Is it actually possible for psychedelics to 'fry' the brain?

Not in the literal sense but as far as the capability for negative long term effects.

Like, I always assumed that nothing like this could actually happened and it was just that people thought they would. Then I met this old ex-hippie dude. He'd done everything a lot. He said he did a huge amount of psychedelics, and even he would admit his brain 'was fried'. The dude couldn't even think well enough to (carry out)/(follow the flow of) an entire conversation. As far as the general flow of the conversation he seemed to link this to psychedelics but he was also a recovering heroine addict.

It gets me wondering exactly what kind of shit it takes to get the brain to that state.

 

its true psychedelics can cause irreversible longterm damage, just like heroin and meth. the reason this is fairly rare (except with the local old hippies) is because it takes a massive amount of long term use to reach that state. psychedelics arent miracle drugs that cure all and cause no damage. The good news is that psychedelics arent addictive, and that they dont lend themselves to frequent use. In the sixties drugs were a way of sticking it to the man, just like free sex and rock 'n' roll. People did too much, and now we have to pay for it. So long as it kept reasonable and you have a healthy respect for what youre taking, it is extremely uncommon to feel long term effects.

 

As for that old guy you speak of, I'd say if you replaced all of his drug use with alcohol use he'd be just as bad if not worse. I've found myself getting sucked into guilt traps thinking that I'm hurting myself with acid but there really is no reason to attribute it to specifically psychedelics.

Any anti-drug douche is gonna say "well yea you're frying your brain", but that's just what we are conditioned to think by authorities. Don't forget that there were massive amounts of anti-LSD propaganda in the 60's that pretty much made the entire world think it was the most horrible thing ever created...so the drug has a much worse reputation than it deserves. So while psychedelics aren't "harmless", they do have a much more volatile reputation than any other drug.

I've found that I have a slightly harder time piecing together coherent sentences sometimes, and I've always wondered if it had anything to do with the 20 hits of LSD I've had over the past 2 years. Every time I trip I notice that my normal speech mechanisms are completely broken down and slowly rebuild themselves as the trip fades. On the other hand, I have a few friends who are in their senior year of college who have tripped more than me still write wonderfully worded essays every week. Those guys might even say that it improved their thinking.

 

i think people who's brains are fryed from psychedelics have tripped too much, and have been overwhelmed by it. i know a man who tripped for a week because he got the wrong dose of acid or something. he said while on his trip, he became jimmy hendrix and toured the country for a YEAR. i guess he had no perception of time! after, he said it took him months for him to remember stuff that had happened before he took the drug. he still today is confused from it.

 

If I was that man I certainly would have picked up the guitar and learned it. Not everyone gets sucked into Hendrix's trip.

 

Unless he continuosly redosed with the acid there is no way he was tripping for a week.

 

perhaps he was given a DOx some lasting 36hrs+

 

or he could of been lying.

I think if you space out trips at least a few weeks i dont think it "fries" your brain. Really all these stories of people unable to talk/think come second hand and if some are true, i believe they are people that crammed multiple trippings in a week for quite a few times. Im not sure though.

 

During a trip the brain is brought back to the normal state of chaos, in many trips i thought that my brain wouldn't be able to get everything together again.
I really believe that it takes some effort from the brain or whatever to rebuild everything, if one does it to much and frequent i can really imagine that the deconstruction and reconstruction of the brain/mind goes wrong.. and they keep a bit of the chaos.

 

I have a theory that when people are high or tripping, its not really physically "frying" their brain, i just think that they are taking in information differently, and not as well as if they were sober. everytime you trip, you lose all that information/
experience and or practice of speech and stuff, so if you do it alot, maybe you are just set back..i have heard from people who have smoked alot of pot for ten years and they say that they arent retarded now, but they sort of missed out on ten years. So, they must be somewhat more dumb than if they experienced that time. It is all in your mind, though, and if you try hard and make yourself think, than maybe you can use it for the better..i dont know.

im not sure if any of that makes sense to you, but its just an idea. i have never tripped, not yet, but i have smoked pot alot, and i know it affects people differently, so my BEST ADVICE IS: DO WHAT EVER WORKS, AND IF YOU FEEL STUPID, THAN STOP DOING WHAT YOUR DOING, IF NOT, THEN DONT. Its not addictive so it'll be alright..

