Indeed, the very desire to drink fluids is itself a prediction error arising from appropriate expectations of one’s bodily volume of water via osmolality.

Focusing on minimizing prediction errors (entropy in the long-term) is computationally much less expensive than processing a complex temporally layered gamut of interoceptive and exteroceptive input in every instance.

But how can the organism and its brain, which has no direct access to the outside world—only to the often ambiguous and noisy sensory signals it receives via the senses—improve its predictions?

But what will I do when I have a serious issue, no time or ability to interpret evidence (or no evidence to interpret), and my catch-all interventions fail? Do I just trust a surgeon? Do I go to a spiritual healer? Do I just ignore things like black liquid sipping out of multiple orifices? I don’t know, my system has edge-cases which I’m sure will make it broken for people that aren’t lucky enough to be in their 20s. This is why my principal focus is still on trying anything and everything I can to monitor and delay aging.

Regardless, I started with the problem of why well-educated people seem to ignore this evidence and chose to use, pay for, subsidize, pay others to, and lobby for subsidization of healthcare services. Surely if there was evidence pointing towards more deaths, longer travel times, and increased costs of going by plane instead of train on most or all routes in Europe or the US, most of these people would start using trains almost exclusively. Why is the same argument not clicking here?

Despite Albee’s acknowledgement that mandatory data collection, including collecting deidentified data, was impossible without passing a new law, the OHA found what it appears to believe is a workaround. Instead of forcing facilitators to disclose client information to OHSU, the agency will force clients to agree to share their information with third parties as a condition of participating in the psilocybin program.

Shortly after meeting privately with Korthuis and the Healing Advocacy Fund in August to discuss data collection, Albee and the OHA published September draft rules for the psilocybin program. Despite having followed many, if not most, of the Advisory Board’s recommendations, the OHA omitted client data rights, the facilitator duty of confidentiality, and the Statement on Data Collection. Moreover, in its statement to the public regarding its rules, the OHA highlighted several aspects of the rules but made no mention of the rejected data protections.

What is even more remarkable is that experienced meditators in the psilocybin group reported better social functioning four months later

In the University of Zurich study, 38 experienced adult meditators were randomly assigned to either a psilocybin or placebo control group. They then participated in a five-day, silent group meditation retreat. On day four, each received either a dose of psilocybin or a placebo (lactose).  Before and after the retreat, members of both groups completed questionnaires about their experiences and perceptions, and underwent an fMRI brain scan. During the scan they were asked to perform three different types of meditation with their eyes closed–resting state, focused attention and open awareness. Each type of meditation was practiced for seven minutes. Four months later they filled out a survey about changes in their attitudes, moods, behavior, and social experiences.

ASD individuals have impaired mitochondrial energy production due to the presence of abnormal mitochondrial markers in their plasma, such as elevated levels of lactic acid and pyruvate (37). Weissman et al. showed that ASD patients had mitochondrial electron transport chain dysfunction, including complex I and complex III deficiencies (38).

The pro-inflammatory condition at baseline was associated with an effective KD treatment, which was demonstrated by a reduction in eosinophils (20).

The Oregon Health Authority may be no intelligence agency, but in collaboration with New Approach and OHSU, it could set the bar for clandestine psychedelic political operations. Unless light is shed on their plans for client surveillance, psilocybin clients in Oregon and Colorado could become unwitting participants in psychological experiments while researchers and corporations watch through figurative one-way mirrors.

The initiative requires the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA) to gather sensitive information about clients’ psychedelic experiences at healing centers, which would be a gold mine of psychological data unavailable elsewhere, and a tantalizing prize for advertisers and pharmaceutical companies.

the technology he and Sanguinetti are developing is intended to help people overcome obstacles to meditation and move more quickly along the path to awakening. 

an increase in frequency decreases the area affectedby the focal point of the acoustic waves (i.e., increases spatialprecision)

Despite this growing corpus,LIFU’s mechanism(s) of action are not fully understood and thedevelopment of a reliable, parameter-dependent handbook forinducing excitatory and suppressive neuronal effects is still in itsinfancy.

Higher levels of left frontal activity are correlated with more approach motivation (Phillips et al., 2008) and positive mood (Fitzgerald et al., 2008), whereas higher levels of right frontal activity are associated with more withdrawal motivation, negative mood (Hauptman et al., 2008), and increased risk for anxiety and depression (Rempel-Clower, 2007).

Psylo is focused on  psychedelic-assisted therapy using psilocybin, the active molecule in ‘magic mushrooms’, is increasingly being evaluated as a potential treatment for severe mental illness. The biotech startup hopes to initially develop a shorter-acting version of psilocybin, which normally takes effect for 6-8 hours in duration.

“I think you’re going to open up now other possibilities where there’ll be new types of small molecule starting to be discovered, which can only be done by the kind of scale and search space that an AI algorithm can do, compared to a traditional sort of brute force screening method.”

For instance, Exscientia is working with companies such as Dainippon Sumitomo on finding bispecific molecules, which can bind to more than one target.

In January 2021, the companies announced a new drug target for chronic kidney disease. BenevolentAI’s computers predicted the target, and AstraZeneca’s experiments validated it.

As part of its genetic engineering platform, the company has licensed CRISPR/Cas9 technology from ERS Genomics for genetic engineering applications related to its therapeutic pipeline.

“By applying our genetic engineering platform to make precise modifications to the genomes of fungi and plants, we can change the amount and kind of neuroactive small molecules they produce, with the goal of developing safe and effective treatments for difficult-to-treat diseases of the CNS.”

