Psychedelic Research

After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right–that on many occasions that afternoon I existed outside time.

I don’t mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me (the part that thinks to itself, “This is me”) had an existence, quite conscious of itself in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it.

Though perfectly rational and wide awake (Dr. Osmond gave me tests throughout the experiment which showed no significant falling-off of intelligence). I was not experiencing events in the normal sequence of time. I was experiencing the events of 3.30 [P.M.] before the events of 3.0; the events of 2.0 after the events of 2.45, and so on.” –Christopher Mayhew, discussing the effects of mescaline (quoted in Grinspoon & Bakalar 1997)

Hallucinogens produce profound changes in sense of time, but very little technically rigorous research has been conducted on this with human volunteers. The early literature generally notes the phenomenon but does little to investigate potential mechanisms. This paper by Jiří Wackermann and colleagues is a welcome addition to the thin literature. It’s the second from this group, and includes a re-anaylsis of data from the 2007 paper by Marc Wittmann et al., as well as some new data. (In contrast to the lack of good studies in humans, there is some very nice work on hallucinogen effects on timing behavior in rats, such as work by Stephanie Body, Timothy Cheung, and colleagues at University of Nottingham.)

Wackermann J, Wittmann M, Hasler F, Vollenweider FX
Effects of varied doses of psilocybin on time interval reproduction in human subjects
Neuroscience Letters 435 (2008) 51–55

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2008.02.006

Abstract: Action of a hallucinogenic substance, psilocybin, on internal time representation was investigated in two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies: Experiment 1 with 12 subjects and graded doses, and Experiment 2 with 9 subjects and a very low dose. The task consisted in repeated reproductions of time intervals in the range from 1.5 to 5 s. The effects were assessed by parameter κ of the ‘dual klepsydra’ model of internal time representation, fitted to individual response data and intra-individually normalized with respect to initial values. The estimates κ^ were in the same order of magnitude as in earlier studies. In both experiments, κ was significantly increased by psilocybin at 90 min from the drug intake, indicating a higher loss rate of the internal duration representation. These findings are tentatively linked to qualitative alterations of subjective time in altered states of consciousness.