anyone who tries to write about them without first-hand experience is a fool and a fraud.” — Hunter S. Thompson
An overactive DMN is also associated with a range of mental health issues—particularly, the obsessive pondering of one’s own unhappiness, known as “rumination,” a symptom of major depression.
Psychedelic treatments have shown great promise at interrupting an overactive DMN, apparently correlating with subsequent improvements to a patient’s mental health.
Published in March 2022, it’s been hailed as a “rosetta stone” that translates symptoms to molecules. Along eight distinct axes of psychedelic experience, it offers an expansive yet precise map of neurotransmitter-receptor combinations that need to be stimulated to induce a specific state of conscious experience.
how the DMN ordinarily works to maintain a stable sense of self capable of withstanding the constant stimulation of being in the world
Bill Clinton’s presidency, when DARE officers were still giving lectures nationwide on the “Three R’s”: Recognize, Resist, Report.
In opposition to this abstinence-focused approach, the founders of Erowid—a Bay Area couple known only by the sobriquets “Earth Erowid” and “Fire Erowid”—created an open-access educational resource. Their stated goal was a “world where people treat psychoactives with respect and awareness;
It remains ad-free and looks much the same as most websites from the earlier and more hopeful days of the internet.
The problem is not the drug—drugs are just molecular tools—but rather, not pairing the right tool with the right patient,” wrote two psychiatrists in Science on the implications of the study.
“The U.S. is going through a profound mental health crisis that has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, yet there have been no truly new psychiatric drug treatments since Prozac
According to suicidologist Craig Bryan, the lockdown reduced stressors for a large portion of Americans: while experts worried about the impact of unemployment, Bryan notes, “People who hated their jobs suddenly had a reason to stop working.
atai founder Christian Angermayer, said recently that he supports decriminalization but thinks legalizing psychedelics could create a backlash for the industry. “Biotech is all about having monopoly,” he noted, in an interview with Insider. “That’s the whole of biotech. You do something novel, you finance it, and you own it.”
Until recently, clinical professionals operated on the assumption that depressed people had a serotonin deficiency and that SSRIs worked by boosting it;
The new consensus is that antidepressants can help the brain form healthy connections between cells that have previously withered, possibly due to stress, and that serotonin might simply be acting as a growth factor.
mice given one dose of psilocybin grow longer and denser dendrites—the tapering branches that extend from the body of a neuron—yielding a full 10% increase in neural connections.
This kind of increased neural plasticity is associated with a concurrent loosening of the DMN’s top-down control over what constitutes the inner self, leading to a leaky filtering of sensations, thoughts, and feelings—essentially, a disintegration of normal self-awareness.
Regions of the brain that aren’t usually in conversation end up talking to each other.
Psychedelics seem to have the special aptitude to slacken certain connections while strengthening others.
anyone who tries to write about them without first-hand experience is a fool and a fraud.” — Hunter S. Thompson
An overactive DMN is also associated with a range of mental health issues—particularly, the obsessive pondering of one’s own unhappiness, known as “rumination,” a symptom of major depression.
Psychedelic treatments have shown great promise at interrupting an overactive DMN, apparently correlating with subsequent improvements to a patient’s mental health.
Published in March 2022, it’s been hailed as a “rosetta stone” that translates symptoms to molecules. Along eight distinct axes of psychedelic experience, it offers an expansive yet precise map of neurotransmitter-receptor combinations that need to be stimulated to induce a specific state of conscious experience.
how the DMN ordinarily works to maintain a stable sense of self capable of withstanding the constant stimulation of being in the world
Bill Clinton’s presidency, when DARE officers were still giving lectures nationwide on the “Three R’s”: Recognize, Resist, Report.
In opposition to this abstinence-focused approach, the founders of Erowid—a Bay Area couple known only by the sobriquets “Earth Erowid” and “Fire Erowid”—created an open-access educational resource. Their stated goal was a “world where people treat psychoactives with respect and awareness;
It remains ad-free and looks much the same as most websites from the earlier and more hopeful days of the internet.
The problem is not the drug—drugs are just molecular tools—but rather, not pairing the right tool with the right patient,” wrote two psychiatrists in Science on the implications of the study.
“The U.S. is going through a profound mental health crisis that has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, yet there have been no truly new psychiatric drug treatments since Prozac
According to suicidologist Craig Bryan, the lockdown reduced stressors for a large portion of Americans: while experts worried about the impact of unemployment, Bryan notes, “People who hated their jobs suddenly had a reason to stop working.
atai founder Christian Angermayer, said recently that he supports decriminalization but thinks legalizing psychedelics could create a backlash for the industry. “Biotech is all about having monopoly,” he noted, in an interview with Insider. “That’s the whole of biotech. You do something novel, you finance it, and you own it.”
Until recently, clinical professionals operated on the assumption that depressed people had a serotonin deficiency and that SSRIs worked by boosting it;
The new consensus is that antidepressants can help the brain form healthy connections between cells that have previously withered, possibly due to stress, and that serotonin might simply be acting as a growth factor.
mice given one dose of psilocybin grow longer and denser dendrites—the tapering branches that extend from the body of a neuron—yielding a full 10% increase in neural connections.
This kind of increased neural plasticity is associated with a concurrent loosening of the DMN’s top-down control over what constitutes the inner self, leading to a leaky filtering of sensations, thoughts, and feelings—essentially, a disintegration of normal self-awareness.
Regions of the brain that aren’t usually in conversation end up talking to each other.
Psychedelics seem to have the special aptitude to slacken certain connections while strengthening others.
For now, there’s no separating the agony from the ecstasy. ♦