But though I will offer some sincere tips here, I would never offer a writing class. Why? Because I am not trying to develop writing skills. I am trying to develop thinking skills. The two are the same thing in beginner stage, but differ in the advanced stage, even though the medium remains the same for both (words). So the first advanced writing skill is to recognize your natural talents and choose to either go with or against your grain. Do you want to be a writer or a thinker? One lifetime normally isn't enough to be both.

In writing, this means that you are at the point where you can focus on a specific emotion, thought, urge, or memory. It’s best to focus on only one of these at a time, otherwise, it may be unclear or conflicting on which Part you write about.

Overall, my life has been trans-formed, and many things have startedhappening on their own even withoutmy efforts while I was trying to be inself-abidance. Both materialistic anddivine help came with his grace. Inmy own experience when the senseof doership is gone with completesurrender life unfolds in the best pos-sible way with least effort.

In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of a coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to.

A paradox presents us with a problem beyond our intellectual and imaginative resources, and the solution requires a radically new framing of reality itself. 

The Five Lightbulbs® framework reveals an invisible structure within marketing. The Lightbulbs themselves represent categories of messaging. These are things you must say if you want turn on the lightbulb in their customer's mind. It works because the Lightbulbs map to the human experience of making a decision.

Assiduous practice, touching in with the body, noticing how urges and actions affect your life, your relationships, your sense of power and autonomy--this is a critical sense to build up. Think of the beginning of this process as similar to your eyes re-adjusting to a new environment after being in darkness for so long. This sense is your birthright, it's natural, it's available--but you need to put in patient effort to let it return, and to allow yourself to make sense of what you're seeing.

Learning to check in with the body while living urgently, learning the subtle pangs and pings that tell you "yes," "no," "not quite," or "not yet"--this is something no other person can teach you, you have to learn the language of your own soma.

You can begin quite simply: spend the next week or so alert and open to any urges that come up, any wants or desires. Don't block, suppress, or dismiss any of them, no matter how absurd, how normal, how incredible, how nondescript, how anything they are. Just notice. Keep noticing. Write them down, if you can.

lowering ourselves to our stickiest patterns.

Even if reincarnation factors in, this is the only life I have. Parts of me may move on to a new incarnation, but that will be a new person, a new ego, a new set of circumstances and drives and obstacles. This is the only life that River Kenna gets to accomplish what River Kenna is here to do.That's what drives the urgency part of this--a healthy awareness that whatever path I take, whatever destinies and destinations I'm heading towards, time is a factor. More important, however, is the root of urgently. To live urgently is to live by what urges us.

The most effective way that I have found to let go of our somatic grip on ourselves is byaccessing the subtle core of the body. The subtle core of the body is conceived as a slendervertical channel that runs from the center of the bottom of the torso (and below) to the center ofthe top of the head (and above). It is called the central channel or the "wisdom channel" inTibetan Buddhism and sushumna in the Indian Yoga system. From this slender core ofourselves, we are disentangled from all of the content of our experience.

o experience our internal wholeness dissolves the conceptually basedboundary between self and other, along with the defensive, strategizing self.

Also, the memories,childhood mentality, and emotional charge that are bound in our somatic holding patternscontinue to exert their influence on our present day awareness

There are a multitude of reasons why someone would seek out a Psychedelic Integration Specialist for aftercare. A very common reason is a “reactivation,” which is the sense of being back in the experience partially or fully. It can manifest in a multitude of ways, but most typically it’s loss of sleep, general anxiety, panic, loss of appetite, listlessness and a fear that they may potentially be “stuck” with these intense sensations. These individuals are commonly not getting the aftercare that they need from their facilitator, and may have the feeling of being alone, and clueless about how to move on and heal from the experience itself.

He doesn’t use the phrase, but Letheby’s book emphasizes the importance of ‘philosophical integration’. We need to subject ‘apparent epiphanies’ to ‘sober scrutiny’ in the ‘post-session integration period’, he writes.Integration is important because in the days and weeks after a trip, we sift through the material to decide what is gold (worth keeping) and what is sand (worth discarding).

Others on the retreat came to all sorts of powerful new beliefs — that it was their destiny to be an artist, or to work with kampo frog healing, that they had been sexually abused as children, that they had visited the Akashic Records, that they had encountered their ancestors, that they had discovered the cosmic meaning of personal tragedies. One participant even decided that his depression was connected to ‘the suffering of the Mongolian people’ (he was from Iowa).

I have been a psychedelic explorer for more than ten years, and I've sat for over a hundred sessions. I'm also a nanny and a childbirth doula, both of which draw many of their foundational axioms from the same principles.

The demonstration of robust clinical effects remains a major hurdle in neurofeedback research. The results of randomized controlled trials in attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and stroke rehabilitation have been mixed, and have been affected by differences in study design, difficulty of identifying responders and the scarcity of homogenous patient populations

Because this evolving science provides a more complete understanding of the origins of—and potentially effective treatment modes for—neurological impairment and illness, we believe that it shall evolve into a foundation science for neurological and psychiatric medicine.

The legislation on Thursday passed in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, a gatekeeper panel that sifts through hundreds of bills and decides whether legislation with a fiscal cost to the state will advance to the full Assembly, but was amended to become only a study of the decriminalization proposal. The amendment was not debated or discussed, and it took Wiener a day to find out how his bill was changed.

Legislation to decriminalize certain psychedelic drugs such as “magic mushrooms,” MDMA and LSD was gutted by the California Legislature on Thursday, though the lawmaker who sponsored the bill vowed to reintroduce the measure next year.

