August 7, 2014 • 30 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and Robert continue their discussion of the overlap between shamanism and cognitive neuroscience. In particular, what sort of hallucinatory experiences do substances like DMT, psilocybin and salvia grant users? Why do humans have trace elements of DMT in their bodies? All these questions and more will be discussed.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Julie Douglas is on vacation
this week, so we're taking the opportunity to re air
our Scientists and the Shaman pair of episodes. These deal
(00:24):
with psychedelics, the history of psychedelics, and also our ability
to turn to these substances to better understand how the
mind works and possibly create some ailments from a scientific standpoint.
So I hope you listen to part one. If not,
go back and listen to that one, then come back
to to this point in this podcast and enjoy Part two.
(00:51):
I just want to let everyone know off the top
of the podcast you didn't get it from the title
or the description. Yes, we're gonna be talking about psychedelic
substances in this episode, but we're gonna talking about them
largely from scientific standpoint, and from the standpoint is some
very exciting and very important research that continues to go
on right now into how these substances affect the human
(01:12):
mind and what those effects can actually reveal about the
inner workings of the human mind and potentially aid us
in dealing with some very real mental problems, mental ailments,
et cetera. And again this was borne out of the
exhibit for I Am the Black Jaguar, which is at
Emory University, and there was a talk there that you
(01:33):
attended with doctor Katherine McClain and doctor Charles Raison about
this very topic, Yes, fascinating topic. Doctor Katherine McClain involved
in a lot of this exciting research at John Hopkins
where they're they're taking individuals, they're exposing them to these
various psychedelic substances and then uh interacting with them, getting
(01:53):
their perspectives on on what they're feeling and what's happening,
looking at their brain, using radioactive tracers to observe exactly
how this is affecting their mind. Lots of fascinating research,
and as we discussed in the last podcast, we're in
at an interesting stage in the sort of ebb and
flow of psychedelic research. Psychedelic research. It makes it sound
kind of silly, but research into psychedelics and how they
(02:15):
affect the mind, because this is all this sort of
kicked off in the fifties, mid fifties, but by the
end of the sixties took a dive to basically nothing
because of the politics and the cultural backlash, backlash, and
he didn't really get picked didn't pick up again until
the nineties and finally achieving some level of of steam
again in at the dawn of the twenty one century.
(02:35):
But of course, a lot of these substances have been
in use for thousands of years through shamanic practices in
various parts of the world. What we're talking about here
are anthony ogenic substances, uh, psychoactive substances used in religious
or spiritual context. Yeah. To put it in a Simpsons standpoint,
(02:55):
Homer Simpson takes peyote and then he talks to a
space iote that talks to him and helps him deal
with his problems. That's kind of I mean, that's the
pop culture Simpsons simplified version of shamantic experience where some
wise person a holy man or woman in a traditional
setting that also you know, probably engages in various cultural
(03:15):
traditional medicines. They give you a magical substance one of these,
you know, the mushroom or the vine of iawassa, and
then you take it. The shaman probably takes it too,
probably in higher doses, and then guide you on the experience. Yeah,
and actually I had read that Shamans were sometimes picked
for their ability to bring on these states of these
(03:38):
altered states of consciousness, um by doing it actually just
on their very own and not necessarily using any sort
of substances. So, uh, they were definitely looking for people
who have this ability to expand their minds into access
a part of their minds that that that we don't
normally use during the day, right or through out the day,
(04:00):
I should say, So, here's this idea that comes online
that perhaps hallucinating is natural to humans, right, because you've
had it in these rituals for thousands of years, we've
had it in practice in this attempt to try to
get a better understanding of our place in the world.
But also you have something called d m T which
(04:23):
is naturally occurring in nature. Die methyl trip to me. Yeah,
and this was this was first synthesized by British chemists
in the nineties. It has a psychotropic properties that were
discovered twenty years later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah.
But then in two Nobel Laurea Julius axel Rod he
discovered d MT in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us
(04:46):
back to the idea, this isn't something you just synthesize,
this is something that is in the mind that exists already.
Uh So this led to speculation that the compound plays
a role in psychosis. People research that possibility and eventually
abandoned it again because of all the the backlash against
research into psychedelics. Anyway, but this was the beginning of
our understanding of what d m T is and what
(05:07):
role it plays in these experiences, the shamanistic experiences, because
it's always been a part of our brain and it's
present in plants such as the the iawassa. Yeah exactly,
And so when we talk about it being present in
the brain, we're talking about trace amounts of these d
MT molecules. So obviously it's not any sort of amount
that's going to, uh say, allow us to accidentally start
(05:29):
tripping because somehow there was some sort of trigger that occurred.
But it does lead people to question why d m
T is in the brain, what sort of role it's playing.
And it should be noted that d m T is
closely related to seratonin, which is the naturally occurring neurotransmitter
that psychedelics effect. So widely, and the pharmacology of d
(05:52):
m T is similar to that of other well known psychedelics,
so there's definitely a relationship going on there. It's just
a question of again, what sort of role might be
empty play in the mind. UM. There have been some
people who say that it's produced by the penny on gland,
but we don't know that for sure. Yes, don't go
stealing pennial glands thinking you anything. Yeah, that's true. That's
(06:16):
a good point. It leads us to this question about
whether or not hallucinations are something that are produced normally
in nature, and whether or not hallucination is something that
humans are supposed to do. UM. I bring this up
because there's a two thousand eleven study that whole university
in the uk UM which has to do with hallucinating colors. Now, UH,
(06:40):
scientists ask a group of pre screened people to look
at a set of gray patterns and try to visualize color.
Eleven members of the group have been identified as highly
susceptible to hypnosis UH, and then seven of these subjects
were not susceptible at all. The study found that all
subjects who were easily hypnotized reported being a range of
(07:00):
colors even while not under hypnosis. In other words, their
brain was hallucinating colors um and then m R I
scans corroborated this and showed that the parts of the
brain linked color perception lit up when they saw in
quotations imaginary hues of colors. So you have this idea
coming online that you know there are parts of the
(07:22):
brain that can work in conjunction to create the reality.
And we talked about this a thousand times that what
we construct is reality is uh, I should say, rather,
our perception really is an approximation of reality, and that
each of us is looking at the world in a
completely different way. We're just sort of all agreeing on
a couple of things to make sure we have some
(07:44):
continuity in life. Now, it's interesting you mentioned that because
on the subject of d MT, the subject of any
of these substances, one of the things that Dr Catherine
mcclaim brought up, specifically stressing the research environment that they
use at John Hopkins where they have they don't just
inject people with these psychedelic substances and then put them
into like a padded room or something tomorrow. Right, they
(08:07):
have a they have a really calming um space that
has some you know, abstract art, has some Buddhas has,
some other religious or spiritual iconographies, some comfy couches. And
they do a certain amount of priming too, because they
don't want to throw somebody into stance from a nightmare trip,
you know, they want to send them on a more
or less positive trip. They can't guarantee it, but they
(08:27):
did find that on I believe psilocybin, that outside of
a clinical environment, about thirty of the people would say
that they had a mystical experience inside of the experiment.
When when they were controlling the the environment in which
they were taking you know, and surrounding them with this
kind of mystical and calming stuff, they would see a
seventy of the test subjects reported having a mystical experience.
(08:49):
So what you're saying is again a lot of it
is suggestion, right, and yeah, and going into it with
with certain expectations as well. You kind of see that
with the m T as well, because I was looking
some of these accounts of of what d MT is like,
and you know, a letter to Alan Ginsburg, William Burrows
described his own and it's of course important to know
that William Burrows did a lot of things. I did
(09:12):
a lot a lot of drugs. He did a lot
of drugs, So he's maybe not the you know, a
pure test subject. But he reported like the first time
he took it, it was he he felt himself turning
into a half man, half woman and that he was
space time traveling. Whereas your buddy John Horgan, author of
Rational Mysticism, he had a totally well not a totally
(09:33):
different experience, but he had a different take on the experience. Yeah,
he took some ayahuasca because he is very interested and
at the time of writing his book Rational Mysticism, was
trying to get to the bottom of what is a
spiritual experience? You know, what's going on in the brain,
what's going on with you know, scientist, what's going on
with shaman's and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip
and it was not um It was not probably pleasurable,
(09:57):
It did not seem like it was for him. But
was it mind altering? Did it open up his perception
that it seems to have done. Yeah, he said, quote
after I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack
in which I was menaced by a malevolent day glow
hued polyhedra. I have no desire to repeat this experience.
(10:17):
So there we go. Kids. If you're thinking about doing
that ayahuasca. Um. But it is really important, And this
is what McClean says, particularly in her talk at Emery
when she was speaking about therapeutic effects of psilocybrin, which
is um if you think about it as shrooms. You
probably heard it on the street shrooms um. She was
saying that it is very important to try to guide
(10:38):
the person into having a sort of breakthrough with the
experience and having as pleasurable experience as they possibly can
aka not having a bad trip. Yeah. And that's a
part of the whole shamanistic deal too, is that the
idea that you had a guide, there's a certain desired experience.
That is then the attempt to create this experience via surroundings,
via priming, via a certain story or narrative or or
(11:02):
mythos surrounding that experience Versus somebody you know who just
I don't know. Is that a concert and somebody passes
them something and they take it totally different experiences. One
is steeped in expectations and priming, in the idea that
you're going on a journey. You're gonna attempting to get somewhere,
perhaps change something about you, figure something out. And the
(11:23):
other is taking something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. Right,
as we've been discussing in this episode, in the Other
Shaman and the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this
really not the set thing. You know. Um, Like I said,
you can look at a puppy or a cat and
it'll change the way you're thinking and the way you're
looking at reality. You know, you can you have a
(11:46):
cup of coffee and your things are gonna sharpen or
fade in terms of your perception. The warmth from the
cup of coffee will inform your ideas about the person
you're talking to you right exactly, And according to Dr
Catherine McClean in this talk that I attended and you
attended in the form of an iPhone, I was inside
really tiny and um, if you feel in your head
(12:06):
around this sort of third eye area sort of between
your between your eyes back behind it, middle frontal part
of the brain, midfrontal cortex just buried back there in
the in the in the brain meat U there are
two structures to play a key ro and maintaining our
sense of self in time and space, I mean too
vital that Like, those are the big ones, right in
terms of like how who I am and how I'm
(12:26):
perceiving reality? How old am I? Where do I fit
in with time? Where do I fit in with space?
I mean, that's like the basic stuff right there. Well,
remember that was some of the meat of being a
person when we talked about personhood. Disability to imagine yourself
in the past, the present, in the future. Ye, so
personhood itself you can you can isolate to a certain
(12:47):
part of the brain that is susceptible to changes. Something
to keep in mind when we're talking about not only
how hallucinations and how psychedelics skew the experience of self
and uh in the outside world, but also just how
susceptible to change are more or less default understanding of
(13:09):
self in the outside world is okay. So mcclan also
brings into question. I think I mentioned this before, that
consciousness may not be as coherent as we think it is.
So um, what she shared with everybody is that there's
something that makes us even more tricky, and that's the
introduction of a drug called salvia and norium and um
(13:33):
in an experiment in they had volunteers take this drug,
this hallucination, and what they found is that all of
these people, all of them hallucinated that they had interactions
with entities while on salvia, little men, elves, that kind
(13:53):
of thing we're talking and I mean we're really getting
into the whole territory of of paranormal experience here and
in spirits and and godlings and whatever else you might
want to encounter in the woods. Now, that's not that
I mean, that's weird, right, just because people had, you know,
halluscinations specifically about entities. What's weird about this is that
(14:13):
when they then had subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited
those scenarios, and those entities and other words, there's entities
became somewhat of a part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah,
the people turned to the same I mean, I'm instantly
(14:34):
reminded of dreams, of course, because we're talking about how
crazy that the idea of encountering an entity is, and
it's you know, and imagine a number of people's minds
are going a little walky with just the idea of
just who I'm they someone took a substance and then
they encountered this being. It wasn't real, but seemed to have, uh,
you know, seemed to act of its own volition. Of course,
we were constantly having dreams at night in which we
(14:55):
interact with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with
unreal people and unreal things in her dreams. But it
is always or very often difficult to return to a dream.
