Yvain, it seems like some of this is potentially answered by how this interacts with other cognitive biases present.
Re: specific delusions, when you have an entire class of equally-explanatory hypotheses, how do you choose between them? The availability heuristic! These hypotheses do have to come from somewhere inside the neural network after all. You could argue that availability is a form of “priors”, but these “priors” are formed on the level of neurons themselves and not a specific brain region: some connection strengths are stronger than others.
I would not wish brain damage on anyone, but should one of us have that unfortunate circumstance befall us I would be extremely inclined to go talk to them. I am so damn curious what this feels like from the inside! I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that the thought of having to build completely new neural connections to get around existing damage sounds like an insanely interesting challenge...
I also wonder about reasoning our way out of delusional states. The closest parallel that most people have access to would be the use of various psychoactives. I have heard multiple reports of people who have reasoned their way out of delusional conclusions on cannabinoid agonists and 5-HT2A agonists (and dopamine agonists, with lesser evidence).
The most difficult challenge would appear to be kappa opioid agonism, a dissociative state induced by the federally-legal herb salvia divinorum. Most users report being unaware they ingested a substance at all, no awareness of having a body, and no concept of self-identity, coincident with extreme perceptual distortions. I am no longer clear what Bayesian reasoning would even look like for some points in mindspace.
Edit: I thought of another relevant state: delirium induced by anticholinergics. Unlike 5-HT2A agonists where people do not confuse perceptual distortions for reality, in delirious states people do routinely believe that what they are perceiving is actually occurring. Unfortunately these states are widely regarded as unpleasant, and no rationalist I know personally has experimented with sufficiently large doses of anticholinergics.
To continue with the bias theme, how about confirmation bias? They settled on the most available theory that fits all the facts, and then it becomes part of their identity, they begin to rally the soldiers. Is their delusion that they are Jesus really that much less sticky than someone’s political party?
Seems unlikely. First, confirmation bias has its limits and normally is never capable beating direct observational evidence. Second, people basing their identity on their being Jesus sounds like a plausible idea, but identity based on the fact that my arm isn’t paralysed not that much. Third, it takes some time to associate own identity and status feeling with an idea—one doesn’t become political partisan overnight—while the anosognosic delusions emerge immediately after the brain is damaged (well, I suppose this is so, but I can easily be mistaken here).
identity based on the fact that my arm isn’t paralysed not that much
I dunno. During the period after my stroke where I was suffering from partial right-side paralysis, a lot of the emotional suffering I experienced could reasonably be described as caused by having my identity as a person whose arm wasn’t paralyzed challenged. I would probably say “self-image” instead of “identity”, granted, but I’m not sure the difference is crisp.
Interesting. Did thinking about the paralysis feel similar to (learning a good argument against your favourite political ideology / seeing your favourite sports team lose / listening to an offensive but true remark made by your enemy / any situation in which you fell victim to confirmation bias)?
I can give some personal anecdotes regarding salvia if you are interested. If I had to come up with a rationalist explanation to the experience, I would say that the affected consciousness accepts, without question, fantastically generated priors as absolute truth, and largely ignoring actual external sensory input, and even then modifying it to fit the delusion.
Do you think it’s at all feasible for someone under the influence of salvia to record their thoughts as they occur? Would it help if they do so often? For example, I write a stream-of-consciousness monologue every day on 750words.com. Would I be competent enough to write down what I’m thinking while under the influence of the drug?
If you lose all sense of self, would you still be able to understand the concept of another person? For example, I wonder if it would be possible for someone under the influence of salvia to answer questions about their mental state.
Considering the description, I’d guess that even if you were physically capable of talking to someone or writing down your experiences, you probably won’t be inclined to, am I right? Or if you did speak, you wouldn’t be aware of it.
Sorry if these questions are intrusive; I’m very curious about this sort of thing.
Considering that I provoked the questions, I don’t consider them intrusive. First of all, due to the extreme distortion of sense of time, the whole episode may occur in less time than it would take to have a useful conversation. However, I have very vivid memories of my stream of consciousness—maybe one of the main reasons that it makes such an impression is that one remembers the whole thing, even if it is difficult to put into words. I’ll recount here a few such memories; this is from quite a few years back, but many facets of it changed my mindset.
First of all, I began to feel a little bit dizzy and noticed a kind of echoing effect in the ambient sounds around me. Soon afterward, I got the impression that I was sweating profusely from my temples, and I reached up to see if it was only a feeling, or if it was actually sweat, but could not reliably analyze my hands, due to a sort of increasing pulsation feeling, like when you get up from sleep and straight into a brightly lit bathroom, but involving all of my senses. I began having difficulty moving around, due to the sensation that “down” was now where “north” used to be, so I had to sit down on the floor to avoid falling out the back door (I use the word sensation in an objective sense; at the time I truly believed that gravity had turned ninety degrees). Continuing to sit on the floor while feeling like I was pressed to the floor by centrifugal force, I became aware of whispering sounds all around the room. I discovered that the room, and all of waking life, was filled with ghosts, whispering to each other and observing the living.
Two things to clarify here: The sweating temples feeling happened consistently. Among this and other descriptions, many times “to hear” something also implies “to see” something, and yet it was not photonically visible. The best I can describe is like a subliminal HUD. Maybe more like what I imagine one might sense with echolocation. It’s to know the shape of something without seeing it. Also, I am completely aware that these impressions are hallucinations, but actually experiencing it changed my thinking even so.
Another time, I “saw” that all words were made of the word EGGERHEXE. It was as if the air were filled with a 3-dimensional crossword puzzle, and at least one letter of every printed word intersected with EGGERHEXE perpendicularly (as in, only the place where they intersected was visible, making up our dimension of words; all the EGGERHEXEs were in another spatial dimension). Even if a word did not have any letters contained in EGGERHEXE, the curves from the “G” or the straight lines from the “X” were the intersection point. And most special of all, of course, was the printed word EGGERHEXE, which was fully and exclusively made of the intersecting versions of itself, making it the “word within words”, which entered an infinite recursion. The whole time I was observing this, I heard “EGGERHEXE” whispered constantly.
Another time, I “saw” that all words were made of the word EGGERHEXE…
Heh. This is a lot like how Erik Davis describes Jewish mystics viewing the Torah as a compressed encoding of all possible texts ever, and the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, as the source of all the words in the Torah.
Yeah, not exactly—Salvia divinorum is native to Mexico—but I’ve read scholars implying that the Middle Eastern mystics often used psychoactive mushroooms in addition to generic techniques like prayer and fasting.
Isn’t it much more likely they were brain damaged in a more permanent way? Religious people who use psychoactives tend to openly praise their drugs much like they praise their gods (think soma, peyote, ayahuasca) - middle eastern mystics didn’t do that. And with malnutrition, rampant child abuse and almost no health care, there’s bound to have been enough brain damage around.
And of course, as Risto_Saarelma mentions in a comment further down, it may be possible to attain similar states through mental exercises without benefit of pharmaceutical remedies.
Thanks! That sounds fascinating, if scary. Did any of these experiences affect your beliefs and actions while sober? I’ve heard of people having life-changing revelations on LSD, for example, although I’d be skeptical of the accuracy of any beliefs suddenly revealed to people while tripping.
I can easily imagine more subtle and potentially helpful behavioral changes, though.
I have had mild but long-lasting effects from revelations under the influence of MDMA and 2C-E. The revelations were personal, not about the nature of reality. I would say that they could generally be described as resulting from a reduced avoidance of thinking about things that I already had plenty of information on, and had basically positive results. Both took some time to integrate afterwards, and the 2C-E trip was at times a somewhat unpleasant look at myself. The MDMA trip was unambiguously pleasant at the time, even considering that I spent time thinking about some fairly unpleasant stuff.
That was something I failed to get across in my reply, I guess. I feel like I owe a part of my mental composition of today to those experiences, I mean, imagining infinity is not the same as experiencing infinity, and even though it was internally generated, the memories and impressions and rewired synapses are very real. I was fully aware when the effects wore off that it was not “revealed knowledge”, but it exposed me to viewpoints and thoughts that I might not have otherwise had access to. My description of the events was my flow of thoughts during the events, not my “usual” philosophy. On a side note, as a child I had the unfortunate combination of truth-seeking and logic, and a strong neurological tendency toward magical thinking. Perhaps my familiarity with walking the line between Spock and Q allowed me the ability to interpret the otherworldly impressions with quiet detachment, while simultaneously benefiting from the sense of wonder they conveyed.
LSD is a source of metaphysical spectacle and entertainment, not of edification. It will give you a lot to think about, but it’s not a source of answers, and I mildly recommend against it if you value intellectual achievement.
