LSD & ESP: Scientists Study Psychic Phenomena and Psychedelic Drugs

See What do we know about the risks of psychedelics? & free documentary What's in My Baggie? There is an incredible danger in thinking you can just find good psychedelics via illegal markets, I can say that from personal experience as I was attacked by a friend who thought LSD could cure his depression.

LSD & ESP: Scientists Study Psychic Phenomena and Psychedelic Drugs

David Jay Brown

Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, and psychologist Stanley Krippner, have collected numerous anecdotes about psychic phenomena that were reported by people under the influence of psychedelic drugs, and several small scientific studies have looked at how LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline might effect telepathy and remote viewing.

A new edition of the 1964 book ESP Experiments With LSD-25 and Psilocybin: A Methodological Approach, by Roberto Cavanna and Emilio Servadio was republished in 2010, with a new preface by Charles Tart. 

In fact, when the chemical structure of an important psychoactive component of ayahuasca was first discovered, now called "harmaline," one of of the original suggestions for its name was "telepathine," due to the psychedelic brew's common association with telepathy.

A great review article by Krippner and psychologist David Luke, that summarizes all of the psychedelic research into psychic phenomena, can be found in the Spring, 2011 MAPS Bulletin that I edited about psychedelics and the mind/body connection. (This article can be found here: www.maps.org/news-letters/v21n1/v21n1-59to60.pdf)

See What do we know about the risks of psychedelics? & free documentary What's in My Baggie? There is an incredible danger in thinking you can just find good psychedelics via illegal markets, I can say that from personal experience as I was attacked by a friend who thought LSD could cure his depression.

DMT Research from 1956 to the Edge of Time

Andrew R. Gallimore and David P. Luke

Of course, to anyone at all familiar with the DMT experience, it is not so much what you see that commands particular attention but, rather, where you go and who you meet there. A large proportion of DMT users, about 50% in Strassman’s study (Strassman, 2008), report travelling to normally invisible worlds and meeting an array of peculiar beings. Curiously, this type of experience was represented in Szára’s first cohort (Sai-Halasz et al., 1958), so might be considered as a core feature of DMT experiences, rather than a later counter-cultural affectation. A 27-year old female physician (we’ll call her Bella) describes the characteristic auditory effects that precede ‘breaking through’:
“The whistling has stopped; I have arrived. In front of me are two quiet, sunlit Gods. They gaze at me and nod in a friendly manner. I think they are welcoming me into this new world.” (Sai-Halasz et al., 1958)

Although this new world seems somewhat more sedate than the worlds many DMT users are familiar with, the sense of having arrived in another place is unambiguous, as is the presence of non-human entities. There is even an attempt at communication:

“One of the Gods—only his eyes are alive—speaks to me: ‘Do you feel better?’” (Sai-Halasz et al., 1958)

The late Harvard psychiatrist, Dr John E. Mack, conducted detailed interviews and hypnotic regression sessions with over 200 so-called alien abductees. Despite not suffering from any known neuropsychological pathology that he could identify (i.e. perfectly sane), all of the abductees were uncompromising in their insistence that their experiences were real; that they had really happened. Similar to returning DMT trippers, this feeling of absolute certainty collided with their most basic assumptions regarding what was and wasn’t possible with such force that they were left in a state that Mack termed ‘ontological shock’ (Mack, 1994). Humans, sane ones at least, are extremely good at distinguishing reality from fantasy and the vast majority are quick to accept that a particularly strange dream was just that – a dream and not real. Whilst this reality-testing is impaired during dreaming and psychosis (Limosani et al., 2011), waking from the dream or recovery from psychosis is generally sufficient to restore this important ego facility and the dream or hallucination is recognised for what it is. This makes the DMT experience all the more compelling and paradoxical – it is far stranger than (almost) any dream and yet there remains a remarkable inability to shake the feeling that it was truly real once the experience has ended.

...DMT is unique amongst the classical psychedelics in not only being very short acting, but also not exhibiting a tolerance effect with repeated use (Strassman et al., 1996). As such, using the same technology developed for maintaining a stable brain concentration of anaesthetic drugs during surgery, it would be feasible to administer DMT by precisely regulated continuous intravenous infusion, permitting the explorer an extended, and theoretically indefinite, sojourn in the DMT reality. Although a well-prepared strong ayahuasca brew might achieve a crudely comparable effect, standardisation of the dose is much more difficult and the concentration of DMT in the brain will fluctuate based on a range of pharmacokinetic and metabolic factors. A well-designed continuous IV protocol could account for these factors, allowing the brain DMT concentration to be kept stable or manipulated to gradually move the explorer deeper and deeper into the DMT space. This approach might give the brave voyagers enough time to orient themselves, get their intellective tools in order and cast their nets far out into the “dark ocean of mind” in the hope of bringing back the message that DMT has been trying to convey since Szára first dipped his toes in the water almost 60 years ago. If ever there was a time, it’s now. Ahoy, shipmates! Ahoy!