December 27, 2012 • 31 mins
The Shaman and the Scientist: Hallucination: Join Robert and Julie as they continue their discussion of the overlap between shamanism and cognitive neuroscience. What sort of experiences do substances like DMT, psilocybin and salvia grant users? Why do human bodies have trace elements of DMT?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you 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 and
I'm Julie Douglas and this episode is The Shaman and
(00:23):
the Scientist Hallucination. It is more or less a part
two following up on our episode The Shaman and the
Scientist My Egoic Mind. Both of these deal with psychedelics.
So just on the last podcast, just want to let
everyone know off the top of the podcast if you
didn't get it from the title or the description, Yes,
we're gonna be talking about psychedelic substances in this episode,
(00:44):
but we're gonna be 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 mind and what those
effects can actually reveal about the inner workings of the
human mind and potentially aid us in dealing with some
(01:06):
very real mental problems, mental ailments, etcetera. And again this
was borne out of the exhibit for I Am the
Black Jaguar, which is at Emory University, and uh, there
was a talk there that you attended with doctor Katherine
McClain and doctor Charles Raison at this very topic. Yes,
fascinating topic. Dr Katherine McClain involved in a lot of
(01:28):
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 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
(01:50):
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
psychede ex and how they 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 bash backlash, and he didn't really get picked
(02:13):
didn't pick up again. Until the nineties, and finally achieving
some level of of steam again in the Dan of
the twenty one century. 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
(02:35):
substances used in religious or spiritual context. Yeah. To put
it in a Simpson's standpoint, Homer Simpson takes peyote and
then he talks to a space coyote, uh 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
(02:56):
man or woman in a traditional setting that also you know,
probably engages in various cultural traditional medicines. They give you
a magical substance one of these, you know, the mushroom
or the vine of ayahuassa, and then you take it.
The shaman probably takes it to probably in higher doses,
and then guide you on the experience. Yeah. And actually
(03:16):
I had read that shamans were sometimes picked for their
ability to bring on these states of these 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 had
this ability to expand their minds into access at part
(03:40):
of their minds that that that we don't normally use
during the day, right or throughout the day, 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
(04:02):
of our place in the world. But also you have
something called d m T which is naturally occurring in
nature die methyl trip to me yea. And this was
this was first synthesized by British chemists in the nineteen thirties.
It has a psychotropic properties that were discovered twenty years
later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah but then intent
(04:24):
two Nobel laure Julius axel Rod he discovered d MT
in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us back to the idea,
this isn't something you just synthesize, this is something that
is is in the mind that exists already up. 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 backlash against research into psychedelics anyway,
(04:49):
but this was the beginning of our understanding of what
d m T is and and what 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 that the yeah, exactly, and so we're when
we talk about it being present in the brain, we're
talking about trace amounts of these d m T molecules.
So obviously it's not any sort of amount that's going to,
(05:11):
uh say, allow us to accidentally start 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
(05:32):
psychedelics effect so widely, and the pharmacology of d 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 d
m T play in the mind? UM. There have been
some people who say that it's produced by the penny
(05:54):
on gland, but we don't know that for sure. Yes,
don't go stealing pennil glands thinking you're going you're triggering. Yeah,
that's true. That's a good point. It leads us to
this question about whether or not hallucinations or something that
are produced normally in nature, and whether or not hallucination
is something that humans are supposed to do. UM. I
(06:14):
bring this up because there's a two thousand eleven study
at Whole University in the uk UM which has to
do with hallucinating colors. Now. UH scientists asked a group
of pre screened people to look at a set of
gray patterns and try to visualize color. Eleven members of
the group had been identified as highly susceptible to hypnosis UH,
(06:37):
and then seven of these subjects were not susceptible at all.
The study found that all subjects who were easily hypnotized
reported seeing a range of 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
(06:58):
when they saw in otations imaginary hues of colors. So
you have this idea coming online that you know there
are parts of the 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
(07:21):
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 continuity in life. Now, it's interesting
you mentioned that because on the subject of b 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
(07:44):
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 have a they have a really
calming um space that has some you know, abstract art,
has some Buddhas has some other really just a spiraitual
iconographies some comfy couches, and they do a certain amount
of priming too, because they don't want to throw somebody
(08:06):
into some read nightmare trip, you know, they want to
send them on a more or less positive trip. They
can't guarantee it, but they 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,
(08:27):
and surrounding them with this kind of mystical and calming stuff,
they would see a seventy percent of the test subjects
reported having a mystical experience. 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 d MT as well,
because I was looking at some of these accounts of
of what d m T is like and um. In
(08:49):
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 a lot a
lot of drugs. He did a lot of drugs, so
he's 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
(09:14):
your buddy John Horrigan, author of Rational Mysticism, he had
a totally well not a totally 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 Shalman's
(09:36):
and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip and it
was not um It was not probably pleasurable. 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.
