This New Study Analyzed The Link Between Psychedelic Experiences And The Attribution Of Consciousness
The potential application of psychedelics as a mental health disorder treatment option has gained growing appeal and credibility in recent years.
Just last month, the largest psychedelic drug study ever conducted underpinned the emergence of this new therapy avenue.
Still, the relationship between psychedelics and their effect on consciousness has remained a mystery.
Some proponents of psychedelics, like psilocybin, cite newfound self-awareness and overall consciousness after usage.
So, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine sought to understand if psychedelic usage could really alter the attribution of consciousness to both living and nonliving entities.
Through their newly published study in Frontiers in Psychology, the researchers analyzed data from over one thousand and six hundred people. The participants were an average of thirty-five years old, white, male, and from the U.S.
Moreover, the participants all cited experiencing “belief-changing” experiences while using psychedelics.
First, about seventy percent of participants “rated the experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and psychologically insightful experiences of their lives,” the report found.
Second, the researchers found that if a participant’s beliefs were altered following their psychedelic usage, then their attribution of consciousness to living and nonliving things grew substantially.
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For example, attribution of consciousness to fungi grew from twenty-one percent to fifty-six percent. And, attribution of consciousness to plants rose a whopping thirty-five percent.
And perhaps even more interestingly, participants also attributed more consciousness to human-made objects. This area grew from only three percent to fifteen percent.
Roland Griffiths, the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, believes these findings only raise more questions in the field of psychedelic research.
“The results suggesting that a single psychedelic experience can produce a broad increase in the attribution of consciousness to other things raises intriguing questions about possible innate or experiential mechanisms underlying such belief changes,” Griffiths said.
“The topic of consciousness is a notoriously difficult scientific problem that has led many to conclude it is not solvable,” Griffiths continued.
Nonetheless, these survey participants experienced their belief-changing psychedelic experiences about eight years before participating in the study. So, it appears that these alterations are long-lasting.
To read the complete scientific findings, visit the link here.
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