Psychedelics Playlist: The Manifested Mind, Part 5

What are psychedelics? How have these substances influenced human minds and culture? What exactly do they invoke in the brain and how could a renaissance of scientific study into their properties improve our lives? In this series of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe explore the world of entheogens.

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Episode Transcript

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Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey,

(01:31):
are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And here
it is the fifth and final installment in our series
on psychedelics. We made it to part five, right, part five.
Then we'll move on to some other topics and probably
come back around to other episodes that involve psychedelics in
the future, because there's just so much research going on,

(01:53):
and that's ultimately what this episode is about. What what
are some examples of the stuff that's going on in
our century and the twenty first century regarding psychedelics, like
with the Friday the Thirteenth Movies. Part five is a
new beginning. It's the Psychedelic Research Revival. So yeah, So
we've been teasing this, I guess throughout the past four
episodes that at some point we're going to talk about

(02:15):
research that's taken place on the clinical significance of psychedelics
in the twenty first century. After some of the veil
of stigma has lifted from from psychedelic assistant therapy and
psychedelic for treating various conditions. Um so to quickly look
at one important study. I think this would be a
good place to start, from the early days of the

(02:36):
twenty first century psychedelic renaissance. I just checked and this
one has been cited seven hundred and eighty nine times
now according to Google scholar. This is a study from
Roland Griffith's, William Richards, Una mccon and Robert Jesse And
this was published in Psychopharmacology and the year two thousand
six called Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial

(02:58):
and sustained personal meaning and spear virtual significance. And I
think we'll we will talk more about spiritual significance as
we go on, maybe later in the episode. But uh,
to give a brief summary, Basically, psilocybin has been used
for religious purposes for centuries, but what does it actually do? Uh.
This research pursued a similar line of inquiry to the

(03:20):
marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen sixty two, which we talked
about in the third episode of the series. This was
dosing people with psychedelics and then letting them loose in
to church basically well seminary students, yes, and so they
were there you know, to learn about the divine and
to become ministers, I guess probably. And they were there
for the Good Friday service in in this church, and

(03:42):
some were given psilocybin and some were given an active placebo.
I think it was niacin, which causes tingling and flushing
and so. In In that that experiment, they did find
that the people who had been given the psilocybin for
this religious service reported having largely reported having these very
profound and positive mystical experiences while on psilocybin that they

(04:06):
believed largely changed their lives for the better, right, not
just memorable experiences, but life changing experiences, and believed subjectively
to be spiritually significant to religious people, not not just
a situation of where it's like, oh yeah, I saw
something or or felt something and it kind of made
me think about some religious concepts. I was already turning

(04:28):
over in my head. You know. It was it was
it was like an order of magnitude beyond that. Yeah.
Uh So this study from two thousand six it was
to study whether psilocybin causes people to have these same
types of experience as mystical or religious experiences that they
rate as positive and profound when compared to a placebo.
And this was a double blind study using high doses

(04:49):
of psilocybin and an active placebo control. The active placebo
they used in this case was not niacin. It was
methyl finitate hydrochloride, which simulates the central nervous system. It's
a stimulant. And I could be wrong, but I think
this one also what they definitely injected it, right, I
think so because you do so. Actually I'm not sure, Okay,
a lot of these a lot of these studies they

(05:11):
do end up injecting it just because it's fast acting
and also sometimes a little stronger than I mean, sometimes
a lot stronger too, because it's just hitting me like
that as opposed to you know, gradually coming up. That's
and yeah, that does happen in some studies. I did
not know the methodic administration here, but so quote, volunteers
completed questionnaires assessing drug effects and mystical experiences immediately after

(05:34):
and two months after sessions. And then they also say
that community observers rated changes in the volunteers attitudes and behavior,
So they didn't just ask people their own subjective impressions
of how they've changed. They also asked other people, Hey,
how has Jeffrey changed? Right, So it's not just Screwedge
saying oh yeah, I'm totally cool with cratch It. Now
you're like you're actually asking cratch It, Hey, what do

(05:55):
you think about Screwge? Just like, oh, yeah, he's totally
different now, I don't know. He must have he took
some than Christmas Eve. Didn't you write something once about
how Scrooge was on d MT? Yeah? Yeah, And I
can't be there. I'm sure I'm not the only person
to make this commentary, but I feel like, um, a
Christmas Carol, the story of Evenezer Scrooge is like such

(06:16):
a psychedelic experience, Like clearly he had. I mean, he
has a supernatural experience that makes him reassess his life
and his life choices and ultimately changes his trajectory. And
I think it has a tremendous amount in common with
some of the psychedelic experiences we've been discussing. Yeah, I
think I think that's about right. It was that bad
potato that he gave, right, you know what he says,

(06:38):
It was like a bit of cheese or meat that
had gone off. Okay, so results of this experiment. The
the the updates sort of on the marsh Chapel model
the author's right quote, psilocybin produced a range of acute
perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods, including anxiety. Psilocybin
also increased measures of mystical experience. At two months, the

(07:01):
volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning
and spiritual significance, and attributed to the experience sustained positive
changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by
community observers. So the authors write that that the life
change is experienced by people who took psilocybin in this

