RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics

Carhart-Harris & Friston 2019 – REBUS and the Anarchic Brain

REBUS is a (somewhat dubious) acronym for RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics. The basic idea: psychedelics reduce the weight of held beliefs and increase the weight of incoming sensory input, allowing the beliefs to be more readily changed by the new sensory information.

Carhart-Harris & Friston theorize that the main thing psychedelics are doing is relaxing the weight of the brain’s top-down prediction-making (“REBUS”) and increasing the weight of the bottom-up sense information (“the Anarchic Brain”).

 

MDMA Clinics to Open This Year

Rick Doblin on The Frontiers of Culture and The Future Of The Psychedelic Renaissance

Finally this year (2019) thanks to Rick’s work, the first legally sanctioned MDMA clinics will open in America to treat people with treatment-resistant PTSD. 

Mindfulness for Kids

Mindfulness reduced a measure of depression in children.

Children in this age-range have traditionally shown less responsiveness to traditional treatments such as medication and talk therapy compared to adults, and therefore we wanted to evaluate the potential of mindfulness meditation intervention in reducing neurological symptoms of anxiety in this age range and serving as a protective factor against later development of disorders.

If you have kids, I would recommend Annaka Harris' Mindfulness for Children.

Mindfulness for Smoking Cessation

Mindfulness seems to beat the "gold standard" practices for smoking cessation.

Jud Brewer's "Craving to Quit" app also beat the National Cancer Institute's app.

Jud's apps come highly recommended.