Whenever we have even just a m O'Keefe returns and
subsequent dream, it's something that's noteworthy, much less to be
encountered with an exact same being or entity. So then
that sort of blurs the line again between what what
(15:18):
is illusion was reality and what we construct as reality. No,
of course, I'm not saying that everybody should go out
there and hallucinate and find an entity and then have
conversations with it. I'm just saying that I think it's
interesting that it's now coated as a memory and it's
part of the continuum, right, And it's worth noting McLean's
study was it was a small number of people she
said for this, than which she had entities. And you
(15:41):
do encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to
have taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities.
So yeah, true, So this is not a guaranteed ticket
to fairy hood, no no, But of course our takeaway was,
you know, hey, you you find some sort of being
and then you pick up the conversation a couple of
weeks later with that person in your head. This is
a vital part of course of shamanistic experience, and one
(16:02):
is taking a substance for a spiritual purpose. I mean,
because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts, mystical hants are full
of people encountering unreal beings. So we can see exactly
where that fits in in a Shutan mystic traditions. Well,
and like William William Burrows Burrows as Us spoke of
the half man half woman, I mean, there's all sorts
of encounters of course. All right, we're gonna take a
(16:24):
quick break and when we come back more of the
scientist and the shaman. What I wanted to talk about
next is this idea of eyes wide shut and particularly
under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find this interesting
(16:48):
because in the talk they were talking about how ayahuasca
and visual processing get really wonky because what you're talking
about here are the areas of the brain associated with
visual processing light. Um. And when you have your eyes open, right,
you you can see the sort of activity in your
brain going on processing that what they found. Um, And
(17:10):
this is again mc claim talking about this, and the
talk is that people who are on ayahuasca with her
eyeshut having hallucinations were having the same level of activity
in their brains um and visually processing as they would
when their waking hours and processing the data, which is
very different from how we normally processed data when our
(17:32):
eyes are closed. Yeah. To that, not only was the
activity in the brain identical two eyes open, they were
it was identical to eyes open in an outside environment,
in a in a very stimulus filled environment. Uh, they
close their eyes and they're they're still encountering that much stimuli. Yeah,
which then a sort of placed this idea, Um, you
(17:54):
know that you're the dream of your consciousness is merging
with what your brain is perceiving as reality. Yeah, I
mean she she laid out that a lot of this
stuffs come down to this breakdown between the sense of
self and other, between the sense of you and the
outside world. And uh, um and and that's part part
of what's a play here now. She and um and
(18:16):
Raison talked about the dangers of ayahuasca. They did talk
about how this is not taken lightly, particularly with this
kind of psychoactive substance, because you apparently have to prepare
your body very well for this type of hallucinogen um
and a lot of this has to do with the
(18:36):
amount of serotonin that you already have in your brains.
You don't want to mess with these levels. Um. And
I say that not because I don't I think someone's
going to do this, but um. This was something that
they stressed in their talk, is that this is not
stuff to play with. This is stuff that they do
in the lab. Is the stuff that they make sure
that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even
the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will
(18:59):
affect the amount of there tonating your brain. And if
you were to then take ayahuasca and you had a
lot of serotonin, you could be very dangerous, can actually
lead to death. Um, So you have to make sure
that all the levels are correct. Yeah, So, no matter
how much you might want to In Timothy Leary's word's
going a billion your journey to God if you have
to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,
because cheese is great. Gonna booyah? What was that part
(19:23):
of the sentence, A billion your journey to go said, booyah?
Journey to guy. Yeah, that works too. I guess nothing.
I'm hallucinating. Um, all right, So there's again this idea
of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery, and
particularly when you look at something like meditating monks vent
(19:47):
monks in particular, there have been accounts all over the
place about months being able to meditate to such a
degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So we talked
about this before, and um with hallucinations having something in
common with meditating in terms of quieting the default mode network,
(20:10):
this chattering part of your brain. Makes you wonder if again,
through meditation, you can access the same sort of hallucinatory experience,
this realm of dreaming, of lucid dreaming. Even well, it
instantly reminds me of Mendala's the idea that the bitten
amongst especially will there's sort of the is the outer Mendala.
(20:31):
You know that you see an art depictions, but these
are kind of blueprints for a really kind of a
thought palace or kind of a memory palace, this kind
of mental space that they put their minds in a
place now. And I mean that in terms of there's
actually like a floor plant, you know, and it's a
way of containing some very complex spiritual ideas and so
(20:52):
creating this crazy structure in their head. It seems similar
in many ways to the kind of crazy structure one
might encounter, say on D M T or you know,
I LOSSA or one of the one of these substances
where one closes their eyes and experiences some sort of
amazing architecture or explosions or what have you. Uh. The
difference being, of course, here that the monk is having
(21:14):
to work really hard to achieve this level of calm
and concentration and in meditative state, whereas the individual taking
the substance. Not to say that it's easy, not to
say that it's a necessarily a shortcut, but there's less
intense concentration involved in reaching that state. Now. I don't
know if this relates to it specifically in terms of hallucinations,
(21:35):
but I do know that there's one practice in meditation
where you um, you essentially try to imagine your own decomposition.
