March 20, 2014 • 35 mins
Acid Flashbacks: Are acid flashbacks real or are they merely a ghost story of psychedelic culture or anti-drug messaging? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie discuss the misconceptions as well as the real science of Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder or HPPD. Image credit: David Crausby/Flick/Getty
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Dulin, and
I want to just throw this out. At the beginning
of this episode, we are about to talk about l
s D, about asset, about psychedelic experiences, and uh, I
(00:25):
just want to go ahead and at the front of
the podcast just remindered everybody, Uh, you know, don't do drugs, kids,
use common sense and uh, and don't take anything we're
about to to discuss as a mandate to go and
try any of these powerful substances exactly. This is just
an exploration of some of the byproduct experiences that one
(00:48):
has with LSD or what has been reported. So again,
it's just an exploration of the how and the why
of LSD and flashbacks. Yes, that being said, it's not
the first time we've covered psychedelic experiences on the podcast.
We've talked about Timothy Leary before, We've talked about John C. Lily,
and we did two episodes The Scientists and the Shaman
(01:09):
about scientific research related to uh, psychedelic substances. Yeah, I mean,
there is resurgence really in hallucinogenic drugs right now, because
there there is a very good amount of information that
tells us that they can be used in a medical
setting for for various things. And again, if you're interested
in exploring that, check out the scientists and the shaman. Um.
(01:32):
I believe that's information is in there. But today we're
going to talk about really the idea of the LSD
experience in flashbacks and whether or not flashbacks really exist.
And uh, of course I'm talking about tabs, trips, white lighting,
and window panes, and I'm talking about school assemblies because
school assemblies. Yeah, I don't know any of these terms. No,
(01:55):
I mean school assemblies in this sense that these institutions
help to keep some key acid flashback urban legends alive
throughout the generations until they could be properly adopted by
the Internet. Oh yeah, I see. The first thing that
at that school assemblies was slang for LSD or something,
because it should be, because a lot of what we're
talking about is in that gray area of of recreational
(02:18):
drug use, of counterculture drug use, and uh, and that
that alone is kind of a breeding ground for for
ghost stories about experiences. Oh, I have a buddy and
he knows this guy who once did such and such,
you know, and there's some sort of wild story. And
then to your point, to school assemblies uh and anti
drug messaging often pick up on these ghost stories or
(02:40):
sort of fabricate their own scare stories about the horrors
of drugs. And you know, as is generally the case
with this sort of thing, the truth is is not
is not quite on either side of that, it is
somewhere in between. Yeah. I think a classic example of
this is the Orange juice Man. Yes, okay, so we're
talking about a's a I who's smuggling what like a
(03:01):
hundred tabs of acid. Yeah, and some some guy a
friend of mine knows the guy right right, Yeah, he was.
He was in Canada. He's about to crush the border. Um.
He had them strapped to his body and they started
question him. They put him in this room and he
got like super freaked down and started sweating, and then
he started absorbing the tabs of acid and then he
(03:22):
thought he was an orange and he started to peel himself.
WHOA for the rest of his life. Yeah. There there
are variations on this too, where he where it will
be a somebody who is again either has it strapped
to his body or he's about to get busted. So
he eats an entire sheet of acid and uh and
for those of you aren't familiar, like a sheet of acid,
it's like like little pieces of paper with little drops,
(03:43):
little little blots of this substance on it. So in
this variation on the urban legend, he eats all this
entire sheet of acid. Uh, just trips his mind out
and suddenly believes that he is a glass of orange juice,
and for the rest of his life sets there, presumably
in a padded cell somewhere, believing only that he is
(04:04):
a glass of orange juice. Now, when I heard this
story as as a tender youth in uh, Michigan, it
was a girl, some girl who you know, we didn't
have the specific name, but someone in our community who
took all this acid and tried to peel herself as
an orange. I see the peeling yourself like that one
(04:25):
has that kind of grizzly level to it, which is
which is kind of horrifying and scary. But I think
I actually like the orange juice one better because that
one is all it's a little less grizzly, it's like
it's a little less on the surface frightening, Like it's
not one of those like PCP peel your face off
and feeded to a dog kind of stories, But it
has a subtle horror to it that is that is
(04:46):
still effective because it gets down to what a lot
of the fears with acid are. A lot of the
fears around psychedelics is that I will take something and
it will change who I am. It will change who
I and how I experienced the world forever. It'll break
my brain and therefore break my universe, because what is
the universe but my uh, my conscious experience of it. Yeah, yeah,
(05:10):
I was what I'm saying. That plays into this whole
idea that you could permanently break your brain, which is
another urban myth that comes up from this idea that
seven times a charm, right, Like if you take acid
seven times, after that you are insane. Yeah, which again
that's just there's no nothing scientifically or legally to back
that up. It's just something that people said. Another one
(05:33):
staring at the sun. A bunch of hippies did acid
once and they all looked up at the sun till
their eyes burned out of their heads. I love that
one because this was a story that was picked up
by California newspapers in nineteen sixty seven, so it appeared
a couple of times in print about four students who
sustained permanent damage their corneas were just fried to a
crisp after they couldn't look away from the sun because
(05:54):
they were so incapacitated. And it was also backed up
by a mysterious spokesman for the Santa Barbara Optimological Society.
Now there's another case we do have to mention, and
this one is a much darker one because this one
does involve an actual death, uh, specifically the death of
Diane link Letter, Uh, the daughter of the famous Art
(06:14):
link Letter who his talk shows and specifically, kids say
the darnist thing that was one of his you know, uh,
the original kids say, they're understand that was kind of
his his big show. His daughter tragically died October ninety nine,
twenty years old, jumped out of a window. Felloward death,
and there has never been any direct evidence connecting LSD
(06:34):
to her death. A person present during the event made
no mention of LSD. The police toxological tests performed on
the body UH didn't show drugs in the system. But
Art link Letter became a very vocal opponent of LSD,
very outspoken about it, and he claimed that LSD had
caused her death and later that LSD flashbacks led to
(06:57):
her suicide. Yeah, and so this is this very great
area that we're going to enter into today about LSD
use and flashbacks, because you don't know what her psychological
state was before after the use of LSD. And also
this idea that flashbacks could have influenced her decision runs
counter to some of the information we have on how
(07:18):
LSD is metabolized by the body. And we'll get more
into that. And and I don't want to vilify the
late Arn't link Letter at all because obviously a very
tragic event happened in his life here. And I think
it's just human nature too. You want to know the
reason for it. And if you can put up put
the blame on something like ls D, you know, or
the culture surrounding it, I mean, that's that's understandable. Sure.
(07:41):
And you have to think about all the media at
that time. Tom you just have this, you had re
for madness, you have all these You've had the stories
of people burning out their eyes, and and the danger
in general of of of hippie culture and hippie counterculture, which,
if you think about it, it must have been super
terrifying for people at that time because they came out
of the team fifties, right, everybody's still wearing suits all
(08:04):
the time, and all of a sudden they turned around
and people are growing their hair out along and listen
to crazy music. I mean it must have been terrifying
to people who had lived their life in a certain
way and had known nothing else. Yeah. I mean, of course,
on one level, I mean, it's always no country for
old man, you know, it's like the older always going
to be frightened, terrified and threatened by the youth and
(08:25):
the things that they're into. But but yeah, particularly for
that time, there was this tide of change and and
and drastically different values that seemed to be be coming
at them. Um, rapidan, the rapid changes. Yeah, and so
and then you have you have this LSD, which is
we're about to discuss. They've been around for a while,
but it's really making uh, making its power known. At
(08:46):
the time, Um, and you had all these scare stories
that were out there, some misinformation, some some correct imforma.
