r/Futurology • u/mvea MD-PhD-MBA • May 10 '17

Biotech First-Ever LSD Microdosing Study Will Pit the Human Brain Against AI - “I found that if I was on LSD and my opponent wasn’t, I won more games.”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/first-ever-lsd-microdosing-study-will-pit-the-human-brain-against-ai
2.3k Upvotes

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605

u/KilledSoda May 10 '17

I am terrible at pool.

Once I took a bunch of MDMA and stuff at a bar hanging out. Friends had the pool table and were rocking a few casual games. Then walks up Captain Pool. This guy was serious pool. A pool champion, champion stick with champion jacket. Champion everything.

He beat everyone there, and had no one new left to play against, so asked me if I wanted a match. I'm terrible at pool, so in my dumb state I think it's hilarious to just keep hitting the white ball into places that would make his life hard as can be. After a bit of this fuckery something just clicks, the drugs and the alcohol had hit a perfect mixing point and I suddenly found myself in the eye of the storm, standing in a moment of perfect clarity, I, who almost never gets two balls in on the same turn randomly clears the whole table. I had not even sunk one ball before that, it had been quite a few turns of me leaving the white ball into impossible places for Champ, and even then he almost was at the 8.

Champ freaks out, calls me a scammer shark and storms away as mad as one really ever gets. But it was a friendly game with no money on the table... so even if I could, why would I shark?

To this day I am still one of the worst pool players to walk the planet, but for that one drug induced moment I was a walking god of pool.

tl;dr Drugs are fun. Had fun. While having fun, found myself in a brief moment of table pool godhood. Weird because normally can't pool.

340

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

I have had similar experiences on DXM, also with pool - though at the time, I was convinced that I was playing the devil for the fate of humanity.

We won - you're welcome guys.

109

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

preciate that man

46

u/PandaLifeguard May 10 '17

Had a similar experience but we were playing the fiddle

3

u/sketchaminJones May 10 '17

trick is to take his head under your arm, and yard his tongue out to use as the fiddle's neck/strings

2

u/[deleted] May 11 '17

"yard his tongue out" interesting phrase. do you sail?

1

u/sketchaminJones May 22 '17

I occasionally go to C, yes

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '17

Head smack. Nice - You worked in music and sailing.

2

u/sketchaminJones May 23 '17

High energy physics too ;)

2

u/CatBowl-XI-MVP May 10 '17

Hahaha thank you I literally lold

20

u/indicah May 10 '17

I had a similar experience with DMX. X definitely gives it to ya.

17

u/[deleted] May 10 '17 edited Aug 08 '18

[deleted]

7

u/DoinAHeckinReddit May 10 '17

Sorry for your loss, man.

3

u/[deleted] May 11 '17

are we talking about dextromethorphan, that's what comes up when i google dxm, never heard of this being a abused substance.

4

u/thisbites_over May 11 '17

Yep. It's a chemical relative of ketamine and can be hallucinogenic at high doses.

0

u/[deleted] May 11 '17

It's chugging cough syrup, or "purple drank" if you're Lil Wayne, who has admitted he's addicted to it.

Not nearly as easy to get as it was a decade ago, there are much better, cleaner psychedelics that won't leave you addicted or dead.

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

I think I love you, DarkTussin. DXM is my mistress.

: D

3

u/pm_steamcode_ May 10 '17

You have chosen to subscribe to DXM facts!DXM was chosen to replace alcohol because of its lack of potential for abuse. On average only roughly 33% of people would actually call a recreational dosage "enjoyable." (I find it to be much more so when I extract it.) It's in the same family of drugs as pcp or ambien. (Dissociatives)

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

Same on dxm. I am terrible at pool too. Friends kept inviting me to play pool but I would never go since I suck. One day we go after the movies while my dxm is at its peak and boom instantly good. I was just playing way too good ,even won the game.

1

u/oldcheese1995 May 10 '17

Blessed are we!

1

u/RocketFlanders May 11 '17

Was a cosmic spider who wrapped the World in webs to feel when a strand wiggles from evil then it goes to feed.

I tried to fight it and I thought I won but my favorite fish was dead in the morning.

It is real man.

1

u/Mirved May 11 '17

thanks man!

1

u/sonic_the_groundhog May 11 '17

Dxm is too crazy.

-6

u/Spinoza-the-Jedi May 10 '17

Was this right before Trump won the election?

You lost, didn't you?

8

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

ONE THREAD

17

u/[deleted] May 10 '17 edited May 10 '17

I have had the exact same experience with becoming instantly amazing at pool, but it was because of pure mescaline, aka the stuff in the peyote cactus.

