The key to optimizing your mind: How truffles can help cultivate passion, creativity and empathy

As an entrepreneur, you strive to be the best version of yourself everyday. To be efficient and aware, to have groundbreaking insights into brand new innovations, and to work harmoniously with others. These form a solid foundation for success in your professional (and personal) life.

But awareness and insight are often elusive. When we want to focus, our minds turn into a circus. Yet when we seek new ideas, our minds go blank. Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

There is growing anecdotal and scientific evidence, however, showing how you can optimise your mind. In this article, I want to show you how psychedelic truffles can help you maintain passion, develop more empathy, and become more creative.

Increased Empathy and Connectedness
Psilocybin is a powerful molecule found within psychedelic truffles. It mimics the effects of serotonin, a neurotransmitter responsible for (among other things) mood, learning and memory. Psilocybin and serotonin have almost identical shapes, which allows the former to bins to the densely packed serotonin receptors in the outer layer of the brain. This then sends the mind into a completely different realm of thinking.

Without psilocybin, information is sent from one brain region to the next in a very predictable way. When you read a sign, electrochemical signals travel from the retina to the back of the brain via neurons, the brain cells that form the information highways in your brain. Visual processing occurs here, allowing you to interpret what you have seen. Once processing is done here, the signals can then get back on the neural highway and travel further into the brain.

But when psilocybin is present, there is a huge change. These once orderly highways are completely re-structured. Areas of the brain that were barely acquainted before, are now able to share a huge dialogue. Suddenly, it is possible to see the world from a completely different perspective.

The world is a manifestation of your mind, and this shift in perspective can benefit the way you interact with the world. Recent research has revealed that psilocybin users have a deeper sense of connectedness with others and their environment. Brian, a 50-year old scientist who participated in a psilocybin study at Johns Hopkins University, told Time magazine:

“It became absolutely obvious that perspective determines your experience with reality and that maybe being able to take more perspectives than one will give you a more rich and probably more true version of what reality is.”

Opening up your mind to a different way of thinking allows you to understand others more clearly. By doing this, psilocybin can help you develop an empathetic mind. Your personal and professional relationships will thrive as you cultivate a deeper sense of empathy. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says, “empathy is everything in a business context…there was no way we could innovate without having a deeper sense of empathy.”

Psilocybin acts as a reset button which can make you more creative
It seems that this new perspective can profoundly change your mindset. The world may have seemed stale before, but taking your mind to a completely different place can make everything seem new and fresh again. This can be explained, again, by the restructuring of your neural pathways.

Negative thought processes and bad habits are often associated with predictable and rigid connections in the brain, but psilocybin can change this. By taking psilocybin, your brain turns into a more conscious state (dubbed the entropic state), which basically means that connections are more free and fluid than before. Researchers compare the use of psilocybin to pressing a reset button in your mind.

This reset button is so powerful that it has even shaken people out of treatment-resistant depression. In the study, patients have described actually feeling their brain structure being re-wired. Robin Carhart-Harris, lead author of the study, told Eurekalert “…one [patient] said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted’.”

With a fresh world to look at, your mind is now more intrigued. These new levels of curiosity can make the most successful entrepreneur. Andrew Bennett, CEO of Havas Creative Group, writes on Entrepeneur that curiosity is the key driver in promoting creativity. And it’s no surprise, then that psilocybin has been shown to boost creative thinking.

Researchers here in the Netherlands showed how psilocybin can make people more cognitively flexible. Volunteers that took part in the study were tested on measures of divergent thinking (the ability to come up with many original answers to one question) before and after they drank some truffle-infused tea at a retreat. The volunteers produced more original answers to questions such as “Think of as many different uses for a pen.” even seven days after using the truffles. These divergent thinking tests are a key marker for levels of creativity, and the truffles boosted the users creative intuition.

Like I said, resetting your perspective can radically change your mindset. If the world can be seen through a new lens, then that will influence the way you interact with it. As things seem new, you want to know more about them, and are able to develop a refined sense of curiosity. Personal and professional struggles can be reframed; in the study, the participants were now able to see more than just a pen. What was an issue before, can now be seen as a challenge, which makes it much easier to find a solution. New experiences and insights from using psilocybin can open up the mind to explore inexplicable ideas. The impossible then becomes possible.

The Entrepreneurial Secret?
Many bloggers, scientists and creatives are crediting their success to psilocybin. More and more stories are being posted about how microdosing (using tiny amounts that don’t cross the perceptual threshold) has helped them on their path to innovation. Many more talk about how they use psilocybin more often to explore themselves and new ideas. Author and angel investor Tim Ferriss uses moderate doses every 6-8 weeks. By doing so, it allows the brain to maintain this fluid state. Research has shown that the structural re-organisation caused by psilocybin doesn’t last forever.

As well as frequency of use, it’s also important to know where and how to use psilocybin. Truffle experiences can be tumultuous and difficult to process. Being in a setting where you can be guided through the experience is hugely beneficial. It also allows you to articulate what questions you might want to explore during the experience, which grounds it in positive intention.

It is this positive intention that can help you develop a more optimised mind. Creativity and empathy can be cultivated, leading to more innovation and ideas in your field, and a deeper sense of connection between yourself and the world around you.

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