributing to the commons with high-quality trip reports, you can lessen the impact of personal matters. Without ever mentioning that “it was about your grandmother”, you can just focus instead on the phenomenal character of your trip and provide the bulk of information to the scientific community. Of course, if there was something about the texture of the experience that made your emotional processing easier or harder, you should ideally point that out. But at no point do you need to delve into the specifics of your social circumstance.

Write It Like a Book Report

Think about the task of writing a trip report in the same way you would write a book report in middle school[4]. The teacher assigns a book to read and then they provide a guide for writing your book report with the help of some basic questions everyone needs to answer. This is so that you do not forget to provide some of the critical information needed to interpret your report. We recommend reflecting on these questions and writing their answers before the trip so that your report of the set and setting that gave rise to the trip is not influenced post-hoc by the contents of the trip. Let’s apply this “write it like a book report” framing to reporting exotic experiences. Please provide:

Demographic Information[5]

At the bare minimum, start by including basic demographic information: approximate age, gender, height, weight, genetics (national origin might be a good approximation, e.g. half-Mexican half-Icelandic), and health conditions.

Set and Setting Information

In addition to demographic information, make sure to include set and setting information: drug, dose, when it was taken, what method of intake was used (ingestion, smoking, etc.), social context, sleep deprivation status (well rested, just had a 20 minute nap after an all-nighter, etc.) how many times you have taken this drug and at what doses, time of the year, indoors/outdoors, and what the weather was like at the time.

After that, here are six basic questions that should ideally be addressed in every trip report:

1. Background Philosophical Assumptions

The most important thing is to start with clarity about what you believe. Most people have background beliefs that govern the way they think about reality even though they don’t really notice them most of the time. These assumptions will heavily influence what happens on a psychedelic trip. What are your background philosophical assumptions? What do you believe? Why do you believe what you believe? In particular, we suggest that you mention:

Recent Media Consumption

What people and media have influenced you the most? For example, recently reading a lot of Alan Watts books versus Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics may lead to very different experiences on LSD. Your recent media exposure cannot be neglected. And this is less about volume than about influence: you may have read a single quote a year ago that you still think about when showering while the daily consumption of your favorite television show is barely noticed by your subconscious. Therefore, share, most of all, how the media you’ve been consuming is influencing how you think about life, the universe, and everything else.

Direct vs Indirect Realism 

Probably the most important belief to address is your stance on direct versus indirect realism about perception. If you read a lot of trip reports, many seem to be implicitly assuming direct realism about perception. This means that people believe they can access the world directly. When they see a flower breathe in and out, they may interpret this experience as the result of being given access to another set of frequencies of light or aspects of reality that we usually ignore. For example, Albert Hoffman seems to have thought about LSD in this way: in the last chapter of LSD: My Problem Child, Hoffman speculates:

If one continues with the conception of reality as a product of sender and receiver, then the entry of another reality under the influence of LSD may be explained by the fact that the brain, the seat of the receiver, becomes biochemically altered. The receiver is thereby tuned into another wavelength than that corresponding to normal, everyday reality. Since the endless variety and diversity of the universe correspond to infinitely many different wavelengths, depending on the adjustment of the receiver, many different realities, including the respective ego, can become conscious.

One gets the impression that Hoffman really believed that LSD’s trippy visuals were revealing true information about the environment around us rather than telling us, perhaps, something about the way our brains construct a world-simulation we confuse for reality itself. This is not to say that one cannot in fact notice true details about the environment with LSD, but we can conceive of this as a trade-off between forms of attending to and processing the environment through our normal conventional senses rather than as being given access to new sense organs yet uncharted by science. This is an important distinction.

We should note that variants of direct realism about perception can be steelmanned to some extent. For example, you may look at a tree on a psychedelic and see a mythological creature embedded into the tree. When you come down, you can also verify it by observing that the tree actually kind of resembles the creature you saw on your trip and shows up when you’re not tripping. Once you notice that sort of thing, you cannot unsee it. And maybe other sober people might also see it too once you point it out. In other words, psychedelics will very likely, within some parameters, allow you to see patterns in the real world that you may be missing out on otherwise. It doesn’t mean that you’re perceiving the world directly through a new sense organ. It just means you’re processing that information in a slightly different way.

We would generally suggest to approach a trip report with an indirect realism mindset, where you assume, until proven otherwise, that you are experiencing states of your own internal world-simulation. This allows you to have much better clarity about many strange phenomena. For example, if you feel that you are somehow entangled with your environment, you would in this lens interpret that feeling as an entanglement with yourself. You are just entangled with a part of yourself that you usually interpret as being the external environment.

Indeed, one of the trickiest things about life that we don’t realize for the most part is that the very sense of an external environment itself is part of your internal world-simulation[6]. So for your trip report, make sure to point out if you are interpreting your experience through this lens, the lens of direct realism, or perhaps a hybrid lens (where some aspects are perceived directly and some aren’t).

2. Emotional and Cognitive State

What is your background emotional and cognitive state like? What is your preferred cognitive style? For example, do you naturally have a high baseline well-being or are you more melancholic? Do you identify as a people person or are you a mathematician with no interest in people?[7] It’s actually quite important to note and can result in quite different experiences. 

Observing Your Emotions 

Paying attention to how emotions are expressed on psychedelics is one of the most important things you can do. People regularly project their emotions onto the nature of reality. Be mindful of this as a failure mode. It’s helpful advice both for better phenomenology and psychologically to try to notice the way emotions manifest in your world-simulation. Emotions will be modifying the way your attention is directed, and noticing this can allow you to gain some control over this process. You can tell the difference between physical suffering and mental suffering in terms of whether these patterns have dissonance[8] located in your (phenomenal) body or in the part of your experiential field that represents thoughts.

It sounds kind of strange. When we’re caught up in mental suffering, we usually don’t realize that it’s a type of unpleasant sensation or dissonance. It is not ineffable. There’s actually a location, region, or subcomponent of the phenomenal field that is vibrating in a strange and unpleasant way. In many ways, noticing how emotions modify the structure of either your felt-sense of your body or your thought patterns will prevent you from being controlled by the emotions without you knowing it.

It’s very important to notice this, and noting this can be helpful for avoiding a bad experience. Often, the reason why you feel terrible in your psychedelic state is not because you realized a big, deep truth about reality or due to anything bad you did. It is frequently the case that you entered some kind of dissonant attractor, and there’s probably a way out of it.

Often, one is advised to “let go and embrace whatever is happening”. This advice does allow you to reduce that dissonance and lessen the grip that mental or physical suffering has on you. It allows you to let it just vibrate on its own for a while without you feeding it energy. And that is helpful. We think it’s even more helpful if you can diagnose the source of dissonance and address it directly. Thus, at an even deeper level, “disengage from dissonant patterns” is better advice than “just let go” because there are some states where letting go is actually a bad idea. If you’re actually very close to making a psychological or intellectual breakthrough, letting go is probably not optimal. Instead, have the mindset of being gentle to yourself by letting go of the dissonant component of the experience rather than its intentional content.

3. Temporal Progression

What was the overall temporal progression of the experience? Draw a graph where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is a variable you want to track, such as “intensity of effects”, “brightness of visual field”, or “emotional valence” and update the graph every half hour. This will help you remember where you were at each stage of the trip and allow you to place your thoughts and ideas along the timeline.

Right after the trip, spend some time making sense of the general structure of what you experienced. That is, identify what kind of arc or main stages the trip involved. Outline how your beliefs and emotions changed throughout each of the stages. Try to recall how long each physical hour felt like[9] (e.g. “1st hour felt like 90 minutes, 2nd hour felt like two hours, 3rd hour felt like two hours, etc”).

Example graph of self-reported valence over time. You can also label points and sections of the graph and then describe them in more detail in your written report. Image by Andrew Zuckerman.

4. The Theme

Was the trip primarily philosophical, self-introspective, investigative, or focused on emotional processing? Go into as much detail as you feel comfortable. Obviously, there are going to be very personal things, so record only as much as feels comfortable or useful to you.

5. Valence 

What did you learn about valence? What was the connection between the way the trip unfolded, the quality of each level, and the various thoughts and feelings? How did those contribute to a sense of well being, despair, or neutrality?

We’re very interested in confirming the idea that it feels really good when all your attention centers are synchronized and flickering at the same frequency. If that was the case, then please let us know. If it wasn’t, also please let us know![10]

6. Qualia and Binding Patterns

In what way did the trip allow you to experience qualia that you have never experienced before (like impossible colors)? Let’s say that you experienced a new combination of touch and auditory sensations. This is really significant! Don’t overlook it, note it down! During the trip, if you’re experiencing new qualia, do as much as you can to explore and investigate it by testing when it arises, when it dissolves, and what actions, if any, can multiply or intensify it.

Buddhists have names for a lot of the novel qualia that arise during meditation. One of those is equanimity. Equanimity feels like something; it’s not just a word. There’s actually a facet of experience that corresponds to it.[11] Likewise, on psychedelics you probably experience a ton of new qualia. We need a glossary for uniquely-psychedelic qualia!

In addition to novel qualia, notice and report any novel patterns of binding. This is about how sensations become coupled together or dissociate in unexpected ways—how sensations are linked together in phenomenal time and space to form coherent phenomenal objects. A special case of “exotic patterns of binding” is synesthesia, where two or more of the sensory modalities become coupled together (such as experiencing phenomenal objects that are sound-touch hybrids). But patterns of binding can also be exotic even when they are expressed within the same modality, such as how the visual field seems to acquire extra virtual dimensions on DMT. We would also consider alterations of the sense of space and time as the result of exotic patterns of binding. So, this is a very general effect with many possible manifestations. If you notice anything of this sort, pay attention to it! How were your sensations bound or unbound in ways that are unusual? Be as detailed as possible.

A Meta Consideration

We suggest that you do not get caught up in the obligation to report things during the experience. Or worse, to believe that in order to be a good trip reporter you have to be able to write everything in real time. Trying to write your trip report in real time is likely to make you feel quite miserable! This is because whether we like it or not, we derive a lot of our self-worth from our feeling of verbal competence. So when you are under the influence of something as powerful as LSD and your verbal skills break down, the feeling that you “are not yourself anymore” gives you a sense of personal failure. But this will only arise if you begin your trip with the expectation that you will be able to report on it in real time. Instead, acknowledge that you will probably be terrible at verbalizing on psychedelics and instead focus your energy on remembering the properties of the state in non-verbal ways. Don’t feel compelled to write extensively because that’s going to be difficult. Just take note of the time or make a drawing or mark that you will understand later.

We do recommend recording the experience as much as you can (short of showing yourself on camera handling or consuming the chemical… don’t do that!). Recording the entirety of your experience unobtrusively in the background may be really helpful for reconstructing what happened afterwards. We have heard that not doing this is a common regret, especially for trips involving high doses where you genuinely wonder what was happening around you in consensus reality (if anything, the footage will help ground you in the certainty that at least the God that visited you wasn’t emitting regular photons that were visible to other people in the room). If you’re comfortable with it, leave at least an audio recording on.

We encourage you to record any important ideas, especially if you suspect that there’s any chance you may forget them. Take your insights seriously. They matter. Don’t feel that you lack the qualifications nor the background for your insights to matter. You are in a very exotic state that’s largely unexplored. What you are experiencing probably matters immensely for the collective understanding of humanity.

Additional Resources for Writing High-Quality Trip Reports

If you’d like some inspiration, here are examples of great trip reports:

  1. Typical N,N-DMT Trip Progression According to an Anonymous Reader
  2. Detailed 2C-B Trip Report
  3. Rational 4-AcO-DMT Trip Report
  4. Lucid LSD Trip Report
  5. Self-Locatingly Uncertain Psilocybin Trip Report

And here are more resources for trip reports and strengthening your phenomenological skills:

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Mackenzie Dion and Andrew Zuckerman for their feedback, suggestions, and copious edits to this document.


Footnotes:

[1]  In fact, we would claim that the mechanism by which “seeing people sob” feels sad can be explained by how this narrative element influences the texture of your experience.

[2]  Beware that it is very loud right before 2:27.

[3]  The ideal units to report would be degrees, depth, and location within one’s visual field. In practice, most people will be better at reporting estimates of distances gauged as if they were physical distances out there in the world. In the future we will provide conversion tables to unify the units of phenomenological reporting.

[4]  Thanks to Ryan Ragnar for providing the analogy between trip reports and middle school book reports. 

[5]  Skip demographic data if you do not feel comfortable sharing it. It will be helpful in order to identify idiosyncratic responses to psychedelics and other compounds, but privacy is also very important. Share approximate information if that makes you feel more comfortable (e.g. “between 20 and 25 years old” rather than “21 years and 3 months old”).

[6]  Steven Lehar’s “Cartoon Epistemology” provides a great visual demonstration and argument for indirect realism about perception.

[7]  See: empathizing-systemizing theory, autism spectrum quotient, systematic empathy.

[8]  Dissonance emerges when two incompatible patterns of resonance try to interact with one another. See Principia Qualia and Quantifying Bliss for an in-depth discussion.

[9]  Physical time being the objective passage of time according to clocks in consensus reality, whereas phenomenal time is how the passage of time feels like in a given experience.

[10]  In particular, pay attention to the temporal and spatial frequency of synchronized patterns, and whether there are competing patterns that cause dissonance with one another (for more, see: Symmetry Theory of Valence: 2020 Presentation and Why Does DMT Feel So Real?).

[11] See Mike Johnson’s interview of Shinzen Young for a discussion on the way equanimity feels.

Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: The Tracer Replication Tool

Try it yourself!


By Andrés Gómez Emilsson (see special thanks)

TL;DR

We developed a new method for replicating psychedelic tracer effects in detail: the Tracer Replication Tool. This tool gives us a window into how the time-like texture of experience determines the state of consciousness we find ourselves in, which clarifies what makes both meditating and taking psychedelics such powerful state-switching activities. We discuss how the technique of using the tracer tool may find useful applications, such as allowing us to describe exotic “ineffable” experiences in clear language, standardize a scale of intensity of psychedelic drug effects (a.k.a. a “High-O-Meter”), help us quantify the synergy between different drugs, and test theories for what makes an experience feel good or bad such as the Symmetry Theory of Valence. The pilot data collected with this tool so far is suggestive of the following patterns: (1) THC and HPPD result in a smooth and faint trail effect. (2) The characteristic frequencies of the strobe and replay effects for 2C-B are slower than those of either DMT or 5-MeO-DMT. And, (3) whereas DMT comes with a strong color pulsing effect leading to very colorful visuals, 5-MeO-DMT gives rise to monochromatic tracer effects. We conclude by discussing the implications of these patterns in light of an analysis of experience that allows for a varying time-like texture. We hope to inspire the scientific community and curious psychonauts to use this tool to help us uncover more patterns.

Introduction

Rhythmic activity in the brain is a staple of neuroscience. It shows up in spiking neurons, synchronous oscillations at the level of networks, global patterns of resonance and coherence in EEG recordings, and in many other places. The book Rhythms of the Brain by György Buzsáki is a systematic review of what was known about these rhythms back in 2006.[1] One of the things György talks about in this book is how a lot of neuroscience techniques focused on finding the neural correlates of perception tend to consider the variable activation of neurons from one trial to the next as noise. In experiments that look into how neurons respond to a specific stimulus, datasets are constructed that track the neuronal activity that stays the same across trials. That which changes is discarded as noise, and György argues that such “noise” is really where the information about the internal rhythms is to be found.[2] We concur with the assessment that understanding these native rhythms is key for making sense of how the brain works. Perhaps one of the most exciting developments in this space is the method of Connectome-Specific Harmonic Wave analysis (Atasoy et al., 2016). This way of analyzing fMRI data describes a “brain state” as, at least partly, consisting of a weighted sum of its resonant modes. This paradigm has been used with success for comparing brain states across widely different categories of experience: LSD, ketamine, and anesthesia, among others (Luppi et al., 2020).

These are exciting times for exploring the native rhythms of nervous systems in neuroscience. But what about their subjective quality? One would hope that we could connect a formal third-person view of these rhythms with their experiential component. Alas, at this point in time the behavioral and physiological component of brain rhythms is far better understood than the way in which they cash out in subjective qualities.

Could there be a way to make these rhythms easily visible to ourselves as scientists? One interesting lens through which to see psychedelics is in terms of the way they excite specific rhythm-generating networks. This lens would present psychedelic states as giving you a sense of what it feels like to have many of these rhythms simultaneously activated, thus having access to a wider repertoire of brain states (Atasoy et al., 2017).

But you don’t need psychedelics to realize there’s something fishy about the solidity of our perception. Intuitively, one may get the impression that normal everyday states of consciousness do not show the signatures of being the result of ensembles of rhythmic activity. That said, some would affirm that paying attention to the artifacts of our perception may in fact be a window into these rhythms. For example, Lehar’s Harmonic Resonance Theory of the gestalt properties of perception (Lehar, 1999) attempts to explain the characteristics of well known visual illusions (such as the Kanizsa triangle) with principles derived from the superposition of rhythmic activity.

Kanizsa Triangles

Paying close attention to the act of observing an object over time has led some researchers to play with the idea that our experience of the world is best understood as music (Lloyd, 2013), for our feeling of a solid surrounding results from the interplay between finely coordinated sensations and acts of interpretation. Indeed, the fluidity of sensory impressions betrays our common-sense notion that we experience a solid and stable world. It often takes a perturbation out of our normal everyday state of consciousness to notice this. As an example here, we can point out that insight meditation practices peer into the illusion of solidity and continuity of our experience, whereas concentration meditation enhances these illusions (Ingram, 2018).

