For three decades, Erowid has been the most important clearinghouse of drug information on the Internet. Among other indispensable resources, the site has a collection of around 40,000 "experience reports" submitted by users (heh, heh) documenting what happened to them while on a variety of psychoactive drugs. Now, UC Berkeley psychology researcher Sean Noah has tasked an AI with reading and analyzing all the trip reports. His goal? To "investigate the effects of different psychoactive drugs on the forms of brain activity that constrain, refine, and elaborate incoming sensory signals, in order to better understand the role these functions play in generating our perceptual world."
Essentially, Noah is looking at what people see when they're tripping to gain insight into human vision and cognition. Jane C. Hu interviewed Noah for UC Berkeley's always-excellent Microdose newsletter:
What could this work tell us about vision and cognition?
If we had a more useful tool for identifying the elemental or specific visual effects in individuals, we could use that tool to study how the brain produces visual perception in the first place. We know psychedelics are powerful tools for altering consciousness and perception but don't yet have a comprehensive understanding of all their effects, either — like how changes in brain activity are associated with their effects, or even the full realm of possible visual effects that occur. Once we have more of a handle on the taxonomy of effects — which is what this study is trying to do — we can trace them back to individual changes in brain activity. And that's actually another study we're starting right now; we'll be administering psilocybin to volunteer participants, putting them in an fMRI scanner, and giving them a visual illusion to see how psychedelics affect their brain's processing of the visual stimulus. The stimulus is basically an optical illusion, something you can perceive in two different ways — like if you remember the viral phenomenon of The Dress, where some people see it as blue and black while others see it as white and gold. Our task isn't The Dress, but it's a similar concept, where people can perceive it in different ways, and the scanner will allow us to understand how psilocybin might change that perception.'
Previously:
• How the Black psychedelic revolution can heal and liberate
• What is the 'heroic dose' of psychedelics, and how can it help mental health?
• Netflix's 4-part adaptation of Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics, 'How to Change Your Mind'
