Now available: Psychedelotropism

We are, every one of us, tied together by an ancient biochemical link; one that predates the divergence of all major kingdoms of life. What began two and a half billion years ago in the primeval waters of the Archean Eon would one day come to be involved in almost all aspects of animal life. What might the origins of serotonin and its chemical cousins reveal about the nature and function of psychedelic experience? (learn more)

Articles

Relieving Psychedelic Speech Paralysis – Four Strategies to Deal With Ineffability

“It is not the case that a man who is silent says nothing,” so goes an Apache saying. But silence is often misinterpreted, Branham warns. Some of the strategies often used to overcome this difficult problem include explicitly qualified expression, poetic evocation, and self-destructive anti-expression (including formal and rhetorical subversion). (Read more)

Quantifying Psychedelic Insight – A Quick Peek at the Psychological Insight Questionnaire (PIQ)

Dr. Alan K. Davis and colleagues of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research recently developed a new psychometric tool called the Psychological Insight Questionnaire (PIQ) and put it to the test on a sample of self-reported LSD and psilocybin users. (Read more)

Probable Evolutionary Relationship of Serotonin and the Plant Growth Hormone Auxin – D. W. Woolley, 1962

Below are digitized pages from my own copy of Woolley's 1962 book, 'The Biochemical Bases of Psychoses - or the Serotonin Hypothesis about Mental Disease,' where he draws several basic parallels between auxin in plants and serotonin in animals. (Read more)

Bicycle Day – An Alternative History

Bicycle Day - An Alternative History by Eric M. Fortier, B.A. | April 19, 2020 Everyone knows the story of Bicycle Day. Hofmann accidentally absorbed LSD through his fingertips and tripped for a couple [...]

Classical Psychedelics for Alzheimer’s and TBIs?

LSD's potent anti-inflammatory, amyloid-clearing and neuroplastic effects, its ability stimulate semantic and episodic memory and maybe even prevent the effects of sleep loss on forgetting, as well as to increase what some scientists call brain complexity, make it a promising treatment approach for Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injuries. (Read more)

Psychedelic Clinical Trials for Patients With Terminal Illness Set to Begin at St. Vincent Hospital

Confronting terminal illness can lead to a devastating sense of demoralization, loss of hope, meaning, desire for hastened death, depression, and anxiety. Terminal cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world. Cancer will take one in four of us, and almost half of us will face it—at least once, at a rate of 1.6 million people in the US alone every year... (Read more)

Multiple Functional Enhancements of Dopamine Signaling by LSD

This study adds to the growing body of evidence that serotonergic psychedelics affect the dopamine system, implicating them in reward and motivation. This may partially explain anecdotal reports of psychedelics dramatically affecting those with symptoms of attention deficit... (Read more)

Adult Disorganized Attachment: Pathology, Absorption, and Mystical Experience

Failed resolution of trauma, and specifically disorganized attachment, expresses itself in a propensity for mystical experiences (unrelated to religious/spiritual beliefs), mediated by trait absorption. (Read more)

Hallucinogen Persisting Perceptual Disorder – A Very Brief Summary

Some factors were found predicting occurrence of HPPD, including pre-existing tinnitus, "floaters," and trouble concentrating, but most importantly, anxiety and panic reactions during the experience. This lead to speculation of hallucinogen-induced PTSD symptomatology as a useful model for HPPD... (Read more)

A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin – Summary and Critical Analysis

This analysis outlines and expands on the psycho-social implications of the film with the use of details directly from the publications, interviews, supplemental panel discussion, paid archives, and from a 2016 presentation given by Dr. Jeffrey Guss, the co-principal investigator of the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Research Project (the main focus of this film), on the study’s primary clinical outcomes. A brief overview of some of the science of how psychedelics work in the brain is offered. (Read more)

Does Dream Content Predict Cognitive Abilities?

REM dreams reflect the use of existing experience to solve cognitively challenging learning tasks requiring innovative solutions (Smith, 2012). We hypothesize that reasoning and working memory would be positively related to dream experiences of good fortune and success, and negatively related to experiences of misfortune... (Read more)

Can You Feel It? On Psychedelic Microdosing

Microdosing, beyond the sub-perceptual, for solving currently relevant complex procedural and social-emotional problems that require innovative solutions. [...] Warning: the serotonin system is involved in regulating energy metabolism, social status (including resource access priority such as to food and mates), and psychedelics may lead to a challenging re-evaluation of priorities... (Read more)

D. W. Woolley, the Serotonin Hypothesis, and the Genesis of Psychopharmacology

The view that biochemistry had no stake in the brain was soon to change after a series of discoveries about serotonin in the early 1950s. [...] Psychosis and mania are characterized in part by an over-ascription of meaning, and depression with a lack of meaning, consistent with Woolley’s work on the hyper- and hypo-serotonergic effects on bipolar psychosis... (Read more)

PSYCHOACTIVE PRESS

PSYCHOACTIVE PRESS aims to bind diverging scientific and academic research to understand the roles of set and setting in mental illness, create original discourse on the effects of psychedelics in human biology, behavior, and perception, and help us better and more safely think about, communicate, and use altered states of consciousness.

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