Why Magic Mushrooms Are Emerging As Major Part Of Public Discourse: Microdosing

(Part two of a four-part series)

Regarding small psilocybin doses, a recently published crowd-sourced research site found that 953 people who microdose showed on average greater improvement in mental health and mood over one month compared to 180 who do not microdose.

As a mycologist and advocate Paul Stamets recently said in an interview with Double Blind magazine, “microdosing, by definition, is sub-sensory. If you take psilocybin mushrooms and you feel an effect, that’s not microdosing.”

The research’s novelty was that it included a non-microdosing control group. It assessed past-month psychedelic practices, mood and mental health and presented tasks testing cognitive and psychomotor processing, completed both at the study outset and on the following 22 to 35 days.

The results showed that the microdosing participants were more likely to be older, white and full-time employees as compared to the non-microdosers. The former experienced greater improvement from baseline after one month, with depression levels shifting from moderate to mild after 30 days of microdosing with anxiety, stress scores, positive mood and larger decreases in negative mood.

These outcomes follow previous research on the positive benefits of small and large doses of psilocybin on mental health. The authors warn about some limitations such as small sample size, the observational nature of the data and the self-selection recruitment.

Separate research on the same topic suggests that expectations may be driving psilocybin’s positive effects. 

With microdosing’s popularity on the rise, the common saying is that it can help improve concentration, mood, creativity and cognitive function. 

Yet while recent open-label observational studies have provided some empirical support for these claims, “these studies are vulnerable to experimental biases, including confirmation bias and placebo effects,” which is “especially problematic” in the case of microdosing, given that users “make up a self-selected sample with optimistic expectations about the outcome of the practice,” researchers explained.

The small study included 34 participants who were already planning on microdosing on their own and agreed to adapt their dosing and schedule to the trial protocol for two weeks: two half-gram doses of dried psilocybin mushrooms in one week, placebo of the same preparation and weight on the other. 

Participants completed self-reporting questionnaires on acute effects experienced with each dose and completed psychological measures for anxiety, positive and negative effects, well-being, stress and tasks to measure creativity, perception, and cognition, while EEGs measured their brain activity. Finally, they reported their expectations of possible mental state changes.

The results reflected significantly higher acute effects from psilocybin compared to the placebo among participants who had identified whether they were taking psilocybin or the placebo.

Also, although the EEG tests presented altered brain wave rhythms, no positive effects of psilocybin were found on creativity, cognition or self-reported well-being. In fact, a data trend suggested that psilocybin use may have hampered performance on certain cognitive tasks, which is consistent with previous research showing high doses of psychedelics may hinder some cognitive functions like attention span and decision-making.

These findings, therefore, do not support the anecdotal evidence on the benefits of microdosing magic mushrooms. Nonetheless, there were several limitations in the study, including the regime’s short-term length and the cohort of healthy subjects (microdosing is thought to have the strongest effect on people with mental health issues). 

Undoubtedly, further research is needed in order to determine whether microdosing psilocybin holds specific mental health benefits.

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