[Petrochemicals (OP)]

Recently I have seen a segment on the bbc news about people taking small amounts of mind altering drugs during everyday life to help them. Is anyone ?microdosing" on here?

[alancalverd]

Define "help".

[Petrochemicals (OP)]

Define "help".

Well, one fellow declared he was able to do 5 hours work in 1 hour. My first thought was he usually doesn't work very hard.

[Zer0]

God grew Weed & offered to All...

Little Fools smoked Alot..

& Big Fools Not Atall!

ps - that governance is Best, which governs the Least.

[alancalverd]

Well, one fellow declared he was able to do 5 hours work in 1 hour.

Or so he thought.
Sober, I can play 100 notes on the piano in a minute and the audience can recognise the tune.
Drunk, I can play 500 notes in a minute with no perceptible relevance to any tune. Or 100 perfectly correct notes in what I think is a minute but actually involved falling asleep for an hour between the verse and the chorus.

[Petrochemicals (OP)]

Well, one fellow declared he was able to do 5 hours work in 1 hour.

Or so he thought.
Sober, I can play 100 notes on the piano in a minute and the audience can recognise the tune.
Drunk, I can play 500 notes in a minute with no perceptible relevance to any tune. Or 100 perfectly correct notes in what I think is a minute but actually involved falling asleep for an hour between the verse and the chorus.

That is what it seems like. Who knows who he claims to work for, what is the nature and product of his work and what happens to the work once completed.

It also struck me that aside from obvious mental illness, are people such as this secretly deeply mentally unwell? If a light dose of psychoactive substance has this much effect what state are they in. Maybe alcoholism has its roots in the same place.

Obviously there is no one on here doing it (apart from yourself and 5he piano).

[evan_au]

I have heard of people microdosing LSD (ie not enough to produce an hallucinogenic effect), with the intent of helping them think "outside the box".
- I can imagine that chemicals like this activate neural pathways that are not usually active
- I heard a claim that in at least one case, this led to a breakthrough (as judged after the chemical had worn off)

But until there is some sort of double-blind study, no-one can say for sure
- At least with microdosing, a double-blind experiment is possible: the trial participants can't tell if they are getting the active substance or a placebo
- This is quite different from the proposed use of hallucinogens for treating PTSD, where it seems the hallucinogenic effect is important in obtaining the claimed neural rewiring; a placebo-controlled trial is not really possible.

PS: I am not recommending that anyone take illegal drugs outside an approved clinical trial.

[alancalverd]

Obviously there is no one on here doing it (apart from yourself and 5he piano).

HM Government defined drinking half a bottle of wine at one sitting as binge drinking.

Falling asleep in the middle of a piano solo requires about 8 pints of bitter, which you define as microdosing.

I prefer your definition.

[Petrochemicals (OP)]

I have heard of people microdosing LSD (ie not enough to produce an hallucinogenic effect), with the intent of helping them think "outside the box".
- I can imagine that chemicals like this activate neural pathways that are not usually active
- I heard a claim that in at least one case, this led to a breakthrough (as judged after the chemical had worn off)

Thinking outside the box is one way of putting it I suppose, I am unsure how good an idea it is though. Picasso made some weird pictures, but I am not sure if you want this if you are designing a Boeing 737.

[alancalverd]

Might explain the MAX, though.

"Hey, man, let's make the plane unstable, add a widget that overrides the pilot without warning, not tell him about it, and blame him when the plane crashes."

"Cool! And in the next issue we could save weight by eliminating some of the bonding wires, so the instruments, like, go crazy in a thunderstorm."

"Yeah! What a ride!"