Slashdot Mirror
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.
anyone whos done shrooms or acid could tell you that. thats the whole point genius
"Creating complexity" in the sense of more measurable neural events is not a measure of "higher conscience". You can get the same effect with a pair of electrodes, or even getting patterns of neural events in seizures. The destruction of existing structures, and the inability to retain those "new insights" long enough to explain or use them either during or after the influence of psychedelic "events" is evidence that disruption is possible, not evidence of a "higher" consceience.
It's very *exciting* to get blitzed, and it can be *fun* to taste the color red. But it's hardly insightful. You can get more "insight" by simply paying attention.
Also known as 'lots of activity'. That may translate to *altered* state of consciousness, but calling it a *higher* state just tells me someone really likes their psychedelic drugs.
Your brain trying to figure out what to do with random signals produced by chemical disruption of brain activity is in no way 'higher' consciousness, no matter how many drug users tell us it feels that way.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A more active state of consciousness does not equal a higher state of consciousness. You can readily come up with another test that would do similar, especially for men. Hook up their junk to electrodes and give them a series of complex questions to answer and each wrong answer generates a shock. I'll bet they reach a more active state of consciousness pretty dang quick, no drugs required, except maybe adrenal and some endorphins for the 'er' discomfort.
In terms of higher human consciousness, you a really talking about consciousness of the group, rather than consciousness of the individual. So appropriate experiments for that would revolve around what some consider very undesirable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... So is more actually going on in groupthink than people are generally aware of and is it actually desirable (only being undesirable with negative thoughts leading to negative outcomes). Groupthink a higher state of consciousness ie shared thought ie a group actively trying to consciously think together, focus their thoughts collectively, rather than just a more active individual thoughts due to physical stimuli ie drugs or electrodes strapped to your junk ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Poppycock. This stuff has been studied extensively for years, with copious FMRI modeling and psychological measures. See this article or watch this video for some more interesting results that don't rely on psychedelics (not that the results for psychedelics are wrong, mind you).
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.
"Creating complexity" in the sense of more measurable neural events is not a measure of "higher conscience". You can get the same effect with a pair of electrodes, or even getting patterns of neural events in seizures. The destruction of existing structures, and the inability to retain those "new insights" long enough to explain or use them either during or after the influence of psychedelic "events" is evidence that disruption is possible, not evidence of a "higher" consceience.
It's very *exciting* to get blitzed, and it can be *fun* to taste the color red. But it's hardly insightful. You can get more "insight" by simply paying attention.
You could not be more wrong. 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.
You are interpreting the summary completely backwards, and you sound like someone who calls all drugs "narcotics," or thinks that any drug use simply amounts to "getting high," regardless of the intentions, results, or method of action in the body. Nancy Reagan and Richard Nixon would be proud.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
higher levels in Discrete Individuals.
Of course, after rereading the /. summary and title again, I can see how people might misinterpret the findings of this study, since the linked article is much more careful not to jump to grand conclusions, and explicitly mentions that they don't believe the psychedelic experience to necessarily be a "better" state of consciousness. But expecting anyone to actually RTFA instead of basing their opinions on the /. title is silly, I guess.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Study the medical aspects involved and you'll have lots of knowledge that is inapplicable to the experience of skydiving. This analogy is a pale example of how these studies really miss the point. And anyone who comments about these experiences without having tried them is truly blowing hot air with no valuable substance at all.
I could describe in detail and pontificate for a decade and you would still not have any grasp of what these experiences are like. You simply cannot, and are being foolish if you think otherwise.
And mushrooms (preferably as tea) are the best.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.
(If this experiment really measures what it claims, drop some acid, read that sentence again, and see what happens.)
So there's a hypervisor or Intel Management Unit in our brains. And you can root it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Happy 420.
They didn't test Soma?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Do we actually know that? I'm sure you see more brain activity in an awake person than an asleep person. But does more brain activity automatically directly correlate to higher consciousness? I guarantee if you are hooked up to an EEG and I smash your thumb with a hammer, you'll see a sudden jump in all sorts of diverse brain signals and a lot of activity. I'd hardly call it higher consciousness though.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Zero dollars. It's an example, and examples are free.
Most people need things that are obvious pointed out to them, otherwise they will remain completely unaware.
