The ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics
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The ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics
Led by public figures like Michael Pollan, Tim Ferriss, and even Joe Rogan, and leading institutions like Johns Hopkins, NYU, Berkeley, and Imperial College London, therapeutic psychedelics are going mainstream again
Packy McCormick • The Magic of Mushrooms
Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS (“Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin” ), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike. The transcendence
... See moreMichael Pollan • How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
It is known that the likelihood of long-term therapeutic gains increases with the likelihood of the subject having a mystical experience, prima facie evidence favoring a critical role for subjectivity. It is precisely the high emotional impact of the memories of the vivid and highly unusual psychedelic experience that serves as the primary source o
... See moreChristof Koch • Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It
The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe. This might not come as news to people who take psychedelic drugs or to the researchers who first studied them back
... See moreMichael Pollan • How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind.