Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing; Szigeti et al 2021

Friday Journal Club #1

Tyler Quigley

Mar 12, 2021

Microdosing is the practice of taking low doses of psychedelic molecules, like a supplement. Anecdotes suggest it can boost focus, well-being, creativity, and more, but this has yet to be teased apart from placebo effects.
This study is the largest placebo-controlled study on microdosing to date; participants recruited online and participated in experiment from home rather than in a clinical setting.
Participants sourced their own psychedelic substance, packaged capsules with either a microdose or nothing (placebo), organized them into weekly sets, and then put them into QR-coded envelopes. After shuffling the envelopes, participants were assigned to either a placebo group, a half-placebo half-microdose group, or a microdose group.
Participants took their assigned capsules according to a set schedule for four weeks. Throughout the regimen, participants answered questionnaires designed assess their mental well-being, cognitive function, and whether they knew they had taken a microdose or placebo.
Researchers found that both microdose and placebo groups reported increases in psychological traits such as well-being, mindfulness, life satisfaction, and openness and decreases in paranoia and neuroticism.
Participants who guessed that they had taken microdose, whether they actually had or hadn’t, demonstrated significantly increased positive psychological traits.
Overall, this study demonstrates that positive effects of microdosing may be due to the user believing in the benefits of microdosing, rather than working via pharmacological action.

Key Limitations:

Most of the psychedelics sourced by participants were from the black market, and so true dosages are not known, however:
- Users that reported microdosing 12 ug of LSD or higher guessed microdosing days correctly more often then predicted by chance, suggesting that doses were noticeable at levels previously published.
- 90% of black market LSD in this area at the time of study was true LSD
Researchers cannot confirm whether participants followed instructions.
Most participants were healthy individuals, study does not rule out that microdosing could be beneficial for individuals with mental illness.
Possible that sample size was still not large enough to see effect; microdosers did show improvement on all measures, just not at a statistically significant level.

Key Figures:

Figure 2: Experimental Set-Up

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Figure 3: Microdosers score highest for all psychological well-being traits, though their scores are not significantly different from half-microdose and placebo.

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👨🏽‍🔬 My take:

I hope Silicon Valley is okay after this article’s publication. This is pretty damning research for firm believers that small doses of LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelic molecules hold the key to mental wellness, creativity and productivity. However, this research also demonstrates how powerful the gullibility of our own minds can be.

An important concept that is not touched on here is set & setting. I will deep dive into this topic once we get through the fundamentals. Basically, it’s the poorly understood concept that one’s mindset and surroundings have a critical influence on their conscious experience on a drug. How important is set & setting on microdosing? Does a participant’s mindset going into this study influence their experience on microdoses? If an individual who is benefitting from microdosing reads this research, will the benefits go away? How can we control for all of this “in the real world” outside of clinical setting?

Many questions remain, so I’m not counting out microdosing yet. If it works for you, then that’s all the evidence you need. And please, app developers, keep doing whatever it is that compelled you to create this.

📃 Here’s the paper:

Szigeti B, Kartner L, Blemings A, Rosas F, Feilding A, Nutt DJ, et al. Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing. Elife [Internet]. 2021;10:1–26. Available from: Here