Congratulations, you are not one of those people. But that doesn't change the sad fact that we stand amazingly few.
Used responsibly, LSD is a phenomenal tool for introspection and "thinking about things from a higher plane". It's hard to describe to anyone who has not tried.
Remove your consciousness from your life experiences, everyday minutia, your body's senses, and politics/history pegged to a timeline, and so on. Freed from these tethers, incredibly insightful things can be realized for the first time in the mind. After you come down, and you remember the experience, you will never view the world the same-old way again, but will process subsequent life experiences from an additional, fresh, and wholistic view-point. It is a marvelous eye-opener.
Once you've "climbed the mountain" of a strong and positive LSD trip a few times, you will no longer need to take the drug to "get to that place", and to see things in this additional, new light. It is a breathtaking experience and changes your perspective forever. Well, for decades, at the least.
* Pardon the slang and 'short-for' phrasing. I tried to make the point as concise as possible to anyone who hasn't tried it – an impossible task. *
They should have gotten blitzed first and wrote straightforwardly and honestly instead of hiding behind academic jargon and obfuscatory syntax.
Here is the dirty little secret about getting published:
No academic paper is approved for publishing. Academic papers are weeded out until only just enough for the journal remains.
Peer-review typically means your work will be sent to whomever you cited, any criticisms of other work is a guaranteed rejection. Making your work intentionally obtuse is critical. Too obvious, even if novel, and it will be thrown out. Too complicated of a style and it will be thrown out. What you need to get published is write the way top academics in your field write, acknowledge or flatter them, and balance between obfuscating the obvious with complexity and simplifying your important bits with jargon which is used as shortcuts to complex topics.
Nobody likes writing this way. Nobody likes reading it. But if you want to get published in an impactful journal, you play ball.
> I'd actually like to record what I say the next time.
That's a great idea. Many years ago, I used to record sometimes and write a lot. I wrote some stuff for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) while in various states of consciousness. Like you, my friends an I had some rather profound experiences.
Listening to recordings back then, and reading later what I wrote (and was well received by the NORML community) is enlightening. We discovered some profound truths such as "whoa, blue is totally blue dude". That was very profound at the time.
The research is trying to address the subjectivity in evaluating "levels of consciousness" using more objective measures of neural activity explored in recent years (and cited in the introduction). The conclusion addresses potential weakness of the study, including whether increased activity actually means more awareness: "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. Future studies should assess the extent to which entropy and complexity based measures of signal diversity capture and confer the fundamental property of “richness” of conscious states, not only in the psychedelic condition but in conscious states more generally."
Yeah. I tried to flout tradition by writing my master's thesis in a non-academic style. I thought I could get away with it because it was technical (a speech recognizer back in the days when we were excited about the new IBM XT), and because Linguistics has a tradition of writing irreverent papers. But I got slammed, told to rewrite it, and I got mad and left without an M.A.
I'm still bitter. As I told the doctor who told me my problem was with the system, "fuck you!"
Do you speak from experience? Sorry about your bad trip man.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
This bares a question - does "vegetative" state + LSD == normal state?
Some of the comments in this thread have been kind of offending me. But that offense has made me think.
A bunch of comments above from people who've done LSD talk about the mind-blowing experiences they've had on it, and put down people who don't want to try it, or who poo-poo it, as some kind of beings of lesser consciousness. As someone with no interest in doing LSD, those comments kind of offend me, largely because the mind-blowing kind of stuff they describe sounds like the kind of state I used to operate in almost all the time, full of off-the-wall crazy insights, constantly finding interconnections between seemingly disparate things, and new angles on everything, way back before life beat the fuck out of me and I had to adopt a much more pragmatic and guarded mindset most of the time. But I still get get into those states now and then, and yeah it's this exhilarating thrill that feels like OMFG I suddenly understand the meaning of life the universe and everything. A lot of what I come up with in those states of mind can, later, in a more sober state of mind, be turned into something more productive, and the insights I find and refine that way continue to positively shape my worldview for the rest of my life. A lot of the other stuff is utter crap, and sometimes it may take me years of sober reflection to realize how crap it was, while other times it's obvious the next morning.
All that makes it seem to me like these people, the ones bragging about how LSD opened their mind and how people won't try it are squares or whatever, seem like they are the lesser-minded beings who need drugs to achieve what seems to me like a natural healthy state of being I've never needed drugs to achieve, and have only found difficulty achieving after years and years of trauma. (Trauma which, as a relevant aside, feels like it is gradually making me more and more like "normal people", which has made me long suspect that maybe what we think of as "normalcy" is the effect of pervasive early trauma in most people's childhoods that I was somehow able to avoid or resist for longer).
But then all that makes me think. Switch out the LSD discussion for one about an anti-anxiety medicine, and instead of talking about having these big open-mind higher-consciousness experiences, let's talk about comfortably socializing with large groups. Now imagine naturally sociable people putting down anti-anxiety meds. And people with social anxiety disorder speaking of how the anti-anxiety meds have transformed their lives, how they could just be social and it wasn't scary or challenging and they just got it. And then the naturally social people looking down on them in turn for needing drugs to achieve what seems to them like a natural healthy state of being they've never needed drugs to achieve.
Those people kinda seem like dicks. Some people just aren't naturally able to do those things, and the drugs transform their lives by allowing them to. But at the same time, other people are naturally able to do those things, and the drugs don't unlock any thing special that they're missing out on without them. And the drug-users suggesting they are missing out on that are also kinda dicks. So maybe let's not be dicks to each other and just accept that different people have different brains, that for some people certain drugs will have dramatic transformative effects on their lives, and yet other people have no need for those drugs to achieve the same things.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
How can a lower consciousness recognize a higher consciousness - does not work, world would look different.
See the current POTUS as an example of failure.
Lots of LSD in my college years basically turned my life into a Philip K. Dick novel.
Here's a taste of that: http://ebookoflove.com/
I have more.
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.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Maybe that is how it works in soft sciences, but for sure not in hard sciences like physics. Peer-review is done by experts in the field of your paper and rejecting a paper because it is critical of the peer-reviewer is highly unethical.
https://www.businessinsider.co...
But it actually is a higher state of awareness. You definitely wouldn't claim it's not if you had actually experienced it. Being more aware of all *kinds* of things, particularly pertaining to your own life is a major component of the psychedelic experience. Why do you think the majority of serious academic study regarding these substances is coming from psychology related fields? Because the hyper awareness of one's own life has enormous potential to help treat PTSD, overcome traumatic life events, etc. In a clinical setting, there can and has been substantial success in treating people.
Of course, after rereading the /. summary and title again, I can see how people might misinterpret the findings of this study, since the linked article is much more careful not to jump to grand conclusions, and explicitly mentions that they don't believe the psychedelic experience to necessarily be a "better" state of consciousness. But expecting anyone to actually RTFA instead of basing their opinions on the /. title is silly, I guess.
Once shouldn't expect anyone to RTFA. A study, not dissimilar to the one linked in the summary, deals entirely with an activity called RTFS. It clearly demonstrated that merely reading a couple of sentences will significantly increase activity in the area of the brain responsible for omniscience.
I read the headline and thought this was going to be an article on the latest claim from President Trumpster. What's with all the science?
You can dump nitrous oxide into an engine and sure, it will run like hell.
That doesn't mean it's beneficial.
-Styopa
In a lot of ways, hallucinogens are like artificial schizophrenia (I have experience with the three drugs used in testing). What does the neural signal diversity of a schizophrenic look like?
At least I think we were moving.
It can be hard to tell.
Of course, after rereading the /. summary and title again, I can see how people might misinterpret the findings of this study, since the linked article is much more careful not to jump to grand conclusions, and explicitly mentions that they don't believe the psychedelic experience to necessarily be a "better" state of consciousness. But expecting anyone to actually RTFA instead of basing their opinions on the /. title is silly, I guess.
Try hard the researchers might, they can't stop news outlets and readers from hyping up their research. Words like "new higher state consciousness found" are just so gilded with gold and wonderfully misinterpreted. How could ANYONE resist?
At one point people have used the same tone about other "obvious" conclusions. Confirming it through objective testing is still necessary, lest we be blinded by our own preconceptions. Sure, I doubt anyone was surprised by the results. But they might have been. And those unexpected discoveries are half the glory of science.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The issue is that a lot of people are jumping on the characterization of this study of 'increased diversity of signaling' to be a 'better' state of consciousness.