I mean, at the very heart of it, kids were
taking this and seeing things, experiencing things, experiencing an altered
state of consciousness, and and that alone, you know, you
can see where that would would be threatening. Now, another
bit of urban legend misinformation about the LSD that was
(09:09):
making the rounds of the time and continues to make
the rounds today, is the idea that you take l
s D and it's gonna have its effects on your
in your mind, but then it's gonna a little bit
of that LSD is gonna get stored away in your
spine or in a fatty tissue, and then later, uh
you know, maybe months, maybe years even uh, this uh,
this LSD, this stored LSD will reactivate and suddenly you're
(09:32):
having this crazy flashback and you're you're you know, and
you're may not be at a music concert at this
point in your life. Maybe you're changing a diaper, driving
a car, and suddenly you're in in mortal danger. Um.
But that is not the case, and we're gonna talk
about why it's not. So let's take a closer look
at LSD or life. Sergic acid die ethel IMiD. Yes, now,
(09:56):
hallucinagens have been around for ages and ages and ages,
dating back all the way through human history. But LSD
is semisynthetic, so we didn't have this until the nineteen thirties.
All right, So let's look back to nineteen thirties. Swiss
chemist Albert Hoffman. He's studying the compound lesurgic acid, which
is derived from ergotamine, which is in turn derived from
(10:17):
a parasitic fungus called arrogate that grows on a rye. Now,
he first synthesized lesergic acid diethyl IMiD or l s
D back in night and he was looking into it
because he thought it might stimulate breathing and circulation, and
he thought it would have very you know, important but
but not crazy clinical purpose potential. But the test didn't
(10:38):
show anything special, so he just, uh, he just set
it aside and the company was looking for working for
sandas they abandoned further study as well. Five years later,
he's he's thinking about it again. He's like, oh, I'm
gonna look at that that compound again and see if
there's you know, see if there's something there, because you know,
I feel like there's some potential. So he goes back
and he's brewing up a new batch of last e
(10:59):
uh for to look at some more, and he starts
to begin strained, to begin to feel strange, all right, uh.
He he described it as a remarkable restlessness combined with
a slight dizziness. And while at home he was in
a quote dream like state and perceived an uninterrupted stream
of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.
(11:21):
So uh, having a scientific mind, he decided, well, I'm
gonna look at this a little closer, you know, you know,
getting closer for a closer look at the at what's
happening to me. So he took two hundred and fifty
micrograms that's ten times more than the typical minimum dose
of elity today and became delirious, couldn't speak, And so
(11:42):
initially he's panicking and he's he's asking his laboratory assistant
to call it doctor. The doctor can't find anything wrong
with him, other than the fact that his pupils are dilated.
He had normal blood pressure, heart rate, respiration. But soon
this panic goes away and he starts feeling the sense
of euphoria and again he's seemed beautiful shapes and colors,
and so ls DO was born. It made its rounds
(12:02):
through through you know, clinical explorations, but then eventually bleeds
out into recreational use in the decades to follow. Yeah,
we really see timke Larry picking this up right. He's
taking it essentially at first in a medical setting and
then taking it outside and saying, hey, let's blow open
the doors of perception with this, and uh, let's I'll
(12:24):
try to get into an altered state and access different
experiences of life. So real quickly, let's run down physical
effects and physiological effects. We're talking about increased heart rate,
increased blood pressure, dilated pupils, sweating, loss of appetite, sleeplessness,
dry mouth, drommer's speech difficulties, and pilo erection. That is,
by the way, goose bumps, Okay, head out of the
(12:45):
get their physiological effects. Hallucinations of course, increased color perception,
which I think is interesting because Oliver Sex has talked
about this time that he was hallucinating. Yes, this is
this color indigo. I think he was had a classical
music concert and he had um used LSD and he
(13:05):
was forever searching for that color. He never found it again.
I remember him talking about he had a whole cocktail
of things he took to try and sort of gauge
his his experience just right to experience and togo. Yeah, yeah,
But is this elusive color that he never found again
in this reality that was not colored by hallucinens altered
(13:27):
mental state, thought disorders, temporary psychosis, delusions, body change or
excusing body image changes, and impaired depth, time and space perceptions.
UH users might feel several different emotions at once or
swing rapidly from one emotion to another. Bad trips may
consist of severe, terrifying thoughts and feelings, fear of losing
(13:47):
control and despair. Now it's some of the A lot
of this sounds like being a toddler. It's like, I
see these these symptoms my son all the time. What
is he on? Um? Well, I mean a way he's
getting hit with all this sensory data for the first time.
Gotta make sense of it. Maybe that is what it
feels like, you know, to be a toddler or a
(14:09):
baby taking and information um Now that the dose is
metabolized by the body within a day and excrete it
in the unit and by the way, LSD the effects
actually begin about thirty minutes after you take it um
but the actual effects of the chemical will sort to
taper off as the hours passed, and so they didn't
(14:30):
tend to be some long hours towards the end. I
understand where you where one may wish to go to
sleep and then think they're sleeping, but you're not really
sleeping because you can't sleep because of the LSD. Right,
And again, of course it depends on how much you take.
But because it is so quickly metabolized, there's no trace
molecules to hang around in the body and eventually be
stored in fat or in this spine that we know
(14:50):
for certain. Yeah, it's all gone from the system in
the twenty four hours, which which of course gets into
that interesting situation where you can't really test for things
like LSD in a person's system. You're really only contest
for things like marijuana. Yeah. So then that brings up
this idea of flashbacks, which previously had been thought to again,
as you it said before, been stored in the body
(15:10):
and like that was the chemical switch that was being
flipped when people have flashbacks. That is not the case.
So you have to start to look more towards someone's
memory of the event or what they perceived and and
and begin to look at it in that light. Yes,
now I do want to add one more note here
about hallucinations. Um, I feel like Hollywood often excuse our
(15:34):
idea of what an acid trip is because if you're
like me, if someone you think movie acid trip, you
probably think if you're in Loathing in Las Vegas, even
though the various substances are involved in Hunter S. Thompson's
experience there, but you see like people turning into dinosaurs
and floors melting, and uh in this idea that you're
just kind of falling into another world. And generally speaking,
(15:56):
the hallucinations experienced by individuals on on ls, the they
know that it's not real. There's not this, there's not this,
this idea that you're just slipping completely into a dream world.
I mean, that's part of it, because for most of us,
the dream world is the only thing we can really
think of to compare to it. So we think of
a dream, we think of being lost in the experience
of the dream, and we kind of lay that over
(16:20):
the possibility for psychedelic experience. I remember a friend of
mine in school, she experienced LSD quite a bit and
and was interested in looking more into it, and so
it was not uncommon for her to attend school tripping.
