First Evidence For Higher State of Consciousness Found (neurosciencenews.com)

New submitter baalcat quotes a report from Neuroscience News: Neuroscientists observed a sustained increase in neural signal diversity -- a measure of the complexity of brain activity -- of people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, compared with when they were in a normal waking state. The diversity of brain signals provides a mathematical index of the level of consciousness. For example, people who are awake have been shown to have more diverse neural activity using this scale than those who are asleep. This, however, is the first study to show brain-signal diversity that is higher than baseline, that is higher than in someone who is simply "awake and aware." Previous studies have tended to focus on lowered states of consciousness, such as sleep, anesthesia, or the so-called "vegetative" state. For the study, Michael Schartner, Dr Adam Barrett and Professor Seth of the Sackler Center reanalyzed data that had previously been collected by Imperial College London and the University of Cardiff in which healthy volunteers were given one of three drugs known to induce a psychedelic state: psilocybin, ketamine and LSD. Using brain imaging technology, they measured the tiny magnetic fields produced in the brain and found that, across all three drugs, this measure of conscious level -- the neural signal diversity -- was reliably higher. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

Comments

Lights on vs someone being home

[TWX]

So what I'm curious about is if the extra activity is productive, or if it's just the firing of synapses without purpose.

As an analogy, consider electrical short-circuits in a ball of unshielded wires with various currents applied, versus a properly laid-out circuit. Depending on how the various short-circuits in the ball line up one might see patterns, but those patterns do not accomplish anything. One might even see heat and light that are absent on the properly laid-out circuit, and one might see more power draw, but again, that might not mean anything advantageous is occurring.

Last time I looked at the subject, oxygen supply and the ability to exchange oxygen between blood vessels and the brain was the limiting factor, more than any other factor. I'm curious if there are any other factors since found.

Re:Lights on vs someone being home

[GuB-42]

I agree with you that we can't use the evolution argument every time. The reason I used it is :
- The human brain is highly plastic, it constantly rewires itself. And the prevalence of mental diseases show that nature is trying new things with our brains. Some mental diseases actually have some positive traits, and some cause symptoms that can be partially reproduced using LSD (schizophrenia).
- The body can already produce DMT, a powerful psychedelic.
- Positive traits typically associated with psychedelics, like insight and creativity can offer a survival and sexual advantage. Someone who can more easily come up with novel techniques for feeding or defense against predator gets and edge over those who don't. He can also make beautiful things to attract mates, lead the tribe through their insights (and get all the best mates), etc...

My experience

[tylersoze]

Personally I had a very profound experience on LSD. I became aware of the illusion that we have a unified consciousness. It started out when I noticed my right hand was moving of its own accord, and I had to "consciously" make it stop. I have this happen on mushrooms as well, but the experience became deeper when I become actually become aware myself as split left/right into two entities. I remember just sitting their slack jawed and told my wife "I think I'm experiencing something profound right now". It was a totally novel experience I can't even adequately describe or even really remember what it was *actually* like. It proceeded like this for a while and I eventually reached some sort of state where I somehow "knew" how consciousness arises from matter, I remember saying something like "this is what this is?" then I feel as if I was "breaking through" back into reality and my consciousness unified and the trip was over just like that. It was amazing, I can't wait to experience it again knowing what to expect, I was kind of caught completely unawares the first time. I'd actually like to record what I say the next time. I immediately started reading all I could about the psychedelic experience, ego death, etc.

As long as you're in the right frame of mind and surroundings (set and setting) psychedelics are some of the safest drugs imaginable. I'd rather be around someone on LSD or mushrooms than alcohol any day. Like literally anything else, idiots that don't know what they're doing can hurt themselves or others if they don't do it properly.

There's always the possibility my experience was just some sort of delusion I suppose. I really believe it does offer some insight into the nature of consciousness, something I've always been utterly fascinated by. It's doing something at the lowest level of neural pathways. It's just something you have to experience first hand otherwise you just have no room to say anything about it. The hard problem of consciousness seems like an even more intractable issue than the fundamental problems of physics. How something like consciousness can emerge from matter.

