Scientist find interesting stuff in once-taboo Psychedelia

[NucleicAcid]

[Nostradamus]

I am trying to find an article I recently read about petroglyph symbols and visions. It's killing me that I can't locate it. It discusses psychedelics and how people have similar images pop into their head like spirals and ladders and such that are found in petroglyphs in many different areas.

[Nostradamus]

[NucleicAcid]

Heh, when all you have is a hammer....seriously, those people take everything, absolutely everything, to be evidence of whatever flavor of crazy they believe.

I'm personally a fan of a slightly tweaked Stoned-ape hypothesis, which, coupled with the already-forming complex social structure, gave rise to specialization (groups of primates had already started to take care of the elderly and the weak), and one of your first dedicated classes to arise would be the shaman. The shaman serves as visionary, storyteller, and intellectual leader (yes I'm talking about bonobos and stuff, maybe early hominids, not quite sure, nor is anyone), serving as a repository for information, while the other classes dealt with food gathering and hunting. The shaman would help ideas and technology pass from one generation to the next, allowing for a wider array of learned tool behaviors. This enhanced specialization of social structure allowed us to evolve our monstrous noggins, which as a consequence makes babies much more vulnerable at birth and require more long term care from the mother. With chimpanzees, the baby comes out and pretty much climbs onto the mother's back. Bipedalism would have also evolved somewhere in this time period of rapid change, alongside brain development. These three factors - tight, structured community, brain enlargement, and bipedalism all sort of enabled each other, giving rise to your hominids, and finally Homo sapiens. I'm not sure when hominids started tripping balls on this timeline, but I think it was at least important catalyzing changes in the status-quo, so to speak.

Shamans would also have been the first to draw pictures, giving rise to the root of written language.

[Nostradamus]

There's a w@cko named Lucus that suggests that the reason spirals are seen in many places around the world is that the failed rocket launch seen in Norway was seen by ancient man, and that the Russians are actually covering for a message from the Annuki that live on Nibiru with tales of a third stage rocket failure of the Bulava rocket.

( Talk about your run on sentences!)

[NucleicAcid]

Naturally.

Or spirals are one of the most basic emergent properties of the universe.
The first property is unity - the ability of something to be seen as a distinct thing, or as many things to be perceived as one.
From unity you derive a cycle - all things eventually return to where they started in one way or another
Since you have a cycle, you have two opposing energies- one drives the movement forward, while another serves as the restoring force. This is duality, and a moving wave emerges.
As the wave progresses, it doesn't ever come back to exactly where it started. Hence, a spiral. Also derivable from the Fibonacci sequence, which is about as simple as you can get for emergent functions (apart from the series of natural number).

From just those principles, you can create all things in the universe. Hence why universal oneness, yin yangs, and spirals are super popular among spiritual people. However, like all things (as predicted by number 2) it can be taken to the extreme, and then it gets out of hand.

[Nostradamus]

The problem with spirals is that they increase without bounds. There are other functions that can be used that are bounded. But then again they are hard to draw. a stick and a string does a spiral.

[NucleicAcid]

It's not a problem, it's a feature! No seriously, one of the things that makes spirals interesting is that they are infinite, but self-similar (fractal).

[Nostradamus]

A spiral such as logarithmic spiral does not meet the requirements for a fractal. It is roughly radially symmetrical, not a fractal.

[NucleicAcid]

Really? My bad.

[jakesteele]

I am a child of the '60s and all that that implies. I took many a trip in my day on everything from LSD to peyote to 'schroom...did I mention LSD? I used to see paisley patterns a lot and would stare at a leaf and see the entire universe contained within and I would...?and, and...the wind cries Mary...

[NucleicAcid]

I've been sick as hell lately and been pumping myself up with guanfenesin, dextromethorphan, pseudoephedrine, diphenhydramine, and paracetamol (basically NyQuil) and lately at night I've been seeing geometric pattens in my field of view, almost like paisley in fact, before I nod off at night. It was really pretty in fact, and it did sort of remind me of those renderings of a Brane style universe, with all the dimensions curled up on itself. Mmmm....unintentional psychedelics...

Incidentally, I've heard Robotripping is the worst thing ever.

[ProfWag]