What is LSD, what does it do to your brain and the reason it’s not lethal even at large doses?
In: Biology
Just a note to younger redditors. Please don’t try this nor other psychedelics until you are more mature age wise. Go ahead, smoke a little pot. But the possible existential crisis / dramatic shift of outlook on life doesn’t always pair well with your high school years. Not to infer any of you lack emotional maturity, but it’s best to be in a place in life with a pre-existing foundation. I say this from personal experience.
Absolutely life changing. Becoming one with all living things in the universe and realizing everything is love and death means nothing. We are a small infinite spec in the endless flow of consciousness that is life. Music and nature are the greatest things I’ve ever experienced in my life especially tripping. Don’t abuse it, shit gets bad. It’s all love!
No scientific answer here, just my perspective.
Hey follow up questions…
1) Is the trip like Mushrooms?
2) It’s not addicting right?
3) considering 2, why is it illegal?
When erratic, maladjusted, mentally unstable or just downright unlucky people take LSD, then things like “bad trips”, abuses of others and of the self, and lasting adverse psychological effects can occur. Lots of people have taken LSD though. No one has ever overdosed and died from toxicity.
In my opinion, LSD is much scarier and far more mystifying to people who have never taken it and will never take it.
When very smart and receptive people take these psychoactive drugs in a concerted way, amazing advancements in human understanding and technology are sometimes facilitated.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis)
Read the bit about “use of hallucinogens”
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I see people talking about consuming large amts and having good to bad experiences. So how does micro-dosing help people?
In normal circumstances your brain’s various regions are isolated from eachother. You only perceive one at a time and they go through a part of your brain that acts like a switch keeping them from talking to eachother. LSD silences that switch and parts of your brain that never talk can now speak directly. This gives you weird perceptions, you see how the lower parts of your brain process information and imagery and the barrier that separates things you imagine from what you perceive becomes blurred the higher you go in dosage. This leads to things like seeing sound, or recognizing objects as other objects, having walls move etc. You’re just seeing raw unprocessed data that your brain normally hides from you.
There is another layer in your brain that acts as shortcuts. A good way of explaining it is when you take the same path to work everyday for months and then one thing changes and you suddenly recognize a building you’ve never seen before like it’s appeared out of nowhere. The truth is your brain through repeated exposure drew a line to useless information because you repeatedly told it that it wasn’t important. Then when it became novel because something changed your brains filtering is disrupted and you see it.
Thinking is expensive and at times uncomfortable so your brain is as lazy as it possibly can be and relies heavily on these shortcuts for everything. Depression and addiction can exist within this system, where people have issues/patterns that trap them mentally in circular thoughts they can’t escape. They cannot change their perception to adapt to their realities. When you take LSD in a dose high enough to induce ego death you are removing these shortcuts. This is where psychedelics can be transformative and it allows you to rewrite the shortcuts, to give new interpretation to events and circumstances. This allows you to figure out what view point serves you best which you can then use to let go of traumatic events, reorient your relationships and transform how you view yourself. You’d be surprised how many people truly hate themselves and how much it negatively effects their life in ways they are incapable of normally perceiving.
It may well be true that what we experience as our ego is just a series of ingrained mental shortcuts that while useful is not without its downsides. There are technical/scientific terms for everything I’m describing, but I find these descriptions do it justice. I have a decent explanation of religious experiences too, but I’ve been told it kills the mystery of psychedelics for some people.
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To be fair, as I recall there IS a lethal dose of LSD. Heck, there’s a lethal dose of plain water. In both cases, I think it’s physically difficult (though not impossible) to ingest that much due to volume limitations of our digestive system.
In other words, to take a lethal dose of LSD, you might have to drink more than your stomach could hold. You certainly couldn’t absorb that much any other way, at least not fast enough. Someone would probably have to keep feeding it to you steadily for a long period.
Of course, that much potent hallucinogen may kill you anyway, since you could easily forget to drink for more than 3 days (which is fatal), or have a fatal accident (walking into traffic or some other dangerous environment, oblivious to what is really around you, etc.). Obviously that could happen on even a short trip, but a really, really long one would multiply your odds for sure.
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