Beat generation

Yesterday I ran into a piece of research out of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology that was published this week in Drug and Alcohol Review, entitled, "Who Uses Digital Drugs?  An International Survey of 'Binaural Beat' Consumers."  I was curious about it -- I'd heard about binaural beats and their potential psychological effects a while back -- so I read the paper.

I was hoping for some analysis of whether they worked, but it turns out that the research was limited to exactly what the title offered; a summary of who is using them and why.  Turns out that that 72% of users were trying to relax or fall asleep, 35% were trying to change their mood, and 12% were trying for a psychedelic experience.  There was some attempt to look into their use as a "gateway drug," but it turned out that according to the researchers, "most of the people who were looking for a psychedelic experience already consumed ingestible drugs."

So that got me into looking at the bigger question of whether or not they could deliver the effects they promised.  I came across a website called "Binaural Beats: A Meditation Shortcut" that looked promising, and better still, it explained what "binaural beats" are.  The idea, apparently, is that you listen to two sounds simultaneously, which differ slightly in frequency (the example given was a 114 hertz tone in the left ear and a 124 hertz tone in the right).  This will result in your hearing a "beat frequency" or "binaural beat," whose frequency is equal to the difference between the two (in this case, 10 hertz).

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Ansgar Hellwig, Beating Frequency, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So far, nothing too strange, and a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who has tried to tune the strings of a guitar.  But what this site, and others like it, claim is that the induced beat frequency will change the frequency of your brain waves, and cause... well, all sorts of things.

The site says that it will bring on a "meditative state:"

When you listen to sounds of a certain frequency, your brain waves will synchronize with that frequency.  You entrain every time you hear a musical beat that has you bobbing your head or tapping your foot. 

By listening to MP3s or CDs that produce brainwave entrainment, you can induce a desired brainwave pattern quickly and reliably.  Binaural beats is one of the most popular methods to utilize the phenomenon of brainwave entrainment...

Using binaural beats provides an easy shortcut.  All you have to do is put on a set of headphones or earbuds, relax, and listen.  For many people, this brings their brains into the same state as deep meditation quickly.

Which was interesting enough, so I started poking around at what else they were claiming this phenomenon did.  I found out quickly that meditative states aren't the only things that binaural beats allegedly can induce.  If you hit the right binaural beat frequency, supposedly you can:

lucid dream
boost your memory
get past creative blocks
(safely) simulate the mental effects of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and ecstasy
lose weight and increase your metabolic rate
jumpstart your physical and mental energy levels
have a "mind-blowingly intense hands-free orgasm"

So naturally, I had to investigate all this.  I skipped the first three, given that (1) I already sleep poorly and have weird dreams, and have no particular desire to make this any worse, (2) I'm too impatient to conduct a long enough experiment to see if my memory improves, and (3) I do pretty well in the creativity department already.

The fourth one, on the other hand, was intriguing.  I thought it might be interesting to see if I felt high and/or stoned after listening to some tones going "wah-wah-wah" in my ears, so I gave it a shot.

If a sample size of one means anything, I can report back... nothing.  I didn't feel any loopier after listening to drug-simulating binaural beats for fifteen minutes than I did before.  So I went on to the "jumpstart your energy levels" one (I really don't need to lose weight), and once again... nada.

Then -- purely in the interest of scientific research, of course -- I had to try the last one.

I found two places that supposedly had orgasm-inducing binaural beats.  Listening to the first one was about as arousing as listening to a washing machine on spin cycle.  So I thought, "Maybe my sex frequency isn't attuned to that one, or something."  So I clicked on the second one, and I found out that on this recording, the binaural beat frequency was overlain with the sounds of a couple in the throes of noisy, and apparently extremely pleasurable, sex.  (And no, I'm not going to provide a link.  You'll have to track that one down yourself.)

So it was not exactly a well-controlled experiment.  Of course, I didn't listen for all that long, because otherwise my wife would have come into my office to see what the hell I was doing in here.   ("Research, honey!  Empirical research!  Really!")