(07:23):
study are similar to the changes reported by people who
have spontaneous mystical experiences without drugs that change their lives. Quote.
The ability to occasion such experiences perspectively will allow rigorous
scientific investigations of their causes and consequences. And this kind
of comes back to William James territory here, right, because

(07:45):
this is not just a study about psilocybin. It's not
just well, what can psilocybin do? It sort of opens
a doorway of generally studying the religious brain to studying
what's happening in our brains when we have a self
disc gribed mystical experience, and how do these experiences work
to change behavior as they often do? But again, this

(08:07):
is a different sort of experiment than a lot of
the other stuff we've been hinting at, because it's the
kind of subjective positive experience we've heard reported anecdotally so
many times before. People have an encounter with something, something
profound and ineffable that that is a is a meaningful
emotional experience for them, causes them to reflect on their

(08:28):
life in ways that might change their behavior and their habits. Um.
But what about the more clinical, more clinically significant uses
like modern research using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders, addiction,
and other issues. Yeah, and and this is where we're
seeing just a lot of you know, tremendous research taking place. Yeah,

(08:48):
and um, we're still i think, on the on the
cusp of it, like we're still in the early days.
But yeah, but but we Yeah, we are seeing a
lot of progress and a lot of promising, uh promising results.
One of the key figures in the modern research of
psychedelic addiction research is man by the name of Dr
Stephen Ross of the n y U Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study.

(09:11):
We We mentioned him in a previous episode already, UH
Paul and Michael Paul and discusses his work at length
in his book. And as I mentioned already, he was
one of the panelists at the two thousand nineteen World
Science Festival, which I was in attendance for. Uh and uh.
This talk, by the way from the World Science Festival
should be available online at some point um in the
months ahead. I'm not sure when, but when it goes up,

(09:34):
I'll make sure I share it on our social so
people can view it. Because it was a great talk
cover some of what we're talking about here and have
been talking about that gets into other areas as well.
UM so uh. Dr Stephen Ross discussed how psychedelics were
not a part of his training in psychiatry and the
study of addiction. UM and and like when you when

(09:54):
you see pictures of him and you see him in person, um,
you know he he doesn't fit. You don't look at
him and say like, oh, well, there's a psilocybin research tree.
If he doesn't look like Willie Nelson's right, he doesn't
look like Terrence McKenna or Timothy Learry. He looks just
like like just an everyday human being. Um And if
you're said, if you're told that that he's a you know,
a professional or an academic, you know, you wouldn't instantly

(10:15):
think psilocybin. But anyway, he discussed, you know, this wasn't
part of his training, despite the fact the psychedelics were
such a huge part of psychology for a while. And uh,
he says that all the research findings from the fifties
and sixties were still out there, quote, hiding in plain sight.
And and when he you know, he looked closer, he saw,
you know, you had this high success rate. Um. Using

(10:38):
you know, mainly it was like LSD with alcohol addiction
is the one that I think really caught his his attention.
But but yeah, he had these we had these really
promising results from the original period of modern psychedelic research.
And so he thought, well, let's let's try it again.
Let's see what else we can learn. How can we
we actually move on from what they had learned decades ago.

(11:01):
The only problem is that, there were, of course huge
administrative hurdles to studying it. But he was able to
push through with an initial focus on terminal cancer patient
studies alleviating end of life anxiety via psilocybin. Yeah, and
this is a big important early thing, I think, also
from the mid two thousands. Yeah. His initial work though,

(11:23):
actually took place at the n y U Dental School
because Bellevue and the n y U Cancer Center wanted
to just stay to stay clear of it because it was,
you know, still it was early days getting back into
and igniting what would become this renaissance of research. So
there was still even in the scientific and medical community,
something of a stigma around psychedelics, even for clinical uses. Yeah,

(11:46):
I mean even you know, even today, like in the
culture at large, I feel like there's still you still
have to push through that, right, Um, Like you still
have to, you know, get to the point where you're
not using the phrase magic mushrooms in the science headline,
right right. Uh. And we're not there yet. I mean,
it's still the popular press reporting about it. It plays

(12:08):
up the kind of you know, hey, or you having
depression symptoms, maybe you should try dropping acid, a new
study says, And and it's understandable that would be the
reaction for so many of us, because again we're coming
on the heels of of the moral panic and so
many of these, uh, these ideas about what LSD and
psilocybin are. But that's another attitude actually that we were

(12:31):
just hinting at. That's not even it's not even the
same as the moral panic that looks at psychedelics as
this sort of culture destroying threat, you know, that's going
to turn your children into acts murderers. It's more the
kind of the trivialization of the psychedelic experience that looks
at it, not necessarily as this horrible threatening thing, but

(12:53):
as this like ho ho ho, you know, oh, here's
the stoner coming to take the psychedelics. Yeah, Which it's
kind of twofold, right. On one hand, like maybe that's
a necessary part of of its transformation and and maybe
that's one way it survives through the through the decades
of darkness there. But on the other hand, it does

(13:14):
it hurts the potential of it, right because it creates
this idea that it is purely recreational, that is pure
hallucination and fireworks and just and there's nothing of value there,
certainly not not medically valuable, right, or I mean even
within the recreational use. What a lot of these enthusiasts
have been emphasizing is like spiritual significance, ability to change

