Early psychedelic research took in brilliant scientists and spit out crazy weirdos:
A 2011 study found that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this. But magic mushrooms apparently have this effect, and not subtly either; participants who had a mystical experience on psilocybin had Openness increase up to half a standard deviation compared to placebo, and the change was stable sixteen months later. This is really scary. I mean, I like Openness To Experience, but something that can produce large, permanent personality changes is so far beyond anything else we have in psychiatry that it’s kind of terrifying.
(Related: 1972 study finds LSD may cause permanent increase in hypnotic susceptibility, which other sources have linked to being “fantasy prone” and “creative”)
And that’s one dose. These researchers were taking psychedelics pretty constantly for years, and probably experimented with the sort of doses you couldn’t get away with giving research subjects. What would you expect to happen to their Openness To Experience? How many standard deviations do you think it went up?
It seems possible to me that psychedelics have a direct pharmacological effect on personality that causes people to be more open to unusual ideas. I know this is going against most of the latest research, which says psychedelics have no long-term negative mental health effects and do not cause psychosis. But there’s a difference between being schizophrenic, and being the sort of guy who is still a leading neuroanatomist but also writes books about the geometric relationships between consciousness and the space-time continuum.
I’m not sure anyone has ever done studies to rule out the theory that psychedelics just plain make people weird. Indeed, such studies would be very difficult, given that weird people with very high Openness To Experience are more likely to use psychedelics. This problem would even prevent common sense detection of the phenomenon – even if we noticed that frequent psychedelic users were really weird, we would attribute it to selection effects and forget about it.
In this situation, the early psychedelicists could be a natural experiment giving us data we can’t get any other way. Here are relatively sober scientists who took psychedelics for reasons other than being weird hippies already. Their fate provides signal through the noise which is the general psychedelic-using population.
Some would say too open, and by “some” I mean dolphins.
And yet Scott Alexander became a polyamorist without the help of psychedelics, and that is normal while people who support space exploration and Ron Paul are weird.
Read a book by Ronald Thomas West, Penucquem Speaks. Blackfeet Tribe understood this 200 years ago. I’m talking about the relationships and the space time continuum.
Slovenian Guest:
Ha! Thanks for writing that, I actually did laugh out loud.
On to the topic at hand…
Part of the problem is that psychological definitions, except at extremes, of what constitutes health are far more broad and vague than any other branch of medicine. Not to mention a certain “preciousness” at changes in what might be called “personal choice” topics.
The Scott Alexander column is an example of failing to join the dots – this phenomenon is nothing new or mysterious.
Think about it: a chemical substance causes permanent damage to some part of the body (in this case the brain).
Q: What is this kind of substance called? A: A toxin, a poison.
There are plenty of examples of toxins which cause permanent damage with a single dose. The ‘change of personality’ is just a sensitive test of Permanent Brain Damage.
For example, if someone has a stroke, e.g. a cerabral haemorrhage, this will usually cause a change of personality which family and friends can notice – not surprising conisdering the brain has been altered, and part of it destroyed (plus compensatory changes).
Some of these drugs will presumbably be destroying some aspect of brain functioning, probably some structural damage is present but too small to be detectable with current technology.
My point is that modern psychiatry has a long-standing tendency for giving a new name to and thereby making ‘mysterious’ something which, plainly understood, is actually perfectly clear (and usually shocking).
Another example (much commoner) is the way that the fact that *all* psychiatric drugs cause withdrawal symptions (more or less severe) is obscured. The SSRI ‘antidepressants’ (e.g. Prozac) produce serious withdrawal problems in at least a quarter of long term users – this is drug withdrawal and leads to drug dependence – but it was cleverly re-named a ‘discontinuation’ syndrome, as if it was something new and mysterious…
But if SSRI problems are called withdrawal and dependence is the outcome – then it becomes clear that SSRIs produce worse dependence problems (on the whole) than the Benzodiazepiness (such as Valium) which are notoriously ‘addictive’. Both cause dependence, but SSRIs are worse.
(The main difference on average is that Valium is usually pleasant to take – i.e. makes the user ‘feel good’, whereas Prozac is either neutral or somewhat unpleasant – makes the user ‘feel bad’. Psychiatrists regard this as a problem for Valium – they prefer to prescrive drugs that coonsistently make patients feel bad – e.g antipsychotics such as Abilify – the best selling drug in the world in recent times.)
Charlton, your dogmatic Christianity is showing. Drugs aren’t necessarily evil.
Indeed, used correctly, LSD is an exorcicotic. It can cure criminality.
LSD is simply powerful. It stretches the brain.
Since it produces permanent changes, using it more than necessary or with a stronger dose than necessarily is like hyperextending a joint. Yoga is good. Too much yoga is literally torture.
Humans vary a lot. Given constant doses, blood level changes in melatonin vary by a factor of 4000 across individuals. I don’t think LSD is that variable, but maybe it is. Definitely, getting the dosing right should be left to a professional. Taking a randomly sized tab is a terrible idea.