The Mind, the Mushroom, and the Research

About one year ago, an intriguing - and very rare - study was published by researchers at John Hopkins University's Medicine department. It was the world's very first scientifically controlled, double-blind investigation into the effects of psilocybin - the psychoactive ingredient in what are colloquially known as magic mushrooms. Psilocybin had been studied before, but never in such a systematically controlled way, and virtually not at all in recent decades.

The lead researcher Dr. Roland Griffiths, professor of behavioral biology and professor of neuroscience at John Hopkins is no light-weight. His CV is here, and you will note that this study is his 239th journal publication. The goal of this particular study was to investigate the potential of psilocybin as a therapeutic agent, and to better understand the functioning of consciousness, sensory perception, and what may be termed mystical experiences. The participants were 36 well-educated adults with no personal or family history of drug use or mental illness.

What did the researchers find?

In the study, more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a “full mystical experience” as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant. Griffiths says subjects liken it to the importance of the birth of their first child or the death of a parent.

Two months later, 79 percent of subjects reported moderately or greatly increased well-being or life satisfaction compared with those given a placebo at the same test session. A majority said their mood, attitudes and behaviors had changed for the better. Structured interviews with family members, friends and co-workers generally confirmed the subjects’ remarks.

In the next few months and years, expect a flurry of follow-up publications. The original research team is currently publishing a 1 year review of the research participants (no word yet on the exact release date). The Griffiths team is also conducting a trial of patients suffering from advanced cancer-related depression or anxiety, as well as designing studies to test a role for psilocybin in treating drug dependence. Researchers at the University of Arizona, UCLA, and Harvard (to name a few) have begun to study psilocybin as a result of this study.

This development is groundbreaking for a number of reasons:

• No real scientific research has been conducted on hallucinogens in the last 40 years. We don't really understand how they work, or what effects they have on their users. Hopefully that will change.
• This opens up an entire new range of methods for investigating the fundamentals of how the human mind works. Philosophical questions of the nature of consciousness, mysticism, and self-concept may be addressed from an entirely new scientific approach.
• New treatments for depression, bipolar disorder, drug dependence and other mental illnesses may be available. Anecdotal evidence is very promising in this area, but empirical research is the only conclusive way to test and develop new treatments.
• Government drug policy may finally be adjusted to reflect realistic potentials for abuse. Psilocybin has been condemned by many governments; in the US, it is ranked as a Schedule I drug, along with cocaine and heroin, and possession carries similarly severe penalties of lengthy prison sentences and substantial fines. However, psilocybin is non-toxic (ie, physical overdose is not possible), it is not physically addictive, and there is not a single recorded death caused directly by psilocybin. By contrast, in 1993, tobacco killed 434,000 Americans (20% of all premature US deaths) and alcohol killed 125,000 (Mathias, 1994.)

What an exciting time to be a psychologist!

As the relevant publications are released in the coming months, I will provide summaries of the findings here on Exeterra.


The full research report is available here:

Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U. & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial systained personal meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268-283.

This is a good, accessible press release written without jargon.

And here is commentary by other distinguished researchers in related fields, originally printed in the same edition of Psychopharmacology.

Q & A with the lead researcher, Professor Griffiths.

Bueller? ... Bueller? ... Bueller?

Those who read Exeterra regularly will know that one of the drums I beat regularly is the need for empirical evidence (ie, real research and real data) to be the basis of our social policy.

This essay by Alfie Kohn makes a research-based critique of the value of homework. According to Kohn, the research is not very supportive. Here's a money shot:

The results of national and international exams raise further doubts. One of many examples is an analysis of 1994 and 1999 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data from 50 countries. Researchers David Baker and Gerald Letendre were scarcely able to conceal their surprise when they published their results last year: “Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships,” but “the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in [amount of homework assigned] are all negative.”

According to Kohn, (and I should point out this is not my research area) nearly all of the research suggests homework is actually quite harmful to kids, in terms of how they learn, their attitudes towards learning, and their overall well-being. My personal experience supports this.

I would add most forms of exams to the list of useless learning aides as well. I can demonstrate this with a thought experiment: think of some times you have studied for a test, be it chemistry, mathematics, history, or anything else. Think of all those things you memorized. Do you remember them now? Did you remember them even one month after the test? What is the point of exams if you forget almost everything once the exam is finished?

Important New Research On Opinion Entitlement

I found this particular news article from the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science to be particularly on target:

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

From The Onion :)

Free Our Information

The Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, is quite simply, fantastic. Every year they have a conference where they have talks and presentations about the coolest ideas coming up, all with the potential to alter how we perceive and interact with the rest of the world. Fortunately, they are all available online. I've only seen a few, but so far they have all been mind-blowing.

