I think you need to add a warning that excessive use of nitrous leads to horrific brain damage. One of my friends sons can barely walk as a result. A kid who was an expert surfer and skateboarder now has the cognitive decline and balance of a 90 year old man. Please read up on this Jamie
Hi Robert--thanks for writing and yes, that's the driving concern right now for youth abuse. If you click on the links to New York mag and Atlantic, they cover it, as do I in Bold Face headline "in the same way alcohol for communion doesn't prevent you from abuse..." There's three categories of potential harm/harm preventions: User Error (passing out and blunt trauma, inhaling compressed gas and frostbite, hypoxia). These are all easily manageable by never standing, never inhaling directly from compressed canister, not using over face masks for delivery etc. Next is the neuro-toxic effects which primarily result from stripping B12, impairing myelination and boosting homocysteine levels. The impairment of motor skills and ataxia sound like what your friend's son has suffered (a massive additional risk factor here is if you carry the MTHFR gene mutation which impairs methylation). Can be mitigated with IM methylcobalamin pre/post. The third is "ontological addiction" which I wrote about in Recapture the Rapture (which this post is excerpted from). That's when the revelatory disclosures are so interesting, profound, unique etc that a user keeps going back to the wishing well, long after they should have stopped.
One of the last times I had a nitrous session, back in the late 1980s, I took the wild notion to experiment with a variation on the old Cheech and Chong routine, about "seeing God" by "taking acid and listening to Black Sabbath sped up to 78rpm." Except that I tried that with one of John Coltrane's last LPs, Expression, and the solo piano Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven, performed by Alfred Brendel (incidentally recently departed, only a few days ago.) And instead of speeding up the 33 1/3 LP to 78rpm, I set the turntable to 45 speed.*
Long story short, I realized that I would never die. Sort of. That existence was infinite, and that all consciousness--including the part that I was leasing--partook of that infinity, In some sense. Not an easy concept to articulate. Not exactly testable as a hypothesis, either. But as a subjective experience, marvelous. Ineffable, yet somehow reassuring. A reassuring message, from the Beyond. But now that I know that or grok it or whatever--now what? The materially inflected plane is what matters. I feel no need to re-visit the experience. I get it. Part of the lesson is that the insight is a flash--a transient flash, at least given the limits of the human condition. Then there's the rest of life to deal with, in the aftermath of it.
That wasn't my last N2O experience, however. That was a few months later, in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. (Wouldn't you know.) Weirdly, I had been given a specific caveat about using nitrous some months earlier in the same exact lot: I was walking around, huffing from a balloon of it, and someone advised me to be sitting or lying down or at least leaning against something while inhaling it. I sort of hand-waved the guy, and he repeated his warning: "I've seen people do face-plants and get serious damage from doing it that way. Broken bones in the face, nerve damage. Experienced trippers." So I finished the balloon after taking that precaution. But I cast his advice to the wind only a few months later, taking a big gulp of gas while standing unsupported, listening to a Dead tape jamming in the background, doing a neatly woven high energy version of "Maggie's Farm"...the music started sounding extra special good, the way it does under the influence of nitrous--and then the gas dropped me. The last thing I remember is someone behind me saying excitedly "that's what that nitrous'll do to ya!" ~~wum wum wum~~I came to on the pavement. Luckily, I hadn't fallen forward. My back had arched over, and I had hit the asphalt exactly on the top of my skull, right on my own crown chakra. The whole episode was over like that. "Maggie's Farm" was still playing when I came to. Didn't even get a bump on my head. But believe me, I was scared. That knocked some sense into me. And I quit using using N2O entirely soon afterward. (I think it was when I found out that nitrous is a pretty serious greenhouse gas--300 times as powerful as CO2. Yeah, I'm one of those eco-squares.) A superfluous indulgence. Anything worth getting from it, I had already gotten.
The coda to that stem-winding tale is that a few months after that balloon knocked me cold in Oakland, I was at another Grateful Dead show. I was chatting with a young couple I had just met,early 20s, both holding balloons. And I left them with the same advice that I had gotten a year or so earlier, about having a stable place to rest before inhaling, to keep from toppling over. They both looked at me with mildly bored distaste, the same way many Deadheads were inclined to react when the band picked "Day Job" as their encore--"oh, no, not that sermon again..." And then, without another word, they both got up from the grass with their full nitrous balloons. After they stood up, they both inhaled deeply, and ran off across the lawn, hand in hand.
"...tell you what to do, but I know that you won't..."
I've just read a Wired magazine story about frequent users of DMT. To each their own, but I've been there, too. I don't find a lot of application in the insights. Extra-dimensional elementals be extradimensional. I don't trust them.** 4-D is where the action is, for us humans. For all of its limitations, like bodily mortality. Material entropy is intrinsic to 4-D. Eternal infinitude of discarnate consciousness notwithstanding. Extra dimensions aside. The entropic conditions of the material world can be improved--they should be improved. Oh yes. But not conquered. A project to add some extra years of high functioning to the physical body of our animal bodies is a good thing, and likely doable. But the notion of elevating the material human condition to "live forever" is getting carried away. Even the imagination of it is limited by anthropocentricity. Extending or even restoring the peak of youth is a much heavier lift, but imaginable. But my intuition is that improvements that ambitious require that humans--humanity, as a shared community--be very good people, humble, kind, reverent, and otherwise true to the game, in the values sense. That's a pre-condition. Achieving a goal like that one isn't just a technical challenge.
Here's where both Meister Eckhart and Ludwig Wittgenstein recommend that I shut up.
*imo both of the aforementioned LPs still sound better at the original speed. The synthetic alteration doesn't produce a qualitative improvement. It's merely faster.
**the evidently very psychedelic ruling castes of New World civilizations appear to me to have been badly misled, by something or other.
This was a fascinating read, all my fav subjects rolled into a juicy collision of history, neuroscience, and the ever-present human drive to tinker with consciousness.
The parallels to ketamine and DMT states make so much sense, particularly the waking delta-wave window and its ephemeral, maddeningly elusive insights. That brief threshold between clarity and forgetting - it’s the same slippery space mystics, psychonauts, and creatives have been trying to hold onto for centuries.
What’s fascinating is that, whether it’s nitrous, psychedelics, or even deep meditation, we seem wired for moments of revelation that dissolve as soon as we try to grasp them.
Brilliantly written - thanks for the deep dive. Loved every minute.
More Delta, Less Blues... LOVE IT!!! Thank you for this absolutely fascinating read. P.S. I’ve shipped zebrafish down to Karl D at Stanford. Never thought to look more closely at his research.
What a fascinating ride! I own your book but haven't cracked it yet - this was ample incentive to do so. I've never tried Nitrous, but as someone who benefitted tremendously from a therapeutic approach to more conventional psychedelics, this helped me relive some of the staggering joy of revelation in bygone experiences. Cheers!
Extremely interesting article. Thank you so much for all of that information.Yes, the MTHFR connection. I have that gene mutation and am thus reluctant to try this . I see you mentioned that in a comment below.
I think you need to add a warning that excessive use of nitrous leads to horrific brain damage. One of my friends sons can barely walk as a result. A kid who was an expert surfer and skateboarder now has the cognitive decline and balance of a 90 year old man. Please read up on this Jamie
https://www.google.com/search?q=nitrous+oxide+peripheral+neuropathy&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari
Hi Robert--thanks for writing and yes, that's the driving concern right now for youth abuse. If you click on the links to New York mag and Atlantic, they cover it, as do I in Bold Face headline "in the same way alcohol for communion doesn't prevent you from abuse..." There's three categories of potential harm/harm preventions: User Error (passing out and blunt trauma, inhaling compressed gas and frostbite, hypoxia). These are all easily manageable by never standing, never inhaling directly from compressed canister, not using over face masks for delivery etc. Next is the neuro-toxic effects which primarily result from stripping B12, impairing myelination and boosting homocysteine levels. The impairment of motor skills and ataxia sound like what your friend's son has suffered (a massive additional risk factor here is if you carry the MTHFR gene mutation which impairs methylation). Can be mitigated with IM methylcobalamin pre/post. The third is "ontological addiction" which I wrote about in Recapture the Rapture (which this post is excerpted from). That's when the revelatory disclosures are so interesting, profound, unique etc that a user keeps going back to the wishing well, long after they should have stopped.
One of the last times I had a nitrous session, back in the late 1980s, I took the wild notion to experiment with a variation on the old Cheech and Chong routine, about "seeing God" by "taking acid and listening to Black Sabbath sped up to 78rpm." Except that I tried that with one of John Coltrane's last LPs, Expression, and the solo piano Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven, performed by Alfred Brendel (incidentally recently departed, only a few days ago.) And instead of speeding up the 33 1/3 LP to 78rpm, I set the turntable to 45 speed.*
Long story short, I realized that I would never die. Sort of. That existence was infinite, and that all consciousness--including the part that I was leasing--partook of that infinity, In some sense. Not an easy concept to articulate. Not exactly testable as a hypothesis, either. But as a subjective experience, marvelous. Ineffable, yet somehow reassuring. A reassuring message, from the Beyond. But now that I know that or grok it or whatever--now what? The materially inflected plane is what matters. I feel no need to re-visit the experience. I get it. Part of the lesson is that the insight is a flash--a transient flash, at least given the limits of the human condition. Then there's the rest of life to deal with, in the aftermath of it.
