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Scientists are all on psychedelics right now.
Recent research on LSD indicates that the drug can potentially treat mental disorders and improve our understanding of human consciousness. At the same time, studies conducted in recent years have explored the effects of psilocybin – the psychoactive compound naturally present in magic mushrooms – on smoking cessation; reduce violent crime; treat depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder; and trigger spiritual epiphanies.
Now, a pharmacology study of 25 October – the official journal of the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society – adds to this growing body of knowledge. He examines another potential benefit of psilocybin. Researchers at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands have studied the cognitive effects of the microdose of psilocybin truffles (technically not fungi, but rather the hardened vegetative part of a fungus). They discovered that small doses can stimulate brain function and stimulate creativity without harming reasoning skills.
Researchers have been intrigued by this topic as microdosing has become popular among the types of advanced technologies in Silicon Valley. Users say the drug, which proponents claim is non-toxic and non-addictive, contributes to flexible thinking, creativity and even employee management. But so far, the evidence was anecdotal and scientists had not studied the microdosing of psilocybin, according to the new study.
Microdoses contain about 10% of the psychoactive components of a standard dose of psilocybin. The idea is to get the benefits but not the disadvantages of the drug, minimal effects that can stimulate thinking but do not lead to extremes like hallucinations.
For this study, researchers tested the effects of about 0.035 grams of a psychoactive truffle on 36 subjects. (They then analyzed the chemical composition of the truffles to ensure that psilocybin was evenly distributed throughout the truffles.) They studied three types of thoughts by presenting the subjects with three different tasks – developed by psychologists to test cognition – which were performed both and after ingesting the drug. Scientists have studied the convergent thinking of subjects, which consists in identifying a unique solution to a single problem; their fluid intelligence, or reasoning and problem solving; and their divergent thinking, the ability to recognize many solutions.
After microdosing, participants' convergent thinking improved with these cognition tests. The topics generated more ideas and their possible solutions were more "fluid, flexible and original," according to the study. Microdosing with psychedelic substances thus improved participants' divergent and convergent thinking. But the reasoning ability of the subjects was not affected by microdoses. Researchers say this indicates that fungi, taken in very small amounts, stimulate creativity without harming fluid intelligence.
Although the study is small, it is a first step to examine the anecdotally touted effects by the users. Scientists will then need to compare microdose subjects to those taking placebo and study the effects on a larger number of people.
Nevertheless, based on these preliminary results, researchers believe that microdosing could be beneficial for more than improved creativity and more flexible thinking. "In addition to its benefits as a potential cognitive enhancement technique, microdosing could be further investigated for its therapeutic efficacy in helping people with thought patterns or rigid behaviors, such as those with Alzheimer's disease." depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, "suggests the cognitive psychologist researcher Luisa Prochazkova in a statement.
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