And I remember one time her being perfectly normal but saying,
you know, the walls are really moving today. By the way,
(16:41):
she was an a student all through well because to
her to your point, but also kind of to her point,
most of the primary effects here are visual. So it's
going to be geometric patterns, uh in the walls, it's
gonna be halos around things. Uh. You look at a
light and then there's like the light streams this way,
or you look up at the night sky and everything
(17:01):
that's black is suddenly red, that sort of thing. So, yeah,
to your point is primarily visual. People aren't really out
of their minds. They are in their minds. It's just
an entirely different experience in their mind. Yeah, and you
know you have adjust your perception of time. That certainly
plays into it as well. But but yeah, for the
most part, we're talking about visual cues. And so when
(17:21):
we start start talking about flashbacks and the idea of
an acid flashback, most of what we're talking about is
going to be kind of visual in nature, but also
there at times a little emotional. Um. If anyone out
there has been watching the television show True Detective on HBO,
(17:42):
there's a character on that who experiences flashbacks. Based on
the information we've been reviewing here, it seems like those
flashbacks as they're presented in the show match up pretty
well with what is often reported. So it's not like
demons bounding out of the walls or anything, but it's
things like like the light seeming to sort of sne
are around you, or or a geometric pattern emerging, that
(18:03):
sort of thing. You're not just stuck in a spiral
that's of psychedelic colors or Yeah. And it's certainly not
like the exploitation film of Blue Sunshine where individuals who
took acid a decade earlier or suddenly turned into bald,
raving psychotics and started like running all over the place. Um,
(18:24):
which again that that was a movie that very much
was exploiting all these scare stories from the previous decade.
So let's start talking about some of the numbers here
when we're actually talking about acid flashbacks, because again we're
getting into that area of of urban folklore, into that
area of ghost story. Everyone is going to have some
sort of story about people experiencing flashbacks, but how many
(18:44):
people really self report having them? How many people actually
have something that we can clinically call a flashback event?
So studies carried out in nineteen seventy to claim that
one in four psychedelic users experienced flashbacks, with fifty seven
percent experiencing pleasant flashbacks and only eleven percent experiencing very
(19:06):
frightening flashbacks. Meanwhile, modern psychiatrist Henry David Abraham claims that
while only five percent of all city users are actually
experiencing hallucogenic episodes, as many as six of frequent users
may report some sort of flashback. So we we have
to end up separating two different things here. One is
the feeling that you had a flashback or a self
(19:28):
report of a flashback. Uh that may or may not
have anything to do with your actual um neural architecture. Again,
the psychedelic experience is going to be very subjective. Memory
is very subjective, So you're gonna have somebody who claims, well, like,
you know, an hour after I tripped, I had to
I saw something kind of weird or I felt something
(19:48):
kind of weird or a day after I tripped, And indeed,
most of the flashbacks that are reported are falling in
that window of time, like the first couple of days
following the use of the substance, not ten years on
the line. And psychiatrist John Halpern said that most studies
don't make clear if other drugs were involved or if
participants had other psychiatric conditions at the time, So we
(20:11):
may have some data on it, but it's not clear,
you know, if if some of this stuff was moving
the needle a couple of degrees. And there's also the
question about if it really is a flashback or just
a provocative memory, because memory is fallible, as we know,
and you know, you can get an intense sensation sometimes,
(20:33):
do you call that a flashback? Um? You know, part
of it is our inability to really define what a
flashback is. Yeah, because we just if we experienced suddenly
we're setting on our desk and we remember like a painfully,
um embarrassing moment from our past and we're kind of like, uh,
you know, we actually feel the embarrassment in our bodies
in the you know, in a sense, that's kind of
(20:53):
a flashback. But there's nothing magical about that there's nothing
psychedelic about that. But what if you're suddenly remembering the
time the night sky became dark red? You know, suddenly
you're adding in that level of of the psychedelic. You're
adding in that that's script and you have a reason
for it. You're like, oh, maybe that was an asset flashback.
(21:15):
Maybe that's that's what that was. And also, again, memory
is foul will. Every time you take that memory out,
you're changing it. So over time, you're you're you're you're
making that even more of a concrete flashback memory. Uh,
as far as your own experience goes. And uh, it's
also worth noting that you don't need a psychedelic substance
(21:36):
to have a flashback. Traumatic or intensely emotional memories have
a tendency to stick with us in ways that normal
memories do not. And uh and and uh and certainly
one can experience an intense traumatic flashback. Uh. You know
this is part and partial to PTSD. So so these
aren't due to foreign substances in our brain, but rather
the effects of experience on our mental state. Okay, now
(21:59):
another again, you already mentioned how there are other factors
that can play you know, they are often not recorded.
What was else was the individual using what was their
existing mental state, or they predisposed to any kind of
psychotic episodes or what have you that the that the
LSD might have triggered. And also we mentioned how long
LSD tends to make people stay awake. That's another thing.
(22:21):
If you've if you've taken LSD and you have stayed
awake all night, you find yourself perhaps a little sleep deprived.
And that's another thing that can that can experience that
can affect your experience of the of the real world. Well,
there's also the aspect of suggestibility, right, because you're talking
about cebio effect. So if you are um thinking that
you're going to have these flashbacks, are very possible that
(22:43):
you may take out some of these memories and examine
them in that context. Yeah, and if you find yourself
paranoid about, oh did I just break my brain? That
was really cool looking? But what kind of harm have
I done to myself? And then you start looking for
these and uh, altered perception. I mean, that's what the
whole experience is about. So you've just previously experienced things
in the world differently than normal. Maybe you've noticed details
(23:05):
in your surroundings that were not obvious beforehand, and you
notice those again when you're not tripping. That can lead
to an interpretation, a self interpretation of a flashback, especially
if you're slowing down that mental process, right, if you're
thinking about it in that context and you're really looking
at the world around you. Yeah, Like think of some
(23:27):
of these optical illusions we've discussed before, where you just
look at it, you don't see it, but once you
see it, you cannot un see it. And so arguably
some flashback experiences are like that. You know, you've you've
seen the pattern, the face pattern in the wall, and
then it's kind of impossible to not see it. But
that is not necessarily a flashback, is just to call
back to an altered perception well, and to confuse matters.
(23:50):
Sometimes people have psychological breakthroughs, personal breakthroughs in their own
narrative in the world right, and they see things in
a different way. They may have more of a true
with them putting that in quote um that they are
hooked into. Now. So if that perception of the world
as well as your your sensory perception is all sort
(24:11):
of intertwined, then it makes it kind of hard to
unravel that and see things for what they are. Uh.
And that being said, though, there is something called the
hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, and we're gonna take a quick buick.
When we'll get back, we will explore what that is.
(24:34):
All right, We're back, and we're going to talk about
something called hallucination persisting perception disorder hpp D. This is
a sudden change in perception that occurs in some LSD
users months or years after the discontinued use. UM. It
is linked to, of course, persistent LSD use and it
has nothing to do with the build up of the
(24:54):
molecules of LSD in the body. And we've said that before,
but it bears mentioning again. And we don't underst dan
exactly what is going on with it, in the same
way that we don't have the clearest idea of how
LSD actually works uh in the mind. But people have
been studying it and uh and it is uh. I mean,
you could arguably say that this is the true LSD flashback,
(25:17):
Like we have all of these uh, these ghost stories
and urban legends, but this is where it actually comes together. Yeah,
And psychiatrist John Halpern had reviewed a bunch of scientific
literature on the matter, and he found that most studies
provided too little information to estimate the actual prevalence of
hpp D in the population. Now, Henry David Abraham says
(25:39):
maybe one person twenty will develop serious, continuous problems related
to the hallucinogenic experience. But he says that's pretty much
true of any drug use. So again, it's hard to
figure out where flashbacks begin and hpp D picks up,
and what exactly, UM defines hpp D. Yeah, but to
sort of give a sort of basic eye idea, UM,
(26:01):
one woman he was treating to thirty tabs of LSD
over the course of a year at age eighteen and
then went on to have flashback experiences for thirteen years.
But but then again, you know, you look at other
famous drug users like Timothy Learry when when he was
asked about the whole seven times makes you crazy thing.
I read that he said, well, I've taken it three
(26:21):
and eleven times, and you know, obviously I'm not crazy.
