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Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by anonporridge on Thursday April 15, 2021 @03:24AM (#26817158)
It temporarily breaks you out of your established mental framework. It's as if your raw consciousness viewing the world without any of the filters that we all use to tune out the noise. That's why the experience can be overwhelming and chaotic and it's useful to be in a safe place with a trip sitter.

I think the magic comes when you discover that something your default mindset was filtering out as noise is actually signal. With that insight, you can more easily make changes to your sober mindset.

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by agent008t on Thursday April 15, 2021 @05:56AM (#26818380)
That is interesting. So it is a bit like reducing your attention, and expanding awareness?

What you described sounds very similar to the effects of mindfulness meditation. The idea in a sense is to increase awareness - that is, sensing the world as is, without the filters or influence of mental objects. The theory is that meditation can then help you free yourself of past negative conditioning that is no longer relevant and to be more present.

It would be interesting to see more studies on both, but I understand that many things to do with the mind and subjective experiences are difficult to measure and therefore to study.

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by anonporridge on Thursday April 15, 2021 @04:16PM (#26825596)
Definitely. Sam Harris' book Waking Up is what turned me on to psychedelics as a mind expanding tool rather than just a party drug, which I had little interest in.

In it, he talks about how his early experiences with psychedelics turned him on to the fact there was something real worth pursuing in meditation and mindfulness beyond the superstitious bullshit. Most of the book is about using meditation as a tool for spirituality without religious baggage or supernatural explanations.

The way he and others talk about it, is that psychedelics effectively force any mind into an objectively different state of consciousness. Even though it doesn't last long and the memory of it fades, just the awareness that radical mind shifts are possible is enough to help people take mindfulness practice seriously.

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by jack_riminton on Thursday April 15, 2021 @06:23AM (#26818577)
Yes there are definitely parallels

At a cellular level, it temporarily vastly increases the connections between the synapses. A lot of what your brain does is travel along well worn synaptic pathways, like running on autopilot. This is when you feel like you're in a rut, it's because your brain for efficiency reasons is just doing what it always does. The temporary frenzy of increased synaptic connections allows people to break out of those ruts

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by vmception on Thursday April 15, 2021 @06:05AM (#26818447)
there is a suspected overlap that both communities talk about

check it out

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by Leparamour on Thursday April 15, 2021 @09:40AM (#26820349)
>I think the magic comes when you discover that something your default mindset was filtering out as noise is actually signal. With that insight, you can more easily make changes to your sober mindset.

Regarding microdosing (as described by the OP) this begs the question: Are there perhaps unwanted side effects for running your brain on permanent "debug mode"?

Re:Psilocybin 'promising' for depression by anonporridge on Thursday April 15, 2021 @04:04PM (#26825475)
Hard to say. This is the first study I've seen that's tried to learn about microdosing. There's not a lot of good data on it, but it wouldn't be hard for me to believe that there are some side effects.