He wants to take stimulants for their concentration/productivity-boosting effects (at ADHD level doses) and eventually LSD as a meditation-on-steroids experience that might help him “discover something about himself”. He has also discussed LSD microdosing for creative thinking purposes.
Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD? If not, he should discount any positive results reported for that population of people and and not think that if something helps those with a problem it will help those without even more.
Here are a few links he might want to dig a bit further into with his research.
This last one is kind of interesting to me for two reasons. First is the connection between working memory and discounting the future benefits one can get. This clearly relates to the incentives to have your cake sooner rather than waiting until later and getting a bigger cake. Not sure what the memory training used was (and this was a small sample size) but that seems to better serve the people than their prior drug uses did. (And yes, one can note that their drug use was not clearly directed at improving their concentration/productivity but it does suggest a correlation between drug abuse and highly discounting the future.)
When I was in grad school once of the professors there was working on a paper related to non-monotonic utility and addiction. It described a situation where the person, proceeding on sound economic rationality, finds themself in a sub optimal equilibrium. The higher discount rate this paper points to seems to fit, and perhaps provide a mechanism for the results being more long-term than temporary equilibrium.
Particularly with stimulants the body can develop an addiction and the benefits per unit dose decrease over time. That can create a very poor feedback cycle. Your son might want to give some though to his own current discounting of the future and if that discount rate is a good one to apply. I suppose a related question here is just how does one measure productivity and is there a potential problem of short term horizons.
There is a, very small IMO, case to be made for creative discovery and LSD. It does seem to remove a lot of the filters we build up so we start “seeing” visual inputs we’re learned to ignore/filter out. That can lead to new insights. I recall seeing a study that tested perception but showing the subject two pictures of the same mask. One was from the front the other from the back. People generally could not tell which was which (it was a flat black,featureless mask showing a human face’s contours). However it seems that people on LSD were able to distinguish accurately which was which.
However, dropping our filters as a way of learning about our selves or finding creative insights (art might a an exception here) is a bit like using the random walk approach to locating the best place to start drilling for oil or digging a new mine. There is going to be a lot of noise in the signal and not really very efficient. It might be interesting to read some biographies of highly creative people and what they attribute their creativity to.
I never, nor did anyone I ever knew really had some life changing/informing revelation using LSD. Most of the “revelations” anyone had under the influence of turned out to be pretty silly, or down right stupid, ideas once the hallucinations were over.
I have had more eureka type moments when I’ve suddenly connected, generally while doing something unrelated but not overly taxing mentally, two (or some series of) different and previously thought of as different and unrelated, ideas. I recall a story about Bill Gates and his doing the dishes at home. His explanation was that doing that type of menial task relaxed his mind and let a lot of his mental processing powers sort of wonder around a bit randomly. He claimed to have moved forward some stuck problems/come up with new ideas doing the dishes pretty often. In short, it sounds a bit like letting the filters drop via a distraction technique. Maybe external crutches to help remove perceptual filters are not really needed.
In the end your son is probably going to do what he wants so he may well explore the use of drugs as a means of improving things in his life. What he might also want to do is make a list of all the things that might be bad outcomes and some type of metric/behavior that indicates moving away from his targeted benefit. Your can both periodically review the experiment results. You might even have him define what criteria represents a “I stop here.” condition. A good experiment should probably include failure modes as well as success modes.
This is really good advice, I’ll pass on the research papers. He’s been doing n-back for a bit now, so has probably already achieved the working memory gains. Hopefully this will dissuade him from riskily and unnecessarily trying stimulents.
> Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD?
I don’t know. He hasn’t been officially assessed but scores just-barely-past-cuttoff on online tests for markers. I suppose that might mean he’d experience limited benefits, I doubt they’re worthwhile though.
Has he tried over-the-counter stimulant supplements like tyrosine, PEA, or for that matter caffeine? The book The Mood Cure contains useful dosing and experimental guidelines for a very wide variety of easily available, non-prescription, mostly non-”drug” nutrients or herbal supplements that can have positive effects on concentration, productivity, creativity, and both physical and mental energy levels—mostly with fewer and milder side-effects than prescription medications or controlled substances. The right supplementation can be life-changing on its own.
He wants to take stimulants for their concentration/productivity-boosting effects (at ADHD level doses) and eventually LSD as a meditation-on-steroids experience that might help him “discover something about himself”. He has also discussed LSD microdosing for creative thinking purposes.
