Balazs Szigeti is a neuroscientist whose work focuses on psychedelic pharmacology and clinical trial design. Working primarily at Imperial College London's Centre for Psychedelic Research and later Columbia University, he has become one of the field's most rigorous methodologists — specifically around the challenges of blinding in psychedelic trials.
His most cited contribution is the 2021 self-blinding microdosing study, a citizen-science investigation that recruited participants who were already planning to microdose and randomized them — without researcher control — to either active or placebo capsules prepared by the participants themselves. The study's most striking finding: participants could not reliably distinguish active psilocybin doses from placebo, yet the active group still reported greater benefits. This raised the possibility that expectation, not pharmacology, is the primary driver of perceived microdosing benefits.
Szigeti's methodological insight was to solve the placebo problem in microdosing research without requiring pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin or institutional approval for controlled dosing. His self-blinding protocol turned participants' own uncertainty against the placebo effect: subjects prepared their own doses and placebos in advance, sealed them into opaque capsules in coded batches they would not open until the analysis phase, and administered them according to a pre-specified schedule. This created genuine uncertainty about whether any given dose was active — the psychological foundation of a working placebo condition — without researcher control of the substance.
The resulting 2021 paper in eLife was methodologically sophisticated and intellectually honest about its findings: no significant differences between microdosing and placebo on pre-registered primary outcomes (task performance, cognitive function), but small positive effects on psychological wellbeing measures that were consistent with an expectancy effect. The paper was immediately enlisted by both skeptics ("proof that microdosing doesn't work") and proponents ("the wellbeing effects are real") — a response that Szigeti himself has engaged with directly in subsequent commentary, noting that the distinction between pharmacological and expectancy effects may be less important than whether the practice produces genuine benefit.
Now at Weill Cornell and collaborating with multiple psychedelic research centers, Szigeti continues to develop methodological tools for studying sub-perceptual psychedelic effects. His work exemplifies what rigorous psychedelic science looks like when it maintains high evidentiary standards rather than defaulting to the enthusiasm that sometimes distorts this field.