Psilocybin microdosing loosens mental structures, making thoughts less intense and thinking more flexible but less stable, while increasing the salience of external stimuli—sometimes making mundane activities more interesting, sometimes causing sensory overload. The experience is appraised more positively in highly structured environments. Momentary ecological assessments and retrospective interviews gave completely opposite accounts of the experience, highlighting profound methodological challenges in microdosing research. The findings relate to stable versus flexible cognition and the concept of salience, underscoring the need for systematic mixed-methods studies to better characterize the lived experience of psilocybin microdosing.
Patients with affective disorders experience emotional stimuli in laboratory tasks not as isolated events but as part of a complex, temporally unfolding process that can persist and blend across trials, a phenomenon termed impressionability. Two distinct alterations in affectivity were identified: affective enchantment, where intense emotions combine with superstitious thinking, and disintwinement, a sense of detachment and emotional blunting. Standardized image-based tasks often fail to elicit authentic spontaneous emotional responses in clinical populations, limiting their ecological validity. The findings underscore the need for experimental designs that capture the subtle, dynamic nature of altered affectivity, including vital feelings, to better understand emotion dysregulation.