Anesthesia, EEG versus CBF

[Astra052]

When these feelings erupt within an ayahuasca session, they can manifest as overwhelming sensations and emotions that seem unrelated to any known circumstance. Arising in disconnected, incoherent form, they’re unaccompanied by any sense of meaning. The chaotic nature of certain difficult ayahuasca experiences can lead to overwhelming sensations, incomprehensible surges of powerful emotions like terror, grief, or despair. Correspondingly these emotions parallel the overwhelming feelings a small child might experience in trauma.

Dr. Gabor Maté said some intriguing things at a Psychedelic Science 2017 workshop on ayahuasca. “There’s no such thing as a bad trip on ayahuasca,” Maté believes. “People say, ‘I felt fear, terror, rage, confusion such as I never felt before.’ ‘Yes, you have,’ I say. ‘You just don’t recall it.’”

He suggested that what we call a “bad trip” could be a reactivation of early childhood trauma. These can be overwhelming experiences, infant or even prenatal. They are encoded not in the brain’s centers of cognitive memory (these don’t develop fully until 18–24 months of age) but directly into the body.

https://psychedelic.support/resources/w ... ayahuasca/

The comparison to the experience of an infant hadn't occurred to me before. But in case of the adult on psychedelics and the infant there is commonality of trying to make sense of overwhelming and chaotic experience.

The article BTW is pretty good at calling out that the road to transformative experience frequently follows a difficult path.

I think there may be something to this. A lot of people report feelings of returning to something or seeing the world with fresh eyes again after intense trips which sounds comparable to returning to a sort of infant-like state of mind.

[Dave casarino]

So it seems rather blurry, but a lot of evidence points to psilocybin as increasing gamma wave oscillation, although other studies say not so much. I could not locate an article discussing the direct relation between psilocybin and gamma waves nor could I find an article discussing directly a relationship between anesthesia and gamma waves. I will share this article again that claims psilocybin increases gamma waves https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5616440/ this article describing brain waves simplistically again https://choosemuse.com/blog/a-deep-dive ... plained-2/ whilst also sharing this article here on CBF (cerebral blood flow) https://radiopaedia.org/articles/cerebr ... d-flow-cbf but what I would like to discuss now is gamma waves in general and their relationship with consciousness and the associated mystical state which is portrayed as evidence for an argument toward idealism. You see if the feeling of oneness and ocean consciousness is merely excited gamma wave oscillations and if gamma wave oscillations are excited by psilocybin then what does this mean for Kastrup's argument revolving around reduced CBF in recipients of psilocybin as evidence for idealism when there is increased gamma wave oscillation ie increased brain activity in accordance with the ingestion of the psychoactive chemical? https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/co ... -hierarchy this article here is a comment on the same article Kastrup cites of the dampening of CBF under psilocybin and comes to a very strange conclusion.

Gamma waves are thought to be the maintenance of unified perception including visual consciousness and perhaps even consciousness itself, in this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_wave#Function quote "The proposed answer lies in a wave that, originating in the thalamus, sweeps the brain from front to back, 40 times per second, drawing different neuronal circuits into synch with the precept [sic], and thereby bringing the precept [sic] into the attentional foreground. If the thalamus is damaged even a little bit, this wave stops, conscious awarenesses do not form, and the patient slips into profound coma.[21]" the thalamus is a continuation of the brain stem and damage to this area along with damage to certain areas of the brain stem itself (as I stated in my previous post) seem to put people into permanent coma's or vegetative states. So what is the deal here? Is Kastrup's argument ignoring gamma waves or is CBF more indicative of brain activity than EEG?

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'm certainly not qualified to speak to any causal correlation between gamma activity and mystical nondual states. However, while I've never tried 5-Me0-dmt, derived from a desert toad (my own 'trip' in this regard being an utterly inexplicable spontaneous event, with no psychedelics involved, notwithstanding the possibility of endogenous dmt being a factor), my understanding is that at a high enough dosage, it pretty much guarantees a break-through trip ~ as far as language can suffice at all to describe it ~ into a boundless, nondual, no-self state, with no phenomenal content whatsoever, of being aware of solely existing as nothing other than unconditioned awareness transcending any subject><object dynamic. And while there is also often mention of the bliss of Satchitananda, spoken of in various tried and tested meditative traditions over the aeons, there can also be a resistant phase of sheer ego-death terror to get through before arriving in the 'emptifullness' of that which one is in essence ~ which his almost always described after the fact as an indelible gnosis beyond any doubt whatsoever. Be that as it may, I'm not sure that even if it can be definitively shown that gamma activity is associated with this state, that a case can be made that it causes the state, or is just phenomenally representative of such a state. Suffice to say, a lot more research needs to be done.

