What if the key to unlocking genius was just a shift in perspective—one so small you barely notice it?
In Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance, Jim Fadiman and Jordan Gruber explore how tiny doses of psychedelics are quietly transforming lives—boosting clarity, sparking creativity, easing pain, and helping people reconnect to purpose.
This is not another book about tripping. It’s a deeply researched, thoughtfully organized exploration of what happens when we turn down the volume of ordinary consciousness—just enough to let something new in.
Drawing from thousands of personal reports, emerging science, and decades of hard-won experience, this is the most expansive and comprehensive guide to microdosing published to date. The authors take readers far beyond the headlines, charting the nuanced terrain of microdosing’s potential to enhance not just mental health—but performance, insight, and creative fluency.
The content resonates deeply with the research and questions we’re exploring at MINDS. Across disciplines—from art and music to engineering and science—readers report that microdosing doesn’t necessarily make their work “better” in any objective sense. Instead, it makes it easier. Tasks that once felt blocked or burdensome begin to flow. Ideas connect more intuitively. The process becomes more accessible, less encumbered by resistance or self-doubt.
Rather than inducing a psychedelic “trip,” microdosing seems to gently adjust the frame—lowering cognitive friction while increasing access to emotional nuance. The result is often a kind of creative unblocking, where individuals find themselves engaging in their work with greater presence, responsiveness, and vitality.
Fadiman and Gruber also point to a pattern we’re beginning to explore in our own research: that microdosing may increase processing fluency—the brain’s ability to make novel connections with ease and speed. This seems to parallel the hypothesis behind our Mind FLUX study, which investigates how psychedelics may enhance creative problem-solving through the inhibition of hippocampal control on episodic memories, allowing us to more easily jump into new semantic spaces.
But perhaps most striking is the tone of the book itself: it’s not evangelical, but grounded—full of scientific humility and lived wisdom. The authors are careful to acknowledge the limitations, unknowns, and legal risks, while still making space for wonder. They are mapping a new territory, not selling a shortcut.
At MINDS, we believe that altered states—when responsibly approached—can offer a powerful catalyst for insight, innovation, and healing. This book is a vital contribution to that inquiry, helping to map the frontiers of what’s possible.
Recommended for researchers, practitioners, creatives, and the simply curious.
For more on the book take a look here.
