For a long time, psychologists thought that as adults, our personalities were relatively fixed.

As we age, neuroplasticity - or our brain's ability to learn new things and form new connections - tends to decrease. In other words, our patterns of thought, habits, and ways of being become more ingrained and rigid.

Now, new research between Soltara, Imperial College London, and the University of Georgia is showing that Ayahuasca plant medicine, when held within a ceremonial container, can increase neuroplasticity and change fundamental aspects of our personality.

It is our sincere pleasure to announce a research study published in Nature Scientific Reports, examining changes in personality after shamanic ceremonial use of Ayahuasca.

Background & Why this Study Matters

Back in 2019, Soltara opened its doors to these research teams, inviting guests to reflect on their ceremony experiences and what shifted for them afterward. The study, led by psychologist Dr. Keith Campbell with doctoral candidate Brandon Weiss, set out to measure something specific: whether Ayahuasca in a ceremonial setting can change personality itself. 

That's a bigger question than it might sound. Personality shapes the goals we set, the values we hold, our capacity to actually reach those goals, and — by a growing body of research — our health, wellbeing, and longevity. It also underpins how mental illness is now understood, with many clinical conditions increasingly viewed as extreme or maladaptive versions of ordinary personality traits. 

In other words, if personality can genuinely shift, people's lives can shift with it.

Importantly, the researchers were also interested in what ceremony offers that a clinical setting doesn't. As Western institutions build out protocols for psychedelic-assisted therapy, the team saw real value in studying a practice refined over generations — the communal setting, the icaros (healing songs) sung over each person, the guiding presence of the Indigenous healer and their Shipibo tradition, and the purgative and physically demanding aspects unique to Ayahuasca — for what it might teach modern treatment. 

The Results

The study followed 256 people through Ayahuasca retreats at three centers in Costa Rica and Peru, including Soltara. Participants filled out a well-established personality questionnaire before their retreat, in the week after, and again three months later — and, importantly, so did a friend or family member back home, who rated them without knowing what the person had reported about themselves.

The biggest and most durable shift was a drop in what psychologists call neuroticism: the tendency toward worry, anxiety, self-criticism, and emotional reactivity. The decline was substantial right after the retreat and still clearly present three months on — and friends and family independently noticed it too, which is what makes the finding hard to dismiss as wishful thinking.

For context, the size of the change after roughly ten days at a retreat was comparable to what the research literature typically finds after several weeks of clinical treatment. Participants also reported modest increases in extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.

Two things predicted who changed most: having a profound, mystical-feeling experience during ceremony, and doing the harder work of revisiting and revising painful beliefs about oneself — a process the authors point out looks a lot like what happens in good psychotherapy. 

Notably, having a difficult or uncomfortable ceremony didn't predict worse outcomes; if anything, the opposite. 

The researchers are careful about what the study can't show: there was no placebo group, so some of the benefit may come from the retreat setting itself rather than the medicine, and no one knows yet how long the effects last beyond three months.

The Importance of Ceremony

As organizations like the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the Beckley Foundation, and others study the benefits of psychedelics under controlled laboratory conditions, many in the West are beginning to create protocols for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. One of the main questions is how this type of healing will fit into the broader field of mental healthcare. 

At Soltara, we take our role in the expansion of these sacred medicines seriously. In considering how these medicines will be offered to more people around the world, it is incredibly important to center the Indigenous cultures, traditions, and wisdom that have evolved over generations alongside the medicine use itself. There is a reason and intention for every aspect of the preparation, training, ceremony, and integration that this work involves. It is a spiritual and biological technology that modern science may not yet have the right frameworks to fully understand. Nevertheless, there is much that modern medicine can learn to inform future protocols: a communal/group setting, ritual, a spiritually rooted foundation informed by experienced Indigenous wisdom keepers, guiding elements and tools (e.g., chanting of song over the course of the ceremony), and personal engagement with the ceremony leader (e.g., personal icaro song delivered by the healer).

In the Shipibo tradition, one cannot separate the medicine from the ceremonial and cultural context. As plant medicine reaches more people, it is imperative that we remain rooted in this understanding as we seek to support the best possible outcomes of this expansion - individually, and collectively. We are grateful to collaborate with scientists and research institutions who understand, honor, and learn from the Indigenous wisdom keepers and their traditions, as we support the collaboration of spirituality and science.

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