(13:37):
habits and and have profound emotional experiences, not like the frivolous,
trivial party drug kind of approach. So Ross's studies ended
up using psilocybin rather than LSD. LSD had been the
primary substance in previous trials, but psilocybin made more sense
for a number of reasons. So it's it's less stigmatized,
has less political badge baggage, it's easy year to obtain,

(14:00):
it's gentler, and it also doesn't last longer than a
researcher's work day. I think that's that's something that's worth
driving home and a lot of this, you know, the
d trip just takes up so much more time and
people need to get home right. A number of studies, though,
have have looked at this, have examined um end of
life anxiety and cancer depression and to what extent psilocybin

(14:23):
could alleviate this condition, and there there have been some
we've been seeing some rapid success. Yeah, you can imagine
why this is fruitful just given people's subjective experiences what
they report about high doses of psilocybin and LSD trips.
A common thing is reduced fear of death afterwards, the like. Again,

(14:44):
this is just anecdotal, but a thing people often say
is like I went through ego dissolution. You know, I
I went to this place where I was having experience,
but there was no me anymore, There was no self.
And people often talk of this in terms of some
analogy of death, you know, it's like ego death or
something like, I felt what it would be like to

(15:04):
die or to to have me not exist anymore, and
I didn't mind. It didn't feel bad in a way.
It actually felt peaceful and good. I mean, obviously, it
also sounds I'm sure counterintuitive to a lot of people,
because you might you might think, well, if I'm if
I'm on my deathbed, or I'm you know, I'm facing
a terminal illness or whatever, the you know, particular situation
is like, this sounds like a horrible time to take

(15:26):
a mind altering drug. But I think, you know, based
on what we've been discussing on the show, I think
there's strong evidence for the counter argument, like, no, this
is the time to take in mind altering job, especially
because it seems like it might have this ability to
reduce death anxiety, to reduce the sensation that the fact
that you will die is a horrible thing. Right, So

(15:47):
effectiveness with psilocybin in these situations it's something like with
a placebo at like And again we're not just talking
about psilocybin itself, but rather the you know, the result
of a lot of set and setting um priming the
individual for the experience, having the experience of the mind
alternating experience, you know, guiding them through it, helping them

(16:10):
them to consolidate it all on the other side. And
again it's not the substance itself, but the state of
mind that the substance creates that seems to be useful
for psychiatric improvement, the experience, not just the compound acting
within the body. Right, It's not take two of these
and call me in the morning. It's take two of these, um,
let me tell you what's gonna happen. I'm gonna be

(16:31):
there while it happens, and then we're gonna spend time
unpacking it afterwards. Now, it also gets into the research
also gets into other areas though, so it gets into
just treat looking at possible treatments for depression, and Ross
says that the work is promising there, but thus far
the work hasn't been too broad not the addiction front.
Researchers are making headway to treat addiction issues with not

(16:52):
only alcohol but also tobacco, opiates, crack, cocaine, and other substances.
But in all of this, Ross stresses that is often
the case in any of these studies, more research is required. Uh,
you know, even he admits that in some cases the
findings are almost too good to be true. We just
have to we have to keep going, Like you know,

(17:12):
there's no point where you're just like, all right, that's it.
Psychedelics are are good across the board. Uh let's just
let's just you know, prescribe them in every instance. Well,
I mean, I do think that there are there. We're
tending towards a future where we're gonna have more confidence
in the results than we have now. There are a
lot of promising basically pilot studies. In fact, I think

(17:33):
maybe it would be good to just talk through a
few examples of recent studies. But maybe we should do
that after we come back from a break. Today's episode
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We're back alright. So I thought it would be good
to just look at a few examples of what these
pilot studies on psychedelic clinical use of psychedelics in recent
years has been, and a good place to turn here

(20:14):
is a pretty recent meta analysis of clinical research on
psychedelics by Albert Garcia, Remew Brennan, Carisguard and Peter Addie
uh This was in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology in twenty sixteen.
Called Clinical Applications of hallucinogens. And so this is like
a meta review of all the existing research out there

(20:35):
right now. And they've got a great just table in
this paper that summarizes findings from a bunch of existing
clinical research up to the year sixteen. And so I
thought we could just go through here and cite some
examples from the categories of treatment you were talking about
a little while ago. And so one thing is a
couple of studies that looked at the treatment of alcoholism.

(20:55):
One is Bogan Shoots at all from and this tested
psilocybin and as therapy therapy sessions. Specifically, it was a
type of therapy I had not heard of, I think
called motivational enhancement therapy. Robert, are you familiar with the uh? No,
I don't believe. Yeah, but it's some kind of therapy, uh.
And so, like many of the other studies, this is

(21:15):
not just looking at taking a drug in isolation, but
taking the psychedelic in concert with some kind of therapy
or or session with a counselor or therapist. I believe
Michael Pollen pointed out there. They tend to be a
par of therapists. You tend to have like a male
a therapist and a female therapist. Yeah. Yeah, and most
of these studies interesting, Um, so this is uh, this

