In large doses, psychedelics have been known to change lives. People have claimed to find god or solve deep personal problems. In small doses, regular users say their practice gives them day-to-day help in managing their lives. Some suffer from anxieties and seek more sense of calm. Some have demanding careers and microdose to achieve better.
That’s all word of mouth advertising. The Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands (PSN) has actually measured what happens.
It’s a scientific fact, according to PSN with regard to psilocybin-laced mushrooms. Small doses work.
PSN set up a non-laboratory, natural environment to follow volunteers who had nabbed psychedelic truffles at a microdosing event. Since PSN did not acquire a careful lab sample to control and pass out, the researchers measured the strength of what participants brought with them. Behavioral Scientist, an online website, reported that, “next, all participants were carefully guided through the experimental tasks. Each task was explained in detail by one of the experimenters with the aid of example items, before participants were allowed to perform the task themselves… After finishing the experimental tasks in the first session, participants consumed a microdose of pre-measured psychedelic truffles made available by the PSN.”
PSN calculated that a recreational dose of fresh truffles would be 10 g, so it doled out 1 g samples. Then it measured.
For instance, the Alternate Uses test measured how well the microdosers did at “divergent thinking.” In this test, a participant is given a common household object, such as a towel, and then asked how many ways they could use it. It is a measure of creative thinking and problem solving within constraints. A skill a coder might need.
After eating the magic truffles, participants thought of significantly more uses for objects and were more elaborate in explaining them.
Another test on convergent thinking measured how well people saw relationships and patterns. In rows of pictures, one object in each row has something in common with one additional objects each other row. The mushrooms enhanced that thinking as well.
Scores for fluid thinking—thinking on your feet as a situation changes—also increased significantly.
So… it’s a scientific fact, according to PSN with regard to psilocybin-laced mushrooms. Small doses work:
“Whereas large doses of psychedelics can introduce a range of undesirable side effects, microdoses of psychedelic substances might prove to be a promising alternative that could eliminate the risks of challenging experiences (sometimes referred to as a “bad trips”) while maintaining the potential benefits of psychedelic substances on human emotion and cognition.”