Science Watch: Got 'Shrooms?

For my 'Culture and Personality' anthropology class this semester, I'm writing a paper on 'The Use Of Entheogenic Plants in Primitive Cultures'. It's pretty fascinating running the whole gamut from the peyote rituals of the Native American Church to the Ayahuasca rituals of South America, as well as many others. Interestingly enough, there was a recent study at Johns Hopkins that shed some new light on so-called 'magic mushrooms':

"Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.

The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.

The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown."

Now, as usual, with any new scientific development, things must be taken with a grain of salt, but this does sound promising:

"The researchers’ message isn’t just that psilocybin can produce mystical experiences. “I had a healthy skepticism going into this,” says Griffiths, “and that finding alone was a surprise.” But, as important, he says, “is that, under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what’s called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person. It’s an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people.”

This conversation also leads us to the discussion that many of us secular humanists have that spirituality and its experiences may be nothing more than biochemical in origin, something that, for obvious reasons, many would find very threatening to their core belief system. David Koepsell, in an op-ed piece at Free Inquiry magazine, is skeptical that this kind of research will continue and expand due to the many taboos it breaks: "

What seems likely at this stage, because of the potential of such studies to undermine traditional mystical theology and our nation's aversion to legitimizing therapeutic uses of drugs that are commonly abused, nothing further will come of this study, despite its interesting promise. In the meantime, we should feel comfortable with some preliminary confirmation of a thesis many of us hold: that mystical experiences do in fact occur, that they are completely naturalistically based, and that there is no basis to view those occurring in convents or seminaries as any more legitimate than those that occurred on the corner of Haight and Ashbury back in its heyday."

Personally, I feel this research could yield us great understanding in the study of human behavior, if we can move past some of the sacred cows in this country and see where this takes us, regardless of what beliefs it challenges.