Johns Hopkins Launches Center for Psychedelic Research
This probably isn&#x27;t the place for it, but here&#x27;s my anecdote to give background to why I think this is a step in a more humane direction than most.<p>Once upon a time, I chopped up a bag of dry mushrooms and mixed them with some general tso chicken. I really love my general tso.<p>This particular meal occurred during a point in my life where I was near my lowest. I was depressed, burned out, reeling from failure.<p>For about an hour, the world remained as it always had. Then, I started periodically feeling something akin to an electric shock pass through my body. Electricity is only a useful explanation in so far as how long the pulses lasted. On and off in an instant.<p>The shocks were like momentary flashes of comfort. In the time between seconds when those flashes occurred, the chair I was sitting on was softer, my clothes were more comfortable and I felt a glow of appreciation for the people in the room with me.<p>I decided to set a watch and eat more general tso on the hour.<p>Eventually the pulses blurred from spikes to rolling hills. I realized they happened when I was stimulated by something beautiful. The mundane became beautiful. The contrast and saturation of my vision increased. My brain streamed my visual frame buffer through a pixel shader that made everything photogenic, perfectly tone mapped. It was like HDR for the eyes.<p>Beauty is something I had never had a refined eye for. Stuff looked &quot;neat&quot;. This felt like a visual sense that perhaps existed normally in other people, but for me I was only borrowing.<p>Then my alarm went off. Time for more chicken!<p>While I was eating, we started watching dune. I was stunned by how colorful David Lynch&#x27;s dune is. Vibrant purple and green matte backgrounds. I would have told you the movie was all desert tone yesterday.<p>I shut off my alarm until the movie was done.<p>I ate one more scoop of general tso after that. Then, I laid down in the dark. I was able to visualize incredibly complicated 3d shapes. I could persist those shapes, rotate, scale and modify them while keeping the image at the forefront. This capability was clearly an enhancement. I got up, opened blender and &quot;printed&quot; some of the things created entirely mentally.<p>After I laid back down, I thought about my childhood. I thought about frayed relationships and trauma I had experienced. Every negative experience I could come up with bounced off simple epiphany after simple epiphany.<p>Prior to this, I was under a crushing amount of stress. I felt like I was being hunted, under attack in a world devoid of merit. I was misanthropic.<p>I thought about the situation I was in, and determined I was fine. Everything is going to be okay. We&#x27;re all bouncing amidst a manifold, influenced by each other. The whole of humanity, even the crabs pulling at our feet, is beautiful. Quite a few people try to pierce the manifold to transcend the chaos. Maybe we&#x27;ll never do it? It&#x27;s valuable to try regardless.<p>The evil in my life became re-framed as force that might send me towards the boundary. Approaching the boundary is the goal.<p>Even if I fail at everything, I&#x27;m better for trying, even after death.