Deightine

That is why you submit it to the Internet in the form of an open letter as well. From the process so far, I'm sure you're tired of yelling at a wall. Don't write for the wall--write as if an intelligent, well-informed, and competent thinker is at the other end. That way when the Internet reads it, folks the world over will judge what they think, and when the panel of reviewers respond, you'll get to see exactly how accurate their representation of the general public is, inside and outside your country. Let their ignorance be their undoing. Make it a formal justification of what you think. That will open it up to a larger dialogue.

Have you ever considered being checked for actual neurological damage? fMRI or the like? We often overlook small details that can be considered symptomatic of an underlying problem just because we're in a hurry, and in the case of your responses, I've noticed a trend.

Your earlier comment regarding only having 1-2 of your friends physically around seemed sensible for a social phobia. Social situations can be scary, even without a severe phobia. But that's because more people = more unbearable. But when you wrote about using TeamSpeak or Vent, you said "The mass of voices isn't good for me.", and it sounds like there may be more going on than just a psychological disorder.

Easiest way I can think of to ask for clarity would be: If you heard 2-3 people talking over one another in a conversation, would you begin to feel anxiety even if you weren't involved in the conversation? If so, the problem may stem from not being able to make sense of the voices.

There are neurological disorders, some resulting from brain lesions and others degenerative familial disorders, that can interfere with sensory input. Hell, most of the time we have no idea how it works, intuitively. We didn't get a user manual at birth. So, unknown to us, our brains triy to blend our senses and make the world something coherent. Often it can been seen by something as simple as seeing someone's mouth moving and hearing them talk, which can alter what you're hearing. An example is the the McGurk Effect and if you have a problem in your sensory or cross-modal wiring, so to speak, it could lead to all kinds of confusion and unease during this processing, which can be reinforced by thinking you're having an attack, which can then bring on an attack.

It's one of the reasons clinical therapist types try to differentiate how much anxiety a person is experiencing, compared to how much they are creating by experiencing it. The created stuff you can work through in therapy... the baseline stuff may not even be something a person can control. Brain damage, for example.

EDIT: Also, if you had an inner ear problem, it could explain some of the nausea symptoms you experienced in your early 20s. Nausea has been linked to a number of sensory conditions in the past.

TL;DR: It may be possible that your anxiety which kicked in at 22 years of age was based around a neurological change that might be able to be mechanically corrected if diagnosed, while the worsening of it may be psychological. Read actual post for argument as to why.

IANAneuroscientist yet. I'm working on it. Grain of salt.

I'm not Tim, but I'll give a non-hallucinogenic example of the kind of expansion he's talking about.

Recently a group of citizen scientist biohackers did a research study on using Chlorin e6 to treat night blindness, and for awhile, those folks could see an interesting range of colors and tones under conditions where you or I might be completely nightblind. Meanwhile, other groups have been working on finding ways to tweak biology to increase metabolic burn, and so on. Tim does a lot of this stuff on his own out of curiosity and has in the past learned some cool stuff that he added into Four Hour Body.

So from a neuroscientific perspective (and this is spit-balling, I have studied the subject academically but I'm not a pure expert on this one topic):

Your mind is a construct of moving parts; synapses firing in clusters that make up the greater whole of a very quickly moving mechanism of thoughts. Sometimes when a person is getting anxious or are proving very stubborn, it's because those thoughts are moving along programmed lines. Like natural grooves of least resistance, they think along the most comfortable route possible. Then you shake it up by introducing a chemical that shuts down some of these pathways randomly, and to get through the same logical chains of thought, they have to use different components of their brains. They have to substitute different memories or internalized justifications, and suddenly, the calculus at the end is different.

It's like saying... your default thought pattern is A + B + C = 3, because at some point you accepted (or had ingrained into you that) they all equaled 1. In this case we'll say A is your sensory perceptions.

Your brain gets very used to processing sensation, it's the first thing you learn in utero, and specialize in for the first year of life. It's why babies stuff so many things in their mouth; sense of taste is a sense you can control, even before you know objects are permanent. The rest are assaulting you all of the time. Some of it gets shut out, some of it gets ruminated on, and ultimately you get used to A being the same value all of the time. Your brain then specializes in keeping just the things you need. This is why humans have developed such amazing pattern recognition. If we remembered even 10% of all sensory input we received, we would spend a lot of time over-processing sensory memories throughout life. So our brains throw things away and keep the patterns we notice. We develop heuristics, not just for making judgments, but for the unconscious pre-processing that our brains do with sensation before handing them over to the rational part of our minds.

So say you take DMT or another hallucinogenic (I have not but I've read a lot of cases) and A now equals 0.5 or even 3, because suddenly your brain isn't throwing away the same 90-95% of sensation; now its decided to throw away an extra 5% of sight and keep an extra 5% of sense of smell, or sense of balance. The calculation of A + B + C now equals less than three, or more than 6. How you think becomes different. Every thought you have will be pushed through the calculation differently.

So for a few hours you trip over things, but notice how little you smelled the world before. You come out of it with a newfound appreciation for your sense of smell. Or your hearing. Or just how you pattern recognition works. Suddenly your world seems a lot bigger and you're purposely seeking different stimuli. It isn't always that you've developed a whole new sense (although humans actually possess 9+ sensory input paths) so much as become incredibly aware of the ones you already have. Or you experience synasthesia and begin processing the same sense through different pathways, interpreting them differently. For a little while you know what red tastes like.

It's not necessary for your brain to make up the things you would see while experiencing this kind of thing, not when there is so much you aren't already processing. It just has to get lazy with the knife while dividing up the world, and give you a little more of the sensory input you weren't receiving before.

A lot of people think that a chemically induced hallucination is like a dream, all inside your mind... Others argue that it is opening you up to sensations you would otherwise ignore. Sensations you might not need in the day to day might get shunted aside for years, only to be woken up under an induced chemical state.

It's an area worth researching, and good research is starting to crop up around it. Especially in treatment of depression, etc.

At least that's the thinking at the time the program is initiated... Then in all but very rare cases, it contributes to the social pressures that lead to uprisings. It's actually counterproductive. Better off using a civilian squealing system like North Korea does. Only they take the next step a tad further than most... three generations of your family into the camp all at once. There is fear of death or blackbagging, then there is that.

That was simply splendid. It's like a stand-up routine delivered like that.