I can&#x27;t speak for MDMA, but I have experimented (ok, recreated) with psilocin (shrooms), 4-ACO-DMT, and DMT, which are all serotonin agonists.<p>The best I can describe it is that a high enough dose feels like putting your brain into debugging mode and then cycling through hundreds of circuits simultaneously. It&#x27;s not so much &quot;I am experiencing happy now&quot; as &quot;I am experiencing happy, sad, confused, interested, pulsating colors, fractals, childlike wonder, fear, and every other cognitive state simultaneously or in rapid succession.&quot;<p>Some people get very spiritual about it, but I think you kind of have to be a spiritually inclined person anyway to have that specific experience. I always saw it more of giving the hardware a good jolt and seeing what falls out. It&#x27;s pretty common to go from laughing uncontrollably, to inconsolable sadness, and back again, fairly quickly. This is where a lot of the fear about &quot;bad trips&quot; comes from, but I&#x27;ve found you can manage that with practice and having experienced people tripping with you or babysitting.<p>I do think there are therapeutic benefits though. Even if there are difficult periods, I find I always felt happier, more ok with the world and open to new experiences and attitudes for up to weeks after words. The article briefly mentions how there&#x27;s a hypothesis that depression is possibly an effect of individuals who &quot;over learn&quot; negative experiences and become fixated on negative outcomes, and this makes a lot of sense to me. Aside from a sort of &quot;purging&quot; feeling just from such intense bursts of emotions, I could see how it helped to kind of kick me out of the traps of negative and habitual thinking and emotions. Maybe it helped my neurons &quot;relearn&quot; there are other experiences, emotions, and modes of thinking that I can access too?<p>This is all anecdotal evidence though, gathered while under severe impairment, so take it with that caveat. I would bet that aside from the legal issues, the hardest part of investigating things like psychedelics in a scientific way is that every experience is inherently subjective and personal. Trying to describe and talk about them gets very squishy very quickly.