The Illusion of Conscious Thought

Some interesting thoughts about consciousness from philosopher Peter Carruthers, particularly for meditators.

In neurophilosophy ... thoughts include only nonsensory mental attitudes, such as judgments, decisions, intentions and goals. These are amodal, abstract events, meaning that they are not sensory experiences and are not tied to sensory experiences. Such thoughts never figure in working memory. They never become conscious.

And we only ever know of them by interpreting what does become conscious, such as visual imagery and the words we hear ourselves say in our heads.

I claim that consciousness is always bound to a sensory modality, that there is inevitably some auditory, visual or tactile aspect to it. All kinds of mental imagery, such as inner speech or visual memory, can of course be conscious. We see things in our mind’s eye; we hear our inner voice. What we are conscious of are the sensory-based contents present in working memory.

Consciousness is generally understood to mean that an individual not only has an idea, recollection or perception but also knows that he or she has it.

Finder's Course & Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS)

The Finder's Course is doing some experimenting with Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS), however it is extremely expensive.

While I don't believe the Finder's Course is necessary, for some people it might give them the motivation to practice well enough and long enough to get the job done.  The December 1 Finder's Course is currently being offered at a Black Friday discount.

Not sure if this link will persist, but there is a long interview with Jeffrey Martin from a Course in Miracles conference.

In addition, the first module of the Explorer's Course, created for people who have transistioned to persistent non-symbolic consciousness, is available for free.

Mantra Meditation Decreases PTSD

Transcendental meditation decreases PTSD

After three months of treatment, meditation was found to be just as effective in reducing PTSD symptoms as the most commonly used psychotherapy, prolonged exposure therapy, and better than health education classes.

Prolonged exposure psychotherapy focuses on re-experiencing the traumatic event through remembering and engaging with reminders of the trauma, as opposed to avoiding them.

Meditation Becoming More Popular

More adults and children are using yoga and meditation

The use of meditation increased more than threefold from 4.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017.

Psilocybin Could Be Legal for Therapy by 2021

We learned about a month ago that Psilocybin was given Breakthrough Therapy status, essentially fast tracking the drug for depression treatment.

But it's interesting that Rolling Stone decided to cover it, in Psilocybin Could Be Legal for Therapy by 2021.

Meditation Plus Running as a Treatment for Depression

Meditation Plus Running as a Treatment for Depression

The protocol was 20 minutes of breath counting meditation, followed by 10 minutes of walking meditation, followed by 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.

“We know from animal studies that effortful learning, such as is involved in learning how to meditate, encourages new neurons to mature” in the hippocampus

The lead researcher commented "I've started meditating".

Microdosers: Higher Wisdom, Openness, Creativity

People who ‘microdose’ LSD and magic mushrooms score higher on measures of wisdom, open-mindedness and creativity

Interesting pilot study based on self reporting from online participants.  At this point we don't know whether microdosing actually led to the differences, or whether people with such attributes are more likely to microdose.

 

How To Have a Mystical Experience

How to Have Mystical Experience: A Research-Based Guide

Another psychedelic trip guide.  A good, simple, overall view.

Psilocybin Microdose Enhances Creativity

Study: Microdosing Magic Mushrooms Enhances Creativity, Problem Solving Abilities

... our results suggest that consuming a microdose of truffles allowed participants to create more out-of-the-box alternative solutions for a problem, thus providing preliminary support for the assumption that microdosing improves divergent thinking. Moreover, we also observed an improvement in convergent thinking, that is, increased performance on a task that requires the convergence on one single correct or best solution.

Dosage used was 0.37 grams of dried fungi (sclerotia, often referred to as truffles).  This form of fungi is not as potent as common shrooms, so the equivalent shroom dose would be significantly less.

Psilocybin for Depression given Breakthrough Therapy status

Psychedelic psilocybin therapy for depression granted Breakthrough Therapy status by FDA.

This latest step from the FDA, to offer psilocybin a Breakthrough Therapy designation, is a quietly extraordinary move from the federal agency, implicitly suggesting this previously stigmatized drug may have beneficial clinical uses. 

Fluid Intelligence Improved with tDCS

Modulating fluid intelligence performance through combined cognitive training and brain stimulation shows that certain forms of transcranial stimulation appear to increase fluid intelligence.

Fluid intelligence (Gf), first defined by Cattell (1963), is the ability to cope with novelty, to think rapidly and flexibly, to see relations amongst items independent of acquired knowledge and is predictive of important life outcomes such as income, work performance, and health.

Rescheduling Psilocybin

Hopkins researchers recommend reclassifying psilocybin, the drug in 'magic' mushrooms, from schedule I to schedule IV

Evaluation of psilocybin safety and abuse research shows that the drug has low potential for abuse and dependence, scientists say.