In any case, my own investigation of binaural beats was kind of a bust.  So I decided to see if there'd been any good studies done of the effect, and I found a site that had what seemed to me to be fair and unbiased summaries of the research.  And the general conclusion is...

... it doesn't seem to work.  Most of the effects recorded were small and very temporary, and the consensus is that your expectations going into the experience have a major effect on what you'll get from it.  If you think it's going to relax you, then you relax.  If you think it's going to energize you, then you're energized.  If you think you're going to have a spectacular orgasm...

... well, you get the idea.  Although I have to add that throwing in the sex noises was hardly fair.

I suppose the whole thing is harmless enough.  I've done a bit of meditating over the years -- never consistently enough to make it a practice, but enough to get the flavor of it -- and found it to be great for calming the mind and centering the body.  So whatever you're after, if "binaural beats" helps you to get there faster and deeper (as it were), cool.

As for the rest of it -- have fun experimenting, but if you're approaching it skeptically, keep in mind that the results might be less than "mind-blowingly intense."

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Android dreams

In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Phantasms," the android Commander Data continues to pursue his lifelong dream of experiencing what it's like to be human by creating a "dream program" -- a piece of software that activates when he sleeps, allowing him to go into a dreamlike state.  The whole thing goes seriously off the rails when he starts having bizarre nightmares, and then waking hallucinations that spur him to attack the ship's counselor Deanna Troi, an action that leaves him relieved of duty and confined to his quarters.

Of course, being Star Trek, the whole thing has to do with aliens, but the more interesting aspect of the story to me is the question of what an artificial intelligence would dream about.  We've yet to figure out exactly why dreaming is so important to our mental health, but it clearly is (this was the subject of what might be the single creepiest TNG episode ever, "Night Terrors").  Without REM sleep and the dreams that occur during it, we become paranoid, neurotic, and eventually completely non-functional; ultimately we start hallucinating, as if the lack of dreams while we're asleep makes them spill over into our waking hours.

So being that the question of why exactly we dream isn't satisfactorily solved, it's going even further out onto a limb to ask what a different intelligence (artificial or otherwise) would dream about, or even if they'd need to dream at all.  Our own dreams have a few very common themes; just about all of us have dreams of being chased, of being embarrassed, of stressful situations (like the "teaching anxiety" dreams I used to have, usually involving my being in my classroom and having my students misbehaving no matter what I tried to stop it).  I still get anxiety dreams about being in a math class in college (it's always math, for some reason), and showing up to find I have an exam that I haven't studied for.  In some versions, I haven't even attended class for weeks, and have no idea what's going on.

Grieving or trauma can induce dreams; we often dream about loved ones we've lost or terrifying situations we've been in.  Most of us have erotic dreams, sometimes acting out situations we'd never dream of participating in while awake.

So although the content of dreams is pretty universal, and in fact shares a lot with the visions induced by psychedelic drugs, why we dream is still unknown.  So it was with considerable curiosity that I read a paper that showed up in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness this month called, "Neural Network Models for DMT-induced Visual Hallucinations," by Michael Schartner (Université de Genève) and Christopher Timmermann (University College London), who took an AI neural network and introduced input to it that mimicked the kind of endogenous (self-created) visual input that occurs during a hallucination, and watched what happened.

The authors write:

Using two deep convolutional network architectures, we pointed out the potential to generate changes in natural images that are in line with subjective reports of DMT-induced hallucinations. Unlike human paintings of psychedelic hallucinations—the traditional way to illustrate psychedelic imagery—using well-defined deep network architectures allows to draw parallels to brain mechanisms, in particular with respect to a perturbed balance between sensory information and prior information, mediated by the serotonergic system.

In our first model, NVIDIA’s generative model StyleGAN, we show how perturbation of the noise input can lead to image distortions reminiscent of verbal reports from controlled experiments in which DMT has been administered.  In particular, the omission of noise leads to a smoother, painterly look of the images, illustrating a potential hypothesis that can be conceptualized with such models: as a 5-HT2A receptor agonist, DMT induces a state in which environmental (i.e. exogenous) sensory information is partially blocked—gated by the inserted noise—and system-internal (endogenous) signals are influencing conscious imagery more strongly.  Contents of immersive imagery experienced in eyes-closed conditions during DMT administration would thereby correspond to the system’s prior information for the construction of a consciously perceived scene.

