The first QRI psychophysics retreat: Ayahuasca

It was a long flight to Brazil. I fell asleep upon arrival, only to awaken to several messages from the Qualia Research Institute team asking whereabouts I was. I knew I had to make it down to the ferry terminal in short order, and I hurriedly booked a taxi, stepping outside only to find the road blocked by a parade, complete with brass band—

In the end the taxi made it through, and a ferry ride, a bus ride, and two more boat rides later I found myself greeted by Andrés Gómez Emilsson and the rest of the research team as I alighted on the beach at Ilha de Tinharé.

Here I was to spend the next two-and-a-half weeks, participating in the pilot of a new kind of psychedelic retreat – a psychophysics retreat, as Andrés was calling it. Here we would run perceptual experiments – some of which would involve psychedelics – in a legal setting.

For such purposes we would have access to mushrooms as well as ayahuasca. Put briefly, ayahuasca is DMT with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor added for the purpose of prolonging its metabolism. One of the downsides of DMT is its short duration – at least, this is an inconvenience in a research context – and so I was looking forward to working with ayahuasca. I did understand that using MAOIs can be risky, and I’d been adhering to the recommended low-tyramine diet for some time beforehand.

I settled in and got to know the team, who came from all over the world and a wide variety of technical and academic backgrounds. This was the first real opportunity I’d had to synchronise with a group of people who shared my enthusiasm for phenomenology and psychedelics – which meant there was much to discuss, and the remote setting only heightened the mood.

I was excited to get started; I had even brought my own experiment. I had written a piece of software called Fourth Eye, which used hyperstereoscopy to display four-dimensional shapes on a Google Cardboard virtual reality setup. What might happen when we viewed it on ayahuasca? After all, if it is possible to perceive hyperbolic geometry while on DMT, then perhaps four-dimensional geometry is not so far-fetched.

With the right combination of psychoactive drugs, could my brain solve the higher-order inverse-optics problem presented to it, and resolve the oscillating three-dimensional percept into a stable four-dimensional one? There was only one way to find out.

Research journal

I kept a journal throughout the retreat – I’ll write up a few of the more interesting entries.

I will acknowledge in advance that our proceedings were not without incident – during my fourth session, I had some kind of adverse reaction to the ayahuasca and passed out briefly. Please see my incident report for full details.

22 May 2023 — Call with Steven Lehar

This was my first full day in Brazil after arrival, and on our agenda for the evening was a call with the vision researcher Steven Lehar! We had a rather animated discussion about his auditory experience of the visual reification process, also known as the crickets – punctuated by lots of descriptive vocal sounds. Bing!

23 May 2023 — First session

This was the first session which I participated in, but I’d arrived a few days late and so this was not the first session of the retreat. We split into two groups, with the first group dosing in the morning and the second group – my group – dosing in the evening. We all agreed that the mushrooms we had were somewhat weak, so we redosed after a short while.

Alongside the classic tracer tool, Andrés had brought a whole psychophysics toolkit developed by a team of volunteers at QRI. This was a collection of software that could generate animated visual stimuli – colourful moiré patterns and suchlike. We were already familiar with these, and myself, Andrés, and Murat sat together while we reviewed how they appeared under the influence of psilocybin.

This was a collection of software that could generate animated visual stimuli – colourful moiré patterns and suchlike. We were already familiar with these, and myself, Andrés, and Murat sat together while we reviewed how they appeared under the influence of psilocybin.

Something I found quite encouraging was how consistently similar effects were reported by different subjects.

I recall one moment which I’d like to highlight. I was sitting next to Murat while we reviewed one of the visual stimuli together. The psilocybin had only enhanced our communication skills, and the description he gave was thorough and precise, covering subtle details like ringing artifacts and Gabor wavelets. It was my turn, and although I was ready to give my own description, all I felt the need to say was: I see exactly the same thing. I have nothing to add.

I like to think that we’re savvy enough to know when communication between subjects might cause priming effects, and this situation wasn’t one of them. I found it immensely validating that phenomenology could be conducted like this.

Part of the purpose of this session had been to evaluate what format and proceedings we thought would be most productive, so we had a small debrief afterwards to discuss options. Groups were good for creativity; pairs for tight communication; and working solo was most optimal if one needed the time and space to study something methodically. For future sessions, we also decided that a science fair layout would make for an ideal workspace, with computers and screens arranged so that participants could come and go as they pleased.

24 May 2023 — Second session

This was our first ayahuasca ceremony. As simply purchasing ayahuasca would have been quite profane, we’d be working with a shaman, Rama, and today he introduced us to the medicine. Our team had interviewed many potential candidates for this role; we’d decided to work with Rama because he was amenable to our research and was comfortable bridging mysticism and science.

One by one, he administered a small dose to everybody – a raisin-sized lump on the end of a toothpick. As I recall it had a delicious taste, sweet yet earthy. I noticed very slight visuals initially, followed by an elevated mood. Very comfy – I had a rather productive day’s study afterwards.

