

Swiss scientists have tested psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, on twelve people and confirmed that it makes time feel slower.

At University Hospital Zürich, each of the volunteers was given a gel capsule with five milligrams of the drug or a lactose placebo. Later, they were asked to perform simple tasks, which would reveal their ability to tell time. When they had consumed the hallucinogen, each subject would take action too soon – indicating that time was moving quite slowly from their point of view.

The duration reproduction task (DRT) followed the same design in both experiments.

A 500 Hz tone was presented to subjects via headphones for a defined duration s (presentation phase); after a constant interval of silence, w = 2 s, the same tone was presented again and the subjects had to switch off the tone by pressing a key when the duration of the second tone was subjectively equal to that of the first tone.

In a report to the journal Neuroscience Letters, which became available on Feb. 9, Jiri Wackermann and her collaborators explained that the hallucinogen acts on proteins called serotonin receptors, but how it affects our perception of time is still not fully understood.

Reference: Jiri Wackermann, Marc Wittmann, Felix Hasler, Franz X. Vollenweider, Effects of varied doses of psilocybin on time interval reproduction in human subjects, Neuroscience Letters, Preprint