Hacking Your Brain

The 60's-era psychedelics that heralded the Summer of Love are back big-time (but in tiny doses) for power women to reach a different kind of career high.

- Noreen Malone

KAREN SMITH HAS A LOT ON HER MIND. The 32-year-old lives in Chicago, where, after working for tech startups abroad for 10 years, she moved last year with her husband to attend a graduate program in data science. On top of her academic studies, Smith works 10 to 30 hours a week as the data guru for a consulting firm. But late last year, what was really bringing her down was the bleak Midwest winters. That, and she’d recently cut out her daily habit of cigarettes and marijuana, frustrated that she’d become so dependent on pot to manage her mood. She needed something to take the edge off.

Smith—whose husband was also feeling low and looking for relief—had an idea, something she’d run across on Reddit. After some research, her husband bought psilocybin (psychedelic) mushrooms from a friend, ground them up with a Cuisinart spice grinder, and separated them into gel capsules ordered from Amazon. The dosage was precisely measured and precisely tiny: 10 micrograms for Smith’s husband and about half of that for her, which is just below the threshold of what would normally make a user “trip.” She took the homemade pill with a glass of water and waited. A few days later, she swallowed another one.