If you're ready for some nightmares yourself, here's one of their images of the output from introducing psychedelic-like noise into the input of a face-recognition software:

For more disturbing images that come out of giving AI hallucinogens, and a more in-depth explanation of the research than I'm giving here (or am even capable of giving), I direct you to the paper itself, which is fascinating.  The study gives a new lens into the question of our own consciousness -- whether it's an illusion generated by our brain chemistry, or if there really is something more there (a soul, spirit, mind, whatever you might want to call it) that is in some sense independent of the neural underpinning.  The authors write:

Research on image encoding in IT suggests that ‘the computational mission of IT face patches is to generate a robust, efficient, and invariant code for faces, which can then be read-out for any behavioural/cognitive purpose downstream’ (Kornblith and Tsao 2017).  The latent information entering the NVIDIA generative model may thus be interpreted as activity in IT and the output image as the consciously perceived scene, constructed during the read-out by other cortical areas.  How this read-out creates an experience is at the heart of the mind-body problem and we suggest that modelling the effects of DMT on the balance between exogenous and endogenous information may provide experimentally testable hypotheses about this central question of consciousness science.

All of this points out something I've said many times here at Skeptophilia; that we are only beginning to understand how our own brains work.  To quote my friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at Cornell University, with respect to brain science we're about where we were with respect to genetics in 1921 -- we know a little bit about some of the effects, and a little bit about where things happen, but almost no understanding at all about the mechanisms that are driving the whole thing.  But with research like Schartner and Timmermann's recent paper, we're finally getting a glimpse of the inner workings of that mysterious organ that lies between your ears, the one that is allowing you to read and understand this blog post right now.

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Getting off the merry-go-round

Today's post is about the outcome of last week's election -- but a part of it you might not have heard about, given the media furore surrounding the race for president.

Last week Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin -- more commonly known as "magic mushrooms."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Arp, Psilocybe semilanceata 6514, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The change came about because of a pair of bills, Measure 109 and Measure 110, which (respectively) made the use of psilocybin legal in a therapeutic setting, including for reasons of "personal growth" (i.e. not to treat a specific condition), and decriminalized the possession of small amounts of a wide range of drugs, making it a minor non-criminal offense on par with a traffic ticket.  I'm not going to get into the second measure, by far the more controversial, except to say that Portugal did the same thing in 2001, diverting the money that would have been spent prosecuting and jailing drug users into treatment programs, and saw voluntary addiction treatment rates rise, and drug use amongst adolescents and deaths due to overdose both decline precipitously.

But passage of the psilocybin measure made me say, "About damn time."  Psilocybin was declared a "Schedule I drug" in 1970, meaning it was claimed to have "a high potential for abuse," "no currently accepted medical use," and "a lack of accepted safety."

All of which, in fact, turned out to be false.  It's non-addictive, rarely if ever causes deleterious side effects, and its efficacy for treating depression has been known for years.  Study after study has come out providing evidence that psilocybin works; so many that it's beginning to sound like the studies disproving the vaccination/autism connection, repeating the same protocol over and over, getting the same result, and saying, "SEE, WE TOLD YOU, IT HAPPENED AGAIN.  BELIEVE US NOW?"

In fact, just last week a study came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that one or two administrations of psilocybin, in a controlled setting, triggered remission of the symptoms of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder for months, possibly years.

