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The Trip Treatment (The New Yorker)

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techstepgenr8tion
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18 Dec 2016, 12:15 am

I just had the chance to read this and wow, it's a long article but it's well worth the read from start to finish.

It starts with recounting the success of recent double-blind pilot studies into the usefulness of psilocybin in palliative care such as for terminal cancer patients and very quickly moves across the board to other topics such as alternative uses such as addiction and long term depression and anxiety, the history of the research, the FDA's slow reopening of research, the reasons it was shut down in the early 1970's, and also some of what other drugs like LSD have showed to be happening on fMRI.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/ ... -treatment

One of the paragraphs that had a lot of truth from my own past experience:

The New Yorker, Michael Pollan wrote:
Carhart-Harris has found evidence in scans of brain waves that, when the default-mode network shuts down, other brain regions “are let off the leash.” Mental contents hidden from view (or suppressed) during normal waking consciousness come to the fore: emotions, memories, wishes and fears. Regions that don’t ordinarily communicate directly with one another strike up conversations (neuroscientists sometimes call this “crosstalk”), often with bizarre results. Carhart-Harris thinks that hallucinations occur when the visual-processing centers of the brain, left to their own devices, become more susceptible to the influence of our beliefs and emotions.


A substance that allowed such cross-talk seems to have a lot of potential for boosting innovation in a whole variety of directions as well. I'd add to this article another angle on that account that didn't get addressed - corporate R&D meetings :P.


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