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What do people see when they're tripping? Analyzing Erowid's trip reports
Noah discusses what analyzing Erowid's trip reports can tell us about psychedelics and human vision.
The result is this amazing database with reports about tons of different substances, including obscure ones that haven’t been rigorously studied by scientists, and for which there aren’t good sources of information elsewhere. But what motivated this study is that we got the sense that standard inventories, like the Altered States of Consciousness survey that’s commonly used by researchers, are really only scratching the surface of the realm of effects psychedelics can cause - and ultimately, defining the categories in advance, of course, is a source of bias. The stimulus is basically an optical illusion, something you can perceive in two different ways — like if you remember the viral phenomenon of The Dress, where some people see it as blue and black while others see it as white and gold.
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