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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?

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How Mushrooms Can Save The World – Paul Stamets Ted Talk (Video)

How Mushrooms Can Save The World - Paul Stamets Ted Talk (Video) | Third Monk image 2

Paul Stamets (one of worlds most well-known mycologists) gives a lecture discussing 6 ways mushrooms can save the world. Far too many people look at fungi as a source of food, but they are much more than that. (Shrooooms!)

The focus of Stamets’ research is the Northwest’s native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.

There are cosmic implications as well. Stamets believes we could terraform other worlds in our galaxy by sowing a mix of fungal spores and other seeds to create an ecological footprint on a new planet.

Paul Stamets - mushrooms

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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