Of course that of course, it's it's kind of subjective
statement too. I'm sure there were people at the time
and today that would say, well, maybe Timothy Learry was
a little crazy. Um, but there you go. And some
of these experiences we're talking about, like trails following moving
objects a television, like static applied to the field of
(26:42):
vision and color changes. So this is what we're talking about.
We're talking about hp p D, And there are a
couple of different schools of thought here when it comes
to hpp D. Some people think that it's a kind
of post traumatic stress that the mind is undergoing, so
again it's taking out that memory and perhaps reacting to it.
While others think that the the extensive use of LSD
(27:05):
may have actually changed the brain's morphology. Yeah, Like, for instance,
if you're going to look at the post traumatic angle
on this the fear angle, you could imagine, say someone
has maybe an aversion of cockroaches anyway, and then they
see a bunch of cockroaches while they're on LSD, Like
that could be the kind of traumatic experience and ultimately
(27:25):
a psychedelic experience that one might have flashbacks too. Yeah,
And Abraham says that at the core, you know, even
though we're not entirely sure what HPPD is or how
it's really acting on the brain, he said that the
core is in an imbalance within the inhibitory circuits of
the visual processing system. So again that preoccupation with the
cockroa which is very much a symbolic representation representation of
(27:48):
the visual system right right now, the inhibitory circuits of
the visual processing system. Uh, what does that mean? Right? Uh?
We talked about the curious way that we see things
before and how it's not just simply matter of my
eyeballs or cameras and they in the camera footage goes
into my brain where there's like a little me that
watches it on a on a screen. No, the version
(28:09):
of reality that we see is just a is exactly
that a version of reality as picked up by these
these limited side organs and passed onto this limited brain. Yeah,
because you think about it, there's so much data to
take in that you kind of have walls up. That's
the inhibitory circuit is saying, okay, we don't need to
let everything through here, just what's important. So the idea
(28:32):
is is that hpp D, you might have some of
those walls coming down. In other words, you're taking in
a lot of data in your brain, as we know,
gets a little overwhelmed sometimes when it has too much data,
and when it doesn't have enough data, it also tends
to hallucinate. Right, we have to see things to understand
the world, but we have to unsee things as well.
(28:53):
Like right now, I'm looking at you, and I have
a clear vision of your face. No our producer is
in the corner of my vision. I do not have
a clear vision of his face. This changes if I
look to know, and then changes back if I look
to you. In the same way, if I look at
this light, I see the light. I look over here,
I don't see it as clearly. But if if the
inhibitory circuits are off, then I may look at this
(29:15):
light and then look over here, and the light from
the light comes with me to the next thing I
look at, and suddenly Noel's face is glowing like an
angel of the heaven. Yeah, there's a visual constancy that
we're trying to establish, and there's lots of things that
can get in the way. That we've talked about Charles
Bonnet syndrome. We talked about lesions on the brain in
which the circuits get a bit crossed and the brain
start to hallucinate. Things we've talked about not even having
(29:39):
enough auditory stimulation. We talked about this in the episode
The Quietest Room in the World, in which your brain
will begin to hallucinate sounds if it doesn't have what
it needs. So there really is a balance that can
be tipped pretty easily. Yeah. One of the best analogies
I ran across through this, uh and this was this
(30:00):
was in the New Yorker article A Trip That Lasts Forever,
which was about hpp D. UM. They talked about the
muddled paint brush theory. And this is the idea that
if the brain is like a paint brush, then h
p p D appears to make the bristle sticky, and
this makes old stimuli colors, shapes, and motions muddy the news.
(30:21):
So again, your brain is seeing things, but it hasn't
stopped unseeing the thing. It just salt and uh. And
again this is the this version of it, this and
this uh, this view of h p p D seems
to be what they set out to portray when you
have this character to Matthew McConaughey character Detective rust Coal, uh,
seeing light sort of bleed through his vision at times.
(30:44):
Now it is treatable, but there's there's not a lot
of stuff out there for it. There's a paper called
Clanaza PAM Treatment of Life Search Acids I have amide
and douce hallucinogen persisting perception disorder with anxiety features, and
that found that eighteen patients suffering from LSD induced HPPD
did find relief using clonaze palm over six month period
(31:08):
in which that drug was administered. So therapy also seems
to help. But I will tell you one thing that
does not, and that is cannabis apparently. Yeah, so there
are certain things that people should not take. All right.
So there you have it, acid flashbacks, LSD, little information
about how this works, how we we think it works,
and some of the various explanations for psychedelic experience and
(31:31):
uh and these supposed psychedelic flashbacks. Um, if if the
passes any indication, I'm sure some people will say, oh,
you shouldn't have talked about any of this. This is
gonna make people want to do drugs. Likewise, some people
are gonna say, oh, you're scaring people away from trying
new experiences. But um, but I would I would hope that, Yeah,
this is kind of a scare story because these are
(31:52):
powerful substances. We've talked about this before. Uh, whether you're
talking about acid or or psilocybin in a magic mushroom.
H these are powerful substances that have an intense effect
on perceptions of reality, and no matter where you're coming from,
they definitely should not be considered lightly. So you can
take the the acid flashback thing as a cautionary tale
(32:14):
if you like, because Uh, people do experience this and
it's not always pleasant. Also think it's interesting as another
viewpoint into the brain and memory and and how we
consume information and interpret it later on. And I would
love to see some studies if it's possible that you
could take um experiences of flashbacks or HPPD and then
(32:38):
line them up with other hallucinations people have had, whether
or not Charles Bonnet syndrome or or some other circumstance
which created a hallucination in the brain, to see if
there's some sort of thread through all of these. Yeah,
and uh and and again. Hallucinations occur for a variety
of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with
(32:59):
illicit subf sences. Uh. And and again, our perception of
reality itself is a form of hallucination. Yeah, and I
was just thinking too. I mean, even something like Stenhall syndrome,
when you look at a beautiful piece of art and
you're overwhelmed, and sometimes people see things or they're seeing
colors in different ways, that is a kind of hallucination.
In fact, one of the studies I was looking at
(33:19):
here made a direct comparison between of supposed acid flashbacks
of definitely of the lighter kind, not full blown hpp
D experiences, but the sort of lighter shade of acid
flashback as directly relatable to Stendhall syndrome or Jerusalem syndrome,
where you're suddenly just overwhelmed by a piece of art
or an historic landmark and you feel this intense bodily experience.
(33:42):
And I think if I would wager to bet that
pretty much everybody has had some sort of it's not
experience Stenhol or Jerusalem syndrome experience, but some sort of
overwhelming feeling at one point in their life in which
they were completely stone cold sober and they had an
altered state. Um. And I would love to hear from
(34:04):
you guys about that. It was the one thing. Was
it a piece of art? Was it just a piece
of music that puts you into that kind of state. Indeed,
all right, so you wanna let us know about this,
you want to get in touch with us, well, there
are a number of ways to do it. You will
not find us on the astral plane, but you will
find us at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
(34:24):
You will find all the podcasts there, you will find
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there are photos there. Because we still get people who
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And if you don't, like you have a very specific
idea of what we look like, don't go and look
at those photos. I don't want at least very jarring
to people it is then, and I don't want to,
you know, spoil your your imagined idea, because I've mentioned before,
(34:47):
I hate it when I'm reading a book and it's
like halfway through that the author mentions that the character
has a mustache, and I'm like, no, they didn't, they
didn't have a mustache earlier in the book. If you
if that character has a mustache, you need to mention
that page one because other wise I'm going to just
have to reject your idea that they have a muthtack?
Are you keeping that mustache by the way, um for now?
