Along with LSD, marijuana, and MDMA, magic mushrooms have been a mainstay in the drug repertoire of the counterculture.

Powered by the active ingredient psilocybin, magic mushrooms create audio and visual hallucinations, feelings of euphoria, unbridled laughter, and a dreamlike state of consciousness.

The drug can take users on an internal journey filled with deep spiritual and psychological revelations.


Magic mushrooms have also been known to make the Grateful Dead’s 1977 show in at Cornell University even more epic.

Unfortunately, in 1970, the U.S. government decided that magic mushrooms carried a “high risk of abuse” so psilocybin was placed in the restrictive Schedule I category, making it illegal.

So much for living in the land of the free.

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However, these days, serious medical studies have shown the drug to work wonders for people with anxiety, depression, and end of life stress, so the movement to legalize the drug has been growing.

A study published in Science Direct found that psilocybin is very effective at reducing symptoms in people with treatment-resistant depression. It also shows that psilocybin can help people become more optimistic and its effective way to treat addiction to tobacco and alcohol.

People who used psychedelics have lower rates of psychological distress and suicidality than those who used no psychedelics, but an equivalent amount of drugs

Kerry Pappas gave a powerful testimony on “60 Minutes” on how psilocybin made her feel comfortable living with lung cancer.

During her trip she saw “An ancient, prehistoric, barren land… there’s these men with pickaxes, just slamming on the rocks,” she told Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” “I was being shown the truth of reality. Life is meaningless. We have no purpose.”

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“I look and I’m still like a witness with the eyes, a beautiful, shimmering bright jewel and then it was sound… booming, booming, booming. Right here right now. Yes, you are alive. Right here. Right now. Because that’s all you have,” she told Cooper.

Roland Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins University, is a pioneer in psychedelic research, and has been studying the drugs effects for the past two decades.

“The red light started flashing. It’s unprecedented – the capacity of the human organism to change. It just was astounding,” he told “60 Minutes.”

If not for the drug war, our understanding of the power of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin would probably be far more advanced than it is currently. But it’s beginning to look like psilocybin may be decriminalized in a similar way that marijuana has over the past two decades.

Back in May, voters in Denver, Colorado narrowly decided to decriminalize the natural psychedelic and the Oakland, California city council did the same the next month.

Next year, Oregon voters will decide on the Psilocybin Service Initiative that could create a licensed psilocybin therapist industry and reduce penalties for growing or ingesting the substance.

The floodgates are about to be opened for psilocybin and it’s about time. There’s no reason why the state should tell us what we can or cannot in our bodies, let alone a substance that’s proven to have incredible mental health benefits.

  • She called it a green flag when her date cooked a healthy meal for her. But then he explained which organ he was protecting.
    Photo credit: CanvaA man cooks for his date at home.
    ,

    She called it a green flag when her date cooked a healthy meal for her. But then he explained which organ he was protecting.

    “I am dating a dummy. But he is my little dummy, and no one can take that away from me ever.”

    Alexandra Sedlak had been seeing a man for over a month and things were going well. He was thoughtful, attentive, and one day invited her over for a homemade dinner. She immediately catalogued this as a green flag.

    She was right to be touched. He had actually thought about what she would like. She’s health-conscious, so he tailored the meal to her preferences. As they sat down he proudly explained what he’d made and why.

    It was designed, he told her, for her prostate health.

    dating, relationships, viral video, humor, couples
    A visibly confused woman tries to think. Photo credit: Canva

    Sedlak asked him if he meant his prostate health.

    He confidently said no. He meant hers.

    Sedlak, an actress and filmmaker with 145K Instagram followers, shared the moment in a video posted on November 22, 2025 under her handle @alexandrasedlak. She described the progression from delight to confusion with great precision. “I am dating a dummy,” she concluded in the video. “But he is my little dummy, and no one can take that away from me ever.”

    For reference: the prostate is a gland in the male reproductive system, located below the bladder. Women do not have one. A study published in PMC found that men’s knowledge of gynecologic anatomy tends to be significantly lower than women’s, which at least provides some scientific context for this particular gap running in the other direction.

    The comments were predictably delighted. One person suggested she invite him over and cook a meal focused on his ovulation health, then casually ask what part of his cycle he’s in. Another compared him to a golden retriever who should be given head scratches and told he’s a good boy.

    He is very caring. He cooked her a whole meal. The organ was wrong but the intention was right.

    For more relationship-based content, follow @alexandrasedlak on Instagram.

  • It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect
    Photo credit: Jutta Klee/fStop via Getty ImagesBabies – whether boy or girl – look to adults for care and comfort.

    Girls and boys are equally social at birth.

    This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.

    But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.

    Mining the neonatal research trove

    Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.

    Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.

    We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences..

    As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.

    Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.

    a blue and a red distribution curve overlap almost completely making it look mostly purple
    Newborn boys and girls are similarly attentive to faces, with the distribution of time they spend looking almost completely overlapping. Data from Karson et al. plotted using tool at sexdifference.org.

