Openness - Third Monk

Oct 15, 2012Jun 17, 2016

Humans Are Biologically Wired for the Magic Mushroom Experience – Roland Griffiths Ted Talk (Video)

Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs.

Roland Griffiths took 36 healthy volunteers who have never had a psychedelic experience. After 2 months of having their first Psilocybin experience the volunteers were given various questionnaires to gauge the effect of the psychedelic experience.

70 percent of people were saying. “This is among the 5 most personally meaningful experiences of my life.” I would ask people, what does that mean? Tell me about that. “When my first child was born that changed my life forever. Recently my father passed away, its kinda like that.”

80 percent of the volunteers said that the experience increased their sense of well-being and life satisfaction. No one said it decreased it.

Magic Mushrooms have been around far longer than our civilization. It’s thrilling that science is finally discovering the magic in mushrooms!

Aug 27, 2012Jan 25, 2018

Bill Maher On Creativity and Psychedelics (Video)

Adderall is the drug of choice these days on campus. Oh, what fun. I don’t know what I would enjoy more, the extremely focused parties or the highly detail oriented sex. But here’s the thing, when Steve Jobs was young, the drug of choice was acid and Jobs told his biographer that dropping acid as a young man was one of the best things he ever did because when he took it with his girlfriend, the wheat field started playing Bach. Which is pretty unbelievable – a computer nerd had a girlfriend?

Now, maybe there’s not a connection between LSD and genius, but it’s something no great American ever said about a Kit-Kat bar. If it weren’t for acid, you might not have an iPod and you definitely wouldn’t have some of the best music in your iPod. Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA while on acid. The Beatles made “Sergeant Pepper” while on acid.

And it’s not just anecdotal. In a study from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine last month, scientists found that a single dose of psilocybin, which is the drug in mushrooms, created a quote “long-term positive personality change in most patients.” People improved in the areas of sensitivity, imagination, and broad-minded tolerance of others. In pharmaceutical speak, psilocybin is known as an asshole inhibitor. And couldn’t we use a little more of that?

Aug 1, 2012Jun 17, 2016

Magic Mushrooms and Positive Personality Changes (Study)

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn’t usually change significantly.

“Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older,” says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Personality was measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, which covers openness and the other four broad domains that psychologists consider the makeup of personality: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Only openness changed during the course of the study.

Griffiths says he believes psilocybin may have therapeutic uses. He is currently studying whether the hallucinogen has a use in helping cancer patients handle the depression and anxiety that comes along with a diagnosis, and whether it can help longtime cigarette smokers overcome their addiction.

“There may be applications for this we can’t even imagine at this point,” he says. “It certainly deserves to be systematically studied.”

> Hallucinogen and Personality | Medical Express