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Microdosing Psilocybin
- 1. Demography of Microdosing: Who's doing what, how and when Rotem Petranker & Thomas Anderson Psychedelic Science Interest Group
- 2. Microdosing LSD ~less than 25 g Psilocybin ~less than 0.25 g of dried mushrooms what?
- 3. Microdosing in the news BBC News, April 2017
- 4. Microdosing in the news Rolling Stone, September 2017
- 5. Microdosing in the news New Scientist, November 2017
- 6. Microdosing vs Full Dose Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (QIDS) Scores (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017)
- 7. Microdosing Anecdotes “When I microdose, I seem to be able to understand things the first time I read them much more often.” “I started my microdosing experiment with psilocybin mushrooms and therein got relief from depression and alcoholism.” “One of the most life changing experiences I’ve ever had. Depression is nearly gone, anxiety is now manageable. I quit smoking cigarettes and pot and no longer crave them.” “Microdosing reduced my migraines about 80%.”
- 8. Microdosing Study Design — Good Science (Munafò et al., 2017)
- 9. Microdosing Study Design — Pre-registration osf.io/ke49d
- 10. Microdosing Study Design — Methods
- 11. Microdosing Study Design — Hypotheses
- 12. Microdosing Study Design — Hypotheses
- 13. Findings
- 14. Do you currently microdose or will your responses be based on past experience? 29 % I am currently microdosing 37 % I am not currently microdosing, but I have microdosed in the past 30 % I have not microdosed yet, but I am interested in microdosing 4 % I am not interested in microdosing 66 % Microdoser 34 % Non–microdoser
- 15. What substance do you use for microdosing? 59 % LSD 26 % Psilocybin-containing “magic” mushrooms 15 % Other 34 % Other Lysergamide 23 % DMT 14 % Phenethylamine 10 % Psilacetin
- 16. How many days do you space between microdoses?
- 17. 83% Male 14% Female Demographics 81% Heterosexual 12% Bi/Multi 69% White 10% European
- 20. Wisdom
- 21. Open Mindedness
- 23. Microdosing Drawbacks Illegality “Can put you in legal jeopardy because of unnecessary, draconian drug laws” Dose Accuracy “Accidentally taking too much and mildly tripping when you have stuff to do” Anxiety “Forces my anxiety on me” Poor Focus “It can be distracting, I mean it IS acid.” Ehrlich reagent: LSD and other indoles
- 24. Microdosing Benefits Improved Mood “General increase in mood” Creativity “Creativity” Improved Focus “Increased Focus” Improved Energy “Higher than average energy levels”
- 25. Microdosing — Next Steps
- 26. Microdosing — Future Directions
- 27. Microdosing — Future Directions
- 28. Questions Results Summary Microdosers scored lower on negative-emotionality Microdosers did not score higher on open-mindedness Microdosers scored higher on wisdom Microdosers scored lower on dysfunctional attitude Find this study online here: osf.io/ke49d Ehrlich reagent: LSD and other indoles radlab
Editor's Notes
- Rotem: 1-9 (Intro, Background) Thomas: 10-12 (Good Science, Methods) Rotem 13-20 (Sample Statistics, Demographics) Thomas 21-31 (Results, Future Directions) Welcome. My name is X and this is X. Today we’re going to talk to you about an observational study we ran on microdosing habits in the real-world based on a online community sample. First we will introduce you to the idea of microdosing, what it is and why we might study it Then we will talk a bit about open science and the importance of pre-registration That will lead in to our specific hypotheses After that we’ll tell you about our preliminary results And then we can talk about some implications and future directions After all that we’ll have plenty of time for questions so if anything comes to mind during the talk just note it down and ask us at the end
- What is microdosing? Microdosing is the practice of taking very small, sub-threshold doses of a substance, in this case, a psychedelic substance. A microdose is not merely a “low dose” of a substance. A microdose is a dose so low that the user should experience no changes that interfere with their ability to go about their daily business. Indeed, the goal is often to enhance one’s daily activities. The exact amount that should be considered a microdose is not yet well-defined, but we’ve got some operational definitions for different substances. In this presentation and in our research in general, we are focusing on microdosing psychedelic substances, mostly LSD, psilocybin, and related substances. Since there is no hard and fast rule for defining how much is in a microdose, we consider the upper-bound of what could be considered a microdose as LSD ~less than 25 g Psilocybin ~less than 0.25 g of dried mushrooms We will have the full details of what people are doing, but that analysis is not yet complete.
- Just another anecdote.
- Indeed, some people are already capitalizing on the idea that microdosing can be valuable in improving one’s quality of life, despite the lack of research. These practices are becoming common, and are getting publicity from media outlets:
- New Scientist, an international science magazine, dedicated its November 22nd issue to the renaissance of psychedelics research.
