psilocybin mushrooms improve hearing?, opinions Options

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I'm just throwing this out, I don't care if the mods move or delete this post.

For the past several years I've had a very nice cache of cyan mushrooms. Yes the psychoactive ones. The ones that make you trip.

I've noticed something interesting - I think they improve my hearing. If I take just a small amount, like a nickel sized piece of shroom flesh - not enough to trip, it makes my hearing more acute. I swear. I'm almost 40, have good hearing normally. I find I become much more sensitive to high frequency sounds (like my CRT, computer power supply and fans) and I think my hearing overall becomes more acute. Suddenly I can hear the neighbors in my apartment complex much more clearly (having good hearing can be a bit of a curse).

I doubt the drug changes the mechanics of hearing, but it does tweak the nerve conduction and sensory processing. It's thought that most of perception is unconscious and a lot of stuff gets filtered before it reaches the level of conscious perception. Perhaps the drug removes some of this filtering?

I've read a few accounts online that agree with this, including one person with moderate hearing loss that found low doses of shrooms helped his hearing greatly.

It would be interesting to actually measure this and see if there's a real difference in hearing acuity, or if it's all in your head

[mjb2006]

rebinator, the subjective experiences you describe aren't the problem, per se. You, alone, perceive whatever you perceive. You might even have a way of quantifying those perceptions and recording how they differ when you're in different mental states. But you don't stop there; you publicly imply that these differences in perception are generally experienced, and this forms your defense of your initial, concern-raising claim that shrooms generally improve hearing.

Even if you say these experiences are only applicable to you or are just your opinion, no one can verify them because the claims are not supported with empirical evidence, thus they're unwelcome on this board.

I'm sure more than a few readers can sympathize with your excitement about having noticed things while not-sober/not-fully-awake that you didn't notice while relatively cogent, and vice-versa. Likewise, it's natural for you to want others to appreciate that this phenomenon is real, i.e. that there's "more to the music" than just what one normally notices—or more broadly, that one's normal/sober/waking way of perceiving sensory input isn't necessarily synonymous with being completely unimpaired or having a complete, correct focus on and understanding of what actually exists. You may be surprised to find that although it's a foreign concept to some, this really isn't that radical a mode of thought; it's the kind of thing covered in introductory psychology and philosophy courses, and many people come to the same realizations without the aid of psychedelics.

Research to demonstrate your and others' subjective experience in this regard and to measure its consistency would probably be interesting, and it might even persuade a few skeptics to be less dismissive, but it would be quite unreasonable to conclude from such research that hearing is "improved" by psychedelics (the first claim you made) and that the effective is "positive", or even that "a tremendous amount of information is contained in the ambient part of a sound". I'm essentially echoing points made in the original posts of this thread when I ask: who's to say what constitutes an "improvement" or whether the details missed by the sober listener are important information? Even among strictly sober listeners with similar hearing, you'll find that some people notice & appreciate things that most people miss, and they miss things that most notice. So how do you even establish a baseline or get a sense of whose perception is more "correct"? You can't, really.

I'm reminded of the "fundamental hearer" vs. "overtone hearer" research from a few years back. It's fascinating to find that the general population pretty solidly breaks down into one group or the other, and it's fun to wonder about the ramifications of that, but it would be improper to say that one group hears "better" or "more of the music" than the other.

So the easiest way to satisfy TOS#8 is to retract your claims. If you did manage to collect & share evidence in support of the claim that different mental states yield different awarenesses, then you wouldn't have to worry about retracting that part, but you'd still be on the hook for the more important and less plausible claim that shrooms "improve" hearing. I suggest just bailing now