Oh, I know that they're drug effects, but I also believe that there are normal parallels. There's nothing a drug does that doesn't happen normally within the brain. Amphetamines induce release of dopamine. LSD selectively activates the 5-HT2 receptor, and even more specifically, psychedelic activity is caused by activation of the 5-HT2A receptor (although no one's quite sure what the purpose of this receptor is). The THC in marijuana activates CB1 and CB2 receptors, mimicking the effect of the the body's endogenous peptide neurotransmitter anandamide. Modafinil, it is hypothesized, selectively stimulates orexin neurons.

Recreationally, the most interesting drugs activate receptors that wouldn't normally be activated (such as the psychedelics), while the drugs that produce the most pleasure and addiction stimulate the dopaminergic pathway from the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens (as amphetamine and cocaine do directly, and nicotine, heroin, and other opiates do indirectly).

Drugs are very crude ways of altering the human brain. They don't affect single parts or small areas; they affect entire systems, or sets of systems. These systems have to have already existed to produce these effects.

Whether this experience was "damaging" I don't know, as I think I made clear in my post. Mescaline can produce some pretty intense experiences, but recent studies tell us that it causes no brain damage whatsoever. Complete sleep deprivation over a long enough period causes immense distortions in perception, personality, and speech, but once you sleep, there's no damage. Any damage this experience produced is likely more a result of elevated blood pressure and heart rate than direct neural stimulation.

And as to the effects of antidepressants, yes, there are some studies out there that say the effect is 80% placebo. But really, fluoxetine (Prozac) has very few side effects. Whether it's placebo or not, it works for a lot of people out there. I have friends who take antidepressants, and when I tell them there are studies like these out there, they don't believe me. Also, Prozac doesn't have the same withdrawal side effects as nearly all of the other antidepressants in the SSRI family, for reasons I can explain to you if you're actually interested.
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But really, none of this has anything to do with my original comment. I would hypothesize that the greatest effect came not from a drug, but from sleep deprivation. There lies my interest.

I've taken all of these drugs before, and taken modafinil and marijuana, the two drugs that I would hypothesize would be the most unpredictable in combination, together, all to no unexpected effect.

Sleep is thought by almost all scientists to play a role in the consolidation of memory, and anandamide (again, the body's natural analogue to the active component of marijuana) appears to play a role in the modulation of sleep and memory.

To me, this experience produces some interesting questions about the interaction between sleep and memory, and the way memory is consolidated. At the very least, it seems to confirm the theory that nondeclarative, semantic, and episodic memory are completely independent systems.

I'd assume that most of you have felt the way I did, but only in dreams. Perhaps as neuroscience continues its progress toward understanding the function of sleep, exactly how this interaction takes place will become clearer.