Psychedelic drugs are a class of compounds that produce a characteristic set of profound and unique changes in human perception, thought, and feeling. There are at least three structurally dissimilar classes of psychedelic drugs: the lysergic acid group, derivatives of tryptamine, and compounds related to phenylethylamine or phenylisopropylamine. Within each of these structural classes, some co...

How do psychedelic drugs produce their characteristic range of acute effects in perception, emotion, cognition, and sense of self? How do these effects relate to the clinical efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapies? Efforts to understand psychedelic phenomena date back more than a century in Western science. In this article I review theories of psychedelic drug effects and highlight key conc...

--Based on the frequently reported similarities between creative and psychedelic (drug-induced, consciousness-expansion) experiences, a preliminary study was conducted to explore the effects of psychedelic agents (LSD-25, mescaline) on creative problem-solving ability. Twenty-seven professionally employed males were given a single psychedelic experience in 1 of 7 small groups (ns = 3 or 4) foll...

The psychedelic experience (including psychedelic-induced ego dissolution) can effect lasting change in a person's attitudes and beliefs. Here, we aimed to investigate the association between naturalistic psychedelic use and personality, political perspectives, and nature relatedness using an anonymous internet survey. Participants (N = 893) provided information about their naturalistic psyched...

Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin are often claimed to be capable of inducing life-changing experiences described as mystical or transcendental, especially if high doses are taken. The present study examined possible enduring effects of such experiences by comparing users of psychedelic drugs (n = 88), users of nonpsychedelic illegal drugs (e.g., marijuana, amphetamines) (n = 29) and...

A psychedelic experience is a period of intensely ditions of the experience -the physical and heightened reactivity to sensory stimuli from emotional climate of the room, the relations of within and without. A "programmed" psychethe voyager to others present, and particularly delic experience is one in which the sequence the attitude of the drug-giving parson. It is by and patterning of stimuli...

What is the level of consciousness of the psychedelic state? Empirically, measures of neural signal diversity such as entropy and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity score higher for wakeful rest than for states with lower conscious level like propofol-induced anesthesia. Here we compute these measures for spontaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals from humans during altered states of consciousne...

One of the most intriguing aspects of hypnosis has been its ability to produce, ia the best Ss, very unusual subjective experiences. In the past decade these phenomena have been largely overlooked, as the emphasis in hypnosis research has been on the development of objective measures of suggestibility (Shor & Orne, 1962; Weitzenhoffer & Hilgard, 1959; 1962; 1963), the nature of hypnotic suggest...

The psychological state elicited by the classic psychedelics drugs, such as LSD and psilocybin, is one of the most fascinating and yet least understood states of consciousness. However, with the advent of modern functional neuroimaging techniques, the effect of these drugs on neural activity is now being revealed, although many of the varied phenomenological features of the psychedelic state re...

introduction: this investigation is seeking for the impact of family form on psychedelic abusing in youth aged 19-35 in tehran city. method: it has been a cross sectional study and the population has been all of youth aged 19-35 living in tehran. using a cluster sampling, 6281 people were selected. the instrument of investigation has been a demographic questionnaire and beck depression inventor...