But now it's a nice handlebar. Find us on Facebook,
(35:10):
find us on Tumbler, find us on Twitter, find us
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(35:35):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Dulin, and
I want to just throw this out. At the beginning
of this episode, we are about to talk about l
s D, about asset, about psychedelic experiences, and uh, I
(00:25):
just want to go ahead and at the front of
the podcast just remindered everybody, Uh, you know, don't do drugs, kids,
use common sense and uh, and don't take anything we're
about to to discuss as a mandate to go and
try any of these powerful substances exactly. This is just
an exploration of some of the byproduct experiences that one
(00:48):
has with LSD or what has been reported. So again,
it's just an exploration of the how and the why
of LSD and flashbacks. Yes, that being said, it's not
the first time we've covered psychedelic experiences on the podcast.
We've talked about Timothy Leary before, We've talked about John C. Lily,
and we did two episodes The Scientists and the Shaman
(01:09):
about scientific research related to uh, psychedelic substances. Yeah, I mean,
there is resurgence really in hallucinogenic drugs right now, because
there there is a very good amount of information that
tells us that they can be used in a medical
setting for for various things. And again, if you're interested
in exploring that, check out the scientists and the shaman. Um.
(01:32):
I believe that's information is in there. But today we're
going to talk about really the idea of the LSD
experience in flashbacks and whether or not flashbacks really exist.
And uh, of course I'm talking about tabs, trips, white lighting,
and window panes, and I'm talking about school assemblies because
school assemblies. Yeah, I don't know any of these terms. No,
(01:55):
I mean school assemblies in this sense that these institutions
help to keep some key acid flashback urban legends alive
throughout the generations until they could be properly adopted by
the Internet. Oh yeah, I see. The first thing that
at that school assemblies was slang for LSD or something,
because it should be, because a lot of what we're
talking about is in that gray area of of recreational
(02:18):
drug use, of counterculture drug use, and uh, and that
that alone is kind of a breeding ground for for
ghost stories about experiences. Oh, I have a buddy and
he knows this guy who once did such and such,
you know, and there's some sort of wild story. And
then to your point, to school assemblies uh and anti
drug messaging often pick up on these ghost stories or
(02:40):
sort of fabricate their own scare stories about the horrors
of drugs. And you know, as is generally the case
with this sort of thing, the truth is is not
is not quite on either side of that, it is
somewhere in between. Yeah. I think a classic example of
this is the Orange juice Man. Yes, okay, so we're
talking about a's a I who's smuggling what like a
(03:01):
hundred tabs of acid. Yeah, and some some guy a
friend of mine knows the guy right right, Yeah, he was.
He was in Canada. He's about to crush the border. Um.
He had them strapped to his body and they started
question him. They put him in this room and he
got like super freaked down and started sweating, and then
he started absorbing the tabs of acid and then he
(03:22):
thought he was an orange and he started to peel himself.
WHOA for the rest of his life. Yeah. There there
are variations on this too, where he where it will
be a somebody who is again either has it strapped
to his body or he's about to get busted. So
he eats an entire sheet of acid and uh and
for those of you aren't familiar, like a sheet of acid,
it's like like little pieces of paper with little drops,
(03:43):
little little blots of this substance on it. So in
this variation on the urban legend, he eats all this
entire sheet of acid. Uh, just trips his mind out
and suddenly believes that he is a glass of orange juice,
and for the rest of his life sets there, presumably
in a padded cell somewhere, believing only that he is
(04:04):
a glass of orange juice. Now, when I heard this
story as as a tender youth in uh, Michigan, it
was a girl, some girl who you know, we didn't
have the specific name, but someone in our community who
took all this acid and tried to peel herself as
an orange. I see the peeling yourself like that one
(04:25):
has that kind of grizzly level to it, which is
which is kind of horrifying and scary. But I think
I actually like the orange juice one better because that
one is all it's a little less grizzly, it's like
it's a little less on the surface frightening, Like it's
not one of those like PCP peel your face off
and feeded to a dog kind of stories, But it
has a subtle horror to it that is that is
(04:46):
still effective because it gets down to what a lot
of the fears with acid are. A lot of the
fears around psychedelics is that I will take something and
it will change who I am. It will change who
I and how I experienced the world forever. It'll break
my brain and therefore break my universe, because what is
the universe but my uh, my conscious experience of it. Yeah, yeah,
(05:10):
I was what I'm saying. That plays into this whole
idea that you could permanently break your brain, which is
another urban myth that comes up from this idea that
seven times a charm, right, Like if you take acid
seven times, after that you are insane. Yeah, which again
that's just there's no nothing scientifically or legally to back
that up. It's just something that people said. Another one
(05:33):
staring at the sun. A bunch of hippies did acid
once and they all looked up at the sun till
their eyes burned out of their heads. I love that
one because this was a story that was picked up
by California newspapers in nineteen sixty seven, so it appeared
a couple of times in print about four students who
sustained permanent damage their corneas were just fried to a
crisp after they couldn't look away from the sun because
(05:54):
they were so incapacitated. And it was also backed up
by a mysterious spokesman for the Santa Barbara Optimological Society.
Now there's another case we do have to mention, and
this one is a much darker one because this one
does involve an actual death, uh, specifically the death of
Diane link Letter, Uh, the daughter of the famous Art
(06:14):
link Letter who his talk shows and specifically, kids say
the darnist thing that was one of his you know, uh,
the original kids say, they're understand that was kind of
his his big show. His daughter tragically died October ninety nine,
twenty years old, jumped out of a window. Felloward death,
and there has never been any direct evidence connecting LSD
(06:34):
to her death. A person present during the event made
no mention of LSD. The police toxological tests performed on
the body UH didn't show drugs in the system. But
Art link Letter became a very vocal opponent of LSD,
very outspoken about it, and he claimed that LSD had
caused her death and later that LSD flashbacks led to
(06:57):
her suicide. Yeah, and so this is this very great
area that we're going to enter into today about LSD
use and flashbacks, because you don't know what her psychological
state was before after the use of LSD. And also
this idea that flashbacks could have influenced her decision runs
counter to some of the information we have on how
(07:18):
LSD is metabolized by the body. And we'll get more
into that. And and I don't want to vilify the
late Arn't link Letter at all because obviously a very
tragic event happened in his life here. And I think
it's just human nature too. You want to know the
reason for it. And if you can put up put
the blame on something like ls D, you know, or
the culture surrounding it, I mean, that's that's understandable. Sure.
(07:41):
And you have to think about all the media at
that time. Tom you just have this, you had re
for madness, you have all these You've had the stories
of people burning out their eyes, and and the danger
in general of of of hippie culture and hippie counterculture, which,
if you think about it, it must have been super
terrifying for people at that time because they came out
of the team fifties, right, everybody's still wearing suits all
(08:04):
the time, and all of a sudden they turned around
and people are growing their hair out along and listen
to crazy music. I mean it must have been terrifying
to people who had lived their life in a certain
way and had known nothing else. Yeah. I mean, of course,
on one level, I mean, it's always no country for
old man, you know, it's like the older always going
to be frightened, terrified and threatened by the youth and
(08:25):
the things that they're into. But but yeah, particularly for
that time, there was this tide of change and and
and drastically different values that seemed to be be coming
at them. Um, rapidan, the rapid changes. Yeah, and so
and then you have you have this LSD, which is
we're about to discuss. They've been around for a while,
but it's really making uh, making its power known. At
(08:46):
the time, Um, and you had all these scare stories
that were out there, some misinformation, some some correct imforma.
