Monthly Archives: March 2022

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For the nascent psychedelics sector, 2021 was the year when foundations were established for a future that may hold impressive payoffs. It remains to be seen if those payoffs will materialize in 2022, or if theyll take a little longer, but signs appear positive for a potentially strong growth market, according to new report.

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The Defiance ETFs report notes that drivers for the growth include legislative changes toward psychedelics, investments rising for example, Peter Thiel backing the psychedelic start-up Atai Life Sciences as well as some clinical trials reporting positive results, and the rise in demand and acceptance of psychedelics-based treatments.

While theres a range of different predictions for the psychedelics market in the next few years, they share a positive trend. DataBridge predicts that the U.S. market for psychedelics will grow at a CAGR of 11.5% between 2021 and 2026, reaching $6.4 billion by 2028, while Research and Markets forecasts the global market to rise at 14.5% CAGR from $3.2 billion in 2021 to $6.3 billion in 2026, the report notes.

Its clear that analysts expect the market to grow dramatically, even if they disagree about the precise size of that growth, according to the report.

Sylvia Jablonski, CIO and co-founder of Defiance ETFs, told GOBankingRates that there are more than 2 billion people with untreated mental health disorders, and that number is growing.

Nearly 30% of mental health patients have not found a cure, or a treatment that worked for them in the realm of conventional therapies, and have often given up, Jablonski said. Billions of dollars have been spent fighting mental illness, but there hasnt been a cure that works for all patients. However, clinical research done by some of the most esteemed academic institutions and research groups like MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies] or Hopkins, to name a few, have proven that psychedelic-based medicines can revolutionize treatments, and provide potential cures to patients.

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She explained that psychedelics essentially help the patient, guided by a medical professional, to a path where the brain rewires itself and allows for paradigm shifts which have led to lifelong disease control or even cure.

Investing in psychedelic firms now could be an opportunity to capture the beginning stages of what is looking to be on the path of a healthcare revolution, she said.

She added that these could be good value plays in the biotech/healthcare space, which is also a potential defensive play, like consumer staples, an improving or failing economy doesnt mean people wont get sick and need therapy, she added.

Some stocks to consider, she said, include Mind Medicine, which is focused on LSD and the psychedelic drug ibogaine, which targets depression, anxiety, attention deficit and addiction. The stock is also in the top psychedelic stocks recommended by the Motley Fool, which puts the companys valuation at $1 billion.

Compass Pathways is another stock to consider, Jablonski said, as it is well funded. The Motley Fool said the drugmaker is conducting the largest clinical trial in history of a psilocybin therapy with its phase 2 study evaluating COMP360 in treatment-resistant depression.

COMP360 is Compass Pathways only pipeline candidate right now. However, its one of the most advanced of all the psychedelic drugs in development, with the potential to move into late-stage clinical testing in 2021, according to The Motley Fool.

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In May 2021, Defiance ETFs launched the first US-listed psychedelics ETF, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PSY, and tracks The BITA Medical in Psychedelics, Cannabis, and Ketamine Index, according to the funds prospectus.

Companies included in the index must have a minimum market capitalization of $75 million and operate in the production, distribution or services related to medical psychedelics, medical cannabis or other medicinal drugs and their derivatives.

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Yal Bizouati-Kennedy is a former full-time financial journalist and has written for several publications, including Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, Bloomberg and Business Insider. She also worked as a vice president/senior content writer for major NYC-based financial companies, including New York Life and MSCI. Yal is now freelancing and most recently, she co-authored the book Blockchain for Medical Research: Accelerating Trust in Healthcare, with Dr. Sean Manion. (CRC Press, April 2020) She holds two masters degrees, including one in Journalism from New York University and one in Russian Studies from Universit Toulouse-Jean Jaurs, France.

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Stage Set for Psychedelics Stock Boom: Here's Where ...

In 1966, researchers at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in California gave mescaline to 27 men who were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers, and artists.

While on the drug, one came up with a new conceptual model of a photon particle; another envisioned a new approach to the design of a vibratory microtome, a lab instrument that cuts material into small slices; and an architect produced a design for a home that was later approved by his client. The mescaline seemed to help facilitate creative problem-solving, particularly in the illumination phase, the researchers wrote.

These kinds of stories are common in psychedelic folklore, leading to the belief that psychedelic compounds lead to Aha or eureka moments, and that answers can be revealed during a trip in one fell swoop. Besides understanding particle physics, people often feel like they receive knowledge about themselves or the nature of the universe.