(10:00):
Have no desire to repeat this experience. So there you go, kids,
if you're thinking about doing the 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 psilocybern which is um. If you think
about it as shrooms. You probably heard it on the
street shrooms um. She had was saying that it is
(10:22):
very important to try to guide the person into having
a sort of breakthrough with the experience and having as
pleasurable experience as they possibly can't aka not having a
bad trip. Yeah, And that's a part of the whole
shamanistic deal too, is that the ideas that you had
a guide, there's a certain desired experience. That is then
the attempt to create this experience via surroundings, via priming,
(10:45):
via a certain story or narrative or our 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 attempting to get somewhere perhaps change something
(11:06):
about you, figure something out, and the other is taking
something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. As we've
been discussing in this episode in the Other Shaman and
the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this really not
this set thing. You know. Um, Like I said, you
can look at a puppy or a cat and it'll
(11:27):
change the way you're thinking and the way you're looking
at reality. You know, you can you have a 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 Katherine
McLean in this talk that I attended and you attended
in the form of an iPhone, I was inside really
(11:47):
tiny and um, if you feel in your head around
the sort of third eye area and sort of between
your between your eyes back behind in middle frontal part
of the brandan midfrontal cortex just buried there in the
in the in the brain meat. Uh. There are two
structures to play a key ro in maintaining our sense
of self in time and space. I mean too vital
(12:07):
that like, those are the big ones, right in terms
of like how who I am and how I'm perceiving reality?
How old am I? Where? 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. Yea, So personhood itself you
(12:31):
can you can isolate to a certain 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
in the outside world, but also just how susceptible to
change are more or less default understanding of self in
(12:55):
the outside world is okay? So McClain also brings into question.
I think I mentioned 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 de norium and um. In an experiment
(13:20):
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 of thing we're
talking and I mean, we're really getting into the whole
(13:41):
territory of of of paranoral experience 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, hallucinations specifically about entities.
What's weird about this is that when they then had
subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited those scenarios and those
(14:06):
entities and other words, there's entities became somewhat of a
part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah, turned to the
same I mean, I'm instantly 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 I
imagine a number of people's minds are going a little
(14:28):
wonky with just the idea of just who I'm They
someone took a substance and then they encountered this being
that 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 interact
with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with unreal
people and unreal things and our dreams. But it is
always were very often difficult to return to a dream.
(14:51):
Whenever we have even just a motif returns and subsequent dream,
it's something that's noteworthy much less the encountered with an
exact same being or entity. So then that sort of
blurs the line again between what what 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 is and then have conversations
(15:13):
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 do
encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to have
taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities. So yeah. True. Yeah,
(15:33):
so this is not a guaranteed ticket to fairyhood, 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. One is taking a substance for a
spiritual purpose. I mean, because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts,
(15:55):
mystical hands are full of people encountering unreal beings. So
we can see exactly where that fits in a shatanistic 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. Um. But what I wanted to
talk about next is this idea of eyes wide shut
and particularly under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find
(16:19):
this interesting 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
(16:41):
they found. Um And this is again McClean talking about this,
and the talk is that people who are on ayahuasca
with her eyes shut having hallucinations, we're having the same
level of activity in their brains um and visually processing
as they would in their waking hours and processing the data,
(17:01):
which is very different from how we normally processed data
when our eyes are closed. Yeah, we're not to that.