I mean, at the very heart of it, kids were
taking this and seeing things, experiencing things, experiencing an altered
state of consciousness, and and that alone, you know, you
can see where that would would be threatening. Now, another
bit of urban legend misinformation about the LSD that was
(09:09):
making the rounds of the time and continues to make
the rounds today, is the idea that you take l
s D and it's gonna have its effects on your
in your mind, but then it's gonna a little bit
of that LSD is gonna get stored away in your
spine or in a fatty tissue, and then later, uh
you know, maybe months, maybe years even uh, this uh,
this LSD, this stored LSD will reactivate and suddenly you're
(09:32):
having this crazy flashback and you're you're you know, and
you're may not be at a music concert at this
point in your life. Maybe you're changing a diaper, driving
a car, and suddenly you're in in mortal danger. Um.
But that is not the case, and we're gonna talk
about why it's not. So let's take a closer look
at LSD or life. Sergic acid die ethel IMiD. Yes, now,
(09:56):
hallucinagens have been around for ages and ages and ages,
dating back all the way through human history. But LSD
is semisynthetic, so we didn't have this until the nineteen thirties.
All right, So let's look back to nineteen thirties. Swiss
chemist Albert Hoffman. He's studying the compound lesurgic acid, which
is derived from ergotamine, which is in turn derived from
(10:17):
a parasitic fungus called arrogate that grows on a rye. Now,
he first synthesized lesergic acid diethyl IMiD or l s
D back in night and he was looking into it
because he thought it might stimulate breathing and circulation, and
he thought it would have very you know, important but
but not crazy clinical purpose potential. But the test didn't
(10:38):
show anything special, so he just, uh, he just set
it aside and the company was looking for working for
sandas they abandoned further study as well. Five years later,
he's he's thinking about it again. He's like, oh, I'm
gonna look at that that compound again and see if
there's you know, see if there's something there, because you know,
I feel like there's some potential. So he goes back
and he's brewing up a new batch of last e
(10:59):
uh for to look at some more, and he starts
to begin strained, to begin to feel strange, all right, uh.
He he described it as a remarkable restlessness combined with
a slight dizziness. And while at home he was in
a quote dream like state and perceived an uninterrupted stream
of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.
(11:21):
So uh, having a scientific mind, he decided, well, I'm
gonna look at this a little closer, you know, you know,
getting closer for a closer look at the at what's
happening to me. So he took two hundred and fifty
micrograms that's ten times more than the typical minimum dose
of elity today and became delirious, couldn't speak, And so
(11:42):
initially he's panicking and he's he's asking his laboratory assistant
to call it doctor. The doctor can't find anything wrong
with him, other than the fact that his pupils are dilated.
He had normal blood pressure, heart rate, respiration. But soon
this panic goes away and he starts feeling the sense
of euphoria and again he's seemed beautiful shapes and colors,
and so ls DO was born. It made its rounds
(12:02):
through through you know, clinical explorations, but then eventually bleeds
out into recreational use in the decades to follow. Yeah,
we really see timke Larry picking this up right. He's
taking it essentially at first in a medical setting and
then taking it outside and saying, hey, let's blow open
the doors of perception with this, and uh, let's I'll
(12:24):
try to get into an altered state and access different
experiences of life. So real quickly, let's run down physical
effects and physiological effects. We're talking about increased heart rate,
increased blood pressure, dilated pupils, sweating, loss of appetite, sleeplessness,
dry mouth, drommer's speech difficulties, and pilo erection. That is,
by the way, goose bumps, Okay, head out of the
(12:45):
get their physiological effects. Hallucinations of course, increased color perception,
which I think is interesting because Oliver Sex has talked
about this time that he was hallucinating. Yes, this is
this color indigo. I think he was had a classical
music concert and he had um used LSD and he
(13:05):
was forever searching for that color. He never found it again.
I remember him talking about he had a whole cocktail
of things he took to try and sort of gauge
his his experience just right to experience and togo. Yeah, yeah,
But is this elusive color that he never found again
in this reality that was not colored by hallucinens altered
(13:27):
mental state, thought disorders, temporary psychosis, delusions, body change or
excusing body image changes, and impaired depth, time and space perceptions.
UH users might feel several different emotions at once or
swing rapidly from one emotion to another. Bad trips may
consist of severe, terrifying thoughts and feelings, fear of losing
(13:47):
control and despair. Now it's some of the A lot
of this sounds like being a toddler. It's like, I
see these these symptoms my son all the time. What
is he on? Um? Well, I mean a way he's
getting hit with all this sensory data for the first time.
Gotta make sense of it. Maybe that is what it
feels like, you know, to be a toddler or a
(14:09):
baby taking and information um Now that the dose is
metabolized by the body within a day and excrete it
in the unit and by the way, LSD the effects
actually begin about thirty minutes after you take it um
but the actual effects of the chemical will sort to
taper off as the hours passed, and so they didn't
(14:30):
tend to be some long hours towards the end. I
understand where you where one may wish to go to
sleep and then think they're sleeping, but you're not really
sleeping because you can't sleep because of the LSD. Right,
And again, of course it depends on how much you take.
But because it is so quickly metabolized, there's no trace
molecules to hang around in the body and eventually be
stored in fat or in this spine that we know
(14:50):
for certain. Yeah, it's all gone from the system in
the twenty four hours, which which of course gets into
that interesting situation where you can't really test for things
like LSD in a person's system. You're really only contest
for things like marijuana. Yeah. So then that brings up
this idea of flashbacks, which previously had been thought to again,
as you it said before, been stored in the body
(15:10):
and like that was the chemical switch that was being
flipped when people have flashbacks. That is not the case.
So you have to start to look more towards someone's
memory of the event or what they perceived and and
and begin to look at it in that light. Yes,
now I do want to add one more note here
about hallucinations. Um, I feel like Hollywood often excuse our
(15:34):
idea of what an acid trip is because if you're
like me, if someone you think movie acid trip, you
probably think if you're in Loathing in Las Vegas, even
though the various substances are involved in Hunter S. Thompson's
experience there, but you see like people turning into dinosaurs
and floors melting, and uh in this idea that you're
just kind of falling into another world. And generally speaking,
(15:56):
the hallucinations experienced by individuals on on ls, the they
know that it's not real. There's not this, there's not this,
this idea that you're just slipping completely into a dream world.
I mean, that's part of it, because for most of us,
the dream world is the only thing we can really
think of to compare to it. So we think of
a dream, we think of being lost in the experience
of the dream, and we kind of lay that over
(16:20):
the possibility for psychedelic experience. I remember a friend of
mine in school, she experienced LSD quite a bit and
and was interested in looking more into it, and so
it was not uncommon for her to attend school tripping.
And I remember one time her being perfectly normal but saying,
you know, the walls are really moving today. By the way,
(16:41):
she was an a student all through well because to
her to your point, but also kind of to her point,
most of the primary effects here are visual. So it's
going to be geometric patterns, uh in the walls, it's
gonna be halos around things. Uh. You look at a
light and then there's like the light streams this way,
or you look up at the night sky and everything
(17:01):
that's black is suddenly red, that sort of thing. So, yeah,
to your point is primarily visual. People aren't really out
of their minds. They are in their minds. It's just
an entirely different experience in their mind. Yeah, and you
know you have adjust your perception of time. That certainly
plays into it as well. But but yeah, for the
most part, we're talking about visual cues. And so when
(17:21):
we start start talking about flashbacks and the idea of
an acid flashback, most of what we're talking about is
going to be kind of visual in nature, but also
there at times a little emotional. Um. If anyone out
there has been watching the television show True Detective on HBO,
(17:42):
there's a character on that who experiences flashbacks. Based on
the information we've been reviewing here, it seems like those
flashbacks as they're presented in the show match up pretty
well with what is often reported. So it's not like
demons bounding out of the walls or anything, but it's
things like like the light seeming to sort of sne
are around you, or or a geometric pattern emerging, that
(18:03):
sort of thing. You're not just stuck in a spiral
that's of psychedelic colors or Yeah. And it's certainly not
like the exploitation film of Blue Sunshine where individuals who
took acid a decade earlier or suddenly turned into bald,
raving psychotics and started like running all over the place. Um,
(18:24):
which again that that was a movie that very much
was exploiting all these scare stories from the previous decade.
