* Katrin H. Preller et al., “The Fabric of Meaning and Subjective Effects in LSD-Induced States Depend on Serotonin 2A Receptor Activation,” Current Biology 27, no. 3 (2017): 451–57. The work was done in Franz Vollenweider’s lab. When the serotonin 5-HT2A receptors were blocked with a drug (ketanserin), “the LSD-induced attribution of personal relevance to previously meaningless stimuli” was also blocked, leading the authors to conclude that these receptors play a role in the generation and attribution of personal meaning.
* The experience would shape his post-NASA work: the former engineer established the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study consciousness and paranormal phenomena.
* “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” (Walter Sullivan, “The Einstein Papers: A Man of Many Parts,” The New York Times, March 29, 1972.)
* Quoted in Charles S. Grob, “Psychiatric Research with Hallucinogens: What Have We Learned?,” Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research 1 (1998).
* Ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from the root of an African shrub, is being used underground as well as in clinics in Mexico to treat opiate addiction; ayahuasca has also been reported to be helpful breaking addictions.
* As for the three volunteers who received no benefit, they had mild or unremarkable sessions. This might be because they were still on SSRIs, which may block the effects of psychedelics, or because some fraction of the population simply doesn’t respond to the drugs. The Hopkins team, too, has occasionally seen cases of “dud trips” that leave people unaffected.
* By me, as it happened. “The Trip Treatment,” New Yorker, Feb. 9, 2015.
* This is how Freud understood depression, which he called melancholia: after the loss of an object of desire, the ego splits in two, with one part punishing the other, which has taken the place of the lost love in our attentions. In his view, depression is a misplaced form of revenge for a loss, retribution that has been misdirected at the self.
* Tom Insel, who after leaving the NIMH went to work for Google’s life science subsidiary, Verily, before joining a mental health start-up called Mindstrong Health, told me that there are now algorithms that can reliably diagnose depression based on the frequency and context of one’s use of the first-person pronoun.
* Or at least people who can afford it. One advantage of medicalizing psychedelic therapy is that it would presumably be accessible to everyone with health insurance.
* He recounts these experiences in his book Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 190–93.
* I don’t dismiss the possibility they may come from somewhere else, but will confine myself here to the more parsimonious explanation.
* In a 1969 essay in the Harvard Theological Review, Walter Pahnke described several distinct modes of psychedelic consciousness, including one he termed “the cognitive psychedelic experience.” This is “characterized by astonishingly lucid thought. Problems can be seen from a novel perspective, and the inner relationships of many levels or dimensions can be seen all at once. The creative experience may have something in common with this kind of psychedelic experience, but such a possibility must await the result of future investigation.”
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