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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 19 2016, @09:04AM
Indeed. Actually, it could only be used as argument for an evil or at least incompetent god, because just as we seem to be hardwired to religious feelings, we are obviously also hardwired to do evil things. Yes, every single of us would say "no, not me." But experiments (Milgram experiment, Stanford prison experiment) show quite unambiguously that if the circumstances are right, the vast majority of us is going to do evil things.
If being wired for religious experiences is assumed to be evidence for a god, it is implied that god made that wiring (because if the wiring just happened without godly intervention, it cannot be evidence for god). But if that god actively made or modified the wiring in our brain, then he could just as well have removed (or not made in the first place) the wiring for evil, and therefore not doing so would have been an intentional decision. And why would a god — who, by the premise, does not mind messing with our wiring otherwise — not remove those evil wirings? Well, the only two explanations I can see for this is that either the god wants the evil wires be in, which by definition would make him an evil god, or that the god didn't figure out how to remove them, in which case it was an incompetent god.
If you want a god that is neither evil nor incompetent, you must assume that this god has a good reason not to mess with our wiring. But then, that god cannot be responsible for the religious wiring either, and therefore the religious wiring cannot be evidence for that god.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 19 2016, @09:24PM
Wow, I hadn't thought of that. Interesting argument; too bad the kind of people who most need to hear it are the types who think William Lane Craig is a respectable philosopher :(
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Saturday May 21 2016, @10:39PM
I prefer to simplify the it as ... we learned to lie to order to survive when resources are too limited to share equally through the entire social grouping.
My evidence is the result of this (old) study. [technologyreview.com]
... have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves.
I believe that our need to believe in something beyond ourselves, a 'god' if you will, stems from the survivor's guilt induced by such a biological imperative. Making hard choices is significantly easier to justify when you pretend that there is some higher power guiding your hand.