And the idea is not just to you know, get
try to figure out what your school would look like,
but to try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral
life is and how important the present is. And um,
(22:01):
apparently this is something that is very disturbing because it
can take over the imagination parts of your brain. Right,
and as we had discussed and hallucinating color. Um, sometimes
what you're talking about here is just sort of making
the inference that this will happen in your mind, taking
it and running with it. Yeah, you see that. That's
actually a motif and cool dual of Tibetan art and
(22:22):
some of the Mandala and Mandala a can Uh creations
where you see like flight and men and bones and
oceans of blood. And it's not like a morbid death
metal celebration of that stuff. But it's about the ephemeral
nature of things and about the the limits of physical existence, right,
and again trying to get a better awareness of life
(22:42):
and opening up your mind a bit. All right, So
there's this idea that this is, you know, speaking of
ephemeral nature may not be long lasting, but there's some
evidence that the drug use as well as the meditation
could have long term impact. Thinking about Roland Griffins, I
believe it's his name, and he is the person we
(23:03):
talked about his eleven study of the stage four and
cancer patients who were taking um hallucinogens in order to
try to vanquish their they're very very obviously, very obviously
real fears that were hams treating them in daily life,
their anxieties because of their illness and their disease. UM.
(23:25):
I wanted to mention it because, uh, what they found
is that some of these patients up to two years
after their hallucinatory experience were still garnering the positive effects
of their experience. In other words, they had a sense
of calmness, They felt very expansive. They uh no longer
(23:46):
worried so much about their own fate or the fate
of others. They just sort of were trying to be
present in their daily life. And they think the researchers
think that the reason for this may be very similar
to how other memories work. So you've ad about this
Before you take out a memory and you examine it,
you might change it, tweak it a little bit. It
gets stronger in your memory every time you take it out. Well,
(24:08):
when the patients went through that experience and they sat
down with researchers and went over it again and again,
they think that the same thing was happening. They were
establishing long term memories that were then um sort of
telling them how they were going to feel about this
in the future. Yeah, the the that studying in particular,
I remember, the one of the key first of all
(24:30):
was preparation. They prepared these individuals for their experience, you know,
make sure that the environment, the preconceived notions, the expectations
of the of the trip um were firmly set in place.
And then afterwards it was then about taking apart what happened,
what the experienced, the altered modes of perception and experience
that occurred, and you know, basically journaling about it, taking
(24:51):
that memory out, looking at it, learning from it, putting
it back, and then like you say, continuing to take
it out. Because every time you take it out, any memory,
it's not this little structure sculpted out of rock. It's
made out of clay and multi you know, still malleable clay,
and every time you take it out and pod around
in your hands, be it uh, you know, some traumatic
memory of childhood or the greatest day of your life.
(25:13):
You get it out, you're putting your fingers in it,
you're mentioning it around, You're changing the shape of it
however slightly. Yeah, you're you're resurrecting the neural correlates, right,
and making them that much stronger. There's a podcast called
Secular Buddhist that McClain was on and she was talking
again about the ability of there to be long term
effects and um, she was talking about an John Hopkins
(25:35):
University study that gave a high dose of psilocyb into
adult participants and thirty of them, she says, went a
measurable personality change that lasted more than a year. Now,
when she talks about personality change, they're talking about these
five different aspects of personality and one of them, um,
was a trait called openness, and she says that that
(25:59):
is the only one that changed with these participants who
have the measurable change over a year long period. Then
she says that of the personality traits that we know
of and we define personality by that of that is
genetic and so you're sort of born with you know,
these types of personality traits that you're either stronger or
(26:21):
weaker in, so you could be stronger or weaker in openness.
And she said that it's very interesting that there's not
a lot of tweaking you can do with personality, but
with this one trait, openness, you could perhaps forge the
way um to continue to thrive in a in the
space of openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished
(26:44):
depression as a result, or continue to have an expansive worldview. Well,
this is weird. I'm kind of maybe it's because we're
recording this during the Christmas season, but hearing this, I
cannot help the wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even
ebone'z er Scrooge do d M T or to or consumes?
Because here you have a curmudgeonally individual, very setting his way,
(27:07):
setting his personality, and then one night he trips his
mind out completely and encounters three U four ghosts, right,
encounters uh four separate entities who take him on this
fantastic voyage through time and space. And then when he
wakes up, what's the big chain? And Scrooge he's more open. Right,
he opens the window and he's calling out to children
(27:29):
in the street that normally he would just want to
beat with a stick. But now he's saying, oh, look
what day it is, this young chap and the and
then it's and then his life is chained. I mean,
he's still scrooge, like you say, a lot of his
personality is still gonna be set in stone, but there's
that portion on that openness that has that has been
altered by the experience. You're right, He's probably still going
(27:50):
to be somewhat thrifty, right, but maybe he's just gonna
be a little bit more open in his heart and
more available to people. Hopefully a year from that experience
US awesome. I've never really thought about it never either.
I don't know. I guess I say it's the Christmas
time around the and then talking about all this psychedelic
experience and how it can conceivably change somebody suddenly. Well,
(28:11):
speaking of those four spirit guides, I wanted to close
out with a quote from John Horrigan, who talks about
how there's his resurgence and hallucinogic drugs and scientific inquiry
and uh rather scientific inquiry. He says, I applaud the
psychedelic renaissance with this caveat h. Spiritual texts often emphasize
(28:32):
the dangers of mystical experiences, whether they're generated by drugs, fasting, meditation,
or other means. That is the theme of an old
Talmudic tale in which four rabbis are brought into the
presence of God, one becomes a heretic, one goes crazy,
one drops dead, and one returns home with his faith affirmed.
So I think it's his point of saying, all of
(28:53):
this is very interesting, but we should not approach this
lightly because what we're talking about here is the mind,
and while it's very fertile ground um, it is also
very fragile. So there you have it, the scientist and
the shame. And we were really proud of the subpair
(29:15):
of episodes, so again we just wanted to share them
with everyone again and for many of our our newer
listeners to share them for the first time. If you
have some feedback you'd like to share on this particular
care of episodes, or any episodes for that matter, or
possible future episodes that we have not even recorded yet, well,
you can find us in a number of ways. As always,
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(29:36):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Julie Douglas is on vacation
this week, so we're taking the opportunity to re air
our Scientists and the Shaman pair of episodes. These deal
(00:24):
with psychedelics, the history of psychedelics, and also our ability
to turn to these substances to better understand how the
mind works and possibly create some ailments from a scientific standpoint.