 

How you know when you are getting stupid? you do some kind of iq test every year and then make statistics from it ^^?
I mean, it's hard to know what drugs does to your mind since your mind = you.
It changes things on a very subtle level and mostly it happens slowly and only takes larger proportions when doing it for a very long time and at regular and frequent base.
I guess, other persons might be a more objective viewer about changes going on in your personality and actions.
But then again, alot of drug users develop the bad habit to isolate theirselves from the outside world.

 

This is true pellinore, but i guess im saying that if you start to notice changes, or others do-listen to them..? i dont know, its hard to say, but if you do feel like your changing in a negative way, then try something new, maybe stop doing some things that you have been doing. Sometimes if i smoke too often, i get dumb especially with paying attention and driving, making mistakes, and grades. there are ways to notice, but i would say that as long as you keep everything in moderation, nothing should go wrong.

I mean, you can die from a potato overdose lol but no one eats that many potatoes because they would notice the negative affect -just dont let yourself go

 

Is it actually possible for psychedelics to cause a longlasting negative shift in cognitive capability?

My answer is yes. It seems unreasonable to think otherwise. In fact, whenever people talk of how cannabis or psychedelics cause people to faulter, the common responses are either: Oh but alcohol and other legal drugs are worse! or But I know plenty of people who earn lots of money and run a successful life and they take drugs. Both of these responses simply oppose drug opposition:
'drugs are illegal because drugs are bad!' 'But alcohol is legal!'
'drugs will cause your life to disintegrate!' 'but HIS life didnt disintegrate!'

The fact remains that psychedelics CAN cause longlasting negative changes in teh brain just like any chemical you 'unnaturally' put into it. I wont discuss whether or not we could possibly influence our chances of having a longlasting negative effect as compared to an intense negative trip that has no longlasting effects.

I think that people are fools if they think that psychedelics, the drugs that stretch our mind the furthest, cannot wraught a man into a long lasting confusion. All these psychedelics we talk of are chemicals that are altering the system that runs our consciousness. we know that one must recover from a psychedelic trip and this implies that a physical change has occured (unless you deny that the brain is the source of the mind). If you repeat this change, or if this change happens to occur in a very sensitive module of the brain, it can lead to us learning wrong connections. we do not control what we learn, and a lot of what we learn is not something we can spit out in words.

I believe that certain mind expanded states can produce signals in cells that trigger processes that are related to learning information, and this produces a learned confusion in the mind. We recover from this simply because the sober world starts to give us signals that 'bring us back to our senses', and those superficial reactions carved into the mind from intense experience are pruned off, so to speak. But sometimes these changes simply confuse the mind to the point that it does not recover in the same way, and is out of sinc with itself, so to speak. the sycnhronisation of our brain, is a requirement for coherent speach and concentration, the main defects related to drug use. Chemical drugs can cause physical weakness in the brain, eg alcohol. Amphetamine related drugs can disrupt the synchronisation in the dopamine system. Cannabis can dull certain forms of thought, such forms are required for maintaining a structured/organised mind (though lets not forget that it can also open the way for other forms of thought). Psychedelics can open our eyes to sights that impress the same influence as hard reality, but possess added abstract weight that can forge together thoughts in our mind that clutter the coherency of our mind in various mild but unpredictable ways. The effect of each drug is variable in each neruon that it interacts with.