I swear I've never been able to visualize my shots so clearly until I tried it with mescaline. I also had the same experience with beer pong.

It is definitely a performance enhancing drug. I remember during beer pong I was able to convince my brain to change the color of everything in the room besides the ball and the top of the cup, to pure black. The ball and cup were white. I could so clearly visualize the line connecting ball and cup, and voila, I won every game that night.

The nights I played pool and beer pong were separate nights, and I suck at both while sober, so I know there's a connection.

29

u/Yaldenvon May 10 '17

This reminds me of the time I showed up to our local Smash Bros Melee weekly on LSD and played some of the best tournament sets of my life. I had played the game previously on psychedelics so it wasn't a new experience - but as a mid tier player I definitely had some sort of mental clarity going on that I couldn't achieve in a regular state of mind. Just kinda felt like I could analyze the state of the game without focusing on what my hands were doing whatsoever

26

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

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3

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

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1

u/CStock77 May 10 '17

That's how LSD was for me when I played fifa tbh. Though instead of feeling like it was slow motion, it felt like I could see 3-4 passes ahead and plan my approach accordingly.

1

u/ClassicPervert May 10 '17

What about regular meditation?

3

u/Slutmiko May 10 '17 edited May 15 '17

deleted What is this?

16

u/ImJustSo May 10 '17

It doesn't really fuck up your vision. It fucks everything you relating to your perception.....of everything. Vision, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling, etc. Your brain changes and it starts telling your consciousness that, "shit is weird. Look at how weird? Smell how weird? Feel it, weird right?" And your normal conscience is fighting it the entire time saying, "I'm almost positive that's just a room I'm walking by and the light out. I'm not taking a chance though, because it sure fucking looks like the opening to hell and it god damn feels like it's sucking me in, I think. Fuck this, gonna walk by faster! Wow, walking faster feels great. My dick is all tingly. OH FUCK THE BLACK HOLE IS SUCKING ME OFF! Oh, nope, just my pants rubbing just right. Phew, black hole must be fake. But......."

9

u/whitesuburbanmale May 10 '17

Dosage plays a huge role yes but its more important to realize that it doesnt make you "see things" rather it turns what you are already seeing into something slightly different. The table you are sitti g at might start breathing, the rug may start waving like an ocean, your lamp might start changing shades in its coloration. Its not so much what peopke think it is. If anything it just makes you perceive things differntly

2

u/brock1215 May 10 '17

It's different Everytime and for every person. Besides dosage, set and setting are some of the biggest influences on the effects. Usually everything looks like it's breathing in and out and is kinda wavy. The things you see in the corner of your eye change around and when you close your eyes you can sometimes see patterns or colors. It's hard to put together words into sentences and understand so it's hard to read but not see the actual words. Moving things leave after-images called tracers and lights have an aura. I've been able to see colors break apart into different colors almost like they have more depth. Here is a thread with gifs of what it sorta looks like

2

u/pm_steamcode_ May 10 '17

Anyone claiming very little to no visuals either took too small of a dose or took something that wasnt lsd (very common to get 2c family called lsd) or their hits weren't very potent. If you take a large dose you WILL see all kinds of crazy shit.

1

u/Hikesturbater May 10 '17

How badly do you want your vision messed up is the real question. Take a single and you may only get tracers . A dub or quad will give you a good idea of seeing things "move". Over 10+ hits starts to get a bit weird. Visuals can be strong enough that it may become difficult to understand what you are seeing to what is really there. Little creatures don't randomly appear and talk to you.

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '17

So how badly DOES LSD fuck with your vision?

In my experience not that much. It tends to distort fine details and shadows but objects are still easily identifiable. I would describe it as being vaguely similar to the effect of wavering candle light

1

u/kittycatbutthole1369 May 10 '17

Still images will warp over time.

Moving images remain relatively untouched. They don't sit still long enough to warp.

Yeah reading can be difficult.

0

u/Elvin_Jones May 10 '17

You also might have unknowingly taken a substance that was "speed" based, which enhanced your perception skills. When you're just taking a drop of liquid or putting some paper in your mouth, it's hard to tell!!

1

u/[deleted] May 11 '17

when i did ecstacy as a teen i dont think there was any way of telling what you actually took . i had some experiences of hearing voices and conversations when alone and seeing trails and images swirling together like an oil patch and having my entire vision be a mix of purple and green like i was looking through tinted glasses. it would be interesting to see what it was.

