from Hacker News

LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

by DreamScatter on 6/13/21, 12:36 PM with 150 comments

• by anm89 on 6/13/21, 10:18 PM

  Totally separate from whatever this paper is claiming, I'm already dreading a conversation at some future party in which some person rambles on regarding a very unscientific understanding of this paper and something about burning man.

• by Animats on 6/13/21, 6:34 PM

  Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal.

  "Shannon entropy" is noise.

  "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".

• by booerino on 6/13/21, 9:19 PM

  I like LSD quite a lot but have a hard time talking about it. I find it kind of highly embarrassing for some reason. Afraid of being judged a freak (I look and act pretty odd, but it's not because of LSD).

  I am baffled how open some people are. I guess this is the curse of having conservative family you'd not like to upset.

• by throwaway64389 on 6/13/21, 7:43 PM

  Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip.

  I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have their own decision trees.

  Also, we're all the same person or being.

  Weird day.

• by jb775 on 6/13/21, 8:57 PM

  There's a company called MindMed that's doing clinical trials with Psilocybin/LSD/MDMA and finding that micro-dosing has really positive benefits on human disorders linked to the brain (depression, PTSD, etc). Could be huge to harness the power of these drugs for the benefit of humanity.

• by nabla9 on 6/13/21, 6:42 PM

  Here is interesting study lecture and article, maybe somewhat related.

  The Geometry and objects of things you see in typical to DMT experiences are hyperbolic.

  Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg

  The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geomet...

• by ______- on 6/13/21, 11:07 PM

  I never hallucinated after trying shrooms, even at high doses. I found this odd, since I have read about countless people saying they saw stuff that wasn't there or saw colorful fractal geometry.

  So my conclusion is that shrooms simply increased my perception and allowed in more information, and that all this fractal geometry is already there, just waiting to be discovered.

  It's just like tuning into a higher frequency. It's not fake or generated by the brain, simply observed for what it is.

• by edem on 6/13/21, 8:26 PM

  Can someone explain this in plain English? What's this fractal structure about? And what's critical state?

• by yoloyoloyoloa on 6/13/21, 9:15 PM

  I decided to start a career in programming and IT oneday at 21 on a LSD bad trip from hell. It was really an eye opening trip and just realized this would be the best possible career path to take. I have never looked back since.

• by akomtu on 6/13/21, 6:09 PM

  LSD also increases activity of that fractal dimension.

• by voldacar on 6/13/21, 10:54 PM

  To increase the "fractal dimension" of anything, just EQ up the high frequency components. White noise has great fractal dimension, lol

  Can't wait for this to be on joe rogan

• by bronzeage on 6/13/21, 6:32 PM

  Why is it even legal to conduct LSD experiments? There was some animal testing post earlier, but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse.