The Return of Psychedelic Research

The Beckley Foundation reprints a Salon article, Flashback! Psychedelic Research Returns, that gives a nice overview of psychedelic research over the years, within the current context of successful research on cancer patients experiencing anxiety.  Historical references going back to William James, Huxley, Leary, Pahnke, and the recent resurgence in research starting with perhaps Strassman and up to Griffiths.


I'm going to sidetrack a bit and rehash what Zaitchik refers to as an "ideal" dose of psilocybin:

Even the dose employed is the result of trial and error: The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong ‘shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety.

That's a dose somewhere between "strong" and "heroic," maybe 4-6 grams of dried mushrooms.  I would advise against grabbing a literal fistful.  Leo Zeff, the "Secret Chief" who administered probably a few thousand trips, recommended 3 grams, but doubled that for alcoholics.  Some would comment that even 3 grams might be a lot for a first timer.  On the one hand, I like the idea of a relatively high dose to fully break through - a lower dose may not do that.  A 2.3 gram dose got me to a mystical experience, but it took 6.2 grams for me to have a decisive experience of oneness, at least the first time.  But on the other hand, if you have an opportunity to work up to that dose, that may lead to some better outcomes overall.

After a lot of successful trips and meditation, 0.25 grams is all I personally need, although I don't see much in the way of visuals at that dose.

Brain Can Rewire At Advanced Age

In a study on rats, Max Planck Florida Institute Study Shows: Persistent Sensory Experience Is Good For The Aging Brain

“This study overturns decades-old beliefs that most of the brain is hard-wired before a critical period that ends when one is a young adult”

 

The neural substrates of mindfulness: An fMRI investigation

The neural substrates of mindfulness: An fMRI investigation

from the paper:

“Mindfulness” is a capacity for heightened present-moment awareness that we all possess to a greater or lesser extent. Enhancing this capacity through training has been shown to alleviate stress and promote physical and mental well-being.

As a consequence, interest in mindfulness is growing and so is the need to better understand it. This study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the brain regions involved in state mindfulness and to shed light on its mechanisms of action. Significant signal decreases were observed during mindfulness meditation in midline cortical structures associated with interoception.  These findings lend support to the theory that mindfulness achieves its positive outcomes through a process of disidentification.

By refraining from subjective appraisal, as evident here in the form of decreased activity in associated brain regions, mindfulness may indeed afford a less subjective experience of each passing moment, consistent with practitioner reports and the outcomes associated with mindfulness practices described by Eastern philosophers as bare attention. Based on the findings of this study, state mindfulness is proposed to be a unique form of higher-order information processing in which subjective assessment of transient events is silenced in favor of maintaining objectivity and gaining insight into the nature of emotion.

Meditation Medicine

Meditation Medicine: A Survey of Psychotropic Drug use in the Development of Western Buddhism is a really nice article covering the intersection of psychedelics and spirituality, and mentioning a lot of big names in Buddhism along the way.

some excerpts:

... many teachers, such as Lama Ole Nydahl and Lama Surya Das, have published gripping accounts of how their initial encounters with these substances helped open their minds to the true potential of Buddhist practice.

In learning to hold my mind empty, I became aware that other levels of reality would more readily manifest. It was only in absolute stillness . . . that many subtle but extremely valuable nuances of reality appeared . . . I found this effect to be greatly amplified while under the influence . . .  This in turn intensified my daily practice.

Nitrous Oxide Brands

There seems to be a limited number of manufacturing facilities worldwide for nitrous oxide, at least for cartridges available publicly.

There are at least a couple of sources in Europe, and one in Taiwan, for the manufacture of nitrous oxide gas.  I don't have any experience with the Chinese source, I must confess I have a slight prejudice against Chinese products, having seen some Chinese manufactured health supplements testing out with substantial impurities.  Might be a different case with the gas, though.  Info would be appreciated.  Some of the Chinese brands include BestWhip, Mr. Creamy, and EasyWhippets.

