In the 1993 film Demolition Man, a not-so-sensitive ‘90s guy (a cop named John Spartan, played by Sylvester Stallone) is thawed out of cryoprison in the year 2032. Halfway through the film, Spartan’s new partner on the San Angeles police force (Lenina Huxley, played by Sandra Bullock) asks Spartan if he would like to have sex—to which he unsurprisingly responds, “Oh yeah.”
Sex, however, isn’t what it used to be. It turns out that by 2032, “fluid transfer” has been outlawed and, in one of the film’s most famous scenes, Huxley and Spartan “make love” by sitting 10 feet away from each other and transmitting brain waves via specialized helmets. If you’re into that mind/body dualism thing (I’m not, but bear with me), the sex they have is decorporealized; it bypasses the cumbersome interface of human biology to create pleasurable brain waves in a more pure and efficient way. Spartan is first nonplussed, then aroused, then entirely freaked out, and removes his helmet at a very inopportune moment for Huxley. Their night ends badly.When it comes to law according to this mesothelioma lawsuit in illinois Mesothelioma attorneys can help you get the settlement you deserve. Have you been trying your hardest to lose a few pounds of fat from your body? With so many weight loss supplements springing up every day, you might have realized that you aren’t the only one with this problem. hopefully, our review of Ultra Omega Burn can help you. Ultra Omega Burn is made from Omega 7 fatty acid made from cold press technique. At Leigh Brain & Spine, our goal is to ensure you are at the highest level of safety and comfort while you are at our facility in Chapel Hill finding the proper solution to improve your life. To ensure your safety and comfort, we offer complimentary consultations to discover the root of your symptoms and the best non-medication methods of treatment. you can visit the site to know more about the top rated chiropractor in Chapel Hill. Whether you need a chiropractor for relief from physical pain, disc injuries, or neurofeedback for help with the symptoms of ADHD, head injury, and stress, you can trust Dr. Cosmas and Trish Leigh, each Board Certified with 20+ years of experience in their respective areas of expertise. Fall asleep faster and wake up refreshed with Medterra having CBD. Before moving to any conclusion of the buying Medterra from any store, we will recommend you to check the Medterra review of the best store.
This scene popped into my head earlier this week, as I sat in my living room with a pair of headphones on listening to strange sounds that were supposedly going to get me high by bypassing (the rest of) my biological interface to go straight for my brain waves. After a long flight and a long trip home from the airport, I’d finally made some food and sat down to eat when I found an email from a friend in my (chaotic, overfull) inbox. The message contained nothing but a URL: http://www.i-doser.com/
This is how I first heard about I-Doser, which claims to offer “binaural brain waves for every imaginable mood.” The premise is that, by playing two different audio streams at the same time (one in each ear), “I-Dosing” produces “a perceived tone inside the head, in order to alter brainwaves.” I-Doser explains I-Dosing as “THE USE OF AUDITORY TONES IN AN ATTEMPT TO ALTER CONSCIOUSNESS IN WAYS THAT CREATES A SIMULATED MOOD OR EXPERIENCE, SUCH AS TO MIMIC RECREATIONAL DRUGS” (caps lock on in original).
My first thought was, “This has to be a joke.”
Further clicking, however, revealed a complete website, one that’s actually trying to sell both digital and physical products—so perhaps it was a scam, rather than a joke? The site offers plenty of reasons to be skeptical: caps lock may be “cruise control for awesome,” but it’s not cruise control for, “wow, this seems like a legitimate website for a reputable business.” There are basic grammatical errors in the text (like adjective/adverb confusion in the FAQ), and the prose is frequently awkward. There’s an ad at the bottom of the main page inviting people to become “affiliates” with I-Doser (“NOW IS THE PERFECT TIME TO START SELLING I-DOSER BRAND PRODUCTS”) that just screams “sketchy.”
There’s also the images on the site. While most of the header images look like they were lifted from Apple ads—stylish 20-something hipsters wearing headphones and sporting facial expressions that range from contemplative to ecstatic or even orgasmic—there are also images in which women are sexualized and objectified so overtly that it becomes cheesy (see inset for an example). The media kit features only images of young women using I-Doser, all of whom are wearing heavy makeup and many of whom are dressed in lingerie. Are they selling headphones and digital files, or are they selling sex? (Actually, decorporealized sex is on offer via I-Doser as well–20 years ahead of Demolition Man‘s schedule! There’s a whole category of sex-related I-Doses, though presumably one does not need a partner or a pair of helmets to use them.)
