How we got here.

I want to lay this out, because most people assume psychedelics went from illegal to legal on a vibe. They did not. A small group of researchers, mostly at Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London, spent twenty years running careful trials, and the results kept holding up. This is the trail.

So no, nothing has full FDA approval yet. The states did not wait for it, and the next section shows where.

Music is the hidden therapist

That phrase is the title of a 2018 paper from Imperial College London. The researchers interviewed nineteen people after psilocybin therapy for depression and found that how each person experienced the music predicted how much better they felt a week later. How strong the drug felt predicted nothing. (Kaelen et al., 2018)

Three years later a team at Johns Hopkins got curious about whether the standard classical playlist was actually the right choice. They ran sessions with overtone-heavy music instead: singing bowls, gongs, sitar, overtone singing. Mystical experience scores trended higher with the overtones, and six of the ten people picked that music for their third session. Ten people is a small study. It still cracked the assumption that Bach owns this work. (Strickland, Garcia-Romeu and Johnson, 2021)

Here is what I notice reading all of it. Every one of these trials used recordings. I have not found a single published study of a trained musician sitting beside the person and playing. The cultures I learned from have done exactly that for thousands of years. That is the study I want to help run, and these are the musicians I want to train for it.

What it does to your own brain

Children learn music easily because their brains are inside a window. Those windows close. In 2023, Gül Dölen's lab at Johns Hopkins reported in Nature that psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, and ibogaine each reopened one of those windows in adult mice, a critical period for social learning, and with psilocybin it stayed open for about two weeks. Mice, I know. Still. If the medicine puts a person back into a learning state, I want to know what they are learning while it is open. (Nardou et al., 2023)

The rest of this is about you, with or without the medicine. In Hannover and Geneva, 156 people in their sixties and seventies who had never played were given a year of piano lessons, or a year of music listening for the control group. The piano players came out with better fine motor control and, probably, better working memory. (European Journal of Neuroscience, 2023) In Australia, a Monash University study followed more than 10,800 people over 70 and found that the ones who played an instrument had a 35% lower rate of dementia. That is a correlation, and it points the same direction as the trial. (Monash, 2025)

And singing with other people does something to the body you can measure. Researchers at Oxford and Goldsmiths tested choir members before and after ninety minutes of singing. People felt closer to each other afterward, and their pain thresholds went up, which is how you measure endorphins without a lumbar puncture. (Weinstein et al., 2016)

If you hold space for a living, your own nervous system is the instrument you use most. This is a way to take care of it.