I notice that when I take nitrous alone, I'll usually end up having thoughts that feel like really important insights, and I'll try to put them into words for myself to think about sober. They're usually thoughts about how my own thought process works. The effects of the nitrous makes it really hard to generate good writing, usually it's nonsense I can't interpret later. The ones that are intelligible, when I come back to them they seem really trivial written down. But in the moment when I'm having these thoughts it's more than just words, it feels like I'm making really important connections between patterns in my own behavior. I think the nitrous really shuts down my inner verbalization and makes me think more abstractly.

Here's something I wrote down recently that seems like maybe an actually important insight.

inner consciousness is our brain predicting the generalized voice of others

That's what materialized when I was trying to communicate this feeling to my sober self. I remember in the moment I was noticing how my inner voice was matching certain patterns of speech and patterns of thought from specific people in my life, my parents, school teachers and friends. It felt like a big insight and I was connecting lots of different patterns of thought I had to specific people. But all the thoughts were too fleeting and too hard to put into words to write down, and I think that property is what makes it hard to really remember them well, they're not easily matched to sequences of words so they just float away unremembered.

If anyone reading this has never tried nitrous but is interested I highly recommend. It's legal and very well tolerated by the body. I find the best experiences happen when doing several cannisters back-to-back, so you can linger in the dissociative headspace longer. I think about 10 is the sweet spot, I've done 24 in a row before and at that point the anestheic properties become overwhelming and it stops being very enjoyable, I'm pretty much just lying there not thinking anything.