psilocybin
Article
psilocybin is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between December 17, 2024 and November 24, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT”; “Any adult can replicate it with five milligrams of psilocybin”; “This effect is basically identical to what a small dose of psychedelics can do, specifically a tryptamine like psilocybin”. It most often appears alongside DMT, FDA, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: December 17, 2024
- Last seen: November 24, 2025
Appears In
- Links For December 2024
- The Colors Of Her Coat
- Links For July 2025
- ACX Grants Results 2025
- Open Thread 409
Related Pages
-
- DMT (3 shared issues)
-
- FDA (3 shared issues)
-
- AI (2 shared issues)
-
- anime (2 shared issues)
-
- Bluesky (2 shared issues)
-
- Catholic Church (2 shared issues)
-
- China (2 shared issues)
-
- Discord (2 shared issues)
-
- France (2 shared issues)
-
- Garrison Lovely (2 shared issues)
-
- Gaza (2 shared issues)
-
- Harvard (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
13: Alfredo Parra of Qualia Research Institute on cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are plausibly the most painful medical condition. If you ask a cluster patient to rate their pain, they’ll almost always say 10/10. Does that mean the headaches are twice as painful as a 5/10 condition? There are some philosophical reasons to expect pain to be logarithmic, so plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition. Once you internalize that possibility, it throws a wrench into normal QALY ratings and suggests that, even though cluster headaches are pretty rare, they might cause a substantial portion of the global burden of disease (or even a substantial portion of the suffering in the world). Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT, seem to treat cluster headaches very effectively, so the more you believe this reanalysis, the more interested you should be in figuring out how to turn these into an accessible therapy (see clusterbusters for more information on this aspect).
And the ease with which Chesterton navigates this interpretation - the way he makes it the most natural thing in the world - made me wonder - what if Chesterton is also just describing his experience completely accurately? The thousandth sunset thing is so prominent in his works, and he never expresses any embarrassment about it, never says anything like “a saint would be able to do this, although of course I cannot”. If anything, the mood is one of mild exasperation that nobody listens to him. This sort of thing would make complete neurological sense - it’s just an increase in the precision of sensory evidence relative to top-down priors. Young children do it naturally - as any parent can tell you after having to read their one-year-old the same book for the thousandth time. Any adult can replicate it with five milligrams of psilocybin or a few dozen hours of samatha meditation. Who’s to say you can’t get it through genetics? Or through being very holy?
7: Related: Cube_Flipper on his (?) experience taking estrogen. “What did change was my sense of space. This one’s quite subtle – it was the kind of thing that was more noticeable when I experimented with deliberately spiking my hormones. I’ll do my best to explain. It’s as if I took the entire volumetric representation of the space around me and increased the degree to which every point within that could influence the location of every other point, recursively. This allows everything to elastically settle into a more harmonious equilibrium. This effect is basically identical to what a small dose of psychedelics can do, specifically a tryptamine like psilocybin or DMT.”
Inline links: Cube_Flipper on his (?) experience taking estrogen
Eli Elster, $13K, to research traditional psilocybin use in Africa. Psilocybin, aka magic mushrooms, is in the process of being integrated into mainstream psychiatric practice; it is already approved for treatment-resistant depression in Australia, and undergoing (currently promising) FDA trials in the United States. Much of what we know about the preparation and administration of psilocybin - including widespread ideas about “set and setting” and “integration” - comes from traditional use by the Mazaetec Indians. In 2023, anthropologists discovered that traditional healers in Lesotho, Africa also use psilocybin mushrooms - the first time such a practice has been found in the Old World - and that they seem to prepare and administer it differently from the Native Americans. Eli and his collaborator Betsy Sethathi conducted the first in-depth fieldwork on the topic earlier this year; our grant funds a return trip to Lesotho to further investigate their ethnobotanical practices and see if we can learn anything from them.
Inline links: Eli
2: Qualia Research Institute announces their spinoff effort ClusterFree. Cluster headaches (aka “suicide headaches”) are probably the most painful medical condition known to science, which makes them a natural priority for some utilitarians. They seem to be extremely treatable by psychedelics like psilocybin and DMT (including sub-hallucinogenic doses), so ClusterFree is working on getting governments to research this further and maybe get these drugs into the medical pipeline (cf. ketamine for depression). There’s an open letter here, and you can contact them here. The information for patients is at the bottom of this page.