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They only did 5 minutes daily for both. I'd argue that

1. breath work has a much smaller minimum effective dosage than meditation. That is to say, 5 minutes of breath work can fulfill the purpose of said breath work much better than 5 mins of meditation can fulfill the purpose of that activity. It takes our brain approximately 11 mins to truly focus on any given activity, so doing a focus meditation for less than 11 mins per day probably isn't going to achieve very much. And

2. Meditation has a much steeper learning curve than breath work and can actually entail a lot of frustration and discomfort in the beginning. It's really not the relaxation or "stress management" exercise it is often marketed as here in the West, but a long-term project with the goal of increasing awareness. But as awareness grows, we are not going to like everything we become aware of. E.g. the first thing many people become aware of when meditating is how busy their mind actually is on a moment-to-moment basis, and how uncomfortable it is for them to sit down and not distract themselves with external stimuli. If you go into a meditation with the express purpose of changing your internal state, as you would with a breath exercise, you've really already lost the plot, because meditation is about acceptance and witnessing of the present moment as it is.

My best friend and I now have a connection for mushrooms. We did them once together in college and now, we try to do them once every few years together just to hang out and reset our brains and have fun together. We usually just hang out, play with the dog, play a board game, go for walks around his neighborhood etc. Its great. With having a regular contact now, I think we’ll be doing it annually.

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Great ELI5, but I think you may have gotten those backwards? I’ve been trying to figure it out, but check this part of the paper:

“…with stimuli presented at diastole judged, on average, 9 ms longer (M = 305, SD = 25) than those at systole (M = 314, SD = 26).”

I think this saying in diastole (when the heart is beating), the time the participant felt an image was up was 9ms longer than when the heart wasn’t beating, and I would interpret that as time “expanding” since you feel like you’re spending a longer amount of time looking at a stimulus than you really are. Maybe this is just confusion about time “expanding” vs “contracting”.

Anyway, cool theory!

You know how sometimes a few minutes or seconds feel really slow, or they go by super fast? This paper focused on the small side, on those few seconds that sometimes feel slow or fast, and they thought “hey maybe it’s related to the heart beating.”

So they went a proved a relationship between when your heart beats and the perceived passage of time, specifically during the 200-400 millisecond windows of “your heart is pumping blood” and “your heart is chilling, waiting to pump blood”. In the first state, time seemed to expand (ie felt longer), in the second state, time seemed to contract (or felt faster) according to study participants.

They also found that this effect nearly completely went away as one becomes more aroused, likely due to other more important factors like your brain interpreting something more interesting, which could easily muddy the results.

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Why’d you quit?

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there wouldnt be war if everybody dosed.....almost

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We used to call them rolls back in the day. Once you get a "dirty" roll you end up seeking that out. Dirty is just mixed with meth.

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At low arousal, as the heart contracts/beats, time seems to go by faster. As the heart relaxes, time seems to go by slower.

As arousal increases, the pattern I mentioned about the heart beat/relax cycle disappears. Under high arousal, it shifts towards feeling like time goes by faster regardless of the beat/relax cycle.

That's how I read this at least.

I brought dissociatives up as I thought that was where you were talking to bringing up NMDA receptors.

You are right that all of these things affect more than just the the primary target, that being the reuptake, release, agonism/antagonism of the primary receptor target. Any drug affecting a monoamine neurotransmitter is going to have downstream effects on others, and many receptors have specific action on regulating feedback loops on the other neuorotransmitters.

I was really only speaking to the direct effect for brevity if nothing else. I'm also aware that the down-regulation of the serotonergic system over time is considered a likely part of the antidepressant mechanism of SSRIs. In general, I agree with pretty much everything you said.

> "Also as of like, last month, “we don’t know how psychedelics induce this neuroplastic change” is an outdated statement"

I hadn't seen that. Mind linking the paper? Sounds like an interesting read.

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This is quite an interesting dynamic to the anecdotal evidence that time seems to move faster as we age. I wonder if there are similar mechanisms in the brain.

It’s definitely something else. Last weekend my spouse and I took shrooms+mdma at a music festival and had the time of our lives. We watched ODESZA for the first time and it was such a magical experience for us. There’s such a fantastic connection with people and music when on it. I highly recommend it, if you can get it from people you trust and test it.

There was that cool study of people dropping from height reading a clock on the way down.

https://www.npr.org/2010/08/17/129112147/why-a-brush-with-death-triggers-the-slow-mo-effect

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Mushrooms + music is the best. No idea what sort of music you are into, but for me it’s pretty hard to beat Shpongle. His music is drugs by itself, but he has a way of just setting a trip off completely. It can definitely be too intense though, depending on where you are at in your trip