Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, of the Neuro-psychopharmacology Unit, Imperial College London, discusses research on Psilocybin and how psychedelics could be used in therapy to help with depression, addiction, and other problems of rigid thought patterns.
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is one of the first researchers in 40 years allowed to investigate the effects of psychedelic drugs. He used an FMI brain imager to study the resting state activation in the brains of volunteers who had taken a small, but very intense intravenous dose of psilocybin mushrooms. What he found surprised everyone.
He found that the psilocybin caused large decreases in activity in various centers of coordination in the brain. This was exactly the opposite to what Robin and everyone else had predicted, but it is a clear and far-reaching finding. Decreasing brain activity that generates a sense of “self” allows our consciousness to expand, a process that Aldous Huxley described as opening the mind’s “reducing valve” in The Doors of Perception.
Great video, it’s good to see that some parts of the UK are allowed to speak freely and with authority on a subject which is taboo; criminalised through fear. Talk to Frank? No thanks. I’d urge effective public discussion before bath salts make things even worse. The culture of reckless binging on whatever is to hand is a symptom that something is rotten in the state of education and drug policy; to live in a state of repression while we pretend that we’re free is the same; people that don’t recognise that man is in every unique case a balance of mind + animal. Each should have an individual right to find what works for them with respect to the rights of the community and each other. Personal responsibility.