psilocybin mushrooms improve hearing?
Reply #26 – 2007-04-22 15:38:04
Psychedelics in general (not just sound) rarely "improve" ones perception and never improve ones *processing*. Most of the time, they simply *change* how we perceive. Regarding sound, we may notice aspects of the sound, which we didnt notice before, while at the same time NOT perceiving some aspects, which we knew already. So, it is shifting and manipulation - not improvement. There are two reason, why it makes no sense to use them for ABXing: first, if hypothetically via psychedelics you can notice lots of artifacts, which you didnt notice before, then this is acutually a GOOD sign - it means that the encoder sucessfully threw away lots of information, which we cannot hear in usual mindstates. Using psychedelics for ABXing is stupid and poisons the results - unless you want an encoder specifically for listening while on psy - good luck finding a coder to put that much effort in, just for this. The second reason is that the use of psychedelics leads to less robust and reliable reasoning and cognitive abilities. This is because psy changes (and in rare cases widens) our PERCEPTION, without adjusting our PROCESSING for this. So, the consumer is confronted with effects which he cannot reliably understand and analyze. People who do have the necessary processing-skills for analyzing alternate mind-states, dont need psy in the first place, because they can shift their mindstates by themselves, without relying on material enforcement. Thus, the users of psy-drugs typically take them, because they lack coresponding processing-skills. This makes most psy-users quite unrealiable in the cognitive domain. A much more interesting question would be, if people who do have more control over their consciousness and who can manipulate it with their will, are able to spot artifacts, which others cannot. On the other hand - taking me as an example - when i am in such states, i have better things to do that ABXing - it would be the last thing i would care about - which throws us back to an earlier question: who should actually use an encoder which accounts for such usually unperceivable effects? When there is no problem/need, then who needs a solution? - Lyx