I don't really know if the effects can be attributed to psilocybin here. It describes general well-being improvements after a social event that was also a retreat focused on a mutually enjoyable activity which was psilocybin exposure. I'm curious if this happens also in writer's retreats, furry or anime conventions, group hiking, or meditation retreats.
The lack of even an attempt at control makes it a very weak paper overall and I wouldn't attribute it to support anything.
Anecdotally, I experienced an effect that was indistinguishable from an MDMA roll toward the end of a 3-day Landmark Forum session I attended a little over a decade ago. I had been a somewhat regular MDMA and psilocybin user during my early 20s.
What took me by surprise was I felt the company/teaching itself was largely bs, but something about how the whole room of 100 or so people seemed to come together in a giant ball of positivity put me in that state, and it was an immediate shift. It was so overwhelming on the drive home that I had to pull over a few times to get my bearings. I woke up the next morning still fully rolling, and it wasn't until lunchtime that it really abated.
I actually wondered if somehow I had been slipped something, but I hadn't eaten for hours by that point and had been sipping out of the same water bottle all day.
Many attendees were acting fairly happy/goofy but it's just one of those things that would be inappropriate to bring up or ask. I attended a follow-up 3 day advanced seminar to see if I could recapture that feeling and left disappointed.
This stuff falls under what I would consider the 'cult' umbrella and I think one of the reasons why such orgs are so successful is because group empathy sessions are really powerful. Unsure if my experience itself was in essence an MDMA flashback or if MDMA (and psilocybin) is a conduit to what group empathy can achieve.
I've noticed that whenever I describe my MDMA experiences to others, I feel a faint a faint version of the effects, sorta like a flashback. I chalked it up to something about the effects being associated with those memories, so activating the memories also activates the effects.
I get a light version of it whenever I do yoga, meditation, or get a deep tissue massage. This was different, like a min 150mg dose - intense body rush, light sensitivity/nystagmus. And it just went on for about 16 hours or so, impairing my ability to function.
Sleep dep, food dep, and states of high emotional arousal are textbook brainwashing techniques.
The MO of a cult introduction is to love bomb the victim and/or to build up tension and then release it cathartically. This is often enhanced by deliberately disturbing food and/or sleep cycles.
The superficial content is not the message. The feelings are the message.
These events are designed to make people leave on a high, so they imprint on the source and keep coming back to it. The high is far more effective than anything that's said, whether or not it makes sense.
Oh for sure. In addition they created their own lexicon used in the context of the teachings and did all sorts of compliance exercises (making the room repeatedly stand up, forced us to call friends/family to confess and recruit).
The thing is, I went in knowing all this. I knew exactly what they were doing, knew the background of the org, and went anyway to support a couple friends. It still got me right at the end, as I was sitting in my chair thinking how ready I was to go home, within the second to last hour of the 3 day retreat.
I didn't come away thinking better of the event, but I was damn curious about the psychological impacts of group empathy, how the room had almost attained some resonant frequency of emotional harmony and I was swept up in it.
I mean if you think about it the effects from the drug are caused by the human brain, thus the human brain should be able to recreate something similar to it if it wanted to. Sort of like how people report having “acid flashbacks”
The tricky thing about psychedelics is that they have been described as delivering the "placebo effect on steroids". That is to say, the set and setting prior to ingestion directly effects outcomes, so if you want to maximize your chance of seeing some consistent results, you would want to prime people with certain expectations and knowledge prior to them taking the psychedelic. If you were to control it against an active placebo (people often use an amphetamine), the participants would be able to deduce they aren't actually taking a psychedelic.
I like to call it psilo-cebo for mushrooms, or psyche-cebo in general.
The approach should be to use different types of psychoactive drugs to multiple pseudocontrol groups. Have a control group have placebo, then another LSD, another Ketamine, another a synthetic cannabinoid, another mushrooms.
That way even if the effects are genuine of psilocybin it will pop from the rest in the results, if is in psychedelics in general LSD will pop as well, if it's anything "mind exploring" Ketamine will pop too, if it's just getting high what makes things better, the cannabinoid will join into the results.
And obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users.
"obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users"
Interestingly, the subjective experience of having a "high" seems to be somewhat learned through prior experiences. Testing on people without drug experience may not be the accurate test one might want and assume.
This is most likely because of the function serotonin has on neurons and neural networks. 5ht is a g protein coupled receptor, and in the case of serotonin what happens when you hit one with an agonist is you set a cascade of second messengers intracellular that modify how the cell responds, such as adjusting the protein expression of different ion channels and/or receptors. This can lead to a greatly increased sensitivity to stimuli that already exists.
participants were able to deduce it because it's not at all the same experience in any way shape or form. Your use of the term "placebo" is extremely incorrect in this case.
Anecdotally, I follow a big con each year-DragonCon-and the warm fuzzy feeling during and after seems real to me. Part of it is the planning and build up the months leading to it, and seeing old friends and stuff, and part is being part of a cool, time boxed community.