Arguably, like a fish who cannot notice water until it’s taken out of it, the stitching process by which our brain constructs reality is usually hidden from view. To be taken out of the water in this context would be to be in a state that allows you to notice the seams of one’s experience. To the extent that this normal stitching process breaks down in exotic states of consciousness, they are clearly useful for research in this domain. Thus we argue that the artifacts of perception in alien states of consciousness are not noise; they provide hints for how normal experience is constructed. In particular, we posit that “psychedelic tracers” (i.e. the cluster of persisting visual phenomena caused by hallucinogens) may be a window into how rhythmic feedback dynamics are used to control the content of our experience. For this reason, we have been interested in turning what until now has been qualitative descriptions and informal approximations of this phenomenon into concrete quantitative replications.

In what follows we will showcase the value of a psychophysics toolkit we developed at the Qualia Research Institute called the Tracer Replication Tool for modeling psychedelic tracer phenomenology. Although we will focus on psychedelic experiences, this tool can have a much broader set of applications. For example, we show how the tool can be used to visualize and quantify the severity of HPPD, which currently has a very qualitative, and imprecise at best, diagnostic criteria. Likewise, the tool has the potential to bring together the complex clinical presentation of visual disturbances such as palinopsia, photopsia, oscillopsia, visual snow, and other conditions, into a coherent framework. Perhaps, speculatively, the connection between all these visual disturbances is to be found in the dysregulation of the rhythms of the visual control systems, which is what the tracer tool sets out to quantify.

The only attempt of arriving at quantitative replications of psychedelic tracers in the scientific literature we are aware of is by (Dubois & VanRullen, 2011). They used multiple-exposure stroboscopic photography in order to depict video scenes. They then asked many people who have had LSD experiences to identify the strobe frequency that best approximated their tracers (which on average was in the 15-20 Hz range).

As we will see, our model for psychedelic tracers is more detailed: it has multiple persistence of vision effects that combine together into a complex tracer. For this reason, the kind of tracers used in Dubois & VanRullen turn out to be a special case of our tool, which we call the strobe effect:

LSD users perceive a series of discrete positive afterimages in the wake of moving objects, a percept that has been likened to a multiple-exposure stroboscopic photograph, somewhat akin to Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs [5] from 1880, or to more recent digital art produced in a few clicks (Figure 1).


Visual Trails: Do the Doors of Perception Open Periodically? by Dubois & VanRullen
Multiple-exposure stroboscopic photograph. (source)

By using a wider set of effects, the Tracer Replication Tool might give us hints about how psychedelics disrupt native rhythms given how they affect the processing of perceptual information at a granular level.

Before we provide the full set of tracer effects along with their associated vocabulary, let us jump into the preliminary psychedelic replications we have obtained thanks to this tool.

Psychedelic Replications

Over the years since I’ve run the Qualia Computing blog, I’ve received many messages from people who, for lack of a better term, we could call rational psychonauts. This should not be too surprising, with pieces like “How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD” and “5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses”, the site has become a bit of a Schelling point for people who like to blend computational reasoning and the study of exotic states of consciousness. These rational psychonauts are people who not only are well acquainted with exotic states of consciousness, but also like to use a scientific and rational lens to make sense of such states. In particular, people in this cluster often ask me to send them experiments to try out next time they take a psychedelic substance. I certainly never encourage them to take drugs, but under the assumption they will do so anyway, I sometimes send them tasks to do. Thus, once we had a prototype for the tracer tool, I already had a set of more than willing anonymous pilot participants. I sent them the link to the tool along with some brief instructions. Namely:

Look at the ball for a few minutes in state X (where X can be any substance, meditation, etc.). Then as soon as you come down, try to fiddle with the parameters on the left until the simulated tracer looks as close as possible to how you experienced it in the state. When you are ready, simply click “submit parameters” and add info about what the state you were in was at the time. In the case of HPPD, just try your best to replicate the tracer (I know it gets confusing when we talk about the tracers of the simulated tracers, but try to ignore those and just replicate the tracer of the original input).

Without further ado, here are the resulting replications I received:

HPPD

Mild HPPD (participant said it was strongest on color red)

THC

12.5mg edible, 60 minutes post-ingestion
15mg edible, 90 minutes post-ingestion

2C-B

20mg orally ingested
12mg “gummed”

Notice how although the replication of the higher dosage is more mild in a way, they both share the presence of a strobe effect at roughly 5.5 Hz!

DMT

5mg vaped
10mg vaped
20mg vaped

The higher dose has a complex mixture of effects, including 40 Hz color pulsing (positive and negative afterimages mixed together), 22 Hz replay, and 27 Hz strobe. I’ll note that the participant included the following comment: “Aside from extremely fast tracers, the white space consisted of pixelated fractals. Color was abundant.”

5-MeO-DMT

5mg vaped
10mg vaped

As we will discuss further below, it is worth noting that at least in this sample, there are no color pulsing effects present (which is unlike “regular” DMT).

Drug Combination: Mescaline + ETH-LAD

125μg ETH-LAD + 2 teaspoons of San Pedro powder

The above is the only datapoint we have so far from the combination of psychoactive substances. The participant took 125μg of ETH-LAD, and then two and a half hours later 2 teaspoons of San Pedro powder. The replication is of the way the ball looked like 5 hours after taking the first drug.

Definitions

Let us now look into the specifics of the tracer tool:

Core Effects

Core effects are pillars of the tracer tool where a particular feedback dynamic is used. The core effects include trails, strobe, and replay.

Modifiers

A modifier effect is one that plays with a core effect and alters it in some way. We will talk along the way about the modifying effects of persistence, intensity, and frequency, and then have a separate section to talk in more detail about the modifier effects of envelope (ADSR), pulse, and color pulse.

Trails (Core Effect)

This is perhaps the most basic effect. Making an analogy with sound, trails are akin to a soft reverb with no delay:

The three settings for trails are: persistence, intensity, and exponential decay (which is binary in the current implementation and otherwise takes on the value of linear decay). Persistence determines how quickly the tracer vanishes, whereas intensity is a constant multiplier for the entire trail. Thus, by changing those parameters you can choose between e.g. a long but dim trail or a short but bright trail.

High persistence / low intensity

Low persistence / high intensity

The exponential decay parameter slightly changes how quickly the brightness goes down; when it’s on, the trails go down more smoothly (cf. gamma correction).

Without exponential decay

With exponential decay

Strobe (Core Effect)

The strobe effect takes snapshots of the input at regular intervals. It works like chronophotography, and it is perhaps what most people think about when you first talk about visual tracers. It is the effect that Dubois & VanRullen used to find that LSD produces visual tracers at ~15-20 Hz.

Strobe effect at 16.4 Hz

The strobe effect, just as the trail effect, also has intensity, persistence, and exponential decay modifiers. In addition, it also has frequency, which encodes how many snapshots per second are being taken.

5 Hz Strobe

10 Hz Strobe

20 Hz Strobe

Note: The current implementation of the trails feature is done with a very fast strobe. In this way, when you set the strobe frequency to the maximum you get something that starts to look a little like the trails effect.

Replay (Core Effect)

With an analogy to sound, replay would be akin to adding an echo or delay to a signal. Replay adds to the raw signal a copy of the output from a fraction of a second into the past. The result is a current output that contains a sequence of increasingly dimmer video replays of itself at regular time intervals into the past.

6 Hz Replay

As with strobe, replay has intensity, persistence, exponential decay, and frequency as its modifying effects.

3 Hz Replay

12 Hz Replay

Note: the replay effect is difficult to distinguish from the strobe effect with only still images

Pulse (Modifier)

This is a modifier effect that can apply to trails, strobes, and replays (right now the implementation only applies to strobe, but we may change that in the future). It takes a fraction of the input and modulates it with a sine wave at a given frequency. This way the trails, strobes, and replays can come and go (either in part or in full) at a given frequency. This adds sparkle to the experience, and it can plausibly help create a sense of reality or object-permanence for the hallucinations as they “vibrate at their own frequency”.

Compare the difference between a strobe at 4 Hz vs. a strobe at 4 Hz with a pulse at 2 Hz:

4 Hz Strobe
4 Hz Strobe + 2 Hz Pulse at 50% amplitude

As you can see, the pulsing effect makes the strobes look like they have a sort of life of their own.

ADSR (Modifier)

This modifier effect was something we decided to add because James Kent of Psychedelic Information Theory (Kent, 2010) talks about ADSR envelopes for tracers in the section titled “Control Interruption Model of Psychedelic Action”:

Using control interrupts as the source of hallucinogenesis, we can model hallucinogenic frame distortion of multisensory perception the same way we model sound waves produced by synthesizers; by plotting the attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR envelope) of the hallucinogenic interrupt as it effects consciousness. (Fig. 2)3,4 For example, nitrous oxide (N20) inhalation alters consciousness in such a way that all perceptual frames arise and fall with a predictable “wah-wah-wah” time signature. The throbbing “wah-wha-wah” of the N20 experience is a stable standing wave formation that begins when the molecule hits the neural network and ends when it is metabolized, but for the duration of N20 action the “wah-wah-wah” completely penetrates all modes of sensory awareness with a strobe-like intensity. The periodic interrupt of N20 can be modeled as a perceptual wave ambiguity that toggles back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness at roughly 8 to 11 frames-per-second, or @8-11hz.5 Consciousness rises at the peak of each “wah” and diminishes in the valleys in between. On sub-anesthetic doses, N20 creates a looping effect where frame content overlaps into the following frame, causing a perceptual cascade similar to fractal regression. We can thus model the interrupt envelope of N20 as having a rounded attack, fast decay, low sustain, medium release, with an interrupt frequency of @8-11hz. Any psychoactive substance with a similar interrupt envelope will produce results that feel similar to the N20 experience. (Fig. 3) For instance, Smoked Salvia divinorum (vaporized Salvinorin A&B, or Salvia) has an interrupt envelope similar to N20, except Salvia has a harder attack, a slightly longer decay, a more intense sustain, a slightly longer release, and a slightly faster interrupt frequency (@12-15hz).6 These slight changes in the frequency and shape of interrupt envelope cause Salvia to feel more physically intense, more hallucinatory, and more disorienting than N20, even though they share a similar throbbing or tingling sensation along the same frequency range.


The chapter about the Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action in Psychedelic Information Theory by James L. Kent

“Figure 2.” (source)

This actually seems to be important for showcasing what makes drugs with similar characteristic frequencies capable of feeling so different.

2 Hz Strobe
2 Hz Strobe + soft ADSR pattern

A really interesting research lead that is connected to the ADSR envelope of psychedelic tracers can be found in The Grand Illusion (Lehar, 2010), where cognitive scientist Steven Lehar narrates some of his experiences with LSD vs. LSD + MDMA. One of the things he discusses is the way that MDMA makes the experience jitter in a pleasant way that results in the LSD visuals becoming smoother (emphasis mine):

Under LSD and ecstasy I could see the flickering blur of visual generation most clearly. And I saw peculiar ornamental artifacts on all perceived objects, like a Fourier representation with the higher harmonics chopped off. LSD by itself creates sharply detailed ornamental artifacts, like a transparent overlay of an ornamental lattice or filigree pattern superimposed on the visual scene, especially in darkness. Ecstasy smooths out those sharp edges and blurs them into a creamy smooth rolling experience.


The Grand Illusion (pg. 62) by Steven Lehar

I would suspect that this distinction will become legible with the judicious use of ADSR envelopes. Below you will find a possible rendition of this effect:

10.3 Hz Strobe (maybe LSD)
10.3 Hz Strobe + soft ADSR pattern (maybe LSD + MDMA)

As we will discuss further below, a more creamy ADSR envelope may cash out in a more pleasant experience, whereas a sharper or spikier envelope may in turn create more harsh experiences.

Color Pulse/Negative After Images (Modifier)

The color pulse effect transforms the image’s color towards its opposite in the CIELAB color space with a given frequency. It modifies strobe, replay, and trails (in principle, there can be a different color pulse for each effect, but for now it modifies all three simultaneously).

23.6 Hz Strobe
23.6 Hz Strobe + 2 Hz Color Pulse

Unlike pulse, color pulse modulates the color rather than the brightness of the input. The way we determine what color to transform into is by going to the opposite side of the CIELAB color space. This accurately approximates the negative afterimage of any phenomenal color (such as yellow being the negative afterimage of blue, and green being the negative afterimage of red). In our current implementation, color pulsing affects strobe and replay quite differently. For replay, the effect is one where there are now versions of the ball (or image, more generally) that have the opposite color that are chasing the original ball, whereas for strobe the effect is that of giving a seizure to each of the recent snapshots of experience! See for yourself:

26 Hz Replay + 13 Hz Color Pulse
26 Hz Strobe + 13 Hz Color Pulse

In a future version of the tracer tool, color pulse may become a sub-property of each main tracer layer in the same way ADSR is a sub-property of the strobe and replay layers.

Color pulsing may be an important piece of the puzzle for understanding how otherwise similar drugs can have such dramatically different effects. Tentatively, color pulsing showed up as a distinction between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT according to one of the persons who submitted parameters (as you can see above in the replication section). For that person, DMT produced color pulses while 5-MeO-DMT did not. Of course this is just a sample size of N=1. But it seems like an important research lead if true! After all, DMT trip reports do talk of highly colorful hallucinations that typically involve the combination of colors and their opposites (e.g. “The wall looked like a Persian carpet with an alternating checkerboard pattern design of neon green and magenta light” – anonymous 10mg DMT), whereas most 5-MeO-DMT trip reports don’t feature color very much. In fact, 5-MeO-DMT trips are often in black and white, pure white, pure black, or “nothingness color”. We discuss the implications of this in more detail in the last section of this piece (Getting Realms from Time-Like Textures).

Face Value vs. Dynamic Feedback Model

It is important to point out that the tracer tool works under the assumption of linearity between the effects it models. In other words, each effect modifies the input in its own way, and the corresponding modifications are added linearly at the end. This does not need to be the case. And in fact, we must expect the brain to have a lot of complex non-linearities where e.g. the pulsing effect is then used in a replay loop which entrains a strobing pattern which focuses your attention and so on. This complication aside, there is a lot of value in postulating the simple model first, and then adjusting accordingly when it fails to model the more complex phenomena. When we get there, once we have identified particular drugs, doses, and combinations that produce strange nonlinearities, we can then build tracer tools that explore how the parameters of particular dynamic systems can best explain the empirical data. Until then, let us start mapping out the space with this (relatively) simple linear model.

Useful Vocabulary

I would like to highlight the fact that using the tracer tool can be very educational. Familiarizing yourself with the effects and their modifications will allow you to be able to describe in detail psychedelic tracers even without having to use the tool again. For instance, I find myself now able to describe what kind of tracer effect appears on any given replication or trippy video. For example, now that you have read about them, can you tell us what is going on in the following gifs?:

(source)

The Explanatory Power of the Time-Like Texture of Experience

Exotic Phenomenal Time

We have previously suggested that tracers in the most general sense (i.e. including tracers for emotions, thoughts, and all sensory modalities in addition to visual experience) are very important for understanding the time distortions one experiences in exotic states of consciousness. The overall idea is that the aspect of our experience that gives rise to the feeling of time passing is the result of implicit causality in the network of local binding connections, which we call the pseudo-time arrow (see a recent presentation about it). Don’t worry about the details, though. All you need to know is that here we model phenomenal time as the direction along which causality flows within one’s experience. And because this is a statistical property of our experience, it turns out that phenomenal time ends up being very malleable; it admits of “exotic phenomenal time” variants:

This framework can articulate what is going on when you experience crazy psychedelic states such as moments of eternity, time branching, time looping, and so on. Now, even these are just some of the possible ways in which the network of local binding connections can give rise to exotic phenomenal time experiences. In reality, because the pseudo-time arrow emerges at a statistical level in the network, one can have all manners of local pseudo-time arrows nested in complex ways, as briefly discussed in the presentation:

 I will end by speculating: I just walked you through seven types of exotic phenomenal time, but if indeed [the experience of time] can be explained in terms of causality in a graph, then there are many other exotic phenomenal times we can construct. This is especially so when we consider the space of possible hybrid phenomenal times. For instance, where in some regions in the network we may find time looping, some other region might be a moment of eternity, and perhaps another region is branching, and you know, if you have a very big experience, there is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to segment different regions of it for different types of phenomenal time. This is not unlike, perhaps, how we think of Feynman diagrams, where this part of it here is moving forwards in time, this part here is doing a loop, this part here is branching… I think a lot of the topologies we see here could be used to represent completely new [hybrid] exotic phenomenal times.


The Pseudo Time Arrow | Andres Gomez Emilsson (2020)

Given the diversity of ways in which phenomenal time can be expressed in an experience, I will start talking about the patterns encoded in the pseudo-time arrow as the time-like texture of experience. This way, rather than assuming that one’s sense of time is globally consistent in a given way (e.g. as in “I am fully inside a time-loop”), we can discuss how various patches and components of one’s experience have this or that time-like texture (e.g. “my visual field was looping, but my proprioception was strobing and my thoughts felt timeless”).

Drugs

As a generic effect, all psychedelics seem to increase the duration of qualia in one’s experiential field, leading to a buildup of energy. But the precise shape this takes matters a lot, and it is certainly different between drugs. An example pointed above is how LSD and DMT seem to produce strobe and replay patterns of markedly different frequencies. For DMT, the spatial and temporal frequency of the visual hallucinations is usually described as “very high”. Based on the replications thus far, along with personal reports from a musician I trust, DMT’s “characteristic frequency” seems to be in the 25 to 30 Hz range. In contrast, LSD’s frequency is more in the range of 15 to 20 Hz: both Dubois & VanRullen’s LSD tracer study and subjective reports I’ve gathered over the years point to the hallucinations of acid having this rough frequency. Hence, the very building blocks of reality of a high-dose DMT breakthrough experience consist of tiny time-loops and strobe effects interacting with one another, weaving together a hallucinated world with surprising levels of detail and intense freshness of experience (as all the time loops are “young” due to their short duration). Really, when you take a small dose of DMT and you see the walls tessellating into wallpaper groups, notice how each of the tiny “bricks” that make up the tessellation is itself a time loop of sorts! It is not a stretch to describe a DMT experience as a kind of complex Darwinian ecosystem of tiny coalition-based time loop clusters bidding for your attention (cf. Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences).

