this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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dart board;; science bs
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What happened was that the people who self-rated themselves as happy before the experience saw virtually no improvement after the experience. Most of the positive outcomes were due to the people who stated they were distressed before the experience.
Also, this link is not pay walled, btw.
from the actual study:
"In contrast the only statistically significant effect we find for non-distressed individuals is a positive, but fleeting, effect on happiness (Figure 2C)."
Pages 17 and 18 of the original study.
https://mattjlowe.github.io/files/Francois%20Lowe%20Matavelli%20(18dec25)%20Psychedelics.pdf
Seems subscription walled to me. I only see a useless couple of intro paragraphs. Better to link to the actual study instead of a medium blog.
Really? This link should be behind a pay wall: https://medium.com/cabbanis/what-happens-when-a-happy-person-takes-ayahuasca-f793d5685cdf?sk=c6c6098f7d39b352e474a0546fd73795
Yes, it's behind some kind of wall for me. I don't know for certain that it's a pay wall, it might be available to free subscribers or whatever, but I'm not gonna sign up whether it's paid of not. I dislike Medium and would rather see the study directly than see someone clickbaiting over it.
(Sometimes paywalls are geofenced too, I think. Every time I load a NYT article from an NYC IP that may or may not be a VPN exit node, it works, but any other IP they block with the "please subscribe" blocker.)
Here it is, in case it was unaccessible before:
https://mattjlowe.github.io/files/Francois%20Lowe%20Matavelli%20(18dec25)%20Psychedelics.pdf