We’ve had this backwards for about 60 years
Picture a Psychedelic Experience Most people picture the same thing. One person. Eyeshades. Headphones. A quiet room. Deeply internal and completely alone. That image comes from clinical research, and it makes sense in a lab. But it has almost nothing to do with how people actually used these mushrooms for thousands of years. The old […]
Dead Man’s Fingers is a real mushroom
Every October, people spend money on fake cobwebs and plastic hands reaching out of the lawn. Meanwhile, three streets over, a rotting stump has produced something considerably more unsettling for free. Mushrooms have the best common names in the natural world, and the spooky ones are in a league of their own. These were not […]
There’s a mushroom named after Halloween
Aristotle Called It Cold Fire Walk into an old damp forest on a moonless night in October, let your eyes adjust for fifteen minutes, and you may see something that has terrified people for thousands of years. A faint greenish light, glowing steadily from a rotting log. It does not flicker. It gives […]
Mushrooms don’t grow. They inflate.
You’ve seen it happen. A patch of lawn, a damp corner of a park, the base of a tree you walk past every day. Empty on Monday. Covered in mushrooms on Tuesday. It looks impossible, and for most of human history people assumed it was. Overnight appearances were exactly the kind of thing that got […]
She asked to be buried in a mushroom
A Quiet First in the Blue Mountains On Friday the 4th of September, a family gathered at Springwood Cemetery in New South Wales to say goodbye to a woman named Carolyn. She was 70. Her family asked that her surname stay private. What made the day historic was what she was laid to rest in. […]
She’d tried everything. Nothing lasted more than two days.
Carine Chen-McLaughlin was 65 when she enrolled in the study. She’d been smoking for decades, and she’d tried to stop the way everyone tries to stop. Nicotine gum. The patch. Cold turkey. Nothing held for more than a couple of days. But when she described what made quitting so hard, she didn’t talk about cravings […]
Did mushrooms build the human mind?
The Boldest Claim in Psychedelics. In 1992, an ethnobotanist named Terence McKenna published a book with an idea so audacious that scientists have been arguing about it ever since. His claim: psilocybin mushrooms made us human. Not helped. Not influenced. Made. He proposed that the leap from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens — and everything that came with […]
Green flags your dose is actually working.
It’s the most common question we get, and it’s a fair one. Microdosing doesn’t announce itself. There’s no obvious moment, no clear before-and-after. Which leaves most people quietly wondering whether anything is happening at all. So they look for the wrong signals. They wait to feel something — and a properly dialed dose is specifically the one you […]
Mushrooms vs. Lexapro. Researchers actually ran it.
For years the question hung there unanswered. Psilocybin looked promising for depression — but promising compared to what? Nearly every trial measured it against a placebo or a waitlist. Nobody had put it up against the actual standard of care. So researchers at Imperial College London did. Psilocybin versus escitalopram — the drug you’d know as […]