The presentation below is by Hans Rosling, and it's about statistics. And it's freakin' sweet! Not in a math-nerd way, but in an everyman way. It's 20 minutes long, and worth every minute.





The most important part of the presentation is the last five minutes. We simply must have a new paradigm of knowledge - of perceiving it and disseminating it. Rosling's presentation is one of the best illustrations I have seen of this. Governments and organizations collect massive amounts of data, and then make it inaccessible. I believe the big revolution of this century will be the liberation of data - the democratization of information. This includes statistics, but more importantly science, entertainment, culture - human knowledge in its entirety. Presently, the producers and masters of human knowledge serve as gatekeepers whose primary role is to create systems which limit access to knowledge. You have to pay dearly to buy books or go to a university. Access to an academic journal often costs $20 per article and are written as to be inaccessible to anyone who has not spent years learning unnecessary jargon. This is no way to promote and disseminate knowledge - it merely keeps knowledge within the elite who are already knowledgeable. Largely, this democratization will occur because of the Internet, but it is much larger than that as well. I believe the impact of liberated data will eventually be on the level of the creation of the printing press, or universal suffrage. It will take time (many decades), and there will be no dramatic news coverage, but the weight of the impact on society will be enormous.

You can download the Trendalyzer software used in the presentation for free.

Conference

The conference today went very well. Twenty minutes seems like a long time at first, but it is actually a very short space to communicate any real sense of nuance or background. I thought that just about all of the presenters did well, especially considering that for most of them it was their first conference as well.

My talk was a (too brief) review of conservation psychology. The basic structure was 1) Why do it? 2) What are its limitations? 3) What I am currently doing

My presentation is online, for those who are curious.

First Conference

On Monday, June 4, I will be presenting at my first research conference. Admitedly, it is a small one at the university, but it will be good practice for the bigger ones. My talk is from 10:40 to 11:00 and is titled "Conservation psychology: Addressing the limitations of an infant subdiscipline." There are three basic parts: First, the limitations with the previous research; then the preliminary findings of my current research; and finally some proposals for research over the next two years, with a focus on addressing the previous limitations.

Abstract is below:

Conservation psychology, the use of psychology to understand and promote conservation of the natural environment, has only recently developed as a subdiscipline within psychology. However, despite a flurry of recent publications in conservation psychology, most of the research has been limited by a number of theoretical or methodological assumptions. These include paradigmatic isolation, a focus on immediate outcomes instead of long-term outcomes, and an over-dependence on self-reported behaviour. In this presentation, I will discuss ways in which these research limitations may be overcome, and specifically how the research studies I am presently conducting will attempt to fill these gaps in the literature by using a cross-paradigmatic approach in longitudinal studies assessing real-life behaviour.

This is the intinerary.

Recycling in Belfast

I've been reading a recent paper from another conservation psychologist, Tim Kurz, who has done some recent work in Australia and here in the UK. He's a friend of my supervisor and I've exchanged a few emails with him. This particular paper is focused on recycling in Belfast. Now that may seem like a pretty mundane topic, but this paper is useful for a few reasons, but in particular because it illustrates many of the counter-intuitive, initially baffling nature of most enviro-psych research.

As I've said before, a major flaw in most enviro-psych research is the complete dependence on self-report data. That is, the researcher asks people how much they recycle or save energy or whatever (usually through a written or online questionnaire), and that person's response is taken as valid. The problem with that is that people are really bad at making estimates about their own behaviour, and the data is often not very accurate. Checking actual behaviour - measuring energy used or weighing recyclables - is very intensive in terms of time and money, but it is the gold standard. To get enough statistical power to run any decent analyses, we need to have data on many people, usually at least a hundred and often many more, just depending on the design. Weighing 100 recycling bins every week for a few months is a big pain in the neck, but that is how it has been done before. The Belfast study got around this by using a new technology I've been drooling over for months: every recycling bin has a unique bar code. The recycling truck automatically weighs and scans every bin, logging the data in a database. It's the kind of system conservation psychologists daydream about while in the shower. I've been hoping we'll get a similar system in Exeter soon, but it's at least years off if it ever happens here. Anyway, this Belfast study has some pretty impeccable behavioural data. They also took psychometric data on concern towards the environment, attitudes towards recycling, and sense of community. These psychological variables can be statistically compared with people's real recycling rates to see exactly what relationships are there, and what predicts what.

