By Oliver Burkeman — 2018
Pollan’s illuminating history of hallucinogenic drugs reveals that their mystical and medical benefits are indivisible.
Read on www.theguardian.com
CLEAR ALL
How magic mushrooms expand consciousness.
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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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These results support a recent model proposing that psychedelics reduce the ‘precision-weighting of priors’, thus altering the balance of top-down versus bottom-up information passing.
Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results.
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are complex subjective experiences, which have been previously associated with the psychedelic experience and more specifically with the experience induced by the potent serotonergic, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
The scientists hope their long-awaited study on LSD in humans will open the floodgates to further research into psychedelics.
In a recent UK trial, 12 patients with major depression took a pill quite different to commonly prescribed antidepressants: 25mg of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms.
At Imperial College we’ve been comparing psilocybin to conventional antidepressants—and the results are likely to be game-changing.
A new brain-scan study helps explain how psilocybin works—and why it holds promise as a treatment for depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress.