SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Scientists have found a way to increase the duration of DMT hallucinogenic experiences:
Known in drug lore as "the businessman's trip" for its lunch-break-size 15-minute duration, DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is infamous for blasting its users into vivid alien worlds. It's among the most literally hallucinogenic of all the psychedelics, and now a pair of veteran researchers have proposed a method to safely extend the experience beyond its normal length. Dr. Rick Strassman and Dr. Andrew Gallimore published their paper in Frontiers in Psychology last month, under the name "A Model for the Application of Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience." Its implications could turn DMT research on its head, allowing for new scientific (and potentially medical) insights into the principle ingredient in ayahuasca. Using techniques borrowed from anesthesiology, the method will regulate the amount of DMT in the body and, more important, the brain. Though still untested on no-doubt-willing psychonauts, Strassman and Gallimore's technology is all but ready for assembly.
Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001) and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy (2014) and perhaps the world's foremost clinical DMT researcher, argues the substance provides access to what users experience as mystical states, comparable to those described in the Hebrew Bible. Gallimore, a computational neurobiologist, is also a historical scholar of DMT. His overview "DMT Research from 1956 to the Edge of Time" recounts a wide range of possibilities researchers have offered over the years (including the notion that DMT is a doorway into an alternate universe). Other theories involve its role in human brain at the time of death, as well as countless South American beliefs inseparable from ayahuasca and DMT snuff traditions. But perhaps the only universal experience of smoked DMT is its brevity.
A Model for the Application of Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience (open, DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2016.00211)
[Continues...]
From the abstract:
Using pharmacokinetic modeling and DMT blood sampling data, we demonstrate that the unique pharmacological characteristics of DMT, which also include a rapid onset and lack of acute tolerance to its subjective effects, make it amenable to administration by target-controlled intravenous infusion. This is a technology developed to maintain a stable brain concentration of anesthetic drugs during surgery. Simulations of our model demonstrate that this approach will allow research subjects to be induced into a stable and prolonged DMT experience, making it possible to carefully observe its psychological contents, and provide more extensive accounts for subsequent analyses. This model would also be valuable in performing functional neuroimaging, where subjects are required to remain under the influence of the drug for extended periods. Finally, target-controlled intravenous infusion of DMT may aid the development of unique psychotherapeutic applications of this psychedelic agent.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RedBear on Thursday August 11 2016, @01:54PM
Hmmm... I am somewhat on the fence regarding the safety of subjecting people to extended DMT trips. I'll talk a bit about why later.
Interesting timing on this, for me. I literally just watched a bunch of the extended interview videos on YouTube that didn't make it into the 2010 documentary based on Strassman's experiments. I caught the movie a few years back on Netflix, it should still be there. For those unfamiliar with the subject, Strassman's basic premise is that DMT, which is found naturally occurring in the human brain in minute quantities as well as many other places in nature, is at the root of many of the subjective events that people throughout history have referred to as "spiritual" or "mystical" experiences, especially life-changing experiences. DMT can be smoked or injected in its purified form and creates a hallucinogenic experience that comes on quite suddenly and lasts only a few minutes as the molecule is rapidly removed from the bloodstream by the body, turned into a neutral byproduct.
The primary description of the experience seems to boil down to a stream of unbelievably rapid events and ideas occurring all at once, a sense of being in a world of indescribable weirdness that is so weird that the extent of its weirdness can't even begin to be conveyed with any words or concepts that we (humans) have available, along with a sense of being strongly connected with and a part of literally everything in the universe and (sometimes) an encounter with indecipherably strange but non-antagonistic "beings" in a different plane of existence who mean you no harm and won't let anything really bad happen to you during the trip. The beings may try to "heal" you of unknown ailments (like death itself) and/or attempt to "download" vast quantities of what seems to be some sort of digital information into your consciousness. Terrence McKenna referred to them as "machine elves"; I've seen two different people refer to them as "gingerbread men". The basic DMT experience is over within a few minutes but can through time dilation subjectively seem to last days, months, years, or even centuries, depending on the dosage and what occurs during the trip. Overly high injected doses just seem to cause memory loss of the event and possibly a vague feeling that something bad happened to you.
So, the problem they are trying to rectify with this IV infusion method, derived from an anesthetic technique, is how to take this event that fades out in a few minutes and make it last much longer, but at an accurately controlled level. Apparently this isn't as simple as just hooking up an IV bag full of DMT, it needs the development of some complicated equations for figuring out exactly how much DMT to give over time, or something? I'm sure everyone who knows how DMT works has had the same basic thought anyway, that if the trip is over so soon why not use an IV drip to extend it. And I'm interested to see what might come out of an extended study using this technique.
Now, why would I be concerned in any way about subjecting people to lengthy DMT sessions? After all, DMT is the hallucinogen involved in traditional South American Indian ayahuasca ceremonies, which when combined with a different chemical during the brewing of the ayahuasca causes extended trips that go on for several hours. Well, because the experience of pure DMT seems markedly different from the sort of contemplative, psychological exploration of the ayahuasca trip. If you watch this playlist [youtube.com] in particular, you'll eventually get to a couple of videos where he discusses something that is slightly disturbing even to someone like myself with a relatively objective mindset. He describes feeling the need to quote, "pretend to be a human being" in order to fit into various social situations without alarming the people around him with his "strangeness", after having experienced an event during a high-dose DMT trip in which he existed as something which bore no resemblance to what we know as a "human being" or a "person", and which subjectively seemed to last nearly a thousand years. In other words, as far as his brain is concerned, he hasn't existed as a "human being" for more than a tiny fraction of the time in which he existed as something which was basically some kind of raw, distilled consciousness that didn't even remember what it was like to be human (during the DMT trip).