So let's start talking about some of the numbers here
when we're actually talking about acid flashbacks, because again we're
getting into that area of of urban folklore, into that
area of ghost story. Everyone is going to have some
sort of story about people experiencing flashbacks, but how many
(18:44):
people really self report having them? How many people actually
have something that we can clinically call a flashback event?
So studies carried out in nineteen seventy to claim that
one in four psychedelic users experienced flashbacks, with fifty seven
percent experiencing pleasant flashbacks and only eleven percent experiencing very
(19:06):
frightening flashbacks. Meanwhile, modern psychiatrist Henry David Abraham claims that
while only five percent of all city users are actually
experiencing hallucogenic episodes, as many as six of frequent users
may report some sort of flashback. So we we have
to end up separating two different things here. One is
the feeling that you had a flashback or a self
(19:28):
report of a flashback. Uh that may or may not
have anything to do with your actual um neural architecture. Again,
the psychedelic experience is going to be very subjective. Memory
is very subjective, So you're gonna have somebody who claims, well, like,
you know, an hour after I tripped, I had to
I saw something kind of weird or I felt something
(19:48):
kind of weird or a day after I tripped, And indeed,
most of the flashbacks that are reported are falling in
that window of time, like the first couple of days
following the use of the substance, not ten years on
the line. And psychiatrist John Halpern said that most studies
don't make clear if other drugs were involved or if
participants had other psychiatric conditions at the time, So we
(20:11):
may have some data on it, but it's not clear,
you know, if if some of this stuff was moving
the needle a couple of degrees. And there's also the
question about if it really is a flashback or just
a provocative memory, because memory is fallible, as we know,
and you know, you can get an intense sensation sometimes,
(20:33):
do you call that a flashback? Um? You know, part
of it is our inability to really define what a
flashback is. Yeah, because we just if we experienced suddenly
we're setting on our desk and we remember like a painfully,
um embarrassing moment from our past and we're kind of like, uh,
you know, we actually feel the embarrassment in our bodies
in the you know, in a sense, that's kind of
(20:53):
a flashback. But there's nothing magical about that there's nothing
psychedelic about that. But what if you're suddenly remembering the
time the night sky became dark red? You know, suddenly
you're adding in that level of of the psychedelic. You're
adding in that that's script and you have a reason
for it. You're like, oh, maybe that was an asset flashback.
(21:15):
Maybe that's that's what that was. And also, again, memory
is foul will. Every time you take that memory out,
you're changing it. So over time, you're you're you're you're
making that even more of a concrete flashback memory. Uh,
as far as your own experience goes. And uh, it's
also worth noting that you don't need a psychedelic substance
(21:36):
to have a flashback. Traumatic or intensely emotional memories have
a tendency to stick with us in ways that normal
memories do not. And uh and and uh and certainly
one can experience an intense traumatic flashback. Uh. You know
this is part and partial to PTSD. So so these
aren't due to foreign substances in our brain, but rather
the effects of experience on our mental state. Okay, now
(21:59):
another again, you already mentioned how there are other factors
that can play you know, they are often not recorded.
What was else was the individual using what was their
existing mental state, or they predisposed to any kind of
psychotic episodes or what have you that the that the
LSD might have triggered. And also we mentioned how long
LSD tends to make people stay awake. That's another thing.
(22:21):
If you've if you've taken LSD and you have stayed
awake all night, you find yourself perhaps a little sleep deprived.
And that's another thing that can that can experience that
can affect your experience of the of the real world. Well,
there's also the aspect of suggestibility, right, because you're talking
about cebio effect. So if you are um thinking that
you're going to have these flashbacks, are very possible that
(22:43):
you may take out some of these memories and examine
them in that context. Yeah, and if you find yourself
paranoid about, oh did I just break my brain? That
was really cool looking? But what kind of harm have
I done to myself? And then you start looking for
these and uh, altered perception. I mean, that's what the
whole experience is about. So you've just previously experienced things
in the world differently than normal. Maybe you've noticed details
(23:05):
in your surroundings that were not obvious beforehand, and you
notice those again when you're not tripping. That can lead
to an interpretation, a self interpretation of a flashback, especially
if you're slowing down that mental process, right, if you're
thinking about it in that context and you're really looking
at the world around you. Yeah, Like think of some
(23:27):
of these optical illusions we've discussed before, where you just
look at it, you don't see it, but once you
see it, you cannot un see it. And so arguably
some flashback experiences are like that. You know, you've you've
seen the pattern, the face pattern in the wall, and
then it's kind of impossible to not see it. But
that is not necessarily a flashback, is just to call
back to an altered perception well, and to confuse matters.
(23:50):
Sometimes people have psychological breakthroughs, personal breakthroughs in their own
narrative in the world right, and they see things in
a different way. They may have more of a true
with them putting that in quote um that they are
hooked into. Now. So if that perception of the world
as well as your your sensory perception is all sort
(24:11):
of intertwined, then it makes it kind of hard to
unravel that and see things for what they are. Uh.
And that being said, though, there is something called the
hallucinogen persisting perception disorder, and we're gonna take a quick buick.
When we'll get back, we will explore what that is.
(24:34):
All right, We're back, and we're going to talk about
something called hallucination persisting perception disorder hpp D. This is
a sudden change in perception that occurs in some LSD
users months or years after the discontinued use. UM. It
is linked to, of course, persistent LSD use and it
has nothing to do with the build up of the
(24:54):
molecules of LSD in the body. And we've said that before,
but it bears mentioning again. And we don't underst dan
exactly what is going on with it, in the same
way that we don't have the clearest idea of how
LSD actually works uh in the mind. But people have
been studying it and uh and it is uh. I mean,
you could arguably say that this is the true LSD flashback,
(25:17):
Like we have all of these uh, these ghost stories
and urban legends, but this is where it actually comes together. Yeah,
And psychiatrist John Halpern had reviewed a bunch of scientific
literature on the matter, and he found that most studies
provided too little information to estimate the actual prevalence of
hpp D in the population. Now, Henry David Abraham says
(25:39):
maybe one person twenty will develop serious, continuous problems related
to the hallucinogenic experience. But he says that's pretty much
true of any drug use. So again, it's hard to
figure out where flashbacks begin and hpp D picks up,
and what exactly, UM defines hpp D. Yeah, but to
sort of give a sort of basic eye idea, UM,
(26:01):
one woman he was treating to thirty tabs of LSD
over the course of a year at age eighteen and
then went on to have flashback experiences for thirteen years.
But but then again, you know, you look at other
famous drug users like Timothy Learry when when he was
asked about the whole seven times makes you crazy thing.
I read that he said, well, I've taken it three
(26:21):
and eleven times, and you know, obviously I'm not crazy.
Of course that of course, it's it's kind of subjective
statement too. I'm sure there were people at the time
and today that would say, well, maybe Timothy Learry was
a little crazy. Um, but there you go. And some
of these experiences we're talking about, like trails following moving
objects a television, like static applied to the field of
(26:42):
vision and color changes. So this is what we're talking about.
