Similar to LSD, mescaline and psilocybin19,20,21,22,23,24, Ayahuasca can cause profound changes of perception and cognition, with users reporting increase of awareness, flexible thoughts, insights, disintegration of the self, and attentiveness19, 25.
The "loosened" voice is free to give rise to flexible thoughts, thoughts that bend and curve and yield to a heightened state of suggestibility.
One validated approach involves training for optimism, by modifying the three components of explanatory style (permanence, pervasiveness, personalisation) through transforming negative thinking into positive cognitive processes that promote flexible thoughts and resilience.
Training our brain to be less distracted and reactive, less prone to falling back on ingrained habits, and more flexible in thought unsurprisingly turns out to have lifelong benefits.
Besides just improving cognitive performance, increasing flexible thinking could one day help people with depression or OCD since both disorders suffer from rigid thought patterns.
Fortunately, the policy the Obama administration is actually implementing is more flexible and thought-through.
She added, "It would be great to have studies of more flexible kinds of thought".
"The joint I'd made was a trope on mental mechanisms the flexible workings of thought, a model of mental gymnastics, the brain as an adjustable tool.
