Throwing this in here as there are a fair few "dude just take drugs" comments and worry they might be the religious types.
Before a controlled high dose Psilocybin experience I "felt" my emotions: Anger, Fear, Frustration.
Afterwards, I gained the ability to observe and "catch" my emotions in-flight. Not sure if it was neuroplasticity induced by the substance, or "you don't know what your brain can do until you know it".
I liken it to previously having Ring 1 access to my thoughts, now I have Ring 0 access.
Definitely persistent: DRAMATIC improvement in my happiness and wellbeing.
YMMV
Easier said than done, of course!
Another way of putting is that I'm self aware that the "qualia" of feeling angry is being projected into my conscious experience as a token, rather than simply experiencing "feeling angry" qualia.
I liken it to being able to set a breakpoint on my emotions, and then single step through the root cause of that emotion.
I seriously didn't have that functionality in my brain before that hero dose trip (even after doing many years of meditation).
Risk taking is not something to advise others to practice in. It is for each and every person to evaluate their own risk tolerance and not have them influenced by those who took risks and came out the other side "for the better".
Were they dried mushrooms you ate? Do you trust the provenance of them? If they were a chocolate bar or similar, many of those do not actually have psilocybin or psilocin in them, and are instead using a variety of different research chemicals that are significantly less understood. If it was dried mushrooms, there are a variety of species that induce hallucinogenic effects through other chemicals than what you find in your usual magic mushrooms.
They might have been regular shrooms, of course - people react to things differently - but that's a different enough outcome that I wonder if it wasn't something else entirely.
What are your qualifications to make a claim like that? There hasn't been much clinical research in humans using psilocybin until very recently [1], and they certainly do not cover the range of different species of mushrooms that contain the alkaloids [2].
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11016263/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_psilocybin_mushroom_sp...
I'm not really sure what you're arguing - neither of these links indicate otherwise. Are you familiar with the null hypothesis? Unless we have evidence of something being the case, why would we think it would be the case?
We also have decades of anecdotal reports on usage of psilocybin and psilocin containing mushrooms and I'm also not aware of any significant evidence from that that such an effect is even remotely common - it's the first I've ever encountered that sort of story about persistent headaches for multiple weeks following their usage.
> neither of these links indicate otherwise
The articles I provided were to back my own statements that I made, not to refute yours, and I am not sure how that wasn't clear.
> I'm not really sure what you're arguing
I am saying that there really isn't a large enough body of scientific evidence yet to conclude definitively that there are no possible mechanisms that could cause this effect, as you stated. Humans aren't uniform systems.
> Are you familiar with the null hypothesis?
Yeah.
> it's the first I've ever encountered that sort of story about persistent headaches for multiple weeks following their usage.
HPPD comes to mind, serotonin syndrome, all sorts of possibilities that do not necessitate it being caused by another substance.
I'm not.
> were suggesting that they were possibly given other substances.
I am. There are a lot of people buying mislabeled products thinking they are ingesting chocolate made out of mushrooms that, in fact, are not. There are also people who sell other mushrooms, such as amanita muscaria, as your garden variety magic mushrooms. (I'm not aware of anything that would cause this with it, either, but it's got significantly less study and anecdotal reports.)
> I am saying that there really isn't a large enough body of scientific evidence yet to conclude definitively that there are no possible mechanisms that could cause this effect, as you stated. Humans aren't uniform systems.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about there being definitively no possible mechanisms. I said there are, to my knowledge, not known pharmacological mechanisms. If you want to dispute that, you're going to need to find some known pharmacological mechanism.
> HPPD comes to mind, serotonin syndrome, all sorts of possibilities that do not necessitate it being caused by another substance.
HPPD can cause a variety of visual phenomenon. That is not the same thing as having a 3 week long headache. SS is a possibility but now you're into multi-drug interactions, and I'd argue the blame is more on the MAOI or SSRI - those things interact with everything. But even still, the majority of SS cases subside in <24 hours... and the literature isn't exactly favorable to the idea that psilocybin is even a good candidate for causing SS in these cases. https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/assessing-risk-for-seroto... (Thomas has done several meta-analysis on this subject so he's about as informed on this topic as you can be.)
When something doesn't fit the current model of something, you ask questions about it - that's the starting point to pretty much any investigation. I'm unsure why you find this so egregious.
But as for mechanism, maybe up/down regulation of sertogenic systems, individual specific conditions (kidney disease, liver disease), etc?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03768...