- Research on full-dose psychedelics already shows great promise both for helping patients to overcome clinical disorders: this study by Carhart-Harris et al, showed that individuals who were well within the definition of “depressed” at the onset of the study improved significantly and became non-clinical (according to the definition of the QIDS) after one full dose of psilocybin. Anecdotal evidence also suggest that there is much potential for helping healthy controls become more open and experience personally significant events Full doses can be life-changing but sometimes one doesn’t have space or need for such a large disruption. These experiences are also sometimes described as difficult and unpleasant, and may not be necessary in order to get certain results. MDing may be more beneficial in lower-stakes contexts such as ongoing therapy, creative work, or while learning new skills
- Lots of anecdotal claims have been made about microdosing psychedelics but no research has been published and no controlled studies have been run: it is hard to say how real and replicable these effects are, whether or not they apply to all populations, and how they operate. These questions require rigorous scientific study.
- But anecdotes are not science. Maybe there’s a placebo effect, maybe people taking microdoses are biased, maybe there are real improvements but they are caused by something else. We can’t know for sure yet. Good science needs to be reproducible and should be replicable, that is, if we run the same experiment under the same conditions we should get the same results. The best way to make replicable science is to pre-register your study. A pre-registration is basically writing down what you are going to do before you do it, and then doing what you said you'd do. <explain diagram>: you generate a hypothesis, then design and run a study, collect and analyze the data, the interpret and write up your results, which become the basis of new hypotheses. The problem is that people didn't do that, but that was bad science, or not really science at all. This led to the replicability crisis wherein less than 40% of psychology studies successfully replicated. I’ll say that again in a different way: more than half of the “findings” in psychology could not be found when they were tested again. So what happened? Well, people didn’t control for their biases, then ran studies with too few participants leading to underpowered studies with poor quality control, they “p-hacked” i.e. they re-ran different statistics until they "found" something at p<0.05, then they tried to get their papers published by writing papers *as if* they had planned to look for what they eventually “found”. This is called HARKing “Hypothesizing After the Results are Known”. That's not the right way to do science or to use statistics. When people try to use those results, most of them are not "real“. That’s not how we want to do our science. HARKing (Hypothesizing After the Results are Known). HARKing is defined as presenting a post hoc hypothesis in one's research report as if it were an a priori hypotheses.
- The key to proper science is writing down your guess — your hypothesis — before you test your guess, and following through openly and honestly. You design a good study, test your guess, then tell other people what the results show openly and honestly. Maybe you guessed right, maybe you guessed wrong, but you share that finding honestly and openly. That's science. The result of whether you guessed right or wrong becomes information for making new guesses based on real findings. It's real science that can move forward because the foundation is solid. To facilitate this proper methodology we’ve pre-registered our study on the Open Science Framework. That means you can go online to this link to read our complete methodology. Many of the materials we used are already online, and in the coming months the data we collected will also be made available to everyone so they can check our findings and explore the data on their own. That link will be on our final slide so don’t worry about copying it down now.
- Our study, the first of its kind, recruited active microdosers from a variety of online communities and reddit-subreddits. Reddit is an online forum and social media aggregation website wherein smaller communities, called subreddits, curate content and cater to specific user-interests. We posted the survey link in a number of subreddits including /r/microdosing /r/LSD and /r/Nootropics Our link was also shared online via other social media links, such as twitter and facebook. Anonymity was strictly maintained and data will be shared on the Open Science Framework.
- H1a: Microdosers will have lower negative emotionality scores than non-microdosers. Negative emotionality: a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept, severe mood swings, frequent sadness, worry, and being easily disturbed. Low scores on this scale are characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence, activeness, and great enthusiasm. H1d: Microdosers will have lower dysfunctional attitude scores than non-microdosers. The Dysfunctional Attitude Scale (DAS) was designed to measure the intensity of dysfunctional attitudes, a hallmark feature of depression. Generally speaking, people who score higher on this scale are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. A sample item is “if I fail partly, it is as bad as being a complete failure”.
- H1c: Microdosers will have higher wisdom scores than non-microdosers. Wisdom is a tricky construct to define and test, because it is always related to acting prudently, which is context dependent and is only known after the fact. Even still, the measure we used spans a broad range of content, from interest in philosophy to feeling unity with nature or being tuned in to one's own emotions, which are broadly accepted as facets of wisdom. H1b: Microdosers will have higher open mindedness scores than non-microdosers. Open mindedness: People who score low on openness are considered to be closed to experience. They tend to be conventional and traditional in their outlook and behavior. They prefer familiar routines to new experiences, and generally have a narrower range of interests. It is comprised of three subscales: creative intelligence, intellectual curiosity, and aesthetic sensibility. A 2011 study found that openness increased following the use of full-dose psilocybin MacLean, K. A., Johnson, M. W., & Griffiths, R. R.; Johnson; Griffiths (November 2011). "Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness".
- Without further ado, here is what we found.