So I hope you listen to part one. If not,
go back and listen to that one, then come back
to to this point in this podcast and enjoy Part two.
(00:51):
I just want to let everyone know off the top
of the podcast you didn't get it from the title
or the description. Yes, we're gonna be talking about psychedelic
substances in this episode, but we're gonna talking about them
largely from scientific standpoint, and from the standpoint is some
very exciting and very important research that continues to go
on right now into how these substances affect the human
(01:12):
mind and what those effects can actually reveal about the
inner workings of the human mind and potentially aid us
in dealing with some very real mental problems, mental ailments,
et cetera. And again this was borne out of the
exhibit for I Am the Black Jaguar, which is at
Emory University, and there was a talk there that you
(01:33):
attended with doctor Katherine McClain and doctor Charles Raison about
this very topic, Yes, fascinating topic. Doctor Katherine McClain involved
in a lot of this exciting research at John Hopkins
where they're they're taking individuals, they're exposing them to these
various psychedelic substances and then uh interacting with them, getting
(01:53):
their perspectives on on what they're feeling and what's happening,
looking at their brain, using radioactive tracers to observe exactly
how this is affecting their mind. Lots of fascinating research,
and as we discussed in the last podcast, we're in
at an interesting stage in the sort of ebb and
flow of psychedelic research. Psychedelic research. It makes it sound
kind of silly, but research into psychedelics and how they
(02:15):
affect the mind, because this is all this sort of
kicked off in the fifties, mid fifties, but by the
end of the sixties took a dive to basically nothing
because of the politics and the cultural backlash, backlash, and
he didn't really get picked didn't pick up again until
the nineties and finally achieving some level of of steam
again in at the dawn of the twenty one century.
(02:35):
But of course, a lot of these substances have been
in use for thousands of years through shamanic practices in
various parts of the world. What we're talking about here
are anthony ogenic substances, uh, psychoactive substances used in religious
or spiritual context. Yeah. To put it in a Simpsons standpoint,
(02:55):
Homer Simpson takes peyote and then he talks to a
space iote that talks to him and helps him deal
with his problems. That's kind of I mean, that's the
pop culture Simpsons simplified version of shamantic experience where some
wise person a holy man or woman in a traditional
setting that also you know, probably engages in various cultural
(03:15):
traditional medicines. They give you a magical substance one of these,
you know, the mushroom or the vine of iawassa, and
then you take it. The shaman probably takes it too,
probably in higher doses, and then guide you on the experience. Yeah,
and actually I had read that Shamans were sometimes picked
for their ability to bring on these states of these
(03:38):
altered states of consciousness, um by doing it actually just
on their very own and not necessarily using any sort
of substances. So, uh, they were definitely looking for people
who have this ability to expand their minds into access
a part of their minds that that that we don't
normally use during the day, right or through out the day,
(04:00):
I should say, So, here's this idea that comes online
that perhaps hallucinating is natural to humans, right, because you've
had it in these rituals for thousands of years, we've
had it in practice in this attempt to try to
get a better understanding of our place in the world.
But also you have something called d m T which
(04:23):
is naturally occurring in nature. Die methyl trip to me. Yeah,
and this was this was first synthesized by British chemists
in the nineties. It has a psychotropic properties that were
discovered twenty years later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah.
But then in two Nobel Laurea Julius axel Rod he
discovered d MT in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us
(04:46):
back to the idea, this isn't something you just synthesize,
this is something that is in the mind that exists already.
Uh So this led to speculation that the compound plays
a role in psychosis. People research that possibility and eventually
abandoned it again because of all the the backlash against
research into psychedelics. Anyway, but this was the beginning of
our understanding of what d m T is and what
(05:07):
role it plays in these experiences, the shamanistic experiences, because
it's always been a part of our brain and it's
present in plants such as the the iawassa. Yeah exactly,
And so when we talk about it being present in
the brain, we're talking about trace amounts of these d
MT molecules. So obviously it's not any sort of amount
that's going to, uh say, allow us to accidentally start
(05:29):
tripping because somehow there was some sort of trigger that occurred.
But it does lead people to question why d m
T is in the brain, what sort of role it's playing.
And it should be noted that d m T is
closely related to seratonin, which is the naturally occurring neurotransmitter
that psychedelics effect. So widely, and the pharmacology of d
(05:52):
m T is similar to that of other well known psychedelics,
so there's definitely a relationship going on there. It's just
a question of again, what sort of role might be
empty play in the mind. UM. There have been some
people who say that it's produced by the penny on gland,
but we don't know that for sure. Yes, don't go
stealing pennial glands thinking you anything. Yeah, that's true. That's
(06:16):
a good point. It leads us to this question about
whether or not hallucinations are something that are produced normally
in nature, and whether or not hallucination is something that
humans are supposed to do. UM. I bring this up
because there's a two thousand eleven study that whole university
in the uk UM which has to do with hallucinating colors. Now, UH,
(06:40):
scientists ask a group of pre screened people to look
at a set of gray patterns and try to visualize color.
Eleven members of the group have been identified as highly
susceptible to hypnosis UH, and then seven of these subjects
were not susceptible at all. The study found that all
subjects who were easily hypnotized reported being a range of
(07:00):
colors even while not under hypnosis. In other words, their
brain was hallucinating colors um and then m R I
scans corroborated this and showed that the parts of the
brain linked color perception lit up when they saw in
quotations imaginary hues of colors. So you have this idea
coming online that you know there are parts of the
(07:22):
brain that can work in conjunction to create the reality.