Taking this paradigm seriously allows us to interpret psychoactive effects at a high level in novel ways. For example, these are some of the general patterns we have identified so far:

  1. Psychedelics tend to have strong replay and strobe effects
  2. HPPD, cannabis, and dissociatives seem to have a much smoother trail effect
  3. MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT have characteristically creamy ADSR envelope effects

Using the sound metaphor to restate the above, psychedelics introduce beats and recursion, dissociatives introduce reverb, and empathogens/valence drugs may affect the temporal blur of one’s experience. Thus, we arrive at a model of psychoactive substances that makes sense of their effects in the language of signal processing rather than neurotransmitters and functional localization. This sheds a lot of clarity on the mysterious and bizarre state-spaces of consciousness disclosed by psychoactive drugs and paves the way for a principled way of predicting the way drug combinations may give rise to synergistic effects (more on that below). More so, it lends credence to the patternceutical paradigm of drug effects.

Meditation: Insight and Concentration Practices

The pseudo-time arrow paradigm suggests that one of the ways in which meditative practices can switch one’s state of consciousness is by disrupting sober time-like textures and enabling exotic time-like textures not available to the sober mind (see also: The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models (Johnson, 2018)). My personal experience with meditative practices is limited, but I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing some strange effects so far. In particular, I would say that concentration practices seem to give rise to experiences with long and stable pseudo-time arrows – a peacefulness in which nothing is happening yet the flow of time is constant and rather uneventful. The phenomenal time of highly focused states of mind may be full of reverb, but I do not think it has crazy time loops. Moments of eternity and timelessness may be present at the limit here (e.g. moments of eternity and Jhanas may be deeply connected), though I will need more personal experience to say this with confidence. 

On the other hand, insight practices such as noting meditation may have more of a replay and strobe effect. In particular, this may happen as a result of three core effects from this kind of meditation: (1) it stops you from dissipating energy across long narratives, (2) it recaptures the energy you were going to use for a longer narrative to feed the noting process instead, and (3) it entrains the rhythm of noting. This in turn (a) energizes a regular constant-frequency pattern (the frequency of noting) and (b) reduces the energy of every other rhythm, which in turn (c) canalizes sensory stimulation energy towards the brain’s noting frequency and all of its harmonics, which eventually leads to a high-frequency energized state of consciousness whose building blocks are tiny time-loops. These can synchronize and create experiences with characteristic time-like textures made up of such tiny energized loops. Hence, noting practice above some level of skill (e.g. with a noting frequency above 3 Hz) can be DMT-like to an extent (in light of thinking of DMT realms as made up of energized high-frequency mini-time-loops).

These experiences characterized by intense tracer effects are in a similar space as the strange temporal distortions that happen when you are dizzy (like when you stand up too fast or hyperventilate). The “loss of context” that results from this effect is due to the longest replay loops becoming too short to contain the necessary information to “keep you in the loop about what is going on”. Hence the confusion about who or what you are, what you are doing, and how you got here that happens when you are near passing out from standing up too quickly. That confusion takes place in an otherwise highly detailed and intense high-energy and high-frequency “rush” made of tiny time loops.

Thus, one of the gateways into altered states of consciousness via meditation with noting can be summarized as what happens when you induce a self-reinforcing pattern of strobing, replay, and pulsing that fully captures your attention. This process builds up a lot of energy, which one can only wield up to a point. When one fails to control it, the state decays into a series of tracer patterns that use the clean loop as its background reference. As this happens, one experiences a world whose building blocks are beautiful tiny jewels of attention, slowly decaying as one loses the ability to stay focused. The decay process also seems to do something good when properly orchestrated. Namely, as the decay process begins, one naturally experiences a Cambrian explosion of qualia critters eager to feed off of the negentropy generated, as thought-forms need attention to survive. This whole process, one could argue, lends phenomenological credence to the paradigm of neural annealing, where one’s brain uses a heating and cooling schedule to entrain brain-wide harmony.

In other words, with something like a noting practice, one ends up creating a world simulation whose building blocks are all embedded in a very tight time-loop, a wind-up universe of concentrated awareness. Perhaps we are going too far with this explanation. Either way, we really feel that thinking in terms of these generalized tracer dynamic patterns is an exciting new conceptual toolkit that allows us to describe the quality of exotic experiences that were hard to pinpoint before.

Three Exciting Possible Applications of the Tracer Tool: High-O-Meter, Synergy Quotient, and Harmonic World-Building

(1) High-O-Meter

How high are you? It is often difficult to put a number on this question. But once we have established the parameters for different drugs (e.g. characterized DMT as living in a region of the parameter-space that is of higher frequency than LSD, etc.) we can show a series of gifs to someone and ask them to point at the one that best shows what tracers looked like at the peak of their experience. This way we can quickly estimate how high they got (at least visually) with a very simple question.

For example, we may find that the “modal response” to 50, 100, 200, and 300 micrograms of LSD looks as follow:

Simulated tracer for 50 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 100 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 200 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 300 μg of LSD

If this works, we would be able to sort research participants into one of these ranges just by asking them to point at the image that best captures their experience. Similar tools for other modalities could be used to obtain a global “highness score” meaningful across people.

(2) Synergy Quotient (orthogonality vs. synergy vs. suppression vs. harmonization)

What happens when you combine psychoactive drugs together? We have previously discussed in great detail what happens when you take combos of drugs from various categories (see: Making Amazing Recreational Drug Cocktails), but admit that there are huge puzzles and unknowns in this space. Of note is that some combinations give rise to synergistic effects (e.g. psychedelics and dissociatives), others blunt each other’s action (e.g. agmatine and nootropics), while yet others seem to create competing effects due to some kind of mutually-exclusive qualities of experience (e.g. salvia and DMT, a.k.a. “drugfights”). For an illustrative example of the third category, famous psychonaut D. M. Turner reports:

I smoked 30 mg. of DMT in three tokes, followed immediately by 650 mcg. of Salvinorin that I had preloaded in a separate pipe.

The effects were felt almost immediately. The first thing I noticed was a grid of crosshatch patterns. I had perceived something similar when using 2C-B with mushrooms, which I believed to be the result of using two psychedelics that were not compatible with each other. However, in this case the patterns were defined to a much sharper degree, and it seemed apparent that these two substances affect consciousness in differing ways that are not synchronistic when used together. Both the Salvia and DMT entities seemed to have been taken entirely off guard and had not been expecting this confrontation. These entities seemingly paid no attention to me as their attention was entirely fixed on each other. It soon became apparent that the two were going to battle, vying to determine who would have control of my consciousness.


Source: #9  D.M. Turner – 650 mcg. Salvinorin with 30 mg. N.N. DMT

We think that the tracer tool can be useful to quantify the degree of interaction between two drugs. For instance, say that drug A produces a robust 10 Hz replay effect, whereas drug B produces a 7 Hz Strobing effect. Would drug A + drug B cause a tracer that blends these two facets, or does it produce something different? If the combination’s tracers are different than the sum of its parts, how large is this difference? And can this difference be identified with a particular recursive stacking of effects, or as the result of a nonlinear interaction between dynamic systems? We believe that this line of research may be very illuminating.

Drug A
Drug B
Drug A + Drug B (“orthogonal”)
Drug A + Drug B (“suppression”)
Drug A + Drug B (“synergy”)
Drug A + Drug B (“harmonization”)

In the above example, we show what various possibilities for the result of drug combos may be. “Orthogonal” effects mean that the resulting tracer is the sum of the tracers of each drug, “suppression” means that one drug’s effect reduces the effect of the other, “synergy” means that the resulting effects are stronger than you’d expect by just linearly adding the effects of each drug, and “harmonization” refers to the possible slight-retuning of the characteristic frequency of each drug’s effect that allows for a consonant blending. How strongly the combo is from the predicted effect based on each drug would determine the synergy quotient of the pair.

A few possible (tentative) examples: alcohol + psychedelics give rise to orthogonal effects, opiates and psychedelics result in effect suppression, dissociatives and psychedelics result in strong synergy (not unlike what you get when you stack reverb and looping in music), and MDMA and psychedelics might result in harmonized tracers (hence the creamy and harmonious visuals of candy-flipping). We would love to see research tackling this question.

(3) Harmonic World-Building

Tinnitus is usually loud and distracting, but in addition, it can also be annoying and unpleasant. At QRI, we posit that the precise pattern of tinnitus—not only its loudness—has implications for how bad it is for someone’s mental health: dissonant and chaotic tinnitus might be worse than consonant and harmonious patterns, for instance. 

In a similar vein, we think that the particular tracer patterns, over and above just their intensity, of perceptual conditions like HPPD probably matter for how the condition affects you at a cognitive, perceptual, and emotional level. Concretely, we would like to study how valence is related to one’s particular tracer patterns: we think that when psychedelic tracers feel good, that such positive valence may show up in the form of (a) harmonious relationships between the components of the effects, and (b) a sort of creaminness in the way the tracers come over time (as shown in the MDMA + LSD trip report by Steven Lehar).

We take seriously the possibility that something akin to the rules of harmony in music (see: Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale by William Sethares) will have a showing in the way resonance in any experiential field cashes out into valence. In other words, the way patterns of resonance in the brain combine might be responsible for whether the experience feels good or bad. In particular, under psychedelics and other high-energy states of consciousness, one’s visual field is capable of instantiating visions of both tremendous beauty and tremendous terror. It is as if in high-energy regimes, one’s visual field acquires the capacity for creating pleasure and pain of its own (albeit “visual” in flavor!). While sober, one can get something akin to this effect, though only mildly in comparison: you can experience beautiful patterns by staring at a smooth strobe with eyes closed, or experience unpleasant reactions when the strobe shines at irregular intervals. The quality of the self-generated light-show in energized states of consciousness (such as a psychedelic experience) will likely have an impact on one’s sense of wellbeing. Is one’s inner light show all irregular, uncoordinated, sharp, and jarring? Or is it smooth, clean, robust, and soft? Based on the Symmetry Theory of Valence, one can anticipate that one’s tracer phenomenology feels good when it expresses or approximates regular geometries and bad when the implied geometries are irregular or disjointed.

Dissonant emergent pattern
Consonant emergent pattern

The creaminess of smooth ADSR envelopes would likewise prevent sensory and emotional dissonance by virtue of softening spikes of sensations. This, of course, is ultimately an empirical question. Let’s investigate it!

Final Thoughts: Getting Realms from Time-Like Textures

The complexity and information content of one’s state of consciousness as induced by a substance may depend on what fits in the repertoire of time-like textures of the state. For example, some states might be much more prone to generate quasi-crystals as opposed to crystals, as we argued in DMT vs. 5-MeO-DMT (Gomez Emilsson, 2020).

What are these crystals? One of the characteristic spatial effects of psychedelics is that they lower the symmetry detection threshold. This gives rise to the beautiful tessellations (at times Euclidean, at times hyperbolic (Gomez Emilsson, 2016)) everyone talks about. Analogously in time, psychedelics are notorious for creating time loops (cf. Going Loopy (Alexander, 2014)). In a deeper sense these are, we might argue, two facets of the same underlying effect. Namely, the creation of, for lack of a better term, qualia crystals. We can be cautious about assigning an ontological interpretation to qualia crystals; all we are proposing here is to accept them as phenomenological artifacts that tie together a lot of these experiential qualities. These gems of qualia come in many flavors, but they all express at least one symmetry in a clean and deep way. Whereas our experience of the world is usually made of a complex distribution of (tiny) qualia crystals which form the macroscopic time-like texture of our mind, we find in exotic states of consciousness the possibility of experiencing the refined, pure version. Timothy Leary in The Psychedelic Experience describes what he believes is the key existential conundrum close to the peak of an ecstatic trip:

Is it better to be part of the sugar or to taste the sugar?


Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner in The Psychedelic Experience

In line with the neural annealing frame (Johnson, 2019), there is a very real sense in which slightly past the peak of a psychedelic experience you will find some of the largest, purest, most refined qualia crystals (at least relative to the human norm). And what this looks like will depend a lot on what the available building blocks are! The diversity of these building blocks makes the time-like texture of experience triggered by different drugs dramatically variable. 

Some of the realms of experience are made with a time-like texture of interlocking time loops of different frequencies allowing you to experience the sense of “a big other”. In some other realms, the time loops are all aligned with each other, which makes self-other distinctions hard to represent and reason about. The various flavors for the felt sense of non-duality, for example, may correspond to different ways in which strobes, replays, pulse, etc. align perfectly to dissolve the internal boundaries used as building blocks to represent duality. At the extreme of “unification”, such as the state found in the 5-MeO-DMT breakthrough, one “becomes” a metronome whose tune is reflected faithfully everywhere in one’s experience, such that there is nothing else to interface with. Hence, one becomes “invisible to oneself”. To be in a state of near total oneness may entail the feeling of nothingness for this reason (thus the highest Jhanas being “nothingness” and “neither nothing nor something”).

This overall interpretative frame of exotic states as the result of time-like textures may show up empirically, too. One of the exciting early results, as mentioned above, is the report that while DMT creates complex positive and negative after-image dynamics full of color and polarity, the tracers on 5-MeO-DMT are monochromatic, meaning that one only experiences their positive after-image.

This alone may go a long way in explaining why the visual character of these two drugs is so distinct at their upper ranges. Namely, because DMT gives rise to complex checkerboard grid-patterns of overly-saturated colors intermingling with their polar opposites, whereas on 5-MeO-DMT, one often experiences an incredibly bright white light, or even a sense of translucid empty space, but no colors! The paradigm of using tracer patterns to make sense of states of consciousness would here suggest that a “breakthrough” experience can be interpreted as what happens when one’s world is saturated with the time-like texture characteristic of the tracer pattern of either drug. The realms of experience these agents disclose are the universes that you get when the building blocks of reality are those specific time loops and attention dynamics, leaving no room for anything that does not follow those “phenomenal time constraints”. When the dose is low, this manifests as just a gloss over one’s otherwise normal experience, a mere modifier on top of one’s sober reality. But when the dose is large, these time loops and attention dynamics drive the very way one’s mind constructs our whole sense of the world.

In this light, rather than thinking of exotic states of mind as places (as the “realm” metaphor alludes to), one can imagine conceptualizing them as ways of making sense of time. When you smoke salvia, you make sense of time in a salvia kind of way, which involves looping back chaotically in a way that typically results in losing the normal plot altogether and instead exotic narratives better fitted for the salvia attentional dynamics end up dominating the world-building process of the mind. Hence you end up in “salvia land”. Which is what you remember best. But the salvia land one ends up in is only a circumstantial part of the true story. The fundamental generator that is upstream of this realm would be the overall tracer pattern, the time-like texture of the experience: the neuroacoustic effect of salvia. He who controls the time-like texture of experience, controls the world-building process of the mind. Thus the paramount importance of understanding tracer patterns.


Do you want to collaborate on this project?

For Researchers

The Tracer Replication Tool is the first of a series of research tools we are creating at QRI specifically designed with psychedelic phenomenology in mind. The spirit of this enterprise is to identify the ways in which psychedelic states of consciousness can enhance the information processing of the mind in some ways. Rather than focusing on how information processing is impaired, we develop these tools with the goal of finding the ways in which it is enhanced (cf. psychedelic cryptography (Gomez Emilsson, 2015), psychedelic problem solving (Harman, 1966)). We take very seriously high-quality trips reports from rational psychonauts, which help us ideate tasks that are likely to show large effect sizes. Thus, rather than bringing traditional psychometric tools to the psychedelic space, we think that developing the tools to assess the psychedelic state in its own terms is more likely to provide novel and significant insights. We would love to have academic researchers include some of these tasks in their own study designs. Becoming familiar with the Tracer Replication Tool takes less than 10 minutes, and based on the pilot results, operating it during a psychedelic experience is possible for a good fraction of people under the influence of these substances. It would be amazing to have tracer replications included in psychedelic studies to come. If you are involved in psychedelic research and would like to use the Tracer Replication Tool or learn more about the toolkit we are developing please reach out to us! We would love to hear from you.

For Participants and Volunteers

There are several ways you can help this project. As a beta tester participant, you can use the tracer tool to replicate tracers that you yourself have experienced. There are three categories here (which you can specify at the point of submission when using the tool):

  1. Retroactively: If you have experienced visuals tracers in the past and think you can remember them accurately (or at least recognize them when you see them), you can play with the Tracer Replication Tool and submit the parameters that best match your memory of the tracers you experienced.
  2. Post-Trip: If you are planning on taking a psychedelic in the near future* and want to submit a datapoint from your experience, open the tracer tool during the trip and look at the bouncing ball (and other animations). While staring at the center of the animation for about a minute, try to get a clear picture of what the tracers look like. We encourage you to play with the color, speed, and animation type while you are in the state so that you see how tracers react to different visual inputs. Then as soon as possible after the trip is over, come back to the tool and find the tracer parameters that best replicate what you saw.
  3. Within Trip: If you are familiar with the tracer tool parameters so that you can tell in real time whether you are experiencing strobing, replays, color pulsing, etc. then you may want to try to replicate the tracers you are seeing in real time. We recognize that this has the problem that the tracer replications will have psychedelic tracers of themselves, and that they get in the way of the tracers you are trying to reproduce. That said, the early reports we have received state that it is actually easier to do a good job at replicating the tracers while in the state than after it. So we also welcome submissions of this type.

The case of HPPD and other non-drug induced tracers could be considered in this frame as well. For instance, we have been made aware that during the meditation practice of Fire Kasina, one experiences many pronounced tracers of various kinds. Thus, if you are currently experiencing meditation-induced tracers, you can submit parameters of the within trip kind. If you saw the bouncing ball (or other animations) during the meditation but have now exited your state, then you could submit a datapoint of the post-trip kind. And if you only have the recollection of tracers but did not see the ball at the time, then submit a retroactive datapoint. Likewise, HPPD and other tracer phenomena may come and go and their intensity may wax and wane, so these categories are also useful in such cases.

