fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into preconscious terrors –
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press
- from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
The list above is a poetic list of ways—false ways—of making ordinary life feel extra-ordinary: the occult, drugs, psychoanalysis, even reading newspapers. If T.S. Eliot were alive today he’d add one more item to the list: psychedelic microdosing.
Stereotypes of psychedelic drugs conjure visions of hippies and shamans on spiritual journeys. But with the rise of microdosing in recent years, psychedelics are moving out of the counterculture and into the mainstream, bringing with them a promise to air brush our minds and moods. Do they really work? And, if they do, is there any cost to our experience of the ordinary?
Microdosing involves taking very small amounts of psychedelics, usually 5 to 10% of a standard dose. It’s not enough to make you hallucinate but can brighten your emotions and augment your productivity, among other things. Think of Silicon Valley professionals optimizing their creativity in a hyper-competitive work environment. Think of a mother who wants to manage her two young daughters with less irritation.
At least, those are the claims you’ll be hearing more about as the hype around microdosing continues its ascent. Much of the knowledge in the area until recently has been based on surveys, self-reports, and anecdotes on the benefits of taking tiny doses of psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and other substances. These reported benefits include everything from boosting wisdom and creativity to improving wellbeing during the pandemic and depression and anxiety in general; and, if Joe Rogan is to be believed, it can help kickboxers “see things” in a fight before they happen.
Recent years have also seen a surge of more controlled research, involving clinical trials looking into the benefits of microdosing for psychiatric conditions like depression and addiction. At the time of the writing of this article, over a thousand trials were listed on the psychedelic.support website, seeking human volunteers for a wide range of medical and psychiatric issues. A smaller number of studies rely on animal models, like using rats or zebrafish to explore psychedelic treatments for alcoholism.
For all the popular hype around microdosing, the research findings are more nuanced and, in some cases, sobering. A 2020 review of microdosing studies showed contradictory results, with both benefits and detriments in terms of mood, creative processes, and energy. Another recent study suggests that the supposed benefits to wellbeing and life satisfaction are placebo effects—the benefits happen because people believe they will happen—while positive expectations were similarly found to drive the findings of a study on the mental health benefits of microdosing.
We shouldn’t be surprised that expectations can drive subjective feelings of enhancement. Hype breeds belief, and in a world losing its religion, hype becomes especially potent as a source of conviction.
Placebo effects were also prominent in a study using “magic truffles”. We aren’t talking about chocolate truffles here, or the kind that pigs sniff up around the roots of oak trees and which sell for thousands of dollars a pound. Magic truffles are related to magic mushrooms, sharing the same hallucinogenic compound.
In the magic truffle study, placebo effects were so strong that over 25% of participants in the placebo condition believed they were in the drug condition. Two participants experienced such powerful placebo effects they requested a smaller dose of the drug they mistakenly thought they were on.
Despite the placebo effects, the findings suggested that microdosing over the course of one to two months produced increases in an aspect of creativity known as “divergent thinking”, which is the ability to think up a lot of loosely associated ideas. Example: How many things can you use a bottle for?
But the investigators noted the findings were “more subtle” than expected. Also, there was no effect of microdosing on another aspect of creativity known as “convergent thinking”, or the ability to see how different ideas are commonly linked. Example: What do the following words–Swiss, Cake, Cottage—have in common? (Answer: Cheese)
It’s still too early to draw strong conclusions about whether microdosing can enhance mental functions. According to the authors of a systematic review of the research from 1955 to 2021,
A key question for researchers is whether the effects of microdosing have clinical or optimisation benefits beyond what might be explained by placebo or expectation.
So, as far as the science goes, we still don’t know for certain if mental enhancements due to microdosing are a result of specific psychedelic impacts on brain mechanisms, or more general impacts due to beliefs and expectations, or some combination of the two.
Even if the actual impact of the drug-related mechanisms is subtle, it doesn’t mean it’s trivial. Brain imaging studies suggest that psychedelics act on brain receptors for serotonin, a neurotransmitter that affects mood. You may have heard of serotonin before. It might be in your antidepressant if you happen to take Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, or another SSRI—a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. According to the latest thinking, SSRI antidepressants don’t work by flooding the brain with serotonin, but by increasing plasticity, or the brain’s flexibility for making new connections.