I’ve understood the claims of LSD therapy to be mostly about fixing psychological hang-ups, like the recent research claim that it helps with alcoholism. This is mostly a separate direction from both entertainment and intellectual achievement. Of course psychological well-being can indirectly lead to more intellectual achievement, and an altered psychological outlook can change the set of hypotheses you will entertain as the starting point for intellectual work. No idea whether the post-LSD hypothesis pool will necessarily be better than the pre-LSD one. If it’s larger, then it might help discover some unlikely ideas that actually do pan out when you take the time to think through them off-LSD.
Incidentally, there are some interesting anecdotes that deep meditative states achieved by long-term meditators resemble the states you end up on LSD. At least MCTB alludes to this.
My personal experience with salvia is limited (2 times, one much more intense than the other), but here are my thoughts.
I don’t think I would want to try to record a salvia experience while it was occurring. While I found the experience interesting, valuable, and rewarding, it was also scary, intimidating, and awe-inspiring. It is not something I would want interrupted by things like conversation or writing. The time dilation might well be too profound for that to even work well. Also, I found noises, light, and rapid changes in sense input to be distracting. Having other people move about the room was… scary. I did not experience the extreme disconnect with reality some people describe, but it was a different mindspace in a way that all other substances I’ve tried were not. Doing anything other than experiencing it to the fullest would seem inappropriate.
(It’s possible many of these problems would fade with repeated use. I would consider such a result disappointing, and have no particular desire to attempt to produce it.)
In contrast, I would be happy to talk with anyone about the experience while on any of the other substances I’ve taken. Depending on mood, I might feel anxious or nervous about talking to someone who was sober, especially if they had no personal experience or were someone I did not know well. Some experiences I’ve had would make writing about them difficult, because of distractability, visual distortion, a tendency to stop and stare at the beauty of the pencil eraser, etc. Others would be easier. DiPT might be easier to write about than talk about; auditory distortion makes conversation difficult / distracting.
Have you read any books on the subject? There are many good ones out there. I could recommend a couple if you’d be interested, though I haven’t read much (or partaken of the substances) lately.
Thanks for the response! :) As you can probably tell, I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth my while to dabble in psychoactive drugs.
I’m not actually very curious about the having the experience itself; it sounds scary and disorienting. I would, however, be willing to endure that scary experience if it’s likely to teach me something interesting and important about myself, which is why I asked about recording it. I’m teaching myself lucid dreaming and meditation in the hopes that I’ll be better aware of my own personal quirks/subconscious obsessions, for example. A sudden, massive shift in perception might help bring things to the forefront which I had avoided addressing before.
In your experience, do drugs as a whole actually help with that, given that I’m not all that interested in the experience for its own sake?
Edit: Actually, real science books would be even better, thanks. I previously avoided drugs because Drugs Are Bad, then because Drugs Are Dangerous, and now I figure I ought to do an accurate cost-benefit analysis. And because I’m biased to think drugs are awful things which awful people partake in, I should explicitly seek out some empirically supported benefits.
I would say my experiences with Salvia were somewhat scary and disorienting, but not problematically so. I’m not quite sure how to describe what I mean here, but “scary” should be a very minor part of the description. I certainly felt no need to do anything about it at the time, or surprise that I didn’t need to after the fact. Think scary as in “I go rock climbing, and looking down makes me a bit nervous”. Except without the adrenaline, and otherwise in a completely different emotional context. I hope that puts it in perspective. Anyway, personally, I would not recommend starting with salvia, though I know a couple people that did exactly that and had good things to say about it.
I would say that drugs can help with what you’re asking about, but that it isn’t guaranteed. Of course, I didn’t go into it hoping for such results at all, so it’s probably far more likely that you’ll get what you’re looking for than not, imho. Set and setting matter a lot. On a related note, if you go into your experience expecting it to be scary, well, you’ll probably get what you wished for. Basically, I think you should do this because you’re expecting to enjoy the experience, and I think that’s an entirely reasonable expectation. I’d also add that my description of salvia as being slightly scary does not apply to any other substance I’ve taken.
For starters on reading, I would suggest Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved (aka PiHKAL) by Alexander Shulgin, and its sequel TiHKAL (Tryptamines …). Alexander Shulgin is a scientist and basically rational thinker, with a strong interest in the human mind. He’s a synthetic organic chemist, and personally invented, synthesized, and took what might literally be a majority of the synthetic psychedelics known.
Yvain, it seems like some of this is potentially answered by how this interacts with other cognitive biases present.