This kind of thing is a godsend, because the current state of treatment methodologies for depression resembles a blindfolded game of darts.  I went through three years of considerable hell trying to find an antidepressant that (1) actually mitigated my depression, and (2) didn't give me miserable side effects.  The frustrating part is that an antidepressant that works brilliantly for one person might not work at all for someone else, and no one knows why.  The first two I tried, citalopram (Celexa) and escitalopram (Lexapro), both made me sleepy and completely wiped out my sex drive.  The second one, lamotrigine (Lamictal) gave me thermonuclear-level acid reflux.  The worst was sertraline (Zoloft), which I know is a game-changer for some people, but made me feel like I was at the middle of a neural lightning storm.  I couldn't sit still, couldn't sleep, and couldn't stop out-of-control thoughts that included suicidal ideation.

I got off that stuff fast.

I was on the verge of giving up, but my doctor recommended trying one more, bupropion (Welbutrin).  Welbutrin doesn't give me side effects, which is kind of awesome.  I wouldn't say it erases my depression -- none of them really do that, pretty much for anyone -- but it blunts the edge of the worst of it.  On Welbutrin I don't have the crashing lows I used to get, and have experienced with clocklike regularity every four or five months for pretty much my entire adult life.

On the other hand, if psilocybin works for you (which it does for the vast majority), it works.  People report complete remission of symptoms, something I can't honestly imagine.  Best of all, it only takes one dose to get long-term positive effects.  

I take Welbutrin every day; for me it's a maintenance med.  The idea that I could take one dose of something and get off the merry-go-round of self-medication, to be able to throw away the little orange bottle I have to carry around with me when I travel, is incredibly appealing.

I find it somewhere between absurd and appalling that the government has dragged its heels on decriminalizing psilocybin and authorizing its use as a therapeutic.  Okay, fine, regulate it; allow it only under a doctor's orders and a doctor's care.  We can argue about whether recreational drugs should be legal another time.  But here we have something that could dramatically improve the lives of an estimated eighteen million people in the United States -- about seven percent of the population -- addressing the main reason for the sky-high suicide rate, averaging one person choosing to end his/her own life every twelve minutes.

Would I try it?

Damn right I would.  In a heartbeat.

I know whereof I speak about this.  I'm lucky to be alive.  I attempted suicide twice, ages seventeen and twenty, only pulling back from going through with it at the last minute out of fear.  I had another serious period of pretty much continuous suicidal ideation in my mid-thirties, and that time was saved by the knowledge of what it would have done to my kids.  I still struggle some days, but with the love and care of my wife and friends, and a medication that takes away the deepest lows, I'm on an even keel most of the time.  But the worst of what I've experienced I wouldn't wish on anyone, and it's unconscionable that our government is creeping along in addressing a disorder that is a direct contributor to the horrifying statistic that suicide is the second leading cause of death in the United States of people between the ages of ten and twenty-four, and the tenth leading cause of death overall.

It's time to start pushing our leaders into doing something, into following Oregon's lead, and into getting correct information to voters that "decriminalizing drugs" doesn't mean "encouraging everyone to become an addict."  That all current Schedule I drugs aren't the same -- lumping heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, and psilocybin in the same category is somewhere between scientifically inaccurate and downright idiotic.  That people with major depressive disorder should have a choice to try something showing tremendous promise not as a maintenance treatment, but something damn close to a cure.

Please write letters, make calls, get involved.  It could change lives.  Hell, it could save lives.  And I'll end with doing something I rarely do: ask my readers to share this post.  Link it, retweet or repost it, email it.  The word needs to get out there.

If we can get one person out from under the black shadow of depression, help one person to step out into the light, it'll be worth it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Devil's advocate

New from the "Not Poe's Law" Department, we have: some evangelical Christians who are concerned that demons are now "legally allowed to be" in Denver, Colorado.

I'm not making this up, but I wish I was.  Christian Post, which is usually marginally sane even if virulently anti-LGBTQ, posted a piece last week by Brandon Showalter that expressed concern for the legalization of "magic mushrooms" in the city.  And the problem, Showalter says, isn't just over what people might do when they're high; it's that this makes it legal for demons to get in:

The city of Denver is set to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms, a move a former drug addict says is opening the city up to demonic activity, just as it does in the life of a drug user...  Seattle-area restaurant manager Shannon Twogood, who is the incoming president of the ministry Hope for Addiction and Dependencies (HAD) in Gig Harbor, Washington, believes that the spiritual ramifications that come with the use of potent drugs are often absent in discussions about legalization...  Policies like what will likely be implemented in Colorado may help a few people but it fails to consider the larger picture for the community, and the social ills that are invited in as a result which will require cleaning up later, she stressed, adding that culture cannot open doors for the demonic realm under the guise of "care" for anything. 

