More than a year after taking a hallucinogenic drug in a carefully controlled experiment, most people rate the experience among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives, researchers report online today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Such findings are helping to renew interest in research with hallucinogens, a field whose reputation long suffered from the psychedelic excesses of the 1960s.The new study follows up with 36 volunteers who participated in earlier experiments led by psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The researchers monitored the mostly middle-aged subjects while they took a strong dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. All of the volunteers had indicated at least some participation in religious or spiritual activities--such as meditating or going to church--and the researchers instructed them to direct their attention inward while under the drug's sway. None had previous experience with hallucinogens. On questionnaires completed after the drug had worn off, and again 2 months later, they rated the experience as highly significant, the researchers reported in a 2006 paper in Psychopharmacology. Volunteers frequently described a sense of greater truth or a sense of the unity of all things while on the drug, for example.The experience remained highly significant to most of the volunteers 14 months later, the researchers now report: 58% rated it among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives and 67% rated it among the five most spiritually significant. And 64% said the experience had improved their sense of well-being or life satisfaction. It's remarkable, Griffiths says, that people continued to rate their 8-hour experience in the lab as similar in significance to life events such as the birth of a first child.The findings suggest to Griffiths that hallucinogenic drugs may provide a way to investigate the neurobiology of religious experiences by evoking in the lab the kinds of mystical experiences traditionally achieved by prayer, meditation, or fasting. Would the drug have the same effect on a group of atheist or agnostic subjects? "We're dying to do that study," he says.In the meantime, Griffiths's team is recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to test whether similar psilocybin experiences can reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients. A few studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggested that the hallucinogen LSD might ease suffering in terminal cancer patients, but that line of investigation was dropped and largely forgotten, says David Nichols, a psychopharmacologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Although such patients often receive heavy doses of pain drugs along with antidepressants and anxiety drugs, Nichols says hallucinogens might provide a better alternative. "If you could change their perception of death and reduce their stress in that way, it would improve their quality of life because their consciousness wouldn't be dulled by sedatives or narcotics," he says.
Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness
.. BODY BEGIN --> Science Daily — Psychologists from the University of Toronto and Harvard University have identified one of the biological bases of creativity.
The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. They administered tests of latent inhibition to Harvard undergraduates. Those classified as eminent creative achievers - participants under age 21 who reported unusually high scores in a single area of creative achievement - were seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition scores.
The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity to think about many things at once - but negative otherwise. Peterson states: "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you'll get swamped."
"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."
For example, during the early stages of diseases such as schizophrenia, which are often accompanied by feelings of deep insight, mystical knowledge and religious experience, chemical changes take place in which latent inhibition disappears.
"We are very excited by the results of these studies," says Peterson. "It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."
This research was funded by the Stimson Fund and the Clark Fund at Harvard University and by the Connaught Fund at U of T.
more here...http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/10/031001061055.htm
This is the series of photographs that were on display at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in June of 2006. They were displayed in the Artist Area Bar Tent. The prints are on display at the World Grotto , Knoxville Tennessee along with other prints of mine. Nate Brown - bass Obadiah
Nick Carrigan- bass. Jeremy Cox- drums.; Mosaic 5-3-6
creative
ashamed