Johns Hopkins researchers suggest that if it clears phase III clinical trials, psilocybin should be re-categorized from a schedule I drug—one with no known medical potential—to a schedule IV drug such as prescription sleep aids, but with tighter control.

If Everyone Believed in Oneness

What Would Happen If Everyone Truly Believed Everything Is One?

New research suggests a belief in oneness has broad implications for psychological functioning and compassion for those are outside of our immediate circle.

Those who hold a belief in oneness have a more inclusive identity that reflects their sense of connection with other people, nonhuman animals, and aspects of nature that are all thought to be part of the same "one thing."

Psychedelics Evolved as protection from Insects

Magic Mushroom Drug Evolved to Mess with Insect Brains suggests that many recreational drugs evolved to protect plants and fungi from insects.

Spiritual Intent Influences Mystical Experience

Information gleaned from an online survey indicates that religious affiliation and spiritual intent increases scores on the Mysticism Scale when using psychedelics.

Attention has 4 opportunities per second to change

The spotlight of attention is more like a strobe, say researchers

The researchers use different metaphors to describe this throb of attention, including a spotlight that waxes and wanes in its intensity. Four times per second — once every 250 milliseconds — the spotlight dims and the house lights come up. Instead of focusing on the action “onstage,” your brain takes in everything else around you, say the scientists.

“The question is: How can something that varies in time support our seemingly continuous perception of the world?” said Berkeley’s Randolph Helfrich, first author on the human-focused paper. “There are only two options: Is the data wrong, or is our understanding of our perception biased? Our research shows that it’s the latter. Our brains fuse our perceptions into a coherent movie — we don’t experience the gaps.”

Perhaps some experience some of those gaps :)

UK petition to reschedule psilocybin

The Psychedelic Society, along with other organisations and individuals listed below, are calling on the UK government to reschedule psilocybin, a compound that has been called a 'breakthrough' treatment for mental health.

Psychedelics Increase Neuritogenesis

From the article:

“People have long assumed that psychedelics are capable of altering neuronal structure, but this is the first study that clearly and unambiguously supports that hypothesis. What is really exciting is that psychedelics seem to mirror the effects produced by ketamine,” says David Olson, assistant professor in the departments of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular medicine at the University of California, Davis, who leads the research team.

In the study, tryptamines such as DMT and psilocin, amphetamines such as MDMA, and ergolines such as LSD, showed activity similar to ketamine, promoting neuritogenesis, the growth of neurites, however ibogaine did not.  Fruit fly larvae and zebrafish were studied.

Therefore, the identification of non-hallucinogenic analogs capable of promoting plasticity in the PFC could facilitate a paradigm shift in our approach to treating neuropsychiatric diseases.

Brain stimulation decreases intent to assault

Brain stimulation decreases intent to commit physical, sexual assault

Stimulating the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for controlling complex ideas and behaviors, can reduce a person's intention to commit a violent act by more than 50 percent.

Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity

Psychedelics Promote Structural and Functional Neural Plasticity

Classical serotonergic psychedelics are known to cause changes in mood and brain function  that persist long after the acute effects of the drugs have subsided. Moreover, several psychedelics elevate glutamate levels in the cortex and increase gene expression in vivo of the neurotrophin BDNF as well as immediate-early genes associated with plasticity. This indirect evidence has led to the reasonable hypothesis that psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity, although this assumption had never been rigorously tested. The data presented here provide direct evidence for this hypothesis, demonstrating that psychedelics cause both structural and functional changes in cortical neurons.

Positive Effects of THC on Older Mice

Cognition and Memory improvement with low dose THC in old mice.

A generally undesired effect of cannabis smoking is a reversible disruption of short‐term memory induced by delta‐9‐tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive component of cannabis. However, this paradigm has been recently challenged by a group of scientists who have shown that THC is also able to improve neurological function in old animals when chronically administered at low concentrations. Moreover, recent studies demonstrated that THC paradoxically promotes hippocampal neurogenesis, prevents neurodegenerative processes occurring in animal models of Alzheimer's disease, protects from inflammation‐induced cognitive damage and restores memory and cognitive function in old mice.

Antidepressant Effect of Ayahuasca

Ayahuasca shows antidepressant effects.

64 percent of the patients who had received ayahuasca still felt that their depression had eased. Just 27 percent of those in the placebo group showed such effects

Psychedelics and Mental Health

Self reported benefits by self medicating users of psychedelics ranked higher than traditional treatments.

Psilocybin effects on Personality

Depressed patients experienced positive changes in personality structure after psilocybin.

Neuroticism scores significantly decreased while Extraversion increased following psilocybin therapy. These changes were in the direction of the normative NEO‐PI‐R data and were both predicted, in an exploratory analysis, by the degree of insightfulness experienced during the psilocybin session. Openness scores also significantly increased following psilocybin, whereas Conscientiousness showed trend‐level increases, and Agreeableness did not change.

