From: phil osborn (philosborn@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Dec 20 1999 - 22:50:07 MST
>From: Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se>>Subject: Re: THC & Cognitive
>Function
>Date: 20 Dec 1999 13:50:55 +0100
>
>"phil osborn" <philosborn@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > I slipped into a completely
> > altered state in which I completely lost touch with perceptual reality -
> > like Snow Crash, literally - my entire perceptual field fell apart into
> > smaller and smaller segments and finally into undifferentiated snow.
>
>Interesting. Sounds like the lateral binding of attention vanished.
>
>Overall, drug reactions are often highly individual. There are some
>basic "building blocks" due to where the drugs bing to receptors (the
>heart rate and temperature swings suggest that the hypothalamus was
>dysregulated, for example, and the LSD trail effect where moving
>objects leave trails seem to be due to disinhibition in the primary
>visual cortex), but how they are combined likely depends on individual
>biochemistry and neural connectivity, personality, set and setting.
>
I noticed over the couple or three years during which I used THC rather
heavily that often people would have the strongest reaction on the first
occasion that they actually got "stoned." In my case, I had smoked maybe 7
or 8 times before the incident I related, but only got sleepy and inebriated
in a way similar to alcohol.
>From a systems basis, the systems theory people observed that complex
systems tend to degrade progressively under excessive stress, attempting to
maintain a normalized state. However, when you completely exceeded the
system capacity to adjust, then you could get wild, chaotic behavior as a
result. Those people who smoked a little and then a little more, etc.,
probably never experienced anything like I described because the brain/mind
system learned to adjust and compensate to the effects of the drug.
Further evidence for this position comes from some studies done in the '60's
which showed up in my Psych. 101 text around 1970. In these studies,
habitual THC users were compared to virgins. On virtually every test
perceptual, coordination, or mental activities, the following pattern was
observed:
The virgins scored lower than normal after ingesting THC. The experienced
users, on the other hand, scored substantially higher (no pun intended) on
almost all measures when stoned.
On a similar note, I tried to use mariuanna as a sedative for about a year.
It worked pretty well at first, but after the first month or two, I began
waking up and suddenly having enormous bursts of energy after smoking. I
finally began a long series of more or less random training sessions in
which I would tackle some task of mental or physical coordination while
stoned. I learned various techniques for speed shifting on my motorcycle,
for example.
I could, while stoned, mentally project myself into the bike, so that I felt
as though it and I were a single organism and every shock and bump felt like
I were literally the tires, etc. This mental modeling illustrates some of
the potential benefits of drugs like THC. The downside, of course, is that
memory is strongly state dependent. Cognitive results are rarely remembered
after a session under the drug. Physical - muscular/sensory - patterning,
however, did survive fairly well.
Unfortunately, however, the other downside is that when you are not stoned,
if you smoke regularly and frequently, you feel like everything is boring
and dull, and you can't wait until you are high again.
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:09 MST