Acid Flashbacks

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 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

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

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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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, 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, find us on Tumbler, find us on Twitter, find us on YouTube at mind Stuff Show, follow us there to support us and uh, Julie, how can they reach out to us with a nice, comforting, personal bit of email on the information super Highway, Well, they can drop us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com