Katharina Buczek
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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