Re:My experience

[slew]

You have to remember that for many, "reality" is an illusion created by the visual cortex part of your brain. Since it takes time for your brain to decode the input from your visual senses in the visual cortex, in a way your conscious mind is interpreting the recent past as "now". Of course there are always "reactionary" processing from our reptilian brain that work on a faster pace (sound, touch, involuntary reflexes, etc) and these occasionally intrude on our quaint visual cortex consciousness view of "now" to give us the misguided impression that we can somehow anticipate the future (maybe a second or so, the feeling of deja vu or flinching before your see something).

There is evidence that psychedelic drugs like LSD allow for additional intrusions from other parts of the brain into the visual cortex in an often uncoordinated or hallucinatory fashion which leads some to speculate that generates feeling of some sort of break with reality, or one-ness with universe as these novel interactions are interpreted by the visual cortex. Unfortunately, there is also some evidence that LSD also inhibits connections between the visual cortex and the parahippocampus which plays an important role in memory encoding. This might explain why memories of LSD trips are often fleeting leaving only vague impressions in their wake...

If you associate the normal visual cortical view of "reality" as consciousness, maybe you might think of this psychedelic state which causes this disjoint amalgamation of signals in the visual cortex as some sort "higher" or "altered" consciousness, but given the apparent difficulties of recording and learning about perceptions that could be potentially distilled from this state, it's a stretch to say that any specific intrinsic knowledge about the mechanics of self perception could be learned or gained this way, but certainly for many it might enable a different way of looking at things (which might give you insight into something that you know about already or bridge many facts/skills/ideas you already have together into something clever or novel).

As with many systems, it's generally very difficult to discover the nature of the system from within the system, but maybe a researcher armed with MRIs (and neural lace?) might be able to learn something about you and your thought processes by studying you when are tripping. That whole idea of somehow an untrained individual unlocking the knowledge of the universe crap while tripping is not bloody likely...

On the other hand, just like the allegory of the caves, I suspect some that partake in LSD somehow develop the impression that it opens them up to a different type of perception of reality from which they do not want to return, but the sad fact is that it is simply a different reality, not "the" reality (you still don't "see" anymore than your senses, you just have a different take on them, a different perspective so to speak). Your brain is still looking a shadows on the cave wall (but maybe multi-colored and fancy with sound and light ;^)...

Re:In other news. scrambling eggs creates chickens

[goose-incarnated]

External electrical influences or seizures absolutely do not create more "complexity," in the same sense as psychedelics; they create dysfunction through disruption, which is very different. And using a ridiculous blanket term like "getting blitzed" shows that you have no understanding whatsoever of the difference between mere intoxication and other types of altered states, such as those produced by psychedelics. This study, while not groundbreaking, is interesting because it has produced more data supporting the notion that psychedelic states are not simply a form of random intoxication, as you suggest, but are indeed indicative of stimulation of certain brain functions.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The conclusion says "In sum, we found increased global neural signal diversity for the psychedelic state induced by KET, PSIL and LSD, suggesting the psychedelic state lies above conscious states such as wakeful rest and REM sleep on a one-dimensional scale defined by neural signal diversity. ".

It's a one-dimensional scale measuring neural signal diversity. Random electric shocks to the brain would result in a higher state on that scale. Actually, random electric shocks to the person (random torture?) would raise the scale too. GP was absolutely spot on that these results mean nothing; higher signal diversity could mean "capable of deeper insight", or it

could

mean "unable to function at all", but the actual study doesn't have any results one way or another.

Re:"Neural signal diversity"

[Mashiki]

but my understanding is that the experience with psychedelics is qualitatively different.

It is. I can get high if I take too many pain pills and have a euphoric feeling. The whole idea for those of us on long-term use of pain meds is to "take it before you need it." If you miss that window, you end up taking more and it takes more to reduce the level of pain. Psychedelics though? I've been in LSD and psilocybin studies for migraine treatment because mine are so severe. I never got a high from taking them, rather I had an immense state of satisfaction and contentment in what I was doing and even in life in general. The general benefits were low at the dosing standard used, but some people saw huge improvements. Especially for people who were in it for cluster headaches.

Re:Hyoervisor

[silentcoder]

But it's also overclocking without checking the temperature - which will overheat a CPU and lead, at the very least, to code execution errors. The latter is pretty comon when taking these drugs - with neurons firing faster than censory input data can arrive, they have nothing to process - so they invent their own substitutes. We call the process 'halucination'.