Romanticize The Hell Out Of Your Life Tbh? Romanticize The Freckle On Your Left Ass Cheek Or Getting

“For all the attention the Berlin conservatory study has received, this part of the top students’ experiences—their sleep patterns, their attention to leisure, their cultivation of deliberate rest as a necessary complement of demanding, deliberate practice—goes unmentioned. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell focuses on the number of hours exceptional performers practice and says nothing about the fact that those students also slept an hour more, on average, than their less-accomplished peers, or that they took naps and long breaks. This is not to say that Gladwell misread Ericsson’s study; he just glossed over that part. And he has lots of company. Everybody speed-reads through the discussion of sleep and leisure and argues about the 10,000 hours. This illustrates a blind spot that scientists, scholars, and almost all of us share: a tendency to focus on focused work, to assume that the road to greater creativity is paved by life hacks, propped up by eccentric habits, or smoothed by Adderall or LSD. Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everybody focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make those more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life. This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”

— Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too

Once the bugs get ironed out, AI Image Generation will forever change propaganda and how easy it is to make and distribute.

i really like just knowing things. learning new things is great of course but it truly does hit differently when you see a painting and know which era it's from and why it was painted in that way particular and how the artist was influenced by their time. it's nice just knowing how an author grew up and how that might have influenced their work. it is a good feeling

Magic Mushrooms for Depression: Brain Scans Show What’s Happening

A new study has shed light on what’s going on in the brain as psilocybin treats depression

Imagine a house share of several people. The house, technically, functions fine. One housemate sorts out the food. One earns the money. One cleans. One does laundry. Except they don’t help each other, don’t collaborate, and don’t listen to each other. They don’t even talk to each other.

Sounds pretty miserable in there, right? In a very simplified way, that’s what a new study has found is going on in the mind of depressed people, with different parts of the mind working isolated from the others.

Psilocybin, the substance responsible for the magic in magic mushrooms, has been under study for some time now and showing very promising results to help with depression. But on a physical level, no one, until now, knew why. Now, scientists have had a glimpse with the help of brain scan machines.

Let’s go back to that miserable house share. Now, the housemate in charge of the food has prepared a new soup for the housemates, and it contains magic mushrooms. What happens next? They all start talking to each other. And suddenly, overnight, the place gets happier. The even better news is that the next day, after the mushrooms have worn off, the walls have stopped moving and the pattern on the sofa has stopped being so incredibly funny, the housemates are still talking to each other. The living experience in the house has been transformed. It’s no longer a miserable place to be. No longer so… depressing.

So it is, according to the new brain scan study, with psilocybin and the depressed brain. Parts of the brain that struggled to interact and remained entrenched in their neural patterns became more fluid and communicated more with other parts of the brain.

One important element of these findings is they show how psilocybin works differently to antidepressants. As study author David Nutt says;

“These findings are important because for the first time we find that psilocybin works differently from conventional antidepressants — making the brain more flexible and fluid, and less entrenched in the negative thinking patterns associated with depression. This confirms psilocybin could be a real alternative approach to depression treatments.” — Nutt

For sufferers of depression who haven’t been responsive to antidepressants, this is very promising indeed. Especially when compared with a traditional antidepressant, psilocybin appears to work faster and with longer-lasting effects.

How effective was the psilocybin in this study?

Participants in the study had taken psilocybin twice over three weeks, as part of previous studies on psilocybin therapy. The results can be compared to people who take an antidepressant pill daily:

Psilocybin: After three weeks and two psilocybin experiences, participants averaged a drop in depression scores of 64%. Low depression scores were maintained for at least six months.

Antidepressant pills (Lexapro): After six weeks of daily pills, the depression score dropped by 37%, with the improvements not expected to continue after stopping the course.

So, on paper, that’s a win for the mushrooms.

While the pills target serotonin levels to help with the feelings of depression, the psilocybin gets parts of the brain talking, so the negative feelings are less entrenched. The brain can find new ways of doing things by talking to itself in a way a depressed brain can’t.

So, magic mushrooms are better than antidepressants then?

That’s not necessarily the case, though it’s easy and tempting to jump to that conclusion. It’s complicated and what works for one won’t work for another.

There’s a very common fallacy that you can spot in the thoughts of the psychedelic community, especially in users of mushrooms and Ayahuasca. That common thought is this: ‘Of course mushrooms are better than antidepressants… pills are synthetic chemicals, mushrooms are natural.’

This is called the appeal to nature fallacy, where our minds like to simplify things to nature is good, unnatural is bad. This is not good thinking. If you pick the wrong mushroom, you will die horribly, however natural it was. Deadly nightshade berries are called that for a reason. We can’t let our brains fall for the ‘nature is better’ trick.

