Here's Scientist Bill Richards's Playlist for Tripping on Mushrooms

“I make the best musical choices I can, trying to separate the ‘very good’ and the ‘excellent’ on the basis of years of experience with many different people,” Richards tells Inverse.

“There’s only room for so much music in a six- to seven-hour period of time.”

Whether a session is held for treating anxiety, depression, and fear surrounding a terminal illness, or deepening meditative practice through a mystical experience — both things Richards has studied — he values music as a way to support a person’s experience.

It’s not a “trippy” playlist, though. You won’t find any psytrance or techno on the list, no Infected Mushroom, Shpongle, Daft Punk, nor any other music you might associate with altered states. Instead, there’s plenty of Brahms, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Bach. Richards says there’s a good reason for this: Orchestral music is less distracting and less likely to give room for a person to fall back on normal patterns of thinking.

“Except in the final phase, I tend to avoid music with words in the language of the volunteer, so as to discourage the rational mind from following the content of the words,” he says. “The human voice, as a solo or choir, can be very supportive, even maternal, but it is received as ‘another instrument of the orchestra.’”