Jay Olson is a stage magician and psychology researcher at University of Toronto. Given his unique background, he was recently called in to help design a scientific study in which the participants would be convinced they had taken a psychedelic compound when really they were given a placebo. See, even as evidence continues to accumulate that psychedelics can be a powerful treatment for a variety of mental disorders—from depression to OCD and PTSD—there are challenges testing their efficacy using traditional double-blind studies and placebos. That's because the unique effects of psychedelics usually make it obvious to participants (and researchers) whether they've received the active substance or an inert pill. The Microdose's Jane C. Hu interviewed Olson about how he approached the problem:
[Among other techniques, we enlisted confederates who] were all friends of ours who had used psychedelics before and acted as participants. We had a training session with them beforehand and we told them to pace and lead: basically, to observe the effects that are happening in the room and then just increase them slightly. So if everybody's dancing to the music, dance a little bit harder.
We also had them plant little statements. While the groups of participants were waiting in the lobby, there's always a bit of nervousness and excitement, so we had one person say, "My friend did this study last week and had a blast."
We had somebody else who just naturally has huge pupils go up to a few people and say, "Hey, your pupils are huge — are mine like that?" We thought that maybe the participant would feel like their body was starting to have a reaction to the drug. And of course, we removed people's smartphones so they couldn't look at themselves using their cameras, and we even covered the mirrors in the bathroom so they couldn't check there. We were hoping that at least some of these little details would help convince some people that they had taken a psychedelic, and that expressing some of the effects might spread through the group via a sort of a contagion mechanism.
Did it work? And how did people react when you told them it was a placebo?
People experienced a huge range of things. Some people experienced nothing whatsoever and thought it was a placebo the whole time. Some people said waves of the psychedelic experience would hit them, fade away, then come back. One person said they couldn't understand language for 20 minutes, and one person said they had a headache where gravity had a stronger hold on the back of his head; another said that he felt a tingling sensation in the chest. Some people even reported that it was indistinguishable from other psychedelic experiences they'd had in the past.
My favorite quote from the entire study was: "So we were really sitting and staring at this painting in silence for 45 minutes, completely sober?"
Olson and his colleagues wrote about their study in a scientific paper beautifully-titled "Tripping on Nothing."
Previously:
• Ancient psychedelic wisdom for modern medicine
• Netflix's 4-part adaptation of Michael Pollan's book on psychedelics, 'How to Change Your Mind'
• Psychedelics are 'anti-distressants'with benefits beyond treating depression