One SF mushroom merchant, who wished to be referred to as “A Responsible Citizen,” said he experienced the market saturation that occurred within the cannabis industry after it was decriminalized, and he predicts the same happening for mushrooms.  “They’re going to monetize love,” A Responsible Citizen said. “It’s going to be corrupted by corporations. I already see the arc.” 

The project aims to expand legal access to psilocybin medicine for patients in Canada suffering from conditions such as end-of-life distress, Major Depressive Disorder and other serious conditions, which have failed to respond to traditional treatment options. It also aims to develop a substantial body of evidence, using a real-world data registry, to document clinical effectiveness, safety and clinician and patient reported outcomes in patients who have received psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy through Canada’s Special Access Program (the SAP), or, under exemptions authorizing possession of psilocybin.

Further legislation to widen access to psychedelics is soon to be tabled, including one bill focused on research and pilot programs within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The bill would seek to help veterans receive psychedelic therapies within the United States, as many cannot afford to go abroad. 

The Right to Try Act also has provisions that limit how the Secretary of Health and Human Services (through theFDA) can use data regarding clinical outcomes of patients who get these drugs through this pathway; require adrug’s sponsor or manufacturer to report annually to FDA on use of the pathway; and require FDA to post certainannual summaries.

It defines an eligible investigational drug as an investigational drug (1) for which a Phase 1 clinical trial has beencompleted, (2) that FDA has not approved or licensed for sale in the United States for any use, (3) that is thesubject of an NDA or BLA pending FDA decision or is the subject of an active investigational new drugapplication and is being studied in a clinical trial that is intended to support the drug’s effectiveness, and (4) forwhich the manufacturer has not discontinued active development or production and for which the FDA has notplaced on clinical hold.

The Right to Try Act offers eligible individuals and their physicians a pathway other than FDA’s expanded accessprocedures to obtain investigational drugs. It defines an eligible patient as one who (1) has been diagnosed with alife-threatening disease or condition, (2) has exhausted approved treatment options and is unable to participate ina clinical trial involving the eligible investigational drug (as certified by a physician who meets specified criteria),and (3) has given written informed consent regarding the drug to the treating physician.

Even though the PSA passed, psilocybin will remain illegal under federal law, unless rescheduled. Until that occurs, it is possible that a form of “cooperative federalism” could arise with regard to psilocybin use in Oregon.[16] This is a policy where the federal government refrains from taking prosecutorial action if state law permits use. The shelter provided by this approach depends on the policy of the U.S. Department of Justice, which can change as the political winds or office holder changes—as was the case with cannabis.[17]

The bill, introduced in February 2021 and enacted without the signature of Governor Greg Abbott in June 2021, mandates that the Department of State Health Services—in collaboration with the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and hospitals for military veterans—“shall conduct a study to evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of alternative therapies, including the use of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine

This allows the estimation of the relationship between270plasma concentration and 5-HT2AR occupancy following repeat-dose administration, and is271considered to be obligatory data in determining dosing for Phase II and Phase III studies in272modern CNS drug development (see72 for an example)

Study proposals

Recent technical234innovations in MRI technology such as accelerated scanning with ‘multiband’ sequences63 ,235increased signal-to-noise with multi-echo sequences 64 and standardised processing236pipelines 65 provide additional capabilities for this technique.

The use of neuroimaging as a tightly-integrated part of189the methodology in key clinical trials has facilitated this, not only by providing important190scientific results and informing theories of psychedelic effects, but also by producing visually-191arresting results (e.g. 20 ) that have been reproduced extensively in the mainstream media.

The 5-HT2AR agonist PET ligand [11C]Cimbi-36 is relatively new29 , has higher sensitivity to121serotonin receptor agonists and has so far been used at only two PET imaging site

We just need to identify the partners who want to use neuroimaging as a core part of their product delivery or research and development.

As humans, we do not generally like to sit with discomfort. Wehave developed many tricks to not have to be present in ourbody.

The first and most powerful mindset you will want to take on, is therealization and acknowledgement that emotions and feelings are NOTrational, but they are predictable.

“There are a lot of people in Colorado who have been harmed by the health care system and they’re not going to be the ones who can get access through healing centers. They want to sit with a wisdom keeper or a sitter in their home. Then we also have a regulated model for those who do want the guardrails,”

With respect to the psilocybin services program, the bill lays out basic regulations, including licensing requirements. There would be four license types—product manufacturers, service center operators, testing laboratories and service facilitators—in addition to psilocybin workers permits. The state Department of Health (DOH) would be responsible for overseeing the program and licensing.

“It is the intent of the Legislature to facilitate the establishment of safe, legal, and affordable psilocybin service centers to provide residents of New Jersey who are 21 years of age or older with opportunities for supported psilocybin experiences to alleviate distress, provide preventative behavioral health care, and foster wellness and personal growth,”

The beginning of the bill discusses the “high prevalence” of behavioral health conditions that afflict New Jersey adults and the growing body of research

would further create a system of licensed businesses to provide psilocybin services in supervised settings.

Executive attention involves monitoring andresolving conflicts among thoughts, feelings, and actions, and thus is heavily involved in subservingcrucial executive functions and self-control. Self-control is the ability to regulate one’s cognition,emotion, and voluntary behavior in accordance with internal goals [1,2]. Conceptually, exercisingself-control often requires the involvement of executive attention. Indeed, both executive attentionand self-control have overlapping brain circuits, including the ACC/adjacent medial prefrontalcortex (PFC) (Brodmann areas 24, 25, 32, 11) and lateral PFC (Brodmann areas 45, 46, 9, 10),further indicating the closely intertwined relationship of these two constructs [6,11]

Overly broad and evergreen patents in the pharmaceutical space have led to high drug prices and monopolies, a pattern that advocates worry about repeating in the psychedelic medicine industry.

Michael Goldhaber’s frame, attention as currency, holds one form of truth, but it isn’t my language. When I passed his metaphor through my own metaphor-making brain, I came up with one that feels more precise and more poignant to me—attention as inner ecology—and then, I could see ways that a holistic system was imperiled.

Policies could include pilot programs that creatively democratize access to medical supervision for decriminalized psychedelic use

Such training efforts are vital given that communities, families, and the public will need education to better understand and support loved ones who may seek out psychedelic treatments.

First, as with cannabis, few monitors are trained to skillfully manage psychedelics clinically, highlighting the need for expanded educational opportunities for interested monitors and students.

Scientific inquiry around therapeutic uses of cannabis was stifled by federal drug policy,4 so qualifying conditions were strongly influenced by patient advocacy, rather than comprehensive scientific data.

Because of recent research and regulatory developments, the risk/reward ratio is changing for pharma companiesconsidering entry in the psychedelic marketplace. Here are five development milestones that, when reached, couldchange how big pharma thinks about psychedelics:

Enosis' patent pending neuro-psychological treatment mechanism works by utilizing multisensory VR stimulation to anchor elusive psychedelic insights and peak emotions in order to reinvoke them later during the integration proces

a final report by December 31, 2025

Achieving the optimal public health benefit ofpsilocybin requires the Commonwealth to invest in andfacilitate research using naturally grown psilocybinmushrooms, which would be infeasible if conducted throughprivate funding

Additional research is required to determine theefficacy of psilocybin and how to maximize its public healthbenefits at the lowest cost with the goal of making thetreatment broadly available if clinical studies provesuccessful.

Consequently, this Commonwealth is in desperateneed of innovative and cost-effective mental health treatmentto combat this significant public health crisis.

In particular, statistical models such as quantitative structure–activity relationships (QSAR)—often as its 3D QSAR variant—are commonly used in the development and optimization of a leading compound. We describe how these drug discovery methods can be taught and learned by means of free and open-source web applications, specifically the online platform www.3d-qsar.com. This new suite of web applications has been integrated into a drug design teaching course, one that provides both theoretical and practical perspectives.

"One of the most interesting things we've learned about the classic psychedelics is that they have a dramatic effect on the way brain systems synchronize, or move and groove together," said Matthew Johnson, a professor in psychedelics and consciousness at Johns Hopkins Medicine."When someone's on psilocybin, we see an overall increase in connectivity between areas of the brain that don't normally communicate well," Johnson said. "You also see the opposite of that -- local networks in the brain that normally interact with each other quite a bit suddenly communicate less."

This partnership will utilise Empatica’s medical-grade EmbracePlus wearable and software, to identify and measure passive behavioural and physiological signals in the upcoming Phase 2 studies evaluating the use of 5-MeO-DMT in combination with psychotherapy in the treatment of treatment resistant depression (TRD).

Beckley Psytech Limited, a private company dedicated to addressing neurological and psychiatric disorders through the novel application of psychedelic medicines, and Empatica, Inc., a medical wearables and digital biomarker company offering continuous, passive, and unobtrusive monitoring for patients with neurological conditions, today announced that the companies have entered into a partnership to support the collection and analysis of behavioural and physiological data in Beckley Psytech’s future clinical trials.

“In many ways we are still living in the shadow of the 1970s [and the] ‘War on Drugs,’ which painted all drugs, and especially psychedelics, with the same broad brush,” says Drew Gomez, head of brand and product marketing at Mindbloom, a company that provides ketamine-assisted therapy. “This sensationalized reputation has often overshadowed the scientific research of the last 50 years, which has shown, time and time again, how safe and effective some of these psychedelic medicines can be to manage and address mental health disorders.”

The decision to let patients see unlicensed psychedelic therapists, even those who are acting in pairs, means there’s less accountability than for patients treated with standard, non-psychedelic mental health therapy.

Semantic impairment, acoustic abnormality, and syntactic impairment were all factors enabling the accurate identification of Alzheimer’s, based on patients’ short descriptions of a picture.

In particular, experts increasingly see the chemical as a potentially effective, low-risk tool to help patients break their dependencies on other substances. Given that more than 100,000 people died after overdosing on opioids and other drugs in the U.S. last year, it’s an understatement to say it’s urgent to find new, effective treatments for substance use disorder.

But collapse is not a theoretical construct. Human history has seen both natural and man-made disasters many times before: the historical record offers us examples of deadly plagues, trade collapse, total war, and the dropping of atomic bombs. And contrary to popular expectation, the record of such disasters suggests that the legal and economic systems that we live under have, in fact, displayed amazing durability.  It is very difficult to identify natural disasters or wars that lead to the sudden end of civilization as it existed before—or even to a full collapse of everyday life. 

The idea that a one-time dose (or even repeated doses) of any drug can solve such problems for good seems bizarre to me,

It’s much sexier to write a newspaper article on using psychedelics to treat depression, than another writing that the identified study switched outcomes and had issues of multiple testing and external validity and blinding, and so the question remains open if these drugs actually work.