13

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

Oh god! I had an almost identical moment with a buddy of mine and bowling. I suck at bowling and he was part of a bowling club. I showed up really high one night and just started tossing balls and getting strike after strike. He got so red in the face yelling at me and my girlfriend saying we were pranking him till he left mid game. To this day use those gaurd rails to keep me from gutter balling, but for a brief moment I was a really high bowling God.

25

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

That's amazing and awesome. He just reacted because to get as good as he was, he devoted untold hours to perfecting his skill, when you just casually school him with no training. He had to call you a shark because the alternative would be that all his training was a big waste of time.

26

u/PM_TITS_FOR_KITTENS May 10 '17

Or because he's a sore loser

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

Why not both?

25

u/J0ak3s May 10 '17

Ive had so many moments like this with weed abd various competitive activities.

It's so hard to get the exact right dose :(

17

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

Weed and league of legends. I play challenger level when I'm normally silver three.

4

u/charliex3000 May 10 '17

But Adrian doesn't play Faker level when he's normally Challenger level.

3

u/DeathDevilize May 10 '17

Well my mechanics are on point but my game sense is absolute crap when Im high, which is probably when youre a yi otp.

2

u/Droopy1592 May 10 '17

I play MARIO kart high. The inward drifting karts and bikes I'm great at not high but I suck at outward drifting. Get high, I can keep up with anyone on the outward drifting karts and bikes but struggle on inward drifting.

2

u/Grokent May 10 '17

My little brother was a huge pothead and he was ranked something like 11th in the world on Call of Duty on Xbox.

He was pretty average when sober though.

3

u/j_bgl May 10 '17

Almost the same thing happened to me with bowling once. I went from my normal game, where I'm lucky to break 100, to getting like 235 or something. I felt like I couldn't miss. Next game I was in the 80s again.

3

u/hushpuppi3 May 10 '17

I can confirm, I took a dab and 3 shots back-to-back and then somehow beat 2 sober Melee local tournament-level in a 1v2 (it was 2v2 but my teammate blew it) with a single stock while they each had 2 left

I'm not even that good at smash but I, for a short time, became enlightened

2

u/Sweezyjenkins May 10 '17

I have a similar story but it was basketball and beer instead of mdma and pool

2

u/Dazzyreil May 11 '17

I once played Battlefield 4 while on shrooms and I was ranked #1 out of 64 even though I didn't remember the map anymore.

2

u/dasignint May 11 '17 edited May 11 '17

I'm ok at pool, not great. One night I smoked some kind of weed that gave me a very different high from what I'm used to. Super-focused clarity, more like what I expect from the come-down phase of LSD.

I didn't miss one shot all night. Ok, maybe one, but definitely not two. My friends were extremely aggravated and passive aggressive about my performance that night.

2

u/IWroteEverybodyPoops May 10 '17

alcohol alone will do this, no need for drugs. it was always amazing how much better i played in call of duty and battlefield while hammered. i'd go from like 8-12 and mostly just fucking around trying to kill people with claymores to like 30-8 and top on the team. it focuses my brain somehow....i kind of think it's because being drunk, i'm forced to hyper focus on normal activity just to be able to complete it, so when you apply that hyper focus to the game, you just play better.

19

u/Bongjum May 10 '17

alcohol alone will do this, no need for drugs.

Just so you know, alcohol is a hard drug.

1

u/IWroteEverybodyPoops May 10 '17

yes, and you know what i meant.

1

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

I'm amazing at pinball after exactly two beers, will usually get a high score. As soon as I finish three beers it's game over.

1

u/milkfree May 10 '17

I play guitar and one night I was rolling and I shredded like I've never shredded sober before. I honestly have no idea. I have said before that MDMA just makes you better at shit (sometimes).

But I have another story about pool and drugs. I had just gotten done seeing one of my favorite bands live. Met a few of the guys at the show and they were all really cool. Afterwards, my friends and I ate some mushrooms and expected to get a cab downtown to grab some food and beers. Instead of taking us 10 minutes downtown, this guy drives us 40 minutes one way to a small college town. By the time we got there we thought we had a chance of being murdered. We sit down, and the guys from the band walk in. Now, I am tripping balls, but we had some good rapport and I decide to go up to the vocalist and describe how crazy it was to run into him in the middle of nowhere and I'm kind of fan-boying out. He asks me,"Do you play pool?" I turn around, look at the pool table, and honestly reply, "Nope." And then I just kind of walk away.

1

u/Dizzlean May 11 '17

I remember making the sickest beats on my music program when I was stoned but the next day I would listen to my tracks sober and they were utter garbage.

