Long Trip

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

It looks like “magic mushrooms” send users on a Long Trip — a long, largely pleasant trip:

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. “It’s one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It’s another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There’s something about the saliency of these experiences that’s stunning.”

Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.

Afterward, about two thirds of the group reported having a “full mystical experience,” characterized by a feeling of “oneness” with the universe. When Griffiths asked them how they were doing 14 months later, the same proportion gave the experience high marks for transcendental satisfaction, and credited it with increasing their well-being since then.

But is a lasting, false sense of profundity a good thing?

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