And we talked about this a thousand times that what
we construct is reality is uh, I should say, rather,
our perception really is an approximation of reality, and that
each of us is looking at the world in a
completely different way. We're just sort of all agreeing on
a couple of things to make sure we have some
(07:44):
continuity in life. Now, it's interesting you mentioned that because
on the subject of d MT, the subject of any
of these substances, one of the things that Dr Catherine
mcclaim brought up, specifically stressing the research environment that they
use at John Hopkins where they have they don't just
inject people with these psychedelic substances and then put them
into like a padded room or something tomorrow. Right, they
(08:07):
have a they have a really calming um space that
has some you know, abstract art, has some Buddhas has,
some other religious or spiritual iconographies, some comfy couches. And
they do a certain amount of priming too, because they
don't want to throw somebody into stance from a nightmare trip,
you know, they want to send them on a more
or less positive trip. They can't guarantee it, but they
(08:27):
did find that on I believe psilocybin, that outside of
a clinical environment, about thirty of the people would say
that they had a mystical experience inside of the experiment.
When when they were controlling the the environment in which
they were taking you know, and surrounding them with this
kind of mystical and calming stuff, they would see a
seventy of the test subjects reported having a mystical experience.
(08:49):
So what you're saying is again a lot of it
is suggestion, right, and yeah, and going into it with
with certain expectations as well. You kind of see that
with the m T as well, because I was looking
some of these accounts of of what d MT is like,
and you know, a letter to Alan Ginsburg, William Burrows
described his own and it's of course important to know
that William Burrows did a lot of things. I did
(09:12):
a lot a lot of drugs. He did a lot
of drugs, So he's maybe not the you know, a
pure test subject. But he reported like the first time
he took it, it was he he felt himself turning
into a half man, half woman and that he was
space time traveling. Whereas your buddy John Horgan, author of
Rational Mysticism, he had a totally well not a totally
(09:33):
different experience, but he had a different take on the experience. Yeah,
he took some ayahuasca because he is very interested and
at the time of writing his book Rational Mysticism, was
trying to get to the bottom of what is a
spiritual experience? You know, what's going on in the brain,
what's going on with you know, scientist, what's going on
with shaman's and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip
and it was not um It was not probably pleasurable,
(09:57):
It did not seem like it was for him. But
was it mind altering? Did it open up his perception
that it seems to have done. Yeah, he said, quote
after I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack
in which I was menaced by a malevolent day glow
hued polyhedra. I have no desire to repeat this experience.
(10:17):
So there we go. Kids. If you're thinking about doing
that ayahuasca. Um. But it is really important, And this
is what McClean says, particularly in her talk at Emery
when she was speaking about therapeutic effects of psilocybrin, which
is um if you think about it as shrooms. You
probably heard it on the street shrooms um. She was
saying that it is very important to try to guide
(10:38):
the person into having a sort of breakthrough with the
experience and having as pleasurable experience as they possibly can
aka not having a bad trip. Yeah. And that's a
part of the whole shamanistic deal too, is that the
idea that you had a guide, there's a certain desired experience.
That is then the attempt to create this experience via surroundings,
via priming, via a certain story or narrative or or
(11:02):
mythos surrounding that experience Versus somebody you know who just
I don't know. Is that a concert and somebody passes
them something and they take it totally different experiences. One
is steeped in expectations and priming, in the idea that
you're going on a journey. You're gonna attempting to get somewhere,
perhaps change something about you, figure something out. And the
(11:23):
other is taking something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. Right,
as we've been discussing in this episode, in the Other
Shaman and the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this
really not the set thing. You know. Um, Like I said,
you can look at a puppy or a cat and
it'll change the way you're thinking and the way you're
looking at reality. You know, you can you have a
(11:46):
cup of coffee and your things are gonna sharpen or
fade in terms of your perception. The warmth from the
cup of coffee will inform your ideas about the person
you're talking to you right exactly, And according to Dr
Catherine McClean in this talk that I attended and you
attended in the form of an iPhone, I was inside
really tiny and um, if you feel in your head
(12:06):
around this sort of third eye area sort of between
your between your eyes back behind it, middle frontal part
of the brain, midfrontal cortex just buried back there in
the in the in the brain meat U there are
two structures to play a key ro and maintaining our
sense of self in time and space, I mean too
vital that Like, those are the big ones, right in
terms of like how who I am and how I'm
(12:26):
perceiving reality? How old am I? Where do I fit
in with time? Where do I fit in with space?
I mean, that's like the basic stuff right there. Well,
remember that was some of the meat of being a
person when we talked about personhood. Disability to imagine yourself
in the past, the present, in the future. Ye, so
personhood itself you can you can isolate to a certain
(12:47):
part of the brain that is susceptible to changes. Something
to keep in mind when we're talking about not only
how hallucinations and how psychedelics skew the experience of self
and uh in the outside world, but also just how
susceptible to change are more or less default understanding of
(13:09):
self in the outside world is okay. So mcclan also
brings into question. I think I mentioned this before, that
consciousness may not be as coherent as we think it is.
So um, what she shared with everybody is that there's
something that makes us even more tricky, and that's the
introduction of a drug called salvia and norium and um
(13:33):
in an experiment in they had volunteers take this drug,
this hallucination, and what they found is that all of
these people, all of them hallucinated that they had interactions
with entities while on salvia, little men, elves, that kind
(13:53):
of thing we're talking and I mean we're really getting
into the whole territory of of paranormal experience here and
in spirits and and godlings and whatever else you might
want to encounter in the woods. Now, that's not that
I mean, that's weird, right, just because people had, you know,
halluscinations specifically about entities. What's weird about this is that
(14:13):
when they then had subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited
those scenarios, and those entities and other words, there's entities
became somewhat of a part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah,
the people turned to the same I mean, I'm instantly
(14:34):
reminded of dreams, of course, because we're talking about how
crazy that the idea of encountering an entity is, and
it's you know, and imagine a number of people's minds
are going a little walky with just the idea of
just who I'm they someone took a substance and then
they encountered this being. It wasn't real, but seemed to have, uh,
you know, seemed to act of its own volition. Of course,
we were constantly having dreams at night in which we
(14:55):
interact with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with
unreal people and unreal things in her dreams. But it
is always or very often difficult to return to a dream.
