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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 18 2016, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-magic! dept.

The BBC reports on a small trial (12 patients) that used psilocybin to treat "moderate-to-severe, unipolar, treatment-resistant" depression:

A hallucinogenic chemical in magic mushrooms shows promise for people with untreatable depression, a short study on just 12 people hints. Eight patients were no longer depressed after the "mystical and spiritual" experience induced by the drug. The findings, in the Lancet Psychiatry [open, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30065-7], showed five of the patients were still depression-free after three months.

Experts cautiously welcomed the findings as "promising, but not completely compelling". There have now been calls for the drug to be tested in larger trials.

From the study:

Psilocybin's acute psychedelic effects typically became detectable 30–60 min after dosing, peaked 2–3 h after dosing, and subsided to negligible levels at least 6 h after dosing. Mean self-rated intensity (on a 0–1 scale) was 0·51 (SD 0·36) for the low-dose session and 0·75 (SD 0·27) for the high-dose session. Psilocybin was well tolerated by all of the patients, and no serious or unexpected adverse events occurred. The adverse reactions we noted were transient anxiety during drug onset (all patients), transient confusion or thought disorder (nine patients), mild and transient nausea (four patients), and transient headache (four patients). Relative to baseline, depressive symptoms were markedly reduced 1 week (mean QIDS difference −11·8, 95% CI −9·15 to −14·35, p=0·002, Hedges' g=3·1) and 3 months (−9·2, 95% CI −5·69 to −12·71, p=0·003, Hedges' g=2) after high-dose treatment. Marked and sustained improvements in anxiety and anhedonia were also noted.


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday May 19 2016, @02:36AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Thursday May 19 2016, @02:36AM (#348121) Journal

    People are animals :D
    Do you expect our close relatives to fundamentally different than us? They can't gain technological momentum because they can't communicate abstractly enough. There are other differences in mental faculties of course, but symbolic communication might open a whole floodgate of technologies that were just out of grasp before your species had managed to pass on arbitrary information between generations. Whales are a funny case, because they might be communicating abstractly (dolphins too). None of them can write, though. We use hands for writing, which whales and dolphins lack. We've progressed very quickly since we managed to figure out external data storage. But if you're looking at the world as a rock with funny water-cycling machines growing on it you shouldn't expect an untrained human to experience the world too much differently than an untrained chimpanzee. If you ever have time for a retro science documentary, episode 11 of Carl Sagan's Cosmos - The Persistence of Memory - [youtube.com] changed how I model whales. It's better than the vast majority of things you could choose to watch, not that watching is a good habit to be in.

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  • (Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday May 19 2016, @03:11AM

    by devlux (6151) on Thursday May 19 2016, @03:11AM (#348139)

    It's more than that though. I'm willing to buy your argument for Monkeys for a moment because I believe that an important aspect of divinity that is missed out on is time for reflection and certain simian groups do have that kind of time. I don't think you even need abstract communication for it. There are evidence of hominid burials featuring flowers that go back to homo-erectus, much further than that and there is nothing organic left so we really don't know. However despite not particularly burying their dead, many simian species do have something approaching a "death rite".

    https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1dduu9/what_do_chimpanzees_and_other_apes_do_with_the/ [reddit.com]

    Also Elephants have a death rites as well. So perhaps they can contemplate something beyond their current existence and perhaps not.

    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday May 19 2016, @03:43AM

      by JNCF (4317) on Thursday May 19 2016, @03:43AM (#348152) Journal

      If we hypothetically granted that some animals have religious experiences, would that make you reconsider the nature of animals or the nature of religious experiences? Neither? Both?

      I'm pretty firmly in the camp of religious experiences being an emergent phenomenon that happens to exist in our wetware, but you seem less certain with regards to this topic. I still haven't finished that Tegmarck paper you linked a while back (it's slow reading when you have to Google the jargon, but I'll pick it back up again). His basic view of consciousness seemed like a reasonable stab to me. I think he posits too many prerequisites, but what the fuck do I know?

