Science shares a study that found microdoses of psychedelic mushrooms really do work to boost creativity and create feelings of well-being… but so did inert placebo doses:
Placebo-controlled trials are tricky to pull off, because psychedelics are so tightly regulated. Now, researchers have come up with a creative workaround: They’ve enlisted microdosing enthusiasts to hide their drugs in gel capsules and mix them up with empty capsules.
The upshot of this “self-blinding” study: Microdosing did lead to improvements in psychological well-being—but so did the placebo capsules. “The benefits are real,” says lead author Balázs Szigeti, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London. “But they are not caused by the pharmacological effects of microdosing.”
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Obtaining ethical approval to enroll psychedelic-taking volunteers was a “long and difficult process,” Szigeti says. And then he had to go out and find those volunteers, which he did by reaching out to microdosing communities, giving talks at psychedelic societies, and holding an “ask me anything” discussion on Reddit. Szigeti eventually garnered more than 1600 sign-ups, but once potential participants realized they’d have to procure their own psychedelics, interest ebbed, and only 246 ended up in the experiment.
There were also hiccups in the self-blinding procedure. The unusual approach required participants to lay out sets of weekly doses of both psychedelics and placebo capsules, group them into blank envelopes tagged with QR codes printed from the study website, then shuffle the envelopes to disguise the contents; the volunteers scanned the codes to get instructions on which envelopes to choose each week.
To ensure that the pills felt the same, study participants who used psilocybin mushrooms weighted their placebo capsules with substances like sugar, for example. Still, Szigeti says “mushroomy” burps made it easy for the participants to guess when they’d taken actual mushrooms. After having to discard some data, he and his colleagues asked the volunteers to make placebo capsules with a nonpsychedelic mushroom instead.
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You can read Szigeti’s self-blinding study in eLife Sciences here.