I’ve felt that this was true for several years now, but this is the first time I have found such a convincing talk backing up my hunch.

(David Edwards, RawStory.com, September 29th, 2011)
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A new study suggests that a single dose of psilocybin — the active ingredient in “Magic Mushrooms” — can result in improved personality traits over the long term. . . . Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that individuals who received the drug once in a clinical setting reported a greater sense of “openness” that often lasted 14 months or longer, according to study published this week in theJournal of Psychopharmacology. . . . The study defined openness as a personality trait that “encompasses aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination and fantasy, and broad-minded tolerance of others’ viewpoints and values.” It is one of five main personality traits that are shared among all cultures worldwide. . . . ”The mystical experience has certain qualities,” lead author Katherine MacLean said. “The primary one is that you feel a certain kind of connectedness and unity with everything and everyone.” . . . Because personality traits are generally considered to remain stable throughout a persons lifetime, researchers are excited about therapeutic implications of the study. . . . “[T]his study shows that psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general,” study author Roland R. Griffiths told USA Today. “And the changes we see appear to be long-term.” . . . In a smaller study published earlier this year, Johns Hopkins scientists determined the the proper dose levels needed to create positive changes in attitudes, mood, life satisfaction, and behavior.

Among several other gems that Kevin Slavin provides in this fascinating talk is my favorite, “It’s a bright future if you’re an algorithm.” …. but if you happen to be something else then perhaps you should think about what he has to say.

This is a very interesting TED talk about the fact that your search results and my search results will be different, even when we search on the exact same phrase or the same word at the exact same time. As the presenter, Eli Pariser, says, “The Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see.”

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