The Pattern of Disruption

Previous research on resting-state activity in depression has found heightened network modularity correlating with symptom severity17,38. Additional work implies heightened within-DMN FC and elevated FC between limbic regions such as the amygdala, and high-level cortical regions correlates with ruminative symptoms in depression12,39. Taken together, a model emerges of abnormally modular spontaneous brain function in depression that is effectively remediated by psilocybin therapy.

Here we hypothesize that the well-replicated finding of brain network disintegration and desegregation under psychedelics30,31 will be apparent subacutely, in post-treatment resting-state fMRI data. We also hypothesize that this effect, consistent with a flatter energy landscape, will relate to improved depression outcomes and will not be observed after a course of the SSRI, escitalopram.

The therapeutic action of psilocybin and related psychedelics is incompletely understood; however, one model proposes that psychedelics cause a 5-HT2A receptor-induced dysregulation of spontaneous population-level neuronal activity, linked to a temporary ‘disintegration’ of intrinsic functional brain networks27 and a hypothesized decrease in the precision-weighting of predictive models encoded (at least in part) by the integrity of functional modules28. One important corollary of modular ‘disintegration’ seems to be the broadening of the brain’s functional repertoire of states, commensurate with a broader or flatter global energy landscape29.

Patients with a diagnosis of depression often exhibit a negative cognitive bias, characterized by pessimism, poor cognitive flexibility, rigid thought patterns and negative fixations regarding ‘self’ and the future9,10. A number of authors have directly or indirectly taken inspiration from dynamical systems theory to describe depressive episodes as ‘attractor states’ (stereotyped cognitive states with ‘gravitational pull’11).

The discovery points toward a general mechanism through which psychedelics may be acting therapeutically on the brain to alleviate depression and possibly other psychiatric conditions that are marked by fixed patterns of thinking.

The quantified self idea is that biometric sensors harvest data from bodily functions -- heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, skin surface temperature, blood oxygen, respiratory rate, sleep patterns and potentially hundreds of others -- and that data is analyzed by software to provide useful information.The IoT idea is that objects other than computers have wireless radios, IP addresses and microprocessors and can communicate with each other without conscious human involvement. One simple example: Your home security camera uploads a screen capture of your face to an application in the cloud, which recognizes your face, sending a command to a smart door lock to unlock the door. The unlocking of the door sends a command that tells your living room lights to turn on. The "Internet of Self" idea is the combination of the two. Data harvested from your body sends commands to the IoT objects in your life.

For Participants, daily habit is a state of equilbrium few achieve.

Think about how a format idea might serve your communication goal and differentiate your brand;

Perhaps it’s easiest to think about it like this. Format sits at the center of media type, narrative concept and content packaging.

Successful formats define the media brand and offer a mental shortcut for the audience. They are repeatable, providing an efficient template for creators. When they are defining, they become insanely valuable. 

(BTW, one might argue that the deep underlying “format” of a newsletter is the unique voice of its author

When format is a real differentiator, it runs to the heart of everything you make.

In print, there are good format examples at a brand level, like how a tight, dispassionate edit defines the WSJ or how the Economist is defined by “objectivity” and reporting rigor, reinforced by a policy of author anonymity. These are foundational concepts that define the product and make them unique. You might say these are just editorial principles. I would agree.

Formats are most closely associated with TV, referring to the general shape and structure of the program, like game shows, reality concepts, etc. Video is a media type, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire“ is a format. Vice innovated the news format. Twitter is arguably a media type and format. Twitter Threads are formats.

“At least through the criminal justice system, someone had a pathway to recovery, as flawed as that was, and as stigmatising as that was,” he continued. “There’s a whole bunch of people who are no longer given a pathway to recovery if they choose it.”

However, I haven’t lowered my expectations of how long until existentially dangerous AI as a result of this. The reason is that I believe an additional “revolution” is needed beyond deep learning to get to existentially dangerous AI in the next few decades. I suspect this revolution will come from neuroscience and in particular understanding how cortical columns work.

When Teo and his colleagues surveyed 487 Japanese students in 2019, they found a strong correlation between excessive internet use and the risk of becoming hikikomori. Researchers working in Poland, Hong Kong, Korea, and Canada have likewise reported a connection between the black-hole allure of techno-realms and crippling social isolation.

RESTORE is a revolutionary advancement in psychedelic medicine that seeks to unlock the full potential of ketamine by making it more rapidly acting, almost twice as effective, and six times longer lasting than regular ketamine infusions. It's also the most affordable and convenient ketamine-based therapy available.

while marketing must still attempt to distill and simplify ideas as much as possible to get through to distant fresh minds as quickly and efficiently as possible, lore is often perversely inaccessible, and the illegibility is often considered a feature rather than a bug.

The second clinical candidate, GM2505, is a novel rapid short-acting 5HT2A agonist and 5HT releaser that is expected to have a rapid therapeutic effect in a wide spectrum of psychiatric disorders that includes properties of both the classic psychedelic DMT and the empathogen MDMA. GM2505's optimized pharmacokinetic profile allows for convenient and cost-effective treatment.

The first clinical candidate, GM1020, is an orally bioavailable non-competitive N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist with the potential for rapid and sustained antidepressant activity.  GM1020 is expected to have a favorable side effect profile allowing for potential at-home use.

I wager these ketamine clinics will spawn the next wave of addiction in America. Today we’re calling it a wonder drug—in five years we’ll be calling it the next OxyContin.

but also Palantir, the data analytics firm responsible for facilitating the National Security Agency’s

Still, the net worth of some of these companies is staggering, especially considering that they are marketing drugs that are still in the research stages and have not even passed clinical trials.

