Your actions have an effect on everyone who sees them, and even some people who don’t. This applies to both negative and positive actions. Children are much more easily influenced than adults — their personalities and opinions are not as well-formed and, as such, are more malleable. But everyone is influenced by everything they see, hear, or otherwise experience. Most things affect us so little that nobody could ever notice the change in us. Even so, the number of things we do and the number of people they affect mean that we should always strive to be good role models, acting as if a dozen children were watching us.

Imagine you see someone throw a piece of trash on the street. Will it make you more likely to litter in the future? My answer is ‘yes’, though probably by such a tiny amount that it will never manifest itself. Even so, it will make you more accepting of littering. It reduces the stigma attached to littering which in turn reduces the barrier to this negative action in our society. Do you see how indirect this is? Person A litters in front of person B. Even if person B never litters, their reduced disdain for littering increases the chance that people C, D, E, F, etc. will litter in the future. This is how our actions end up affecting society much more than we think they do.

Now consider the opposite: you see someone pick up someone else’s piece of trash and put it in a trash can. This makes the street cleaner, increases the stigma associated with littering, and decreases the barrier to the positive action of picking up somebody else’s trash. And on another level, it makes you happier and increases your faith in humanity. This is a wonderful thing. Positive actions are as infectious as negative actions are, perhaps even more so.

I’m not saying you should spend all your time walking around cleaning up other people’s messes, but think about this next time you see a crumpled up piece of paper on the street.

“Magic” mushrooms really do have a spiritual effect on people, according to the most rigorous look yet at this aspect of the fungus’s active ingredient.

About one-third of volunteers in the carefully controlled new study had a “complete” mystical experience after taking psilocybin, with half of them describing their encounter as the single most spiritually significant experience in their lifetimes.

Read the rest of the article here.

There’s also a Q&A with Roland Griffiths, the study’s lead researcher:

Q 1: Why did you undertake this research?

In the 1950s and 1960s, basic science and applied research studies were taking place with hallucinogens, offering hints that they might be of value in psychotherapy, addiction treatment, and creativity enhancement, and suggestions that the hallucinogens can occasion mystical-type experiences. Laws enacted in response to excesses of the “psychedelic 1960s” stopped almost all that work, leaving some promising threads dangling. Despite ongoing illicit and licit use, remarkably little is known, from the standpoint of modern psychopharmacology research, about the acute and long-term effects of the hallucinogens. Our study is among the first to re-open this field. Since the Hopkins psilocybin work began, researchers at other major universities, such as UCLA, the University of Arizona, and Harvard, have begun planning or are carrying out hallucinogen research.

Read the rest of the Q&A here.