In studies such as these with huge intersubject variability, and probably also quite large intrasubject variability from day to day on many scales, it makes sense to look at change from baseline for individuals in the various groups rather than just differences in raw scores between treatment groups.<p>It seems by a cursory glance that most analyses done were of the latter kind, and I think then a study such as this, with low N, is expected to not show very much effect of any kind. (Since the intersubject variability and potentially also the natural intrasubject variability for most measured scales seem higher than any expected treatment effect).<p>I am almost certain that e.g. none of the approved and quite convincingly working SSRI:s would have shown any efficacy in a study with this design and similar N.
I'm sort of surprised they didn't extract/synthesize psilocybin directly and administer that. Decades ago, I grew a few batches of P. Cubensis. Even amongst mushrooms from the same rice cake, the dosage wildly varies. You could have a "trip" from a tiny mushroom or eat a handful of duds.
(It's strange that we're using the term microdose, even in scientific contexts - prefixes have meanings - it should be called a decidose.)<p>Anecdotally, I've had a degree of short term success treating my depression with smallish doses of mushrooms, but I've never had the continuing access required for a microdosing regiment.<p>It'd be nice if the government were willing to come to the table on this, but alas.<p>That said, every time that I've had a months long lift, it hasn't been a small dose, but an epic dose that often cast me into a night of turmoil.<p>(Which would make the rigours of double-blind testing completely ineffectual.)
Been doing it for some months on & off, this shit is legit. Altough 0,5g has me tripping so I rarely dose above 100 milligrams.<p>Get up early, do a workout, take cold shower, meditate and then pop a microdose shrooms, feels great. Microdosing is like steroids for meditation.<p>Especially helpful for the programmer logic types of people like me, gets you out of your head for some time and helps you connect with your emotions and body.
I think this is saying that microdosing is mainly placebo effect, and otherwise doesn’t do much. This makes sense. All these participants took full dose psychedelics at some point, and thus had very strong associations.
I see the appeal of microdosing, but to me it renders similar to the kick you might get out of rebelliously sipping a pocket-flask at work. You get the mental boost of "letting loose" while impaired just below the radar.
Participants were required to bring their own psilocybin mushrooms. Probably because it can be expensive and difficult for researchers to get obtain and administer pharma-grade psilocybin.<p>The dose was 0.5g of dried Cubensis mushrooms. Usually a microdose is 0.1-0.2g.<p>All the participants were healthy volunteers. There may be more noticable effects in people with depression or anxiety disorders, etc. Consider that antidepressants often have no effect in healthy volunteers.
> These changes were accompanied by reduced EEG power in the theta band, together with preserved levels of Lempel-Ziv broadband signal complexity.<p>Sounds more like a specs of a DSL modem than a psychiatry paper. I certainly didn't expect to see Lempel-Ziv mentioned in a context other than compression.
It's very difficult to dose mushrooms properly, in real world, content of psilocybin in a particular bag of mushrooms may vary by a factor of 5 or more, plus it decays at speed hard to predict. Even proper taking of mushrooms is quite unpredictable - you can be blown away or hardly feel anything - and microdosing is always harder. Personally i don't like mushrooms for that reason. If you could eat more if the original amount turned insufficient that would be OK, but psychodelics just don't work that way.
Do mushrooms make you write incoherent ramblings on Facebook about how you are God and how everyone else is stuck in the matrix? Because I have 3 different friends who all started doing that after dabbling in psychedelics
Skimming the abstract, my eye catched a mention of the "Lempel-Ziv". I know it's a name of algorithm used in early loseless file archivers (later replaced by Lempel-Ziv-Welch, which is used today in GIF image compression). Imagine my surprise learning that part of this algo is used now in biomedicine to measure complexity of brain activity. Truly, one never knows where things are gonna end up.
Anecdotally in the past I have felt major differences in my mood right after and over the next few months since after taking mushrooms containing psilocybin (liberty caps locally picked growing in nature).<p>The quantity was anything but microdoses though. Each time I had them the amount ranged from 6x to 10x individual dried caps (over a period of 4-5 hours each time).<p>I'm not sure about its impact on my creativity though, but it sure did not impact negatively.
The TL;DR essence from the abstract:<p>> The reported acute effects were significantly more intense for the active dose compared to the placebo, but only for participants who correctly identified their experimental condition. [...] For all other measurements there was no effect of microdosing except for few small changes towards cognitive impairment. According to our findings, low doses of psilocybin mushrooms can result in noticeable subjective effects and altered EEG rhythms, but without evidence to support enhanced well-being, creativity and cognitive function. We conclude that expectation underlies at least some of the anecdotal benefits attributed to microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms.
Microdosing is great but not for everyone. It can actually increase your anxiety if you take too high a dose. Personally, I take a micro dose of LSD every other Friday, drink a cup of coffee and hit the gym. It does wonders. And definitely not addicting.
I had some positive results with microdosing. I used the fadiman protocol for a whole month, ingesting about 0,1g - 0,2g self grown dried mushrooms, on an on-off-off-on basis.
Am I reading this right, from the abstract:<p>> The reported acute effects were significantly more intense for the active dose compared to the placebo, but only for participants who correctly identified their experimental condition.<p>Does that 'correct identification' go both ways, psilocybin & placebo? If so I don't think they claimed a strong enough result!
Note: the 2021 preprint version <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.470657v1.full" rel="nofollow">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.30.470657v1....</a> was also extensively discussed, so that is why this might sound familiar.
The study participants tried psilocybin (mushrooms) for microdosing (low dosing actually); but it seems to me that the more common practice is to use LSD for microdosing, at least according to the references #1,2,3 in the paper.
It improves your mood, which quiets down the internal critic always shouting at you that what you’re creating is a waste of time. That’s probably the actual most important benefit.
I have been interested for quite some time to dabble with psilocybin but just haven't yet had the chance with buddies(outside of a work related traveling event) to do so.<p>I absolutely refuse to try anything like this outside of an environment I have some level of control in or trust in the people around me(not the general public I.E: Bars, clubs, Vegas, etc).<p>Any advice on what to avoid for a first timer from any experienced person here?
TL;DR (via GPT3): Microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms did not have any positive effects on well-being, creativity, or cognitive function. The only noticeable effects were subjective changes and altered EEG rhythms.
> The reported acute effects were significantly more intense for the active dose compared to the placebo, but only for participants who correctly identified their experimental condition<p>I find attempts to study psychedelics with placebo control kind of comical. The positive effects are not due to a chemical change, they are due to a direct subjective experience [1][2]. It's like trying to placebo control the effects of reading a good novel or seeing a sunset.<p>But I guess this does help to dispel the similarly comical idea that a completely non-psychoactive dose of psychedelics can be beneficial.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8033615/#:~:text=Finally%2C%20in%20a%20psilocybin%20study,again%20suggesting%20some%20specificity%20to" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8033615/#:~:tex...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://superbowl.substack.com/i/65186479/the-psychedelic-experience" rel="nofollow">https://superbowl.substack.com/i/65186479/the-psychedelic-ex...</a>
How does one even get contacts to consider this (in a safe manner)?<p>One thought about this and I'd actually consider myself fairly in tune and at peace with my inner self already, so I'd be curious to see how it could help me deal with some of my ruts I get in from time to time.<p>Alcohol definitely isn't helping
Looks like they found no change on a wide variety of tests, like measurements of openness and creativity, except for an array of subjective, psychedelic experience questions like "Sounds influences things I see", "I see distorted shapes", etc.
The N of this study is 34, but it’s probably multiple observation. How do you calculate power in this case? Is it just based off N, in which case, seems low…
Considering micro-dosing either helps you or at worst it has no bad effects I don't see why you wouldn't try it if you had access to it and the legal aspect didn't hinder you.<p>Personally and subjectively it did help me, I wasn't depressed but it did help with creativity and learning, I gained like 150-200 points on chess.com just from playing and reviewing games (rarely)
Thanks for all the great info. EROWID was long before the decriminalization trend, the "right thing" to check before you trip\try any new subtance people might use for psychoactive effects. And many (including "heroic-to-crazy" sounding combinations) pharm-and-farm\forrest caffeine+substanceX etc. Look for "trip reports" section, if its still in business.<p>And any geek who had The Way Things Work on the (rents'?) bookshelf as a kid would get a kick out of PIHCKAL and TIHKAL, the father of "officially done right" psychoactive synthetic experimental chemistry's two compendious ½-&-½ encyclopædiæ\tomes, each split down the middle: first the detailed, timestamped group dose controlled-environment reports with friends and colleagues (maybe mainly fellow accademicians from Cal. Berkeley),
then the terse Chemistry-journal style synthesis-procedure lab-8nstr7ction recipe database and huge index of subtance-nicknanes.<p>I lived illegally for a time in a closet-sized office I rented in OAKtown; chill RockerChik[tm] who did the same down the hall told me about the guy's public funeral and his last gift (of which she accepted a dose to take home and try).<p>And although probably already discussed on yc, the only other mass-market book I've ever read the didn't pander or condescend to the reader by expecting technical symbols to scare us away is essentially all of the (central-core + a bit of stringstuff) math-and-physics base-knowledge you need, from prehighschool fractions through exterior\Clifford Algebra tensor calculus and 1-forms and things, to be able to attack the real literature like a grad student. Diagrams every other page or so, including his own invention of graphic symbols which is really the only reasonable (visible notational) way to manipulate general Tensors. Flip through it and all that exotic\fancy\mysterious mathematics formula gobbledygook is dense and enticing for kids who haven't seen multiple and path integrals and PDEs before, but the explanation is well written an holds your hand to actually bring you through it. It's like 2⅜+inches of trade-paperback goodness 1st 580?\850? or so pages mainly math and relativity, rest of 1300pp or so of mainly quantum physics and cosmology, by the guy (Nobel in Phy.,PhD was math) who had the first famous bet with Hawking, wasn't it? Sir Roger (Penrose). Only complaints: stupid 1st title word, and overambitious promise RE posting solutions for the ton of easy-through-WTF-level excersise footnotes. Great for every mathscience-nonaverse 6+yo competent English reader on your list who thinks actual details scare only sissies, and if nec. you can always put tl;dr
here: I personally recommend those who can afford c.$US 20(newish) to buy and READ\BROWSE\REREAD\SHARE ppbk "The Road to Reality" BY [now Sir] Penrose, Roger (RE:pre-Higgsmass edition)
I wish people better understood that their advocacy of and for drugs is and was pushed by the CIA to essentially deconstruct and damage a society that would otherwise organize and oppose the will of the ruling class. There is an interesting book that was recently released, The Poisoner in Chief that is a good introduction, even though it seems it is meant to also be a bit of a rehabilitation of a horrible human, Sidney Gottlieb.
Maybe the trendy hallucinogenic microdosers should try microdosing food, water, air, speech and constantly being the center of attention. It just isn't interesting giving credibility to a new ignorant generation rediscovering what was known in some cases 60-80 years earlier, in some cases thousands of years earlier. Rediscovery is not interesting. It is embarassing.