A psychedelic researcher’s approach to creating a psilocybin session playlist

Kelan Thomas write this fun piece for the MAPS Bulletin, commenting: "Psychedelic music session playlists have been utilized consistently for modern psychedelic-assisted therapy clinical trials, and more recently researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College of London have specifically studied the effect of these music playlists on participants in trials. In the previous era of psychedelic-assisted therapy trials, researchers Gaston and Eagle (1970) also conducted research on response to music in LSD-assisted therapy under various experimental conditions (including no music). I have collected and listened to playlists from the more recent psilocybin-assisted therapy trials, to summarize the similarities and differences among them, especially in the context of their temporal relationship to the psilocybin session’s subjective experience.  The minimum duration of a psilocybin playlist is roughly 6 hours, which coincides with the time that subjective effects for psilocybin typically wear off as reported by a return to baseline on drug effect rating scales. Musical playlists have been reported in the LSD therapy literature, with Eisner and Cohen (1958) using participant selections or semi-classical music in the early phase and more piano concertos during the peak phase. Later publications with LSD and psilocybin have parsed the playlist selections into more discrete phases (Kaelen, 2017) … I grew up listening to music as much as possible and would often select music that resonated with my current mood state to express those emotions more fully. In college, I became a radio DJ and completed some musicology coursework, while also attending many live music events. This is also when I first started playing music selections for my friends to engage in deep listening as breaks from studying. When I decided to focus my psychiatric pharmacy scholarship on psychedelic medicine, it seemed like a natural extension of these interests to develop session playlists. In clinical trials creating a standardized playlist is necessary, but in the future, I hope facilitators will also consider a more individualized approach to psychedelic playlists based on each person’s musical history. For some examples of my playlists in various media formats, please visit the bottom of this webpage: https://linktr.ee/kelanthomas."

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