Here is a list of four human psychedelic studies that are currently recruiting participants. These are all seeking people with specific illnesses. Most of these details were obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov and maps.org
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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.)
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Perceptual rivalry is one of the neatest ways to study the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, you can read Olivia Carter’s online tutorial on binocular rivalry, one commonly studied type of perceptual rivalry. (There’s also some nice images in a Figure from Blake & Logothetis’ 2002 Nature Reviews Neuroscience article here).
Perceptual rivalry should fascinate anyone with an interest in consciousness research. It is also a rare area where scientific studies of consciousness and hallucinogens converge. Carter has done groundbreaking studies (links below) of how psilocybin and possibly LSD affect perceptual rivalry, including some research using the amazing phenomenon of motion-induced blindness (demo here), my favorite visual illusion. Carter’s research is consistently inspiring: She uses rigorous quantitative tools to measure the effects of pharmacological manipulations on consciousness. Her work is one reason I consider perceptual rivalry among the most interesting directions to pursue in future human hallucinogen research, even if (as Carter and Dittrich’s data suggest) hallucinogens do not affect rivalry through a 5-HT2A mechanism.
Two noteworthy developments in non-hallucinogenic rivalry research are a paper by Jakob Hohwy and colleagues giving an elegant theory for why rivalry occurs and a great paper by Joel Pearson and colleagues showing that mental imagery influences rivalry.
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July 16th was the anniversary of Gordon Alles’ first self-experiment with MDA in 1930 —to my knowledge the first experience with an MDMA-like drug. Much later, at a 1959 conference at UCSF, he described his experience. If you’ve ever wondered what a hallucinogen/MDMA-like experience would be like to someone without any expectations aside from an interest in finding treatments for allergies and congestion, here is his remarkably observant account:
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This paper by Matthew Johnson and colleagues is an important and thoughtful companion article to this group’s recent psilocybin paper. It provides a lot of information on how the researchers prepared and safely monitored volunteers who had no previous hallucinogen experience. Interested readers can click through for links to the full text of both papers and information on the Council on Spiritual Practices. Griffiths and colleagues are apparently currently recruiting for a study in people with current or past cancer diagnoses (http://cancer-insight.org/)
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Roland Griffiths, Bill Richards, Matthew Johnson, Una McCann, and Bob Jesse have a follow-up to their landmark paper in which they reported mystical experiences in volunteers given psilocybin. In this new paper, they find that time has not diminished the impact of the mystical experience seen in many of their carefully prepared participants. 14 months later, the experience is still important. At this time point, 58% of 36 volunteers rate the experience on the psilocybin session as among the five most personally meaningful experiences and two-thirds rate it among the five most spiritually significant experiences in their lives.
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Looking back on the College on Drug Dependence annual meeting, a number of standout presentations about MDMA and psychedelics (or ‘hallucinogens’ as we scientists call them) spring to mind. Here, I highlight just three of them even though I could spend hours and pages discussing a larger number of fascinating presentations.
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