Clinically, one of the things that’s believed to keep people depressed or anxious is rumination. When we ruminate, we get stuck, deeply stuck, in a repetitive pattern of negative thoughts and feelings. Most of us have had a day or a week, and sometimes longer, when we find ourselves struggling with thoughts like, “I’m worthless” or “It’s never going to get better”. That’s rumination: like a railway track in the brain, it goes around in spirals, never heading anywhere except down. SSRIs might exert their therapeutic effects by lifting the train off the ruminative track and resetting its course. The early evidence suggests that psychedelics might work the same way.
Now that I’ve got you convinced there really is something going on in the brain, I should point out that serious doubt has been cast on years of research on the benefits of antidepressants, with meta-analyses showing they may be due to strong placebo effects. That’s a whole other story, and many experts (and probably patients) would disagree. But it’s worth mentioning, as it brings us back to the possibility that expectation, hype, and other psychological variables, can powerfully and meaningfully shape our subjective well-being. Faith can move mountains, as the saying goes, and so it’s not surprising that strong beliefs can lift unhappy trains off their depressive tracks and move them in a healthier direction.
Drugs aside, there are non-pharmacological ways for enhancing mental functioning. Forest walks, as well as meditation, exercise, or a good night’s sleep, have all gotten a salubrious nod from scientists. Even prayer, at least for people who identify as religious, has been shown to improve attention, presumably by freeing up resources that might otherwise be consumed in worry and rumination.
Of course prayer and sleep and forest walks, though wholesome and side-effect free, can seem banal compared to the mystique and excitement of microdosing, which is now moving into the commercial marketplace. Red Light Holland grows and sells a “premium brand of magic truffles” in the Netherlands for recreational use, and is publicly traded on the stock market. Other companies, these with a more clinical focus, are using low-dose ketamine to treat psychological disorders and are likewise game for your investment dollars. Treatments through other psychedelics are expected in the near future.
It may be too early to disentangle the role of placebo effects from psychedelic microdosing, or to say which substance, and at which dose, is genuinely beneficial for what clinical conditions. As for microdosing in mentally healthy individuals, many might ask, If it works, why not? Who wouldn’t want to go through the day feeling more positive and creative?
And maybe it goes a bit further than that. People yearn for experiences of wonder and enchantment. Most of us don’t want an ordinary life; we want an extra-ordinary life. Microdosing might turn out to be that “extra” for some, adding a glow to the contours of our everyday existence—like enhancing a smartphone picture with a tap.
But there may be a cost for that extra: a growing intolerance of the ordinary, an estrangement from the real. With that comes a risk that we become less patient with things as they are; more bothered and more bored with plain old living, less willing to learn to cope with the difficult moments, less able to see beauty without looking through the lens of a drug.
Microdosing is a bit reminiscent of “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. Soma is everyone’s go-to drug for soothing unhappy moods, though its effects can verge on the spiritual, like a holiday in eternity. There are no religious practices in Huxley’s utopia because soma helps fill that need. Will microdosing fill the same need in our own world?
Then again, it might be more blasé than that: more like people who slump about all day wearing earbuds, because they can’t experience life as sweetly without a continual soundtrack.
Our generation is hardly new in searching for ways to amplify the beauty and wonder of life. We started off with a fragment of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, a poem that was written about 80 years ago, in the recent aftermath of a world war, global pandemic, economic collapse, and the start of a new world war—a time a little like our own, perhaps. In Eliot’s words, a time “when there is distress of nations and perplexity”.
Other poets and writers of that earlier upheaval were exploring the same problem as Eliot, struggling to find a new spirituality to recover what had been lost in the death of the old religion. Or, in the case of Eliot himself, to refresh our understanding of the old, whose truth had never actually died.
Below, I’ve posted the full section from Eliot’s poem for those of you with a more literary bent. For my part, I’m pulling on my boots and going out for a long walk in the soggy spring woods.
To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
- from Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages V