Mystical Mushrooms

To my mind, one of the greatest mysteries is how our mental experiences relate to the chemistry of our brains. Researchers have discovered a tremendous amount about the complexity of synapses, neural circuitry, and neuroanatomy and psychologists explore the intricacies of human behavior and mental processes.
Still, a huge gap remains in our understanding of the brain and the mind. One way of approaching this brain-mind connection is to see how certain chemicals that influence the brain affect mental experiences.
Recently, I was very pleased to attend a lecture by Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor of Behavioral Biology and of Neuroscience who is a leading Hopkins psychopharmacology researcher and expert on the effects of abused substances.
I was looking forward to his presentation because I knew that he would be speaking on his psilocybin research, which had received considerable national attention when it was published several months ago in the journal Psychopharmacology.
Psilocybin is the naturally occurring compound that is found in certain mushroom species and is associated with altered mental states when eaten. Although psilocybin is commonly described as a hallucinogen, it is more likely to cause illusions and altered perceptions. More prominent may be the users' sense of having a mystical experience.
Although there has been a tremendous amount of research on commonly abused substances, such as heroin, cocaine, and alcohol, no serious scientific investigations have been done with psilocybin for several decades. The compound seems to have its effect through interactions with particular serotonin receptors in the brain.
Griffiths and his colleagues devised a carefully designed plan to compare the effects of psilocybin with a very different psychoactive substance, the stimulant medication methylphenidate, which was used as an active-comparison compound, or control. They specifically recruited people with a spiritual orientation who had no history of mental illness.
The announcements of the study described it as examining "states of consciousness brought about by a naturally occurring psychoactive substance used sacramentally in some cultures." As part of the study's design, each subject came in for either 2 or 3 different 8-hour sessions that were separated by about 2 months; only one of these sessions involved the ingestion of psilocybin. The participants took the compounds in a comfortable laboratory setting with specially trained monitors by their side throughout all sessions. They were encouraged to close their eyes and direct their attention inward.
As I mentioned above, each of the 36 subjects in the study was given the psilocybin just one time. As expected, during those sessions when psilocybin was ingested, the participants did experience perceptual changes, intense subjective feelings, and, occasionally, some anxiety and paranoid thoughts. Seven hours after ingesting either the psilocybin or the methylphenidate, the participants each completed various questionnaires about their mental state.
Overall, the participants regarded the psilocybin use in this comfortable and controlled research setting as a positive experience. Especially interesting were their reports of a sense that the psilocybin produced in them a mystical experience. I'll describe more of the surprising results of the psilocybin study in my next entry.