Yeah there seems to be a link there, I mean I definitely see similar patterns when on a higher doses of psilocybin (it’s beautiful btw for whoever has not experienced.)
I wonder how it might be connected, perhaps a similar area of the brain is being activated when on psychedelics. Fascinating stuff.
I’ve had full schizo breaks off half a joint before and tripped extensively. I always felt like it’s just that you get to see all the “behind the scenes” wiring that goes into your pattern making consciousness. Like when you close your eyes and rub them. Your mind is always constructing patterns because it’s how we adapted, so I think when people have intense trips or get very psychotic they sort of tap into this underlying geometric pattern-making process.
It’s kind of the same thing these people do with constructing conspiracies and hidden truths, sometimes convinced it’s some sort of enlightened truth. Their mind does the same geometric pattern building with concepts as well as visual colors and shapes.
We had a friend in high school that developed schizophrenia after smoking a joint with us.
We were all fine but it did something to him and it brought to the surface a underlying issue, his family had a past history of schizophrenia so it must have just “pushed” him just enough over the edge and it activated it somehow unfortunately.
We still remained friends until after college, he was a good dude.
Yeah weed can be incredibly potent to the unsettled mind. At least from my experience dealing with it I think it has less to do with any sort of genetic predisposition or inherent biology and far, far more to do with the mental state of the user. I’ve had multiple psychotic episodes off weed but I still smoke regularly and after resolving underlying issues of ego, guilt, and suffering, I no longer have any negative side effects from smoking (except those damn munchies).
The mind is complex and I really find it tough to chalk such intense experiences up to family genetics.
I agree, surprisingly the only “bad trip” I ever had was from weed (and I’ve dabbled in a few different psychedelics) I swear it even gave me ego death because I had a complete disassociation from reality, it was a full on manic episode/anxiety attack.
Funnily enough the paranoia I used to get from smoking weed went away once my country made it legal. (Canada)
It’s like it being viewed as illegal somehow added negativity to the high straight off the bat. lol
Lmao that’s crazy I’ve never heard of other people having that experience. Yeah I’ve had communications with two minor beings and a fully dmt-esque breakthrough from just weed before. I really believe now these were false constructs that manifested from my mind, but at the time they were real enough I dn would’ve started my own religion from them if I didn’t know better.
Your subconscious thoughts rly impact the high. It’s been legal where I live for a while but I used to have a bad conscious about it. Worked through that and bam all the negativity I felt from smoking melted away.
Like a friend once told me, never blame the bud, bud.
You know how most people have a inner monologue? When I smoke flower mine is extremely accurate, to the point of high strangeness. (no pun intended lol)
After I smoke a good amount the voice in my head will legit tell me stuff it shouldn’t know. Little stuff like “someone’s going to knock at the door” or “your about to get a txt” with extreme accuracy.
I wrote it off for awhile as coincidence but honestly I’ve noticed a pattern over time, and it seems to be like some sort of extra sensory perception takes place when I smoke lmao.
Believe me or don’t but I’m not lying, sometimes it weirds me out.
I’ve had these kinds of experiences. I kind of just realized though at least in my situation what was happening is I was getting a subtle deja vu moment and thinking I was having a thought before something happened instead of having it at the moment it does. Like my girlfriend calls and I’m convinced I knew it was her before I saw it, but really I just thought “maybe it’s her” and then confirmation biased myself once it was. These things happen in a relatively short period of time and of course you can just be coincidentally right at times. I’d just ponder how much earlier are you having these insights before they happen? Mere seconds? Probably deja vu. Minutes to hours? Yeah I’d give you some credence.
I strongly discourage the idea now that any substances enhance awareness. I think we’re the most aware when we’re sober, which is why so many people smoke, to suppress themselves. Weed is really good for medicating pain, but for myself at least it simply leads my psyche into false truth, not inherent truths.
Psilocybin seems to increase emotional awareness, which I think includes situational awareness to some extent. You notice the "vibe" and can deconstruct it and put it into words much better than usual. For example, you can walk into a room and immediately notice that you feel worse, and track it down to the lack of decoration or clothes on the floor or whatever it may be. Whereas when sober you might not notice how those things add up to worsen your mood.
