Oshan Jarow

Want to learn how to meditate? Scientists have a new theory that might change how you practice.

DMT, “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family,” explained.

The human mind is designed to predict, but uncertainty helps us thrive.

Whippets on TikTok are just a re-run of inhaling nitrous on stage in the 1800s.

New brain stimulation techniques could help scientists understand how meditation changes the mind.

A new study argues the long-run benefits outweigh the costs nearly 10 to 1. A child allowance would lift kids out of poverty now, and be an investment in our society.

From megaquakes in Japan to flooding in Vermont, or The Really Big One, natural disasters are becoming a bigger part of travel. Here’s how to prepare.

Many thought Lykos Therapeutics’s application to the FDA for psychedelic therapy with ecstasy was a done deal. What happens now?

We’re flooded by guaranteed income pilot experiments that offer some promising results, but don’t seem to be moving us any closer to actual federal policy. Yet findings published today from the largest randomized basic income experiment in the US to date, backed by Sam Altman and OpenAI, should get your notice. The study, held from November 2020 through October 2023, gave 1,000 recipients $1,000 per month, no strings attached. It’s one of the biggest and longest trials ever run on direct cash gi…

After Colorado became the first state to legalize the sale of recreational cannabis to any adult in 2014, it took just 10 years for about half of the country to follow suit. More than 100 million adults in the US went from having no legal access to the drug to being able to waltz into their local dispensary, buy some weed, and take it home to get as stoned as they please. Now, Beau Kilmer, co-director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, sees the same kind of early activity in state psyched…

The Gallup Global Emotions Report for 2024, released last Tuesday, starts with a provocation. By trying to measure life’s intangibles, like feelings and emotions, the survey is seeking insights into the health of societies that, as the authors of the report themselves note, “traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture.” Thankfully, the report doesn’t offer yet another critique of why GDP isn’t a perfect indicator for progress. Instead, it reports on the annual stat…

One strange thing about the American unemployment insurance (UI) system — which provides weekly payments to jobless people who meet certain criteria — is that it’s not insurance against being unemployed. More accurately, it’s insurance against losing a job “through no fault of your own,” which makes UI more like “getting laid off insurance.” Aside from a few exceptions in some states for things like escaping domestic violence or hostile workplaces, voluntarily leaving your job disqualifies you…

A film adaptation of science fiction author Terry Bisson’s 1991 short story, They’re Made out of Meat, opens with two aliens in dismay. Sitting in a roadside diner booth disguised as humans, cigarettes hanging limp from their mouths, they’re grappling with an observation about the creatures who surround them: Humans, it seems, are made entirely of meat. They’re dumbstruck by the idea that meat alone, with no help from machines, can generate a thinking mind. “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to b…

Some of the rhetoric around meditation can get pretty extreme: awaken us from the illusion of selfhood, dissolve the mental habits that generate suffering, and maybe merge with the primordial oneness that our thinking minds make us feel separate from. But of the 35 million Americans (as of 2017) who find some crevice of their day to practice some kind of meditation, including the sort of quick mindfulness meditation that tops app-store charts and bestseller lists, it’s unsurprising that many wi…

Today, an Federal Drug Administration advisory committee held a public hearing to weigh the evidence on MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, casting a non-binding vote against approving the treatment — indicating strong odds that the FDA will follow suit in their official determination, and setting a handful of precedents for efforts to legalize other psychedelics that are close behind. The FDA’s decision is slated to arrive by August 11, and if MDMA therapy is approved, it will mark…

Here’s another strange and under-studied prospect of psychedelics: a world without severe chronic pain. For Court Wing, a former martial artist and CrossFit trainer, the most surprising thing about participating in a 2020 clinical trial at NYU for psilocybin and major depressive disorder wasn’t that his depression — which had resisted treatment for over five years — disappeared. It was that his long-standing chronic pain, something unrelated to the trial’s focus, also disappeared. “Shockingly, I…

Mindfulness is one thing. Jhāna meditation is stranger, stronger, and going mainstream.

From humans to AI machine learning models, information loss is a common problem. When it comes to our own consciousness, language has an indescribability problem.

The 40-hour workweek in the US will turn 84 this June, making it older than most human beings alive today. But unlike humans, who are always changing and adapting, today’s standard workweek has spent its 84 years frozen in time. The last time federal law reduced the workweek was in 1940. An amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) dropped the threshold of hours after which workers qualify for overtime pay from 44 to 40, capping off a steady decline in average working hours that began bac…

In 2020, it looked as though the war on drugs would begin to end in Oregon. After Measure 110 was passed that year, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs that had been outlawed by the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, ranging from heroin and cocaine to LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. When it went into effect in early 2021, the move was celebrated by drug reform advocates who had long been calling for decriminalization in the wake of President N…