2021-04-20 Costudy Experiment
by: Dave Gorum
East meets Tech: Digital Shamanism & Closed-Loop Psychedelic Therapy
RC-Harris Joining UCSF. A lot of foremosting here. Would like to understand the politics and money around this move. How effective are organizations like this at substantive R&D? Skeptical of the volume, but haven’t been around institutional environments enough to understand how these things work.
Closed-Loop Human-Computer Systems
This concept broke my brain open. Irony. First firings:
- What kinds of information are trackable?
- What is the nature of the interface (how clumsy, how portable)?
- How responsive is the system? Guess is it’s incredibly lo-fi (pong era of video games).
- How far are we away from goofballs and market maniacs playing with this stuff?
- Risk risk risk risk risk risk
- Psychology of ‘challenges’. What determines Goldilock’s zone for challenge? Relation to flow research? I have been dancing around this stuff for a long time. Relevance to coaching, training, process, habituation, and ecological design process (enormous amounts of tendrils for me here)
- The medicalization of therapy (marketing this thing as digital medicine) vs an educational therapeutic approach. Therapy as a fundament of educational process rather than separate medicinal practice. Taking your brain to the shop for upgrades and procedures vs enacted growth processes as part of pedagogy
- “Rather than usurp traditional wisdom systems, closed-loop technology has the potential to breathe life into millennia-old healing practices like shamanism, contemplative traditions, and other lineage-based practices under intense extinction pressure.” - whole-heartedly agree w/ author