How is use of psilocybin related to beliefs in aliens, flat Earth, ghosts etc?
Encounters with people using psychedelic substances have given me a strong belief that those types of things seem to fuck with a persons ability to think hyper-rationally, they start to believe in all kinds of garbage, it's like parts of their rationality permanently dies.
Maybe they are happier, but at what price? We need more retards, really?
Many people use drugs as self medication. Same with the correlation of weed use and schizophrenia: reefer madness people say that the drug causes the illness, but weed is used by schizophrene people to tame the inner voices.
Weed exacerbates latent schizophrenia, and can make it worse, so do stimulants like Adderall
I've seen the opposite. I convinced a cute crazy and sometimes schizo young women to stop with the weed. A year later she couldn't keep her voices under control and went into a clinic, now she is destroyed by pharma.
Until now I've seen only studies about correlation. Many try to explain why one causes another, but nobody has found the mechanisms - most likely because they search for a causation that is not there. Maybe they should try to explain how being stoned can help making inner voices less urgent and demanding.
Rationality isn't killed, psychedelics cause neurogenesis but not in the purely rational parts of the brain, so the "weight" of your rational thinking is displaced by new neural pathways.
It's good for problem solving in that it helps abstract thinking but do it too much and you become spacey because too much of your brain is under developed and focused on abstractions. A few good trips are probably good for a person especially when they plateau or get stuck in life. But a hobby of it is a terrible idea that will see your rational mind totally displaced.
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