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Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by beat on Monday April 10, 2017 @12:56PM (#14080232)
This makes me think of a long time ago, when I was diagnosed with ADD as an adult. I started medicating with dexadrine, which really did work wonderfully. Changed my life. A couple of years later, I had the worst mental breakdown of my life. I was a wreck. Borderline suicidal. I'm amazed that I didn't lose my spouse or my job over it, and I did lose a number of friends.

Quit taking dexadrine, and it cleared up. Serotonin imbalance is no laughing matter. I technically still have a prescription, but I haven't taken it in years. I've learned to just live with the issues the ADD causes.

On the subject of LSD... personally, I think LSD is a wonderful invention with enormous therapeutic potential. Back when I was just a bum kid in a college town, I probably tripped at least 50 times. I learned a lot about myself and the world, and don't regret a moment of it. With that in context, I find the research into microdosing really fascinating. I can easily imagine the benefits.

But that serotonin thing. I'd want to know more about that.

Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by amorphous_hn on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @03:53PM (#14091815)
Dextroamphetamine has a bit of serotonin action, but not a ton.

D-amp primarily releases DE and NE so I doubt it was directly related to serotonin

Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by Tycho on Monday April 10, 2017 @09:59PM (#14084279)
What did you learn about yourself and the world?
Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by amorphous_hn on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @03:57PM (#14091852)
Not the one you asked, but psychedelics inject a ton of entropy into the system, allowing you to break out of the "bound states" humans tend to get stuck in.

Taking shrooms pretty much rewired my value structure from the ground up. I went from caring about traditional things like a good career (therefore social approval and everything else), to valuing spending time in the sun with good friends more than our usual ego-centric living patrerns.

LSD is great for the visual/aesthetic experience - it's so stimulating and kinesthetic - but it leaves your mind a little more intact.

DMT is a really interesting and profound psychedelic, and one that is massively misunderstood and, IMO, unfairly judged. Doing large amounts of DMT improved my ability to visualize hyperdimensional systems, and gave me (in my subjective opinion) a better understanding of the nature and structure of existence

Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by omarchowdhury on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @03:13AM (#14095474)
How do you know your understanding of the nature and structure of existence, is actually the nature and structure of existence?
Re:Microdosing: People taking LSD with breakfast by amorphous_hn on Monday April 24, 2017 @02:39PM (#14186821)
You don't.

The trip logic works like this. Your brain-organism evolved in the context of our 4-dimensional universe. Psychedelics tend to alter patterns of perception in a way that releases a flood of images. Your brain itself is a hyperdimensional problem solver so when flipped on its head with DMT you can experience really fascinating hyperdimensional universe-images.

As to revealing anything of the real structure of existence...nothing can be said. They reveal the structure of our brains, which themselves are a micromodel of our universe (compare the branching pattern of the brain's neurons to a zoomed out picture of the universe to the branching pattern of a tree to the lichtenberg patterns of lightning to the branching pattern of mycelia...they all tend to converge to the same fractal).

DMT can never give you "real" knowledge of the universe...but neither can any kind of experiment. All of our observations are really just images formed via some form of interaction. All you can really do is get hunches, and hope that as a prt of the universe, its greater structure is reflected in the microcosm that is you.

If I was forced to guess, I would say we exist in a 4d pocket universe within a fractally infinite hyperdimensional bulk multiverse. Universes are constantly being born and dying, with the net effect that the fundamental nature of reality is timeless (time is a psychological abstraction). But that brings us no closer to true understanding, which is probably an illusion anyway.