4. MDMA

You love everyone, everyone is smiling, everyone is laughing with you, not at you: There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of how MDMA makes you feel loving, trusting, friendly, and sociable. It was fascinating to see how this party drug is being researched in serious studies and even more fascinating to see how fruitful the results are (just to be clear: it is not the same as ecstasy as it does not contain crap they add to the pills). Testing it on a sample of mentally healthy people provided some basics for the typical pro-social behaviour. When on MDMA, people have a hard time recognising negative emotions, but are much better (and biased towards) recognising positive ones. So you're being all friendly and social partly because you just don't perceive negative cues in the faces of others. Another finding has shown a remarkable increase in empathy accompanied by high levels of oxytocin (you might have heard of it as "cuddle hormone", "love molecule" or other overgeneralising names) in the blood. Which makes me wonder whether MDMA could be used to treat psychopaths who are known to lack any empathy whatsoever (please don't steal my idea, I will find you and I will kill you). In some diseases, however, MDMA has already been shown to be quite useful. For example, people suffering from PTSD showed a great improvement up to two month after the end of the treatment. MDMA is thought to losen the grip of the emotions and to reduce the fear connected to the memories so that the trauma can be revisited without being overwhelmed. "The MDMA was like armour that I put all over my body so that I could dive into the darkness of my PTSD, and then come back unscathed", - as one of the patients puts it. Another things MDMA is currently being research for is treatment of social anxiety in people with autism spectrum disorders (to help them to shift towards an attitude of openness and introspection) and anxiety related to life-threatening illnesses (to reduce the disease-induced fear and depression).