Thursday 13 March 2008

Time and liberty caps: Mushrooms conquer Chronos


A new study on the “Effects of varied doses of psilocybin ["magic mushrooms"] on time interval reproduction in human subjects” has been published in Neuroscience Letters, (Available online 9 February 2008) by Jiří Wackermann, and his team at University Hospital Zurich (which includes Franz X. Vollenweider).


According to an article on Wired Science Blog, which mistakenly referred to the lead author as a woman, psilocybin subjects had a perception of time moving much more slowly than those who took the lactose placebo. I published an exploratory article about psilocybin time perception a couple of years ago in Strange Attractor Journal 3 that came to the same conclusions, and more. The article - Liberté, légalité, éternité: Some notes on psychonautic misadventures in time - coincided with new legislation in the UK that criminalises the picking of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in the wild, surely a legal anachronism in terms of human rights.


Jiří Wackermann, who was a man last time I saw him, has previously published papers in Neuroscience Letters including a study into EEG brain correlations in distant subjects, a relatively new type of parapsychological investigation into "anomalous distant communication" between humans (i.e., telepathy). Now that Wackermann is conducting psilocybin research I wonder whether he will be looking at parapsychopharmacological effects as well?