This is why we rely on science. If we’re making personal decisions on how to treat ourselves, even if self-medicating, we need to be able to think clearly to make our decisions and not fall for common thinking errors.

Internal communication for mental health has a precedent

There’s a fascinating branch of therapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS), where the idea is to get parts of the mind to talk to each other and come to agreements and work together. The system uses talk and imagination.

In early research, the method has been showing positive results for treating depression, even in cases where medication and the more common cognitive behavioural therapy haven’t helped.

In the houseshare analogy, IFS would be like having a therapist show up, sit the housemates down, and get them talking and coming to agreements.

The two methods of creating in-brain communication both seem to be very effective. But we can’t assume they’re doing the same thing.

Psilocybin is shown through scans to improve communication in different parts of the brain. IFS encourages communication in different parts of the mind. These parts of the mind don’t necessarily live in different parts of the physical brain.

The two methods support each other in certain important aspects though: depression can be helped by getting whatever is in our heads to communicate better with itself. They do that in using very different ways.

In a nutshell, the study says psilocybin may work like this;

“…psilocybin’s antidepressant action may depend on a global increase in brain network integration.” — study authors

Internal Family Systems, like this;

“Just as our bodies are made of many parts that form a dynamic, interwoven system that works together, so it is with our psyches.” — Ralph de la Rosa

There’s one more little bit of psychology that we can possibly infer that our wellbeing is related to internal communication of different parts, be that of the mind or the brain: how we refer to ourselves in our inner voice affects our wellbeing.

People who talk to themselves as “You” generally have better wellbeing than those using “I”. There’s no inter-mind communication using I. The part of us that I refers to is itself. When you comes into it, that’s a part of us separate from the bit that uses I. People who use “We” also tend to feel better than those who use I. This again could be related to in-mind communication. This is all inferred and would need proper study.

But what if this inter-mind/brain communication could be done with extra love and compassion for the parts that communicate? Could that help?

Enter MDMA.

MDMA therapy and in-brain communication

MDMA, also under much study to help with various psychological disorders, works, in a super-simplified explanation, by adding compassion to proceedings. In the case of PTSD, for example, it’s by adding compassion to the memories that underly the trauma.

So would adding MDMA to IFS therapy add compassion to how we view and communicate with ourselves, and aid our mental health? The link is in early stages, but it seems so. That’s like entering our miserable houseshare and passing around ecstasy pills — and getting the housemates to talk to and feel very fond of each other in a way the compassion will last even after the drug has worn off. That’s a healthy state for a brain to live in.

Back to the psilocybin study, and brain communication. Would adding MDMA to mushrooms be useful in the same way? Possibly. Research into such an idea has begun, though first with LSD rather than psilocybin. Underground, adding MDMA to mushroom therapy has been used to aid the experience, and to take the edge off a bad psychedelic experience. If inter-brain communication really is the key to aiding depression with psychedelics, adding some extra compassion to the mix may be an effective idea.

Talk to yourself

It seems that one possibility is that helping depression may come down to good, old-fashioned communication. It may just mean doing it on the level of neural pathways with the assistance of psychedelics such as psilocybin.

Don’t rush out and buy or pick yourself a bag of mushrooms though. The study authors stress not to self-medicate based on these results, and psychedelics can have dangers for some people. Taking psychedelics for any reason is a big decision and should be considered thoroughly, with risks in mind as well as benefits.

The new study is another in the growing list in support of using psychedelics to help with mental health, and one of the first to give a clue of how they work physically in our brains. Plenty more research is to come.

By Alexander M. Combstrong (Medium). Image: Pixabay at Pexels.

irresponsible adhd top tip #???

sleep with the curtains open because you can turn off six hundred alarms but you can't turn off the sun without effort

I realize this may be a tad out of your ambit, but from my research, Christianity has been responsible for a heck of a lot of the authoritarianism that has caused a lot of harm from conservative logic. How did this come about, and why doesn't it show up in (many) other religions? Or at least not as strongly?

so I’m gonna say something Controversial Yet Brave here: the problem isn’t Christianity, the problem is religious fundamentalism + the Roman Empire.

religious fundamentalism is what happens when you mix religion (value-neutral, not intrinsically a force for good or evil) with traditionalism, which…

if you’re playing along with your The Earl Longpost Bingo Card at home, this is the space marked ‘childhood trauma’! But Bret Devereaux’s series on Sparta got me thinking about this, so you get to hear the rant.

people who’ve been traumatized from a young age often only feel safe when they’re in conditions that are similar to the conditions that traumatized them. if you’re used to the world working a certain way, it can be jarring and even painful to discover that in most of the world, it doesn’t work like that. it’s like… if you were used to gravity being upside-down, so you walked on ceilings, and then suddenly it goes back to “normal” and you have to get used to walking on the floor.    