- While this breakdown has more people who are either current or past microdosers, it still allows us to compare between groups, and one future analysis we have planned looks at the difference between currently microdosing and non-microdosing individuals, to examine whether it is necessary to maintain microdosing in order to keep the effects.
- Notice the bimodal distribution here, most people microdose one day on, two days off, but some people microdose roughly once a week. They probably don’t microdose every 7 days exactly, but rather do it from time to time. It suggests two distinct patterns of microdosing: routinely and occasionally. The 1on-2off is the Fadaiman protocol, so it’s common (though there’s no evidence for it beyond anecdote) but one point is that we’ve discovered this other pattern of “once-a-week” MDers.
- We want to remember that this can look like a “bad” thing (sample bias) but may also accurately reflect the demographics of people interested in this kind of thing, no way to tease apart
- "Microdosers" are defined as those participants with experience microdosing, whether current or historical. <explain axes> H1a: Microdosers will have lower negative emotionality scores than non-microdosers. Microdosing predicts lower negative emotionality even when controlling for gender (females are canonically higher in negative emotionality)
- H1d: Microdosers will have lower dysfunctional attitude scores than non-microdosers. Microdosing predicts lower dysfunctional attitudes even when controlling for diagnosis; we expect people with diagnoses for mental illness to have more dysfunctional attitudes.
- H1c: Microdosers will have higher wisdom scores than non-microdosers. Microdosing predicts higher wisdom scores even when controlling for age and level of education (which may confer more wisdom).
- H1b: Microdosers will have higher openness scores than non-microdosers. Microdosing does NOT predict higher openness.
- These observational, correlational results seem promising, particularly for mental health issues Microdosing may not be related to openness to experience (in contrast to full dose) It could also be that the sample is a more open sample than usual, because it’s from online reddit communities of self-selected people willing to fill out surveys about microdosing
- so far it seems like Microdosing seems pretty good. that may be, but before everyone starts doing it, remember, there are some drawbacks. we asked participants to list up to three benefits and three drawbacks of microdosing Lets start with the most common drawbacks Illegality Dose Accuracy Anxiety Poor Focus so remember that there are some drawbacks and it is too early to tell people that they should microdose indeed, one of the other common concerns is that the risks are not understood because there is no science on this topic so we cannot recommend microdosing that said, if anyone were to microdose, it’s important to test your substance in order to mitigate the risks involved in consuming black market substances that could be any of a variety of research chemicals potent enough to be active in doses that could fit on blotter paper. So if you do microdose, which we cannot suggest at this point, but if you do: test your substances you can pick up an Ehrlich reagent from a testkitplus.com, dance-safe, or even Amazon it looks like this and it’s super easy to use and just takes a drop.
- that said, Microdosing still seems pretty good and participants do list benefits microdosing, and they rate them as more important than the drawbacks the most common benefits are Improved Mood, Creativity, Focus, and Energy so while it is too early to tell people that they should microdose there is ample evidence that we should do scientific studies on microdosing
- What we’ve presented here today is preliminary data, and we’ve got much more to come from this study. We have not yet analyzed our creativity measures assessing whether there is a difference in measured creativity between microdosers and non-microdosers. As creativity was one of the major reported benefits of microdosing we intend to run future studies on creativity in particular, perhaps even addressing the tendency for creativity to decline across the lifespan. One of the goals of this study is to create a foundation: a solid, scientific, pre-registered foundation. We hope that we and others can build on this work. But it’s important to remember that we want to be good scientists about it. we don't just want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks; we want to make hypotheses based off what people are saying, pre-register those hypotheses, THEN throw it all against the wall and see what sticks! Then happily report when we were right, when we were wrong, and when there is more to the story (moderators, mediators).
- As we said earlier, MDs may be easier to administer and monitor in a lab setting MDs are amenable to lots of classic psychological and neurophysiological tests that could help us map out the intricacies of how psychedelic substances perform their actions in the brain. We could see how performance on well-known tasks changes and we could measure participants’ brains with fMRI and EEG. We could also put participants into situations that might be unethical if they were under a full dose of a psychedelic. Such states are more fragile and suggestible. With microdosing we could have a lot of freedom to explore sensitive and difficult emotional processing combined with psychotherapy, especially considering the reported decreased anxiety and depression
- We could also have participants engage in more complex lab tasks, such a driving simulation. While we all look forward to self-driving cars, we’re not there yet, and we would not want to have people driving under the influence of psychedelics, even at the very low doses involved in microdosing. Driving can be considered one of the more complex multisensory-coordination tasks that a human can perform. It involves integrating stationary and moving visual and auditory stimuli while mapping complex relative spatial coordinates and making fine-motor adjustments in the arms, hands, legs, and feet, all of which must be done at an extremely rapid pace at great personal and interpersonal risk. please be responsible, we don’t want anyone to get hurt, and we don’t want the media to blow that out of proportion
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