Whatever arguments you might have about psychedelics, this particular study pretty much just says 'signals are more diverse', which in general terms can mean good things or bad things. Quiet signals are generally useless, and overly noisy signals are also useless, so too with 'diversity' of signals in the brain could be presumed to be an equally useless single dimension of measure.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Time in dreams is a bit of an interesting concept. It's not like your brain actually has to 'play' the whole scenario, just the salient points and instances that you actually pay attention to, and things that conscious you would have *presumed* to happen may not have played out at all when you were first dreaming it, because we fill in the blanks. E.g. if your dream has you on one end of a field, then another, your remembrance may fill in the blanks and presume you traversed the field, even though that may not have been part of the dream at all when initially encountered.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Of course on the other hand, their own words and the whole point of the study would suggest strongly they *wanted* this sort of interpretation, though they could not in good faith do it themselves.
"suggesting the psychedelic state lies above conscious states such as wakeful "
Use of words like 'above' is a specific word choice, though the rest of the sentence tries to soften it, it feels like they have a particular opinion.
"Future studies should assess the extent to which entropy and complexity based measures of signal diversity capture and confer the fundamental property of “richness” of conscious state"
Again, ostensibly this is saying 'we don't know', but phrasing is biased toward 'there's some extent that should be validated'.
Ultimately, the whole study is pretty pointless on the face of it unless there is some presumed value to the measure. So by virtue of even publishing something and presuming the thing has value, they have some opinion that this is meaningful.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
don't believe everything you see in movies. Everyone I know dreams in "real time".
That's what science is about - quantifying reality in order to model it. Saying "everyone knows that X is true" is (even if "everyone" indeed think so - seldom the case) doesn't verify that X is true and if X is true under what circumstances that isn't true etc.
However the brilliant text you quoted isn't even something obvious, dreams can cause very complex patterns.
Higher state no, different state yes ! Yes chemicals can cause all kinds of brain activity. To suggest that they are higher is foolish. A man who drops acid and jumps out an eighth story window thing he is a sea gull and can fly is not in a higher state of consciousness. He is in a scrambled state full of nonsense and error.
When on the drugs the Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity score was higher, but the paper also states:
"Since the value of LZc (also LZs) for a binary sequence of fixed length is maximal if the sequence is entirely random, the normalized values indicate the level of signal diversity on a scale from 0 to 1."
In other words, higher LZ means more random. However, "true" complexity does not increase monotonically with randomness. In fact, they have an inverted U relationship, where past a certain point, complexity _decreases_ with increasing randomness. For example, see Figure 2 on this page:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pa...
I would argue that consciousness if far more likely to relate to this type of "true" complexity rather than the uncompressability expressed by LZ.
So... If vegetative patients are at a lowered state, and these psychoactive drugs can elevate mental state, has anyone done a study giving these drugs to someone in a vegetative state / coma to see if it can bring them out of it, even temporarily?
I'm certain there are all sorts of ethical concerns there (medical experiments on someone who's incapable of consent, etc.), but what if this could help some of those patients regain function?
From a transparency of the mind perspective: this is like saying the garbage in the dumpster outside some businesses are at a different level than the garbage outside other businesses. While true, it is garbage.
The truth about life is anything you do not choose for yourself really has no meaning. Consciousness cannot tell you who you are. Identity is something someone has to push out into the external world. You can't consume it passively like vitamins.
Consciousness is like a mindless frankenstein monster. It just stumbles around moaning until it gets directed into a created meaning. Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Nietchze understood this.
I have an alarm clock that repeats once every 5 minutes after the set time until you silence it. Once in a dream I heard the alarm & then heard it again about 10 subjective minutes later after having done some other random things (that would in reality take more than 10 minutes, but of course, dreams can be unrealistic). When I woke up, I saw that the alarm had only gone off twice, so I definitely perceived the time span differently rather than just missing an alarm in the middle.
Of course, getting engrossed in something (especially something that gets progressively faster, like certain video games) can give a subjective speedup while awake, too.
did you do the random things, or you just "knew" that you had done them somehow? While dreaming, you accept as good facts that can't possibly be true. And know things that you can't know. So, having the knowledge that you have done something does not imply that you actually did it while dreaming.