(21:38):
was to treat alcohol dependence in this study and they
found quote significant reduction in self reported drinking days and
heavy drinking days for thirty two weeks after psilocybin administration
compared to baseline. Another study by Krebs and Johansson inve
was a meta analysis of previous research on LSD assist

(22:00):
therapy or counseling, and it found across a total sample
size of more than five hundred participants that a single
dose of LSD, which was two to eight hundred micrograms,
paired with alcoholism treatment found uh quote that that therapy
produced significantly reduced reports of alcohol misuse that follow up

(22:20):
compared to a control group receiving treatments without the psychedelics.
So so it really there are several studies now showing
that it really does seem to be working with alcoholics.
There are also a number of studies, as you mentioned
about depression. For example, Carhart Harris at All in tested
psilocybin quote in a supportive setting on patients with treatment

(22:41):
resistant unipolar major depression and it found significant reductions and
self reported depressive symptoms from one week to three months
after treatment. According to one scoring method for depression symptoms,
eight of twelve participants showed complete remission of depression symptoms
after one week, and five of well showed complete remission
after three months. And these results are twenty milligrams of

(23:05):
psilocybin um. So I think that's interesting because one thing
it shows there is something that I think has showed
up in a few other studies, is that again, while
these compounds appear very promising, they're not a cure all
and they don't appear to last forever. It appears like
they do have an effect. The effect seems to be
very positive, but the effect fades over time. And this

(23:27):
might be a thing where some applications of psychedelics and
the clinical setting maybe something that is a like a
type of therapy that you would repeat at intervals over time,
the same way that you would repeatedly visit a therapist
for psychotherapy sessions, right, or certainly the same way that
in a lot of these traditional societies one would um

(23:47):
would continually go to the shaman or would partake of
psychedelic substance as a part of a regularly occurring religious observance.
Another study on depression was a Storio at All in
they tested ayahuasca for recurrent major depressive disorder UH. This,
like some of the others, was open labels so not

(24:07):
placebo controlled as test group of six so like many
of these small groups, but found significant reductions in reports
of depressive symptoms after one, seven and twenty one days.
Um And and Michael Pollen has an interesting section in
his book How to Change Your Mind about Treating Depression
with Psychedelics in which he talks to the psychologist Rosalind Watts,

(24:31):
who she she so she talks about these master themes
discovered in studies about what's going on with depression, and
I just wanted to read a couple of sections from
Poland's book that I thought were interesting concerning these these
master themes. Quote. The first was that volunteers depicted their
depression foremost as a state of disconnection, whether from other people,

(24:54):
from their earlier selves, their senses and feelings, their core
beliefs and spiritual values, or nature. Several referred to living
in a mental prison, others to being stuck in endless
circles of rumination. They likened to mental gridlock. I was
reminded of Carhart Harris's hypothesis that depression might be a
result of an overactive default mode network, the site in

(25:18):
the brain where rumination appears to take place. And so,
of course you know what might be going on there
is that we we've talked about psychedelics as having at
least metaphorically being these boundary dissolvers, that they, you know,
seem a kind of ultimate remedy for symptoms related to disconnection.
That they encourage the sensation of being connected to other

(25:40):
and all things, and to other people and to the
environment and all these things that people feel disconnected or
cut off from. Uh And then going to the second
master theme that Rosalind Watts explains to pollen quote, the
second master theme was a new access to difficult emotions,
emotions that depres ussian often blunts or closes down completely.

(26:03):
Whats hypothesizes that the depressed patient's incessant rumination constricts his
or her emotional repertoire. In other cases, the depressive keeps
emotions at bay because it's too painful to experience them.
Uh So, like often I think a lay person's understanding
of depression might be, uh, like that you feel intense sadness,

(26:26):
you know, like this this really intense single emotion, which
is not exactly what depression seems to be, right Like,
I mean, I always come back to, um, was it
was it C. S. Lewis that referred to depression as
the black dog, like this this kind of thing that
would come and like just weigh him down. Um. You know,

(26:47):
I always come back to those kind of description because
those feel more accurately when when you are experiencing depression,
or when you're encountering some of the depression, it's not
just like uncontrolled weeping, you know it is it is
more in line with this disc action we're talking about,
this feeling of being trapped within something or within yourself.
In some ways, I think it can be thought of

(27:07):
as sort of like a hyperd motivated state where it
can just be difficult to do anything or to feel anything.
And I guess hopefully hopefully more people were aware of
that now. I feel like the messaging about what depression
is is is better today than it was like when

(27:28):
when when I was, you know, a kid, or when
I was in high school. You know, yeah, I don't
think we had a good idea of it. I think
you had like occasionally to be like a newsweek article
about it, but it wasn't really something that was particularly
discussed in school. As I recall, Yeah, that does seem
like something that's very important, like helping people understand what
depression is, and like being able to recognize the symptoms

(27:50):
so that it can be diagnosed rather than you know,
people just thinking like what's wrong with me now? To
come back to a couple of other areas, um chinned
in this meta analysis of of recent research on the
clinical use of psychedelics, one is studying obsessive compulsive disorder,
so moreno at all. In twenty sixteen, did a double

