Psilocybin and The Psychedelic Experience Creates a Prolonged Positive Outlook on Life (Study)

Psilocybin and The Psychedelic Experience Creates a Prolonged Positive Outlook on Life (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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The human mind expands with the number of new experiences that are encountered. Psilocybin research points to the possibility that these experiences open up realms of consciousness that are otherwise untapped during normal cognitive functioning. Your brain and body remember these states of being resulting in a positive shift towards one’s outlook on life.

After psilocybin injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep.
– Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study

These hyper emotional states are also seen during dream states. By experiencing these senses in your waking life through magic mushrooms you expand your perception and view reality more like a dream long after the initial trip. This helps relieve stress and has shown to lead to a positive outlook on life.

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Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.

Based on these findings, shrooms may take you on a trip to a happier and more positively charged outlook of reality.

Psychedelic Mushrooms Put Your Mind in a “Waking Dream”, Study Finds | Washington Post

The Effects Of Negative Emotions On Our Health

The Effects Of Negative Emotions On Our Health | Third Monk image 6

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Humans experience an array of emotions, from joy and severe depression and everything in between. Each one of these emotions create a distinct feeling in the body.

That’s why Power Poses can be such a great way to influence your brain’s release of chemicals.

That raises the question, what happens when we have negative thoughts consistently?

Positive or Negative Emotions, it’s All Perspective

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Imagine yourself driving down the street when suddenly you are cut off, what happens next? Do you react in anger? Or do you simply apply the brake slightly and move on with your day.

The same experience can yield two very different results based on how we define our experience. 

Tune Your Perception

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With that in mind, we realize that positive or negative emotions are only defined as such by us.

This reminds me of a wonderful Zen Parable:

The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life.

A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.

This made her parents very angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.

In great anger the parents went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.

After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed.

A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.

The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.

Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”

The Mind Body Connection

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The unseen connection between your mind and body is very powerful and the effects your mind can have on your physical body are profound.

Our emotions and experiences are essentially energy and they can be stored in the cellular memory of our bodies. Have you ever experienced something in your life that left an emotional mark or pain in a certain area of your body? It is likely you have residual energy stuck in that area of your body that you have yet to acknowledge.

It’s all a learning and growing process that we don’t have to judge nor fear. Positive or negative thoughts, the choice is yours! 

> Emotion Effects on our Health | Collective Evolution

Psilocybin Mushrooms Help Erase Conditioned Fear in Lab Mice (Study)

Psilocybin Mushrooms Help Erase Conditioned Fear in Lab Mice (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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Low doses of psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms have been found to aid in removing a condition fear response in lab mice. The Lieber Institute for Brain Development conducted the study to find out how psilocybin affected fear and anxiety.

Psilocybin and Fear in Mice – Methodology Day 1

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Mice were injected with varying doses (0.1, 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 mg/kg) of psilocybin, 1.0 mg/kg of ketanserin (a drug that acts oppositely on the receptor which binds psilocybin), or a saline control.

– Twenty-four hours later, the animals were placed in a testing chamber and conditioned to fear a 15-second audio cue.

– The mice heard the cue, and after 30 seconds, received very brief electric shocks delivered through the chamber floor. Each mouse underwent ten trials, each separated by 210 seconds.

After ten trials, all of the animal subjects froze in fear after the start of the 15-second audio.

Psilocybin and Fear in Mice – Methodology Day 2

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The next day, the mice were placed in the chamber again and underwent the same process. Except this time, the shock was left out. The goal here was to effectively retrain the mice to not fear the audio cue and disassociate it with the shock.

– The researchers found that after only three trials, mice treated with low doses of psilocybin (0.1 and 0.5 mg/kg) no longer froze after hearing the audio cue.

– But mice injected with higher doses of psilocybin or ketanserin didn’t stop freezing until the tenth trial.

– Mice that were injected with a saline control still froze in fear after ten trials.

Power of Love in Shrooms Tied to Brain Chemistry

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The head of the research team, Dr. Briony Catlow thinks the fear removing effect of psilocybin might have something to do with the mushroom’s ability to modify and control neural circuitry.

“Memory, learning, and the ability to relearn that a once threatening stimuli is no longer a danger absolutely depends on the ability of the brain to alter its connections,” Catlow told Real Clear Science.

“We believe that neuroplasticity plays a critical role in psilocybin accelerating fear extinction.

“It is highly possible that in the future we will continue these studies since many interesting questions have come up from these experiments. The hope is that we can extend the findings to humans in clinical trials,” Catlow told RCScience.

Low Doses of Psilocybin Help Extinguish Conditioned Fear | Real Clear Science

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

Humans Are Biologically Wired for the Magic Mushroom Experience  – Roland Griffiths Ted Talk (Video) | Third Monk image 2

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!

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Bill Maher On Creativity and Psychedelics (Video)

Bill Maher On Creativity and Psychedelics (Video) | Third Monk

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?

Magic Mushrooms and Positive Personality Changes (Study)

Magic Mushrooms and Positive Personality Changes (Study) | Third Monk

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