Misc. news stories

An online survey involving a vast number of adults revealed that after initiating psychedelic use, participants often reduced or stopped their intake of alcohol, antidepressants, and cocaine. Conversely, their consumption of cannabis and tobacco products increased. The study was published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.

Australian patients with chronic health issues prescribed medical cannabis showed significant improvements in overall health-related quality of life and fatigue in the first three months of use, along with improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain. See the study here.

In the Arab world, psychedelics are considered “haram,” or forbidden. Haya Al-Hejailan is working to reframe them as medicines.

New research provides evidence that psychedelic experiences are related to “hypersynchrony” in the brain….The study also opened up an exciting avenue for understanding consciousness.

The study, conducted by researchers at New York University’s Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, suggests that “co-use of MDMA with psilocybin/LSD may buffer against some aspects of challenging experiences and enhance certain positive experiences”.

Image by: William Rafti (Wiki Commons)

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has a message for young people.

Dreams are one of the most universal yet elusive human experiences…Most people rarely, if ever, realize that they’re dreaming while it’s happening, what’s known as lucid dreaming. But some enthusiasts have cultivated techniques to become self-aware in their sleep and even wrest some control over their dream selves and settings.

A recent case study published in Frontiers in Psychology sought to compare the experiences of a near-death experience (NDE) and an experience induced by the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT.

A new study found that giving mice 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting psychedelic, leads to a long-lasting increase of dendritic spine density in the medial frontal cortex region of their brains… The study was published in Neuropsychopharmacology.

A new study has shown that arithmetic has biological roots and is a natural consequence of how our perception of the world around us is organised. The results explain why arithmetic is true and suggest that mathematics is a realisation in symbols of the fundamental nature and creativity of the mind.

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed.

In the first and only clinical trial of a psychedelic for migraine, Dr. Schindler and colleagues found a roughly 50% reduction in weekly migraine days, as well as significantly reduced attack intensity, for two weeks following administration of a single, low (non-psychedelic) dose of psilocybin. No serious or adverse events were reported. See research here.

Cannabis-based medicinal products might help to improve symptom severity, sleep quality, and health-related quality of life in those with anxiety, according to new research published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

An open label study of a group of individuals suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who also reported suffering chronic pain showed that MDMA-assisted therapy led to significant reduction in pain intensity and pain-related disability in participants with highest levels of chronic pain. The study was published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

There are a number of classic experiments and theories that every psychology student learns about, but more recent research has questioned their findings so that psychologists today are reevaluating human nature.

Image from: loc.gov (Wiki Commons)

The findings, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, highlight the importance of experiential avoidance as a potential mechanism underlying the positive effects of psilocybin therapy.