That wasn't my last N2O experience, however. That was a few months later, in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. (Wouldn't you know.) Weirdly, I had been given a specific caveat about using nitrous some months earlier in the same exact lot: I was walking around, huffing from a balloon of it, and someone advised me to be sitting or lying down or at least leaning against something while inhaling it. I sort of hand-waved the guy, and he repeated his warning: "I've seen people do face-plants and get serious damage from doing it that way. Broken bones in the face, nerve damage. Experienced trippers." So I finished the balloon after taking that precaution. But I cast his advice to the wind only a few months later, taking a big gulp of gas while standing unsupported, listening to a Dead tape jamming in the background, doing a neatly woven high energy version of "Maggie's Farm"...the music started sounding extra special good, the way it does under the influence of nitrous--and then the gas dropped me. The last thing I remember is someone behind me saying excitedly "that's what that nitrous'll do to ya!" ~~wum wum wum~~I came to on the pavement. Luckily, I hadn't fallen forward. My back had arched over, and I had hit the asphalt exactly on the top of my skull, right on my own crown chakra. The whole episode was over like that. "Maggie's Farm" was still playing when I came to. Didn't even get a bump on my head. But believe me, I was scared. That knocked some sense into me. And I quit using using N2O entirely soon afterward. (I think it was when I found out that nitrous is a pretty serious greenhouse gas--300 times as powerful as CO2. Yeah, I'm one of those eco-squares.) A superfluous indulgence. Anything worth getting from it, I had already gotten.
The coda to that stem-winding tale is that a few months after that balloon knocked me cold in Oakland, I was at another Grateful Dead show. I was chatting with a young couple I had just met,early 20s, both holding balloons. And I left them with the same advice that I had gotten a year or so earlier, about having a stable place to rest before inhaling, to keep from toppling over. They both looked at me with mildly bored distaste, the same way many Deadheads were inclined to react when the band picked "Day Job" as their encore--"oh, no, not that sermon again..." And then, without another word, they both got up from the grass with their full nitrous balloons. After they stood up, they both inhaled deeply, and ran off across the lawn, hand in hand.
"...tell you what to do, but I know that you won't..."
I've just read a Wired magazine story about frequent users of DMT. To each their own, but I've been there, too. I don't find a lot of application in the insights. Extra-dimensional elementals be extradimensional. I don't trust them.** 4-D is where the action is, for us humans. For all of its limitations, like bodily mortality. Material entropy is intrinsic to 4-D. Eternal infinitude of discarnate consciousness notwithstanding. Extra dimensions aside. The entropic conditions of the material world can be improved--they should be improved. Oh yes. But not conquered. A project to add some extra years of high functioning to the physical body of our animal bodies is a good thing, and likely doable. But the notion of elevating the material human condition to "live forever" is getting carried away. Even the imagination of it is limited by anthropocentricity. Extending or even restoring the peak of youth is a much heavier lift, but imaginable. But my intuition is that improvements that ambitious require that humans--humanity, as a shared community--be very good people, humble, kind, reverent, and otherwise true to the game, in the values sense. That's a pre-condition. Achieving a goal like that one isn't just a technical challenge.
Here's where both Meister Eckhart and Ludwig Wittgenstein recommend that I shut up.
*imo both of the aforementioned LPs still sound better at the original speed. The synthetic alteration doesn't produce a qualitative improvement. It's merely faster.
**the evidently very psychedelic ruling castes of New World civilizations appear to me to have been badly misled, by something or other.
This was a fascinating read, all my fav subjects rolled into a juicy collision of history, neuroscience, and the ever-present human drive to tinker with consciousness.
The parallels to ketamine and DMT states make so much sense, particularly the waking delta-wave window and its ephemeral, maddeningly elusive insights. That brief threshold between clarity and forgetting - it’s the same slippery space mystics, psychonauts, and creatives have been trying to hold onto for centuries.
What’s fascinating is that, whether it’s nitrous, psychedelics, or even deep meditation, we seem wired for moments of revelation that dissolve as soon as we try to grasp them.
Brilliantly written - thanks for the deep dive. Loved every minute.
More Delta, Less Blues... LOVE IT!!! Thank you for this absolutely fascinating read. P.S. I’ve shipped zebrafish down to Karl D at Stanford. Never thought to look more closely at his research.
What a fascinating ride! I own your book but haven't cracked it yet - this was ample incentive to do so. I've never tried Nitrous, but as someone who benefitted tremendously from a therapeutic approach to more conventional psychedelics, this helped me relive some of the staggering joy of revelation in bygone experiences. Cheers!
Extremely interesting article. Thank you so much for all of that information.Yes, the MTHFR connection. I have that gene mutation and am thus reluctant to try this . I see you mentioned that in a comment below.
Anything that gains people a perspective outside of themselves is helpful. Its all self absorption.
I havent had it in many years, but didnt gain any insight when I did. Also didnt set out with that intention. Just getting silly.