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baronfulmen · 2 years

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Why you should clear your brain’s cache and cookies

A Rant About Shrooms, AI Art, Trauma, and Appreciating Life

Hey look at this image. You shouldn’t trust evolutionary psychology people because it’s often Just So Stories people make up, but that doesn’t mean we should throw out the baby with the bath water so let’s talk about the evolutionary importance of ✨PATTERN RECOGNITION ✨

Okay so the tiger in the picture above is trying to hide so it can eat us, and we’re trying to see it so we can avoid being eaten. Great. Cool. That means there’s a VERY important part of our brains that has evolved to look at noisy images and play “find the tiger”. (It works for non-visual stuff too, we’ll get to that.)

This is also how AI-generated art works, basically. You give a computer some random static and then say “somewhere in this image is [insert prompt], find it” and it tries very hard to do so, like when you point out shapes in clouds to someone.

Our brains work via committee, so the part that’s doing that kind of pattern recognition and visual processing isn’t really any smarter than something like Google Deep Dream which you can hand a picture of some dude and say “FIND THE DOGS” and it’ll give you this:

People have compared images like the one above to being on shrooms and, having now taken shrooms for the first time I can say I get the comparison. What’s important, though, is WHY this seems to be the case. So far as I can tell (I’ll say this disclaimer once, I am some random dude on Tumblr and this is an anecdote, not scientific data - your experiences and brain chemistry may vary, do your research, I am not endorsing anything illegal, etc.) what happens on shrooms isn’t you being high, in the traditional sense.

Some drugs interfere with your perception and processing of the world. That’s what I was expecting, and for a moment it’s what I thought I was getting. But instead, I think what the shrooms did was delete my brain’s config file.

So now you’ve lost all the built up definitions and stored patterns, and you look at the walls and your brain no longer knows if there’s something important in all the detail. Is there a tiger hiding in there? WHO KNOWS! And it takes all those little swirls and textures in the plaster or paint and starts over-processing all of it looking for patterns. This means you don’t so much “come down” from being high, but finish re-calibrating. At some point your brain is all, “Hey I’ve determined that’s just a normal texture for the ceiling to have, I’m not going to look that closely anymore”.

Okay but what does that have to do with trauma and appreciating life?

So glad you asked, hypothetical reader.

As I mentioned above, it’s not just visual stuff that we look for patterns in. From an evolutionary standpoint it’s super valuable to be able to say “hey I ate that plant and then got sick, those are probably related and I shouldn’t eat that anymore”. But there’s two big problems with that. The first is that as with the visual processing that one part of your brain on its own isn’t smart. It’s an algorithm, not an entire brain, so it fucks up sometimes.

I know a guy that couldn’t check his mail, because he’d been in really bad debt for a while and the fear of losing his home and the hounding by debt collectors traumatized him so badly that his brain said “Man every time we look at the stuff that comes in the mail we get SO UPSET! Better avoid looking at mail!” which meant when someone put envelopes down on top of the groceries (meaning he’d have to pick up what might be bills to get to the food) he found himself thinking “maybe I should just order pizza” even though he knew how stupid that was. Trauma is a bitch, y’all.

The other thing is that sometimes the pattern was valid but is simply no longer useful. The context has changed, and now it’s getting in the way rather than helping... but your brain doesn’t have a reset button. Well, not a built-in one... but turns out this shit does the trick:

This is a PB&J&M sandwich I ate yesterday. Ignore the chipped plate. It made me feel kinda queasy all day, and at first I was disappointed. I felt a little floaty and wobbly and things did start to look a little interesting, and I was having a nice time, but it wasn’t the mind-blowing experience I’d been hoping for. And then the shrooms finished deleting all my stored patterns.

You know that stoner thing where they’re like “dude this cat is, like, so soft. Why can’t we all just love each other and pet cats?” and you roll your eyes at them? Yeah, well, the thing to know is that’s not them being stoned, that’s them seeing the world with a fresh perspective and realizing that, yeah, cats ARE soft and we don’t appreciate that enough and man why CAN’T we just relax and love each other?

In other words, it’s not distorting your perception - it’s resetting it. You get to experience that wonder and joy of seeing things for the first time, and it’s lovely. There are so many details that your brain files away as unimportant - it’s busy checking for tigers, who cares about appreciating the grass? I had a great talk with my daughter (side disclaimer, she’s an adult and I was totally lucid by then and I cleared it with my designated babysitter first) and got to really see her as an adult for the first time. Kids grow up a little at a time and it’s wild to be able to wipe out the “yeah, yeah, that’s your kid, you know what they look like” thing and SEE them, see how they’ve grown and what they really look like as a whole adult person.

I also realized I wasn’t being fair with her. She’s had issues I won’t go into here, she’s done some dangerous or irresponsible shit like most kids have and I was still filled with parental anxiety about that and was viewing her through that filter. What is she up to? Is she acting squirrely? She hasn’t been home for a few days and now she’s all manic, is she safe? Is she fucking up? Am I fucking up by letting her fuck up?

And with that filter erased, I could see... she’s a good kid. She’s manic because she has ADHD and decided she doesn’t want to take meds. She has some issues, but she’s an adult now and those aren’t my business anymore; those are now her adult issues that she can work on in her own time and her own way. I can finally look at her as... not a peer, she’s still my kid, but as a complete adult person that I don’t need to fix and can just love and support.

It’s like Marie Kondo came into my brain and was like “hey does this pattern you’re viewing everything through spark joy? No? Okay let’s thank it for its service and send it on its way.”

And this is why people use shrooms to treat trauma. I’m not saying it’s a magic cure-all, I’m not saying that it will work for everyone, but... man it’s pretty great to clear things out. That sense of wonder and appreciation is already fading, but it’s not that the shrooms are wearing off - the wipe was an event not a condition - it’s just the normal process of my brain filing things away as “not a tiger” and ignoring them again.

It’s like those power washing videos. You scour off the accumulated grime, and then the grime starts to build up again but at least you get it nice and clean for now and were reminded that, hey, that can look pretty nice. I can see why people say not to do them too often, as wonderful as my experience was there just wouldn’t be a point in doing it again right away. Maybe in a few months, who knows.

Final thoughts and warnings

I was queasy the whole day, longer than most people seem to experience. It didn’t bother me much, I never felt like I was in danger of throwing up although I know people who have. If you’re worried about it there are ways around that, it’s caused by the actual mushrooms rather than the active chemicals so you can (supposedly) make a sort of tea and strain out the actual mushroom bits.

I tried watching some of those trippy videos, and that was a mistake. There was too much visual stimulation and the disconnect of “wait it looks like we’re flying through a psychedelic landscape of fractals but it feels like we’re just sitting in a chair” made me feel antsy and uncomfortable. Turns out it’s better to just look at something fairly boring and let your brain over-analyze it.

Have a babysitter. My wonderful supportive wife was mine, and I ended up not needing one but frankly that might be my own strange brain. I’ve always had a strong separation between the main “thinking” part of my brain and the rest, so there wasn’t really any chance I would mistake my altered state for normal life. Better safe than sorry though, especially at first.

Do your research. Don’t go for the highest dose you can in search of some crazy trip - the best thing is the mental refresh, not seeing the walls move. I took 3.5g, just for reference.

Plan for it to take up your whole day AND to be kinda tired the day after. Think of it like taking a sick day, you’re going to want to spend most of the time just laying back and dozing on the couch.

Be in a good mood, and a place that makes you feel good. Lots of people suggest being out in nature, I can imagine that would be really nice.

Be extremely cautious when combining shrooms with other things. Don’t do it on purpose - it’s not needed, I promise - and do your research if you’re on anti depressants because while it seems mostly safe there’s theoretically a chance of having a bad interaction like serotonin syndrome. My own research has implied that’s probably not an actual concern but I’m just some guy on Tumblr and you shouldn’t trust me.

Don’t use drugs if you’re under 20, don’t do illegal stuff, don’t blame me if you fuck yourself up. I will not under any circumstances assist anyone in obtaining shrooms. All I’ll say is they’re legal in some places and if you don’t live in one of those places you’re on your own. While they do grow naturally in some places, so do mushrooms that will fucking kill you - and it can be hard to tell the difference. Don’t eat random mushrooms, ever.

#shrooms #magic mushrooms #cw drug use #tw drug use #psychadelic

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