Mushrooms and meaning.

Johns Hopkins researchers are getting profoundly trippy, PhysOrg reports, in a research project that found psychedelic mushrooms can have long-lasting spiritual effects:

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.

In a related paper, also published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, researchers offer recommendations for conducting this type of research.

You can read more from these researchers in a pdf from a presentation they did at the 2007 Mid-Year Research Conference on Religion & Spirituality called “Psilocybin and the Frontier of Experimental Mysticism”. There’s another summary at Science magazine.