Whenever we have even just a m O'Keefe returns and
subsequent dream, it's something that's noteworthy, much less to be
encountered with an exact same being or entity. So then
that sort of blurs the line again between what what
(15:18):
is illusion was reality and what we construct as reality. No,
of course, I'm not saying that everybody should go out
there and hallucinate and find an entity and then have
conversations with it. I'm just saying that I think it's
interesting that it's now coated as a memory and it's
part of the continuum, right, And it's worth noting McLean's
study was it was a small number of people she
said for this, than which she had entities. And you
(15:41):
do encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to
have taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities.
So yeah, true, So this is not a guaranteed ticket
to fairy hood, no no, But of course our takeaway was,
you know, hey, you you find some sort of being
and then you pick up the conversation a couple of
weeks later with that person in your head. This is
a vital part of course of shamanistic experience, and one
(16:02):
is taking a substance for a spiritual purpose. I mean,
because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts, mystical hants are full
of people encountering unreal beings. So we can see exactly
where that fits in in a Shutan mystic traditions. Well,
and like William William Burrows Burrows as Us spoke of
the half man half woman, I mean, there's all sorts
of encounters of course. All right, we're gonna take a
(16:24):
quick break and when we come back more of the
scientist and the shaman. What I wanted to talk about
next is this idea of eyes wide shut and particularly
under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find this interesting
(16:48):
because in the talk they were talking about how ayahuasca
and visual processing get really wonky because what you're talking
about here are the areas of the brain associated with
visual processing light. Um. And when you have your eyes open, right,
you you can see the sort of activity in your
brain going on processing that what they found. Um, And
(17:10):
this is again mc claim talking about this, and the
talk is that people who are on ayahuasca with her
eyeshut having hallucinations were having the same level of activity
in their brains um and visually processing as they would
when their waking hours and processing the data, which is
very different from how we normally processed data when our
(17:32):
eyes are closed. Yeah. To that, not only was the
activity in the brain identical two eyes open, they were
it was identical to eyes open in an outside environment,
in a in a very stimulus filled environment. Uh, they
close their eyes and they're they're still encountering that much stimuli. Yeah,
which then a sort of placed this idea, Um, you
(17:54):
know that you're the dream of your consciousness is merging
with what your brain is perceiving as reality. Yeah, I
mean she she laid out that a lot of this
stuffs come down to this breakdown between the sense of
self and other, between the sense of you and the
outside world. And uh, um and and that's part part
of what's a play here now. She and um and
(18:16):
Raison talked about the dangers of ayahuasca. They did talk
about how this is not taken lightly, particularly with this
kind of psychoactive substance, because you apparently have to prepare
your body very well for this type of hallucinogen um
and a lot of this has to do with the
(18:36):
amount of serotonin that you already have in your brains.
You don't want to mess with these levels. Um. And
I say that not because I don't I think someone's
going to do this, but um. This was something that
they stressed in their talk, is that this is not
stuff to play with. This is stuff that they do
in the lab. Is the stuff that they make sure
that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even
the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will
(18:59):
affect the amount of there tonating your brain. And if
you were to then take ayahuasca and you had a
lot of serotonin, you could be very dangerous, can actually
lead to death. Um, So you have to make sure
that all the levels are correct. Yeah, So, no matter
how much you might want to In Timothy Leary's word's
going a billion your journey to God if you have
to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,
because cheese is great. Gonna booyah? What was that part
(19:23):
of the sentence, A billion your journey to go said, booyah?
Journey to guy. Yeah, that works too. I guess nothing.
I'm hallucinating. Um, all right, So there's again this idea
of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery, and
particularly when you look at something like meditating monks vent
(19:47):
monks in particular, there have been accounts all over the
place about months being able to meditate to such a
degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So we talked
about this before, and um with hallucinations having something in
common with meditating in terms of quieting the default mode network,
(20:10):
this chattering part of your brain. Makes you wonder if again,
through meditation, you can access the same sort of hallucinatory experience,
this realm of dreaming, of lucid dreaming. Even well, it
instantly reminds me of Mendala's the idea that the bitten
amongst especially will there's sort of the is the outer Mendala.
(20:31):
You know that you see an art depictions, but these
are kind of blueprints for a really kind of a
thought palace or kind of a memory palace, this kind
of mental space that they put their minds in a
place now. And I mean that in terms of there's
actually like a floor plant, you know, and it's a
way of containing some very complex spiritual ideas and so
(20:52):
creating this crazy structure in their head. It seems similar
in many ways to the kind of crazy structure one
might encounter, say on D M T or you know,
I LOSSA or one of the one of these substances
where one closes their eyes and experiences some sort of
amazing architecture or explosions or what have you. Uh. The
difference being, of course, here that the monk is having
(21:14):
to work really hard to achieve this level of calm
and concentration and in meditative state, whereas the individual taking
the substance. Not to say that it's easy, not to
say that it's a necessarily a shortcut, but there's less
intense concentration involved in reaching that state. Now. I don't
know if this relates to it specifically in terms of hallucinations,
(21:35):
but I do know that there's one practice in meditation
where you um, you essentially try to imagine your own decomposition.