The brands that I would recommend are the ones where the gas is manufactured in Belgium and then put into cartridges in Vienna, and there are some basic EU standards for purity.  To be honest, I think the purity is for the gas manufacture itself, as opposed to the gas you can get out of a cartridge.  As near as I can figure, there is no difference between the various brands produced by those factories.  Rather, the differences seem to be cosmetic changes for brand marketing.

My favorite here would be Ultra-PureWhip.

ISI is said to be good, but they charge more (I believe there is more brand awareness), and yet come from the exact same factories.  SFG and Sexxy Whip come from this source as well, but the cartridges are shiny chrome and I find them slightly harder to keep track of in use.  I also find larger boxes (50 count) more difficult to deal with than the usual 24 per box.  EZ Whip I haven't tried.

The brands that I don't recommend come from Hungarian/German gas manufacture with cartridge manufacture in Hungary.  Typically, this would be the regular PureWhip brand, for example, as well as some cheaper generic unlabelled product.  Apparently there is some kind of oil that is I guess part of the cartridge manufacture, and once in a while you get some really oily cartridges from this source.  Pretty nasty.

The distributor I deal with should be pretty easy to guess from a bit of web searching.  I didn't really want to link to them considering the off-label use I recommend.  Once you've ordered with them they should offer you some price discounts.

Also check out:

• Nitrous Oxide, a catalyst for Oneness
• Nitrous Oxide Harm Reduction

More Quick Looks at Research

Three Insights about Compassion, Meditation, and the Brain from the recent International Symposium for Contemplative Studies:
1. We can train our brains to be more compassionate
2. Scientists are starting to measure consciousness—sort of.
3. Meditation can make you feel more connected to others.

A blog post about The Emotional Life of Your Brain, a book by Dr. Richard Davidson that is based on research around the following six emotional styles:
Resilience: slow or quick to recover from adversity
Outlook: short or long sustainment of positive emotion
Social Intuition: oblivious or sensitive to social signals
Self-Awareness: oblivious or sensitive to bodily feelings
Sensitivity to Context: unskilled or skilled at regulating emotional responses to situations
Attention: unfocused or focused

Why great ideas can come from zoning out captures the idea that a little time spent on a non-demanding task can afford some creativity.  I wonder how mindfulness would have compared?

Recent Research - Second Looks

Judson Brewer's work is recapped in "The Healing Art of Meditation".

Brewer and his team found two notable trends in the results of the study. First, experienced meditators showed deactivation of the part of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN), a region involved in self-referential processing, including daydreaming. All three forms of meditation showed similar results. This discovery is interesting because one of the goals of meditation is to remain focused, and deactivation of the DMN seems to show that meditation is functionally doing just that in the brain. As meditators self-reported significantly less mind-wandering, these results support the hypothesis that deactivation of the DMN is related to a reduction in mind-wandering.

Gary Weber's site covers a bit of recent research in "Persistent Meditative States - How?"  On why the pleasurable states of meditation do not seem to habituate, he writes:

The big question is why the great pleasures of "thought-free" meditation, presumably operating by the same dopamine/opiod neurochemistry system, persist, and do not saturate and operate in the same way to produce less pleasure with more craving.  Patricia's paper, and Buddhism, develops the idea that our repetitive thought patterns can be viewed as a form of addiction.  If we dramatically reduce the internal narrative, the dopamine down-regulation/reduction apparently does not occur.  Instead of an endlessly repetitive stream of thoughts, the brain is engaged in a dance of open awareness with its continually changing show, and all of its concomitant neurotransmitter-induced pleasure.

And another video of Robin Carhart-Harris talking about his research.  I had not realized that his research with psilocybin was based around the idea that there may be a neurobiological basis for some of Freud's theories.  He was particularly influenced by Grof's book, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research.

LSD, for example, promoted REM during sleep, and dreams, as theorized by Freud, were the key to the unconscious.  With psilocybin, decreased blood flow was seen in the primary motor cortex, thalamus, brainstem, and subgenual cingulate.  The latter was mentioned as being active in repression.  Increased blood flow was seen in areas of visual association, which is similar to REM.

Although there was a decrease in the blood flow to the thalamus, there aren't a lot of 5-HT2A receptors there, so that implies that there are indirect or feedback effects at work.