Thanks.
Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD? If not, he should discount any positive results reported for that population of people and and not think that if something helps those with a problem it will help those without even more.
Here are a few links he might want to dig a bit further into with his research.
https://journals.lww.com/behaviouralpharm/Abstract/2010/09000/Comparative_neuroscience_of_stimulant_induced.3.aspx
https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/27/6/1069/28318/Prescription-Stimulants-Effects-on-Healthy
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322310008528
This last one is kind of interesting to me for two reasons. First is the connection between working memory and discounting the future benefits one can get. This clearly relates to the incentives to have your cake sooner rather than waiting until later and getting a bigger cake. Not sure what the memory training used was (and this was a small sample size) but that seems to better serve the people than their prior drug uses did. (And yes, one can note that their drug use was not clearly directed at improving their concentration/productivity but it does suggest a correlation between drug abuse and highly discounting the future.)
When I was in grad school once of the professors there was working on a paper related to non-monotonic utility and addiction. It described a situation where the person, proceeding on sound economic rationality, finds themself in a sub optimal equilibrium. The higher discount rate this paper points to seems to fit, and perhaps provide a mechanism for the results being more long-term than temporary equilibrium.
Particularly with stimulants the body can develop an addiction and the benefits per unit dose decrease over time. That can create a very poor feedback cycle. Your son might want to give some though to his own current discounting of the future and if that discount rate is a good one to apply. I suppose a related question here is just how does one measure productivity and is there a potential problem of short term horizons.
There is a, very small IMO, case to be made for creative discovery and LSD. It does seem to remove a lot of the filters we build up so we start “seeing” visual inputs we’re learned to ignore/filter out. That can lead to new insights. I recall seeing a study that tested perception but showing the subject two pictures of the same mask. One was from the front the other from the back. People generally could not tell which was which (it was a flat black,featureless mask showing a human face’s contours). However it seems that people on LSD were able to distinguish accurately which was which.
However, dropping our filters as a way of learning about our selves or finding creative insights (art might a an exception here) is a bit like using the random walk approach to locating the best place to start drilling for oil or digging a new mine. There is going to be a lot of noise in the signal and not really very efficient. It might be interesting to read some biographies of highly creative people and what they attribute their creativity to.
I never, nor did anyone I ever knew really had some life changing/informing revelation using LSD. Most of the “revelations” anyone had under the influence of turned out to be pretty silly, or down right stupid, ideas once the hallucinations were over.
I have had more eureka type moments when I’ve suddenly connected, generally while doing something unrelated but not overly taxing mentally, two (or some series of) different and previously thought of as different and unrelated, ideas. I recall a story about Bill Gates and his doing the dishes at home. His explanation was that doing that type of menial task relaxed his mind and let a lot of his mental processing powers sort of wonder around a bit randomly. He claimed to have moved forward some stuck problems/come up with new ideas doing the dishes pretty often. In short, it sounds a bit like letting the filters drop via a distraction technique. Maybe external crutches to help remove perceptual filters are not really needed.
In the end your son is probably going to do what he wants so he may well explore the use of drugs as a means of improving things in his life. What he might also want to do is make a list of all the things that might be bad outcomes and some type of metric/behavior that indicates moving away from his targeted benefit. Your can both periodically review the experiment results. You might even have him define what criteria represents a “I stop here.” condition. A good experiment should probably include failure modes as well as success modes.
This is really good advice, I’ll pass on the research papers. He’s been doing n-back for a bit now, so has probably already achieved the working memory gains. Hopefully this will dissuade him from riskily and unnecessarily trying stimulents.
> Regarding the first goal, is he ADHD?
I don’t know. He hasn’t been officially assessed but scores just-barely-past-cuttoff on online tests for markers. I suppose that might mean he’d experience limited benefits, I doubt they’re worthwhile though.
I likely have little to say that’s of use, but I’m curious what online tests these are now.
Has he tried over-the-counter stimulant supplements like tyrosine, PEA, or for that matter caffeine? The book The Mood Cure contains useful dosing and experimental guidelines for a very wide variety of easily available, non-prescription, mostly non-”drug” nutrients or herbal supplements that can have positive effects on concentration, productivity, creativity, and both physical and mental energy levels—mostly with fewer and milder side-effects than prescription medications or controlled substances. The right supplementation can be life-changing on its own.