(28:12):
blind experiment with psilocybin to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, and
they found quote marked reductions on the Yale Brown Obsessive
Compulsive Scale, which is a scoring scale for for those
symptoms for all participants during one or more psilocybin sessions,
and these effects lasted for at least twenty four hours,
though they're not sure how long after that. Obviously, I

(28:33):
think it would be less useful in a clinical setting,
for if it only treated something while you were on
the drug. Right, It's more important to look at like
these kinds of lasting changes that come about from an experience,
but we don't know how long the changes might be.
Operant on obsessive compulsive here. Uh. And then another thing
is tobacco dependence. I guess that goes in a similar

(28:54):
category to alcohol dependence. But Johnson at all In tested
psilocybin paired with cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, and they
found quote biologically verified smoking abstinence in eight percent of
volunteers at a six month follow up, as assessed by
exhaled breath, carbon monoxide, and urine cottoning levels. I'm not

(29:15):
sure what cotening is. It's probably some downstream thing of nicotine.
But the authors here also listed a couple more studies
showing that both psilocybin and LSD assisted psychotherapy were linked
with decreased anxiety and depression symptoms and people who were
facing life threatening illnesses and cancer. But we we should,
I think acknowledge, as we've mentioned several times, that we're

(29:37):
still in the early stages of the psychedelic research renaissance
because a lot of these studies have small samples. A
lot of them are small samples a lot of them
are like open labels, so they're not placebo controlled. People
know what they're getting, uh, and you know, they're not
necessarily randomized controlled and all that. So I think the
future looks bright. But as you were saying a little

(29:57):
while ago, to invoke this much hated scientific cliche, much
much more research is needed, and specifically it's more rigorous
and larger, more statistically powerful research is needed. I can
only imagine too that rescheduling these substances would also help
broaden some of these studies hugely. Yeah, I mean it's
you're talking about small study sizes, but with a schedule

(30:19):
one narcotic that has that has had, you know, a
lot of taboos associated with it, even for clinical and
research purposes. Yeah, exactly. And so to some up, I
think where where we stand. I want to quote from
the discussion section of that that meta meta analysis by
Garcia remu at all quote the psychedelics including LSD, psilocybin,

(30:40):
mescal and d m T, and the d m T
containing ad mixture ayahuasca, have shown promise in treating a
range of psychological disorders for which currently available treatments are
often insufficient, such as mood substance use and anxiety disorders.
These studies have mostly been conducted in small, relatively homogeneous
sam puples, limiting the generalizability of their findings. However, safety

(31:04):
and feasibility of psychedelic facilitated treatment models have been established
by these initial studies, paving the way for further investigation
in larger, more diverse samples using randomized controlled designs. So essentially,
these small studies up front have been very important in
establishing protocols demonstrating legitimacy and safety of these methods of research.

(31:27):
And we're sort of on the way now to look
and see what the results are once we try this
with lots more people, in more settings and more rigorous methods.
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take
another break, and when we come back, we're gonna get
more into the you know, some of the possible future
scenarios for psychedelic use. And we're gonna we're gonna kind

(31:49):
of take this in both the grand direction and a
very mundane direction. We're gonna look at, uh, psychedelics as
a as a radio for speaking to God, and also
we're gonna look at micro dursing. Okay, what grows in
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So we've talked a little bit about about the religious

(34:20):
experience and psychedelics already. Sure, the marsh Chapel experiments of
ninety two with psilocybin on on seminary students and in
a good Friday service, and then the follow up study
the two thousand and six study by Griffith's at All
He looked at mystical or religious experiences people had on
psilocybin and found that people did view these as profound,

(34:41):
significant experiences and that they were positive. Yeah, and we
we see all these different examples of this kind of thinking,
this kind of interpretation of of psychedelic experiences that people
have had. You know, Terence McKenna, who we talked about
in some of the earlier episodes, and certainly he got
into some of these more abrid ideas of saying like
the machine elves, but in Food of the Gods he

(35:04):
discusses this this idea of the possibility of the holy other.
And we see that in other people's writings as well.
Huxley wrote of the mind at large. Uh. And then
we even have these various, you know, other religious encounters
to consider things that are maybe seemingly like a little
less grandiose in terms of just you know, how the

(35:28):
writers using them. Uh. One of these examples being a
cancer patient Dina Beser, who describes feeling quote bathed in
God's love during her experience as part of a two
thousand ten n YU cancer anxiety study. By the way,
she also made an appearance of that World Science Festival
talk she was in the audience. This is a really

(35:49):
interesting point because actually Paul And interviews Beser for his
book and How to Change Your Mind and mentions this
experience interestingly, at least to me. He points out that
her belief that she was bathed in God's love, that's
a quote. Bezer does not believe that God exists, so
to quote from Pollen quote, during the climax of a

(36:09):
journey that extinguished her fear of death, Besier described being
bathed in God's love, and yet she emerged with her
atheism intact. And he wonders how it's possible like to
hold these contradictory ideas at the same time. Eventually, he writes, quote,
not only was the flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful,
but it was unattributable to any individual or worldly cause,

(36:33):
and so was purely gratuitous a form of grace. So
how to convey the magnitude as such a gift? God
might be the only word in the language big enough.
And I think that's really interesting. It's like we don't
have the language to describe these experiences without keying on
other signs, pointing to the unsayable and the indescribable, and

