“participants rated the vividness of colour experiences and selected specific colours in response to a set of graphemes (letters/sounds like ‘S’, ‘U’, ‘OO’) and sounds in L SD and placebo conditions. Participants also independently completed measures of absorption and visual imagery” (Terhune et al. 2016). Is that a good measure for “experience of drug-induced synaesthesia-like experiences”. LSD volunteers are not reliable because they’re in no uncertain terms behaving unpredictably. The evidence suggests they are in a disorganised, creative, and free roaming state of consciousness (Kaelenso et al. 2014) to use any type of self-assessment would be fraught with subjectivity and miscommunication through their own sensitivity to emotional states and others, this is related to atypical experiences under the effect of psychedelic drugs. I don’t think it is feasible to test highly sensitive individuals, in lucid dream-like states of mind under controlled experimental conditions without controlling for said conditions, we would ideally need a condition control group as well as a placebo control condition group, although in my opinion a placebo control isn’t necessary because we are aware the drugs are having a distinct effect and do not need confirmation that these effects are not being caused by placebo effects. What we need to account for is the set and setting, the old idiom of many experienced users of psychedelic drugs, including but not limited to culturally relevant rituals, such as you may refer to in shamanic practices. Although these rituals are highly relevant in western societies too, referring to Free-Masonry practices where ritual is highly relevant in inducing specific states of consciousness.
I am not sure I completely understand what you are asking. However a classic research design, which I have used in research on cannabis, and has been used also with alcohol, uses four different conditions as follows:
1 2
P Placebo Informed that it is a placebo Informed that it is a drug
D Drug [ Informed that it is a placebo] Informed that it is a drug
Condition D1 is ethically controversial and we decided not to include it in our cannabis study. However, this led to at least one rejection by a journal editor!
There is an amazingly strong placebo effect in condition P2 among experienced users, due to the set and setting factors you mentioned in your question. Never discount the placebo effect even in spite of your assumption: "drugs are having a distinct effect and do not need confirmation that these effects are not being caused by placebo effects."
I would be interested in communicating further about your research project.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question!
I can see the validity in using the design you are mentioning, was it a repeated-measures/within-participants design?
However, the study I was referring to was investigating the experience of synaesthesia while under the influence of LSD. There may be a need for a placebo control in the experimental design but considering the research failed to find a strong enough presence of synaesthesia I was suggesting that by altering the conditions of the environment and or stimuli there may be an increased likelihood of finding the effect they were looking for, although that was actually suggested in the paper so I'm really just reiterating the ideas the authors made.
I would interested to read further on the placebo effects you found! I'm in the early stages of my research but I will continue to stay in communication.
The design was independent groups. Repeated measures isn't really possible because it becomes a 'guessing game' for participants to outwit the experimenter. We used repeated measures designs in drug and alcohol studies where the participants entered every possible combination of a 3 x 3 matrix of cannabis (3 does) and alcohol (3 doses) with a practice session at the beginning. They took great delight in trying to correctly guess the specific combination at each particular session.
I am not aware of the study you are referring to, but synaesthesia is quite rare, even with psychedelics. You might want to investigate the influence of music as part of the setting or other forms of acoustic stimuli including readings of literary texts such as poetry to stimulate the experience. The set could also be manipulated to induce synaesthesia by raising the expectancies of the participants. It is an interesting field.
I would like to relate Huston Smith's observation that classic placebo-controlled studies are ineffective, I would even say irrelevant, in psychedelic research since it quickly becomes apparent to all involved, subjects and researchers alike, who got the placebo and who got the psychedelic agent (he made such a comment after having been involved with the original Good Friday experiment). Moreover, such studies stem from the ethos of reductionist-materialist scientific practices - which are of value in clearly materialistic sciences like chemistry, for instance - in which the fantasy of "objective" science can be approximated. Ultimately all data obtained from experimentation must be interpreted by human beings, who are subjects. As I say this approach has practical value within the parameters of the Newtonian scientific worldview, which has been of enormous value in consensual reality; but becomes irrelevant, even ridiculous, to one who is in a psychedelic state. Not only are their rational communicative capabilities impaired - the observation of an outside observer - but their valuation of participating in such a study becomes laughable in their alternative/expanded state of reference. The research of Claudio Naranjo or Stanislav Grof, for instance, is more relevant. Here, a highly trained scientific observer of those in psychedelic states apply a qualitative analysis, which can really only be conducted after acquiring a significant corpus of experience and acknowledging that subjects can evaluate subjects only within a tentative theoretical framework - the ideal of true science in any case, where theory must be endlessly revised to match observation. Also, as Mr. Marks observed, synaesthesia is a fairly infrequent feature of psychedelic states. Further, experiments meant to observe particular outcomes in psychedelic states cannot be crafted by design due to the highly individualistic nature of the entheogenic experience. I should mention my bias: I am a psychologist focusing on consciousness studies, which can only be a qualitative interpretation. This does not preclude rational and scientific study, but it does preclude the reductionist gold standard of objectivity and unswervingly reproducible outcomes.
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