Not only was the activity in the brain identical two
eyes open there, 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
(17:21):
much stimuli. Yeah, Which then it sort of placed this idea, Um,
you 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 does come down to this breakdown between the sense
of self and other, between the self sense of you
and the outside world and uh, um and and that's
(17:43):
part part of what's at play here now. She and
um and Rason 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
(18:05):
hallucinogen um. And a lot of this has to do
with the 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 labs, the stuff that they make sure
that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even
(18:28):
the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will
affect the amount of serotonin in your brain. And if
you were to then take Ayahuaska 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 And Timothy Leary's where
it's going to billion your journey to God if you
(18:48):
have to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,
because cheese is great, gonna booyah. What was that part
of the sentence a billion, your journey to billion said, buya,
your buya journey to guy. Yeah that works too. I
guess I think I'm hallucinating. Um alright, So there's again
(19:09):
this idea of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery,
and particularly when you look at something like meditating monks,
to bent monks in particular, there have been accounts all
over the place about monks being able to meditate to
such a degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So
(19:32):
we talked about this before and um with hallucinations having
something in common with meditating in terms of quieting the
default mode network, 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
(19:55):
lucid dreaming. Even well, it instantly reminds me of Mendala's
the idea that the bitten monkst especially will there's sort
of there's the outer Mendola. 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
(20:16):
that in terms of there's actually like a floor plant,
you know, um, and it's a way of containing some
very complex spiritual ideas and and so creating this crazy
structure in their head. It seems similar in many ways
to the kind of crazy structure one mind encounter, say
on D M T or you know, Awassa or one
of the one of these substances where one closes their
(20:37):
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 to work really hard
to achieve this level of calm and concentration and uh
in meditative state, whereas the individual taking this 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
(21:03):
in reaching that state. I don't know if this relates
to it specifically in terms of hallucinations, 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
(21:24):
try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral life is
and how important the present is and um, 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
(21:44):
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 due to Bettan art and some of
the mandala and mandala a can uh creations where you
see like flate and bones and oceans of blood and
it's not like a morbid death metal celebration of that stuff.
(22:05):
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 and opening up
your mind a bit um. 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
(22:27):
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 talked about
his eleven study of the stage four and cancer patients
who were taking um hallucinogens in order to try to
vanquish there they're very very obviously, very obviously real fears
(22:51):
that were hamstring them in daily life, their anxieties because
of their illness and their disease. Um I wanted to
mention it because us. 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.
(23:13):
In other words, they had a sense of calmness, They
felt very expansive. They uh no longer 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 talked about this before. You take
(23:34):
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, 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
(23:55):
how they were going to feel about this in the future. Yeah,
that s in particular. I remember the one of the
keys first of all 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
(24:15):
was then about taking apart what happened, what the experience,
the altered modes of perception and experience that occurred, and
you know, basically journaling about it, taking 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
(24:38):
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. 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 correlate's right and making them that
much stronger. There's a podcast called Secular Buddhist that mcclaim
(24:59):
was on in she was talking again about the ability
of there to be long term effects and um, she
was talking about a John Hopkins University study that gave
a high dose of psilocybe into fifty one adult participants,
and thirty of them, she says, went a measurable personality
change that lasted more than a year. Now, when she
(25:21):
talks about personality change, they're talking about five different aspects
of personality and one of them, um was a trait
called openness, and she says that that is the only
one that changed with these participants who had the measurable
change over a year long period. Now, she says that
of the personality traits that that we know of and
(25:44):
we define personality by that, eight percent 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 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 trade openness, you could perhaps forge the way
(26:09):
um to continue to thrive in in the space of
openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished 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 but wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even
(26:31):
ebone'z er Scrooge do d M t or to or
consume my loss? Because here you have a curmudgeon ly individual,
very setting his ways, setting his personality, and then one
night he trips his mind out completely and encounters three, no,
well four ghosts, right, encounters a uh four separate entities
(26:52):
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 in the street that
normally he would just want to beat with a stick,
but now he's saying, oh, look, what day is this
young chap and uh, and then it's uh, and then
his life is changed. I mean, he's still scrooge, like
(27:13):
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 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. That's awesome. I've never really
(27:34):
thought about it. I don't know. I guess I say
it's the Christmas time around it, and it's and then
talking about all this psychedelic experience and how it can
considerably change somebody suddenly. Well, 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 hallucinat chick
(27:54):
drugs and scientific inquiry and uh, rather scientific inquiry. He's
as I applaud the psychedelic renaissance with this caveat. Uh.