(36:55):
religious words are the words that seem to fit that
best and fall most within each even if we don't.
I mean, some people do mean them exactly in their
traditional sense, but a lot of people on psychedelics use
these words without meaning them in their traditional sense, but
still because they're the only word they can find to
suggest what they felt. Yeah, now and now they just

(37:18):
to critique Paul in a little bit. I mean, I
would argue that, uh, most of us have u contradictory
ideas in our head. You know, I think there are
a lot of us that both believe and don't believe
in a God or some sort of spiritual model. So
we probably have multiple spiritual models regarding some you know,
vague aspect of the metaphysical realm floating around our head

(37:42):
right alongside like a a very like stern scientific interpretation
as well. But but that's that's kind of beside the point.
But uh, but but I do think that I do
think his interpretation is really interesting here, and I think
that the baser is a story is his interesting. You know,
we we often encounter this idea of glimpsing God or

(38:05):
if not a God or a deity or a goddess
or something glimpsing what is often referred to as the
Ultimate Reality um which which of course this gets into.
You know, this is not new to the psychedelic realm.
Like this is something as a as a very old
consideration in Hinduism as well, the idea of like seeing
through the veil of illusion and like seeing the world

(38:27):
as it really is. And so one doesn't have to
take a psychedelic in order to have this experience, but
it certainly seems to be one of the pathways to
to to having it. Uh So we there's actually another
Roland Griffith's study that comes out. It comes up and
this is what this one is actually is from this year,
from nineteen. This is from JOHNS. Hopkins and it was

(38:49):
published in p Os one, and it looked at data
from four thousand, two dight five people worldwide who responded
to online advertisements to complete one of to fifty minute
online surveys about God encounter experiences. And it particularly asked
about encounters with the Ultimate Reality or God or divine

(39:11):
beings you know, like angels, etcetera, that sort of thing
of those. Uh. Four thousand two eight five individuals. One thousand,
one dred and eighty four attributed their experiences to psilocybin um.
One thousand, two hundred fifty one said they took LSD,
four hundred thirty five UH said they took ayahuasca, six
hundred and six said they took D m T. In total,

(39:33):
three thousand, four hundred seventy six individuals responded to the
Psychedelic Survey UH part of the study, and then eight
hundred nine responded to the non drug survey UH, you know,
zeroing in on people who are UH claiming to have
had some sort of divine experience encounter without the aid
of a of a psychedelic But it is interesting to

(39:55):
look at the numbers the way that they fall out
here because in both studies, seventy five pc of people
said it was among the most meaningful events of their lives,
which I guess shouldn't be that surprising. If you encounter
something that you perceive as being the ultimate reality or
a god or an angel or what have you, like,
it better be memorable, Right, Yeah, I met God, but
it wasn't a big deal. Yeah, you don't want to

(40:17):
be like, oh, yeah I met God. I don't know
why that didn't come up before. Oh yeah, I saw
an angel, yeah, um, and then God was kind of boring.
But then they're also these differing factors to like. So
seventy percent said that there was communication involved. So not
only do they behold the divine or behold of the
objective reality, they also had some sort of communication with it.

(40:40):
Seventy five percent reported there being this this air of
benevolence to it, reported a sense of intelligence, uh, seventy
reported sacredness, and seventy percent described an eternal nature to it.
So it was, you know, like this is something that
has always been and always will be. Now, obviously these

(41:02):
are just these are subjectively applied labels. It's the sense
to which people thought these words applied to their experience.
But we still learned something from asking people these kind
of questions. Yeah, uh, to keep going here. Seventy reported
a decreased fear of death in the psychedelic group, fifty
seven percent in the non drug group. Interesting In both groups,

(41:23):
fifteen percent said that it was the most psychologically challenging
experience of their life. Of the psychedelic group described it
as the ultimate reality. Fifty nine percent of the non
drug group described an encounter with a god oran angelic beings.
So I think that's interesting. I'll come back to that.
The people that had a psychedelic experience, they tended to

(41:45):
they were more likely to describe it as just a
like they saw through the veil, they saw the universe
or the world as it really is, whereas the non
drug group were more inclined to encounter a being. Now,
Griffith says that there's a lot more to explore here.
You know, he's he's not drawing any ultimate conclusions from

(42:06):
any of this, uh, but you know, some of the
things to tease out might be, like, you know, what
factors may pre predispose one to have these interpretations like, um,
Like I wonder, for example, if the tendency UH to
interpret it as the ultimate reality over a God, goddess,
angel encounter in the psychedelic experience has more to do

(42:29):
with the religious ideals of the individual, you know, like
here's somebody that they took LST or took psilocybin, so
maybe they weren't like super religious, or if it has
something to do maybe with the you know, the dissolution
of boundaries, uh, you know, the pressing down of the ego,
the the the turning off of the default mode network
for a little bit. So maybe you're you're less inclined

(42:52):
for this experience to be boiled into this egoic entity
and you're more likely to have this broader, dissolved varience.
But then at the same time, I mean, you know,
mckinna and others have talked about encountering and other while
you know, having a you know, a rather intense trip.
So and I guess it basically comes down to they're