In his 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote that one feature of a mystical-type experience is this noetic quality, or a feeling of deep knowing. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority, he wrote.

But how can we tell if the insights received while under psychedelics are true? In a recent talk for the UCL Society for the Application of Psychedelics, Johns Hopkins cognitive neuropsychopharmacologist Manoj Doss said its likely that psychedelics can evoke illusory insights, or the feeling of a profound insight that is misattributed to ideas that arise during a psychedelic experience.

This too, James was familiar with. After inhaling a large amount of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, James wrote furiously on the topic of Hegelian dialectics, a complex kind of philosophical argument. At the moment of transcribing, his thoughts were fused in the fire of infinite rationality, he wrote. But when he was sober again, his revelatory insights were incomprehensible. Meaningless drivel, James called them. He published an excerpt from his notebook in the journal Mind:

What's mistake but a kind of take?

What's nausea but a kind of -usea?

Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.

Everything can become the subject of criticism

How criticise without something to criticise?

Agreementdisagreement!!

Emotionmotion!!!!

By God, how that hurts! By God, how it doesn't hurt!

Understanding the nature, and veracity, of psychedelic insights will be crucial if these drugs are to be taken by more and more people, especially those who will seek them out to have insights that better their mental health and well-being.

Luckily, insights, or "Aha moments," have been studied by psychologists outside of psychedelic research for decades. Insights have been found to be unique cognitive phenomena that are often associated with correct solutions to problems, but within insight research, theres also been recent work on false insights: insights that feel real, but are objectively incorrect.

False insights can be induced in the lab through some simple tricks, and feelings of insight can spill over in how people regard other worldviews and factsmaking untrue facts or extreme beliefs seem more true, a subject highly relevant to psychedelics. The feeling of insight does not guarantee that an insight is correct. Certainly not all psychedelic insights will be false, but recognizing that they probably wont all be true either, despite how they feel, makes room for problematic insights to be tested, and not simply accepted as untouchable truth.

An Aha moment is the experience of suddenly believing you understand something, or suddenly solving a problem that you've previously been unable to solve. A classic example comes from the life of Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Archimedes was asked to determine if a gold crown made for King Hieron II had been mixed with silver, rather than made with pure goldbut the king didnt want Archimedes to damage or melt down the crown while figuring it out.

Puzzling over how to do this, Archimedes took a bath. He noticed that the water splashed onto the floor when he got in, displaced by the volume of his body. In a flash of insight, he realized he could compare the crowns volume in water to another piece of gold or silver with the same mass, and compare the density.

A person doesnt need to come up with a brilliant solution, like Archimedes did, for an Aha moment to exist, said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara. What characterizes it is that abrupt feeling of truth.

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John Kounios, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University and coauthor of The Eureka Factor, has shown through brain imaging and behavioral experiments that insights do seem to be the result of a real and distinct kind of emotional and cognitive process, not just a typical new idea with an emotional flourish tacked onto it.

There is also research showing that when an Aha moment accompanies a solution, it's more likely to be right, said Ruben Laukkonen, a postdoctoral fellow at The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In studies using a task called the remote associates, people are given three words, and they have to come up with a corresponding fourth word. When people solve these problems, sometimes they have an Aha moment and a solution pops into their mind. Other times, they solve it through more slow and careful analysis. In these studies, if people had an Aha moment, they were more likely, on average, to have gotten the correct answer.

People may have learned that this Aha feeling is often associated with correct solutions throughout their lives, Kounios said. It might be why when people have an idea that feels like an Aha, and it's accompanied with a sense of profundity, theyre more likely to think those ideas are true. When we have Aha moments, we often treat its content as sacred. James Joyce wrote in Stephen Hero, his posthumously published autobiographical novel, that epiphanies must be recorded with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

But even in those laboratory studies, Laukkonen said, false insights were lurking amongst the true ones. False insights were when people had the same feeling of sudden knowing, but what they knew wasnt correct. Researchers have mostly followed and tried to characterize true insights, but recent work has turned to examine these false insights.

In 2020, Laukkonen and colleagues gave people an anagram to solve, and then presented them with a fact that was either true or false. When people successfully unscrambled the letters in the anagram, and felt an Aha moment doing so, they were more likely to think that false facts were truemisattributing the Aha feeling from the anagram to whatever the fact was.