    The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.

    Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.

    The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).

    In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.

    Boys, too, prefer faces

    Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.

    The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.

    Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.

    This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

  • Licensed therapist shares 6 signs you’re doing a lot better than you think you are
    Photo credit: CanvaA woman in quiet contemplation.

    For many people, it’s easy to overlook progress because it often lacks clear milestones. There can be increased anxiety and stress from feeling like they’re still catching up or even falling farther behind.

    In a recent Instagram post, licensed therapist Jeffrey Meltzer points out six signs that people are doing better than they think. He breaks down a pattern of achievements that tend to be easily missed. How individuals interpret their past, how they presently handle their relationships, and even asking simple questions, reveal a very different story about where they’re at in their lives and where they’re going.

    Surviving the unsurvivable

    Meltzer begins, “You’ve survived everything that once felt unsurvivable. Every hard season, every moment you thought you wouldn’t get through. You did. That is no small feat. Your brain forgets those victories the moment they pass, but they still count.”

    Learning how to cope with life isn’t just about “toughness.” Resilience is a measurable, multi-layered process tied to effective coping strategies. A 2025 study in Psychology Today points out that rising above adversity isn’t the simple solution. Having support systems that function well enough means you don’t have to.

    Becoming what we desperately want

    “You’ve changed in ways you once desperately wanted. Think back to who you were three or five years ago. Some of the growth you desperately wanted back then, you’re living it now.” Meltzer adds, “However, your brain likes to move the goal post without telling you.”

    People constantly face an adjustment to satisfaction because expectations rise over time. A 2024 study in Springer Nature Link explored the hedonic treadmill. Even after massive achievements, the boost of happiness doesn’t last as long as people expect.

    personal preference, dislikes, self-awareness, secure attachment
    She doesn’t like it.
    Photo credit Canva

    Knowing what we don’t like

    “You know what you don’t want.” Meltzer continues, “That might sound like a consolation prize, but it’s actually hard-earned clarity. A lot of people waste years chasing the wrong things. But knowing what drains you, what doesn’t serve you, what you won’t settle for anymore, that’s actual progress.”

    Psychology emphasizes that self-awareness leads to better behavior and stronger emotional regulation. A 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior found that this process brings a clearer sense of who we are and who we are becoming.

    An easy relationship to navigate

    “You have at least one relationship that feels easy. You’re at least one person that doesn’t require a performance from you. Someone who you can be a little bit of a mess around. You don’t need to be perfect around them, and it feels easy.” Meltzer explains the value, saying, “That kind of connection is rarer than people like to admit.”

    Strong interpersonal relationships are key predictors of mental health and well-being. A 2024 study in the National Library of Medicine found that secure attachment helps people experience fewer of the symptoms associated with anxiety and depression. Even one stable, supportive relationship is linked to long-term well-being.

    neuroplasticity, achievement, growth mindset, motivation
    Feelings of achievement.
    Photo credit Canva

    Learning something new

    “You’ve learned something in the last year.” Meltzer explains, “Whether it’s a skill, a perspective, a hard lesson, all of it counts. Remember, a brain that’s still learning is a brain that’s still growing.”

    The human brain remains capable of learning and adapting throughout a person’s life. A 2025 study published in MDPI found that brain neuroplasticity allows traits such as emotional regulation and awareness to be reorganized and improved over time.

    Asking better questions

    Lastly, Meltzer offers, “You’re asking the right questions. The fact that you’re reflecting and trying to see your life more clearly, that’s a sign of someone who hasn’t given up.”

    Believing that change is possible shapes emotional recovery and motivation. A 2025 study in Springer Nature Link showed that a growth mindset leads to better psychological outcomes and improves a person’s ability to adapt to new situations.

    appreciation, gratitude, reflection, mental health
    A woman enjoys the sunlight on her face.
    Photo credit Canva

    People are doing better than they think

    These six signs shared by Meltzer helped viewers understand that they’re doing better than they think. As people flooded the comment section, some seemed to struggle with #4, having that one reliable friend. Still, most were just appreciative.

    “This made me feel so much better”

    “i don’t have number 4 unless my dog counts”

    “all I need now is the 4th one, I’m working towards it by socializing more it’s challenging but I’m learning”

    “I’m winning despite feeling defeated”

    “I needed this right now.”

    “Does Mom count for #4?”

    “I’ll give myself credit, it been rough recently, 5 out of 6 is better than I expected”

    “This made me remember how far I have become even tho I still work on things, it’s so good to get these reminders this genuinely made my day”

    Meltzer tries to help people reframe their perspectives. Often, things look like they’re “not enough” even though the actual evidence suggests otherwise. Psychology reveals growth is incremental and easy to miss. The fact that a person wants to do better is the clearest sign that personal growth is already underway.

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