The Importance of Integration in Psychedelics

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With psychedelics, you really get that expansion, whether you can get the focus. It's another matter. I mean, there's the classic example of being on psychedelics and thinking that you've had a wonderful insight and you try to write something down. And the next day, it's just nonsense, right? Yeah. The quality control comes in. There isn't too much haste to try and stitch things back up,. But rather just let them slowly kind of settle and crystallize without forcing any kind of psychoanalytic interpretations necessarily.

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific research as well. Along with restrictions placed by individual nations, it has been very difficult for scientists to study the effects of psychedelics on the brain, despite indications that they might have significant therapeutic potential. But this has gradually been changing, and researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris have begun to perform controlled experiments to see how psychedelics affect the brain, and what positive uses they might have. Robin and I talk about how psychedelics work, how they can help with conditions from addiction to depression, and how they can help people discover things about themselves.

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Robin Carhart-Harris received his Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and holds an honorary position at the University of Oxford. His research involves functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

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