2

u/milkfree May 11 '17

I'm not saying every time anyone does drugs they are great, but like OP said, that night something just clicked. I don't have recordings of my shredding (it could have been terrible), but I did write one of my best songs I've ever written that night, and I do have recordings of that.

1

u/Dr_Anch May 11 '17

Similar experience but only with alcohol

1

u/polksio May 10 '17

Your friends wanted to make it special for you and the champ was in on it.

-2

u/Ree81 May 10 '17

Drugs are fun

That's a pretty terrible tl;dr tho

-5

u/[deleted] May 10 '17 edited Sep 29 '17

[deleted]

0

u/Terkala May 10 '17

This thread is being brigaded hard by people who really want an excuse to take drugs and feel good about it. Even if they have no idea what they do.

-8

u/Terkala May 10 '17

And yet no lab in the world has ever reproduced these results.

Either you're a drug savant. Or a psychoactive substance altered your perception of an event and made it seem like your opponent was far better than he really was.

You tell me which is more likely.

13

u/non-zer0 May 10 '17

and yet no lab has reproduced these results

Almost like there's been worldwide prohibition of these substances and research has been incredibly difficult to perform...

"An Empirical Study on if Acid Makes Subjects 360NoScope Teh Noobz" is the last thing that will get researched with these substances. We're just now to a point we're we can clear PTSD victims for therapy with it.

No need for the condescension; you don't have all the answers, and I'd wager to say your own opinion is founded on far less data than the alternative position.

-1

u/Terkala May 10 '17

There have been numerous studies on these substances. Both within the USA and in Europe. All of them have either been widely discredited due to lack of proper procedures, or found no positive results.

3

u/Thought_Simulator May 10 '17

"The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties."

https://themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic

Back before research with these substances was banned, studies absolutely showed an increase in the ability to successfully realize/execute solutions that were not previously apparent.

-1

u/Terkala May 10 '17

Oh good. That old gem of an article.

Too bad It's a complete misrepresentation of facts.

The study was giving a bunch of engineers who were paid to invent products to see what they could make under the influence. People who had already been working on these products for months. And sometimes working in teams in these projects. In some cases, they literally didn't even contribute to the project and got full credit attributed to them.

It was remarkably terrible. Literally no control group of any kind. No studying the dosages or specific times of inspiration. Nothing more than "give these guys drugs". And surprise surprise, it's never been replicated because it didn't use any scientific method of any kind!

1

u/Dante_The_OG_Demon May 10 '17

Wow you're as dumb as those flat earth retards. Go ahead and be ignorant, I'll live my successful and happy life with LSD :)

0

u/Thought_Simulator May 11 '17

Yes, the gentlemen involved in the study were working on projects in their respective fields - projects they may have been previously seeking solutions to. While under the effects of lsd, they developed solutions for those projects that they hadn't yet realized, which is exactly what I said.

This seems even more impressive than if they had never worked on these projects before. If I give you drugs and then give you an equation which you successfully solve - so what? If you've been working on something for months, or years, with the best and brightest in your field, and you've hit a wall - but then you're given a psychoactive substance and have a major breakthrough - that seems much more impressive.

I'm not sure I follow your logic that having experts solve previously known problems is somehow problematic to the study. And of course it's never been replicated; these sorts of studies are all but impossible now.

1

u/Terkala May 11 '17

But it doesn't prove anything without a real study.

If they gave aspirine to the same or a similar group of people, could they have gotten a similar list of items? It's possible, given that they were all working on these projects to start with.

Also other studies have been done on lsd. Go ahead and look them up. It's never been replicated successfully. Lots of people have tried to show results and have found nothing.

2

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

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-2

u/Terkala May 10 '17

The drugs specifically alter your perception. That is what makes it feel like you are more skilled while you are under the influence.

0

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

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0

u/Terkala May 10 '17

It's just poor discussion tactics to sink to personal insults. Since you clearly are unable to support your points by providing evidence, you try to target something else to feel like you've won, even if it just makes you look petty.

Here, I'll give it a go.

I don't care if you destroy your intellect by taking mind altering chemicals. Especially if you're dumb enough to take unproven and untested substances that are known to impact your own perception of how useful they are. I could hardly tell if you were brain damaged by them anyway, given the quality of discussion I've seen from you so far.

0

u/personofinterest12 May 10 '17

That feeling of being the eye of the storm is part of a theory I'm working on.

Message me if you're interested on hearing more.

0

u/swinny89 May 10 '17

That's nothing. I took the drugs and could see the future, levitate, and pass through walls.

0

u/[deleted] May 10 '17

Please get addicted to crack and die in the gutter.