Awesome, thanks for the lengthy reply. Heroic is usually considered at least 5g - there's a saying you can meet God at 5g; so it was probably an equivalent dose to that in synthetic form.
I am curious myself if there are other diagnostics, health metrics that are easily/non-invasively measured to help determine or predict what experience a person will have for their first experience or to give an idea of how many sessions may be necessary for what level of "breakthrough."
Sounds like a good practical list of things to do - to develop multiple angles of "attack" to build more weight towards the goal, to reference for yourself as support to counter the strength/weight of urges.
In part reminds me of "psychological flexibility" practices - to help allow thoughts to be less rigid, to offer more fluidity to thought - perhaps you already had that open-fluid mind and so you simply needed the practice/guidance for the practice to then benefit from that value; an example is perhaps you normally would tell yourself "I feel happy" but then that might trigger a stress or feeling of cognitive dissonance, and so instead you'd train yourself to acknowledge all aspects of you in that moment and instead say "I feel happy AND sad;" perhaps not the best example or explaining of similarity. I wonder if the researchers first created a survey to determine the level of this kind of psychological flexibility a person has, and then see how those different groups perform in the psilocybin research - if and how the outcome of different groups differ; could perhaps divide it up even further by providing psychological flexibility training to part of the different groups - and see how all the numbers conclude.
Fun fact: the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous actually wanted the first step to be everyone do LSD/acid.
5g of actual mushroom fungus bodies? Yeah, this was just chemical psilocybin on it's own nothing else, and if I remember right the dose was consequently measured I think in mg rather than g, but they did use the phrase "sometimes called 'heroic'" when I asked about the dose, so, yeah, something like that. (They were clear that it was going to be a very large dose -- informed consent!)
> So instead you'd train yourself to acknowledge all aspects of you in that moment and instead
The counselors/guides involved definitely had a sort of Buddhist philosophy, with regard to quitting smoking as well as the psilocybin session.
I find Americanized (not to be pejorative, just we're always in our culture) Buddhist philosophical approaches to be increasingly popular among therapist and mental health experts generally. But they definitely were here. I have an interest in them myself.
I do not actually think I have a particularly "open-fluid" mind, compared to others, but I guess I'm trying (-without-trying). :)
> I wonder if the researchers first created a survey to determine the level of this kind of psychological flexibility a person has, and then see how those different groups perform in the psilocybin research
They definitely gave me all sorts of survey instruments, at various points in the study. Most of them multiple times, at various points before and after the session. It sometimes seemed obvious what they were "for" from the questions, other times mysterious. My sense is that while some of it may be, like you say, to see what kinds of people might have different outcomes -- more than this, I think a lot of it was to see if the psylocybin session changed people in what ways.
I don't think it actually changed me in a way that would show up on the survey instruments (I was kind of hoping it would!), but I haven't seen the analysis of my survey instruments, and I didn't keep copies of my answers!
I am curious myself if there are other diagnostics, health metrics that are easily/non-invasively measured to help determine or predict what experience a person will have for their first experience or to give an idea of how many sessions may be necessary for what level of "breakthrough."
Sounds like a good practical list of things to do - to develop multiple angles of "attack" to build more weight towards the goal, to reference for yourself as support to counter the strength/weight of urges.
In part reminds me of "psychological flexibility" practices - to help allow thoughts to be less rigid, to offer more fluidity to thought - perhaps you already had that open-fluid mind and so you simply needed the practice/guidance for the practice to then benefit from that value; an example is perhaps you normally would tell yourself "I feel happy" but then that might trigger a stress or feeling of cognitive dissonance, and so instead you'd train yourself to acknowledge all aspects of you in that moment and instead say "I feel happy AND sad;" perhaps not the best example or explaining of similarity. I wonder if the researchers first created a survey to determine the level of this kind of psychological flexibility a person has, and then see how those different groups perform in the psilocybin research - if and how the outcome of different groups differ; could perhaps divide it up even further by providing psychological flexibility training to part of the different groups - and see how all the numbers conclude.
Fun fact: the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous actually wanted the first step to be everyone do LSD/acid.