Please sign up to the QRI mailing list if you want to stay informed about the development of QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit. We also want to emphasize, as we note in the Special Thanks section below, that this tool could not have been made without our amazing QRI volunteers. We are very eager to work with anyone with technical skills useful for this and related projects. If you would like to help us build these tools and advance our collective understanding of exotic states of consciousness, please get in touch. For more QRI volunteer projects see our volunteer page.


 [1] A significant message of the book is that it is useful to conceptualize these rhythms as being the result of endogenous pattern-generating networks specialized to create specific frequencies, envelopes, and types of synchronization.

[2]  “There are only two sources that control the firing patterns of a neuron at any time: an input from outside the brain and self-organized activity. These two sources of synchronization forces often compete with each other (Cycle 9). If cognition derives from the brain, this self-organized activity is its most likely source. Ensemble synchrony of neurons should therefore reflect the combination of some selected physical features of the world and the brain’s interpretation of those features. Even if the stimulus is invariant, the brain state is not. From this perspective, the most interesting thing we can learn about the brain is how its self-generated internal states, the potential source of cognition, are brought about. Extracting the variant, that is, brain-generated features, including the temporal relation between neural assemblies and assembly members, from the invariant features evoked by the physical world might provide clues about the brain’s perspective on its environment. Yes, this is the information we routinely throw away with stimulus-locked averaging.” (Buzsáki, 2006)


*Disclaimer: We are not encouraging anyone to ingest psychoactive substances. 


Special Thanks to: Lawrence Wu for implementing the current version of the tool. To Andrew Zuckerman, Quintin Frerichs, and Mike Johnson for a lot of useful ideas, conversations, and keeping the project afloat. To Robin Goins and Alex Zhao for getting a head start in implementing an earlier version of the tool. To the QRI team for encouragement and many discussions. And to the anonymous rational psychonauts and the HPPD sufferer for contributing pilot data with visual replications of their own experiences.


Bibliography

Buzsáki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford University Press.

Atasoy, S., Donnelly, I., & Pearson, J. (2016). Human brain networks function in connectome-specific harmonic waves. Nature Communications, 7(1), 10340. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340

Luppi, A. I., Vohryzek, J., Kringelbach, M. L., Mediano, P. A. M., Craig, M. M., Adapa, R., Carhart-Harris, R. L., Roseman, L., Pappas, I., Finoia, P., Williams, G. B., Allanson, J., Pickard, J. D., Menon, D. K., Atasoy, S., & Stamatakis, E. A. (2020). Connectome Harmonic Decomposition of Human Brain Dynamics Reveals a Landscape of Consciousness [Preprint]. Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.10.244459

Rudrauf, D., Lutz, A., Cosmelli, D., Lachaux, J.-P., & Le Van Quyen, M. (2003). From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics of being. Biological Research, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.4067/S0716-97602003000100005

Lehar S. (1999) Harmonic Resonance Theory: An Alternative to the “Neuron Doctrine” Paradigm to Address Gestalt Properties of Perception. Available at http://slehar.com/wwwRel/webstuff/hr1/hr1.html

Lloyd, D. (2013). The Music of Consciousness: Can Musical Form Harmonize Phenomenology and the Brain?. Neurophenomenology. https://commons.trincoll.edu/dlloyd/files/2012/07/Lloyd-2013-Music-of-Consciousness.pdf

Ingram, D. (2018). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. Newburyport: AEON Books. Available at: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/book

Dubois, J., & VanRullen, R. (2011). Visual Trails: Do the Doors of Perception Open Periodically? PLoS Biology, 9(5), e1001056. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001056

Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 17661. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17546-0

Kent, J. L. (2010) Psychedelic Information Theory. PIT Press. Available at http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/pdf/PIT-Print-Web.pdf

Lehar, S. (2010). The Grand Illusion: A Psychonautical Odyssey Into the Depths of Human Experience. Available at: http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf

Turner, D. M. (1996). Salvinorin – The Psychedelic Essence of Salvia Divinorum. Panther Press. Available at: http://www.lavondyss.com/donut/toc.html

Leary, T. Metzner, R. Dass, R. (1964). The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Available at: http://www.leary.ru/download/leary/Timothy%20Leary%20-%20The%20Tibetan%20Book%20Of%20The%20Dead.pdf

Harman, W. Fadiman, J. (1996). Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training. Psychedelic Reports. Available at: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/harman.htm

Gomez Emilsson, A. (2015). How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD. Qualia Computing. Available at: https://qualiacomputing.com/2015/05/22/how-to-secretly-communicate-with-people-on-lsd/

Gomez Emilsson, A. (2016). The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes. Qualia Computing. Available at: https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/

Gomez Emilsson, A. (2018). The Pseudo-Time Arrow: Explaining Phenomenal Time With Implicit Causal Structures In Networks Of Local Binding. Qualia Research Institute. Available at: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/s/The-Pseduo-Time-Arrow.pdf

Gomez Emilsson, A. (2020). 5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses. Qualia Research Institute. Available at: https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-the-9-lenses/

Alexander, S. (2014) Going Loopy. Slate Star Codex. Available at: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/

Johnson, M. (2018). The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models. Qualia Research Institute. Available at: https://opentheory.net/2018/12/the-neuroscience-of-meditation/

Johnson, M. (2019). Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything. Qualia Research Institute. Available at: https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/


If you want to use the software, please reference it by citing it in the following way (APA style):

Wu, L., Gomez Emilsson, A., Zuckerman, A. (2020). QRI Psychophysics Toolkit, Qualia Research Institute. https://qualiaresearchinstitute.github.io/psychophysics/

And cite this article as (APA style):

Gomez Emilsson, A. (2020, October). Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: The Tracer Replication Tool. Qualia Computing.

Psychoactive Anecdata

[Epistemic Status: anecdotal data; this is not a list of “life hacks”; it is intended as a list of interesting research leads; don’t take drugs unless you really know what you are doing!]

I’ll mark to the right of each anecdata:

  • n=x when I can remember clearly how many people have said this to me up to n = 10 (e.g. n=7 means that 7 people have told me this)
  • n=x/y when I know that y people have tried it and of those x have experienced this
  • n>1 when 1 < n < 10 but I don’t remember exactly how many people have said it, and
  • pattern if it’s a pattern I’ve observed across more than 10 people pooled from online trip reports and conversations from email exchanges, forums, group chats, private messages, and things that have come up at IRL discussions (e.g. at festivals).

Psychedelics

The “best” phenethylamines in terms of the balance between mind expansion, euphoria, and low bodyload are:

  • 2C-B (low bodyload, high euphoria, unlikely to freak out at <25mg) [pattern]
  • 2C-C (like 2C-B but also relaxing, unlikely to freak out at <40mg) [pattern]
  • 2C-D (particularly easy on the body relative to other phenethylamines, unlikely to freak out at <30mg) [pattern]
  • 2C-I (more trippy and stimulating than the above, unlikely to freak out at <25mg) [pattern]

Among some of the worst 2Cs (but perhaps not worst phenethylamines) we find:

  • 2C-P (particularly bad bodyload, inevitable vomiting above some dose) [pattern]
  • 2C-E (“just too weird” for a lot of people, strong bodyload) [pattern]
  • 2C-T-2 (high bodyload, strangely similar to LSD in headspace) [n>1]
  • 2C-T-7 (same as 2C-T-2) [n>1]

IV Psychedelics

  • Do not ever IV 2C-E as it leads to instant extreme crams, nausea, and general bodily discomfort. [n=1]
  • The come-up of IV 2C-B is very fast relative to oral administration (5 minutes) and the peak is a lot more intense as well. 5mg results in an intensity of experience comparable to 35mg oral at its peak. [n=5]
  • Within 10 minutes of IV 2C-B one feels an intense urge to defecate. [n=4/5]
  • While IV 100μg LSD takes a full 30 minutes to show the start of effects, IV 300μg takes only 5 minutes to show pronounced effects. [n=1]
  • Ketamine is reportedly experienced as a “completely different drug” when the ROA is IV vs. IM vs. intranasal. [pattern]
  • IV Ketamine gives rise to a distinct metallic taste in one’s mouth within a few seconds of administration. [n>1]

Anti-Tolerance Drugs

In Anti-Tolerance Drugs we gave a list of drugs that, when taken in conjunction with painkillers and euphoric substances, can lessen, prevent, and even reverse tolerance. But “drug tolerance” is not a natural kind. Indeed, there are many systems of neuroadaptation that prevent drugs from exerting the same effect over time. Nothing makes this clearer than the typically life-long loss of “magic” to MDMA after a few experiences, which stands in contrast to the largely reversible tolerance to ethyl alcohol post-PAWS. Indeed, “drug tolerance” can mean tolerance to reduced action for: antidepressant effects (SSRIs), lessening chronic pain (opioids), increasing executive function (modafinil), enhancing motivation (amphetamine), “the magic” (ketamine, MDMA), the sense of unity and interconnectedness (LSD), otherworldliness (salvia), and so on. Indeed you can have a drug that generates tolerance to one of its effects but not others. For example, Slate Star Codex’s nootropic survey found that despite the common wisdom that prescription amphetamines stop generating a sense of euphoria after a while, most people who use them clinically for ADHD continue to experience an enhanced focus on the drug for many years. In this vein, the following anecdata highlights how anti-tolerance drugs have a much more subtle and multifaceted effect than just “reducing tolerance”:

  • DXM and other dissociatives seem to potentiate both the analgesic and euphoric effects from opioids, increase constipation, and leave pruritus the same. [n>1]
  • Proglumide reduces both the intensity of opioid withdrawal as well as the tolerance to their analgesic, sedative, and constipation effects. It does not affect euphoria or pruritus. [n>1]
  • Ultra-low dose naltrexone (ULDN) reduces tolerance to analgesic and sedative effects from opioids but not euphoria (“it makes opioids more sleep-inducing but a lot less fun“). Interestingly, ULDN prevents constipation from opioids. [n>1]
  • Black seed oil and ashwagandha reduce the tolerance to the analgesic, sedative, euphoric, and pruritus effects of opioids without influencing constipation. These effects are milder than all of the above. [n=1]
  • Agmatine potentiates the analgesic effects of opioids without an effect on other facets like euphoria or constipation. [n =1]
  • Turmeric primarily increases the sedative effects of opioids without changing much of anything else. [n=1]
  • Anti-histamine anti-cholinergic drugs (such as diphenhydramine) potentiate the sedative and analgesic effects, but leave constipation and euphoria the same. They can increase restlessness. [pattern]

Drug Combinations

In addition to all of what was said in Making Amazing Recreational Drug Cocktails:

  • DXM does not mix well with a bunch of things: 2C drugs [n>1], noopept [n=1], tianeptine [n=1], phenibut [n=1], ethyl alcohol [pattern], most nootropics. [n=1]
    • This seems to be especially bad for high-bodyload 2Cs as described above. [n>1]
  • Vaporizing DMT while on ketamine “slows down” and in some cases “freezes” some aspects of the hallucinations of DMT, allowing you to inspect them more closely. It also prolongs the DMT experience for a good 3 to 5 minutes. [n=3]
  • Taking 30mg of MDMA and 30μg LSD at the same time, followed by 10mg 2C-B four hours later, gives rise to a very positive synergy that allows you to maintain easy executive function while having trippy thoughts and a very high hedonic tone. It’s a smart and psychologically safe state. The combo has very mild hungover effects relative to how great it feels. [n=4]

Nootropics

  • Coluracetam is surprisingly psychedelic. [n=5]
  • Mixing coluracetam and weed gives rise to a mild LSD-like mindspace. [n=4]
  • Rhodiola Rosea has a distinctly “dopaminergic quality”, which is rare among nootropics other than L-tyrosine. [n=3]
  • Most racetams (piracetam, oxiracetam, aniracetam, etc.) successfully mask the verbal impairment (both comprehension and execution) caused by weed and/or alcohol (up to a point!). [pattern]
  • Agmatine (500mg) significantly blunts the intensity of orgasm. [n=1]
  • Agmatine (500mg) can be used as a replacement for NSAIDs like aspirin and ibuprofen for mild to moderate pains and aches. [n=1]

Surprising Analgesia

  • Microdosing LSD (5 to 20μg) can substantially reduce the pain of very bad premenstrual syndrome (PMS). [pattern]
  • Microdosing LSD can also reduce the pain associated with shingles. [1<n]

Spiral

[Excerpt from Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved (published in 1990 and usually abbreviated as PIHKAL) by Alexander and Ann Shulgin, pgs. 98-103]

Part Two: Alice’s Voice

Spiral

When I finally gave it a name, I called it the Spiral.

This is how it was. Lying down for a nap time (as a child) or at night for sleep, I would have reached that point of relaxation where one is not very much aware of the body. The small itches and discomforts have subsided, and the mind is beginning to drift. When I sensed it beginning (I never knew when it was going to come), I would immediately snap into alertness, excited and pleased, then I would just lie quietly as it unfolded.

The first thing that happened was a change in my breathing. It became increasingly shallow, to the point where my rib cage was barely moving at all.

If someone came into the room and talked to me, as sometimes happened, I could open my eyes and answer normally; the experience continued uninterrupted inside my head.

Every part of it, every stage, was the same each time. It was always in black and white. There was no color anywhere, and try as I did, especially around the age of fourteen, I could not force color to come onto the screen. And I could never extend it, by so much as a few seconds. When it was finished, it was finished.

First came the image-sensation after which I named the entire experience – the spiral. I felt my entire self drawn rapidly into a tiny point which kept shrinking, until it could shrink no further, at which time the microscopic point became a tunnel in which I continued traveling at great speed, inexpressibly small and implacably diminishing.

Simultaneously, I was expanding. I was expanding to the edges of the universe, at the same tremendous speed as that of the shrinking, and the combination, the contraction-expansion, was not only an image, it was also a sensation the whole of me recognized and welcomed. This experience of myself as microcosm-macrocosm lasted exactly four minutes.

The image of the spiral is found everywhere that the human has left his mark on earth. It has been cut into rock faces, painted on huts and clay pots, traced on the walls of initiation caves. I’m certain that it has been important to all the races of man because it is a symbol for the experience I’m describing, and for the concept, the understanding that the intellect forms out of what is initially not an intellectual, but a soul experience of the Alpha and the Omega.

The next stage came abruptly, as did all the changes. I was looking at standing figures which were vaguely human, dark thin figures being pulled into elongated shapes, like the sculptures of Giacometti. They stretched out, arms and legs like black string, until it seemed they could elongate no further, then the scene changed and I was watching obscenely rounded bodies, Tweedledums and Tweedledees without costumes, their small heads and legs disappearing into their puffed, bloated flesh.

The sensation accompanying this stage was one of discomfort, unpleasantness, a feeling of something grating on my soul. I once timed this part and the one that followed; they lasted a total of six minutes. I disliked them intensely.

Abruptly again, the inner screen became white, a horrible dead-white, nasty and aggressive like the underbelly of a sting-ray. After presenting itself for a few seconds, the flat white began to curdle from the outer edges into black, until finally the screen was totally black. A thick, awful, dead black, a pool of tar in an unlit cave deep underground. After another brief pause, the black began to curdle at its edges into the white again. The process repeated itself once, and the sensation was similar in every way to the previous one: irritating, grating, a feeling of unpleasantness that approached repugnance. I always endured it with a mental gritting of teeth, knowing it had to be gone through because that’s the way it always went and it was not to be changed.

And then, finally, I broke out into the last stage, the final part for which I had always been and always would be willing to undergo the middle parts.

Now I was at the edge of an unseen cliff, looking out into a very different blackness, the deep, cradling blackness of the infinite universe, of space which stretched without end. I was completely happy and comfortable in that place, and would have stayed there indefinitely, had I been allowed, breathing in the beautiful darkness and the exquisitely familiar sense of infinity as a living presence, surrounding me, intimate and warm.

After a moment of this pleasure, came the greeting. From the upper left-hand corner of the universe there came a greeting from Something which had known me, and which I had known, since before time and space began. There were no words, but the message was clear and smiling: Hello, dear friend, I salute you with respect-humor-love. It is a pleasure with laughter-joy to encounter you again.

That which greeted me was an entity so far removed from anything in human experience that I concluded, when I was an adult, trying to find a way to describe it to myself, that even the word, “entity”, could not be applied; a word creates boundaries, it says this is the shape of what you are describing, as different from other shapes which are bounded by other words. It had no shape, no form, no definition, no boundaries. It was. It is. It was my oldest friend and it greeted me as its equal. I always replied to it with a rush of love and delight and my own laughter.

Then it was over.

It had taken exactly twelve minutes.

It was something I’d always experienced, taken for granted, and had given no thought to when I was very young. Not until age fourteen did I take a good look at it and recognize it as unusual, something peculiarly my own, my secret private treasure. I also got very analytical about the whole thing, began my habit of timing it and made the first of my unsuccessful efforts at altering it. But I didn’t decide on a name for it until many years later, discarding “Microcosm-macrocosm,” as too long and unwieldy, and settling on the simpler “Spiral.”

It had probably been going on since I was born. There’s no way to be sure, of course, but because it had been part of my life ever since I could remember, I tend to assume it was familiar to me from the very beginning. My mother said something once about having seen a change of some kind coming over me occasionally when I was a baby; she said she didn’t worry about it because when it passed, I appeared to be quite normal.

It always (with one single exception) came under the same circumstances, when I had settled down in bed for a nap or for the night’s sleep, but well before sleep itself took over.

The one exception happened when I was around fifteen, shortly after my father had been transferred to Santiago de Cuba as American Consul. We were staying in a hotel, while those responsible for helping us find a home were still busy with their search. My father and mother, my brother Boy and I were having lunch in the hotel dinning room and my eyes focused on the butter plate on the table. In the exact center of the round plate was a single pat of butter, and somehow the sight triggered the familiar feeling I associated with the beginning of the Spiral. I was surprised and very pleased, because it was a new thing to have it start under such unusual circumstances.

