
On psychedelics: researchers are heading into the world of psychedelics - prostoalex
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/erik-davis-psychedelics/
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ScottBurson
Wow, I love this piece. I can't resist quoting a couple of paragraphs:

 _And now there is a new competing narrative. Studies recently carried out at
Yale, and published last month in the journal Science, have confirmed earlier
reports that ketamine offers remarkable, nearly instantaneous relief for
people who suffer from forms of major depression impervious to other treatment
methods. Interpreting depression as a hardware problem largely caused by the
loss of synaptic connections, the researchers argue that ketamine works by
encouraging sprightly neural growth in brain regions correlated with memory
and mood. Journalistic reports also linked this research with the development
of a new vein of antidepressants, including Naurex’s GLYX-13, that have the
neurone-fertilising power of ketamine without, as one report describes them,
the ‘schizophrenia-like effects’.

Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of
human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone
suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them
on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes ecstatic, and certainly
mind-bending modes of transpersonal consciousness whose subjective power might
itself boot the mind out of its most mirthless ruts._

