These are the top 25 psychiatric medications by number of U.S. prescriptions dispensed in 2009, according to IMS Health.
Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me feel good and bad in equal measure. The crucial difference is that I believe in what video games want to give me, while the bequest of cocaine is one I loathe. I do know that video games have enriched my life. Of that I have no doubt. They have also done damage to my life. Of that I have no doubt. I let this happen, of course; I even helped the process along. As for cocaine, it has been a long time since I last did it, but not as long as I would like.
Manifesting The Mind is a forthcoming documentary about psychedelic drugs. The trailer features such heads as Dennis McKenna, Alex Grey, and Dr. Rick Strassman. When it comes to laying out a comsic rap about the magic of hallucinogens, these guys are pros.
A Campbell River man has received $63,000 in damages for an "out-of-body experience" in which he said he saw God after being accidentally overdosed with the painkiller Ketamine while recovering from back surgery in Vancouver General Hospital.
After Hinds' fight in Las Vegas, he spent three days in a coma. "I was totally astral-traveling. I had the most enlightening, loving feeling. I specifically remember being in outer space, looking down on planets and stuff." His journey was eventually interrupted by a sharp pain in the groin — he was somewhere near Saturn, he estimates, when a nurse began to change his catheter.
For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.
Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States. Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among this country’s thrill-seeking youth.
It's been more than a year since John Hayes, a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola College, ingested psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. He claims that the series of three eight-hour highs, administered—in a laboratory-turned-living room at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore—have made him a calmer, less fearful person. "It gave me this sense that space and time are human constructions that can collapse," says Hayes, 59. "The ultimate reality is something beyond those constructions, and more importantly, everything in the world is connected."
Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
A complete stranger to science, Cass immersed himself in the world of neuroscience, subjecting himself to brain scans, psychological tests, and scientific conferences, as he attempted to gain a better understanding of ADHD, anxiety, stress, motivation and reward, and consciousness. Then things got a little weird. What began as a more clinical effort to understand himself soon became a personal and emotional journey into the fragile, mysterious workings of the mind and the self.
In a relatively short amount of time, we have become a nation of caffeine addicts. Science has barely had time to study the effects of consumption at this volume. New research does, however, suggest that caffeine may not give us the instant jolt of productivity, alertness, and happiness we think it does. And most of us, it turns out, are using the drug all wron
"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the Mind at Large – this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual," he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the world.
One in five Nature readers -- mostly scientists -- say they up their mental performance with drugs such as Ritalin, Provigil, and Inderal.
Nat Bletter, an ethnobotanist and herbal healer, speaks from his experiences with the shamanic Amazonian plant medicine, Ayahuasca, the all "spirit vine." This video was shot on January 25, 2007 at Eyebeam, in NYC.
If horses can alter their own brain chemistries at will (and have good reasons to do so), what about human beings? In “On Deep History and the Brain,” Daniel Lord Smail suggests that human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states. We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices — from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels — we’ve acquired to do so
Zeroing in on a group of cells in a high layer of the cortex, a team of researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute may finally have found the cause of the swirling textures, blurry visions and signal-crossing synesthesia brought on by hallucinogenic drugs like LSD, peyote and "'shrooms." The group, which published its findings in this week's issue of Neuron, may have settled a long-simmering debate over how psychedelic drugs distort human perception
Alexander Shulgin is the world's foremost "psychonaut." The 82-year-old chemist has not only created more of the 300 known consciousness-altering (or psychoactive) compounds than anyone living or dead, he has, by his own account, sampled somewhere between 200 and 250 of them himself—most of them cooked up in the musty lab behind his home in the hills east of Berkeley, Calif., where he has shared many a chemical voyage with his wife of 26 years, Ann.
High on Mount Sinai, Moses was on psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments, an Israeli researcher claimed in a study published this week.
Anthropologist Narby's very personal account of his encounters with Amazonian shamanism and his passionately researched syntheses of anthropological, biochemical, neurological and mythological scholarship fascinate but do not convince.
New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness. Using EEG methods we have studied the effects of meditation, feeling release therapy and the drinking of ayahuasca - a mind expanding tea. We have also studied EEG changes in people who were in a higher state of consciousness. [via
mymindonbooks]
In 1954, Aldous Huxley published "The Doors of Perception," a famous essay observing that the effects of mescaline were remarkably similar to the unitive mysticism of the world's great religions, particularly Vedanta, the philosophical-mystical form of Hinduism which Huxley practiced. It caused an immediate sensation. Many in the public were outraged by its pro-pharmacological spirit, and many in the academy accused Huxley (like William James before him) of flattening different mystical traditions, and of disregarding distinctions between "sacred and profane" mystical practice.
These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies and, if you will accept the reasoning, could be classified as hallucinations. Such fantasies, or hallucinations, are inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood. Dreams are really the emotions that we find ourselves reluctant to examine, think about, or meditate upon, while conscious. [ via
mindhacks ]
Out-of-body experiences? Near-death experiences? Researchers are beginning to understand what's really going on. By Steven Kotler, author of West of Jesus.
The Lucidity Institute's FAQ about technology, drugs, etc. Lots of good links to other resources.
