Google · The Atlantic Technology
DiNardo claimed that Mindstate’s AI works like AlphaFold, the model from Google DeepMind that has wowed structural biologists—and
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Only one of the company’s compounds has reached the testing phase in humans, and it wasn’t discovered by the model; Shulgin synthesized a version of it in the 1980s.
Key facts
- A psilocybin analogue developed by Reunion Neuroscience appears to produce a high that lasts three or four hours, according to findings from a Phase 2 trial of 84 women with postpartum depression
- For 17 centuries, Chinese Taoists have been preserving one such text called Baopuzi
- People who use psilocybin recreationally may become confused and jump off a building, David Yaden, a researcher at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University
- Mindstate started by compiling a large database of more than 70,000 trip reports
Summary
Nature is always performing chemistry experiments, and in the dark and sticky corners of its forests and jungles, it creates compounds that have hyper-specific effects on the human mind. In China’s Yunnan province, a yellow mushroom with a droopy cap sprouts up in the mountains, usually in the shade of long-needled pines. Many people of different ages and cultural backgrounds have eaten this mushroom and experienced the same hallucination. For thousands of years, humans have searched nature for mind-altering substances through a process of trial and (sometimes fatal) error. Now that psychedelic research has been legitimized, scientists at university labs and biotech start-ups are wondering whether they can create a better one. “Nature’s compounds aren’t always optimal,” Manoj Doss, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. A single dose of it seems to help people liberate themselves from opioids, quelling their cravings and mellowing their withdrawal symptoms.