Veldig kjekk lesning.

"En relativt ny og fremtredende teori om hvorfor inntak av psilocybin kan medføre bl.a. økt evne
til introspeksjon og perspektivskift, er at virkestoffet begrenser aktivitet i hjernens såkalte Default
Mode Network (DMN)."

-Er akkurat dette som gjør soppen så risikabel. Dem som har litt erfaring kjenner nok til følelsen av at livets lange opplærte filtre blir kastet bort sekundet du for fullt er påvirket.
Plutselig blir noen ting veldig tydelig, det kan føles sårt og skummelt ut, men jeg liker å tro at om man tar imot følelsene fra det, og aksepterer det at man kanskje har borttrengt litt av hvert som dukker opp, så kan man vokse fort på kort tid!

This points to what may be the most exciting reason to pursue the new science of psychedelics: the possibility that it may yield a grand unified theory of mental illnesses, or at least of those common disorders that psychedelics show promise in alleviating: depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession. All these disorders involve uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination that gradually shade out reality and fray our connections to other people and the natural world. The ego becomes hyperactive, even tyrannical, enforcing rigid habits of thought and behavior—habits that the psychedelic experience, by loosening the ego’s grip, could help us to break.

That power to disrupt mental habits and “lubricate cognition” is what Robin Carhart-Harris, the neuroscientist at Imperial College who scanned the brains of volunteers on psychedelics, sees as the key therapeutic value of the drugs. The brain is a hierarchical system, with the default mode network at the top, serving as what he variously calls “the orchestra conductor” or “corporate executive” or “capital city.” But as important as it is to keep order in such complex system, a brain can suffer from an excess of order too. Depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction could be how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it.

Dr. Carhart-Harris suggests that, by taking the default mode network offline for a period of time, psychedelics can, in effect, “reboot” the brain, jog it out of its accustomed grooves and open a space for new pathways to arise. His lab has made maps of the brain’s traffic patterns on psychedelics showing that, when the default mode network is quieted, myriad new connections spring up in the brain, linking far-flung areas that don’t ordinarily talk to one another directly.

The value of such an experience is surely not limited to the mentally ill. There are rich implications here for what one psychedelic researcher calls “the betterment of well people.” Who doesn’t sometimes feel stuck in destructive habits of thought? Or couldn’t benefit from the mental reboot that a powerful experience of awe can deliver?

One of the lessons of the new research is that not just mental illness but garden-variety unhappiness may owe something to living under the harsh rule of an ego that, whatever its value, walls us off from our emotions, from other people and from nature. “For the moment,” wrote Aldous Huxley, describing his own psychedelic journey in 1954, “that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.”