This worked for world views, too: people were more likely to endorse statements like free will is an illusion if they were given a key word, like illusion, in a scrambled format first. If we elicit a little insight experience, even using something as trivial as an anagram, that feeling that is elicited can color anything that's happening at that moment, Laukkonen said. The feeling of insight could essentially be moved around and put onto other things.

In another recent study from this year, Hilary Grimmer, a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland, Laukkonen, and others were able to elicit an Aha feeling in people who were objectively having a false insight.

People were given a list of words that all shared an association, like wheelbarrow, seedlings, glove, and soil. Then, they were given an anagram that looked like a word that would belong with that list, but actually didnt. For example, paired with the list of gardening words, they would be given the anagram for endanger, which shares a lot of letters with the word "gardener." People would solve the anagram as "gardener," and feel like they had an Aha moment even though their solution was incorrect.

These studies showed different kinds of false insights: In one, people who had a true Aha moment from solving an anagram misattributed that feeling to other, untrue, facts. In Grimmers study the Aha moment occurred around a solution that was objectively wrong. But both reveal how the feeling itself of the Aha moment isnt always paired with the truth.

"It seems like that feeling can just exist on its own," Grimmer said. "We can have the same feeling of insight, regardless of actual truth."

People on psychedelics wont be solving anagrams and responding to facts; their insights will be more complex, and so will the contexts around them. But knowing that the feeling of insightfulness can be elicited with false information, or moved around and applied to unrelated information, is essential when considering insights that come from psychedelics.

Doss thinks a number of factors could make psychedelic experiences a breeding ground for the feeling of false insight or knowing. Studies have found that in a psychedelic experience, words or concepts that wouldnt typically be associated can be relatable. While the people in Grimmers study were misled to think gardener based on the gardening words, this could mean that more tenuous associations could prime people to have false insights while in an altered state.

People can be set up to expect true insights, based on what they're told at the outset of a trip. When people are told under psychedelics that they will come up with certain insights, you're going to be more inclined to attribute the feeling of insight to the truthiness of ideas that you might come up with, Doss said. I think all these things kind of come together in a perfect storm to potentially create something that feels very real but doesn't necessarily have to be."

People might have different thresholds, even under sober conditions, for how much information they need to have an Aha moment. You might have 10 pieces of information in your head and if all 10 of them snap together, you have this coherent insight about something, Kounios said. But what if only nine of them snap together, or eight of them snap together?" Its possible that psychedelics could lower that threshold, Kounios said, to create Aha moments with less input.

Another important lesson from insight research is that some people may be more swayed by insights, and the positive feeling that comes with them. In 2020, Kounios and his colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity when people solved anagrams with Aha moments, finding that in the moment of insight, there was a sudden burst of high frequency brainwaves.

Some people in the study were high in a personality trait called reward sensitivity, a trait that is found in thrill seekers and others motivated by pleasure. In those people, there was another burst of brain activity a tenth of a second after the insight in the brains reward system, the same area that is engaged when people eat delicious food, take addictive drugs, or have orgasms. People who were not high in reward sensitivity didnt exhibit this. Kounios said it suggests that some people can have an insight without always having the feeling of pleasure or emotion alongside it.

Though the study didnt collect subjective reports, Kounios said that anecdotally, those who were high in reward sensitivity got really into the tests, and thought they were fun. People like having insights, Kounios said. Its why a lot of people like to do crossword puzzles, read murder mysteries, have creative hobbies, do researchthey get a thrill from Aha moments.

David Yaden, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins who studies the subjective effects of psychedelics, thinks that its important to parse out the different kinds of Aha moments that different people may have while on psychedelics.

Not all insights can be tested, the way an anagram can be right or wrong. A person might have insights about the nature of reality or about their life, like realizing they should quit their job, or move to a different city; these kinds of insights will be hard to measure.

But there are others, like the predictions of events that may or may not happen, which could be tested. Creative insights could be judged by others for their novelty and usefulness. Simply put: before making the claim that psychedelics lead to more true insights across the board, that should be measured.

Psychedelic insights could also be assessed for an alignment with therapeutic goals or overall well-being. If a person has the insight that theyre not worthless, or that they are connected to others, that might align with the goal of improving depression symptoms.

These kinds of insights might not be falsifiable, but could be valuable to a person for their healing process, Laukkonen said. But in the cases when an insight feels real, but isnt helpful or true, the fact that the feeling is separate from the content can be useful, especially in responding to complex or traumatizing experiences, or pushing back on the guru effect, when people have insights that feel very authentic about their position over other people, or their reasons to cross ethical boundaries.

