You've probably heard about microdosing, the "productivity hack" popular among
Silicon Valley engineers and
business leaders. Microdosers take regular small doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. At these doses, they don't experience mind-bending, hallucinatory trips, but they say they get a jolt in creativity and focus that can elevate work performance, help
relationships, and generally improve a stressful and demanding daily life. If its proponents are to be believed, microdosing offers the cure for an era dominated by digital distractions and
existential anxiety—a cup of coffee with a little Tony Robbins stirred in.
So far, though, it's been impossible to separate truth from hype. That's because, until recently, microdoses haven't been tested in placebo-controlled trials. Late last year, the
first placebo-controlled microdose trial was published. The study concluded that microdoses of LSD appreciably altered subjects' sense of time, allowing them to more accurately reproduce lapsed spans of time. While it doesn't prove that microdoses act as a novel cognitive enhancer, the study starts to piece together a compelling story on how LSD alters the brain's perceptive and cognitive systems in a way that could lead to more creativity and focus.
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But does a microdose change brain function in a subperceptual way? There's a myriad of ways to test this, but Terhune looked specifically at the way the subjects perceive time. When shown a blue dot on a screen for a specific length of time, the subjects were asked to recreate that length of time by pressing a key. Typically, with longer time intervals, people underrepresent time (i.e. hold the key down for a shorter period of time than reality). In the study, those who received microdoses held the key longer, better representing the actual time interval.
Does this mean microdosing makes you smarter? Terhune and his co-authors were cautious in overinterpreting their finding. For one, it's not clear that perceiving time more accurately is preferable. The brain seems to favor underrepresenting time for reasons that are unclear. Disrupting the brain's default way of representing time, though, may beneficial in certain daily tasks or creative pursuits. That's not clear yet, and the relationship between time perception and cognitive function needs to be further developed. Importantly, though, the finding does show that microdoses changed brain function in some way, despite not inducing a strong drug "feeling."
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