Maybe it's just me, but I get a little nervous about people talking about an experience with a substance possibly damaging, in a very permanent way, their connection to their own humanity.
On the other hand, the end result seems to be less of a sort of dangerously psychotic "I'm going to start cutting people up with a machete now because nobody seems real anymore" depersonalization state but rather a state of feeling like having transcended being a simple human animal and having experienced a state of being something much more integrated with the universe, and thus reacting in atypical ways in certain social situations. Maybe what this person experienced was at least a portion of what is referred to as "enlightenment" and maybe he only experienced this because he spent many years already training to be a shaman and using other shamanic substances to go on other "spiritual journeys" prior to participating in the DMT study. I have no idea. But with all his shamanic experience he too warns that DMT might possibly be a dangerous substance to subject people to without psychological preparation. Because his DMT experiences really took him on a trip around the universe and turned his human identity inside out in ways he can barely describe.
Separately, someone left a comment on another unrelated DMT experience video, describing their own DMT experience. They stated that during their trip they heard a voice that said something like, "because you're such a good person you'll have to experience the deaths of everyone who ever lived," and this person proceeded to do just that during what was subjectively a very long period of time. An infinite number of excruciatingly painful deaths, experienced in great detail, and all remembered permanently after the trip and frequently re-experienced in flashbacks. Thus DMT seems to be capable of producing what can only be described as permanent PTSD aftereffects. So that worries me a bit. It reminds me of an episode of Naruto where one of the characters is subjected to a highly traumatic hallucinatory illusion of being run through with a sword an infinite number of times. Regardless of whether the event is real, the subjective experience is real and can leave a powerful mark on the psyche.
Now, if you can extend what was originally a trip that lasts only a few minutes into a trip that lasts several hours, what could be the end result of such an experience if even the short excursion can subjectively seem to last a thousand years? Would the person who comes back from a trip lasting 12 hours run the risk of having subjectively not been a living human being for what as far as their brain was concerned was several billion years? Would that person still really be what we would describe as a "person"? Would that person still react the same way to various social or emotional stimuli in a recognizable way?
On the gripping hand, the very low dose DMT experience seems to be much closer to a controllable deep meditative state than a potentially dangerous hallucinogenic mind-thrashing, which could lead to some interesting psychological and/or spiritual breakthroughs if one could stay in that state for more than a couple of minutes. I guess in the end you can't make a psychotherapeutic omelet without risking scrambling a few psyches, so let's get started, eh?
And that's my useless $27.16 on the subject. Now I probably won't make another post for a month, because that's just how my slow, plodding brain works. Spent all my cents (sense?) in one place again.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 11 2016, @02:44PM
That's kind of how transhumanism is, drugs not necessarily required.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday August 11 2016, @04:51PM
Transhumanism is a mixed bag, of intellectual extrapolations and expectations. Most of what I've seen on the subject still prizes - actually exclusively prizes - the rational intellect.
The aim often appears to be unfettering the intellect from various constraints, to operate as a supreme agent, without limits imposed by temporality, etc. The result is imagined to be like Lt. Cmdr. Gary Mitchell in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" or maybe Galactus, from the Fantastic Four. ;-)
In short, it's a mere ego-desire. I suspect that transcending one's personal ego results instead, in very little visible effect to the casual observer. And, without attachment to the individual being of one's ego, immortality, etc. are nonsensical ideas.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2, Funny) by frojack on Thursday August 11 2016, @03:54PM
I'm sure everyone who knows how DMT works...
That would be who?
The implications of TFS is that nobody knows what the hell it actually is doing, but everybody survives.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 11 2016, @09:33PM
Now, why would a *good* person have to experience that? Sounds like the kind of thing a serial murderer and rapist would be subject to...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday August 12 2016, @07:59AM
Yes, I also found that a bit odd. I interpreted it as the speaker having some variant of a subconscious Christ complex. You know, the desire to be the sacrificial lamb that takes the world's suffering upon itself. But no one said hallucinations have to make any sense.
In the playlist I linked, Patricio briefly mentions, almost as an afterthought, that during one phase of one of his high-dose DMT trips he experienced, to paraphrase, "an infinite amount of pain", such that he believes no matter what actual physical pain he experiences in the real world henceforth for the rest of his life it will seem only a pale shadow of what he endured during that trip. So, basically the same experience as the random commenter I was quoting. Another reason not to approach a high-dose DMT trip lightly.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 12 2016, @04:40PM
By definition if he was experiencing infinite pain he'd still be experiencing it. This isn't right. He'd need to be infinitely large and have infinite power of perception including nociception to experience that too.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday August 12 2016, @06:04PM
First of all, I was loosely paraphrasing a subjective experience, so it makes little sense to be pedantically nitpicking it. Assuming you're joking, ha ha, amusing. Secondly, when you become one with not just the known universe but all possible cosmoses that could ever possibly exist in any possible reality, from the beginning of time to the end of time, which is infinite in and of itself, would you not by definition become infinitely large with infinite power of perception?
Thus, I don't see the problem. *wink*
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday August 12 2016, @06:32PM
He'd still need infinite time. We're talking about an endless amount of something which takes time to perceive, hence he'd need infinite time to perceive it all. I know infinities are hard to comprehend but that one is fairly obvious.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fleg on Friday August 12 2016, @02:40AM
thanks for the interesting post.
you might like this...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ [slatestarcodex.com]
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday August 12 2016, @08:05AM
I did like that, thanks. Very zen koan mixed with a DMT trip. I keep groping around for that damn door handle but never can seem to find it.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