The Greek word for sorcery in the Bible is "pharmakeia," from which the word pharmacy is derived. 

When Twogood learned that, it transformed how she saw drug use, particularly given how occult practices and witchcraft often involve the smoking of illicit substances or using them to make teas and potions that cause hallucination. 

She now teaches in prisons and centers for recovering addicts that it is important to understand that they are operating in the courtroom of heaven, that God is the judge and Jesus is our intercessor and advocate.  Until the sin of drug use is repented from, the demons are legally allowed to be there through the open door of drug use.

Well, first of all, let's clear up the etymological issue.  Yes, φάρμακον can mean "poison" or "enchanted potion."  The problem is, it also means "medicine," "drug," and "dye."  Implying that pharmaceuticals are somehow evil because the word root once meant "magic spell" is as idiotic as thinking that someone left-handed is sinister.  (Yes, that's actually the root of the word "sinister."  And, as much as it pains me to admit it, there are people who say we should avoid medications because pharmacies are literally sorcery -- based solely on the fact that they share a common etymology.)

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Martin Schöngauer, ca. 1485) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But what puzzles me most about Showalter's article is the whole thing about demons being legally allowed to enter Denver.  Since when do demons care about laws?  Aren't they demons because they don't give a shit about sinning and breaking rules and so on?

Lucifer:  Ha ha!  We shall enter Milwaukee and possess its inhabitants!  They shall suffer the fires of hell! 

Beelzebub:  Um, boss?  We can't do that.  Milwaukee has a strict no-demon policy. 

Lucifer:  Dammit!  I hate it when that happens!  Perhaps we should attack Denver instead. 

Beelzebub:  No problem there.

In all seriousness, there's a piece of this that pisses me right off, and that's the implication that all illegal drugs are equally bad.  This is especially egregious in this case, because psilocybin -- the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" -- has shown tremendous promise in ameliorating treatment-resistant depression.  As a person who has suffered from depression my whole adult life, and for whom medication and therapy have had equivocal results at best, I would take psilocybin in a heartbeat.  The idea that these people are adding yet another layer to peel back before the medical establishment will be able to use this chemical to help people for whom nothing else has worked is profoundly infuriating.

But there you have it.  The legalization of drugs and/or demons.  It's getting so I can't tell the actual websites these people create and the ones that are parodies.  Or maybe that's just the legal demons clouding my mind.  You can see how that could happen.

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When the brilliant British neurologist and author Oliver Sacks died in August of 2015, he was working on a collection of essays that delved into some of the deepest issues scientists consider: evolution, creativity, memory, time, and experience.  A year and a half ago, that collection was published under the title The River of Consciousness, and in it he explores those weighty topics with his characteristic humor, insight, and self-deprecating humility.

Those of us who were captivated by earlier works such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, Awakenings, and Everything in its Place will be thrilled by this book -- the last thoughts of one of the best thinkers of our time.

[Note:  If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Psychedelic uplift

In a study released last week by a team of psychologists working at the University of British Columbia, we find that in an extensive survey of 1,266 men from the ages of 16 to 70, guys who had used psychedelic drugs (specifically LSD or psilocybin) had a statistically significant lower likelihood of abusing their partners.

In "Psychedelic Use and Intimate Partner Violence: The Role of Emotion Regulation," by Michelle S. Thiessen, Zach Walsh, Brian M. Bird, and Adele Lafrance, the authors write:

Males reporting any experience using lysergic acid diethylamide and/or psilocybin mushrooms had decreased odds of perpetrating physical violence against their current partner (odds ratio=0.42, p<0.05).  Furthermore, our analyses revealed that male psychedelic users reported better emotion regulation when compared to males with no history of psychedelic use.  Better emotion regulation mediated the relationship between psychedelic use and lower perpetration of intimate partner violence.