Have You Had a Positive Psychological Experience with Psychedelics?

Have you had a psychedelic experience that was psychologically insightful?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins want to know.  30-45 minute survey.

Mindfulness Helps With Rejection

Social rejection is painful and can lead to violence -- mindfulness may provide a solution

Antidepressant Effect of Ayahuasca

Paper:

Rapid antidepressant effects of the psychedelic ayahuasca in treatment-resistant depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial

Psychedelics Enhance Neurogenesis

Psychedelic drugs could inspire new medications to treat depression and anxiety.

Psilocybin Psychiatry

From MD magazine, Running Away or Righting The Way: Is Psilocybin a Viable Psychiatric Treatment?

Interesting coverage of the history of the history and possibilities of psychedelic therapy, centered around one patient's journey, including a video interview of the patient at the end of the article.

“If in the middle of your trip, a dragon comes at you with huge jaws and teeth, bellowing fire and fumes, right your way, don’t run away. Ask the dragon what it wants. It’s your unconscious making this dragon.”

Raison said that patients often confront their demons—or dragons—in these sessions. It can bring on intense feelings of liberation, he added, because it helps them feel as if they’ve mastered something, or moved beyond a hurdle that was holding them back.

Regarding the prohibition that began under the conservative Nixon administration:

“You have this mountain of studies until about 1970, and then it stops. All human studies stopped, so there were just ongoing animal studies that were trying to understand their abuse liability,” said Charles L. Raison, MD, professor in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There was a hiatus of 26 or 27 years where research was just killed, and when it started again there were significant difficulties and significant pressure. It was really a challenge.”

Had psychedelics been available to study in the 1980s when modern pharmacology started to take off, people would have studied it, Raison said. Physicians and scientists would have been able to push harder to pursue them for an indication. “I’m almost certain that we’d be in a totally different world,” he said.

Generally, when you read the reviews, the literature was given a very short shrift, and shown to be ineffective,” said Mike Bogenschutz, MD, professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. “But when you go back and look, [several trials] found that, in fact, there was a robust effect of psilocybin over control treatment at the first follow-up and it persisted for at least 6 months.”

  
in 2012 ... a meta-analysis ... combed through older trials to determine which had produced results that could be deemed statistically significant and clinically relevant based on the standards of modern trials.
“When the results were pooled in that meta-analysis, they were statistically and clinically significant, with an odds ratio close to 2 in favor of [the therapy],” Bogenschutz said. “That’s more effective than any FDA-approved treatment for alcoholism.”

“You give a talk and there will be some people who have an entrenched belief that these are dangerous and using them therapeutically is crazy,” Bogenschutz said. “Then there are people who are critical of the war on drugs, and maybe are enthusiastic about potential benefits of psychedelics and want to believe they’re magic cures—and they’re not.”
  

Spirituality aids Stress, Depression

What happens in the brain during a spiritual experience?

Her research has indicated that people with habitual spiritual practices show cortical thickening in the prefrontal cortex. Intriguingly, she says that individuals who live with chronic depression experience cortical thinning in the same brain region.

This has led her to argue that spirituality and depression are likely “two sides of the same coin.”

Maybe more generically, a relaxed, non-attached mind and depression are likely two sides of the same coin.

Anthony Bourdain LSD advice

Basically Anthony Bourdain did a short PSA about doing psychedelics.

Compassion Boosts Resilience

Training compassion ‘muscle’ may boost brain’s resilience to others’ suffering.

Training consisted of practicing compassion meditation or reappraisal using guided audio instructions via the Internet or compact disc for 30 min/day for 2 weeks. Compassion trainees practiced cultivating feelings of compassion for different targets including a loved one, the self, a stranger, and a difficult person (someone with whom they had conflict). For each person, they imagined a time when the person had suffered, brought non-judgmental and balanced attention to reactions to suffering, and then practiced wishing the person relief from suffering. They repeated compassion-generating phrases such as, “May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and happiness.” They were also instructed to pay attention to bodily sensations (particularly around the heart) and to envision a golden light extending from their heart to the heart of the other person.

The reappraisal trainees practiced re-interpreting personally stressful events to decrease negative affect. They practiced the 3 strategies in response to daily stressors such as having an argument with a significant other. Strategies included: (1) thinking about the situation from a different perspective (such as thinking that the argument was helpful in working through conflict), (2) thinking about the situation from a friend or family member’s perspective, and (3) imagining a year had gone by and a positive outcome had occurred. Reappraisal training used common approaches in cognitive-behavioral therapy and was designed by a licensed clinical psychologist.

Underground Trip Doctors

The Psychedelic Miracle: How some doctors are risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens.

