By overwhelming popular demand, I'm going to do a thread on "Drugs and Mysticism", the best PhD thesis ever!

This was a crazy experiment done in the 60s where they gave psilocybin to Harvard divinity students to see if it'd trigger a transcendental experience...and it did. https://twitter.com/BomptonC/status/1326428653090168834

I checked it out by Interlibrary Loan after having heard about it a documentary on drugs I'd been watching while bored, but you can read it online here: https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/pahnke/walter_pahnke_drugs_and_mysticism.pdf

(The physical book /is/ more fun though, so if you can...do find a copy to read!)

Now, you might be wondering first off, how do you even define a "transcendental experience" so you know if you're triggered one? Seems very touchy-feely!

Indeed, great question!

They start with a historical survey of these experiences through the ages.

Then they proceed to define a mystical experience upon the basis of this survey.

Both parts of that are fascinating and well worth reading but we won't cover it here; we'll presume we know what's meant and that it becomes well defined in the study.

By the way, before I go further on the experiment itself, let's just pause to admire the ... je ne sais quoi about this whole thing. As typified, for instance, by the acknowledgement at the start to Dr. Timothy Leary for assistance in the experiment.

This is all just so 60s.

Okay, but we've accepted the overall premise of what we're trying to test and that we can, somehow, figure out if it happens.

Do we just give them the drug and see what happens?

No!

"[Mind]Set and Setting": we prime the setup to hit our target!

So to get the right mindset for a mystical experience, who better than divinity students? Presumably they're going to be seeking such experiences, be somehow prepared to accept them, and be the most prone to them.

And we're at Harvard, so we'll just grab a few locally!

Yes, that's right. Harvard. The Harvard. Is apparently fine in the 60s with giving some divinity students drugs to get them to have a mystical experience. I know, right? IRBs ruined all the fun!

Now, setting!

We get a special closed Easter Mass. In Latin, obviously!

Now, that's the part I didn't fully appreciate at the time, having never been to a Latin Mass. I get it a bit more now, but again, remember these are divinity students: they *know* this service, this occasion, this is all primed for the peak effect before we introduce the drug.

Okay, so we've done our work on the psychedelic preparation but how are we going to get the statistical power? This is another brilliant aspect: the design is so good they can prove significance despite n=20!

(in before factorial joke)

How do they do this? Two key techniques:

One is heavy use of matched pairs; another is by having a lot of different factors to compare (on the survey which is basically "Did You Just Have A Mystical Experience? Answer These Questions To Find Out!").

The reason that matched pairs is powerful is that rather than having to test the difference between two populations, we get to have a set of differences to test against zero. This is /way/ more effective....at least if you do the matching well!

Having a ton of different factors means that we can look at not just "okay, all ten pairs were stronger with psilocybin" but "all ten pairs were stronger with psilocybin on all one hundred factors".

That's a simplification but it really is almost that striking an effect.

So, not only does this experiment have "let's give divinity students drugs to see if makes them holy", it also has the counterexample to the claims like "well it was only 35 subjects; no way they could tell anything!":

Good design is more important than sheer size.

One of the other aspects that's really cool about this is that the author isn't blindly just "so take drugs and have a mystical experience!"

I can't recall where but I distinctly recall discussion along the lines of "is it right to barge into the Throne Room of God?"

That is: let's say God is real. And let's say this demonstrated effect really puts a person somehow into direct contact briefly.

Is that really something someone should be doing casually or should this maybe require, like, a *lot* of consideration first?

Even from a secular perspective, a lot of the logic they're using for the design is already based in extensive experiments and history of psychedelic use (like the whole "set & setting" concepts), which are basically "be very careful or it will go horribly wrong".

That's the core of the setup and concept of it. It's worth reading if it sounds intriguing because I swear the whole thing is a masterpiece; I read it fascinated like a novel and should make time to read it again.

Now I'm going to just start pulling great quotes out of it, which I could do endlessly. The conclusion:

"[...] subjects who received psilocybin experienced phenomena [...] defined by our typology of mysticism."

Translation: it worked.