There's certain types of insights that I think that people need to be very cautious with, Doss said.

Not all psychedelic insights will be false, and many may be true insights, or just helpful, unfalsifiable ones. But knowing that the feeling of insight is able to be disentangled from the content of the insight itself is importantit paves the way for critical thinking and examination of an insight later on.

It can be difficult to question epiphanies that come with an Aha feeling, and they may be subjected less to ethical or critical analysis, Yaden said. Grimmer said that insight moments, under sober conditions, are more closely held onto. They have a memory advantage, people remember solutions that came with an Aha.

Some people suggest that once we've had an Aha moment, whether it's true or false, some amount of us will kind of always believe it because of that unique way with which it arrives in our consciousness, Grimmer said. They seem kind of sticky.

But all insights, true and false, should lead to more examination after the Aha momentwhether it occurs on psychedelics or not. It goes along with an idea that it's important to have epistemic humility, Yaden said, meaning we should be humble about our knowledge and what we think we know. The noetic quality doesn't excuse not having epistemic humility.

And checking an insight doesn't diminish the value of Aha moments. It just means that like any other thing that people do, it can be wrong, Kounios said. Ive always told my kids in school: when you do a math problem, check your results. The same logic should be applied to insights. If you have an Aha moment, check it. What do you have to lose?

Schooler agreed that insights should be revisited later on. When Archimedes had his idea, he still had to put the crown in water and see if he could actually calculate it, he said. It's important not to just stop at the epiphany phase.

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The Insights Psychedelics Give You Arent Always True

When South by Southwest held its debut festival, it was a four-day music showcase of 177 artists playing 15 venues. Thirty-five years later, it reaches way beyond music and plays out over 10 days citywide on scores of stages where it gives a preview of a future that will be funded by venture capital.

SXSW this weekend is wrapping up the 2022 edition of what has exploded into a mega-event known globally for its futuristic exploration of art, media, technology, sports, wellness, politics and activism.

A launch pad for ideas, brands and personalities that later become household names, SXSW each year draws tens of thousands of people to Austin seeking forward-thinking solutions and novel approaches to big problems.

Which is to say that the event has secured its place as a vital part of the venture capital ecosystem and its ever-optimistic quest to create the future of everything. And this year's installment has been no exception, featuring experts delving into some of Silicon Valley's biggest passion projects, from crypto and climate science to the metaverse and psychedelic drugs.

The return of SXSW following a pandemic hiatus also comes at a time when the city of Austinthanks in part to the festival itselfstars in another drama that hits home for the VC ecosystem: The rise of hot new metropolises winning over tech and other corporate leaders seeking locales that are more accommodating of their business and personal ambitions.

Conference visitors who were trying to plan out time slots in the packed schedule could be forgiven for feeling that they had to choose between equally buzzy but competing sessions: one could be about saving the world from climate change, the other about saving musicians' profits through shrewd use of NFTs and decentralized platforms.

It's a boom time in so-called Web3 innovations that empower musicians and other artists to claim economic control of their brand and intellectual property outside dominant channels owned by publishers and companies like Spotify.

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, created by artists are grabbing much of the spotlight, especially at music-crazy SXSW. The blockchain-based tokens can certify ownership and authenticity of digital creative assets and even physical ones (like an artist's branded merchandise). Musicians are tapping into them for a sizable revenue stream of royalty payments for sales of their branded work on secondary markets.

Kelsey Byrne, the singer-songwriter also known as Vrit, is one of them. Byrne educated herself on tokens during her own pandemic isolation and emerged with a rising name in music but also a knack for using NFTs to make a sustainable living as an indie singer. "The whole point of this is to work outside the system," she said on a panel.

Another panelist told of several artists with small followings who've been able to rack up meaningful revenue. "You can have less fans but make more money," said Sam Hysell, co-founder of digital media company NFT Now. The model is taking off. In December, investors valued NFT marketplace OpenSea at over $13 billion in a $300 million VC funding round.

Take weed. Organizers programmed at least 20 panel discussions or featured speakers on the topic as seen through issues including racial equity, regulation, consumer products, social change and international markets.

Investment in VC-backed cannabis companies retreated to $2.8 billion last year from its high point of $3.6 billion in 2019, according to PitchBook data. Investors are taking aim at the world cannabis market estimated to be worth more than $32 billion last year, mostly concentrated in North America. But opportunity for weed businesses in other world regions looms large, with 50 countries (not counting the US) having created legal cannabis markets on a national level, according to Prohibition Partners, a UK-based cannabis research firm.

