## Metadata - Author: [[Tom Shroder]] - Full Title: Acid Test - Category: #books ## Highlights - The psychedelic experience, Grof concluded, not only produced healing but often led people to a certain view of the universe and their place in it, a set of values based on a direct perception that they were more than their identity as male or female, white or colored, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist. If the mystical experience afforded by psychedelics allowed people to identify themselves not by ego or tribe or nation but as part of a universal life force shared by all, then it would follow that they would become less threatened by diversity, more tolerant, and better able to live together without trying to kill one another. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=1122)) - but he wondered if his consciousness had somehow accessed the internal experience of a plant from a larger ocean of consciousness that contained all living awareness. ([Location 1307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=1307)) - Carl Jung believed that human consciousness was shaped not only by individual experiences but by a collective unconscious containing mythical archetypes and cultural “memories” that encompassed all of humanity, and in fact all of life. ([Location 1310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=1310)) - seeker, a decade older than Rick, told him about primal therapy, which was enjoying a moment following the 1970 publication of The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. The idea was that we were all, to one degree or another, held hostage by repressed pains or suffering inflicted on us early in life. Conventional talk therapy, which activated only the verbal centers of our brain in the cerebral cortex, couldn’t undo the damage of the early trauma, which was centered in the emotion-controlling limbic system of the brain. The therapy supposedly worked by revisiting the early traumas, peeling them back to the root until the patients reexperienced the claustrophobic calamity of birth itself and, while feeling the pain, fully expressed their suffering—thrashing, screaming, whatever it took—for the first time, thus ending the repression and removing the blockages. ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=1346)) - Just as the first reports of LSD’s powerful effects on consciousness were being published, chemists were surprised to discover that a substance called serotonin, which was known to contract the muscle of the small intestine and constrict blood vessels, could also be found in the brain. They had no idea what it did there until, in 1954, a researcher noticed that the chemical structure of serotonin bore an eerie likeness to that of LSD-25. The physical similarity of the two molecules, coupled with the known power of LSD to alter how people think and feel, switched on the light that inaugurated the modern science of the brain. ([Location 3321](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3321)) - Serotonin, it became clear, functioned in the brain to mediate the ways we thought and felt, and LSD worked by somehow altering the way the brain processed serotonin. Serotonin turned out to be only one of many body-produced substances that regulated and facilitated brain activity—called “neurotransmitters” because they worked to transfer signals from one brain neuron to the next. In fact, serotonin was far less abundant than other neurotransmitters, but it had outsized impact, involving itself in the regulation of appetite, sleep, memory and learning, temperature, mood, behavior, muscle contraction, and function of the cardiovascular and endocrine systems. ([Location 3325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3325)) - Precisely because the LSD molecule is physically similar to serotonin, it fits into the same neuronal receptors serotonin fits into—like a key in a lock—but with different results. Now the psychedelic experience begins to make a little more sense—the brain with psychedelics mucking around in serotonin receptors becomes a different kind of place. ([Location 3330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3330)) - injected subjects with psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, and then observed their brains with the fMRI machine. ([Location 3338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3338)) - the larger the decrease in brain activity, the more intense the subjective experience. ([Location 3343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3343)) - Task-oriented areas of the brain, like the areas associated with seeing and moving, had only nominal decreases. But the more complex areas—those associated with self-image, introspection, and imagining past or future events—showed large decreases. ([Location 3344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3344)) - themselves had unusual significance, and a feeling that the present moment had expanded into a kind of “eternal now.” ([Location 3347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3347)) - a brain on psilocybin bore a striking resemblance to the brain of an experienced meditator during deep meditation; ([Location 3348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3348)) - areas of the brain with decreased activity under the influence of psilocybin were the same regions that showed chronically increased activity in people with clinical depression. ([Location 3349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3349)) - In normal consciousness, when the introspective part of the brain is active, the part that scrutinizes the outside world quiets, and vice versa. But under psilocybin, those areas go up and down in sync. Could this lockstep between the objective and subjective be related to the feeling of “oneness” with the world that is a common feature of the psilocybin experience? ([Location 3352](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3352)) - Asthma medication and MDMA don’t mix well. ([Location 3691](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=3691)) - “I had an insight that my primary role as a father was to maintain a rock-solid attunement with my daughter. That is, no efforts to influence her development should sacrifice her experience of my attunement or of her being loved. . . . The significance of this for me was that personal relationships do not need to be managed. Therefore, there is no need to present a false self and, in fact, doing so will severely limit the joys available naturally in relationships.” ([Location 4477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00INIQTD8&location=4477))