I like to explain psychedelics this way: When you were a baby, you couldn't make sense of anything around you. You had visual input into your eyes, but you couldn't recognize any shapes. You had to learn what clusters of input represented useful objects. 1/9https://twitter.com/danlistensto/status/1191458746498727938 …
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This same process happened at every level, not just visually- you had to learn to make sense of the world around you. Experiences turned into expectations, a way to make predictions. You grew a model of the world, a model that you now live in. 2/9
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Psychedelics dissolve your model for a few hours - they put you back into that baby state, where you don't have a means of making sense of the world. And slowly, over the course of a trip, your meaning structures come back online - 3/9
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But now you can observe those structures because you can compare them to what it was like not having them. You can see what led to them and how they were not inevitable, but a product of your particular experiences. 4/9
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What you were once *subject to* becomes an *object* you can observe and manipulate. This is especially useful for those with depression, as depression removes the ability to see alternatives to your current experience. Psychedelics can grant that ability again. 5/9
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For another metaphor, psychedelics have been compared to the process of annealing in computer science (and metallurgy)- 6/9
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"Psychedelics 'heat up' the brain, increasing plasticity and weakening the influence of prior beliefs. As the psychedelic stops being active, the brain 'cools' – the hierarchy re-forms, though perhaps in a different configuration than the pre-psychedelic configuration." 7/9
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Above quote is from an http://enthea.net article on the Carhart-Harris & Friston paper 'REBUS and the Anarchic Brain'. (which I would link to, but my copy/paste isn't working on the twitter app
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Anyway, psychedelics are a powerful tool that allows for the restructuring of your mental processes and the meanings behind them. For changing out the water you swim in, as it were. Best used with intention and purpose. 9/9
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