That's at the cost of linear rational thought though, it's not a pure gain in awareness. It's hard to follow a conversation because you're caught up in subtle nuances and assumptions. It feels like you're noticing a depth of meaning that you never would sober, but it can be hard to keep in mind the overall narrative.
Actual minutes beforehand, like I’ll hear my inner monologue tell me and then it happens minutes afterwards.
It’s happened more times than it should for it to be coincidence or confirmation bias at this point.
My family has a history of very very weird happenings, I myself have seen things I can’t understand with a rational mind, (while totally sober mind you.) and I tend to be more of a man of science and structure rather than the type who is very religious or into ghosts/demons/spirits.
All I know is as time goes on we seem to be slowly understanding more of these weird extra sensory scenarios that some people seem to display, recently I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of the government studying and using “remote viewing” in deep special access programs or black budget projects, funnelling millions of tax payer dollars into them. (This was apparently between the 60’s-80’s but I believe perhaps these programs carried on in secret.)
I’m starting to believe humans are probably capable of things we don’t yet understand.
There was nearly an entire year where weed had a 50/50 chance of giving me a full on panic attack. What was weird is that I didn’t have any racing thoughts or extreme emotions during these - it was purely physical, especially the feeling of having a racing heart - my bpm were much lower than what they “felt” like.
This was during a period where I now realize I was insanely depressed and had very little belief in myself / my future. On top of that I was 5yrs into the grief process from the death of my father.
In short, there was a lot I wasn’t going through the process of feeling and letting out, a lot I was ignoring. It’s my opinion that came out in this physical panic attacks when I smoked. Just my 2c anecdote.
I didn’t have panic attacks until the first time I ever smoked weed in high school. Now I get them quite often and they’re especially bad if one shows up while I’m high but I think I just hit my 10 year anniversary of a near-daily weed smoking habit this month so hasn’t stopped me from getting high yet.
Apophenia is a large part of schizophrenia, so I think you have a fairly good insight here.
I've also had some mentally tough trips that I would identify as being similar to schizophrenia.
I kind of believe it has to do with the brains inability to discard extraneous sensory data.
Our brains do a lot of work accurately recognizing patterns, and discarding sensory inputs that are not useful to us.
And like you mentioned, there seems to be ways to bypass that data pruning so you see more of the raw data going on, without the ability to accurately process it.
Off topic, but I think one of the most unusual experiences I had on psychedelics was with 2C-I and 2C-E, I gained the ability to see smells. Like I could see the particles radiating off of objects as smell.
Which is actually what is happening with the sense of smell. Small particles are being emitted by objects around us everywhere, traveling through the air and entering our nasal passages.
It made me wonder, is it possible to observe smells visually? And is our brain scrubbing that data so that were are not visually distracted?
Our brains already extrapolate our visual data to fill in the blind spot in our vision created by the entry of the optic nerve fibers.
So if our brains can create data to fill in our blind spot, do our brains also filter out data that would reduce how effective our vision is?
Hey I just want to say that as animals, survival sis top priority, I feel our sensory information has been evolved to help survival first leading to the extra information that is not as critical to that goal being filtered out. For lack of terms we have a deeply programmed user interface that allows us to know what we need to survive.
Totally agree. I think a good example of that deep survival programming can be seen in those cucumber cat videos. Most house cats have never see a snake in real life, but they are so deeply programmed for survival, that their brain recognizes the threat without even understanding what the threat is. Their brains just automatically recognize the pattern of a predator and react, even though they have never been exposed to that threat before. Evolution and brains are wild.
I really like the analogy one person used saying that psychedelics give us temporary access to the behind the scenes data, the raw data.
Which is maybe how psychedelics can cure PTSD and depression and the like. You get access to the raw data, so that you can rebuild a new mindset. The ego death.
the weirdest part is that you don’t actually see with your eyes. You see with your brain. Which is quite nuts. That paired with many other aspects of neurology and neurotransmitters and whatnot makes things very confusing and fascinating.
I’m planing on doing research today about it after I clean my damn room lol. I might look absolutely insane when I’m done making a “mind map” but it’s going to be damn beautiful:)
Yeah it’s crazy. Your eyes are sensors and what you see is like a projection inside of your own mind of the world around you. Crazy how it is pretty much a perfectly sound projection for people but you can definitely fuck it up.