(43:12):
multiple factors involved here, and it will be interesting to
see how how future studies might tease that out and determine, like,
you know what, what is impacting the scenario versus the
other and ultimately, like you know what is the you know,
how each can be beneficial, the the psychedelic experience or
the like purely non drug religious experience. Well, when you
encounter some kind of reality beyond that with which you

(43:36):
were familiar, Yeah, what what tends to be correlated with
people believing that there is a an entity there, like
a person or a mind or something versus just some
kind of plane of existence or or you know, state
of truth or I mean you sound kind of silly
when you start trying to put it into words yet again, right,
but I mean it is worth pointing out that, you know,

(43:59):
you're still looking at you know, sevent in both studies
saying that there was communication. So it's it's like something
is communicating with that there's some sort of communication, but
maybe it's you know, it's it's less directed, it's less
tied to an individual. H But anyway, it was, you know,
an interesting study to look at. And again this was

(44:20):
this is Roland Griffiths. So we talked about earlier and
that that earlier religious studying from two thousand six. Yes,
so that's one sort of grandiose way of looking at
the future of psychedelics and psychedelic research, right, figuring out
how we interpret the divine and how they could even
be as psychedelics can be used as part of some
sort of religious experience, like not only uh, you know,

(44:41):
the traditional religious experiences, but maybe some sort of new
religious experience. Well, yeah, I'm curious to see how the
idea of psychedelically prompted religious experience squares with traditional beliefs
in dogmas, because there are very different attitudes that people
can come at this way. I mean some people. I
think some people look at the psychedelic experience and say, oh,

(45:05):
this proof of God. You know, because all these people
take these compounds have experiences of meeting another higher power
or something like that. It's got you know, the consistency
of these reports indicates there's got to be a real
being up there that that people are encountering. And then
people come at it from completely the opposite way and say, look,
if you know, if people are taking drugs that are

(45:25):
causing them to have these experiences, that would tend to
show that the experience is something going on in the
brain and not like an actual spiritual being or entity
up there that that's doing something right, Like why would
that entity only be communicating with people are primarily communicating
with people who have taken a certain compound into their brains.

(45:45):
And it's interesting that this exact same reality causes completely
opposite reactions. Yeah, yeah, that to one person it is uh,
you know, faith in God restored, and the other it
may be a sign and that there was nothing there
to begin with. So yeah, it we'll be interesting to
see how I see what kind of light future research

(46:06):
sheds on this issue. Well though, I also want to
make clear that, at least from my perspective. I mean,
I don't think that even if you don't think that
there are actual other entities out there that people are
encountering on these drugs, that doesn't mean that the mystical
experience is not fascinating and useful and revealing. If we

(46:27):
are encountering other entities, even if they're not like ghosts
or some kind of being that acts, you know, outside
of our control, we are encountering something inside our mind
that is a latent potential there. Yeah, and if you're
communicating with that, even if you're just communicating with yourself,
well there could be something of value there. Yeah. Um. So,

(46:47):
so that's kind of the grandiose view into the future,
you know, communicating with with God, envisioning God, and communicating
with the self, etcetera. On the other end of the spectrum, uh,
Silicon Valley Bros. Micro dosing. So I don't want to
be too judgmental, but yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, So,

(47:07):
I mean obviously the intended um goal with micro dosing
is not to uh justify the ways of God's to man,
but to rather like be a little better your job, right,
creative in Your Job. So we touched on this in
the last episode of Well I Guess the Uh the
episode prior to the last episode, uh and uh, and

(47:28):
I wondered if any research had looked at whether Silicon
Valley types would actually benefit from micro dosing to enhance
creativity or novel thinking. Micro dosing, by the way, the
idea is generally there's no like, you know, definite definition,
but generally it's taking one tenth of a tripping dose
of a psychedelic so you're not having a you know,
perceptually altered experience or not in any significant way. It's

(47:52):
more just kind of like thinking, this kind of loosens
the mind a little bit, right, Yeah, just kind of
like not shaking the snow globe of the brain all
the way up. It just kind of like giving it
a little shuffle and then like doing an eight hour
work day. So anecdotal evidence would indicate that it elevates
mood and mental acuity. But then ultimately, what what do
we have in terms of studies, Well, we don't have much,

(48:15):
but there was there there was actually a study that
came out this year that looked into this a bit
um looking at micro dosing in rats. It was a
University of California Davis study headed up by Dr David Olsen,
and they micro dosed rats with d m T, so
they gave them one tenth of the estimated hallucinogenic dose

(48:35):
in rats. So that's one milligram per kilogram of body
weight every third day for two months. And this is
you know, again more or less standard one tenth of
a tripping dose. They treated them for two weeks and
then began studying mood, anxiety, and cognitive function over a
two day period. And these were the basic results, an
improved ability to overcome fear uh antidepressant effects associated with

(48:58):
reduced immobility, and no obvious impairments or improvements in cognitive
function or social ability. Then, but there were also some
potential downsides. They observed significantly increased body weight in male
rats and euronal atrophy and female rats. This despite the
fact that a previous study from Olson and company had
shown that a single high dose of d MT and

