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Mind-hacking: everyone's doing it. Of course, being Americans, it's not enough for us to just do drugs for pleasure or escape—we want to be more productive, more efficient, better workers. More American.
Silicon Valley's overstuffed with gadgets to "upgrade" your mind, and the coders behind the products are stuffed themselves with modafinil, or tiny hits of LSD, or short sessions with their hypnosis apps. Maybe it's magic. Or maybe it's all Palo Alto New Age wackadoo.
Nellie Bowles's "An Evening With the Consciousness Hackers," from 2015, is probably the most fun introduction, if only because it digs into "telekinesis," courtesy of the co-founder of InteraXon, makers of the Muse meditative headband.
“You can make your phone vibrate from a distance. We’ve made thought-control toasters,” she said. “There’s a thought-control beer tap in our office. I have a levitating chair, and you close your eyes and relax and it goes back down.”
Jan 5, 2017I would like to tell you that after I nervously downed that mug of acid-laced water, I wrote some of the best and most creative prose of my life. But I'm afraid that's not true.
↩︎ GQ
Micro-dosing's going mainstream partly due to Michael Pollan, partly thanks to Ayelet Waldman's new book, published this month, A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.
From a Marie-Claire article on women getting high, so to speak:
Waldman was thrilled with the results: She regulated her own moods better and worked through marital bumps more easily. Her children—whom she told only that she was trying a new medication—gave her experiment glowing reviews. "I didn't fly off the handle as much," she says. "I wrote a whole book called Bad Mother [which was published in May 2009]. If I had been micro-dosing back then, I probably would have written Remarkably Calm, Compassionate Mother."
Waldman's got an interesting round-up of related research links on her website, like this story about women using ecstasy to treat PTSD. But she lacks Tim Doody's profile of Dr. James Fadiman, a bit of a godfather in micro-dosing circles.
Jan 5, 2017When you knock on someone's door and listen to them and talk about both views, people will talk, and will express uncertainty—most average people will.
↩︎ Vice
Here are five "zombie" parasites that mind-hack their hosts, such as the jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa), which hunts cockroaches and takes over their decision-making processes.
