This Is Your Brain (Though Perhaps Not Your Ego)... on LSD

[CommonDreams]

This Is Your Brain (Though Perhaps Not Your Ego)... on LSD

Jon Queally, staff writer

You may or may not know what it feels like for your ego "to dissolve" under the effects of LSD, but now—with a brain-imaging study described as a historic breakthrough—you can at least know what it looks like.

In a study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Imperial College London, in partnership with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualized the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly called LSD, on the brain of users.

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[Melmac]

One pill makes you smaller,
and the other makes you tall,
and the one that mommy gives you,
doesn't do anything at all.

[smallisbeautiful]

Ah, but fortunately I have the key to escape reality
And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile
It don't cost very much, but it lasts a long while
Won't you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone
No I'm just tryin' to have me some fun
Well done, hot dog bun, my sister's a nun

[theinitiate]

about a month or so ago...I was playing this song.... on a Sunday... while cooking and cleaning.... and it lasted in my head for about one week... did not go away...

[maxbeaverbrook]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[maxbeaverbrook]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[webwalk]

"... trippers experienced images through information drawn from many parts of their brains, and not just the visual cortex at the back of the head that normally processes visual information. Under the drug, regions once segregated spoke to one another."

This is PRECISELY what i've always said is going on in a trip: The barriers between different parts of your consciousness are dissolved.

This doesn't only help explain hallucinations and ego dissolution. It also helps explain the "bad trip" experience, when a person is shockingly exposed to areas of their consciousness they were completely unaware of, and which in some cases may hold terrifying thoughts, feelings, experiences that we have suppressed.

So great that some scientists are finally allowed to research this!

[rolson]

The paranoid ego has spoken

Same fear was evident in the WaPo bloggers. Don't go there a bad trip is waiting. People flip out get flashbacks.....the sky is falling

Welcome to the precarious fearful ego.

Same ego that needs to bomb the enemy that is coming. They really are coming.

[Melmac]

I hope I did not start the process again for you?

[Melmac]

I'm still waiting on the flashback. They promised me.

[onedman]

I recall Real Street, don't know about today 50 years later. The concept of being ego-free is the journey, to reintegrate with the one, oh it is so nice, yet fleeting, to use a drug for me now would be cheating in class.

[Poet]

"In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained. This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant's mind." —Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, lead researcher

Infants are also quite vulnerable and as such susceptible to being easily controlled, molded, and shaped by those "in charge". To willingly regress yourself by some chemical to the helplessness of an infant is beyond irresponsible--it is a criminal abdication of your responsibility as an adult. Such manipulation by those pushing this garbage for reasons of scientific research is engaging in the same rationale of Drs. Mengale and Vershoor who ran the "medical" experiments in Nazi concentration camps .
Dr Robin Carhart-Harris sounds like he is either knowingly or unwittingly an asset for the security state which is always looking for ways to control people and willing helpers for their nasty work.

[diana]

as Terrence McKenna so often said, the reason pyschedelics are illegal is because of their ability to help break down artificial barriers of the ego and transform thought--not because they're concerned for people's safety. a lot of promising work has also been done with psilocybin mushrooms with folks suffering from alcoholism and depression.
encouraging to see more info like this coming out, albeit too slowly.

[braj]

[SuspiraDeProfundis]

The trip itself is an experience unlike any other. The perceptions of the world that surrounds you can in fact be described as feeling spiritual and connected, with a sense of insight.

The worst part of the experience is coming down, when it all ends and you feel a disconnect as that ego re asserts itself.

[raydelcamino]

The worst part of coming down is how many days it can take. Some of the current legal cannabis edibles have the same characteristic.

[skeezyks]

Hmmm... it never took me days. But that was a long time ago.

[Upthepeople]

Yes, and don't forget the secret lyrics in Wooly Bully that made all those people jump off bridges.

[diana]

i needed a genuine laugh. thanks.

[Labelle]

Back in the 70s, LSD became a drug of choice, for me, till i had a bad trip, as we used to call the experience, then. When under the influence of the drug, i felt, that the drug was part of our original brain and that somehow we had lost the ability to use that part, and that LSD was a way to get it back. Hope this will make some sense to others who read this, but i feel it confirms some of your article