In late 2015, Rolling Stone wrote about an unlikely "hot new business trip" taking Silicon Valley by storm: microdosing LSD. It was the post that launched a thousand blogs, and in the year and a half since, nary a media outlet hasn't written about microdosing at least once.As its name suggests, microdosing involves regularly taking hits of acid that are so small (between 1 and 10 micrograms, or below a tenth of a regular dose) that users won't feel any of the trippy effects. Still, the microdosing community swears by the practice and reports boosted creativity, energy and a sense of wellbeing, as well as lower levels of depression. But despite the growing popular interest in microdosing over the last year and a half, there was little scientific evidence to back up the experiences that microdosers were reporting. Could it all be placebo and SV technohipsters are chewing scraps of blotter paper for nothing?Enter Jim Fadiman, a pioneer of psychedelic studies who was researching the effects of LSD right up until it was federally banned in 1966 (although his informal research never seems to have stopped). For the last five years, Fadiman has been laying the groundwork for a science of microdosing, and last weekend during the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) psychedelic science conference, he revealed some surprising initial results from his independent microdosing study.Continue reading on Motherboard.