I Tried to Scientifically Test Microdosing - [30 Days Group Test]

before i get started i want to thank audible for sponsoring this video right now it kind of feels like my fingers are vibrating and i don't think i'm supposed to feel like that oh this isn't good this feels really bad oh no what's happening right now this is not microdosing microdosing for context is the consumption of a small amount of psychedelics usually lsd or psilocybin which is most commonly found in magic mushrooms these are compounds that have the power to take a normal human brain under a neural scan and light it up like this scientists

have been interested in the effects of psychedelics since the 1950s with the cia testing lsd on subjects with the hope that it could unlock the power of human mind control spoiler alert it didn't work however a sudden shift in culture and politics at the end of the 1960s made psychedelics illegal and almost overnight it became virtually impossible for researchers to pursue any new testing or research into the effects of these drugs until very recently researchers are experimenting with the use of magic mushrooms showing they could treat things like depression ptsd and addiction the results so

far are so encouraging people come out feeling alive again the past decade has produced incredible breakthroughs in the use of psychedelics for treating various mental health conditions with additional research finding that microdosing a small amount of psilocybin could also boost creative thinking so for the next 30 days i want to try microdosing psilocybin to test three of its most common claims that i can improve our creative thought our focus and overall mood and at the end of my 30 days i'm going to conduct a large group test to see if any of my personal experience

holds true on a larger scale it feels so dumb already quick disclaimer i live in one of the few cities that has voted to decriminalize psychedelics you can purchase magic mushrooms at a walk-in store and i know that is not the situation for most people also if you're watching this and you're a cop or my mom uh this is a sketch and none of it's real but if it was here's how it would work once every three days i'm going to consume one tenth a recreational dose of psilocybin which for me is going to be

between 0.2 and 0.3 grams this won't be enough to experience the trippy dreamlike experience psychedelics are known for instead it should be just enough to explore the creative and productivity benefits many people claim to experience through microdosing while i may feel some effects for the first couple hours from what i've read i should continue to see benefits from the micros for the two days following as well so on day one i took what i thought was a proper microdose and sat down to test it out so this is day one micro dosing for creativity and

productivity my plan was to go through some writing on an upcoming video and it was about 45 minutes before i started to feel a kind of unfamiliar feeling in the back of my mind i continued working and for a while my concentration my work remained focused so focused in fact i forgot my camera was rolling and when i did remember i couldn't find my words when i tried to explain what it was i was feeling brain just goes like oh yeah like all this other stuff then i proceeded to do 18 more takes convinced i

was failing to get any of them right just when i'm on the work and i can really lock in oh gosh i don't think i did this right eventually i decided i wasn't a state to get any work done and instead watched midsummer on my sofa coming to terms with the fact that rather than a boosting creativity on day one my experience was more like a mini trip prevailing theory is that top-down structures that we learned throughout our lives psychedelics seem to add all kinds of entropy in a way that you're allowed to look at

things from a new perspective but also develop new patterns this is martine strip the co-founder of synthesis a psychedelic retreat that has been working with researchers from imperial college to explore the transformative effects of psilocybin it really helps with people that seem to be too stuck in a certain pattern so think about addiction ocd body dysmorphia anxiety depression often those are loops that people are in and what comes up is how we really feel everything we've been holding whether that's you know sense of trauma or sense of gratefulness or sense of connection with with our

loved ones that becomes very very and almost intensely present after talking with martine i know i need to be more careful measuring my microdoses at the start of each day and almost immediately i start to see a real spike in my daily productivity one thing that's really noteworthy is on my second and third days when you're still supposed to be feeling those like carryover effects of the psilocybin i had two of the most productive days in recent memory i mean i got all of my work done that was on my to-do list i worked out

early and efficiently i even was like reading some short stories before bed so if i have more days like that coming ahead that would be amazing but these benefits didn't last today i'm really struggling to stay motivated with my work my thoughts feel really loose and unfocused and this is not the first day i have felt like this especially when i am in the first couple hours after i take a micro dose i'm getting really inconsistent results each time i take it which can lead to days like this that suck so gotta say one and

a half weeks in not the best so far after a frustrating couple of days i decided to put this challenge on hold for a week to try and figure out a better way to approach it then when i was editing through my interview with martine i found this piece of advice that i'd forgotten he mentioned the experience is very dependent on the context in which it is taken for example you take a painkiller and painkiller works whether you're at home or where you're in a plane with a psychedelic you have a very very different experience

