"QUALITATIVE COMMENTS: (with 18 mg, orally) “Wild effects noted in an hour. Remarkable changes in sounds heard. My wife’s voice is basso, as if she had a cold—my ears with slight pressure as if my tubes were clogged but they aren’t. Radio voices are all low, music out of key. Piano sounds like a bar-room disaster. The telephone ringing sounds partly underwater. In a couple more hours, music pretty much normal again.”
(with 25 mg, orally) “Within the first hour I noted changes already, and my hand-writing became very poor. I cannot seem to measure the rate of the drug’s effects as there is no obvious window through which I am moving. Abrupt sounds have golden spikes attached to them as after-sounds, but I can’t focus in on any other sensory changes. I moved into a completely quiet environment and there don’t appear to be any effects of any kind. If I were deaf, this would have been an inactive compound. How many other drugs have appeared to be inactive because I didn’t know where to look for effects?”
(with 50 mg, orally) “Everything was auditory, and I can only describe it with a ‘!’”
(with 100 mg, orally) “Nothing until 35 minutes when a definite change in hearing was observed. There was a decrease in high frequency acuity with an unusual tonal shift of all frequencies to a lower pitch. Voices sounded very similar to a single side-band radio signal which had been mistuned to the low side of the center frequency. All familiar sounds became foreign, including the chewing of food. No effects were noted with respect to clarity of speech, and both comprehension and interpretation were normal. Music was rendered completely disharmonious although single tones sounded normal. There were no changes in vision, taste, smell, appetite, vital signs, or motor coordination. The effects began to fade at four hours post ingestion, and were completely gone at eight hours. Mild diarrhea occurred from five to ten hours post-ingestion but was not a significant problem.”
(with 250 mg, orally) “Shortly after I ingested the substance I heard a spirit say, ‘Once in a lifetime.’ She encouraged me to believe that I would have more life after the experience. But, there was a feeling of foreboding. The light was there, but DIPT was the body of Satan. The voices of people were extremely distorted—males sounded like frogs—children sounded like they were talking through synthesizers to imitate outer space people in science fiction movies. In fact I felt that I was somehow sent into an anti-universe where everything looked the same as normal but was a cold and empty imitation. I felt I was a fallen angel.”
(with 8 mg, smoked) “In four minutes I was aware of things going on, and by eight minutes, I was at a plus 2. My tongue was numb, and my ears felt plugged up although my hearing was keen and there was a background hissing sound.”
- A physician friend of mine has expressed it using a neurological vocabulary: “If it [the drug] delayed only the neural response to a stimulus, then pitch might have been shifted down, and yet harmony between notes should have been preserved. A variable delay related to the pitch of the stimulus would produce the disharmony but would not explain the preservation of normal relationship between single tones. It seems clear that this compound affects the auditory processing centers in the brain in a complex way which deserves further scientific study. The lack of significant toxic effects should make this compound useful for further studies.”
I am in absolute agreement. Here is a drug that goes directly after the hearing system, rather than the seeing system. Let’s stick a carbon 11 on one of those isopropyl groups, and see where the drug goes using the positron emission tomography camera. Will we highlight the auditory cortex? Or maybe some association area? But if we are indeed dealing only with musical pitch, not musical structure, there might be only a small part of that cortical region visible. This could well be a tool for two things. First, the localization of the pitch center in the brain. And second, it is a prototypic drug that might allow structural modification in several directions with several augmenting atoms. Some simple homologue might well have even more remarkable and specific properties. If you don’t look, you won’t find."
So basically it's hallucinations of the auditory part of the brain. It can seem like you're going deaf.
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