Re: specific delusions, when you have an entire class of equally-explanatory hypotheses, how do you choose between them? The availability heuristic! These hypotheses do have to come from somewhere inside the neural network after all. You could argue that availability is a form of “priors”, but these “priors” are formed on the level of neurons themselves and not a specific brain region: some connection strengths are stronger than others.
I would not wish brain damage on anyone, but should one of us have that unfortunate circumstance befall us I would be extremely inclined to go talk to them. I am so damn curious what this feels like from the inside! I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that the thought of having to build completely new neural connections to get around existing damage sounds like an insanely interesting challenge...
I also wonder about reasoning our way out of delusional states. The closest parallel that most people have access to would be the use of various psychoactives. I have heard multiple reports of people who have reasoned their way out of delusional conclusions on cannabinoid agonists and 5-HT2A agonists (and dopamine agonists, with lesser evidence).
The most difficult challenge would appear to be kappa opioid agonism, a dissociative state induced by the federally-legal herb salvia divinorum. Most users report being unaware they ingested a substance at all, no awareness of having a body, and no concept of self-identity, coincident with extreme perceptual distortions. I am no longer clear what Bayesian reasoning would even look like for some points in mindspace.
Edit: I thought of another relevant state: delirium induced by anticholinergics. Unlike 5-HT2A agonists where people do not confuse perceptual distortions for reality, in delirious states people do routinely believe that what they are perceiving is actually occurring. Unfortunately these states are widely regarded as unpleasant, and no rationalist I know personally has experimented with sufficiently large doses of anticholinergics.
Availability heuristic seems related, but still doesn’t explain why delusions are so much more fixed than ordinary conclusions.
I think dreams are also a good parallel for psychosis, but it’s hard to tell how good without having been psychotic.
To continue with the bias theme, how about confirmation bias? They settled on the most available theory that fits all the facts, and then it becomes part of their identity, they begin to rally the soldiers. Is their delusion that they are Jesus really that much less sticky than someone’s political party?
Seems unlikely. First, confirmation bias has its limits and normally is never capable beating direct observational evidence. Second, people basing their identity on their being Jesus sounds like a plausible idea, but identity based on the fact that my arm isn’t paralysed not that much. Third, it takes some time to associate own identity and status feeling with an idea—one doesn’t become political partisan overnight—while the anosognosic delusions emerge immediately after the brain is damaged (well, I suppose this is so, but I can easily be mistaken here).
I dunno. During the period after my stroke where I was suffering from partial right-side paralysis, a lot of the emotional suffering I experienced could reasonably be described as caused by having my identity as a person whose arm wasn’t paralyzed challenged. I would probably say “self-image” instead of “identity”, granted, but I’m not sure the difference is crisp.
Interesting. Did thinking about the paralysis feel similar to (learning a good argument against your favourite political ideology / seeing your favourite sports team lose / listening to an offensive but true remark made by your enemy / any situation in which you fell victim to confirmation bias)?
It did not feel especially similar to any of the examples you list.
The general case is harder to think about… I’m not sure.
I can give some personal anecdotes regarding salvia if you are interested. If I had to come up with a rationalist explanation to the experience, I would say that the affected consciousness accepts, without question, fantastically generated priors as absolute truth, and largely ignoring actual external sensory input, and even then modifying it to fit the delusion.
Do you think it’s at all feasible for someone under the influence of salvia to record their thoughts as they occur? Would it help if they do so often? For example, I write a stream-of-consciousness monologue every day on 750words.com. Would I be competent enough to write down what I’m thinking while under the influence of the drug?
If you lose all sense of self, would you still be able to understand the concept of another person? For example, I wonder if it would be possible for someone under the influence of salvia to answer questions about their mental state.
Considering the description, I’d guess that even if you were physically capable of talking to someone or writing down your experiences, you probably won’t be inclined to, am I right? Or if you did speak, you wouldn’t be aware of it.
Sorry if these questions are intrusive; I’m very curious about this sort of thing.
Considering that I provoked the questions, I don’t consider them intrusive. First of all, due to the extreme distortion of sense of time, the whole episode may occur in less time than it would take to have a useful conversation. However, I have very vivid memories of my stream of consciousness—maybe one of the main reasons that it makes such an impression is that one remembers the whole thing, even if it is difficult to put into words. I’ll recount here a few such memories; this is from quite a few years back, but many facets of it changed my mindset.