We're talking about hp p D, And there are a
couple of different schools of thought here when it comes
to hpp D. Some people think that it's a kind
of post traumatic stress that the mind is undergoing, so
again it's taking out that memory and perhaps reacting to it.
While others think that the the extensive use of LSD
(27:05):
may have actually changed the brain's morphology. Yeah, Like, for instance,
if you're going to look at the post traumatic angle
on this the fear angle, you could imagine, say someone
has maybe an aversion of cockroaches anyway, and then they
see a bunch of cockroaches while they're on LSD, Like
that could be the kind of traumatic experience and ultimately
(27:25):
a psychedelic experience that one might have flashbacks too. Yeah,
And Abraham says that at the core, you know, even
though we're not entirely sure what HPPD is or how
it's really acting on the brain, he said that the
core is in an imbalance within the inhibitory circuits of
the visual processing system. So again that preoccupation with the
cockroa which is very much a symbolic representation representation of
(27:48):
the visual system right right now, the inhibitory circuits of
the visual processing system. Uh, what does that mean? Right? Uh?
We talked about the curious way that we see things
before and how it's not just simply matter of my
eyeballs or cameras and they in the camera footage goes
into my brain where there's like a little me that
watches it on a on a screen. No, the version
(28:09):
of reality that we see is just a is exactly
that a version of reality as picked up by these
these limited side organs and passed onto this limited brain. Yeah,
because you think about it, there's so much data to
take in that you kind of have walls up. That's
the inhibitory circuit is saying, okay, we don't need to
let everything through here, just what's important. So the idea
(28:32):
is is that hpp D, you might have some of
those walls coming down. In other words, you're taking in
a lot of data in your brain, as we know,
gets a little overwhelmed sometimes when it has too much data,
and when it doesn't have enough data, it also tends
to hallucinate. Right, we have to see things to understand
the world, but we have to unsee things as well.
(28:53):
Like right now, I'm looking at you, and I have
a clear vision of your face. No our producer is
in the corner of my vision. I do not have
a clear vision of his face. This changes if I
look to know, and then changes back if I look
to you. In the same way, if I look at
this light, I see the light. I look over here,
I don't see it as clearly. But if if the
inhibitory circuits are off, then I may look at this
(29:15):
light and then look over here, and the light from
the light comes with me to the next thing I
look at, and suddenly Noel's face is glowing like an
angel of the heaven. Yeah, there's a visual constancy that
we're trying to establish, and there's lots of things that
can get in the way. That we've talked about Charles
Bonnet syndrome. We talked about lesions on the brain in
which the circuits get a bit crossed and the brain
start to hallucinate. Things we've talked about not even having
(29:39):
enough auditory stimulation. We talked about this in the episode
The Quietest Room in the World, in which your brain
will begin to hallucinate sounds if it doesn't have what
it needs. So there really is a balance that can
be tipped pretty easily. Yeah. One of the best analogies
I ran across through this, uh and this was this
(30:00):
was in the New Yorker article A Trip That Lasts Forever,
which was about hpp D. UM. They talked about the
muddled paint brush theory. And this is the idea that
if the brain is like a paint brush, then h
p p D appears to make the bristle sticky, and
this makes old stimuli colors, shapes, and motions muddy the news.
(30:21):
So again, your brain is seeing things, but it hasn't
stopped unseeing the thing. It just salt and uh. And
again this is the this version of it, this and
this uh, this view of h p p D seems
to be what they set out to portray when you
have this character to Matthew McConaughey character Detective rust Coal, uh,
seeing light sort of bleed through his vision at times.
(30:44):
Now it is treatable, but there's there's not a lot
of stuff out there for it. There's a paper called
Clanaza PAM Treatment of Life Search Acids I have amide
and douce hallucinogen persisting perception disorder with anxiety features, and
that found that eighteen patients suffering from LSD induced HPPD
did find relief using clonaze palm over six month period
(31:08):
in which that drug was administered. So therapy also seems
to help. But I will tell you one thing that
does not, and that is cannabis apparently. Yeah, so there
are certain things that people should not take. All right.
So there you have it, acid flashbacks, LSD, little information
about how this works, how we we think it works,
and some of the various explanations for psychedelic experience and
(31:31):
uh and these supposed psychedelic flashbacks. Um, if if the
passes any indication, I'm sure some people will say, oh,
you shouldn't have talked about any of this. This is
gonna make people want to do drugs. Likewise, some people
are gonna say, oh, you're scaring people away from trying
new experiences. But um, but I would I would hope that, Yeah,
this is kind of a scare story because these are
(31:52):
powerful substances. We've talked about this before. Uh, whether you're
talking about acid or or psilocybin in a magic mushroom.
H these are powerful substances that have an intense effect
on perceptions of reality, and no matter where you're coming from,
they definitely should not be considered lightly. So you can
take the the acid flashback thing as a cautionary tale
(32:14):
if you like, because Uh, people do experience this and
it's not always pleasant. Also think it's interesting as another
viewpoint into the brain and memory and and how we
consume information and interpret it later on. And I would
love to see some studies if it's possible that you
could take um experiences of flashbacks or HPPD and then
(32:38):
line them up with other hallucinations people have had, whether
or not Charles Bonnet syndrome or or some other circumstance
which created a hallucination in the brain, to see if
there's some sort of thread through all of these. Yeah,
and uh and and again. Hallucinations occur for a variety
of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with
(32:59):
illicit subf sences. Uh. And and again, our perception of
reality itself is a form of hallucination. Yeah, and I
was just thinking too. I mean, even something like Stenhall syndrome,
when you look at a beautiful piece of art and
you're overwhelmed, and sometimes people see things or they're seeing
colors in different ways, that is a kind of hallucination.
In fact, one of the studies I was looking at
(33:19):
here made a direct comparison between of supposed acid flashbacks
of definitely of the lighter kind, not full blown hpp
D experiences, but the sort of lighter shade of acid
flashback as directly relatable to Stendhall syndrome or Jerusalem syndrome,
where you're suddenly just overwhelmed by a piece of art
or an historic landmark and you feel this intense bodily experience.
(33:42):
And I think if I would wager to bet that
pretty much everybody has had some sort of it's not
experience Stenhol or Jerusalem syndrome experience, but some sort of
overwhelming feeling at one point in their life in which
they were completely stone cold sober and they had an
altered state. Um. And I would love to hear from
(34:04):
you guys about that. It was the one thing. Was
it a piece of art? Was it just a piece
of music that puts you into that kind of state. Indeed,
all right, so you wanna let us know about this,
you want to get in touch with us, well, there
are a number of ways to do it. You will
not find us on the astral plane, but you will
find us at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
(34:24):
You will find all the podcasts there, you will find
the videos there. The blog entries pictures of what we
look like. If you don't know what we look like,
there are photos there. Because we still get people who
are like, hey, I didn't know what you look like.
And if you don't, like you have a very specific
idea of what we look like, don't go and look
at those photos. I don't want at least very jarring
to people it is then, and I don't want to,
you know, spoil your your imagined idea, because I've mentioned before,
(34:47):
I hate it when I'm reading a book and it's
like halfway through that the author mentions that the character
has a mustache, and I'm like, no, they didn't, they
didn't have a mustache earlier in the book. If you
if that character has a mustache, you need to mention
that page one because other wise I'm going to just
have to reject your idea that they have a muthtack?
Are you keeping that mustache by the way, um for now?
But now it's a nice handlebar. Find us on Facebook,
(35:10):
find us on Tumbler, find us on Twitter, find us
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a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com
(35:35):
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