A Roast of the Pragmatic Dharma Community

The satirical website Tutteji.

EEG Research Links

Sam Synder's blog came up in my standard search.  Here I link to posts categorized by the term meditation.  Many of these posts have extensive links to research.  Current posts under this topic include:

• Meditation and PET or SPECT Scans
• Meditation and MRI or fMRI
• Meditation and EEG
• Meditation and Depression
• Meditation and Anxiety
• etc.

Your Brain on Meditation - Jud Brewer

A bit more about Judson Brewer's research at Yale, experimenting with real time fMRI feedback on the PCC.

Your Brain on Meditation

Roland Griffiths at Psychedelic Science 2013 on the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin studies

A video of Roland Griffiths presenting from the Psychedelic Science 2013, "Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Project: Studies of Mystical Experience and Meditation in Healthy Volunteers, and Palliative Effects in Cancer Patients".

The video covers pretty much all the ground that has been covered in the Johns Hopkins research since 1999.  It has no specific information on the cancer studies.

I was very interested to see the initial research on meditation and psilocybin, this starts around 32 minutes in.  There was frustratingly little information about results, as the study is not complete.  The design for beginning meditators includes 2-3 sessions of psilocybin over 6-7 months and looks at low (1mg) and high (20-30mg) dose and low and standard meditation support.  Initial results seem to be dose related psilocybin effects as opposed to meditation effects (or some combination), but it was teased that the final 3 months of data may prove more interesting.

Also disappointing that in various parts of the video, the graphics were not updated, apparently because these were ongoing studies.

The plan for studies of long term meditators and psilocybin will include fMRI and there will be some time for sitting meditation in the sessions.

Also covered were the web based survey studies, one based on psilocybin dervied mystical experiences as well as the study on difficult experiences.

From the mystical experience survey, analysis revealed 4 factors

• unity, noetic quality & sacredness
• positive mood
• transcending space & time
• ineffability

From the difficult experience survey, most people found even these challenging experiences to be mostly meaningful and beneficial, with longer difficult experiences less so.  Least effective means of dealing with such a challenge was doing another drug.

Griffiths felt that psychiatrists with largely negative impressions of psilocybin and the related research were essentially biased by their exposure to bad outcomes as part of their work, they were not seeing the overall results of the drug.  As he emphasized, overall negative effects are rare with good set and setting.

Future research ideas include

• what factors effect the likelihood of a genuine mystical experience
• what pharmacological and neuronal pathways are activated
• possible therapeutic applications (addiction, depression, fear of dying)

Roland described the research as a "wedge" into understanding the human impulses to compasssion, etc.

Clinical Perspectives in Preparing and Managing High Dose Psilocybin Sessions

Another video from the Psychedelic Science conference 2013, Clinical Perspectives in Preparing and Managing High Dose Psilocybin Sessions: Insights from Johns Hopkins.

Various Recommendations:

• "surrender to" and accept the experience
• the TLO mantra: "trust, let go, be open"
• move forward/into rather than avoiding
• let go of self-consciousness; allow catharsis
• be the witness
• the breath is always with you
• ask it what it has to teach you
• convey love and acceptance
• allow yourself to be devoured, dissolved
• "enter into it and look out through its eyes" - Ann Shulgin
• welcome difficulty
• "bring it on" (to scary thoughts)
• boomerang - you will come back

Thoughts about Microdosing: variable effects

Stumbled on this the other day:  Effects of ultra-low doses of morphine, naloxone and ethanol on morphine state-dependent memory of passive avoidance in mice.

This study points out the sometimes unusual dose response curves which prompts the old saying, the dose makes the poison.  And people's individual metabolism varies quite a bit.

Few would have guessed a result such as in this study, 1mg/kg of ethanol in mice improved memory recall, for example.  This would equate to around a quarter to a half of a normal drink in adults.

A review of the literature indicates that, for several drugs and chemicals, the effects of nanogram doses are the opposite of the effects of milligrams, because different doses have different sites as well as mechanisms of actions. In conclusion, from the above results one may suggest that, in determination of the dose-response of at least some drugs, the study of the effects of doses much lower than two orders of magnitude of the minimum effective dose are warranted.

What Can Buddhist Meditation Teach Us about Psychedelic Science?

Johns Hopkins researcher Katherine MacLean speaks at the Psychedelic Science conference (more videos) in What Can Buddhist Meditation Teach Us about Psychedelic Science?