      • (Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday May 19 2016, @04:22AM

        by devlux (6151) on Thursday May 19 2016, @04:22AM (#348163)

        Well if you look closer at what I said, I didn't say animals don't. I said that humans are the only ones we know of for certain that do. We seem to be hard wired for it and at the moment this hard wiring is the only actual support I find for the divine, which I did call God, but I should have used the word divine. Here I mean divine to mean anything we can conceive that is beyond our ability to fully perceive, comprehend or measure. Now when I say support, I mean it in the hard science, testable hypothesis sense.
        Finding that animals had religion would make me reconsider nothing because it's only cursorily relevant to the hypothesis.

        As for the Tegmark paper,
        There are video versions as well...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjhEtqhUZkY [youtube.com]

        FYI, something I find highly compelling. If you take a look at 12:29 and look at his error correction method, you'll notice that it closely matches the in built Error Correcting Codes found by S James Gates in Super Symmetry.
        http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~crose/papers/ROSEita13_sequence.pdf [rutgers.edu]
        Which makes me wonder if despite the fact that they are completely unrelated if there isn't some deeper connection.

        Why would neural nets and super symmetry possess the error correcting codes?

        • (Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday May 19 2016, @04:53AM

          by devlux (6151) on Thursday May 19 2016, @04:53AM (#348171)

          Meant to link this earlier, but right now I'm fighting a pretty serious case of dengue (break bone fever) so to say I'm perhaps a bit feverish today and over focusing is putting it mildly.

          Nevertheless, I am shocked at how much adinkras (supersymmetry's graph function), look like neural nets.
          https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.0051.pdf [arxiv.org]

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network#Gallery [wikipedia.org]

          OTOH it also reminds me of Qabalah
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Qabalah [wikipedia.org]

          There are probably a lot of really good reasons for striking similarities, perhaps this type of graph just naturally grows from a human mind trying to express an enormously complex topic. But the possibility that something is in this direction just seems to be standing out like a "detour" sign in the middle of the interstate.

          • (Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday May 19 2016, @05:37AM

            by devlux (6151) on Thursday May 19 2016, @05:37AM (#348187)

            This will be my last post on the topic and on soylent for awhile.
            I need to go to the hospital for a few days and get proper treatment, this tropical fever is kicking my ass and I have no desire to find out the truth of any of these theories first hand just yet.

            Anyways, this is a really good layman's explanation of Tegmark's theory that avoids much of the "oh crap I need to look that up" moments.
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXBfXNW6Bxo [youtube.com]

            Last Post! (at least for now)

            • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday May 19 2016, @05:55AM

              by JNCF (4317) on Thursday May 19 2016, @05:55AM (#348196) Journal

              Well if you look closer at what I said, I didn't say animals don't. I said that humans are the only ones we know of for certain that do.

              I didn't mean to imply that you didn't think it a very real possibility, merely that you seem to think it less certain than I do. I feel almost exactly as confident speculating that chimpanzees are conscious as I do speculating that other humans are - unless this whole thing is a simulation just for me in which I am not an emergent phenomenon but rather the star of the show, it seems like these other apes have to be feeling things too.

              Finding that animals had religion would make me reconsider nothing because it's only cursorily relevant to the hypothesis.

              I think it's very relevant. If there are Simulators, and they purposefully let only one species have religious experiences, then that is a huge arrow of intent. If the Simulators purposefully gave every conscious species religious experiences, that would imply a different intent. If there are Simulators but they had nothing to do with our religious experiences, we may still be a meaningless emergent phenomenon even if the universe at large has a purpose (it could be a metaphysical foam sealant - it seems to expand a lot).

              This presentation by James Gates [youtube.com] has some great animated visuals in it.

              I don't think the possibility of us living in a simulation on top of some other universe is absurd, and if the layer of abstraction were intelligently designed (which is necessarily less likely) I would happily agree that the Simulators were metaphysical entities, even definitionally gods. It would be a really interesting twist for physics to take, certainly.

              right now I'm fighting a pretty serious case of dengue (break bone fever)

              Oh shit, that sounds horrible. Wikipedia tells me that you might die, but it's really rare. Try not to die, I guess?

              I need to go to the hospital for a few days and get proper treatment, this tropical fever is kicking my ass and I have no desire to find out the truth of any of these theories first hand just yet.

              Yeah, seriously. Try not to die. Hope you get better, buddy! I enjoy most of your posts that I see here.