Mentioned in the article, ICEERS, the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research & Service.  Notably, they offer free support for people having difficulty integrating experiences from ayahuasca and ibogaine.

Michael Pollan: Adventures With the Trip Doctors

As part of promoting his new book "How to Change Your Mind", Michael Pollan's quite good NYT article, My Adventures With the Trip Doctors, the researchers and renegades bringing psychedelic drugs into the mental health mainstream.

rTMS and Depression

"A specific type of non-invasive brain stimulation, known as rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation), can reduce suicidal thinking in a significant portion of people with hard-to-treat depression."

Psychedelics Continue Into The Mainstream

Pop media overview of a number of potential treatments stemming from psychedelic drugs such as ketamine, MMDA, CBD and psilocybin.

LSD blurs line between ourselves and others

LSD blurs line between ourselves and others

“Our interpretation is that LSD reduces your sense of integrated self,” said Katrin Preller, a psychologist who worked on the study. “In this particular case, the drug blurs the boundary between what is you and what is another person.”

Ayahuasca Increases Acceptance

As compared to an 8 weeks MBSR mindfulness program, "the present results suggest that "the 'acceptance' domain of mindfulness capacities is particularly sensitive to improvement by ayahuasca, and potentially other psychedelics."  Sounds similar to the changes in openness observed with psychedelics.

Not surprisingly, the MBSR training was better at increasing mindfulness.

Photic Stimulation for Alzheimers

An hour a day of strobe lights flashing at 40hz (gamma) resulted in a reduction in amyloid plaque in mice.  An initial trial is being done in humans.  If validated, this would be as easy as using simple light goggles ala a light and sound machine.

Psychedelics Change Your Personality

A review of studies shows that psychedelics can change aspects of personality such as openness and self-transcendence.

Novice Buddhist Monks are unenlightened idiots

A surprising study found that fear of the annihilation of the self was most intense among the monastic Buddhists, and that the monastic Buddhists were less willing than any of the other groups to sacrifice years of their own life for a stranger.

Strangely, the researchers chose to survey something more along the lines of novices rather than experienced practitioners.

Emotional Empathy increased by Psilocybin

According to Effect of Psilocybin on Empathy and Moral Decision-Making, psilocybin significantly increased explicit and implicit emotional empathy.

Are You Sleepwalking Now?

In a dense piece, neuro-philosopher Thomas Metzinger explores fundamental questions of the self, and the need for mindfulness to achieve "mental autonomy".

There can be no politically mature citizens without a sufficient degree of mental autonomy

The Transpersonal Revolution

The Transpersonal (beyond ego) Revolution through meditation and psychedelics, and the need for society to adapt to people having spiritual crises along the way.

Benefits to Psilocybin Plus Meditation

Another piece of research from Johns Hopkins showing that high dose psychedelics with proper set and setting, combined with high support for meditative practice, cause enduring positive changes.

The study showed robust interactive positive effects of psilocybin dose and added support for spiritual practices on a wide range of longitudinal measures at 6 months including interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning/purpose, forgiveness, death transcendence, daily spiritual experiences, religious faith and coping, and rating of participants by community observers. Analyses suggest that the determinants of these effects were the intensity of the psilocybin-occasioned mystical experience and the rates of engagement with meditation and other spiritual practices.

Music Playlists from various Psilocybin Studies

Haven't checked these out, but they are listed on Spotify as:

• Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Study
• Psilocybin Research, Johns Hopkins, Sacred Knowledge, William A. Richards
• NYU's Psilocybin Trial Playlist

And:

• William Richards playlist on YouTube

Meditation and PTSD

TM meditation, which is simply meditation using a repeated mantra like "Om", reduced PTSD symptoms significantly.  I'm not excited that the research is, unsurprisingly, from the TM Mahariji foundation, but this is a result that makes sense.  Participants didn't re-experience trauma, but I would expect that at some point this might come up.

Psychedelics and No-Self

Model Hallucinations, a slightly heavy piece on the self as a cognitive model and the fact that psychedelics can help bring this into awareness.

Ketamine Intranasal Spray

Ketamine has passed phase III trials for treatment resistant depression, apparently based on injection.  But a derivative (isomer) of ketamine has passed phase II trials based on an intranasal spray which would be much more practical for people to use.

Pragmatic Dharma Podcasts

Deconstructing Yourself has a soundcloud podcast with some interesting pragmatic dharma type folks such as Kenneth Folk, Shinzen Young, Vincent Horn, David Chapman, Daniel Ingram, Culadasa, Judson Brewer, Almaas, and Thomas Metzinger.  I'll be listening for weeks.

The fast talking Daniel Ingram was also recently interviewed at spiritualteachers.org.

Also Vincent Horn at Warrior Radio.