Spiritual texts often emphasize 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
(28:14):
four rabbis are brought into the presence of God, one
becomes a heretic, one goes crazy, one dropstead, and one
returns home with his faith affirmed. So I think it's
his point of saying, all of 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. Yeah, it's
(28:39):
it's powerful stuff. The effects can be long lasting and
can can literally change who you are. So if you
end up going down any of those routes, again, we
don't advise it. We don't condone the use of any
of these substances, but do put some thought into it
and realize that you're you're talking about some really powerful
agents that affect who you are at a very basic level.
(29:00):
All right, And if you you want to find out
more about these topics, I'm sure you do. Uh. We
have a number of articles on how stuff works dot
Com about it. We have an article about l s D.
We have an article about psychedelic mushrooms, a number of
articles about how the mind works in terms of things
that we've referenced in this podcast, and now there's if
you live in the Atlanta area, the Jaguar exhibit will
(29:21):
probably be gone by the time you hear this, or
or certainly will be gone long term. But check out
what Emory's doing because they're always having fascinating exhibits. They
always do a big Tobad exhibit every year. They're always
bringing in really top shelf presenters to share something in
the arts and the sciences, something culturally, something historic, really
cool place, a great university in terms of stuff that
(29:41):
you can obtain without traveling to Atlanta. The book by
John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, Yeah, very good. I think it
was written in two thousand three, two thousand and four,
but a lot of the research is still very much
um cutting edge or what people are building on some
of the stuff that he goes through. It's very interesting.
And then on on on that flicks the d MT
documentary d MT the Spirit Molecule that's available for streaming there,
(30:05):
as well as a number of Ted talks that get
into you know, just how the brain works and uh.
And then if you want something just a little cheesier.
There's some there's some great, some great horror movies about
people taking these substances and turning into mindless killers. There's
a great movie called Blue Sunshine. It's uh, kind of
a cheesy but but a very interesting horror flick about
(30:26):
like former flower children who in who ten years later
all start losing their hair entering into psychotic psychotic killers
because they took some sort of tainted LSD back in
the day. So uh, anyway, it's all up there if
you want to explore it. Um As for getting in
touch with us again, we would love to hear from
anyone who has thoughts on this particular topic, given the
(30:47):
nature of this subject, but we may not be able
to share everything to share with us with the rest
of the listeners that we're still happy to hear from everybody.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on
both of those. You can also find us on Twitter,
where our handle is below the mind, and you can
always drop us a line at blow the Mind at
discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
(31:16):
other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com brought
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Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you 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 and
I'm Julie Douglas and this episode is The Shaman and
(00:23):
the Scientist Hallucination. It is more or less a part
two following up on our episode The Shaman and the
Scientist My Egoic Mind. Both of these deal with psychedelics.
So just on the last podcast, just want to let
everyone know off the top of the podcast if you
didn't get it from the title or the description, Yes,
we're gonna be talking about psychedelic substances in this episode,
(00:44):
but we're gonna be 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 mind and what those
effects can actually reveal about the inner workings of the
human mind and potentially aid us in dealing with some
(01:06):
very real mental problems, mental ailments, etcetera. And again this
was borne out of the exhibit for I Am the
Black Jaguar, which is at Emory University, and uh, there
was a talk there that you attended with doctor Katherine
McClain and doctor Charles Raison at this very topic. Yes,
fascinating topic. Dr Katherine McClain involved in a lot of
(01:28):
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 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
(01:50):
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
psychede ex and how they 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 bash backlash, and he didn't really get picked
(02:13):
didn't pick up again. Until the nineties, and finally achieving
some level of of steam again in the Dan of
the twenty one century. 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
(02:35):
substances used in religious or spiritual context. Yeah. To put
it in a Simpson's standpoint, Homer Simpson takes peyote and
then he talks to a space coyote, uh 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
(02:56):
man or woman in a traditional setting that also you know,
probably engages in various cultural traditional medicines. They give you
a magical substance one of these, you know, the mushroom
or the vine of ayahuassa, and then you take it.
The shaman probably takes it to probably in higher doses,
and then guide you on the experience. Yeah. And actually
(03:16):
I had read that shamans were sometimes picked for their
ability to bring on these states of these 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 had
this ability to expand their minds into access at part
(03:40):
of their minds that that that we don't normally use
during the day, right or throughout the day, 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
(04:02):
of our place in the world. But also you have
something called d m T which is naturally occurring in
nature die methyl trip to me yea. And this was
this was first synthesized by British chemists in the nineteen thirties.