First of all, I began to feel a little bit dizzy and noticed a kind of echoing effect in the ambient sounds around me. Soon afterward, I got the impression that I was sweating profusely from my temples, and I reached up to see if it was only a feeling, or if it was actually sweat, but could not reliably analyze my hands, due to a sort of increasing pulsation feeling, like when you get up from sleep and straight into a brightly lit bathroom, but involving all of my senses. I began having difficulty moving around, due to the sensation that “down” was now where “north” used to be, so I had to sit down on the floor to avoid falling out the back door (I use the word sensation in an objective sense; at the time I truly believed that gravity had turned ninety degrees). Continuing to sit on the floor while feeling like I was pressed to the floor by centrifugal force, I became aware of whispering sounds all around the room. I discovered that the room, and all of waking life, was filled with ghosts, whispering to each other and observing the living.
Two things to clarify here: The sweating temples feeling happened consistently. Among this and other descriptions, many times “to hear” something also implies “to see” something, and yet it was not photonically visible. The best I can describe is like a subliminal HUD. Maybe more like what I imagine one might sense with echolocation. It’s to know the shape of something without seeing it. Also, I am completely aware that these impressions are hallucinations, but actually experiencing it changed my thinking even so.
Another time, I “saw” that all words were made of the word EGGERHEXE. It was as if the air were filled with a 3-dimensional crossword puzzle, and at least one letter of every printed word intersected with EGGERHEXE perpendicularly (as in, only the place where they intersected was visible, making up our dimension of words; all the EGGERHEXEs were in another spatial dimension). Even if a word did not have any letters contained in EGGERHEXE, the curves from the “G” or the straight lines from the “X” were the intersection point. And most special of all, of course, was the printed word EGGERHEXE, which was fully and exclusively made of the intersecting versions of itself, making it the “word within words”, which entered an infinite recursion. The whole time I was observing this, I heard “EGGERHEXE” whispered constantly.
Heh. This is a lot like how Erik Davis describes Jewish mystics viewing the Torah as a compressed encoding of all possible texts ever, and the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, as the source of all the words in the Torah.
Now we know what they were smoking!
Yeah, not exactly—Salvia divinorum is native to Mexico—but I’ve read scholars implying that the Middle Eastern mystics often used psychoactive mushroooms in addition to generic techniques like prayer and fasting.
Isn’t it much more likely they were brain damaged in a more permanent way? Religious people who use psychoactives tend to openly praise their drugs much like they praise their gods (think soma, peyote, ayahuasca) - middle eastern mystics didn’t do that. And with malnutrition, rampant child abuse and almost no health care, there’s bound to have been enough brain damage around.
That is also implied in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Or, maybe some of the Nephites returned to Jerusalem with a stash...
And of course, as Risto_Saarelma mentions in a comment further down, it may be possible to attain similar states through mental exercises without benefit of pharmaceutical remedies.
Thanks! That sounds fascinating, if scary. Did any of these experiences affect your beliefs and actions while sober? I’ve heard of people having life-changing revelations on LSD, for example, although I’d be skeptical of the accuracy of any beliefs suddenly revealed to people while tripping.
I can easily imagine more subtle and potentially helpful behavioral changes, though.
I have had mild but long-lasting effects from revelations under the influence of MDMA and 2C-E. The revelations were personal, not about the nature of reality. I would say that they could generally be described as resulting from a reduced avoidance of thinking about things that I already had plenty of information on, and had basically positive results. Both took some time to integrate afterwards, and the 2C-E trip was at times a somewhat unpleasant look at myself. The MDMA trip was unambiguously pleasant at the time, even considering that I spent time thinking about some fairly unpleasant stuff.
That was something I failed to get across in my reply, I guess. I feel like I owe a part of my mental composition of today to those experiences, I mean, imagining infinity is not the same as experiencing infinity, and even though it was internally generated, the memories and impressions and rewired synapses are very real. I was fully aware when the effects wore off that it was not “revealed knowledge”, but it exposed me to viewpoints and thoughts that I might not have otherwise had access to. My description of the events was my flow of thoughts during the events, not my “usual” philosophy. On a side note, as a child I had the unfortunate combination of truth-seeking and logic, and a strong neurological tendency toward magical thinking. Perhaps my familiarity with walking the line between Spock and Q allowed me the ability to interpret the otherworldly impressions with quiet detachment, while simultaneously benefiting from the sense of wonder they conveyed.
LSD is a source of metaphysical spectacle and entertainment, not of edification. It will give you a lot to think about, but it’s not a source of answers, and I mildly recommend against it if you value intellectual achievement.
