A novel method for quantitatively analyzing subjective reports of psychedelic visual experiences
By Eric Craypo
A new paper from the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics titled, "A novel method for quantitatively analyzing subjective reports of psychedelic visual experiences," has been published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal. The paper's authors, Sean Noah, Miranda Shen, Earth Erowid, Fire Erowid, and Michael Silver, describe a novel method for quantitatively analyzing subjective reports of psychedelic visual experiences using a large dataset of self-reported subjective experience reports from the Erowid Center.
Summary
"Our study focused on how psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin affect visual perception, revealing that the type and intensity of visual effects vary significantly among different psychedelics.
By leveraging natural language processing techniques and novel language modeling tools from OpenAI, we translated textual descriptions of psychoactive drug effects into numerical data, enabling us to systematically compare the visual effects of over 100 substances. Our novel approach to textual analysis offers new insights into the varied effects of psychedelics on visual perception and establishes a quantitative framework for further psychological and neuroscientific exploration of altered states of consciousness.
This paper is hopefully the first of several from our lab that will use large language models and the Erowid database to obtain insights regarding characteristic subjective effects of a large number of psychedelics. Discovering systematic relationships among different psychoactive molecules and their effects may provide insights into the properties of conscious experience as well as the chemical and physiological actions of drugs that affect consciousness."
Read the Paper
Animations
About the Images
Related Information
Sean Noah
Miranda Shen
Michael Silver
UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics