I'm fascinated by the new research into psychedelics, e.g. magic mushrooms and LSD, for the treatment of depression. When we were asked to write a project for medical school, I had to write it on this.
When I was reading through the literature, I kept noticing something. There are two arguments as to how the psychedelics are working:
- through the subjective/spiritual experiences while on the drugs or;
- through objective reactions in the brain.
I'll be writing my project to investigate this. Is it the dissociative experience—the high—that allows you to align your values, or find peace with past traumas? Are the psychedelics stimulating the growth of new neurones? Are they altering your serotonin concentrations? These are the questions I'll be answering. As much as I'm tempted by a first-hand experience, I don't fancy jumping out of a window because I think I've grown wings. For now, it's probably best that we leave the psychedelics in the lab 😵💫.
🗓 This Week
How to stop fear & anxiety from paralysing you.
Fear can propel us to perform at our best, or paralyse us. In this week's video, I explore how fear affects our brains and bodies, and outline the three steps that I'm using to stop fear from paralysing me. I hope this can be of value.
🔊 Resonators
Here are 3 things that resonated with me this week.
The Wisdom Of Intuition - Iain McGilchrist (Podcast)
Iain described four ways of knowing something: science, reason, imagination and intuition. He believes that our scales have tipped too far in favour of science and reason, neglecting the wisdom of imagination and intuition.
During exams in the past, I've distrusted my intuition. My gut—figuratively, not literally— tells me it's one answer, but then my logical brain persuades me that it's another. More often than not, my gut is right but my logic has lost me the marks. Iain says that to master your craft, the process needs to become intuitive. That's not to say that reason doesn't have its place, but we should question whether it's always the best way to come to an answer. Trust your gut.
How I Built 5 Multi-Million Dollar Companies: Marcia Kilgore (Podcast)
Marcia Kilgore is the entrepreneurial Michael Jordan. She's had back-to-back commercial successes, from the beauty industry, to creating Soap and Glory, to creating FitFlop. She's unstoppable! I love hearing the background of people who've reached such stratospheric success.
She thought she was unique in her approach to problems, until reading Adam Grant's book 'Originals'. I immediately bought it.
Originals: How Non-conformists Change the World (Book)
I've already made it through the first chapter. Here's a taster. A company noticed that some of their employees were much more productive than others. In trying to uncover a trend, they found that it wasn’t correlated with how long they'd been at the company, or how old they were. It was much more random. Their productivity depended on the Internet browsers they used. Those that used Firefox or Chrome had more sales and remained in their jobs 15% longer than those that used Safari or Internet Explorer. What on earth?
This was because the latter two are the default browsers on Windows and Mac, whereas the former required employees to take the initiative to download them separately. They took this optimisation approach into other aspects of their job and life to not accept the default. These are Originals. Non-conformists.
Quote
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw