Holiday report blog time!
I went on a trip to Copenhagen this week with my sister. Two hours by train, and then a one-hour flight. That was my first time flying, actually, and it's pretty amazing. I'm surprised how easy you forget that you're in a chair that's
ten fucking kilometers above the ground and also traveling
one thousand kilometers per hour when the space you're in looks and sounds (and smells, if you're unlucky) just like any other mode of medium-scale people transportation.
In Copenhagen we went to the zoo, visited some music bars, went to the big amusement park that's smack in the middle of the city, did a canal tour, and saw the viking exhibition in the national museum. The amusement park is crazy: it has all the rides you would expect from the average amusement park, as well as a lot of carnival features, but also a few theaters, a cornucopia of gift shops, and so many places to get food that you would have to eat every meal there every day for three weeks before you'd have tried them all. They range from hoity-toity design restaurants to fast food joints, even including beer breweries and tea houses, plus a restaurant on a pirate ship. (I mean, holy shit,
just look at this.) And if you wanted to go to a specific one for dinner, you'd have to pay the park admission fee to even get in, so I have no idea how they attract enough customers. Danes must have money coming out of their ears.
And then right as I came back, I was invited to a barbecue at the new residence of a friend who's in my Master's. They made vegan cookies with a lot of weed in them, and I figured I'd try half of one since I don't smoke. Summary of the experience: Fascinating. Edifying.
Never again.
It was a lot of weed, and my physical state went from "everything is normal" to "oh god I'm being poisoned" in about three minutes. It started with eye muscle slowness, which was followed by feeling my skin crawl, and my blood pressure dropped like a rock so I had to go lie down. Then, in the silence, auditory hallucinations started - no doubt enhanced by the whistling already in my deaf ear - of wind blowing and crickets, so I put on some music to make it go away. My vision started looking like I was seeing everything through a camera lens with extreme chromatic aberration, and every edge seemed to have light diffracting from it. While I was writing those things down - in case I forgot - I started getting involuntary muscle twitches that progressed to the point where I was just shaking uncontrollably.
At this point, I was trying to maybe fall asleep enough to calm the hallucinations, but they seemingly progressed from low-level, sensory random noise (wind, crickets, colours) to high-level association area random noise (shapes, speech). In terms of consciousness, that translates to seeing lots of fractals and hearing constant run-on sentences that do not contain words, only the information about cadence and flow of the spoken language.
This actually seemed to illustrate some fascinating information about how the brain stores and processes information: in the case of the visual system, the fractals appeared to be the average of any given visual scene in my memory. It's like I was looking at the superimposition of every visual image that I am able to see, grouped according to their similarity to a certain fractal that seems to be the basis for organising an image.
Similarly, the informationless speech I was hearing was very informative to the way we actually produce speech. What I heard was a template of speech sounds that could be used to form a correct sentence if you filled in the right words in between. As with the fractals, it sounded like the averaged sound of every sentence that I can speak. That leads me to believe that when I (or anyone) form a spoken sentence, I don't pick out the words I want to use, but I pick out the soundwave template to insert the correct words into. That has some striking similarities with how other species communicate using sound, and it makes sense that human language would evolve from applying sound templates rather than putting words into a certain order. In sound-based communication by other species, the template is the entire message, but humans seem to have developed a way of refining it to fit an infinite number of meanings.
Now, that was all very interesting, but it did mean that the drug was causing widespread and nonspecific auto-activation of multiple brain areas, which caused the multi-sensory and multi-level random noise hallucinations as well as the muscle twitching. Combine that with occasional muscle spasms and the feeling of some parts of my brain intermittently blacking out, and I was convinced I was on the verge of a full-blown seizure, even though those definitely do not happen as a result of weed. I mean, every part of my brain that was not being used to analyse the situation was putting out random noise, including motor areas. How does that not approach a seizure?
Obviously, I was in no state to go home that night, so I slept in the guest bed. The inhibiting effects on bladder and bowels diminished in the middle of the night, but my spatial awareness was completely out of order, and as a result of not being aware of anything that wasn't directly in front of me, I could not find the bathroom, but fortunately I did find the stairs to the other bedroom where I could ask my friend to show me the bathroom. Mission accomplished: didn't piss myself while drugged out of my wits.
When I (and my hosts) got up in the afternoon we made a nice, big, vegan breakfast that included a big bag of french fries from the snackbar and homemade bread. It was so big, in fact, that after I went home I didn't eat for 24 hours. I figure that's also an after-effect of the weed, but I'm not sure how that works.
Anyway, based on this I think I learned a lot just from being very aware of the state my brain is in, but it could also be that my hallucinations are extremely persuasive instead of informative, so I don't know. Not doing that again, though.
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Topic: Blog Thread 4; Live Free or Blog Hard - 'cos we all like blogging (Read 568214 times)