December 1, 2023 • 37 mins
Laurie's former student and friend, Dr. Maya Shankar, has a Pushkin podcast we love called A Slight Change of Plans. If you like The Happiness Lab, then this show is right up your alley. In this episode, Maya and author Michael Pollan discuss the fascinating science of psychedelics and how they have the power to transform our minds and improve our mental health. You’ll also get a glimpse into Michael’s personal experience with psychedelic trips and how they unlocked a singular kind of joy within him. Plus, you'll hear him try and convince scaredy-cat Maya to give them a try.
You can hear more from A Slight Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Today, I'm bringing you a
new episode from one of my favorite podcasts. It's another
Pushkin industry show called A Slight Change of Plans, hosted
by my former student, doctor Maya Shunker. In this episode,
Maya speaks with author Michael Pollin about a topic of
growing interest and happiness studies, the science of psychedelics. Michael
(00:37):
and Maya explore how these powerful chemicals work and how
guided psychedelic trips have the power to change our perspective
and our overall well being. And while I have you here,
just a reminder that our Giving Tuesday campaign is still
on until the end of the month. You can join
me and other Happiness Lab listeners in helping the people
of Gobobo in Rwanda through GiveDirectly dot org slash happiness.
(00:59):
Just five or ten bucks could really help a person
in need, so consider being generous. It'll help your happiness.
That's give directly dot org slash happiness now onto the episode.
If you like it, you can check out A Slight
Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I suddenly saw myself from outside and I saw myself
kind of explode in this cloud of blue post it notes,
you know, like confetti, and they came down to the
ground and they kind of masked in this pool of
blue paint. And that was me. I had complete acceptance
that had I died and vanished, that was fine. It
(01:49):
was what was meant to be. There was a continuing
consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy and
very hard to put into words.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That's renowned author Michael Pollan. He's talking about how a
guided psychedelic trip on psilocybin, a molecule found in mushrooms,
helped him see his mortality through an entirely new lens.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This is a very non interventionist therapy. The therapists say
nothing during the experience except would you like a glass
of water or a snack or need to go to
the bathroom. It really they let your mind go where
your mind wants to go. It is a kind of
self exploration, self healing.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
On today's show, we hear from Michael Pollan about how
plants have the power to change our minds. I'm Maya
Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a
show about who we are and who we become in
the face of a big change I'm fascinated by the
(02:58):
kinds of experiences that can drastically change our perspectives, and
guided psychedelic trips have the potential to do just that.
While psychedelics aren't legal in the US, have been used
in certain clinical trials and have delivered powerful therapeutic benefits
for people struggling with things like addiction, depression, and existential distress.
(03:20):
So what's happening to our brains under their influence that
gives rise to these remarkable changes. Michael's written two books
that explore the answer to this question, How to Change
Your Mind and This is Your Mind on Plants. And
so today we dig into the science of psychedelics. We
started off by discussing the somewhat astonishing fact that basically
(03:40):
every culture in the world has discovered psychoactive plants. They
contain molecules that can alter human consciousness. We're talking about
the morphine and the opium poppy and the caffeine in
coffee and tea. Michael says, there are a few explanations
for why we're so drawn to these substances. For starters,
they can provide pain, relief and stave off boredom.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
But then I think that there are more profound uses
to which people have put these psychoactive plants. Talking here
about the more powerful ones, the ones we call psychedelics,
and that is for access to other realms, other dimensions
of reality and afterworld and underworld, and religious visions essentially,
(04:24):
you know, mystical experiences that are at the heart of
a great many religions. And it may well be that
it was these psychedelic substances that opened up that way
of thinking, that gave people the visions that were interpreted
in such a way as to underwrite whole religions. And
(04:44):
we just think of the artists who were influenced by psychoactives,
you know, new metaphors, new insights, or scientific discoveries. I mean,
there's a great many scientific discoveries that trace to psychedelic use.
I think of it as the natural history of imagination.
But it sure is interesting to think about.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
It is, and I mean it is striking to me
that it just appears like normal consciousness isn't enough for
us humans, right, Like we're not sated by it. And look,
there's obviously a continuum. And I fall closer to the
risk averse. I'm more of a boring person who seems
(05:23):
I feel totally fulfilled by my current realm of consciousness.