There are a lot of ways that "psilocybin therapy" is more similar to behavioural/experiential (rehab, Camino del Santiago pilgrimage, etc.) than pharma therapy.
I'm not sure that those things are an appropriate control. But yes, there's been very little serious research. It was near impossible to do until just recently.
Some more solid old research on iboga and some new, somewhat more mature research happening with mdma.
I think the difference here is experiencing an entheogen. A psilocybin experience can literally restore your spiritual faith. I have experienced different conventions and different drugs, and the after-glow of entheogenic drugs is different than the after-glow of a con or shared group experience.
experiencing an entheogen. A psilocybin experience can literally restore your spiritual faith
Interesting point. Given individuals temperamentally and experientially predisposed to depression and who report they know no other cognitive condition then entheogen exposure could supply the experience of alternate (positive) states of mind. Assuming these individuals report they want to entertain these induced positive states then you could imagine a therapeutic regimine which would involve use of psilocybin-like compounds coupled with presentation of social interaction simulations through 3D VR headsets outfitted with strategically placed EEG monitoring probes. If simulations are shaped to elicit negative reactions which subsequently are detected then audio queries can be inserted such as 'is this an appropriate reaction? What would be a better reaction or strategy?' which could aid individuals in shaping their own cognitive behavior. - does sound like a personalized interactive AI date-sim plus often the only winning move is not to play :-)
> Due to the non-random sample, as well as the lack of placebo control, it could be argued that sub-acute enhancements are due to uncontrolled factors such as psychological expectations, or the environment in which the drug is taken.
Indeed. The setting of the retreat (“After ingestion, participants were instructed to stay on the premises, and were able to do what they wanted, as long as they did not disturb other participants. Facilitators provided music, tools to draw and/or write, and food. In the evening, all participants and facilitators came back together as a group.”) might have had a significant effect on the results. These should be, at least, compared to a similar retreat where no psilocybin is ingested.
Otherwise, the effects could come solely from the environment, e.g., a calm and relaxing retreat far from a busy life.
If depression were so easy to treat it would hardly qualify as a mental illness. I think the purpose of the pleasant, relaxed setting was more to ensure the psilocybin had positive rather than negative effects on the participants. It's a precaution, like how in radiation therapy you point the radiation at the tumor rather than adjacent vital organs.
Sure, it makes sense --- but I think what your parent is trying to say is that a control would be fairly easy to implement --- just put some other people on the retreat and don't let them take anything.
I think it would be better to put them on a separate retreat. Otherwise they could piggyback on the group dynamics of the people who took the psilocybin.
Good point. Trying to equalize the retreats for time of year, weather, and other externalities could get tough. But with a big enough sample size maybe those features would be levelled out.
The one time I took psilocybin, my buddy and I sub-acutely plastered ourselves in apple sauce and paper towels so we’d look like mummies, then we watched ninja turtles for about four hours.
The only movie I've watched while tripping is eXistenZ, and that was an indescribable experience. I can imagine four hours of anthropomorphized turtles doing karate was also a good time, though probably less horrifying than eXistenZ.
Out of curiosity, how old were you when this happened?
> The truffle sample (15 grams; Psilocybe Hollandia) contained 1.9 mg of psilocybin and 10.5 mg of psilocin. Participants ingested an average (SD) 34.2 (8.9) grams of truffles throughout the day.
Is that equivalent to 15 grams of dried mushrooms? If so that is a serious dose (over 1/2 an ounce!), there would be breakthroughs and breakdowns happening left and right given that amount.
Seems unlikely that participants (particularly first timers) would ingest such a large quantity, even when spread out over a number of hours.
Perhaps if one only drank the tea the effects wouldn't be as extreme as both drinking the tea and eating the remnants, but still, I'd have some concerns if the facilitator presented 15 grams to me and said something along the lines of, "now don't worry, just drink the tea and eat the rest, everything's going to be just fine [after you get through the maelstrom phase]" :)
Truffles are less potent than mushrooms, so you need to more or less double the dosage. I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms. Since it was ingested throughout the day, I would assume that's dosages equivalent to 1-3 grams spread out through the day.
> I would think that the 15 grams of truffles then would be equivalent to about 7-8 grams of dried mushrooms
Spread throughout the day that would be reasonable for a facilitated retreat, yes. Also depends on the variety, some strains can be extremely powerful, to the point that 3.5 grams is more than enough.
Truffles are less potent than mushrooms, and are typically administered non-dried.
Therefore, 15g of truffles is more like 1.5g of dried mushrooms.
The amount of psilocin and psilocybin given in the article confirms this. It's a very low dose.
When I was in Amsterdam, I bought a package containing 20g of these truffles. The label on the packaging said you should split it into two doses, but I've never been one to diddle the dose, so I ate 'em all, en route to the famous Amsterdamse Bos.
It ended up being, quite literally, a walk in the park :)
Not sure about the weight concentration in truffles, but for fresh mushrooms, if my memory doesn't fail me, the weight for a similar psilocybin dosage is about 10:1, so 50g of fresh mushrooms would be the equivalent of 5g of dried ones.
