Warning: For reasons that will hopefully become clear below, this praxis should not be duplicated by people who don't know what they're doing. Under the wrong circumstances the activities described below can be harmful to your health, or just unpleasant.

I decided "as much as possible" of a neurotransmitter should be interpreted as meaning "as much as possible without ill health effects" - especially considering that several of the ones suggested in the task description will kill you if you get too much. And I also decided that, since your body becomes desensitized to many stimuli over time, I would spend a week working for a single instance of maximal levels.

I also decided I wanted to do one of the three fun neurotransmitters - dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, which together are responsible for most pleasure. Dopamine has the problem that anything you can do to achieve this task is at least a little bit addictive, and many of the more potent techniques either break the law or require you to be in a relationship. I take medications that mess with the other two, though - a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor and a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. Thankfully, at the present point in my life neither is essential - one is for ADD, and when you're unemployed it's often OK to be a little more disorganzed than usual; the other is an antidepressant, and while I have had depressive episodes in the past I'm not actually presently depressed.

Under normal circumstances, of course, going off an antidepressant is a really unwise idea. In this instance, though, I actually did just fine without it for the duration, as at present its function is basically a preventative one and I'm not under the sort of stress that led to the depression it was prescribed for.

So, I decided to do this task with serotonin. My basic strategy consisted of adjusting my body to a lower than normal level of serotonin-production stimuli, including by going off both of the aforementioned medications for a while, and then both stimulating the production of more and decreasing my metabolism of it.

In addition to these less-relevant factors, today I took Syrian rue seeds, which contain certain chemicals that prevent the body from metabolizing serotonin - increasing the amount of it running through my nervous system.

For the past week (longer than necessary, but as you will see it's best to err on the side of caution) I've been off my SNRI. More recently I also stopped taking my NRI - because while I don't think that one is relevant to the experiment, I don't know for certain how the serotonin and norepinephrine systems interact. I also spent more of my time indoors under relatively low light, to encourage my body to get used to producing its desired amount of serotonin under conditions different from the norm.

There were also some dietary rules I've had to live by for several days, and will for several days more. Harmaline is a harsh mistress, and I knew I was planning to take some as part of this task. Warning to others who think this sounds fun: Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) like the drugs involved here interact with everything - most other drugs, be they legal, prescription, or over-the-counter, as well as many items in your diet. If you haven't done the research and don't know what to avoid, this is bad.

The clinical details: Harmaline the other, similar alkaloids found in the seeds of the Syrian rue plant, are classified as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) - chemicals which inhibit your body's production of the enzymes monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and/or monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B) In this case I believe they inhibit both, but the important part for this task is that MAO-A is the enzyme which metabolizes serotonin.

Because serotonin is the neurotransmitter involved in much of the action of most of the psychedelic drugs, and these alkaloids suppress its metabolism by the body, harmaline and related alkaloids in the quantities involved here (about 5 g of Syrian rue seeds, which are 3-5% alkaloid by mass - a light to moderate dose, but it's been close to two years since I've done anything like this so I figured I shouldn't have too much) can sometimes produce an effect not entirely unlike that of Psilocybe mushrooms. It's not entirely like it, either - and as I discuss below, psychological factors (and possibly to some extent the diet and light stuff I did) influenced the results to be less psychedelic but somewhat more fun.

Forgive me if I start rambling a bit here - from this point on, this entire praxis is being written while under the influence - which probably doesn't have a huge effect, but also probably doesn't have none. The stuff above it has been edited in that state too.

(For those of you who are reading this and wondering: yes, this is legal.)

This morning, I woke up bright and early, went for a walk, and prepared myself some Syrian rue tea. This I put into the freezer to chill it, because I really didn't want to be aware of the smell later when the time cames to take the stuff.

I should mention at this point how unimaginably vile Syrian rue tastes. The flavor has been compared to a decomposed chocolate mint - which is about right as far as the smell goes. The aroma alone has been known to cause nasuea. However, this misses out on how incomparably bitter it is. To make matters worse, to properly extract the alkaloids you need to add some acid to the water (I used lime juice), making it sour as well. Once you've downed your tea, it's always best to chase it with a strongly flavored beverage to wash the flavor away. In this case, I had half a bottle of raspberry-flavored hefewiezen.

This takes a half hour or more to kick in, so I made some cornbread which my trip-sitter* and I ate.

*Note: psychedelic drugs shouldn't be taken alone. The person you are taking them with should be sober, experienced, or ideally both. In this case, mine was Levitating Potato, and he was both.

Later, we had homemade lemon gelato (made in a hamster ball, of course), and then after a while we went for a walk in the partial sunlight. By the time we got back (about three and a half hours into the experience) I was feeling decidedly more of a serotonin-style happiness than previously, but not especially weird in any other way. Given how suggestible many mind-altering drugs, and psychedelics in particular, tend to be, this is not surprising at all - I was doing this in connection with Neuroscience, and I was hoping for the serotonin feeling, so that's what I got. In other words, my mind was doing me a favor by playing up that aspect of the trip.

Then I popped open a can of root beer. Oddly, the flavor was exactly the same as always, but I was more able to tease out the different flavors within it (wintergreen, anise, and vanilla being the big three, but this brand has somewhat more cinnamon in it than is typically found) than I normally am. It was neat.

Later I kept LP company for a while while he worked on a task that should be hitting the praxis fairly soon. We also brainstormed a game, but we haven't yet played it on a surface more public than scratch paper, so that is incomplete. By this point my drugs were just starting to wear off. (Our game won't feel drug-induced when you see the rules, by the way; as I have mentioned this wasn't as weird a trip as I've had on Syrian Rue in the past.)

Conclusions: Being full of serotonin feels good. Drugs that tend to do other weird things too are suggestible enough to keep those effects surprisingly small if you're expecting them to fill you with serotonin. When your serotonin levels are raised artificially, a normal or even boring day where not much happens is actually pretty fun. Tasking on drugs may produce some strange results, and should probably happen more often (given tasks that permit it).

At the time of this posting, about seven and a half hours after taking the Syrian rue, I am sober. I'm also still feeling pretty good about my day. However, the week-plus-long process isn't over. I'm still off my medicine for a couple days, and on a special diet for a little less time.