a single psilocybin trip and i i specify trip because sometimes when people take psilocybin at the doses that griffith uses they don't have a psychedelic experience most people who take the dose do but not everyone those who take the dose and don't have the mystical experience don't experience the consequences of taking the drug and the consequences can be quite profound so one consequence is that if you have the mystical experience that's associated with psilocybin ingestion you're liable to represent that to others and yourself as one of the two or three most experienced important experiences of
your entire life so that would be at the same level as the birth of your child or your marriage let's say assuming that those were transcendent experiences but but that's but that's how people describe them so that's that's very interesting in and of itself then the next thing that griffith another thing that griffith reported was that one year after a psilocybin dose a single psilocybin dose profound enough to induce a mystical experience the trait openness of the participants had increased one standard deviation which is a tremendous amount and so it looked like one dose produced
a permanent neurological and psychological transformation now you know i'm not saying that that's a good thing i'm not saying that because i don't think that openness is a un troubled blessing but it's certainly a testament to the unbelievable potency of the of the drugs there's about a ten percent chance by the way with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to hell and so that's certainly something very much worth considering when you're thinking about the potential effects of of this kind of experience so the the mystical experience produced by psilocybin is rated by people as the most
profound among the most profound experience of their life as life-changing it produces permanent personality transformations 85 percent success in smoking cessation with a single dose right that's another thing that griffiths demonstrated now that is mind-boggling because there are chemical treatments for smoking cessation buproprion is one it reduces craving to some degree but its success rate is nowhere near 85 percent certainly not with a single dose and so we don't understand how it can be that that occurs but it's nicely documented by griffith's team in this experiment he gave psilocybin to people who were dying of
cancer cancer patients often develop chronic clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety previous studies suggest that may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients aldous huxley took lsd on his deathbed by the way so the idea that there was something about psychedelic substances that could buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea that's as old as experimentation with the drug itself the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life-threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression and or anxiety unsurprisingly i don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of
people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain prognosis or mortal significance as depression precisely you know you know what i mean is that if you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable fatal cancer the normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that and so it one of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression because i don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis i don't think that's the right
way to think about it i think that you have a big problem and it's not surprising that you're overwhelmed by negative emotion and to think about that as a psychiatric malfunction is a major error but anyways it's it's a side issue with regards to this study the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life-threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression and or anxiety i cannot imagine how they got this through an ethics committee it's just we're going to take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life-threatening and we're going to
give them psychedelics it's like but they did it they did it and i think it's a testament to griffith's stature as a researcher that that that was allowable this was a randomized double-blind crossover trial very carefully designed clinical investigation people were assigned to the treatment group or the to the drug group or the non-drug group randomly blindly and investigated the effects of the drug also at different doses which is another hallmark of a well-designed pharmacological study very low placebo-like dose one or three milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight versus a high dose 22 or
30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of of psilocybin chemical psilocybin administered in counterbalance sequence with five weeks between sessions and a six-month follow-up instructions to participants and staff minimized the effects of expectancy participants staff and community observers rated participant moods attitudes and behaviors throughout the study that's also the hallmark of a well-designed study because they didn't rely on a single source of information for the outcome data right they got self-reports that's fine but they had relatively objective observers also gather data at the same time high-dose psilocybin produce large decreases in clinician and self-related measures of depressed
mood and anxiety along with increases in quality of life life meaning and optimism and decreases in death anxiety and that's an interesting it's a subtle and scientifically sparse statement but it's a very interesting one it was the in there's a there's an intimation of a causal relationship here increases in quality of life life meaning and decreases in death anxiety i mean the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the felt meaning in your life and the psilocybin dosages potentiate that but it's a good thing to
know in a general manner if it happens to be a generalizable truth right if you're terrified of mortality terrified of vulnerability there's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the negative element of existence it's a reasonable hypothesis and an optimistic one i think although a difficult one at six month follow-up these changes were sustained with about eighty percent of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety stephen ross commenting about this he was a co-investigator said it is simply unprecedented in psychiatry
that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results right which means we have no idea why this happens participants attributed improvements and attitudes about life slash self mood relationships and spirituality to the high dose experience with more than 80 percent endorsing moderately or greater increased well-being and life satisfaction community observers showed corresponding changes mystical types psilocybin experience on session day mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes what that means is that well when the researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug ingestion and the
positive outcome the causal relationship was drug ingestion mystical experience positive outcome it wasn't drug ingestion positive outcome there had to be the experience produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect now we don't again we don't know why that is either i mean maybe some people needed a higher dose who knows because people vary tremendously in their sensitivity to pharmaceutical substances now why am i telling you all this well i'm telling you for a variety of reasons one is the first is make no mistake about it human
beings have the capacity for forms of consciousness that are radically unlike our normative forms of consciousness and the evidence that those alternative forms of consciousness are purely pathological which is the simplest explanation right you perturb a system it produces pathology that's negative that is the simplest explanation the evidence for that is weak at best leaving out the bad trip issue which which is non-trivial the empirical evidence as it accrues in fact seems to suggest that the consequence of mystical positive mystical experiences associated with psychedelic intake is overwhelmingly positive even in extreme situations and you really
can't find a more extreme situation than uncertain cancer diagnosis with concomitant and depression and anxiety like i mean that's not as bad as it gets but it's kind of in the ballpark and so the fact that even under circumstances like that there was the overwhelming probability that the experience would be positive because that's another thing you wouldn't expect you know even from some of the earlier earliest discussions about psychedelic use that were put forth by people including timothy leary describing the importance of set right so that the early experimenters noted that if you had a
psychedelic experience and you were in a bad state or in a bad place that that was one of the precursors to a bad trip that the negative emotion that you entered the experience with could be magnified tremendously by the by the chemical substances so that it was necessary to be somewhere safe to be around people that you trust to be in a familiar environment to get all the variables that you could on control under control but here is a situation where that isn't what's happening at all because people have this cancer diagnosis of cancer diagnosis
of unspecified outcome and they still the vast majority of them had a positive experience and the positive experience experience had long lasting positive consequences so so the case that the transcendent experience is not real that's wrong it's real now we don't know what that means because it actually challenges to some degree our concepts of what constitutes real but it's certainly well within the realm of normative human experience so it's part of the human capacity and you know there's been other neurological experiments too there's there's a researcher canadian researcher if i remember correctly who invented something
he called the god helmet and it used electromagnetic stimulation brain stimulation to induce mystical experiences now i don't remember what part of the brain he was shutting off or activating with that particular gadget but and you know there's there's there's als there's all sorts of other indications of this sort of thing that have cropped up in another domains of the neurological literature for example it's very common for people who are epileptic to have religious experiences as part of the prodroma to the actual seizure that was the case with dostoevsky for example who had incredibly intense
religious experiences that would culminate in epileptic seizure and he said that they were of sufficient quality that he would give up his whole life to have had them and the funny thing too is that in my reading of dostoevsky at least is that i think that epileptic seizures and the associated mystical experiences were part of what made him a transcendentally brilliant author i don't think that he would have broken through into the domains of insight that he possessed without those strange neurological experiences and it was certainly not the case that his epilepsy or the experiences
that were associated with it produced what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive function it's quite the contrary at least that's how it looks to me