I was also pleased because it was my special thing, and in asking to be excused from the table to go up to my room, I felt a certain sense of importance, which was rare when I was with my family. I said just enough to make it clear that my strange “thing” was beginning, and my parents grudgingly gave me permission for me to leave. I reached the room upstairs in time for the completion, the wonderful last few moments. It turned out to be the only time it ever happened that way – when I was out of my bed, involved with ordinary matters of daily living.

I tried to make it come, searching out all sorts of images of round space with dots in the center, but nothing worked. I never found a way to make it happen. It came when it chose to, unexpectedly, once in a while. The times it chose had no apparent connection to anything else that was going on in my life, either generally or in particular. In twenty-five years, believe me, I looked for every possible connection; I found none. When I was very little, I think it might have happened as often as once a week or so, but as I grew older it came less and less often, until around age twenty-five, when it happened only twice in one year, then never again.

The discovery that I was not alone in my journey into the interior cosmos came as a complete surprise. It gave me a great deal of excited pleasure and opened up a whole new series of questions. I happened when I was around twenty two, and – interesting enough in itself – the two proofs came to me within a single four month period.

The incidents were astoundingly similar.

The first one took place one evening when I went to a party given by a friend in San Francisco. I was in the host’s kitchen with several of the other guests, doing what people usually do in strange kitchens at informal parties – talking, drinking and munching potato chips and carrot sticks – and after a while one young man named Evan and I found ourselves alone, deeply involved in a conversation about unusual experiences, mostly read about or heard from others, the kind of conversation that seems to come about more easily, somehow, in the midst of a high energy, noisy party than at any other time.

Suddenly Evan was telling me about what he referred to as “a really weird thing,” which had been happening to him ever since he was very young. I remember the prickling that spread up my back as he began describing it, and I understood immediately the look that gradually came into his face, a mixture of embarrassment and anxiety (She’s going to think I’m crazy; why am I talking about this?). I tried to make it easier for him to continue by nodding encouragingly and once – when he faltered briefly – I volunteered what I knew was going to be the next image, and he looked startled, almost frightened, drank a bit from his glass, muttered, “Yes, exactly”, and continued to the end. His end was not mine; his journey came to a close after the black and white curdles. I thought, with a touch of pity, that he seemed to have missed the best part, although he did have the wonderful spiral at the beginning. I was glad I hadn’t prompted him further. When he’d finished his story, I told him I’d had every one of the images he had described, and that he was the first person I’d ever met who shared the experience. I said nothing about my own different ending.

He was staring at me, and I wasn’t sure he’d really heard what I’d been telling him. Finally, he smiled and said that I was the first person he’d ever told about this private, “crazy thing,” and he couldn’t believe – it was so extraordinary – that I actually knew what he was talking about. He said that he had always wondered if the experience was a sign of insanity of some kind, and it was such a relief to know that somebody else had had it. Neither of us felt it necessary to add that, in a situation like this, it was also reassuring to see that the person who shares your strangeness appears to be relatively sane and reasonably functional.

I smiled back and said I understood exactly how he felt. We left the kitchen and joined the rest of the party. I never saw him again, and didn’t particularly expect or want to. It was enough to have heard one other person repeating what I knew so well, and it was intriguing to know that my journey, or process, had gone farther, longer, than Evan’s; after all, although I was more than willing to give up exclusive rights to the whole thing, I didn’t mind retaining a little bit of superiority.

The second incident was almost identical to the first, the only difference being that the young man (whose name I forgot almost immediately) was talking to me in somebody’s living room, instead of the kitchen, in the middle of another noisy party, when he began describing the “strange vision” that he, too, had had ever since he was a small child. His, also, ended short of where mine did, and he was astounded and obviously very relieved to know that there was somebody else in the world who knew about it.

Both young men seemed quite unremarkable, although pleasant enough and intelligent. I never saw the second one again, either.

I remember wishing briefly that I could put an ad in the Chronicle or Examiner, something along the lines of, “Seek contact with others who have experienced…,” and of course, the imaginary ad stalled there.

It happened – my beloved Spiral – for the last time when I was twenty-five. I had no way of knowing, of course, that it would not come again. It may or may not have been a coincidence that, within three weeks of the last time, I had my first encounter with a psychedelic material, the Divine Cactus, peyote.



Has the above ever happened to you? Did you experience the Spiral as a kid? If so, please let us know!

See also:


Featured Image Credit: Matthew Smith

Self-Locatingly Uncertain Psilocybin Trip Report by an Anonymous Reader

See more rational trip reports by anonymous readers for: 2C-B, 4-AcO-DMT, LSD, N,N-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT


Pre-ingestion Notes

Physiological Background

  • Restfulness: Well-Rested (7-8 hours of sleep)
  • Wake-up time: 5:10 am
  • Morning run: 5:30 am (~30 minutes total)
  • Breakfast time: 9:25 am
  • Food: 2 chicken sausages + ½ bagel, ¾ can of Peach-Pear La Croix (carbonation will create a slightly acidic environment, possibly potentiating drug’s metabolism)
  • Weight: 55-60 kg
  • Height: 170-180 cm
  • Sex / Identity / Orientation: Male / Cis / Hetero
  • Libido: decently high; 2 days since last masturbation
  • Dosage: 6 g, mostly caps; took 2x dosage of everyone else to prevent any potential short-term homeostatic adaptive effects which might lead to upping dosage mid-stride
  • Other Drugs: none

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“I have a split personality”, said tom, being frank

Environmental Stimuli

  • Temperature: moderately warm – cozy (~ 74 F, 23 C)
  • Light: near window with ample filtered sunlight
  • Touch: sitting on fuzzy carpet; comfortable loose-fitting athleisure wear clothes
  • Olfactory: 5 sprays of peach-nectarine body scent (as an experiment to test memory retrieval of trip, as unlike other sensory systems, scent mostly bypasses the thalamic sensory gating filter)
  • Taste: regular mushroom taste, 2 Listerine strips immediately afterward (again to engage in potential memory retrieval). Nothing nauseating or stomach-troubling.
  • Auditory: listening to minimalist / contemporary classical music by Ludovico Einaudi
  • Visual: YouTube videos of fractal images & Islamic art
  • Social: 4 friends (3 of which are of the rationalist-tribe; all techies)

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    Plate of mushrooms and accompanying peach-nectarine body scent

Prior Cognitive State

  • Past drug experiences: 2 occasions of cannabis, few times alcohol, and 2 occasions of adderall. All minor experiences, none negative, and generally I strongly abstain from psychoactive drugs (even caffeine). No prior experience with psychedelics(!)
  • Mood: relatively optimistic and happy; no negative feelings
  • Beliefs: generally Fictionalist in ontology, though in recent years have experienced Platonist tendencies. Strongly grounded in an empirically-based, scientific-physicalist perspective. Strong sense of individuality + Selfhood. Not religious, nor spiritual, though upbringing was Roman Catholic.
  • Training: former academic neuroscience + pharmacologically-trained; current data science graduate student
  • Goals: to gain first-person experience of Klüver constants and re-establish/confirm any potential taxonomy of geometric forms (see here, here, and here for more)
  • Expectations: extremely skeptical that any fantastical effects might occur other than some random colors in the visual field, minor mood changes, minor memory + time effects such as retarded / slowed time, and maybe at most some Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome perceptual-type effects. Hoping for experiences of strong and consistent + clearly defined Klüver constants, but skeptical they even exist. Skeptical of any notion of god-minds, communion with nature, dying and being reborn, and generally any spiritual or mystical experiences.


Real-Time Trip Report (unedited)

Time of Ingestion – 9:55 am, 02/15/2020

10:21 – First noticeable effect. Concentration lagging. Palms beginning to sweat. Starting to feel like it might be difficult to focus enough to write a report.
10:29 – REALLY strong physiological effect. Losing focus. Similar to being extremely tired(!). Sweat increasing (palms, pits, neck in that order). No visual or auditory hallucinations yet. Everyone else is laughing somewhat uncontrollably.
10:33 – First STRONG spike of losing concentration. Similar to being really tired or fainting.
10:36 – Another strong spike of losing consciousness. No hallucinations yet.
10:37 – Spike again. Increasing frequency now. One about every 15-20 seconds. Have to write this sentence in bursts, and memory is trying to keep up recovering my train of thought. Have to stop and now and then to
10:38 – First visual effectss! Tortoise shell-like fractal images. Hard to focus. Palms really really really sweaty, notice it as keyboard residue.
10:43 – Still hanging in there. Notice that friend’s response time is really late with around 2 minute delayss, not sure if that’s me or them? Extreme switching cost now between chrome tabs of writing and watching youtube vid.
10:46 – Switching cost too strong. Dilemma now between 3rd person documentation and 1st person immersion. Trying hrad.
10:47 – okay giving in to the experience now. too strong now
10:48 – laughter
10:48 does not make sense, really hard to type now, losing languge
50 trying hard to document. worried hwo to convey this
51 realizati not abot documnting 52 thats it 53 can i come back
54 latice structs 58 still here k
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03


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Post-Trip Report

Total Trip Duration: ~6-7 hours

I’m writing this now being fully recovered and in my usual frame of mind. I’m going to start with how much I can remember…

Somewhat cognizant but before peak experience, I came back from one of my blackouts and saw one of my friends outside the cabin. I worried about their safety but realized that other people were going to take care of him. I also remember one of my friends constantly checking up on me. The strongest thought that I recall during the beginning of my experience was realizing that I had to let go of all this documentation, stop worrying about others and what other people think, and had to let go of this 3rd person perspective. I know this sounds somewhat monstrously misanthropic, but at the time of the experience I felt like that to pursue Truth I had to go further than everyone else even if that meant leaving them behind, and it was distracting to even have to jump back and forth between 1st and 3rd person perspective to focus on responding to other people during my brief moments of sanity to tell them I was ok when I could be delving deeper and deeper into the experience. This thought of leaving all thoughts of others behind to pursue the Truth reoccurred a few times as I began to get sucked into the vortex of patterns found in the wood grains of the floor and the curls of the carpet.

Linearity of experience was soon lost. I blinked in and out of existence. Time was definitely not unraveling like the constant forward stream I was used to and I felt like I was teleporting from one false reality to the next. I didn’t know in what order those events occurred. At this period I really wasn’t thinking, but more just passively viewing brief glimpses and snapshots of my body going through the motion. One moment I was in the kitchen. The next locked in the bathroom. The next on the living room floor. It’s such a shame that there’s a quirk in our language requiring me to express these as “next experiences” when in reality I did not experience them as having an order. I felt a really strong sense of déjà vu and reverse déjà vu tied to each of them, as if I’ve already done them before while also simultaneously knowing that I will be doing them in the future. It was really weird to have the feeling that you know you’ve already lived the future.

I blinked onto the bathroom floor. I thought why should I even look back and respond at all to the other people asking if I was okay when I finally have the chance to explore and find Truth with a capital T, and suddenly a strong sadness hit me. It was more of a feeling than a coherent logical thought, but the best way I can explain it was that it was a type of guilt that I’ll never be able to share this with my sister, my brother, my mom and dad, and then what will happen to my roommates, and then all my other friends and classmates around me, and how they’ll worry about me and so I told myself I’ll have to come back for them.

And so I tried to come back. Trying and wanting is such an interesting concept. It’s weird to desire language without being able to form a coherent line of thought or internal sentence in your head, but that is what I remember doing. How do you say to yourself that you want something without even being able to describe to yourself what that is? It seems desire may be more fundamental than internal language. Soon my linguistic centers began to reboot and I realized that this had to do with my memory chunks getting larger and allowing me to hold more in short term memory. Although seemingly primitive and simplistic, I can’t emphasize enough how this realization that memory and language were intertwined and recursively bootstrapping each other really helped soothe away any panic that I was totally lost.

I blinked into the kitchen. Time was becoming more linearly coherent now, but I kept blanking out and teleporting randomly throughout the kitchen. The thing was: I didn’t think of it as the same kitchen. I thought of it as different parallel realities of a kitchen that I recognize. I remember my friend offering me a chip and me trying so very hard to grasp that chip from her and hold on to that reality even if it was not the true real one, as if by merely believing by sheer force of will that I am actually grasping an object then made it concrete. I recall saying ‘trying to parse’. I strained with cognitive effort to stop teleporting. I remember asking everyone in each reality I blinked into whether or not this was the real one. “Wow, is this real?” became a repeating question tinted with wonder and surprise.

I blinked into the living room. Time was linear again, and it seems I began to be able to somewhat coherently reflect on the geometric patterns clouding my sight. I regretfully wished I could have focused on them more (as well as the apparently living, pulsating, and breathing floor beneath me and the shrinking and growing of my hands), but it was at this moment that I truly to the deep core of myself had the gut feeling that this reality wasn’t my original one. I honestly and wholeheartedly believed that this reality was a construct and that I was living out a simulation either in the mind of my true body in the real world (where I was probably in some coma in the hospital) or inhabiting the body of a different version of myself in a parallel universe. Everything felt false. Fake. Simulated. I was overcome with a Great Sadness that I didn’t know how to get back to my own original reality, and that I never said goodbye to the people I loved. And I was surprised because these melancholic emotions were of such strength to overcome my scientific training and any previous skepticism I once held.

I tried in vain to remember some mathematical way of proving you were living in a simulation, maybe something from information theory, or Tegmark’s mathematical universe, or something regarding speeds and frames of references and computational power being limited in an embedded simulated universe, but I could not for the life of me recall how to actually prove this to myself or what experiment to run. I remember, fuck man, I really should have worked out those thought experiments and proofs in depth because now I’m stuck.

However, it was on that thought of frames of references that I realized with some sadness and regret that maybe it’s not all that bad since how can I be the one to say one reality is more real and valid than the next? The best way I can convey this was that it was a somewhat mono no aware-type feeling. Even if this is a simulation in my mind or I’m in some parallel universe, why should I be any less happy? If someone spent their whole life creating their own meaning through something as removed from reality as art, or music, or pure math, and was able to live a fulfilling life, why should any particular version of myself be considered less meaningful just because this version of me possesses a memory of another me as an origin and potential branching-off point? Wasn’t another reality just as valid as the original one that I just came from? What made my old frame of reference special except for the mere fact of it being my origin? Why was I feeling this sense of sadness that I left it all behind to teleport to this version of reality? And then came the acceptance that if this reality was just as real except for my gut belief that it wasn’t, why shouldn’t I be able to simultaneously accept that gut feeling and move on and live in this version of reality?

And so I decided to live on, and within a few hours began to lose this sense that this was the false reality (although I really really wished I had a GoPro camera with me so that I could definitively prove to myself that I was in the correct reality). I began to have a newfound strong sense of empathy towards people with dissociative disorders. Thinking back on the experience, I think I primed myself for these thoughts when I kept switching between first-person and third-person perspectives, telling myself I couldn’t handle the switching cost any longer and that I should just immerse myself fully in the experience and forget about documenting this for other people, and why was I even submitting myself to the approval of others anyways because if there’s anyone who will have to go further in their exploration and sacrifice the chance to be with others then I guess I’ll just have to take up that burden.

Overall, I think the strong dissociative experience of thinking this reality was the fake simulated one had to do with maybe a couple of things. As mentioned before, one cause could have been the psychological priming induced by constantly switching between 1st and 3rd person ways of perceiving this event, creating the necessary emotional conditions of being simultaneously split between existing and being fully immersed in the present moment versus wanting to abstract / detach myself from the moment.

The second potential cause of the dissociation could have been due to my brain constantly blacking out and being rebooted in another physical part of the house. Because I had no memory of the continuity of how I got from one context to the next, this conditioned my brain to rationalize and register each separate event as a separate reality, probably falsely recognizing and incorrectly pattern matching these experiences as being more similar to a dream state where teleportation is normal, perceptions are distorted, and sequences of events are jumbled. This probably then began synthesizing the necessary eventual gut-belief that this reality was fake (because I subconsciously falsely pattern matched that it was similar to a dream).

Finally, I think the third potential contributor to the dissociation occurred when I was coming down from the experience and my brain went on overdrive trying to rationalize events. It might be possible that the more you are adept at creatively rationalizing things away the paradoxically worse you are at accepting this reality. Just having knowledge of potential parallel realities in physics, the simulation hypothesis that we might either be simulated in our heads or on a computer and may not realize it, the philosophy of solipsism, and knowing the neuroscience of how just freaking good the brain is at tricking itself that something is real, all created fertile conditions for my brain to interpret this reality as false.

Thinking back on the experience, I now have a newfound appreciation for memory and the continuity of experience, and their contribution to what it means to feel situated and embodied in this reality. If I were to do this again I would probably micro-dose so that I could still retain my linguistic faculties and linear way of reasoning in order to investigate the visual geometric effects in much greater scientific 3rd person POV-like rigor, focusing less on the semantic psychoanalytical content of the experience and more on the psychophysical optical effects (which was my original goal!). This really showed me how dependent the sense of Self was on the continuity of memory and experience and that maybe the Self really is composed of different smaller frames of reference generated by subnetworks in the brain (and hence is an ecology of momentary and brief snapshots / selves constantly going in and out of existence, both competing and coalescing in dynamic flux to make up the whole Self). Without the strong pillar that the continuity of singular memory provides to the host body that this community of selves inhabits, I think there really could be a binding problem for integrating these individual snapshots into a singular Selfhood and individual identity that persist through time that we call ‘I’.
Overall, I gained a much greater appreciation for continuity, the linear narrative of language intertwined with memory, and what it feels like on the inside of someone who is dissociated and thinks their surrounding reality is just a construct and not real. Also, the geometric images were really cool and I finally now understand why people say Google’s DeepDream art seems psychedelic, because looking into the mirror during the later stages of my trip confirmed that my face really did look like a globular, eyes-everywhere, and skewed proportioned / sized image!sIALPrcsO8TouJL3khCiXQ-small
Anyways, I really want to thank my friends that were with me on this trip and for constantly checking up on me to make sure I was okay. Rarely do I feel comfortable in the presence of other people and I’m glad I felt safe with you.

Thank you ❤️

Overall, I’d give my first experience with psychedelics a 7/10!


2-Week Post-Trip Report

So it’s been 2 weeks since ingestion and I just wanted to briefly report this one last interesting phenomenon for documentation’s sake.

Out of the 14 days post-trip, a little less than half of those nights (6 nights in total, distributed more heavily in the week immediately after the trip), I’ve had dreams that featured strongly self-referential phenomena. Within these dreams, my perceptual surroundings immediately reminded me of my aforementioned psychonautical experience of questioning my reality. These strong emotional realizations would then essentially cause my brain to kick itself out of the dream.

However, instead of truly waking up, I was still nested inside another dream in which I was imagining waking up. I usually went through 2-3 rounds of this false waking-up cycle until I finally surfaced into the real reality of the morning.

I thought it interesting for the first 2 nights, but after that it actually got really tiring always waking up questioning whether or not I’m really awake, and then having to go through the same motions of prepping for school/work knowing you’ve done that 2-3 times already in your head for the day.

What was funny though was that this always occurred around the same time each morning (my body has always naturally woken up at 5 am on the dot since high school), and in each iteration of the dream in which I falsely woke up I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it is 5 am. This would then lend me false-confidence and confirm that “ah, ok, I’m not in the dream anymore since I really do wake up at 5 am“. However, I think after enough times of this not working my brain finally came to learn that that was no longer a reliable indicator of the reality being real.

This skeptical realization finally got strong enough to be able to recall within my dream and act as an early kick-out mechanism that I eventually woke up closer and closer to my true ‘waking up point’. I remember going through the wake-up, look at the clock, remember that this no longer works, then immediately get kicked out, and wake up again, look at the clock, then remember this no longer works and get kicked out again, wake up, then look at the clock and finally get some inkling that this perception is a little different and realize that’s because I’m really waking up for real now. A rather fascinating experience!


Featured image by Nick Swanson

Harmonic Society (3/4): Art as State-Space Exploration and Energy Parameter Modulation

The following essay* was recently published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (issue). Below you will find models 5 and 6 (out of 8), which are new, original, and the direct result of recent insights about consciousness as uncovered by modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the work of the Qualia Research Institute. (See models 1 & 2, and 3 & 4).

I will wrap up this series next week with something many readers would know to expect – an explanation for how art is connected to valence. Stay tuned!


5. State-Space Exploration

The elucidation of the origin of qualia-rich subjectivity is important not only as an activity in the natural sciences, but also as a foundation and the ultimate justification of the whole world of the liberal arts. Bridging the gap between the two cultures (C. P. Snow) is made possible only through a clear understanding of the origin of qualia and subjectivity.
Qualia symbolize the essential intellectual challenge for humanity in the future. The impact of its elucidation will not be limited to the natural sciences. The liberal arts, religion, and the very concept of what a man is will be reassessed from their very foundations.
– Ken Mogi in The Qualia Manifesto (1998)

Is there anything beyond the sacred? Yes. This model of art posits that one key feature of art is the pursuit of novel experiences that challenge preconceptions of what is possible to experience. The state-space[1] of possible experiences is unfathomably vast, and mundane everyday human experiences are restricted to a tiny corner of this enormous behemoth. As they say, “you won’t know if you like it until you try it”. Applying that logic to the exploration of the state-space of consciousness would encourage us to open our horizons and become receptive to the possibility that there are true gems of experience waiting to be found in exotic regions of this space.

Now, it is easy for some people to fetishize the exotic for novelty’s sake. But contrary to popular belief, novelty is not intrinsically valuable. Taking into account previous discussions (especially models 2 and 3 above), we can interpret artistic explorations that push the boundary of our knowledge about what can be experienced as a sophisticated form of signaling genetic fitness. In particular, mastery over novel modes of experience shows that you have the mental and physical power to devote copious amounts of resources to exploration, for only one in a thousand attempts at discovering something new results in something that other people can appreciate. It is thus the case that a lot of novelty creation is aimed at courtship rather than being driven by a genuine passion for knowledge.

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Left style source: Adrián Regnier Chávez. Right style source: Carpet by ALGE

That said, what is out there hidden in the state-space of consciousness beggars belief. Anyone who is exploring that vast space in an intelligent way will sooner or later find incredible things. But how do we explore this space intelligently? A systematic exploration of possible images, for instance, could involve taking a picture and changing one pixel at a time. But as we all know, the Library of Babel is almost completely devoid of meaningful books. At least relative to its size. A much better way of exploring the space (inspired by Steerable Pyramid and Deep Dream-type algorithms) would be to sample possible images with an intelligent method, such as training generative neural networks on previous works of art, and then asking them to hallucinate possible images while constraining the neural layers you identify with the aesthetic quality of the images. Style transfer techniques and similar methods can result in images sampled from a given aesthetic, rather than from e.g. a particular low-level feature set (e.g. a type of edges) or a set of high-level semantic content (e.g. cars, people, dogs, etc.).

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Left style source: blue balloons in a living room. Right style source: collection of blankets by ALGE

Exploring the space of possible images is an extremely small sub-problem of exploring the state-space of consciousness. But I think the analogy is useful as a general idea. Now, how vast is the state-space of consciousness? Well, it tends to be larger than you think, even when you take that fact into account. I will coin that fact as Gomez-Emilsson’s Law. Every time you think you know how vast the state-space of consciousness is, you will be surprised to find out you are wrong if you choose to dig deeper.

Consider what happens when someone takes LSD. Most people expect that they will simply get to experience new sensations like brighter colors, tracers, or synesthesia. This is true to a point, for light doses. But on medium doses, in addition to exploring the state-space of sensory configurations, one also experiences new aesthetics, which this model would define as ways of organizing a lot of sensations in ways that feel right. More so, an aesthetic is also a way of delivering uninhibited sensations in a way that feels good at the level of the whole experience, from moment to moment. Most people have no clue that there is a vast space of possibilities here.

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Illustrates “state-space of beach rocks” by unknown artist at Sombrio Beach in Vancouver. Photo: Julia Pope

On higher doses, people are surprised to find an even more general way of exploring the state-space of consciousness. Namely, one instantiates alternate games. The DMT “vibe” that people report can be thought of as more than a “context switch”. It is, rather, a more radical change that we could describe as a “game switch”. The “Jester” that people talk about regarding DMT experiences is an archetype that the mind uses to signal the “rule violation” quality of the state. There is so much going on that one’s experience splits into multiple games at once trying to find some common ground, and this feeling of game-incompatibility feels very alien. A sort of anti-virus system in the mind is triggered at that point, and labels the inconsistency with a feeling of weirdness so that you know not to update your actions based on the (currently globally inconsistent) experience of multiple superimposed games. Rule violation through fast changes in implicit games of social status causes you to interpret what is going on as having extreme stakes. Interacting with DMT Aliens, Gods, Elves, etc. feels like the upper limit of potential social status transfer that your world simulation affords (like meeting a president or a king). The state-space of consciousness contains all of these alternate games and metagames, and we have not even begun to catalogue them. This is all to say: seen in this light, the era of art has just begun.

Like the previous models, this one also gives rise to an aesthetic of its own. I call this the aesthetic of “Rainbow God”. This is the meta-belief that we gain value by understanding and experiencing extremely novel states of consciousness. Ultimate bliss, according to this aesthetic, is not a bland monotone state, but rather, is a state that incorporates within it an extraordinary variety of types of qualia. Posthuman aesthetics will not only show up in the form of intense feelings, but also in the form of extremely “rainbow-ey” experiences. The concept of a full-spectrum intelligence (an intelligence capable of instantiating any qualia at will) plays an important role in this aesthetic. Thus, the full-spectrum artists of the future will have access to a qualia pallet in an experience editor[2] that includes human qualia like sight, touch, scent, emotions, thought-episodes, etc. It will also include qualia only found in insects, fish, mollusks, people tripping, people having seizures, novel neurocircuitry, etc. The asymptote of incorporating all possible varieties of qualia into a single experience is the final realization of Rainbow God, the ultimate state of knowledge and beauty according to this aesthetic.

6. Energy Parameter Modulation

SeifertSurfaces

Seifert Surfaces by Paul Nylander

People say they have weird and novel experiences with art, but by a large margin, the novelty itself is not the focus of what matters in people’s reports. Rather, people especially talk about having experiences that are not only novel and unusual, but also characterized by heightened states of consciousness. For example, when people “get art” they report being inspired, amazed, surprised, enthralled, or even shocked. These states seem to have in common a quality of high-energy in one form or another. Although possible, it is rare to talk about art as purposefully sedating, boring, anesthetizing, or numbing. That’s the exception. In general, art as diverse as Japanoise and Jodorowsky have in common the quality of heightening, and not only changing, one’s state.

At the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) we take very seriously the notion that experience has an energy parameter. In psychology-speak, nearby concepts include emotional arousal and activation level, though these tend to have more physiological than phenomenological connotations. In contrast, we hold that you can indeed experience very high levels of conscious energy without at the same time experiencing the physiological responses that are usually associated with high arousal (such as high heart-rate, high breath-rate, high blood pressure, sweating, etc.). Likewise, it is not the case that only traditionally high-arousal emotions (such as being excited, thrilled, fearful, anxious, etc.) come in high-energy forms. Indeed, it is possible to experience states of relaxation, serenity, equanimity, and peacefulness in extremely energetic forms(!), as happens in the concentration-based altered states of consciousness called “Jhanas” in the Buddhist tradition.

Here it is relevant for me to bring up the fact that my colleague Mike Johnson recently wrote about the neuroscience of meditation. He discussed how to make sense of the acute and long-term effects of meditation through the lens of modern neuroscience paradigms, and then found a way to tie them together into an overarching theory. For the sake of brevity I will schematically outline some of the key features of the paradigms he integrated:

  1. Free Energy Principle (Karl Friston, 2010):
    1. The brain is trying to minimize expected future surprise by building high-level models of sensory input
    2. When a model says that the input is very unlikely, our brain propagates an error signal in the form of excess energy
    3. This energy motivates the search for a better model, for which the previously surprising input is now expected
  2. Entropic Disintegration (Robin Carhart Harris, 2014):
    1. Psychedelics elevate the “neural temperature” of the brain, meaning that they increase the entropy/disorder present in neural circuits
    2. One’s everyday mode of consciousness relies on learned neural patterns solidified over years, which at times can be chronically maladaptive
    3. By “raising the temperature” of our neural circuits, maladaptive neural circuits, especially “egoic structures” in the default-mode network (DMN), disintegrate
    4. This enables you to “start from scratch” and form new, more adaptive, neural patterns
  3. Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (Selen Atasoy, 2016):
    1. Physical systems with excitation-inhibition wavefronts have harmonic modes
    2. By mapping out the connectome of a brain (white and grey matter tracks) and using empirically-derived excitation-inhibition differential equations of neural activity, one can infer the electromagnetic resonant modes of a given brain
    3. Using this technique, it was found empirically that psychedelics increase the amplitude of connectome-specific harmonic waves across the spectrum, and in particular, the amplitude delta is higher on the upper ranges of the spectrum

Tying together these frameworks we see that (a) the brain responds to surprise in an excitatory way which gives rise to a process of search for better models, (b) there is a sense of neural energy for which increasing it gives rise to the disintegration of pre-existing patterns, and (c) there is a sense of actually physical energy in the brain tied together with its resonant modes, which are variable depending on one’s state of consciousness. To bring all of these frameworks together, we can interpret them in terms of energy sources and energy sinks:

  1. Energy Sources: surprises, sensory stimulation
  2. Energy Sinks: passage of time (decay factor), semantic content (crystallization around explanatory representations), pre-existing attitudes

At a high-level, we could describe the relevance of these frameworks for art as follows: For art to energize you it needs to either reduce the influence of energy sinks and/or increase the amount of energy from energy sources.

The numerous tricks of the craft of different kinds of art can be reinterpreted in this framework. For example, a lot of artistic advice for a broad audience focuses on making sure that there is a twist you are introducing in an otherwise familiar space. Even subtle surprises (colors being out of place, unusual garments, implausible actions, perspective mixups, etc.) will propagate a prediction error and heighten the energy available in one’s state. This will make you experience the rest of the piece in a more energized and impactful form. Now, to sustain the heightened energy parameter, it is important to avoid making it easy for the brain to redirect the energy to a large energy sink. If the perceptual mistake one makes is one you are familiar with and have experienced before, you might end up diverting the newly available energy towards reinforcing an attitude you developed about that perceptual mistake (e.g. word tricks could trigger anxiety about not being a good reader rather than helping you stay in an energized state).

This paradigm also puts in a different light, and makes sense of, the criticisms often raised against pieces perceived as Kitsch, Camp, and Cliché, or other aesthetics centered around the over-use of a given artistic trick. Art can fail to sufficiently energize your state by failing to introduce a large enough surprise. If you can immediately grasp the full scope of the novelty introduced by a given piece (even if you are misapprehending the input!) you can quickly categorize your experience into a pre-existing bucket and skip the intended energized state. This functions as an energy sink, and hence you fail to stay energized.

This is just a piece of the full story here, for energy sinks are not completely reliable. There is a phenomenon called semantic satiation, where a pattern of rapid and regular repetition of words, images, and concepts makes them feel meaningless. So even the most cliché of art can indeed get the job done of energizing your state of consciousness, by presenting many versions of the same thing in flashes at a sufficiently high rate (I’m not saying this is necessarily pleasant, but it might be effective!). On the flip side, if what you are after is the maximization of a particular meaning in e.g. a commercial, you will find there is a Goldilocks Zone for the number of times you should present the core concept/image to the audience; too few and the meaning will be weak, too many and you’ll trigger semantic satiation by overwhelming the energy sinks of the audience.

Schematically, there are three broad ways of inhibiting energy sinks to allow the buildup of what we call “semantically neutral energy”. You can:

  1. Disable,
  2. Overwhelm, or
  3. Avoid them

Let me elaborate. First, you can disable energy sinks by switching to unfamiliar contexts (e.g. it is harder worrying about work while on a screen-free beach, at a museum… or at Burning Man). Also, disabling energy sinks can happen in states of exhaustion, fasting, intoxication, or other states of mind that impair some of the normal functions of the brain. Second, as we saw, semantic satiation would be an example of overwhelming energy sinks, but there are many other ways of doing so, such as increasing the intensity of input above a certain threshold. And third, avoiding energy sinks involves things like setting the intention to focus your attention on a meditation object and refocus on it every time you get distracted. Alternatively, one can load a given energy sink with negative implications and learn to avoid it via negative feedback (e.g. when a standard interpretive framework is frowned upon by a social group).

Most drugs and activities could be described in terms of their characteristic effect on energy sources and sinks.[3] But only some of these drugs and activities are “broadband energy enhancers”, in the sense that the energy they give rise to is transferable to a broad range of mental and physical activities. This is what sets meditation, trance-inducing music/dancing, psychedelics, philosophy, and art apart from other energizing activities. Those methods in particular allow energized states to be sustained for long periods of time, and they give rise to novel sensations exclusive to the high-energy regions of the state-space of consciousness.

A note on psychedelics here is in order. There is indeed something very peculiar that psychedelics do to the energy sources that to my knowledge is not done by the other broad-band energy enhancers. Psychedelics make energy sources echo! They change the neuroacoustics of the brain, which favors temporally repeating patterns in a delayed-echo fashion along with a slower decay function for experience over time.[4] Thus, visual tracers and the amplification of music appreciation during a psychedelic trip are both expressions of the same underlying principle: the brain is more resonant. The fact that this effect is distinct from what art, meditation, philosophy, or strobes have to offer makes psychedelics synergistic and complementary with the other methods. After all, it is hard to ignore the gazillion subjective reports of enhanced aesthetic appreciation experienced on even small doses of psychedelics.

For the above reasons, I think this model has a lot of explanatory power. To recap, this model of art says that increasing the energy parameter of one’s consciousness is the success condition of art. It explains the repeating trance-inducing quality of music, the need for balance between predictability and surprise, common craft advice, and the existence of higher aesthetics. In turn, this model implies that art can be done in a wrong way. Art that is uninspiring, insipid, unexciting, irrelevant, etc. could be understood as art that fails to raise the energy parameter of those who experience it. And indeed, the higher the form of the art, the more it allows for the buildup of semantically-neutral energy.



[1] The term “state-space” refers to a very general concept that identifies the set of all possible configurations of a given system (of equations, machines, experiences, etc.) and the ways in which these configurations can transition from to another.

[2] As a proof of concept: According to cognitive scientist Steven Lehar, combining LSD, Ketamine, and THC can give rise to a “free-wheeling hallucination”, which is a state of mind where one gains the ability to edit the contents of one’s experience at will (“You can say ‘give me a table’ and a table will appear right in front of you as real as a solid table”).

[3] For example, anti-psychotic drugs are broad-band energy sink enhancers, psychedelics are broad-band energy source enhancers, classic stimulants (such as amphetamines) are narrow-band energy source enhancers, classical depressants (such as benzodiazepines) are narrow-band energy sink enhancers.

[4] In one account proposed by “Psychedelic Information Theory” (James Kent), psychedelics achieve the tracing/echo effect by disabling an energy sink. The control interrupt model of psychedelic action says that there are natural inhibitory processes that prevent features of our current experience from building up over time. Psychedelics are thought to chemically interrupt inhibitory control signals from the cortex, which are constantly preventing the build-up of qualia. In this account, what you are paying attention to is in fact the part of the sensory input that is being inhibited the least. Interrupting the inhibitory “control signal” gives rise to echoes of previous states across the board that you intrinsically attend to whether you like it or not.


Featured image credit: Seifert Surfaces by Paul Nylander

* Originally titled: Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

Rational 4-AcO-DMT Trip Report By An Anonymous Reader

Date: 5/5/2019

  • Self:
    • Weight: ~[150-170) lbs, Age: [20-25), Height: [5’8’’-5’11’’), Male, Dosage: 12-15mg 4-AcO-DMT, 200mg caffeine, 100mg L-theanine, 0.25-0.5g cannabis, vaporized and smoked
  • Companion:
    • Weight: ~[110-130) lbs, Age: [20-25), Height: [5’5’’-5’8’’), Female, Dosage: 10-12mg 4-AcO-DMT, 0.5g cannabis, smoked and vaporized

Relevant  Beliefs

  • Ontology on personal identity: favors ‘empty individualism’
  • Ontology on time: favors ‘eternalism’
  • Strongly favors ‘indirect realism’ over ‘direct realism’
  • Believes that an ‘information processing’ account of the mind-brain is appropriate in a variety of situations.
  • Believes states of meditation, psychedelic use, and the combination of the two allow for an application of ‘energy’ which is directed towards the brain’s natural harmonics. Coarsely, there is a pattern of energy application -> entropic disintegration -> search/self-reorganization -> neural annealing which is likely to occur in such states.
    • Believes meditation is a tool which can increase the amount of cognitive control an individual has over his/her conscious experiences.
  • Believes 4-AcO-DMT is an entactogen, and feelings of empathy and connection with others are desirable.
  • Grappling with the Symmetry Theory of Valence
  • Believes there is an interaction of ‘top-down stories’ and ‘bottom-up sensory data’ in the mind-brain. Each affects the other, and neither provides a complete account of reality.
  • Problem of other minds: Believes animals and other complex systems are capable of experiencing conscious states, other individuals exist and are conscious.

Experience

Caffeine/L-theanine:

I took a pill with 100mg of L-theanine and 200mg of caffeine when I woke up at ~7:45AM, in order to wake up at ~8:10AM. Those unfamiliar with the caffeine nap should give it a try.

Dosing/Setting – 12:45

We took our 4-AcO-DMT in capsule form, gathered our ‘tripping accoutrements’ and set off for the local park. It was a beautiful 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, with some welcome clouds in the sky, which seemed placed for our later entertainment. We made it to the park without feeling the effects, making small talk and finding our ‘goldilocks zone’ – the tree with enough shade, ample view, and dry grass. We walked back and forth several times, finding out which side the grass was greenest on. During this 10 minutes, I began to notice the first perceptible changes.

Onset – 13:15-13:45

I described to my partner that I could tell the drug was ‘kicking in’ due to an increase in my proprioception (closest ‘subjective effect’ is probably bodily control enhancement). I then noticed a man lying on his side on the grass in front of us, with his arm and leg out of my view, and next to him lay which I soon realized was a bike. At first blush I thought he was an amputee, and that the device next to him was a walker of some kind. Upon seeing him sit up, I realized I had been mistaken, at which point it could not have been clearer that the ‘walker’ was actually a bicycle (I noted that I was highly aware of the distinction between my perception of the objects and my top-down ‘storytelling’, a welcome surprise I’m sure our Buddhist friends would approve tremendously of). I relayed this to my partner and she laughed, clearly still more certain of her own ability to discriminate. As we lay under a beautiful oak tree in the ‘goldilocks zone’, she commented some discomfort (in the form of ‘anxiety’), and that she felt “too much energy” was getting pumped in with “no place to go”. As a reader of opentheory.net, this analogy was welcome and even surprising in its similarity to my current opinions. I chuckled, although I too was feeling a tinge of anxiety (which I attributed mostly to the 200mg of caffeine I had consumed), increased bodily temperature, and some minor pattern recognition enhancement in the surrounding flora. As I looked to the edge of my visual field, I had the distinct sense of being in a simulated environment. While I have at times toyed with “simulation theory”, I have transitioned to a view more based on an “inner simulator”: that the reality we enjoy is taking place within the boundary of our minds, and these inner simulations exist in separation from one another (similar to Max Tegmark’s ‘bubbles’), with each one representing the mind-independent reality that I believe, but do not “know” exists. In light of this thought, I found myself looking towards the ‘boundary of my external reality’ and explaining to myself that it was in truth actually like looking deeper internally. I noticed (again with more than sober clarity) a change in my belief map.  

Resonance: ~13:30-14:30

My partner put on some appropriate lo-fi music and we began to talk as the effects became more pronounced. I felt my experience to be ‘classically psilocin-like’, characterized by intense drifting, pattern recognition enhancement, magnification, color enhancement and geometry similar to that found in ‘trippy artwork’ (internally and externally).  When I focused more loosely on my surroundings I had my first brush with scenery slicing, which divided my view of the fountain and hillside opposite us into thirds, each characterized by tapestries of fractal geometry. My partner had been blowing dandelion seeds, which reminded me of a thought I had had on a past trip, that subconsciously she was fulfilling a genetically programmed role in the ecosystem, explained away as a ‘weird urge’. We began discussing the ‘jobs’ other insects and animals had in the ecosystem, and enjoyed their personification. I spouted off some factoids on dragonflies, and their 95% predatory kill rate. She respected the prowess of the beautiful little assassins, and I internally hoped to live in a balanced ecosystem without the predators we now honor. We both noticed that we could see dandelion seeds almost a hundred feet up (magnification, and in my estimation an artifact of our mental entrainment at the time). My partner went to the bathroom in the art museum nearby, and I took 2.5 minutes to meditate, using a silent mantra technique. I experienced beautiful 8B geometry in this state, a truly profound experience. When she returned, we saw a young boy playing with dandelions in front of us. He was so purposeful, so confident, and so apparently random in his behavior. My word choice in describing him (in hushed tones, so as not to disturb his work) revealed a greater availability of infrequently-used words in my vocabulary, and some increased sense of humor. My partner commented that she thought the whole thing to be fake, and this label seemed to cause an increase in my acuity enhancement and color enhancement of the scene (again, I was highly aware of the influence of the ‘top-down story’ on my experience). To me, it also appeared in some ways “not real”, but I thought the two of us had a very different sense of the concept.

Tree

Color enhancement (experienced especially with trees) – (source)

I too needed to relieve myself at this point, and decided to take the adventure towards the bathroom, listening to the Johns Hopkins psilocybin experiment playlist on Spotify along the way. I will (for the sake of brevity that I am otherwise flouting) focus only on the seemingly pertinent detail of how I received directions to the bathroom. My partner described the sequence of steps and potential pitfalls to me, and I had an extraordinary ability to visualize the path I eventually followed. My visualization skills in general were extremely heightened, and I noticed I could imagine quite easily and accurately envision how my scenery would change when I moved to a different position (e.g. sitting to lying down).

Exploration: ~14:45-15:45

At this point we both were reporting intense cognitive euphoria (as well as spiritual euphoria). We decided to pack our things and make a trip to expend some of the boundless energy we had in our possession. We journeyed to the sculpture garden behind the museum, and I began to describe the chemical differences between psilocybin and psilocin as my partner and I basked in the glorious shade of the trees there (to which we both felt intense connection). I found that in the sculpture garden I had a greatly increased appreciation for art, and especially the symmetry and proportion found in the sculpture and museum itself. Combined with my feelings of intense well being and spiritual euphoria (which felt augmented by the artwork), this amounted to a point in favor of the Symmetry Theory of Valence. I also noticed cracks in the unity of my conscious experience, where locally bound objects seemed to separate (the analogy I could find was separate “virtual environments” a la whonix), which also engendered in me a type of pleasure I cannot find in the “Subjective effect index”. This may be an area of further examination for the Qualia Research Institute. We enjoyed a blissful walk in the park, featuring feelings of intimacy with children, pets, and ducklings. Of note here was what I felt to be an enhancement of my working memory, as borne out by the following observations: I again had higher availability of vocabulary and terminology in conversation, I was able to juggle rocks more effectively while walking (and felt that during my juggling I was simultaneously apprehending more objects – this was again pleasantly accompanied by increased reflective intelligence that allowed gave me the felt sense of 8B geometry without the visuals). I threw a rock in the stream and found that I could apprehend each ripple simultaneously, and my qualia decay function was much fatter as well. Hmmm, maybe there are some beneficial computational properties of consciousness! We sat on a bench, as I felt the intense urge to exercise physically (specifically to climb a tree, but that was a bit conspicuous). Instead, we looked at a goose and talked about memetics. We marvelled specifically about Dr. Seuss, and how his thoughts had taken root, despite his distasteful personal tendencies. I began to think about the cultivation of plants, and how we tend to use hypotheses and heuristics to guide advances in the rapid evolution, wondering if the same could be done with ideas.

ripple-effect-of-the-ciso-630x330

I found myself capable of simultaneously ‘holding in my attention’ each ripple as I cast a stone in the water. (image source)

Home

*Skip home journey, where much of the conversation centered around the responsibilities of pet ownership* 16:30-17:30

We found ourselves at home with the welcome company of a close friend. We relayed some of our experiences, and I felt the onset of some fast euphoria – there were simply too many things I wanted to do – feel water on my hands, do yoga, eat food, smoke marijuana, have sex. I considered how wonderful it would be to restructure the human cognitive reward architecture around health, knowledge of which could be researched, stored and relayed via artificial intelligence. More simply put, as I consumed an entire family-size amount of Tostitos Hint of Lime chips (feeling gustatory and olfactory enhancement), I wished pleasure mapped 1:1 to health. We did some yoga, ate some food (I found sociability enhancement with the delivery man) and we again basked in the glory of the weather and natural environment, taking comfort in each others’ arms. I noticed multisensory magnification and acuity enhancement, finding that I could hear and see elements of nature that usually were unavailable to me, such as the sounds of distant insects and birds, and the ability to see bits of dust floating far off in the sunlight. The birds above drew my attention to my frame rate enhancement, as I could easily watch their wings flapping each time, even from a distance.  I could also extract more information from an amorphous reflection in a car door, with the feeling that I was “looking through it” to a slightly more misshapen world. We saw a bunny (“awww bunny!!!”) and had an interesting exchange:

Me: “You know, when I look at that bunny I think about the algorithms going through it’s head – eat blade -> look for next blade -> check for predators -> eat blade -> ..”

Her: “Yeah, that sounds like something YOU would think. I just like to think he’s so excited every time he sees another blade, like it’s the first time every time. That would be cute.”

Me: “Well actually, those could both be true. I’m just talking about the ‘program’ – it could be implemented any way you like. I really have no idea how they feel when they see the next blade of grass, but I hope you’re right. In terms of it being the ‘first time’, he could be like Clive Wearing, on a perpetual refresh.”

Her: “I guess we’ll never know what it’s really like.”

Me: “I don’t know about that.”

Really, we’re just talking about Marr’s theory, but it was interesting to see a real-life example. I was discussing his algorithmic level of analysis, while she was pointing to potential features of the implementational level. Makes me think about how virtual and augmented reality could be such wonderful tools for education. As someone who had thought about his theory often, it was also interesting how this exchange affected me phenomenologically: I felt now like I understood it. I definitely think understanding clearly has qualia-properties (not a very bold statement), and also important computational properties (ahem). I certainly think I can “do more” in terms of analogizing etc. with concepts I understand, and yet I find that understanding likely boils to a feeling. I have had this issue ever since reading John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment and thinking it was positively moronic.

ftd-babyrabbit

What Is It Like To Be a Bunny? (image source)

As we were talking, I found that I had heightened coordination and dexterity in playing with my pocket knife, something I often do when deep in thought. I considered how it could be a use of some of the ‘excess mental energy’ I had been accumulating, and how the increase in neuroplasticity that Paul Stamets swears by could be playing a role as well.

Intimacy – 18:00-19:00

We vaporized some marijuana (~0.125g each – I commented on how the Pax 2 would eventually come equipped with it’s own brain) and went inside to enjoy a shower and cuddling together. Before our shower, she commented that the water was too cold, and I joked that the whole day was ruined. Yet in that moment, I felt none of the ecstacy which so permeated our day, and so I thought once again that empty individualism had such merit. I had intended to experience the feelings of ‘oneness’ commonly associated with 4-AcO, and wasn’t disappointed, feeling at times as though I was touching my own body when I felt hers. Point in favor of open individualism. For unimportant reasons which I label “boundaries”, I’ve chosen to keep the rest of the details of our intimacy to myself…  

Concluding remarks:

There is much more I could write, and yet there are only a few pertinent details of our trip that I’d like to share:

  1. We smoked some additional marijuana, which ended up overpowering the influence of the 4-AcO as the trip came to a smooth stop (there were none of the feelings of depletion or dejection I associate with other compounds such as LSD).
    1. I had a relative reduction in REM sleep compared to my average and felt a small amount of residual grogginess which I personally attribute to the marijuana.
  2. When we went out for a late snack, I again had a thought and associated changes in perception (or vice-versa, who knows?) I discussed in ‘Onset’ – I saw a car headlight, and as the afterimage decayed from my visual field, I had the sense that it was slipping from my attentional system as well. It was moving further in space-time, and more internally, making its retrieval more difficult.

Credit of Featured Image: Psychedelic brain, Bloomington photo by Ali Eminov

 

Detailed 2C-B Trip Report by an Anonymous Reader

by an anonymous reader

Introduction

Yesterday I took about 30mg of 2C-B. In my experience, the “peak” of 2C-B is rather short-lived, so I decided to divide my dose in half so that I could have time to examine the effects over the course of a prolonged plateau. I took 15mg at 2:15pm and then another 15mg at 4:00pm. The whole experience lasted around seven hours, with residual effects for about two more hours. I was just about back to baseline by 11pm. Today, I woke up hangover-free and quite happy and refreshed. I love 2C-B for this reason; unlike MDMA, it does not feel like it taxes the body very much, and unlike LSD, it does not seem to be a completely unpredictable trip with the potential for undesirably deep existential worries – “ontological paranoia”, as a friend once put it. And unlike 2C-I, 2C-E, or 2C-T-2, it is relatively nausea-free and very upbeat. I think that the quasi-entactogenic boost in mood provided by 2C-B, more so than its trippy, psychedelic effects, may be the reason why it feels “psychologically safer” than acid. I’ve never had a bad time on 2C-B- only somewhat uncomfortable- but it never gets worse than a -2 on a sadness-happiness scale from -10 to +10, whereas acid can take you all the way down to -6 or -7 if you are really unlucky and you let it happen. Anyway- I am very happy I did it and I wanted to share some observations about my experience.

From a third person point of view, I’m sure my behavior wasn’t too out of the ordinary. I laughed harder than I usually laugh, and I was clearly giggly and arousable. But I wasn’t slurring my speech, speaking slowly, or making nonsense sounds. I am reasonably certain that for most of the experience, I could have spoken to a sober person without them realizing I was on anything. They might have thought that I was in a very open-minded mood, perhaps, but I don’t think it would have been obvious that I was tripping. Time-wise, I spent the first two hours or so listening to music, looking at patterns that I had saved for just this occasion, and staring at the ceiling. From the time I re-dosed (4pm) until about 7pm, I spent a lot of that time chatting online with a friend, smelling scented objects I was able to find in my house, and trying to test some hypotheses about the state I was in. From 7pm to about 9:30pm, I danced, chatted a bit with a different friend, and tried to take some notes- but I had trouble staying on track due to my short attention span. And from 9:30pm and onwards I mostly just laid back, got sucked into a rabbit hole learning about the Unarius religion, and played chill music.

For context, I should add that I’ve read a good number of Qualia Computing articles and I like to follow the links I find in them. I may get something wrong- please forgive me if I botch any specific reference. But I do think that this analysis of my experience might be helpful for the project of consciousness research. That being said, here are some highlights of the thoughts and observations that I gathered from my trip:

Key Signatures and Atasoy’s Work

In a presentation about brain harmonics (link), Selen Atasoy described how the “repertoire of brain states increases” on LSD. But she also mentioned that LSD has the general effect of (1) increasing the amplitude of brain harmonics across the spectrum, and (2) increasing the amplitude of high-frequency harmonics more so than that of low-frequency harmonics. I remember that the first time I read about brain harmonics, I thought it was some kind of hippie fantasy, or like some sort of 19th century model of how the brain works (e.g. Atasoy quotes Tesla in her presentation). But thinking about it while coming up on a psychedelic is quite revealing. The first thing I noticed was that at the 40 minute mark, I felt an overall amplification of the energy of my consciousness. I know this sounds crazy- especially if you’ve never tried a psychedelic- but there is a global increase in the intensity of your experience. It’s very much true that when you start coming up on psychedelics, it feels like someone is turning up the volume of your experience overall. This is not only true for every sensory modality of your experience (visual, sound, tactile, etc.), but also true for the affective (emotional) and cognitive (thought) components!

On a low dose, or at the beginning of the come-up on a medium or large dose, all you really notice is this global amplification across the board. But then it gets more interesting. I realized yesterday that the mild background noise that I can hear in my head when things are silent kept changing as I was coming up. At first, the noise kept slightly increasing in amplitude. There was a certain mixture of ringings (I don’t really have tinnitus, but I hope you see what I mean… I think weed and dissociatives amplify this noise too, but in a different way), and what I noticed was the way that the mixture of components that make up this subtle background noise started changing and shifting upwards in frequency. The thing is, this didn’t happen in a simple linear progression. I paid attention to how this happened, and I noticed that at around the 50 minute mark, I experienced perfect silence. It was like all of that background noise was gone (apparently MDMA does this to people who suffer from tinnitus). But then, at around the 55 minute mark, other sounds started to appear. It was a new mixture, but the overall spectrum of frequencies was now higher than before- like a higher-pitched mixture of subtle ringings. Then, at the 1 hour mark, I heard silence again! And then another episode of ringing, but higher still- then it switched to silence again, and then it mostly stayed that way. It felt like there were several phase-changes; it seemed like mixtures of brain harmonics can sometimes cancel each other out, but at other times they leave a residue. And the higher the overall spectrum of your brain state in frequency, the higher the pitch of the residue- unless it is silence, which feels the same at any level.