I’ve understood the claims of LSD therapy to be mostly about fixing psychological hang-ups, like the recent research claim that it helps with alcoholism. This is mostly a separate direction from both entertainment and intellectual achievement. Of course psychological well-being can indirectly lead to more intellectual achievement, and an altered psychological outlook can change the set of hypotheses you will entertain as the starting point for intellectual work. No idea whether the post-LSD hypothesis pool will necessarily be better than the pre-LSD one. If it’s larger, then it might help discover some unlikely ideas that actually do pan out when you take the time to think through them off-LSD.
Incidentally, there are some interesting anecdotes that deep meditative states achieved by long-term meditators resemble the states you end up on LSD. At least MCTB alludes to this.
My personal experience with salvia is limited (2 times, one much more intense than the other), but here are my thoughts.
I don’t think I would want to try to record a salvia experience while it was occurring. While I found the experience interesting, valuable, and rewarding, it was also scary, intimidating, and awe-inspiring. It is not something I would want interrupted by things like conversation or writing. The time dilation might well be too profound for that to even work well. Also, I found noises, light, and rapid changes in sense input to be distracting. Having other people move about the room was… scary. I did not experience the extreme disconnect with reality some people describe, but it was a different mindspace in a way that all other substances I’ve tried were not. Doing anything other than experiencing it to the fullest would seem inappropriate.
(It’s possible many of these problems would fade with repeated use. I would consider such a result disappointing, and have no particular desire to attempt to produce it.)
In contrast, I would be happy to talk with anyone about the experience while on any of the other substances I’ve taken. Depending on mood, I might feel anxious or nervous about talking to someone who was sober, especially if they had no personal experience or were someone I did not know well. Some experiences I’ve had would make writing about them difficult, because of distractability, visual distortion, a tendency to stop and stare at the beauty of the pencil eraser, etc. Others would be easier. DiPT might be easier to write about than talk about; auditory distortion makes conversation difficult / distracting.
Have you read any books on the subject? There are many good ones out there. I could recommend a couple if you’d be interested, though I haven’t read much (or partaken of the substances) lately.
Thanks for the response! :) As you can probably tell, I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth my while to dabble in psychoactive drugs.
I’m not actually very curious about the having the experience itself; it sounds scary and disorienting. I would, however, be willing to endure that scary experience if it’s likely to teach me something interesting and important about myself, which is why I asked about recording it. I’m teaching myself lucid dreaming and meditation in the hopes that I’ll be better aware of my own personal quirks/subconscious obsessions, for example. A sudden, massive shift in perception might help bring things to the forefront which I had avoided addressing before.
In your experience, do drugs as a whole actually help with that, given that I’m not all that interested in the experience for its own sake?
Edit: Actually, real science books would be even better, thanks. I previously avoided drugs because Drugs Are Bad, then because Drugs Are Dangerous, and now I figure I ought to do an accurate cost-benefit analysis. And because I’m biased to think drugs are awful things which awful people partake in, I should explicitly seek out some empirically supported benefits.
You’re welcome!
I would say my experiences with Salvia were somewhat scary and disorienting, but not problematically so. I’m not quite sure how to describe what I mean here, but “scary” should be a very minor part of the description. I certainly felt no need to do anything about it at the time, or surprise that I didn’t need to after the fact. Think scary as in “I go rock climbing, and looking down makes me a bit nervous”. Except without the adrenaline, and otherwise in a completely different emotional context. I hope that puts it in perspective. Anyway, personally, I would not recommend starting with salvia, though I know a couple people that did exactly that and had good things to say about it.
I would say that drugs can help with what you’re asking about, but that it isn’t guaranteed. Of course, I didn’t go into it hoping for such results at all, so it’s probably far more likely that you’ll get what you’re looking for than not, imho. Set and setting matter a lot. On a related note, if you go into your experience expecting it to be scary, well, you’ll probably get what you wished for. Basically, I think you should do this because you’re expecting to enjoy the experience, and I think that’s an entirely reasonable expectation. I’d also add that my description of salvia as being slightly scary does not apply to any other substance I’ve taken.
For starters on reading, I would suggest Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved (aka PiHKAL) by Alexander Shulgin, and its sequel TiHKAL (Tryptamines …). Alexander Shulgin is a scientist and basically rational thinker, with a strong interest in the human mind. He’s a synthetic organic chemist, and personally invented, synthesized, and took what might literally be a majority of the synthetic psychedelics known.
s/salvia/saliva/g for fun.