A lovely, historically accurate, trip down memory lane, courtesy of David Presti, senior lecturer of neurobiology at CAL.
The numbered footnotes in the excerpt below link directly to the relevant Johns Hopkins University research study.
Oh boy oh boy, do we have a lot of Johns Hopkins University research studies to talk about! 🙂
Here’s an excerpt from David’s lovely blog post:
“Timothy Leary was a visionary.  He explored ideas 50 years ago that psychological research may productively return to in the coming 50 years. He was deeply interested in the nature of the human mind and in human behavior. He conducted psychedelically-assisted psychotherapy with prisoners, hoping to have positive impact on their rehabilitation. He carried out studies of psychedelic substances demonstrating that, with careful preparation and attention to set and setting*, life-transforming mystical experiences may take place.
This finding has recently been replicated and extended by exquisitely designed studies conducted at Johns Hopkins Medical School (4,5), the latest installment of which just appeared a few days ago (6). Shamans may have known such things for a very long time, but in contemporary biomedical science it helps to have demonstrations with controlled studies conducted at prestigious institutions.
Other recent work has demonstrated the therapeutic efficacy of psilocybin in relieving anxiety and improving mood in terminal cancer patients (7), and the efficacy of a very different kind of psychedelic substance, MDMA, in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (8). These are all clinical studies of profound importance and, if the trend continues, research like this will continue to expand (9).”
*Editor’s note: “dosage” is often left out of the “set and setting” equation, but it inevitably plays a key role in the experience, as the Johns Hopkins study shows.
