Hallucination drugs
And I learned a really important lesson in that moment, which is that I’m not identical to my ego. It wasn’t upset or defensive or trying to do anything. The consciousness that was perceiving all of this was not my usual ego. Then I looked out I saw myself spread over the landscape as a coat of paint. I didn’t have any urge to stack the papers back up together. I saw myself get scattered to the wind, but I was all right with it. I reached a point where my “self” just kind of fell apart into these little pieces of paper. What was stunning about it was I had an experience of complete ego-dissolution.
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These are serious professionals, but they are doing something illegal. I had to work with someone illicitly, and I learned that there is a thriving underground of psychedelic therapists. My best was a fairly high-dose psilocybin journey that I had with a guide, a woman in her 50s who was a very skilled therapist and who worked in other modalities as well. You tried various psychedelics for the book. But here was a very positive aspect of personality that could change and did change. Normally, our personalities are fixed by the time we’re in our 20s. To find an actual measurable change in personality as adults is a very unusual finding. One of the big questions about this is: what endures from this experience? One of the interesting studies they did when they crunched the data on the first groups of people who had had a guided psilocybin session was that these were adults, but one of their personality traits that psychologists call openness - openness to other people’s views, openness to new experience, openness to new ideas - increased. How do some people change after taking psilocybin in clinical trials? After the session, you always come back the next day and have what’s called a period of integration, where the guides, who are trained therapists, help you interpret what happened and figure out ways to put it to good use in changing your life. Some people are put in touch with childhood traumas, some people have encounters with death - it can be very dark.īut with the help of the guides, you use that material and try to understand it. Then, you come out of this experience, which can be very difficult for some people. It’s an incredibly safe environment in which to let down your defenses, and that’s essentially what happens.Īll of our customary defenses that we use to deal with life and the world will be suspended for a period of time, and that creates this opening, this plastic moment where people can reexamine themselves and get some perspective on their habitual ways of thinking and doing. And you’re with two guides at all times, who are there looking out for your interests. You’re lying down on a couch, you have eye shades on and headphones, which are playing a very carefully curated playlist to make you go inside to have an internal experience. For a period of four or five hours, you are in a room that’s decorated like a cozy den or study. This isn’t doctors giving you a pill and sending you out into the world.
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Well, it’s important to remember that when psilocybin is used in a medical and healing context, it’s very different than the recreational use of the drug. If the brain is stuck in these narrow grooves of thought - whether it’s an obsession or a fear or the story you tell yourself - all those deep grooves that lock us into patterns of both thought and behavior are dissolved and temporarily suspended in a way that allows us to break those patterns. The feeling among the scientists is that these chemicals allow us to essentially reboot the brain. What do scientists believe that psychedelics can offer people? Your book talks a lot about the scientific approach to psychedelics. New connections are made that could produce new insights, new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world. Your emotion center starts talking directly to your visual cortex, let’s say, and you see things that you’re hoping or fearing. And that seems to lead to new connections in the brain temporarily forming. When that happens, you have this sensation of ego-dissolution: that your self is evaporating or dissolving. The interesting thing about psychedelics, both LSD and psilocybin - the ingredient in magic mushrooms - is that they take this network offline. That network is very involved with operations having to do with our sense of self: how we integrate what’s happening to us in any given moment, with our abiding sense of who we are. But psychedelics appear to diminish activity in one very important brain network called the default mode network. We’re really just at the beginning of exploring that frontier. The honest answer: nobody quite understands.
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What do psychedelics do to the human mind?