And the idea is not just to you know, get
try to figure out what your school would look like,
but to try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral
life is and how important the present is. And um,
(22:01):
apparently this is something that is very disturbing because it
can take over the imagination parts of your brain. Right,
and as we had discussed and hallucinating color. Um, sometimes
what you're talking about here is just sort of making
the inference that this will happen in your mind, taking
it and running with it. Yeah, you see that. That's
actually a motif and cool dual of Tibetan art and
(22:22):
some of the Mandala and Mandala a can Uh creations
where you see like flight and men and bones and
oceans of blood. And it's not like a morbid death
metal celebration of that stuff. But it's about the ephemeral
nature of things and about the the limits of physical existence, right,
and again trying to get a better awareness of life
(22:42):
and opening up your mind a bit. All right, So
there's this idea that this is, you know, speaking of
ephemeral nature may not be long lasting, but there's some
evidence that the drug use as well as the meditation
could have long term impact. Thinking about Roland Griffins, I
believe it's his name, and he is the person we
(23:03):
talked about his eleven study of the stage four and
cancer patients who were taking um hallucinogens in order to
try to vanquish their they're very very obviously, very obviously
real fears that were hams treating them in daily life,
their anxieties because of their illness and their disease. UM.
(23:25):
I wanted to mention it because, uh, what they found
is that some of these patients up to two years
after their hallucinatory experience were still garnering the positive effects
of their experience. In other words, they had a sense
of calmness, They felt very expansive. They uh no longer
(23:46):
worried so much about their own fate or the fate
of others. They just sort of were trying to be
present in their daily life. And they think the researchers
think that the reason for this may be very similar
to how other memories work. So you've ad about this
Before you take out a memory and you examine it,
you might change it, tweak it a little bit. It
gets stronger in your memory every time you take it out. Well,
(24:08):
when the patients went through that experience and they sat
down with researchers and went over it again and again,
they think that the same thing was happening. They were
establishing long term memories that were then um sort of
telling them how they were going to feel about this
in the future. Yeah, the the that studying in particular,
I remember, the one of the key first of all
(24:30):
was preparation. They prepared these individuals for their experience, you know,
make sure that the environment, the preconceived notions, the expectations
of the of the trip um were firmly set in place.
And then afterwards it was then about taking apart what happened,
what the experienced, the altered modes of perception and experience
that occurred, and you know, basically journaling about it, taking
(24:51):
that memory out, looking at it, learning from it, putting
it back, and then like you say, continuing to take
it out. Because every time you take it out, any memory,
it's not this little structure sculpted out of rock. It's
made out of clay and multi you know, still malleable clay,
and every time you take it out and pod around
in your hands, be it uh, you know, some traumatic
memory of childhood or the greatest day of your life.
(25:13):
You get it out, you're putting your fingers in it,
you're mentioning it around, You're changing the shape of it
however slightly. Yeah, you're you're resurrecting the neural correlates, right,
and making them that much stronger. There's a podcast called
Secular Buddhist that McClain was on and she was talking
again about the ability of there to be long term
effects and um, she was talking about an John Hopkins
(25:35):
University study that gave a high dose of psilocyb into
adult participants and thirty of them, she says, went a
measurable personality change that lasted more than a year. Now,
when she talks about personality change, they're talking about these
five different aspects of personality and one of them, um,
was a trait called openness, and she says that that
(25:59):
is the only one that changed with these participants who
have the measurable change over a year long period. Then
she says that of the personality traits that we know
of and we define personality by that of that is
genetic and so you're sort of born with you know,
these types of personality traits that you're either stronger or
(26:21):
weaker in, so you could be stronger or weaker in openness.
And she said that it's very interesting that there's not
a lot of tweaking you can do with personality, but
with this one trait, openness, you could perhaps forge the
way um to continue to thrive in a in the
space of openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished
(26:44):
depression as a result, or continue to have an expansive worldview. Well,
this is weird. I'm kind of maybe it's because we're
recording this during the Christmas season, but hearing this, I
cannot help the wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even
ebone'z er Scrooge do d M T or to or consumes?
Because here you have a curmudgeonally individual, very setting his way,
(27:07):
setting his personality, and then one night he trips his
mind out completely and encounters three U four ghosts, right,
encounters uh four separate entities who take him on this
fantastic voyage through time and space. And then when he
wakes up, what's the big chain? And Scrooge he's more open. Right,
he opens the window and he's calling out to children
(27:29):
in the street that normally he would just want to
beat with a stick. But now he's saying, oh, look
what day it is, this young chap and the and
then it's and then his life is chained. I mean,
he's still scrooge, like you say, a lot of his
personality is still gonna be set in stone, but there's
that portion on that openness that has that has been
altered by the experience. You're right, He's probably still going
(27:50):
to be somewhat thrifty, right, but maybe he's just gonna
be a little bit more open in his heart and
more available to people. Hopefully a year from that experience
US awesome. I've never really thought about it never either.
I don't know. I guess I say it's the Christmas
time around the and then talking about all this psychedelic
experience and how it can conceivably change somebody suddenly. Well,
(28:11):
speaking of those four spirit guides, I wanted to close
out with a quote from John Horrigan, who talks about
how there's his resurgence and hallucinogic drugs and scientific inquiry
and uh rather scientific inquiry. He says, I applaud the
psychedelic renaissance with this caveat h. Spiritual texts often emphasize
(28:32):
the dangers of mystical experiences, whether they're generated by drugs, fasting, meditation,
or other means. That is the theme of an old
Talmudic tale in which four rabbis are brought into the
presence of God, one becomes a heretic, one goes crazy,
one drops dead, and one returns home with his faith affirmed.
So I think it's his point of saying, all of
(28:53):
this is very interesting, but we should not approach this
lightly because what we're talking about here is the mind,
and while it's very fertile ground um, it is also
very fragile. So there you have it, the scientist and
the shame. And we were really proud of the subpair
(29:15):
of episodes, so again we just wanted to share them
with everyone again and for many of our our newer
listeners to share them for the first time. If you
have some feedback you'd like to share on this particular
care of episodes, or any episodes for that matter, or
possible future episodes that we have not even recorded yet, well,
you can find us in a number of ways. As always,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot
(29:36):
com that is our mothership. That is where you will
find links out to our various social media accounts such
as Facebook and Twitter and tumbler. So who's gonna talk
to us? There? Also, there's an email address and you
can always reach us there at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(29:56):
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
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