I genuinely believe that most political traditionalism comes from people who were traumatized as children trying to force everyone else to live in the world where they feel safest. and unfortunately for all of us, the world where they feel safest is ‘a world where things work the way that they do when you’re a small child being mistreated by your parents’.

most self-described traditionalists want everyone to live by a set of rules laid down by a semi-divine, parental authority figure- whether that’s God, Lycurgus, Odin, or a modern guru. These rules are inherently full of contradictions and non sequiturs- no one can properly follow them, even if they want to.

But the consequences for not following them are as harsh as they are for not obeying an abusive parent, and applied just as arbitrarily. so you must perform the arbitrary and pointless tasks your authority tells you to perform, adore the authority upon command, and- of course- hate the people your authority figure tells you to hate, without question.

there is a reason why most forms of religious fundamentalism look more like each other than they look like the religion they’re based on. a religion based on giving to the poor and breaking down power structures becomes a religion about hoarding whatever you can and begging your authority figure not to smite you; a religion of peace becomes about striking down those your authority figure hates… because it’s not about the religion anymore; it’s about making the world feel safe for people who only feel safe when the world is arbitrary and cruel.

 child abuse is, unfortunately, ubiquitous. there are traumatized people everywhere, because there are people who should not be parents everywhere. it’s not unique to the USA or to the Anglosphere or to the Christian world… and so neither is religious fundamentalism.

there are fundie Muslims. there are fundie Orthodox Jews, and fundie Hindus, and fundie Buddhists. from what I understand, there are fundie Confucians and fundie Shinto. there are definitely fundie pagans and atheists, though they’re unlikely to use the label because of its connotations.

the reason that it seems like Christianity is so much worse is that … well… Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. it just so happens that one of the ‘arbitrary rules’ that fundie Christianity tends to keep over its original incarnation is “go ye to all the world and tell them what happened here”… because it’s convenient for both the people who need the world to be trauma-safe and the people in power who need others to do what they say.

The Romans, and the empires that inherited their legacy and worldview, spread Christianity to every place they touched. between Rome, Byzantium, British/French/Spanish colonialism, and American hegemony… there are Christians everywhere, and in the Anglosphere, Christians are a majority.

and of course there’s a lot of factors that go into whether the fundie strain of a religion is the majority. but in general- fundies with the power to do so traumatize their children, creating a new generation of fundies, who seek more political power so that they can feel safe and traumatize their children because It’s The Rules, henceforth and forever. so a lot of the time there are at least a plurality of fundies in any religion, and…

you’re more likely to hear about Christians behaving badly if you live in, well, Christendom, because there are simply more Christians than anyone else. and when fundie Christians specifically are the majority… they have the power to make everyone else live in Trauma City. 

I suspect that if the Roman Empire had embraced Mithraism as its primary religion, we’d be sitting here talking about whether Mithraism is uniquely terrible and likely to foster authoritarianism; if they’d stayed Dodekatheist we’d be arguing if worshiping Zeus or Ares was more likely to make you an authoritarian asshole, and if they’d somehow gone atheist, we’d be discussing whether believing in a god makes you less authoritarian.

Because it’s not about the specific religion; it’s about the political hegemony + the fundamentalism.

Warlock concept: A warlock multiclassing as warlock.

“Here’s what I know: if someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it. So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours. If you’re doing it wrong you can do it a thousand times and not produce any particularly interesting results. So you have to make sure you’re trying the right way. […] I’m curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years of wanting and hoping and working. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by craft. I think it’s because it requires such a sustained tenacity. Like Michelangelo saying that he just chips away at everything that didn’t look like David: a hundred thousand little motions to reveal the underlying beauty. I think a lot of people want to be but they don’t want to do. They want to have written a book, but they don’t want to write the book. They want to be fit, but they don’t want the tedium of working out. They’re ashamed of rejection and they’re ashamed of imperfection. I might want lots of people to subscribe to this Substack, but do I want to workshop a post every day? Donna Tartt once said in an interview that if the writer’s not having fun the reader isn’t either. I think people make the best things when they love the process, when they willingly shoulder the inherent uncertainty and pain that comes with it. It’s almost like a form of prayer: you offer up what you can even though the reward is uncertain. You do it out of love.”

— Ava, effort (via luxe-pauvre)

Ace of Pentacles

Everyone’s favourite crane master Cristian Marianciuc’s latest works are just as stunning.