I microdosed shrooms once (.1g) and it was distracting. I guess my creativity was 'up' but that was because I kept getting distracted by cool lights and random thoughts.
It did motivate me to workout but mushrooms always make me want to exercise for some reason
I tried Psilocybin on two different occasions and two very different trips. The first being pleasant, the second being my last.
The first time I took it, I was outside. The very first thing I notice is just how vivid the green leaves swaying in the wind were. How calm, serene, peaceful. Then I started seeing the walls, "breathe". I've never been able to feel such inner peace before. In this moment, I realized, I have so much potential. We all do, yet it's our own doubts, and the internalized opinion of others or vanity metrics hindered our progress. I've found "spiritualism". I started playing Gran Turismo and realized how effortless I've been able to drive around the Nordschliefe. Normally I'd crash but I was putting no effort yet I was playing at a level that surpassed my normal everyday skill. Then I started joining meetups. Like groups that I never thought I'd join. I was suddenly interested in women's rights, I got interested in Hinduism.
The next day, the inner peace continued to linger. However, after a few months, I was back to my old self.
So this econd time, I upped the dose (bad idea). This time I stayed in my room (another bad idea). Instead of the inner peace, I was in a state of panic. There were some scary visuals like the Eye of Providence, I could feel the presence of some extra-terrestrial intelligence, looking at me, judging me with those unchanging Eye on the US dollar bill.
I headed downstairs and the visuals just got stranger. I close my eyes and see complex geometrics, and reopen them to see math formulas everywhere. I was getting even more panicky and I head to lie down.
Then I experienced what is called "Ego Death". I felt like I was dead. No identity, no awareness. It was awful, I longed for anything, any sort of order and structure I had in my normal reality. I was thinking "yup I fucked up. I poisoned myself. good god."
During the ego death, the only certainty I felt was Math. Math is the language of both this universe and the fabric of our universe. We are made out of math. The gut feelings we get, the emotions, thoughts, they were ultimately mathematical manifestations. This was the intuition I was feeling, a spiritual plane where Everything is Everything while being Nothing. The ubiquity and the ephemeral nature of both our life, and the universe.
There is a positive story out of this. I came out of the ego death, and I was sooooo thankful that there was something in this reality instead of nothing. The trip was not over, and I started seeing this bright pulsating object that looked like a symbol of sorts....kinda like a lightning symbol appear right above between the eye brows of the people I looked at!
I am not a religious person and have not come into contact with any Hinduism materials but when I looked up the Hindu symbol for the Third Eye, I almost fell out of my chair-it was the same. I never even heard or seen the Third eye before, and I was just reading other people's trips and there were people who saw the exact same thing....
After the trip was over, the next morning, I woke feeling light. It felt like I sat in a sauna but instead of sweating out chemical toxins, my spirit felt like it was cleansed. I did make some positive life changes....but ended up right back where I was.
It seems like you need to keep taking psilocybin to see the benefits but after that trip, I'd rather not open that door anymore. It was frightening more than it was awakening but perhaps because the possibility that our material reality that the Western civilization claims is be-all and end-all is not only incorrect but immature-civilizations and cultures that existed longer all have gone through such stages, and eventually gave way to spirituality at some point.
I'm also not a religious person but I once had a very odd feeling after a guided meditation (I completely lost ALL fear of death for a couple days... including the baseline fear of death, which we all actually have and which I had never noticed before, since it's always there). It is good to be skeptical, but I think it's also good to acknowledge when something truly subjectively weird occurs.
> including the baseline fear of death, which we all actually have
That is a strong claim.
I have no fear of death, but a fear of what often immediately precedes death, namely decrepitude and illness. I'm in my mid 50s and so I watched the generation of my grandparents go through it, and then my parents generation. The only positive I can find in that is that if any of them feared death, the illness had made them prefer it over the constant sickness.
Tibetans talks through all the different stages of heightened awareness as you meditate deeper. In fact, one of the meditative technique requires you to visualize the Tibetan alphabet letter for AH sound, sort of like the OM sound in Hindi, and it goes into great detail about what sort of sensations one might feel, so its very possible that you've reached a mental state that is just void of the ego that you used to have. It's the ego that fears death most of all, because it means losing attachment to the material things in the ego's mind.
I remember one Hindu guy telling me after a long discussion in the sauna, "Ego is your brain trying to protect you from truths you cannot handle".
Do you have any information on these sensations? When this particular meditation is "working" (or at least, when I believe it is), I feel kind of a tingling over my whole body that I don't feel in any other circumstance, I don't know how better to describe it. It's usually around the part where the guided meditation says something like "try to find the rhythm beneath your heart rhythm"
FWIW the guided meditation that got me to my "experience" was apparently inspired by Babaji
There's plenty of sober people who think this idea is entirely possible, maybe even probable. The idea goes by the name the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and the foremost proponent is Max Tegmark.
The lack of even an attempt at control makes it a very weak paper overall and I wouldn't attribute it to support anything.