I was reading through the old IQ thread and thought it would be interesting for this board to kick around.
There is a theory that’s kicked around that psychoactive drugs such as psilocybin and LSD stimulates mental evolution and what is responsible for humans developing consciousness. This theory goes on that psychoactive drugs can stimulate intelligence and why profound geniuses of the 20th century often dabbled with them. An example of this would be the famous story of the scientist who figured out DNA sequencing while on LSD. And for a little bit of levity there’s the famous story of Dock Ellis pitching a no-hitter on acid (I wish the game film of this existed)
When I was in college, I was a psychology major. As such I thought it would be interesting to do some IQ tests while on different substances. Granted these were completely unscientific and largely for amusement but it was interesting none the less.
Sober - 129 IQ
Marijuana - 109 IQ
Alcohol (tipsy) - 115 IQ
Psilocybin Mushrooms - 150 - 170 IQ depending on the test
Amanita Mushrooms - 145 IQ and intense focus unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
I didn’t try it on LSD or any other substances but I found the swings on IQ tests to be interesting. Especially the high scores on mushrooms.
I went to school with Dod Ellis, I believe everything said about him, cool guy but a real rebel.
Aside from pot I haven’t done any drugs in about 40 years. Mushrooms and acid certainly made me feel very smart. I did some photography while on muchrooms once. I am a terrible photographer even by amatuer standards. It was heads and shoulders above any photography I have even done before or since. I have also looked back at some of the writing I did in my late teens and it also showed superior thinking to my normal thoughts. Most likley it was acid I had been using as mushrooms I only did a handful of times.
Did you use the same test each time? If so, which order did you take them in? Seems like the last two results would be better explained by the fact that you already knew the answers.
Even if the actual tests were the same, the fact that the OP had taken several IQ tests before would seem to have provided some practising on the kind of reasoning tested on IQ tests, which could in part explain the higher scores.
I wonder about the ethical implications of researching this in a scientific setting. Also, if certain mushrooms improve your thinking, wouldn’t they be the substance of choice for competitive chess players?
Also possible that the mushrooms didn’t improve your intelligence, so much as give you additional focus/concentration, and so improve your test-taking skills. (And the converse for the cannabis and the alcohol.)
In other words, in so far as they show anything at all, they may show that IQ tests don’t measure intelligence so much as aptititude for test-taking.
I’ve heard the same thing; from what I understand this has been known for decades. My father was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known personally. He wasn’t Linus Pauling or Ed Witten caliber, but he was definitely in the Walter White league. I’ve never been able to beat him at chess, but I did stalemate him once when I was about nine years old. The only person I’ve ever known who could consistently trounce me at chess was an ex-convict who had spent half his adult life behind bars and had played thousands of games in his copious spare time.
I tried acid a couple of times when I was a kid and thought it made me dumber than a stump. I couldn’t even read the comics page when I was under the influence of it. There’s a huge community of people now who dabble in compounds loosely grouped into a class of drugs which have been labeled ‘nootropics,’ or more colloquially ‘smart drugs.’ I’ve tried all of them, and a few of them actually seem to work a little bit. Coluracetam in particular seems to have a pronounced effect in me. I can juggle multiple tasks much more smoothly when I take it. But from what I’ve read, most neurobiologists dismiss the entire notion of smart drugs and say that if you have a positive response, then there’s something wrong with you, and you’re simply chemically patching an underlying pathology such as ADHD. They may be right. Even at their best, the benefits they confer can be likened to getting a full night of deep, restorative sleep.
Heh, if I took mushrooms, I’d probably end up more interested in the wood-grain on the chessboard than in the game.
I think the notion that psychoactive substances stimulated intelligence is a non-starter. Though I do think that such substances were very significant in human social evolution - as an aspect of shamanism.
One possibility is that drugs might reduce test-taking anxiety. The result would be you would achieve higher (no pun intended) results without actually being more intelligent.
Amanita Muscaria is psychoactive, but I have heard it can be very unpleasant. Siberian shamans used that species. Sometimes, one person would eat the mushroom and others would drink their piss - in effect, using the mushroom-eater as a human filter! The first person would experience more of the negative side-effects …
Some Amanita species are quite deadly rather than only mildly poisionous and psychoactive.
We have Amanitas that come up every year in a “fairy ring”. They are beautiful. We took some to a mushroom club meeting for show and tell, and one member got all upset about legal concerns.