"I think that provides an amazing opportunity, but it also leaves a question mark as to when the US will join the ranks," said Stephen Murphy, managing director of Prohibition Partners, who moderated a panel looking at the global pot business.

Another dozen or so other talks focused on the future (and present) of psychedelics: Psychedelics in wellness. As a market opportunity. In public policy. In tourism. Even in Judaism.

One of the best-attended panel discussions this year focused on the prospects for psychedelics to treat severe depression, PTSD and behavioral disorders. Such therapies remain on the fringes of Western medicine. But authoritative research is gaining traction, of course with Silicon Valley VC funding, among companies such as therapeutics specialist Atai Life Sciences, which is backed by Peter Thiel and recently got federal approval to do a clinical trial of a non-psychedelic form of ketamine intended for use as an antidepressant.

Another high-profile adherent is the influential entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, who took to the SXSW stage with a group of eminent psychologists to share intimate details of his experimentation with ketamine in his own battle (with "life-changing" effectiveness, by his own account) against chronic depression.

Outside the meeting hall, a passerby's T-shirt read, "Make Acid Great Again."

Regardless of how seriously you view the use of psychedelics in medicine, it's clear watching Ferriss speak that he has done his homework on the research and can hold his own delving into the scientific minutiae alongside some of the field's top experts.

Ferriss and his co-panelists like Roland Griffiths, a Johns Hopkins University pharmacology professor, said they see much promise in clinically supervised treatments through altered states of consciousness, but they also plainly acknowledged that modern medicine is in its infancy of truly understanding psychedelics.

To Pico Velasquez, a designer whose work has straddled physical and virtual dimensions, the power of the metaverse is to capture "beautiful intricacies of this world." But she also maintained it's not just about games or entertainment.

"Instead," she told one session, "it's an evolution of our lives, the future of work, the future of culture. The future of absolutely everything is going to get transported into this new space."

Some efforts to demonstrate the idea didn't quite land. At a late-night party thrown by Blockchain Creative Labs, an NFT-focused startup studio backed by Fox Entertainment, guests were invited into a pop-up exhibition that was meant to evoke the dazzling imagery associated with highly stylized digital environments. It was basically a flashy electronic installation on the walls.

At a demo kiosk for Qualcomm-owned chip designer Snapdragon, visitors could create their own digital avatars having their likeness scanned using face- and body-recognition software. My avatar, showing a fully bald man, was totally unrecognizable, but it did at least allow me to show I had a receding hairline of my own, using any color of my choosing.

Featured image of the Blockchain Creative Labs exhibit by Alexander Davis/PitchBook News

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SXSW stage is a collision of weed, metaverse, NFTs, acid and saving the planet - PitchBook News & Analysis

Jaden Smith Recalls His Experience With Psychedelic Mushrooms (Photo Credit: Instagram)

Actor Jaden Smith thought everything was so beautiful when he took psychedelic mushrooms in a park with his friends.

Smith said: I was with people who I really loved dearly. We go to a park, which was the best decision that we could have ever made. Everything just becomes so beautiful.

We look at the sky and everybody starts feeling like they want to cry, but no one says anything. We were running in the park. Were sprinting. Were talking fast. We decided to hug a tree and felt like we actually went inside of the tree, Jaden Smith said.

He added, I saw the inner workings of the tree and it looked like a rainbow. I could tell in that moment that trees were alive, but more alive than anyone could ever think. As alive as humans are.

The Karate Kid actors experience with psychedelics has influenced his latest clothing collection, Trippy Summer, and he explained how the collection has taken advantage of what happens when people are in an altered state, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

Jaden Smith told Mr Porter journal: I believe that mushrooms are going to help us expand consciousness. The collection is not just clothes to sell.

Its loaded with spiritual experiences and mystical states. Were just making clothes that can go along with peoples journeys.

When youre in that sensitive space, the wrong shirt can ruin things. Whether the shirt says, Oh, f*** you, you f****** f***, or, Go to hell and die, it might scare somebody Were taking advantage of the certain visual cues that happen when youre on mushrooms. Things slightly move, Jaden Smith said.

He then concluded by saying, If you give something the feeling of motion, when youre on mushrooms and you look at it, your brain will finish the work and put it in motion so that youre like, Holy f***! His pants are moving.

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Jaden Smith Recalls His Experience With Psychedelic Mushrooms: Everything Just Becomes So Beautiful - Koimoi