25 May 2023 — Kasina experimentation

I spent an afternoon methodically exploring the MindPlace Kasina – a system for experiencing the ganzflicker effect – the geometric patterns resembling checkerboards and tunnels that are sometimes observed when one stares into a strobe light. These are also known as flicker phosphenes. I’d spent some amount of time thinking about this phenomenon and had even written a small strobe app as part of a previous post.

What I found was surprising; what I saw did not quite match the form constants as described in the literature.

There seem to be two primary patterns that inhabit different frequency ranges; fine-grained pinwheels from about 2.5 Hz to 17.5 Hz, and large-scale cymatics patterns from 7.5 Hz to 40 Hz.

The pinwheels are sharp and well-defined, centered on the fovea, and grow in size as the strobe frequency is increased. They tend to exhibit 4-fold, 6-fold and 8-fold rotational symmetry – but I also observed less stable 4½-fold symmetries and suchlike. The cymatics patterns are more nebulous, appear most prominent in the peripheral vision, and increase in spatial frequency as the strobe frequency is increased. They exhibit a wide variety of shapes, including some more symmetrical ones which do resemble checkerboards and tunnels.

At no point did we find that a particular strobe frequency corresponded to a particular stable pattern; Murat discovered that once a given pattern was dialed in, a random new one could be selected simply by blinking. I think we’d expected to find a one-to-one relationship between frequencies and patterns – but instead we found that entire families of patterns were accessible at any given frequency.

The cymatics patterns increase in spatial frequency the closer they get to the fovea. This leads me to speculate that they might correspond to standing wave patterns on the visual cortex; which is known to devote more neuronal real estate to the regions nearest the fovea.

I have no idea what the pinwheels might represent. Perhaps they are simple nonlinear waves.

26 May 2023 — Third session

We set up in the house for the first full ceremony with Rama. We had a minor cross-memeplex exchange beforehand, despite the language barrier – Rama took me through the process by which he uses ayahuasca to commune with aliens from the Pleiadian system; and I demonstrated Fourth Eye to him, which he quite enjoyed. The ceremony started, and I leant into it.

This was a fairly mild dose, in hindsight. I felt some very high frequency body load, globally coherent and evenly distributed over the surface of my skin. My impression is that the MAOIs significantly soften the impact of the DMT, rounding off any sharp edges. It was quite pleasant.

When the ceremony was complete, we went to check out the psychophysics experiments.

Rama had forewarned us about keeping our distance from electronics while on ayahuasca – bad energy, apparently. Like, I could probably craft a metaphysical headcanon as to why this might be true, but as it turned out, this advice actually made sense. We were running our experiments across a number of laptop computers – some of which had fancy graphics cards and loud cooling fans. I found that proximity to any ambient humming or whirring noises while on ayahuasca would result in an unsettling hallucinatory soundscape – like a swarm of insects whizzing around behind my head – and the other participants encountered similar phenomena, too. I could totally see how this might buzz somebody out.

I methodically did my rounds and tried out most of the experiments. I was delighted to find I could read the message in Symmetric Vision‘s psychedelic cryptography project, and I found that Andrés’ psychophysics experiments were similar to the previous session, only not as strong as before. I managed to find some frequencies on the Kasina which made me feel like I was seeing out of only one eye.

I sat down next to Andrés and we tried the hyperstereoscopy viewer together. It sure looked crispy, but we did not see into the fourth dimension.

29 May 2023 — Fourth session

It was during this session that I passed out briefly. Please see my incident report for full details.

After this happened, Andrés and Hunter decided that we would not hold any more ayahuasca ceremonies at the house for the remainder of the retreat. One other person elected to pursue a tobacco ceremony outside the house.

3 June 2023 — Fifth session

This was our final research day. Despite taking ginger root beforehand, the mushrooms made me nauseous and grouchy, so I took the day off to hang out with the cats instead. It happens sometimes.

I made the most of the psychedelic headspace and spent some time thinking about how to generate a replication of one of the psychophysics experiments. I was new to linear algebra, and wanted to perform a large autoconvolution – but I knew that a naïve implementation would have to run in O(n⁴) time… Perhaps there would be a faster way to do it in the frequency domain?

I’d been struggling to get into a flow state previously, perhaps due to the heat – but the mushrooms got me unblocked, and later that evening, I started programming.

Conclusion

A venue to conduct psychophysics research is an incredibly valuable thing in its own right – but I also wish to emphasise the additional value which I felt came from finally having the opportunity to synchronise with my fellow researchers. And synchronise we did – with many late nights spent sharing tales and lore from our respective scenes and fields. For both these reasons, I remain immensely grateful that this thing even happened – and I very much hope that such congregations of likeminded individuals may continue to happen in future.

I feel that the best way to end this post is with a little story. We lacked any kind of ocean-going vessel, which meant that acquiring provisions from the local township involved a twenty-minute stroll along the beach at low tide. It was on one of these walks that I stumbled across a giant millipede. I wasted no time in pointing and squawking – harmonic resonance! – overjoyed that those around me would already know what I meant. It was at this moment that I finally felt amongst my people.