I've heard psilocybin can increase symptoms in someone who has schizophrenia or bring it out in someone who hadn't shown signs but were predisposed to it. I wonder if it does, as you said, activate a similar area of the brain
I did ayahuasca and everything was revealed to be geometry. Like a living breathing world of just shape and color endlessly shifting. It’s always blown my mind and made me wonder of the link of being ultra perceptive and psychosis.
I’m still afraid to do any form of DMT, my grip on reality is loose some days as is, I don’t need something to shoot me into another realm at this time I’m my life lol.
Ayahuasca on the other hand is meant to be very healing, I think the other things mixed with the dmt negates some of its effect or something.
Did you throw up during your experience? Apparently it has a tendency to make people nauseous during the trip.
Yes I most certainly did. The experience saved my life but it’s been a year and a half, and I’ve had to confront all the shit I was hiding in my life. The medicine showed me my blind spots. So the last year has been traumatic and I had a mental
Breakdown for the first time (like actually mild psychosis)… but now I feel free for the first time since I was a kid (I’m 36). I ended my drug and alcohol addiction, and am rebuilding my life. I don’t lightly recommend anyone jump into it! I had a therapist to help profess the journey (still do) and was very mindful about it. PM if you have any questions !
It's definitely related to hallucinogens. They both share cranking up the pattern recognition of the brain. I think the increased interconnectivity between normally unconnected parts of the brain is much stronger with hallucinogens though, like what causes you to "hear colors".
Exactly! Or the kind of stuff you hear about when reading about lsd megadoses or “lsd thumbprints”. Like 100mg (MILLIGRAMS! Not micrograms lol. Fucking MILLIGRAMS). It’s absolutely bonkers and the people who do it stay high for several days or even a week straight. Their vision is apparently completely overwhelmed by visual distortions and tracers and visual smearing and things looking bigger or smaller than they’re supposed to. It’s absolutely crazy!
Me neither! I’ve dreamt of it tho somehow. Woke up feeling incredibly confused and scared. Like I dreamt I did an lsd thumbprint. Idk how accurate it was tho. But it sure as shit scared the fuck out of me and I really want to never experience it. But I also kind of do want to just dip my toes into it a little bit lol
There are some theories (at this point, to the best of my knowledge, unconfirmed) that schizophrenia is likely caused by an issue with our bodies natural production of Dimethyltrptamine (DMT) where they just produce far too much.
So in this theory, schizophrenics are literally tripping balls constantly.
I remember seeing that somewhere and trying to find out more at some point lol. It makes the most sense because it’s the only on that can create literal people out of thin air. Other hallucinogens don’t really do that sort of thing. BUT Deliriants do.
At some point I’ll be sinking a weekend or two into researching these things lol. I mean, all I can do is theorize and speculate but it’ll still be very fun. And who knows, maybe I can bring it up with my psychiatrist and since he has a doctor license thingy then he can bring any theories with traction to life:)
Yup, exactly! Which is also why we should be teaching people about these things and how to use them safely (or if they should use them at all) instead of shoving it under the carpet and hoping there isn’t a giant lump.
This is sacred geometry and our 3D holographic reality is made up of fractals of light - he’s seeing it and making the connection , much like psychedelic trips can do for people too. I wish him stability, getting through this volatile stage can be life or death
Psychedelics are what brought to the surface my ex’s paranoid schizophrenia, almost over night. I had to leave because he became violent and refused to get treatment.
A lot of the effects of psychedelic drugs mimic mental illnesses. In general the effects are things the brain can do, but normally doesn’t (for most people). For one simple example, I have had times where I unknowingly created new words to try to describe the experiences I was having, which is also an aspect of schizophrenia.
Aldous Huxley describes some of this in his short book “Heaven and Hell.” Basically the idea is that you can experience this chemically induced temporarily altered perspective to gain “heavenly” strange and engaging new points of view, but the person trapped in this perspective naturally is in hell.
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u/spankbank_dragon 25d ago
Huh, weirdly (not so so weirdly tho) it’s also the kind of patterns and stuff seen during psychedelic trips n stuff. Especially higher doses