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.
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.
I'd go with the "firing of synapses without purpose" hypothesis.
It if was actually productive, evolution probably would have made it available to us without drugs. Psychedelics are not special, these are relatively simple molecules imitating neurotransmitters. So if tripping were so beneficial, it could probably be triggered through normal pathways, with the added bonus of being able to switch from high to baseline at will.
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.
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.
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'.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually, this may be a 'higher' state of consciousness, but that does not necessarily denote 'better'.
Think about hearing someone on the other end of a phone whisper, it's useless because you can't make it out.
Then at a 'normal' speaking level, they make sense and things function.
Then if they yell into the phone, there's no denial there is heightened activity, but it's so noisy and clipping and chaotic as to be useless again.
Increased activity and/or diversity does not always equal better (particularly increased diversity of a signal generally leads to problems).
So 'higher' can still be 'crazy'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.