Before I tell you the results, are there any guesses? Raise your hand if you think general concern towards the environment is related to recycling. Mmm, ok. What? No, keep those hands up. Ok, now raise your hand if you think attitude towards recycling is related to actual recycling. Ok. Now raise your hand if you think sense of community plays a role. You can put your hands down. Now, get a piece of paper, and write down how much you think these three things are related to actual recycling. Do this in a percentage, which we will call "shared variance." It's a kind of measure of how much two measures overlap, or how well you can predict one if you know the other. For example, altitude and air pressure have about 100% shared variance because it is a virtually perfectly correlated relationship.

And now... the answers:
General concern for the environment and actual recycling : 0.0% shared variance
Attitude towards recycling and actual recycling: 3.6% shared variance
Sense of community and actual recycling: 4.0% shared variance

Surprised? That's what a lot of enviro-psych results look like. It is actually incredibly difficult to predict behaviour, and people's attitudes do not go as far in helping with that prediction as our intuition would suggest. So the holy grail has been to find better predictors of behaviour; to an extent this can be improved by just asking more and more specific attitudes: "How do you feel about recycling glass?" is more predictive than "How do you feel about recycling?" and "How do you feel about recycling this particular glass bottle right now?" is most predictive of all. Unfortunately, the more specific you get, the less practical it is in an applied setting. The other best predictors of pro-environmental behaviour are: gender (women do more pro-environmental behaviour than men) and past behaviour (people have done an action in the past are more likely to do it in the future). Of course, both of these are profoundly unhelpful in applied work, as one is unchangeable and the other circular. There are other factors that play a role: how much neighbours recycle, perceived risk of not taking action, and others, but they generally do not account for more than 5% of shared variance, leaving nearly all of the behaviour unexplainable. Environmental education, which I think is a terrific thing, generally accounts for 2% or less of the variance in actual behaviour. This is the tough nut to crack. Every intuitive measure clocks out at very low levels (low for applied value, high enough for proof-of-concept value), leaving nearly all of the behaviour unexplained. On one hand, that's pretty poo-ey, as influencing human behaviour is the most critical part of tackling climate change (more important than technology, or anything else.) On the other hand, it is exciting because these are mostly uncharted psychological waters, with most of the treasure still undiscovered (ughh, pirate metaphors are never good), which can seem like a very rare thing when searching through thousands of journal articles.

Environmental Strategy

I've just finished reading the consulation draft for Exeter's Environmental Strategy. You can too, if you want; just click on the picture. Given it is a government document, I'm pretty impressed with it. It's readable, comprehensive, and ambitious in its plans. The areas where it seems to really be on target are taking centralized, concrete actions. For example, the Council is installing 6 wind turbines on it's offices, along with photovoltaic solar cells, and fitting in green biomass generators at many of the public schools; all city documents will be printed on 100% recycled paper, printed with non-toxic inks; informal city gardens will be landscaped with native plants, grown locally and organically; fertilizer and pesticide use by the city will be heavily reduced; the old shipping canal's locks will be retrofitted with micro hydropower generators; all timber used by the City will be either reclaimed or from sustainably farmed European forests; all bricks will be reclaimed from old sites. There are 60 pages of recommendations like this, all with completion dates and where the funding will come from (most are self-funding; the green power will pay for itself).

Here is where it falls short: communication and public behavioural change. Helping the environment requires action on many fronts: technological adaptations, governmental support, and public awareness, to name a few. But all of these mean little without a change in public behaviour. Everything the Council is doing is terrific, but it is small pertaters without public change as well. This is where social psychology comes into play. Awareness is not the same as behavioural change. There is actually very little relation between the two, as countless psychology studies have found. Knowing ≠ doing. For example, the UK government gives money away to people to insulate their homes and take various green actions. It's very easy to get this money, and most people know this resource is available. Yet, they do not act on it. Paradigms and public behaviours must change, and actually affecting these changes is by far the weakest point for all organizations concerned with protecting the environment.

The research I'm doing is aimed at figuring out how these changes in behaviour come about, and understanding which paradigms work and which do not. I'll be doing some studies over the summer with the City Council, and have three that I am now doing in the University. Of course, I'll just be scratching the surface, but it really is surprising that most public awareness/behaviour campaigns are designed intuitively, rather than actually being based on empirical evidence or psychological theory. Without evidence and theory, it's all just shots in the dark. Even if something works, we will not know what, or how. To their credit, the City realizes this is a problem, and is eager to work on it. I'm pretty eager too. Research can be surprisingly exciting, and these projects will be a lot of fun. I'll continue to post updates as they progress.

ORSAS

I received word this morning that my application for funding to the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS) was successful. This is very good news, as it means my PhD is now fully funded. This means I can squander my Fellowship grant on things like food and paying utility bills, instead of putting it all towards tuition as I did this year. Very welcome news indeed.