Given the role of psychedelics in changing levels of activity of serotonin -- a major mood-regulating neurotransmitter -- it's unsurprising that this correlation exists.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons: This image was created by user Caleb Brown (Joust) at Mushroom Observer, a source for mycological images.You can contact this user here., 2013-10-22 Psilocybe cyanescens Wakef 378614, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is more surprising is that apparently, it only takes one use.  Consider, too, that one use of another psychedelic drug -- ketamine -- has been found to relieve many cases of intractable depression, acting in as little as thirty minutes and providing dramatic improvements that last for months.

If you've checked out the links, you may have noticed that none of these studies took place in the United States.  The first one was done (as I mentioned) in Canada; the research on ketamine was the result of two studies done in China.  Here in the United States it's extraordinarily difficult even for neuroscientists to obtain permission to experiment with psychotropic drugs, and there's been strong resistance to easing up these regulations by a group I can only describe as being the Morality Police.  Odd, isn't it, that alcohol -- a clearly mood-altering drug that is responsible for (by estimates from the National Institute of Health) 88,000 deaths yearly -- is legal.  Tobacco, which kills even more than that, is not only legal but is federally subsidized.

Psychedelics are unequivocally illegal in all fifty states.  At least some motion forward has happened with marijuana, which has been known for years not only to be effective for pain relief in terminal cancer patients, but has shown promise as an anti-anxiety medication.  The problem seems to be that marijuana and psychedelics have both become associated with recreational use, and I guess there's a sense that therapeutic agents shouldn't be fun.

I dunno.  Maybe there's a better reason, but if so I've never been able to figure it out.  It seems to me that careful administration of chemicals that can potentially alleviate depression and anxiety shouldn't be dependent on people moralizing about what amounts to this century's version of Demon Rum.

This is brought into sharper relief by the suicide last week of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Depression is reaching epidemic proportions.  I use the word "epidemic" deliberately, and not as hyperbole.  Another study, released just three days ago by the US Center for Disease Control, has found that since 1999 there's been a thirty percent increase in suicides in the United States.  Only one state -- Nevada -- had a decrease, and that was by only one percent.  Twelve states had an increase of between 38% and 58%.  The result -- suicide has become the third highest cause of death, and is so frequent it's actually contributed to a statistically significant drop in American life expectancy.

This is a personal one for me.  As I've mentioned before in Skeptophilia, I've suffered from moderate to severe depression and serious social anxiety for as long as I can recall.  The depression is being controlled reasonably well by medication; the anxiety is still a work in progress.  But if I could knock out my depression -- potentially get off antidepressants permanently -- by one hit of ketamine, one use of LSD or psilocybin -- I'd do it in a heartbeat.  And I'd like to hear, if any of my readers are in the no-way-no-how column of the legalization controversy, a cogent argument about why I should not be allowed to do that.

Interestingly, I was asked that very question by one of my oldest friends, even before the tragic suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain.  Would I be willing to try it?  Would I do so even before it was legalized?  My answer was an unequivocal yes.  Given a reasonable dosage, and friends to make sure I didn't do anything stupid while high, what exactly would be the risk?  Speaking perfectly honestly, if a 57-year-old middle-class science nerd with no social life had any access to the chemicals in question, I'd already have done it.

Perhaps we're waking up, though.  Like I said, there is an increasing push to legalize certain drugs, and that's encouraging.  (Nota bene: I'm not saying these drugs should be completely unregulated.  There are very good reasons for keeping them away from children, and for making sure that they're not used before someone gets behind the wheel of a car.  But if we can handle those challenges with alcohol, we can handle them with other chemicals.)  It's to be hoped that we'll see reason -- and potentially do something to alleviate the suffering of people whose illnesses have heretofore been essentially untreatable.

And maybe, in the process, reduce some of those suicide numbers, which are absolutely horrifying.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.