And throughout the industry, executives who used to steer the direction of mineral extraction and other mining companies are now in high positions with some of the leading names in psychedelics.

Psychedelics have long had the ability to be all things to all people: therapeutic tools, creative lubricants, weapons of warfare. As psychedelic therapy pioneer Stan Grof put it, they are “non-specific amplifiers.”

By treating depression with a completely new mechanism of action, psilocybin-assisted therapy has changed the playing field—and thus will be sped through regulatory hurdles for further study and eventual approval.

But the dream that LSD could revolutionize psychiatry fell apart in the 1960s with the counterculture explosion and its attendant backlash. Scientists, therapists, politicians, and parents were all alarmed.

Now dozens of start-ups want to standardize, commercialize, alter, patent, and market these ancient compounds—and they stand to make a fortune doing so.

But marketing one, even though they all remain illegal and none have passed all the clinical trials required for approval? That can make you a millionaire.

defy authority,

This allowed the researchers to view the drugs through the lens of the receptors and “really be able to distill what sets of receptors are closely linked to which sets of conscious awareness changes,” he says.

“Imagine you have two huge Excel spreadsheets,” Bzdok says, “On the first, you count the occurrence of 14,000 different words, which are all from the testimonies themselves, we did not pick anything about these words.” These words included things like “happy” “color” and moving.” This helped them develop “archetypes” of drug-induced consciousness shifts.

“Constellations” of neurotransmitter pathways may contribute to the hallucinogenic experiences induced by drugs like psilocybin and LSD, a new study finds.

Our pattern-learning strategy has dissected phenomenologically rich anecdotes into a ranking of constituent brain-behavior factors: each characterized by a unique neurotransmitter fingerprint of action and a unique experiential context.

all steps of our modeling pipeline are blind to the topographical position of particular brain atlas regions

the cortical mappings of factor expression often turned out to be spatially contiguous with smooth transitions of expression strength between neighboring brain regions. Clusters of adjacent brain regions with a particular expression strength also respected well-known anatomical and functional divisions.

Each subjective drug experience was modeled as a specific combination of the brain-behavior factors. In this way, we have carefully deconstructed the changes of conscious awareness triggered by hallucinogenic drugs into its component parts.

The dominant factor elucidated mystical experience in general and the dissolution of self-world boundaries (ego dissolution) in particular.

We aimed to illuminate key principles that mediate hallucinogenic states of consciousness.

In this study, we have linked detailed text reports to hallucinogenic drug affinity for neurotransmitter receptor subclasses. Our study goes beyond previous hallucinogenic research in at least three ways: (i) We have extracted knowledge by mining 6850 post hoc reports of real-world experiences, in which participants freely describe the subjective hallucinogenic experiences that they have had. In contrast, laboratory studies or randomized clinical trials on hallucinogens have been restricted to testing drug effects in a handful of participants. (ii) Our data-driven approach allowed rigorous testing for the existence of receptor-experience mappings across a diverse array of hallucinogenic drugs. This is a prerequisite for exploring overarching principles that may encapsulate how specific sets of receptor bindings are linked to specific drug-induced alterations of subjective awareness. (iii) We have aimed to deconstruct the hallucinogenic perturbations of subjective awareness by cutting across a spectrum of molecular receptor subtypes. In an ecologically faithful approach, we describe an anatomic grounding for the subjective experience of altered states of consciousness.

uch drugs interact minimally, indirectly, or not at all with 5-HT2A receptors in the brain (15–17). This fact hints at a richer spectrum of neurobiological mechanisms underlying hallucinogenic action.

In support of this latter notion, similar alterations in subjective awareness by hallucinogenic drugs that are biochemically and pharmacologically distinct from the classical psychedelics have been reported.

5-HT2A

A therapeutic alliance established between patient and practitioner can be a key predic-tor of treatment outcome (Zilcha-Mano et al., 2019).

When a participant cor-rectly believes they have received the treatment, they may show greater treat-ment response due to expectancy effects and, conversely, the disappoint-ment of those who know they have received a placebo may decrease the placebo response.

unhealthy lifestyle choices can cross over into pathology, with substance abuse being a major contributor to premature death

To maximize these benefits, we believe this work should include behavior as a treatment target with measurable treatment metrics to establish best practices and guidelines.

In the future, hardware like sensors in the bloodstream, infrared scanners, and Neuralinks will be able to measure what’s happening in our bodies in real-time, physically and even emotionally. We’ll all have our genomes sequenced and actually know how to use the information. We’ll be able to tell the AI our goals – more energy, lose weight, avoid cancer – and it will be able to do things like order “the perfect meal for that moment for me: for my mood, for my genome, for my blood contents” via drone, automatically. Most humans see a scenario in which computers know more than we do and tell us what to do as dystopian. He thinks they’re wrong. He thinks it sounds incredible: If we all had this, we would not look back and be like, “I wish I was making awful choices every day like I was in the past.” I think we’ll all be so much healthier. When we look back today, one of the things that’s going to look so primitive is the one-size-fits-all thing, like reading advice about keto. Each genome is going to have very specific, unique advice coming from AI.  

During the COVID-19 public health emergency, the DEA has used its public emergency authority to waive the prior in person requirement. This has enabled providers to safely prescribe controlled substances remotely using telemedicine, increasing access to clinically appropriate medications, including for mental health and substance use disorder treatment.

Participant 06 responded, “I think I felt incredibly safe, you know, especially as I was cannulated and people were taking blood from me and I knew I was under constant observation. I think I felt remarkably comfortable and at ease.”

Two sub-studies in different populations of healthy participants were carried out as follows: part 1 was an open-label dose-escalation study in psychedelic non-naïve participants, and part 2 was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized study in psychedelic naïve participants.

These practices, articulated by Johnson et al. (2008), typically involve intensive preparation prior to drug administration, oversight of two attendants or “guides” during the acute period of drug action, and multiple follow-up psychotherapy “integration” sessions in the days or weeks following drug administration.

The technological era was defined by the creation of the technical building blocks and protocols that undergird the Internet; there were few economic incentives beyond building products that people might want to buy, in part because few thought there was any money to be made on the Internet

Results: From 1991 to 2018, total prescriptions of SSRI and SNRI drugs rose by 3001%. Total Medicaid spending on SSRIs and SNRIs increased from USD 64.5 million to USD 2 billion in 2004, then decreased steadily until it reached USD 755 million in 2018. The SSRIs average utilization market share was 87% compared to 13% of the SNRIs utilization market share. About 72% of total Medicaid spending on the two groups goes to SSRIs, while the remaining 28% goes to SNRIs. Brand SSRIs and SNRIs prices increased over time. On the contrary, generic drugs prices steadily decreased over time.

an anecdotal experience of using LSD to treat a milk allergy that shows up in a book is prior art. (And, in fact, casts doubt on an already-granted patent around LSD and allergies.)

Since neuropsychiatric disorders are so heterogenous, the approach of trying to treat single biological targets will not sufficiently treat the diversity of patients in need of effective therapies. This is why many companies and researchers are now seeking to apply machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify clusters of biological and phenotypic features that personalize effective treatments. 

PsyProtix, Inc, was established with Duke University spinout Chymia, LLC. PsyProtix takes an alternative route to treating brain disorders based on principles of precision medicine.

“We need to be taking more alternative approaches to healing because our existing toolbox of medications or therapies clearly aren’t cutting it,” Bartlett said.

In addition to nutraceuticals and nutritional products, The Healing Company should also look at psychedelics, Chopra said, adding that ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin (the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms) could all have a role to play in treating mental health problems.

changes in risk-adoption for hospitals have motivated some hospitals to adopt different forms of remote patient monitoring technology. The 2010 Affordable Care Act instituted the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), which now applies to most acute care hospitals in the U.S. Under the program, hospitals with more than the national average of patient readmissions within 30 days (after adjustments for patient characteristics) are penalized with a reduction in Medicare payments. This incentivizes hospitals to pay closer attention to patients following discharge; as a result, some have adopted remote patient monitoring to provide patients with an additional layer of at-home monitoring.

Possible reasons for the lower success rate include thechallenge in characterizing the active pharmaceutical ingre-dients (APIs), which are often mixtures of several botanicalingredients

Botanicals are naturally heterogeneous mixtures and oftenlack distinct active constituent(s), so more than oneconstituent may contribute to the overall therapeutic effect.

Modern psychiatry was strongly influenced by the emergence of so-called Biological Psychiatry and the Decade of the Brain (1990's). The belief at the time was that we were on the threshold of a new psychiatry, where we could reduce mental illness to defined perturbations of neuroreceptors, trusting that our novel antidepressants and antipsychotics would provide definitive treatment.

“Fluence is proud to provide high-quality professional education about psychedelic therapy for research and community-based clinical practice,” says Elizabeth Nielson, Ph.D., co-founder of Fluence.

a clinical pilot investigating the efficacy of group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for frontline healthcare workers (“Frontline KAP”). With the final cohort of participants expected to begin treatment in March 2022, data analysis is currently underway and will be published following completion of the clinical pilot.

Using Real-World Evidence to Accelerate Psychedelic Drug Development

They provide clear proof that ceremony can be safely conducted without the need for paid facilitators who abstain from fully participating in the ceremony. Accordingly, religious communities who operate under M109 should have the option to provide their own peer-support assistance through community members that have been certified by their community as being qualified and capable to provide that assistance. 

CYB004 has demonstrated potential efficacy at lower doses while also increasing the duration of drug effect providing a therapeutic profile that may alleviate the common negative experiences associated with classical DMT.

the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) has granted U.S. patent 11,242,318 to the Company’s investigational deuterated dimethyltryptamine (“DMT”) compound CYB004. The allowed claims include a range of deuterated forms of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. The patent, which is expected to expire in 2041

While venture-backed startups can deliver quality tooling, there are many important areas in biological software that don’t have large commercial markets to offset costs for academic users and to incentivize capital investment. This is because scientific software development is genuinely a domain of research, requiring close interaction with scientists and new measurement technologies long before there is a clearly identifiable market for the tools being built.

The computational biologist Adam Siepel summarizes this saying: “Institutions have not been forced to pay professional programmers competitive salaries; grant agencies have not been compelled to set aside appropriate funds for a software infrastructure; and the line items for professional software engineering have not made it into budget models. Thus, genomics has become accustomed to, even addicted to, abundant free software. In a sense, in our idealistic, anti-establishment zeal, we free software warriors have locked computational genomics into an unsustainable financial model.”

Overall, we remain bullish and excited about the potential of this new asset class.

To address this issue, we have advised many of our portfolio companies to become private again and to buy out their short-term shareholders with new long-term capital

Learn in three-month sprints and commit to a new learning project every quarter.

“there’s no procedure available under the Right to Try Act, because the Right to Try Act does not provide the agency any authority to waive the requirements of the Controlled Substances Act.”

“In short,” the opinion says, “AIMS’s issue is not with the DEA’s letter, but with the CSA’s criminalization of psilocybin use, subject to narrow exemptions. An advice letter recognizing that Congress has not yet made an exception to the CSA to allow for the legal use of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes is not an agency decision.”

And at the time of the build, one of the key objectives, I recall, was actually being able to develop a dataset that could be used to address specific research questions through a set of custom projects between Flatiron and Janssen, that was focused on MCL patients specifically. And so, we started to build the dataset by actually leveraging existing data models and abstraction approaches that had previously been developed and used at Flatiron for relevant tumor types.

The hypothesis set out here is that this most basic urge to connect is dependent on circuits based in three main components: the midbrain superior colliculi (SC), the midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG), and the mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine systems originating in the midbrain ventral tegmental area.

DBR is a type of treatment that focuses on the muscles of the shoulders, neck, head and face of patients when recalling a traumatic event.

announces that the first cohort of psychotherapists have begun training in advance of the expected Phase 2 clinical trial examining 5-MeO-DMT-assisted psychotherapy in treatment resistant depression (TRD). The training is being conducted in collaboration with Fluence, an expertise-driven educational platform that provides professional training in psychedelic therapy for psychiatrists, psychotherapists, social workers, and other healthcare practitioners.

We question epistemic authority based on the double-blind design, the molecularization discourse, and contextual issues about safety. We propose a new approach to foster epistemically fair research, outlining how to enforce indigenous rights, considering the Brazilian, Peruvian, and Colombian cases.

Feilding adored her father and scrambled everywhere after him. “He never went by what an authority said. He always went with his own thoughts,” she says. “In a way he was quite a big guru to me. He was my main intellectual influence.”

We always saw it as the masthead from where this change would happen.”

These days, the research and debate surrounding ketamine are less concerned with whether it can treat depression than with how it works, which delivery method makes it most effective, and how drug companies and health-care providers might best profit off a substance whose patent expired in the nineteen-eighties.

Researchers began studying it as a treatment for depression, and, in 2006, the National Institute of Mental Health concluded that a single intravenous dose of ketamine had rapid antidepressant effects. Around three hundred clinical trials have since been held; the broad consensus is that ketamine relieves symptoms of depression for a period that can last days or weeks, during which time talk therapy often proves more effective than normal.

Acceptance, for me, has involved a private joke of a self-image that is a mix of Camus’ Sisyphus and the Max Fischer character in Rushmore, coupled with a model of the ‘Idea Guy’ mental style as a chronic medical condition. I don’t know if you’ll find the medical metaphor in this piece funny, but you might find it useful. This is not a piece about becoming an idea person. That is not something you choose. It is a condition you have to manage, like diabetes, once you recognize  it.

All the while, Bansal says, he was well aware that it was simply his mind creating these images, thoughts, and ideas. He knew he was in a safe room wearing eyeshades and headphones.And yet, he says, it felt true. "The images and feelings are so powerful that you cannot help but believe they are in some way a part of reality."

For Bansal, a doctor and scientist accustomed to using hard facts rather than touchy-feely slogans to navigate the care of patients, it was an adjustment, to say the least

The dose, 25 milligrams, had been carefully calibrated to induce a psychedelic experience sufficient for therapy. Much less than that, say 10 milligrams, isn't enough for most people to enter this state. A double dose, 50 milligrams, though not physically unsafe, may leave you too incoherent to have the useful insights key to therapeutic value.

"Trust and let go," was a kind of mantra for the treatment repeated by his guide and other doctors.

Since short and simple explanations of the past usually reflect somerepetitive regularity that helps to predict the future as well, every intelligent systeminterested in achieving future goals should be motivated to compress the history of rawsensory inputs in response to its actions, simply to improve its ability to plan ahead.

hough its predictive power is limited—for example, it doesnot explain quantum fluctuations of apple atoms—it still allows for greatly reducing thenumber of bits required to encode the data stream, by assigning short codes to eventsthat are predictable with high probability [28] under the assumption that the law holds.

My work and learning arose from my own experiences of recovery from madness, and today I am passionate about new visions of mind and what it means to be human.

Usually, the received view among the smart side of the internet is that the many problems of the world are not due to people being intrinsically evil, but ignorant and/or irrational. They aren’t able to see cooperative equilibriums, or get dragged along by emotional responses that end up leading to war, corruption, crime, and so on.

Over the past 4 years, regulators have assessed $13m in fines for non-compliance with federal and state mental health parity laws.

The gold standard is to measure clinical outcomes using randomized control trials (RCTs) with clinical endpoints. However, RCTs are expensive and logistically complex, so single-arm or retrospective research designs are often used instead. These look at the average clinical outcomes before and after completion of the program. The most common clinical outcome measures for mental health studies are the PHQ for depression and the GAD for anxiety.  

Features sometimes ascribed to personality – impulsivity, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness, or agreeableness – may be altered through neural interventions. DBS, for instance, may address debilitating symptoms of treatment-resistant depression, but leave individuals unsure about their own recognition of themselves (e.g., “I’ve begun to wonder what’s me and what’s the depression, and what’s the stimulator…it blurs to the point where I’m not sure, frankly, who I am.”) [24].

We define personal identity as the concept of self for an individual agent, whereas agency can be understood as the ability of this individual to make and communicate choices, often through action.

This, incidentally, is why it’s easier to raise venture capital with an idea and a deck and maybe a prototype than it is once you have a product in customers’ hands and a little bit of revenue. It’s probably why the NBA Draft gets twice as many viewers as the average nationally televised game. People fucking love potential.