Thus I consider prolonged trips and seemingly permanent scars in the minds of some trippers, as the example where the above effects occur in specific neurons that are vulnerable and produce new thoughts which are not pruned away and instead play into the mind of their victim, feeding back into themselves. It may be that language and concentration skills require a spohisticated synchronisation that can be affected in many ways. although alcohol can influence people in horrible ways, it definately does not alter a persons ability to concentrate as much as psychedelics can. It is merely that there is variability involved and thus some people have the luck of having neurons that resist the longlasting effects of psychedelics. perhaps some people also have lifestyles that lead them to quickly 'resychronise; and 'prune' those neuronal changes that may inferfere with focus and attention span. But other people may have brains that are, by the contingency of the world, vulnerable to misalignment and thus a clouded or disjointed mind, to varying degrees. The structure of the mind is based on genes. its also based on how much those genes have expressed themselves (how much your brain has developed), and also on the particular thoughts that you learn to be able to have in your life. Everyone learns about the world in a different way and everyone constructs their own trees of meaning, or webs of relation. These relationships are mirrored by certain aspects of brain organisation.
The variability of psychedelic drug effects means that
there is the chance that the drug will cause an influx of thoughts
and internal representations
that intuitively deduce some sort of meaning or totally unconscious relationship which may
in itself
seem profound, or epic, or terrifying, or horrific,
but which weakens the basis of a person's coherent web of thought,
in place of that awesome
or aweful experience this person had.


But with the right training and diet and excercise and all those good but painful things, appropriate psychotherapy (not necessarily by a professional, or anyone who would call it by that name), and a sincere outlook, psychedelic burnout is overcomeable. maybe this means i think burnouts are 'weak'. but i think its sort of like with intelligence. unintelligent people are not always weak, sometimes they have just lived a life or lifestyle that does not engage them in a way that promotes cognitive development.


Since this post is long, I will not forget to mention that one interpretation of LSD effect is that it shuts of certain neurons that discriminate between 'appropriate' or 'efficient' thought patterns, and thus opens us up to a miriad of thought modes and imaginative progressions that we naturally filter out automatically. In this way, we can consider that the shutting down of these neurons may be harmful in certain neurons in certain brains, and if those neurons are related to very significant processes then the damage to the neuron could cause a chain of interactions resulting in the defect in some mental process. This perspective also shows that LSD can indeed have the propensity to near-permanently affect the interconnected structure of the mind. However, I do not personally ascribe to it with passion as of yet

 

exactly.

 

Well, the last time I did mushrooms which was about 2 months ago, I was chilling as usual through the night, I was laying outside for like 2 hours just listening to Bill Hick's stand up comedy. But, I was getting tired so I stood up real fast and went into my house and into my room.

Right when I got there I knew something was up. I dont know what is called exactly but its when you stand up real fast after having all the blood get trapped within your legs. This causes you to somewhat blackout and get really dizzy. Though, I was tripping so I wanted to let the blackout continue, I stared at my tree outside as my vision got whiter and whiter until everything was bright geometric patterns. I tried to shake it off, but at that point it was like my whole brain was scrambled, all my sences were flipped upside down and pushed around, nothing was normal. This shit has happened to me before, when I saw a show after consuming only a shit ton of marijuana did i begin to get a blinding white light that wouldn't go away.

But anyway, this shits going on, I can't contain it or even figure out whats happing, I fall to the ground and into the fetal position, I kept telling myself that I didn't like that at all, and I told myself never to let me do that ever again.

So I crawl into my bed and heres where things get weird. I slowly crawled into my bed as a loud sharp hissing noise pierced me ears. I could feel in my brain something like sparks as if there were things being put back into place. It seriously felt like my brain was a machine being repaired on, eventually the sound went away, I could see normal patterns again and I could think. See, when you blackout or whiteout, its like your memory is being erased. You can't think, you can't even recall what you were thinking about 1 second prior.

In conclusion, yes, psychedelics can fry your brain, whether it be consistent use or misuse when confronted with anatomical and cardiovascular porblems. My warning,
don't do psychedelic drugs ritually, if you start eating lsd once a week for a long time, you got something that needs fixed.

Also, when you trip or when your sober and you stand up real fast after sitting down for a long time, don't allow the chaos to consume you, other wise, you may get trapped with it.

 

would tripping once every week for a few years do that damage or are we talkin' like 3 trips a week or something for the frying to begin?

 

It depends what substance you're talking about. As far as LSD and Shrooms. No. There are zero long term heath effects. My source is the book by ram dass, the power of now.

 

What are you going to be tripping on?

 

acid or shrooms

 

Well from acid I don't think there are many long term effects, at least not in everybody. My dad has tripped for about a month straight every day redosing (By eye drops, which could cause some damage... He does wear glasses now). He did that along with numerous other psychedelics (Mescaline and shrooms mainly) and he is completely fine mentally.