[Dave casarino]

Well on a different but similar note doing further research I have found yet another article claiming to solve the mystery of anesthesia https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 150619.htm where using evidence gathered from an experiment the article claims to resolve the mystery of unconsciousness by stating "The TREK1 potassium channels release potassium, and that hyper-polarizes the nerve -- it makes it more difficult to fire -- and just shuts it down," this process starts when lipid clusters are exposed to anesthetics, the full process is described in the article and lipids are described here https://www.news-medical.net/life-scien ... ipids.aspx now back to the subject of gamma rays certain anesthetics lower them dramatically as seen here https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... anesthesia

These listings again challenge idealism because in one article once neurons stop firing consciousness seemingly stops existing and in the other the mystical associated gamma waves are put to sleep by sevoflurane (putting transcendence to sleep?), how can idealism defend it's position scientifically against these studies? The research done in the science daily article has very materialist implications.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Dave ... As far as I can tell, none of this latest data can be said to definitively refute Bernardo's premise and model, and that this ongoing debate has been no further advanced from the ones in the old forum. Not to say that further research won't eventually verify materialsm's premise, but until such time it seems pointless to keep claiming that it might be the case. In any case, when all is said and done, the fact that I actually had this experience, and that clearly I'm far from alone, and that hypothetically anyone can have this experience, and that it can and usually does profoundly change one's life, I'm not sure how much it really matters whether or not it confirms or refutes idealism according to some scientific analysis. And regardless, idealism could still become the predominant paradigm even in the absence of such proof, just as materialism became the predominant paradigm without ultimate proof of its premise. Again, we're just going to have to wait it out, if indeed it ever can be resolved.

[Dave casarino]

But as the research I just listed directly implies through the experiment that no neurons firing no consciousness, I feel a stronger counterargument is needed on behalf of idealism.

[Astra052]

But as the research I just listed directly implies through the experiment that no neurons firing no consciousness, I feel a stronger counterargument is needed on behalf of idealism.

If a study was truly able to prove that neurons produce consciousness it would be plastered everywhere you could think of. It's just a single study, you can't make huge claims based off that. I'm not even saying their conclusion is necessarily wrong, you're just being way too eager to jump the gun here.

[Soul_of_Shu]

But as the research I just listed directly implies through the experiment that no neurons firing no consciousness, I feel a stronger counterargument is needed on behalf of idealism.

Once again, this is only according to someone's subjective opinion, already biased by an a priori assumption, and it could also mean that there is no memory processing, and so there's no way to recall some experiences. There's still simply not enough knowledge to make any definitive claim.

[Silver0ne]

This is literally the same argument as before. Like really, it’s just “anesthesia does stuff to the brain and produces a state of unconscious, thus consciousness isn’t always present”. The studies posted don’t change that argument or bolster it, all they do is give evidence for the mechanisms of how anesthesia works, any metaphysical suggestions are still opinions. Like others have mentioned, you can’t determine whether consciousness is really gone or still there but memory formation is disabled. The results of either are identical (which Bernardo has mentioned in a post from 2011). One could also make an argument that regardless of whether an alter’s consciousness is disabled or not, the M@L’s consciousness is still present (cuz the M@L is just reality while the alters are just fragments of it).

And I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but there have been plenty of NDEs that have occurred under anesthesia too, so clearly experiences under anesthesia aren’t impossible regardless of how it works.

Also, since Hammeroff was mentioned, people did message him about that anesthesia study posted and here was his response on Facebook:
“ Thanks for asking about the anesthetic study. Their idea that anesthetics act to prevent consciousness by disordering lipids in membranes (or lipid rafts in the new study) was disproved in the 70s. The amount of disordering caused by anesthetics is equivalent to the disordering caused by a slight temperature change. We don't lose consciousness with a slight fever. Evidence suggests anesthetics act by dampening terahertz vibrations in microtubules, at least by computer modeling. The dampening is proportional to anesthetic potency. We plan to test that experimentally.”

I don’t know how accurate this is or not, but thought it might be pertinent.

And to be clear, I’m not all in on idealism, but do find aspects of it have better explanatory power compared to other systems.

[Astra052]

This is literally the same argument as before. Like really, it’s just “anesthesia does stuff to the brain and produces a state of unconscious, thus consciousness isn’t always present”. The studies posted don’t change that argument or bolster it, all they do is give evidence for the mechanisms of how anesthesia works, any metaphysical suggestions are still opinions. Like others have mentioned, you can’t determine whether consciousness is really gone or still there but memory formation is disabled. The results of either are identical (which Bernardo has mentioned in a post from 2011). One could also make an argument that regardless of whether an alter’s consciousness is disabled or not, the M@L’s consciousness is still present (cuz the M@L is just reality while the alters are just fragments of it).

And I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but there have been plenty of NDEs that have occurred under anesthesia too, so clearly experiences under anesthesia aren’t impossible regardless of how it works.

Also, since Hammeroff was mentioned, people did message him about that anesthesia study posted and here was his response on Facebook:
“ Thanks for asking about the anesthetic study. Their idea that anesthetics act to prevent consciousness by disordering lipids in membranes (or lipid rafts in the new study) was disproved in the 70s. The amount of disordering caused by anesthetics is equivalent to the disordering caused by a slight temperature change. We don't lose consciousness with a slight fever. Evidence suggests anesthetics act by dampening terahertz vibrations in microtubules, at least by computer modeling. The dampening is proportional to anesthetic potency. We plan to test that experimentally.”

I don’t know how accurate this is or not, but thought it might be pertinent.

And to be clear, I’m not all in on idealism, but do find aspects of it have better explanatory power compared to other systems.

I think Hammeroff has the tendency to get a bit kooky but he is a genuine anesthesiologist so I give his word some weight here. His views on consciousness are definitely out there but he does have genuine interest in studying the brain and what effects things have on it within scientific norms.