By Michael Pollan — 2020
The dark history of how coffee took over the world.
Read on www.theatlantic.com
CLEAR ALL
Have you ever had the feeling of your mind being outside your body—maybe looking down, or up, or across the room at yourself? About 10 percent of people report having had an out-of-body experience at least once.
In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec...
The drug lowers brain barriers, allowing distant regions to talk and thoughts to flow more freely.
Risky pursuits like BASE jumping offer a buzz better than any drug. New technologies provide the same rush without the danger.
For a long time, research into flow states was subjective—researchers had to rely on people’s self-reported experiences to understand altered states of mind.
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“How many surf bums who can’t keep a job washing dishes will be up at 5 AM putting on a gritty, sandy wetsuit to paddle out in cold, sharky water for just one shot at a barrel? That’s motivation. If you could bottle that, then what’s possible?”
For those psychedelic users who experience post-use “spiritual comedowns”, psychedelic withdrawals, or a general sense of dopamine depletion, what can be done to alleviate these symptoms?
Ganzflicker is known to elicit the experience of anomalous sensory information in the external environment, called pseudo-hallucinations.
In mice and one person, scientists were able to reproduce the altered state often associated with ketamine by inducing certain brain cells to fire together in a slow, rhythmic fashion.
Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD can induce an experience known as oceanic boundlessness, which is characterized by a feeling of oneness with the world and a sense of awe.