It has a psychotropic properties that were discovered twenty years
later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah but then intent
(04:24):
two Nobel laure Julius axel Rod he discovered d MT
in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us back to the idea,
this isn't something you just synthesize, this is something that
is is in the mind that exists already up. 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 backlash against research into psychedelics anyway,
(04:49):
but this was the beginning of our understanding of what
d m T is and and what 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 that the yeah, exactly, and so we're when
we talk about it being present in the brain, we're
talking about trace amounts of these d m T molecules.
So obviously it's not any sort of amount that's going to,
(05:11):
uh say, allow us to accidentally start 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
(05:32):
psychedelics effect so widely, and the pharmacology of d 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 d
m T play in the mind? UM. There have been
some people who say that it's produced by the penny
(05:54):
on gland, but we don't know that for sure. Yes,
don't go stealing pennil glands thinking you're going you're triggering. Yeah,
that's true. That's a good point. It leads us to
this question about whether or not hallucinations or something that
are produced normally in nature, and whether or not hallucination
is something that humans are supposed to do. UM. I
(06:14):
bring this up because there's a two thousand eleven study
at Whole University in the uk UM which has to
do with hallucinating colors. Now. UH scientists asked a group
of pre screened people to look at a set of
gray patterns and try to visualize color. Eleven members of
the group had been identified as highly susceptible to hypnosis UH,
(06:37):
and then seven of these subjects were not susceptible at all.
The study found that all subjects who were easily hypnotized
reported seeing a range of 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
(06:58):
when they saw in otations imaginary hues of colors. So
you have this idea coming online that you know there
are parts of the 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
(07:21):
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 continuity in life. Now, it's interesting
you mentioned that because on the subject of b 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
(07:44):
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 have a they have a really
calming um space that has some you know, abstract art,
has some Buddhas has some other really just a spiraitual
iconographies some comfy couches, and they do a certain amount
of priming too, because they don't want to throw somebody
(08:06):
into some read nightmare trip, you know, they want to
send them on a more or less positive trip. They
can't guarantee it, but they 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,
(08:27):
and surrounding them with this kind of mystical and calming stuff,
they would see a seventy percent of the test subjects
reported having a mystical experience. 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 d MT as well,
because I was looking at some of these accounts of
of what d m T is like and um. In
(08:49):
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 a lot a
lot of drugs. He did a lot of drugs, so
he's 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
(09:14):
your buddy John Horrigan, author of Rational Mysticism, he had
a totally well not a totally 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 Shalman's
(09:36):
and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip and it
was not um It was not probably pleasurable. 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.
(10:00):
Have no desire to repeat this experience. So there you go, kids,
if you're thinking about doing the 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 psilocybern which is um. If you think
about it as shrooms. You probably heard it on the
street shrooms um. She had was saying that it is
(10:22):
very important to try to guide the person into having
a sort of breakthrough with the experience and having as
pleasurable experience as they possibly can't aka not having a
bad trip. Yeah, And that's a part of the whole
shamanistic deal too, is that the ideas that you had
a guide, there's a certain desired experience. That is then
the attempt to create this experience via surroundings, via priming,
(10:45):
via a certain story or narrative or our 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 attempting to get somewhere perhaps change something
(11:06):
about you, figure something out, and the other is taking
something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. As we've
been discussing in this episode in the Other Shaman and
the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this really not
this set thing. You know. Um, Like I said, you
can look at a puppy or a cat and it'll
(11:27):
change the way you're thinking and the way you're looking
at reality. You know, you can you have a 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 Katherine
McLean in this talk that I attended and you attended
in the form of an iPhone, I was inside really
(11:47):
tiny and um, if you feel in your head around
the sort of third eye area and sort of between
your between your eyes back behind in middle frontal part
of the brandan midfrontal cortex just buried there in the
in the in the brain meat. Uh. There are two
structures to play a key ro in maintaining our sense
of self in time and space. I mean too vital
(12:07):
that like, those are the big ones, right in terms
of like how who I am and how I'm perceiving reality?
How old am I? Where? 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. Yea, So personhood itself you
(12:31):
can you can isolate to a certain 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
in the outside world, but also just how susceptible to
change are more or less default understanding of self in
(12:55):
the outside world is okay? So McClain also brings into question.
I think I mentioned 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 de norium and um. In an experiment
(13:20):
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 of thing we're
talking and I mean, we're really getting into the whole
(13:41):
territory of of of paranoral experience 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, hallucinations specifically about entities.
What's weird about this is that when they then had
subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited those scenarios and those
(14:06):
entities and other words, there's entities became somewhat of a
part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah, turned to the
same I mean, I'm instantly 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 I
imagine a number of people's minds are going a little
(14:28):
wonky with just the idea of just who I'm They
someone took a substance and then they encountered this being
that 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 interact
with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with unreal
people and unreal things and our dreams. But it is
always were very often difficult to return to a dream.
(14:51):
Whenever we have even just a motif returns and subsequent dream,
it's something that's noteworthy much less the encountered with an
exact same being or entity. So then that sort of
blurs the line again between what what 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 is and then have conversations
(15:13):
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 do
encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to have
taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities. So yeah. True. Yeah,
(15:33):
so this is not a guaranteed ticket to fairyhood, 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. One is taking a substance for a
spiritual purpose. I mean, because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts,
(15:55):
mystical hands are full of people encountering unreal beings. So
we can see exactly where that fits in a shatanistic 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. Um. But what I wanted to
talk about next is this idea of eyes wide shut
and particularly under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find
(16:19):
this interesting 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
(16:41):
they found. Um And this is again McClean talking about this,
and the talk is that people who are on ayahuasca
with her eyes shut having hallucinations, we're having the same
level of activity in their brains um and visually processing
as they would in their waking hours and processing the data,
(17:01):
which is very different from how we normally processed data
when our eyes are closed. Yeah, we're not to that.
Not only was the activity in the brain identical two
eyes open there, 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
(17:21):
much stimuli. Yeah, Which then it sort of placed this idea, Um,
you 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 does come down to this breakdown between the sense
of self and other, between the self sense of you
and the outside world and uh, um and and that's
(17:43):
part part of what's at play here now. She and
um and Rason 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
(18:05):
hallucinogen um. And a lot of this has to do
with the 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 labs, the stuff that they make sure
that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even
(18:28):
the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will
affect the amount of serotonin in your brain. And if
you were to then take Ayahuaska 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 And Timothy Leary's where
it's going to billion your journey to God if you
(18:48):
have to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,
because cheese is great, gonna booyah. What was that part
of the sentence a billion, your journey to billion said, buya,
your buya journey to guy. Yeah that works too. I
guess I think I'm hallucinating. Um alright, So there's again
(19:09):
this idea of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery,
and particularly when you look at something like meditating monks,
to bent monks in particular, there have been accounts all
over the place about monks being able to meditate to
such a degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So
(19:32):
we talked about this before and um with hallucinations having
something in common with meditating in terms of quieting the
default mode network, 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
(19:55):
lucid dreaming. Even well, it instantly reminds me of Mendala's
the idea that the bitten monkst especially will there's sort
of there's the outer Mendola. 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
(20:16):
that in terms of there's actually like a floor plant,
you know, um, and it's a way of containing some
very complex spiritual ideas and and so creating this crazy
structure in their head. It seems similar in many ways
to the kind of crazy structure one mind encounter, say
on D M T or you know, Awassa or one
of the one of these substances where one closes their
(20:37):
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 to work really hard
to achieve this level of calm and concentration and uh
in meditative state, whereas the individual taking this 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
(21:03):
in reaching that state. I don't know if this relates
to it specifically in terms of hallucinations, 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
(21:24):
try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral life is
and how important the present is and um, 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
(21:44):
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 due to Bettan art and some of
the mandala and mandala a can uh creations where you
see like flate and bones and oceans of blood and
it's not like a morbid death metal celebration of that stuff.
(22:05):
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 and opening up
your mind a bit um. 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
(22:27):
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 talked about
his eleven study of the stage four and cancer patients
who were taking um hallucinogens in order to try to
vanquish there they're very very obviously, very obviously real fears
(22:51):
that were hamstring them in daily life, their anxieties because
of their illness and their disease. Um I wanted to
mention it because us. 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.
(23:13):
In other words, they had a sense of calmness, They
felt very expansive. They uh no longer 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 talked about this before. You take
(23:34):
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, 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
(23:55):
how they were going to feel about this in the future. Yeah,
that s in particular. I remember the one of the
keys first of all 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
(24:15):
was then about taking apart what happened, what the experience,
the altered modes of perception and experience that occurred, and
you know, basically journaling about it, taking 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
(24:38):
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. 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 correlate's right and making them that
much stronger. There's a podcast called Secular Buddhist that mcclaim
(24:59):
was on in she was talking again about the ability
of there to be long term effects and um, she
was talking about a John Hopkins University study that gave
a high dose of psilocybe into fifty one adult participants,
and thirty of them, she says, went a measurable personality
change that lasted more than a year. Now, when she
(25:21):
talks about personality change, they're talking about five different aspects
of personality and one of them, um was a trait
called openness, and she says that that is the only
one that changed with these participants who had the measurable
change over a year long period. Now, she says that
of the personality traits that that we know of and
(25:44):
we define personality by that, eight percent 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 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 trade openness, you could perhaps forge the way
(26:09):
um to continue to thrive in in the space of
openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished 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 but wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even
(26:31):
ebone'z er Scrooge do d M t or to or
consume my loss? Because here you have a curmudgeon ly individual,
very setting his ways, setting his personality, and then one
night he trips his mind out completely and encounters three, no,
well four ghosts, right, encounters a uh four separate entities
(26:52):
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 in the street that
normally he would just want to beat with a stick,
but now he's saying, oh, look, what day is this
young chap and uh, and then it's uh, and then
his life is changed. I mean, he's still scrooge, like
(27:13):
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 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. That's awesome. I've never really
(27:34):
thought about it. I don't know. I guess I say
it's the Christmas time around it, and it's and then
talking about all this psychedelic experience and how it can
considerably change somebody suddenly. Well, 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 hallucinat chick
(27:54):
drugs and scientific inquiry and uh, rather scientific inquiry. He's
as I applaud the psychedelic renaissance with this caveat. Uh.
Spiritual texts often emphasize 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
(28:14):
four rabbis are brought into the presence of God, one
becomes a heretic, one goes crazy, one dropstead, and one
returns home with his faith affirmed. So I think it's
his point of saying, all of 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. Yeah, it's
(28:39):
it's powerful stuff. The effects can be long lasting and
can can literally change who you are. So if you
end up going down any of those routes, again, we
don't advise it. We don't condone the use of any
of these substances, but do put some thought into it
and realize that you're you're talking about some really powerful
agents that affect who you are at a very basic level.
(29:00):
All right, And if you you want to find out
more about these topics, I'm sure you do. Uh. We
have a number of articles on how stuff works dot
Com about it. We have an article about l s D.
We have an article about psychedelic mushrooms, a number of
articles about how the mind works in terms of things
that we've referenced in this podcast, and now there's if
you live in the Atlanta area, the Jaguar exhibit will
(29:21):
probably be gone by the time you hear this, or
or certainly will be gone long term. But check out
what Emory's doing because they're always having fascinating exhibits. They
always do a big Tobad exhibit every year. They're always
bringing in really top shelf presenters to share something in
the arts and the sciences, something culturally, something historic, really
cool place, a great university in terms of stuff that
(29:41):
you can obtain without traveling to Atlanta. The book by
John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, Yeah, very good. I think it
was written in two thousand three, two thousand and four,
but a lot of the research is still very much
um cutting edge or what people are building on some
of the stuff that he goes through. It's very interesting.
And then on on on that flicks the d MT
documentary d MT the Spirit Molecule that's available for streaming there,
(30:05):
as well as a number of Ted talks that get
into you know, just how the brain works and uh.
And then if you want something just a little cheesier.
There's some there's some great, some great horror movies about
people taking these substances and turning into mindless killers. There's
a great movie called Blue Sunshine. It's uh, kind of
a cheesy but but a very interesting horror flick about
(30:26):
like former flower children who in who ten years later
all start losing their hair entering into psychotic psychotic killers
because they took some sort of tainted LSD back in
the day. So uh, anyway, it's all up there if
you want to explore it. Um As for getting in
touch with us again, we would love to hear from
anyone who has thoughts on this particular topic, given the
(30:47):
nature of this subject, but we may not be able
to share everything to share with us with the rest
of the listeners that we're still happy to hear from everybody.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on
both of those. You can also find us on Twitter,
where our handle is below the mind, and you can
always drop us a line at blow the Mind at
discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
(31:16):
other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com brought
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