New Johns Hopkins Study Explores Relationship Between Psychedelics and Consciousness

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(I wasn't sure where to put this one, feel free to move it @Num7 )



Psychedelic drugs, like psilocybin, an ingredient found in so-called magic mushrooms, have shown promise in treating a range of addictions and mental health disorders. Yet, there’s something mysterious and almost mystical about their effects, and they are commonly believed to provide unique insights into the nature of consciousness.

Now, a new study by Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers addresses the question of whether psychedelics might change the attribution of consciousness to a range of living and nonliving things.

The findings, published March 28 in Frontiers in Psychology, reveal that higher ratings of mystical type experiences, which often include a sense that everything is alive, were associated with greater increases in the attribution of consciousness.

“This study demonstrates that when beliefs change following a psychedelic experience, attributions of consciousness to various entities tend to increase,” says Sandeep Nayak, M.D., postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research and one of the researchers involved in the study. “It's not clear why, whether that might be an innate drug effect, cultural factors or whether psychedelics might somehow expose innate cognitive biases that attribute features of the mind to the world.”

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Taking sleeping pills and watching the world perception break down taught me a lot about how my visual cortex works.

It reconstructs everything I see as a realtime 3D model and enhances features you don't actually see based on assumptions from previous experience. Because the sleeping pills ruined my 2D to 3D reconstruction, I had the sensation that walls were running like water, despite being perfectly still when focusing on any single point on the wall. Each discernable feature gets a 3D position in a graph of estimated distances to nearby neighbors. Because distances are stable even if things rotate and move, it is used to enhance depth perception.

Because I failed to classify my lamp correctly as a lamp, it started to flap with beetle wings due to the classification error. Staring at me from the ceiling.

Because my interpretation of touch sensation broke down while my muscles were paralyzed from partial sleep, I felt that my blanket was holding me down by force and rubbing against me in an attempted rape.