Therapist Responses to Participant Discomfort with Music

Vivaldi. Bach. The Beatles. The Johns Hopkins playlist has been the standard soundtrack in psychedelic trials at Johns Hopkins and therapy rooms around the world for more than 25 years. It also skews toward Classical and Christian music. When Sughra Ahmed, a Muslim, enrolled in a psilocybin study that used this playlist, she didn’t love what she heard. So where did this playlist come from exactly? And what can science tell us about what role music plays in a trip?