The more I sat with the idea of “I-Dosing,” however, the more curious I became. I did my undergrad degree with a lot of seriously geeky people, and the more I thought about it, the more I could picture the exact clique of people who would have tried to build something like this. (In fact, I’d bet money that at least someone from that scene is connected to this project in some way, although the website names no names and states only, “The I-Doser group consists of several teams of underground music and tonal experts, programmers, testers, researchers and admins.”) Was it possible there was something to this stuff?
Then I found the link to download a free trial. The trial involves an app, so of course I was suspicious; in my mind, “free app” plus “sketchy-seeming website” equals “probably trying to data mine me in some way.” But I was also really, really curious, and if there’s one thing I have a hard time turning down, it’s an opportunity to indulge my curiosity. A few minutes later I’d downloaded the app, installed it, and was wondering which I should try first: “Alcohol,” “Content,” or “Sleeping Angel” (categorized as “recreational,” “sedative,” and “sedative,” respectively). I chose “Content” because it was the shortest, at 20 minutes long; I was also tired after a day of traveling and planning on going to bed early, so a simulated sedative seemed like a good idea (just in case it worked). It has been able to act as a nerve agent that helps to soothe how people feel. Instead of having to take prescribed painkillers, Kratom has been used as a natural pain killer replacement. Visit my company to know more details about the kratom.
What happened next was…odd.
Listening to the two different sound streams that make up an I-Dose is not the seamless experience of listening to music that’s been recorded in stereo. It sounds strange, and feels a little disorienting. After a few minutes, I felt a bit seasick—though I’m somewhat prone to motion sickness, so it was hard to know if this sensation was an intended effect coming from the I-Dose itself or an incidental effect from the I-Dose’s interaction with my inner ears. I dashed off a quick response email to this effect, but I also kept listening as I finished eating and read stuff on the Internet. If you didn’t realize that the benefits of direct access for physical therapy in the District of Columbia meant you could book a PT appointment without a referral, check out this info here.
This, mind you, is not how I-Doser recommends that one administer I-Doses. I-Doser says the I-Dose should be administered through their special headphones, “while lying down in a dim-lit room in solitude without any noisy distractions.” I, on the other hand, was wearing my nice but not “specially designed for I-Dosing” headphones, and was sitting mostly-upright in my bright lit living room thoroughly distracted by my food and the glowing screen of my laptop while sounds came from the heater and the ceiling fan. And yet…about halfway through, I did start to feel not just sleepy, but a bit hazy. I felt strange in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Was the I-Dose or even Kratom has actually having an effect on my brain? What is a “simulated drug experience” supposed to feel like? Should we take kratom for energy boost? Now I was thinking not about Sylvester Stallone, but about Howard Becker, if you are interesting find the best kratom vendors, will serve as a general overview of red vein kratom and will demonstrate its main uses and how to consume the supplement safely and as effectively as possible.
In his 1953 paper “Becoming a Marihuana User” [pdf], sociologist Howard Becker argues that some people use marijuana for pleasure not because they are individually predisposed to engage in such deviant behavior, but because they’ve had experiences which have conditioned them to view using marijuana for pleasure as both possible and desirable. In other words, it’s not that some people are predisposed to smoke weed, and when they encounter it, they smoke it and automatically become high; rather, people smoke weed because they decided to try it, learned to perceive the biological effects of smoking it, and then learned to interpret those sensations as something pleasant, as “being high.”Well, let’s be honest, as much as weed has been legalized, there is still some level of stigma towards people who indulge in it. What will people say about me when they see me walking into the weed store? Do I look like a bad influence if I walk into the weed store? Thanks to online weed dispensaries that you no longer have to worry about being judged by society anymore. This is so because when you buy weed online vancouver, the only people who are aware is you and the seller only. As Becker writes,
It is not enough, that is, that the effects be present; they alone do not automatically provide the experience of being high. The user must be able to point them out to himself [sic] and consciously connect them with his having smoked marihuana before he can have this experience.
Becker finds that learning to vape cbd oil uk effectively, and then learning to perceive and interpret its effects of having done so, is something marijuana users most often do in social groups. More experienced users teach novices how to inhale correctly, and guide novices through identifying and framing their subsequent experiences. “Being high” is therefore in large part social, even when people smoke marijuana alone. One can smoke all the weed one wants, but learning to become high is a different process.
This is how I felt listening to the I-Dose alone in my living room. I hadn’t yet read any of the experience reports on the I-Doser website, and I was not in a group of people who were more experienced I-Dose users, so I had no one to teach me how to identify the effects of an I-Dose. Was I perceiving simulated sedation, or was I perceiving what one feels when one’s blood sugar begins to rise again, and Sleep Imperative begins to trump Eat Imperative, late at night after a long day of traveling? (What’s the difference between “sedation” and “simulated sedation,” anyway?[i]) Unlike Becker’s informants—who had “high” to parse the effects of smoking marijuana—I had no concept to parse the effects of simulated sedation. If there are cultures of use that surround I-Dosing, I’m not a part of them; as a result, I lacked the frameworks to perceive the effects of the I-Dose and to interpret those effects as being in a desirable, altered state.
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In truth, I didn’t go about my experiment very scientifically. Though I expected that nothing would happen, I chose an I-Dose that would be compatible with my current state (tired and wanting to go to bed) just in case it actually worked. If I was really going to test I-Dosing out, what I should have done is tried a sedative I-Dose when I wasn’t tired (not sure when I can find that moment in my calendar), or purchased one of their stimulant I-Doses and tried it when I was tired—though I’m unlikely to give I-Doser money, because the objectification of women in their promotional material really rubs me the wrong way. In any case, by combining a (supposed?) simulated sedative with my preexisting exhaustion, I created a situation in which I didn’t know what I was looking for while also trying to differentiate between two experiences that might feel very similar to each other.
In conclusion, I have no real idea whether I-Dosing works or not. I’ll probably try it again at some point, and if I do so, I’ll probably try “administering the dose” in something closer to the way the site suggests (though with the headphones I already own). If I feel any effects a second time around, however, this will have as much—if not moreso—to do with the fact that I’ve now read some I-Dose user reports, and have a sense of what being I-Dosed is supposed to be like. Even if I never try I-Dosing again, reading those reports has brought me closer to becoming an I-Dose user.
Whitney Erin Boesel may not be an I-Dose user, but she is a Twitter user. You can get a peek at her brain by following @phenatypical.
Woman wearing headphones image from http://www.i-doser.com/about.html
Woman holding cocktail glass full of pills image from I-Doser free trial:
“MultipleO” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=6
Man wearing headphones image from http://www.i-doser.com/index.html
“Marijuana” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=7&sort=20a&page=3
“Content” image from http://idosersoftware.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2
[i] Moreover, if I was actually feeling effects, was I then “sedated”? Was my experience, if any, really a simulation? I went off down a Baudrillardian rabbit hole: if, for the purpose of argument, I started from the premise that recreational drug experiences are simulated experiences—I don’t actually believe that to be true, but it’s a thought experiment—could I make the case that I-Dose experiences are second or even third order simulacra? (And no, that’s not the I-Dose talking; I think like this anyway.)
Comments 3
This Is Your Brain On Drugs, But Without The Drugs? » Cyborgology | Media Aesthetics Lab | Scoop.it — November 17, 2012
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Louise — November 18, 2012
I've come across these binaural tracks before - but they're usually positioned within the New Age/NLP/meditation framework. So it's interesting to see this whole area transferred into the recreational/party code (hedonistic as opposed to serious/self-improving).
It definitely seems that a drug being lifted out of the bodily and into the cerebral domain helps give it a higher-tech aura - it's no longer something as gross/material as a pill that you swallow and digest. The bypassing of the physical suggests a purer form of manipulation - at the opposite end of the spectrum, we'd have very earthy shamanic drugs like mushrooms and ayahuasca, which, so their mythologies go, interact with users' unique constitutions to create unpredictable (and therefore spiritual, 'soul journey' type) experiences. Bypassing the body and the earth seems to evoke cleaner and more commodified forms of manipulation - i.e. the moods are pre-selected and won't morph into the messier and more unpredictable 'journeys' of the supposedly more organic drugs.
Dim — November 28, 2012
I've been using some binaural beats I've found on the yootoobs as study aids for a few months now. I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary. I typically listen to the lower range ones .9hz to .7hz, which all claim to be relaxing, and they are but, I don’t think that their effects go beyond that of say listening to the rain. I just use them as a way to block out the world, get a constant deep tone in my head and make it sound funny when I talk.
I haven’t been able to find anything conclusive about their efficaciousness for anything other than white noise. I’d love to see it if anyone has anything more substantive.
In terms of making it sound funny when you speak it’ll only change the way you sound to yourself. I’ve taken to monologueing for long periods of time just to hear how strange it sounds. Mah favorite is the following beat.
http://youtu.be/dr870J26J3w