While I was noticing these qualitative changes happening in the background noise that I can hear in my head, I was also paying attention to my visual field. I noticed that something quite similar was happening there too. There were several phases that I would cycle between depending on how high I was. Usually, there is a little bit of “static” random noise in my vision. And on the 2C-B, I noticed that at first, this noise diminished and my vision felt like it was perfectly clear. But then, I would see criss-crossing patterns across my visual field. They were very subtle at first, and then grew more and more noticeable over time. Then the criss-crossing patterns would get higher in their spatial frequency (lines with less space between them), up to the point where they started to saturate my visual field. And then, the whole thing would break into a visual noise pattern similar to where I started from, except that now, it seemed both brighter and more defined than before. Then, again, my visual field would go clear and crisp, like the air was being sucked out of the room. And then again, subtle criss-crossing would start overlaying it, and the entire process would repeat. It repeated itself about four times during the first hour and a half of coming up, and it ended up in the criss-crossing region, now at fairly high frequencies.

 

I spent some time during the trip wondering how this could happen. It reminded me of a few concepts which I had studied previously: aliasing, beats, and Moiré patterns. I’ll leave some pictures here (courtesy of Google Images) that do a good job of replicating some of the elements of the transitions:

 

I like the one on the left in particular, in which the concentric circles increase in their spatial frequency as you go up. You can imagine that going up that image is how it felt coming up on 2C-B. The thing is, at any given point, I was experiencing an overlap of many different frequencies, but the most dominant ones would interfere with each other- sometimes generating a single, clear, strong beat pattern when superimposed, sometimes generating silence/crisp images, and sometimes making a strange mesh of noisy, grainy, superpositions. But one thing is for certain- the frequency of the underlying components, both temporally and spatially, seemed to go up as a function of how high I was on the 2C-B.

I suppose that many people would read Atasoy’s work and Andres’s speculation about how it could be extended to quantify how happy you are (ref) to mean that in any given moment, you are experiencing just one frequency- or maybe two or three. But I think it’s more like you have a broad range of frequencies active at any point in time, and on psychedelics, the range of possible combinations explodes. At any single point in time, they are both superimposed on and interfere with each other. I guess I thought this was very abstract before the trip, but now I think I was able to feel that process from the inside and know what brain harmonics refer to. The mesh of increasingly high-frequency Moiré patterns is how it looks and sounds like- how it feels like- from the inside, to retune your connectome-harmonics upward.

 

At the time, I thought that this could potentially be explained by making an analogy to keyboards, where each brain harmonic is like a musical note on a keyboard. On 2C-B, you get a double keyboard, with a wider range of possible notes. And perhaps LSD would be not only giving you more possible notes, but also providing you with additional features- like, for example, a general synthesizer that can apply distortions to the sounds. 2C-B has some other effects in addition to increasing the range of available notes, but they are hard to describe. Reverb and delays are there for sure, but not crazy things like on-the-fly timbre modifications, which are more akin to the weirdness of LSD. More generally, my experience has been that phenethylamines have fewer features than lysergamides and tryptamines. On the other hand, when it comes to establishing an emotional base, phenethylamines have a certain “loving” frequency that persists throughout the experience, and I think that makes them better in many contexts.

Emotion

This train of thought led me to consider my experience in light of something that Mike Johnson recently blogged about: the view that our moods are the result of the key signature of our brain state:

This is not to say our key signatures are completely static, however: an interesting thread to pull here may be that some brains seem to flip between a major key and a minor key, with these keys being local maximas of harmony. I suspect each is better at certain kinds of processing, and although parts of each can be compatible with the other, each has elements that present as defection to the internal logic of the other and so these attractors can be ‘sticky’.

– Mike Johnson, A Future for Neuroscience

With respect to emotion, the things I experienced are very hard to describe, but I’ll give it a go. I think, on average, if you aggregated all the micro-moods of the experience, it would come out to be fairly positive overall- maybe a +3 on the -10 to +10 scale. But the mood would fluctuate in peculiar ways over a period of just fractions of a second. There was an underlying low-frequency tonality to the experience- which was very pleasant- that I think may be the result of the mildly euphoric, stimulant-like effect which 2C-B has. This was a strong base for the overall quality of the total mood, and it made the experience very pleasant for the most part. But there was another big component of mood, that could switch from pleasant to worried and back in the span of about half a second. It didn’t sway the base euphoria very much, and I was actually able to appreciate the switching quality. All in all, I mostly stayed on the positive side, and the negative moods were very fleeting (seconds at most). But I was amazed at how little stability there was, and how the buzzing of various frequencies didn’t settle into a particular coherent emotional impression. It certainly felt like the mood was directly connected to the buzzing of notes, which were creating a complex, chaotic symphony made up of meshes of brain harmonics. Thankfully, it was certainly biased towards positive and awe-inspiring moods. My self-model was also disassembled and reassembled with constantly shifting emotional tones. The come-up in particular had a certain anxious edge, and the semantic content of that anxiety seemed to be connected to particular things I’ve done in the past which have embarrassed me. Undergoing those emotions was intense, but it also felt somehow cleansing. It’s like- once you fully see the consequences of your embarrassing actions (or at least imagine them), you don’t worry about it as much. You get used to it and move on.

High-Energy Consciousness

As I approached the moment I would finally plateau, I experienced many different philosophical views of reality as distinct, short, intense bursts of existential feelings. In these states, one “realizes” that particular philosophical views must be true by the sheer fact of how intense they feel. I can certainly recall having believed in such intense feelings in the past, especially when I was in my early twenties and trying psychedelics for the first time. This time, the images were still as intense as they had been before in similar levels of alteration, but they were about different topics (it’s been a while since I’ve experimented with psychedelics). I recognize that these experiences have a powerful capacity to shake up your pre-existing model of the world. You either cling to your previous models and suffer, or you let go and get brainwashed into having new metaphysical views of reality. I don’t know… Over the years, the content of those feelings has changed, and I’ve seen contradictory things which seemed like the final truth at the time. I think I now interpret these intense bursts of philosophically-flavored experiences as being instances of some kind of “energetically super-charged, super-coherent state of consciousness”. I can see how many people could arrive at the conclusion that these bursts of intense consciousness are messages from aliens, or perhaps psychic laser beams coming from a secret organization, or whatnot. God, the divine, infinite life, now-ness, Buddha nature, awakening, etc. are all suitably grandiose concepts that sort of provide a conceptual framework to make sense of these super-high-energy states of consciousness. Alternatively, we just haven’t figured out how to harness these unusual state-spaces of consciousness for information-processing purposes, or even for non-brainwashy aesthetic experiences… they confuse the heck out of us.

f36b6f36

We currently lack the conceptual frameworks and adequate techniques to make sense of, and make use of, super-high-energy states of consciousness.

Anyhow, in this particular case, the intense flashes of super-energetic consciousness seemed to be about the reality of the present moment on the one hand, and the way in which scent is related to feeling alive on the other. It sounds arbitrary, but it didn’t feel arbitrary at the time. I remember looking for things to smell in my house and finding an essential oil of orange (as well as cinnamon powder, mint tea, ground coffee, and nutmeg). The particular orange smell of that essential oil really seemed to resonate with my state. How should I put it? It was an intense feeling of awake effervescence, youthful reality, and spacious energy. The scent seemed to be a key for a lock, that when turned, would bring all the channels of my experiential field into contact and into a unified expression of “presence/aliveness”. Ok, this is word salad. I’m not going to pretend this is anything but poetic allusion. Here is a concrete, logical-sounding insight instead: I felt like I was finally able to make sense of what scent qualia is getting at. Scent qualia is the phenomenological expression of the resonant signature that is produced in a high-dimensional manifold as a result of energizing it with a certain combination of frequencies. Sorry, word salad again. Let’s try once more…

Orange essential oil seemed like the olfactory equivalent of playing all the notes of a major chord at once. In fact, every scent felt like it had an equivalent in auditory qualia, and that we could describe a scent as presenting you with every note in a key signature all at once. It gave me the impression that perhaps scent is a qualia that can be experienced in a much more general way. Imagine that, all your life, you’ve only ever listened to music made by playing all the notes of certain keys at the same time. I’m sure you could make compelling music that way, and if our brains didn’t separate the notes, we might get the impression that that is all there is to music. Perhaps we are restricted in this way for scents, and the scent of lavender is, in fact, decomposable into a whole number of notes. And I don’t mean chemically purifying the product, because I think that even pure chemicals have complex smells. During the experience, I kept coming back to the orange scent to try to capture the overall emotional key signature of my state. Warm, loving, intense, bright, surprising, flickering, effervescent, citric. Make of this what you will.

state_space_of_scents

State-space of scent qualia (adapted from: Categorical Dimensions of Human Odor Descriptor Space Revealed by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization; Castro, Ramanathan, Chennubhotla. 2013; link)

Many of the “moments of experience” (ref) of high energy I experienced seemed to be half-posed questions and lack semantic content in the conventional sense. I assume that they could be co-opted by beliefs that say “that’s your karma” and “that’s God” or “that’s a vision of the future”, but honestly, all of those interpretations fall short of the actual thing- which, at the time, seemed more like random snippets of hyper-associations in a super-energized form, akin to a high-dimensional neuronal resonance box, if that makes any sense.

Sometimes the powerful bursts of high-energy consciousness were about the concept of now, and its connection to Open and Empty Individualism, and also the way it connects to the concept of “pure awareness”. I’ve explored these threads before, and it’s always startling when you get these flashes that feel like they mean something and yet contain almost no information. To extend the analogy with musical key signatures, it occurs to me that these states are in fact important nodal points in high-energy state-spaces of consciousness, but we don’t understand either their context or the way in which they fit together with all other possible experiences. I got the impression that these states have their own unique grammatical, syntactic, and semantic structure that is ultimately closed and self-consistent. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of recognizing a song by hearing one brief sub-second fragment of it. You realize there is more, much more, to it, and that the little fragment you heard is meaningless out of context. Yet the fragment is compelling in that it evokes and suggests a whole world of experience. These states feel like that- a high-energy fragment of something that seems completely genuine, whose level of structure and emotional depth is just complete enough to be highly suggestive of a higher world of organization into which such fragments could fit perfectly. From a secular point of view, one could perhaps describe this as the first glimpses of an art form that will be accessible to transhumans and posthumans, once the underlying laws that rule the emotional character of such experiences are understood and mastered.

Existential Humor and Semantic Nihilism

At the conceptual level, I remember that my mind latched onto two related themes: existential humor and semantic nihilism. For reference, I Heart Huckabees would be an example of a movie that plays with existential humor. The movie touches on existential crisis and absence of meaning; and it manages to be funny not despite it but because of it.

Existential humor is humor in the face of unresolved existential questions. Part of what makes this humor work is its self-reflective nature. It’s the humor of the fact that humor is possible in such circumstances. I think that the unresolved mood of the 2C-B state didn’t allow for an over-arching gestalt to form, and one could say it kept being a sort of affective pastiche. Like musical improvisation without a central theme. The deep philosophical questions that were posed didn’t produce deep undertones, like they usually do on LSD. Perhaps this makes it a more friendly state in a way… the buzzing of competing moods protects you from going too deep into some existential crisis, and allows you to sort of have some distance from any particularly unpleasant impression. The only somewhat constant feature here was giddiness, which probably explains why humor was present even though deep existential questions seemed to be both posed and left unresolved.

In turn, I also gained a new appreciation of the general idea of semantic nihilism (which I saw mentioned here). I once took a philosophy of language class in which we discussed Frege, Quine, and Wittgenstein. I was impressed by the fact that these authors would suggest that the semantic content of words was in some way completely relative. I may be misremembering, but I have the image in my mind of a text by Quine where he talks about how meaning is the result of a network of references and has no fundamental grounding (ref). He claimed that analytic and synthetic statements weren’t truly different- at least, not out of context. I didn’t know how to respond to this at the time, but over the years, I’ve thought about it now and then. It’s not like I’ve had the time to sit down and read that philosophy of language textbook again- and maybe I should- but I get the sense that one could, in principle, reformulate meaning by grounding it in qualia. These “no ground of reference” ideas fly in the face of felt-sense and my ability to use attentional attractors as designators. [Edit after writing this – turns out Andres has already discussed something along these lines in an article]. But what if someone claims that qualia is not enough to ground meaning? I think that hearing a strong argument against the view that qualia and meaning are connected would be very interesting. This is what my mind came up with during the trip- the view that not even feelings can be used as the source of meaning. The existential humor seemed to play very well with semantic nihilism. After all, isn’t it funny if nothing means anything and you are still laughing about it? It’s contagious laughter, that’s why. The thought that there was no true reason for why the laughter was appropriate was itself very funny. And then I’d apply the same mental move to this meta-funny layer, and so on. It was hilarious- in a niche philosophical sort of way- which only certain people who are obsessed with understanding reality could probably relate to.

As an aside, I think that if we look at it from a cultural point of view, most people would have a bad time if they were to experience a high-energy state of consciousness that does not reach a conclusion. The abstract expressionism of felt-sense, meaning, and audio-visual qualia is alarming without a framework to make sense of it. I realized that applying semantic nihilism to these experiences made me feel comfortable with them not actually meaning anything specific. It seemed okay that they would stay as they were: existential feelings with no resolution. I think that perhaps some aesthetics could really turn this into an art form. Perhaps Buddhist Vipassana meditation is trying to get at this.

Symmetry Groups

I paid a lot of attention to the visual textures I saw during the relatively long plateau. The textures that I had saved to look at were a bit enhanced, but they were not as interesting, I found, as the textures of the wall, ceiling, carpet, and blankets. The key difference was the fact that the live textures had actual depth. Although subtle, it still gave rise to interesting effects. I started the journey with the intention of examining the symmetrical structures of the textures I saw. I was impressed by the idea that a mathematician who experimented with LSD was able to catalogue each of the 17 wallpaper groups in his visual hallucinations (ref). I, on the other hand, was only able to see a few. Sadly, I didn’t practice naming the symmetries before going into the trip. But I can say that I noted mirror symmetry was rarely involved, and that the simplest, the one called “o”, was the one I saw the most frequently. By looking at the table now, I can definitely say that I also saw “2222”. I did see a lot of rotational symmetry elements, and they would click together to form larger symmetrical bundles. It was very interesting to watch.

 

I tried to really pay close attention to how the visuals were formed. It was very fascinating. I recall that there are many “subtypes” of visual effects, and they’ve been catalogued to some extent (ref). But what I noted this time was how they are all interconnected. Here is the story: first, the texture would appear relatively normal, just slightly brighter than normal. Then the positive after-image of the texture would linger for long enough to start overlaying onto itself. Then there would be a critical moment where that positive after-image would flip into a negative after-image (e.g. from orange to aqua, green to magenta, white to black, etc.). My brain would then try to deal with the presence of the negative after-image, and somehow fit it discreetly into the texture, in order to preserve as much information as possible from the “real texture”. Here is where the depth comes into play. For whatever reason, the negative after-image would tend to find its place in the crevices of the texture. There, it would form wavy patterns that seemed to self-organize in parallel lines. Once parallel, the patterns would lock into symmetrical shapes and dance together in synchrony. So now I had this two-layered texture that behaved as a unified wave pattern, and after a little while that would form a positive after-image, which in time would start to overlay onto itself- and then my mind would have to find a way to deal with that. With each iteration, my mind would find new ways to fit all of that residual after-image bundle together, and this would often look like some kind of surface trying to be shaped into something recognizable. I got the distinct feeling that whenever I could see something in the texture (cf. apophenia), the overall amount of after-image to deal with would be drastically reduced. I remember an article where the concept of energy sinks was discussed, and I think that both symmetrical re-arrangements of the residual after-image bundles and semantically-meaningful re-arrangements of them both seemed to work as energy sinks. Hence, the symmetrical texture repetition is a way by which the energy of these after-image bundles gets dissipated (and the surface gets locked in the shape that sucked out its energy). I remember thinking how the entire process somehow encapsulates many of the classic visual effect categories; tracers, drifting, pattern recognition, and symmetrical texture repetition all fit together in a continuous sequence of unfolding re-arrangements of an after-image bundle surface. Perhaps some trippers will relate to this description.

Visual Tracers

I also spent some time trying to figure out how to describe the tracers. I probably spent about 10 minutes doing this, and got to a fairly satisfying account, I think. The tracers were mostly composed of “echoes” rather than being the result of applying just a smooth and long decay function. Based on playing with GIFs, I estimated that the first visual echo lagged behind the original stimulation by about 200ms. Then there was another echo (the echo of the echo) which happened roughly 400ms afterwards. I took some time to look at the pictures in How to secretly communicate with people on LSD, and the GIFs seemed to work, but not exactly as the text describes it. It was really cool, though. During the plateau, I found it hard to tell which of the images had the artificial tracer on top (see the article’s “Secret C” GIFs for reference).

oscillation_1_5_5_75_75_1_10_0-05_signal_trailing

(notice the double echo)

Music

I will conclude by mentioning that music was very intense and interesting in this state. I specifically noted that music with reverb sounded massively amplified (example). With the appropriate combination of meditation and reverb-rich sounds, I could experience very pleasant states of equanimity that I don’t usually experience sober. I tried playing pulses of sound and seeing if I could experience “auditory tracers”, but it didn’t seem to work. That is, there wasn’t a clear analogue to the trace structure in the auditory domain. Rather, it’s less that “sound itself sounded like it had more reverb”, and more that “for the sound that already does have reverb, such reverb seemed amplified”. Why would the reverb itself sound amplified? And what is the reverb signature of such amplification? I don’t know! These seem like fertile grounds for novel research.

And that’s about it. I hope you find these observations useful, and if not, at least interesting to read. Peace! 🙂