(49:19):
I should a single high dose of d MT showed
increased your own old growth. So again this is one
of those studies that is not is just the beginning
of a story rather than anything like an end to it.
More study is needed, but it ultimately shows that there
may be some quantitative benefits to micro dosing, but there
also may be some key risks, and Olsen says that

(49:41):
that likely dose frequency and length of time are going
to be key here to whether we're talking about a
therapeutic dose or a potentially harmful effect. And of course,
as always, you know, rats are not humans and our
brains are working very differently. But yeah, this is an
interesting indication of what might be going on. I'm especially
interested in in the idea of overcoming fear and to

(50:04):
what extent if that's an analogy for what's going on
with micro dosing and human brains. Uh, if I don't
know that it could be that there's some kind of
like positive disinhibition quality. I mean, this is something I think,
Uh people have thought about alcohol before. You know that
that like sometimes people drink alcohol at parties because it

(50:27):
makes them more sociable. You know, you feel disinhibited. A
lot of the kind of like fear that would keep
you inside your shell goes away. But then of course
there are tons of negative effects that come with alcohol.
You know that that also, like it might make you
less inhibited and and better at socializing with people you
don't know very well, but also makes you stupid er,
you know, just like you're not at your peak in

(50:50):
every possible way. And I would be interested to see
if there are ways in which small doses of psychedelics
could be relevantly disinhibiting without having some of the negative
effects that come with other disinhibitory drugs like alcohol. Now,
obviously there's a great deal to focus on in this
episode about you know, clinical research, and and it is essential,
but you know, I don't think it's our only means

(51:13):
of looking at psychedelics. UM. Michael Pollan and others. They
point out that the psilocybin is not marijuana, and we
can't really look to a you know, one to one
comparison on how decriminalization or legalization will or even should
proceed in regard to psilocybin, for example. But but another,
you know, I think important note here is that even

(51:33):
if we're not seeing, even if we were not seeing
all of these potential benefits for therapy, UM, are there
enough negatives in place to rationalize the continued illegal status
of psychedelic substances. I mean, I would think about it
more from the other direction. I'm like, well, are those
negative effects enough that it should be illegal and punished
by police officers and law enforcement community and the justice

(51:56):
system for people to just have some I don't know.
I mean, it seems to me more like the reasoning
should be that there should be a really good reason
to make things illegal, not there should be a good
reason to make them not illegal. Yeah, and I mean especially,
I mean, we were talking about plants too, and fun guy,
and you know, to what extent should we outlaw fungus
or you know, or multiple species of fungus, you know,

(52:19):
and especially if we're we're talking about like all the
other things that happened when you outlaw substance. You you know,
you you take these and you these these things and
you leave their traffic, their trade, and their culture to fringe,
underground and criminal elements. Um. You know, because one of
the issues with a lot of illicit drugs is that
by making them illicit, we limit our ability to regulate them,

(52:40):
to effectively educate people about them, and to help people
when they encounter problems, be that problem a challenging trip
or something like um, you know, uh, addiction to a
substance like cocaine, I was actually looking at a study
recently taught looking at legalization of marijuana. Uh and in uh,
in the the years they were looking at how it,

(53:02):
um it lessened cases of underage use just because since
it was available legally but it was regulated, Um, there
were fewer people below the appropriate age acquiring the substance.
That's interesting. So, uh, you know, easily we could do.
You could do a whole episode, multiple episodes, just talking
about all these issues and drug legalization and regulation, what

(53:25):
should be, what should be illegal, and what shouldn't be illegal,
not only in terms of substances, but pretty much anything
within a given society. UM. But UM, I mean hopefully
in these episodes we've given everybody some food, some food
for thought, uh God, some food of the gods for
thought on that topic. Uh and in general, hopefully you know,
we've provided everyone of a bit more information about the history, nature,

(53:47):
and reality of psychedelics so that you can make up
your own minds about it, or even change your mind
if you so wish. All right, So there you have it, psychedelics. Uh.
It only took us five episodes, but here we are,
and I feel I feel frustrated because we still I
like there's so much stuff we wanted to get to
that we never did. I just remembered we were going

(54:07):
to come back to the stuff about adult personality change.
There's psychedelics that, uh, maybe we can explore that in
a future episode. Oh absolutely, Yeah. This is one of
those rich topics where you you know, the more you
look into it, the more stuff you bring up, the
more you realize you're missing out and not even exploring.
So if we didn't talk about your favorite sub topic
or issue in psychedelics, sorry, we we just didn't get

(54:30):
to it right. So we would obviously love to hear
from anybody. So if there's there's a particular part of
this five part journey that you would love to hear
a future episode on you want a deeper dive, you
want us come back to it, let us know about that. Uh,
if you have general thoughts right into us. Also, if
you have you know, particulars about your own experiences with
any of these substances or even with just uh, you know,

(54:53):
hallucinatory experiences that are not tied to psychedelic use, uh,
feel free to share those with us. And if you
want to remain an anonymous on a future listener mail episode.
You can make a note of that as well, and
we will definitely honor that. Uh. In the meantime, head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership. That's we will find all the episodes
of the show. If you want to support our little

(55:14):
show here, the best thing you can do is to
rate and review us wherever you have the power to
do so, and make sure that you have subscribed. Huge
thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, Maya Cole.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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(55:45):
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