in those two situations so what i would recommend you do is every time you take the the microdose you do it in conjunction by starting out with a meditation or uh listening to a binaural beats or whatever is your preference so i decided to shift the time of my microdose to the evening while carving out time to pair it with some mindfulness breathing and music other activities i tried including drawing while listening to an audiobook doing some journaling or reading all of which made the experience much more relaxing and easy to get through and allowed

me to stay productive with my work the following day while i am seeing improvement in my experience since i switched to microdosing in the evening rather than early in the day i know i can't draw any meaningful conclusions just from my own personal experience so i decided to take a closer look at the 2018 study that found microdosing psilocybin improve subjects creative thinking skills i want to find out how the research team was able to measure something as complex as human creativity and it turns out it's pretty hard to simplify their tests the research team

divided their focus into two areas of creative thought those being divergent and convergent thinking skills convergent thinking focuses on our creative problem solving when there is a single solution that may require some out of the box thinking divergent thinking on the other hand measures our mental flexibility by asking subjects not to find one correct solution but instead to come up with as many possible solutions as they can imagine a common divergent thinking test is to give someone an item and ask them to list as many possible uses for that item as they can come up

with so to test if micro dosing really can improve our creative thinking i asked my brother cam and some of our friends if they'd be willing to try some divergent and convergent thinking tests to see how they scored draw four continuous straight lines connecting all the dots without lifting your pencil from the paper move one matchstick to make this equation correct it feels so dumb already for about 140 foot ladder under corn green so as many uses of this item as possible you could tape it over an outlet to baby proof the outlet oh it

gives you a back spreader it looks like a good vessel to like float on top of water once the first test was complete they agreed to each consume a microdose and return in 90 minutes to take a second test if their scores came back higher the second time around we'd know my producing produced an improvement but i also realized i was introducing a variable here if my second test wound up to be harder or easier than the first test it would ruin the whole experiment so to control for this during our first round of testing

i gave half the subjects test a and the other is test b this meant if one test was harder than the other it didn't really matter when they came back for round two each group would just take the opposite test we also included a control group who didn't consume a microdose between the two tests to see if their scores improved at the same rate as everyone else's all that was left now was to see how they fared uh yeah let's start with waterboarding you can signal with the pen yes no make yourself vomit use the

cap you take a very small dose of something oh i know the answer to this one this is too easy use it to eat food out of oh wait no that doesn't actually work like a little bit of that as a fan like a shoulder stretcher put it over a loaf of bread when it's rising the 59th day i don't know maybe that that micro dose did do something when we talked the results on both tests the scores on test a improved by 20 after subjects consumed a microdose while the scores on test b improved

by 50 when we compared these results to the control group we found the control group showed no improvement between their first and second test so i think that pretty much speaks for itself microdosing definitely makes you smarter and more creative proved it with science yes science obviously i'm being sarcastic as our sample of eight people is way too small but as we were working on this video one of the very first phase three tests with over a hundred subjects showed that therapy aided by psychedelics was able to heal mental trauma caused by ptsd it's one

of the largest studies of its kind and i genuinely we are entering a turning point into how we classify psychedelic substances understanding them as a tool that could be transformative for so many people all that said the major claims around microdosing remain largely unproven and even though i was kind of shocked by the results of our mini experiment there was nothing i found in my experience that would lead me to recommend micro dosing as a meaningful tool to unlock your focus creativity or improve your mood if you would still like to learn more about this

topic i recommend you use the sponsor of this video audible to check out michael pollan's audiobook how to change your mind what the science of psychedelics teaches it's actually a much longer title but it's a great resource that tracks the history of psychedelics and includes so many details i wish we could have included in this video personally i've been using audible for at least five years now and what i love is that with your membership you get a free audiobook credit every month from audible's vast library regardless of price or length so if you are

like me that means you are going to use that credit on a 20 plus hour fantasy audiobook that you can listen to when you go for a walk work out or make breakfast recently i did this with patrick rothfuss's king killer series which i would listen to every morning as part of my daily routine and genuinely two of the best books i have ever experienced and listening to them as part of my daily routine made doing things even as basic as folding laundry delightful because i got to spend that time in a story i loved

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audible.comguys or text go guys to 500 500 for a free trial and 60 off your first three month you can gift audible to someone you love this holiday season or just gift it to yourself thanks so much for watching [Music]