I know lots of other people have a much more
exploratory mindset, but it is striking that across all cultures
there is some itch for something beyond our everyday conscious experience, and.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
We seek transcendence. Of course, not just through drugs. Extreme
sports and intense periods of physical activity can do it
releasing drugs in the brain basically, I mean, we can
drug ourselves in all sorts of ways. Fasting, does it, dance,
ecstatic dance, rhythm, you know, drumming. I think the desire
for transcendence goes really deep, and it's interesting. I mean,
(06:02):
do other creatures have it? We know that some other
animals do like to change consciousness from their Elephants love
alcohol apparently and apparently birds will you know, favor cannabis
seeds over all different kinds seems to addle them a
little bit. But transcendence, that idea that you know that
(06:23):
there is another, there is another realm of existence, another
way to be, is something that I think is a
deep human desire.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, I'm wondering, Michael, if you can give us a
quick history lesson because in recent years, there's been a
huge resurgence of interest in the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics
for people with anxiety, depression, addiction, terminal illness. What's been
responsible for this shift.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Well, you know, one of the big surprises in researching
psychedelics was discovering how much research had been done during
this period from the late forties through the mid sixties
and the fifties. It was, you know, a really vibrant
field of research with some very promising results using LSD
and psilocybin to treat alcoholism, end of life anxiety, things
(07:12):
like that. It was completely respectable, and then the work
stops in the late sixties early seventies, there is a
tremendous backlash under President Nixon, and the culture kind of
turns against them. There's a backlash and the media, which
had been incredibly positive about psychedelics turns on a dime,
(07:32):
and so the research stops. The way it gets restarted
is really a function of a couple things. One is,
you have a group of psychiatrists therapists of other kinds
who never lost faith in the fact that these were
powerful therapeutic agents, and in fact, some of them were
working with them underground, and people in that world started
(07:54):
kind of plotting the return of psychedelics. And then in
the early nineties they kind of got a signal from
the FDA. There was a bureaucrat there in charge of
drug development, and he basically sends a signal to researchers that, look,
we're going to just treat psychedelics like any other drug.
If you've got a good experiment, if you've got a
(08:15):
good indication, you think it's going to be useful for
We're not going to discriminate against it. The key moment,
I think, though, comes when Bob Jesse, who is an
interesting character. He's not a doctor or a therapist. He's
a computer engineer at Oracle who had experiences with psychedelics
(08:35):
that had convinced him of their value. And he reaches
out to a man named Roland Griffith, who is a
very well respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, you know, the
leading medical institution in the country, and they cook up
this study and it's not a clinical study, it's not
a therapeutic study at all. It's an effort to see
(08:57):
whether you could induce a mystical type experience in someone
with a high dose of psilocybin. Mystical type experience is
something that Roland is personally very interested in, and they
do this that's published in two thousand and six, and
it's the craziest study. I mean, the title is something
like psilocybin can occasion mystical type experience in healthy, normal people,
(09:20):
something like that. And for me to see these words
mystical experience in the pages of a medical journal was
just so mind blowing.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And what is the hallmark of a mystical experience?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Good question, I had no idea, but it involves a
transcendence of space and time. Are euphoric feeling or feeling
of intense well being, a dissolution of ego followed by
a sense of merging with something larger than yourself. You
feel connected to nature or other people or the universe
(09:53):
of the divinity. And they found that of the two
thirds of people who had this mystical experience, they reported
enduring changes in their sense of well being going out
six weeks or eight weeks or something. And in a
follow up study they found that aspects of their personality,
specifically openness, the trait of openness increased, And that's quite
(10:17):
striking because in general, personality doesn't change in adults. So
this study really is the foundation on which subsequent work
has been done. And by looking at these results that
there seemed to be an improvement and well being, the
idea occurred, well, we should try this with cancer patients.
(10:37):
We should try this with people who have what the
psychiatrists call existential distress over their diagnosis or the proximity
of death. And that became the first clinical trial that
the people at Hopkins did, and it was duplicated at
the same time at NYU.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Yeah. You know, what's notable about some of these controlled
studies is that participants report that their guided experiences on
psychedelics are totally singular in nature, right, that they count
among the top most meaningful experiences they've ever had. And
I'd love to dig into the neuroscience just a bit
so we can understand what is giving rise to these
(11:15):
exceptional subjective states.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, the honest answer is, we don't really know. We
have some really interesting hints, but there's a lot more
work to be done. A researcher in England named Robin
Carhart Harris put people in an fMRI machine and injected
them with psilocybin in one trial and LSD in another,
and he found something very interesting. Where he expected to
(11:42):
see a kind of explosion of activity mirroring the extraordinary
visual effects and emotional effects, he actually found the most
notable thing was a quieting of activity in one particular network.
And this network, which I had never heard of, is
the default mode network. The default mode network is the
(12:02):
part of your brain that's most active when you're not
doing anything. It's where your brain goes. It's the default
and it was discover when they were doing fMRI tasks
of other kinds and they had to get the baseline.
So they tell people don't do anything, don't think about anything,
or try not to think about anything, just lie there,
and it turns out their brains lit up and all
sorts of stuff went on, and a lot of it
(12:23):
involved self reflection, worry, rumination, thinking about the future, thinking
about the past. The default mode network seems to be
involved with creating this projection or illusion that we have
as self. It's involved in time travel, the ability to
think about the future and the past, which, if you
think about it, you need if you're going to have
(12:45):
a sense of self. Our sense of self is what's
happened to us in the past, and what we hope
will happen in the future, or what we think might
happen to us in the future. It's also involved in
something called theory of mind. That's the ability to imagine
the thoughts of other people, to understand that other people
have thoughts, have a subjectivity, have an interiority. That's a
big deal, And it's involved in the what's called the
(13:09):
narrative self, the story we tell ourselves of who we
are and how we take new events and kind of
weave them into that narrative. So you know, to the
extent the self has an address in the brain, it
appears to be in this network. And this network gets
very quiet under psychedelics and in the minds of very
(13:33):
experienced meditators and you know Robin. Then you know correlated
reports of ego dissolution, and people can describe that it's
quite a wild experience. You observe your sense of self
completely melting or crumbling. It once happened to me when
(13:54):
people reported that they had the most precipitous drops in
activity in the default mode network. So that's one of
the findings really of psychedelic science already that is significant,
I think for our understanding of consciousness and the self.
But it's not the only theory of what's going on.
There are people who aren't sold on the default mode.
We're hoping to get some more precise answers to these questions.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, I mean, in addition to some of the therapeutic effects,
it is so compelling that this basic research can help
us further understand what brain structures are associated with our
sense of self.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah. There's another area to investigate, too, is what psychedelics
might teach us about the consciousness of children. You may
know Alison Gopnik.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Allison, Yes, I'm such a fan of hers.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And she studies child consciousness and problem solving, and she's
convinced that the psychedelic experience is as close as adults
get to the mind of the child and the way
of thinking and the kind of what she describes as
the lantern consciousness, as opposed to the spotlight consciousness of adults,
(15:07):
which is very focused in linear. Children take in information
from all different sides, which allows for a different kind
of creativity, and she thinks that there's a retrogression in
psychedelic consciousness that closely resembles that of children, So that's
a whole other avenue of exploration. That's very exciting.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Yeah. I love her quote that babies and children are
basically tripping all the time. Yes, what a lovely, colorful
way of saying it.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
This was an insight she had when her granddaughter was born.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I love that. Yeah. You know you mentioned that you
did have the experience of feeling your ego dissolved, and
I know you did try psychedelics while you were writing
your book. You say that you felt your sense of
self scattered to the wind like a blizzard of post its.
And I'm wondering, can you just paint a scene of
the many ways in which ego dissolution expressed itself during
(16:01):
your trips.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
It was such an interesting, strange experience. I was really
not prepared for it. So I had a fairly high
dose psilocybin experience guided by an underground guide, somebody I
really trusted. And I mentioned that because if you're going
to let go to the extent of allowing your sense
of self to completely vanish, you're going to have to
(16:25):
feel very safe and very comfortable. And I did you
know under her guidance, and anyway, at a certain point
well into the experience. She offered me what's called a
booster dose, and I figured in for a dime, in
for a dollar. I was doing this for my book, actually,
and so I said sure, and I ate.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Another my research purposes, strictly for.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Research purposes, you know, in the interest of my readers,
because it really was because I was although I was
very curious, I was very afraid to do psychedelics, you know.
I didn't do this till I was like in my
late fifties, and I had a lot of fear of
what could happen. I had read the stories of you know,
bad trips, and I didn't know what. Also, you can
(17:08):
discover really unpleasant things about yourself. And anyway, at this point,
I suddenly saw myself from outside, and I saw myself
kind of explode in this cloud of post it notes,
blue post it notes, you know, like confetti, and they
came down to the ground and they kind of masked
(17:28):
in this pool of blue paint. And that was me.
And I was absolutely sure it was me, but I
was perceiving it from this new perspective that I had
never experienced before. I don't know quite what it was.
It wasn't me it was very equable, disinterested. It had
no problem with what had happened. I didn't feel threatened
(17:51):
in any way, and that was me. I was gone
and that was fine, but I was still aware. And
it was the first time it ever occurred to me
that you could have awareness without self, which is something
Buddhists and Hindus will tell you about. But you know,
that seemed very far from my experience. And then what
(18:11):
happens when you don't have a self is that that
you merge with everything around you. And in this case,
what I merged with was a piece of music. And
she put on Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite number two in
D minor, which is a very sad piece of music,
(18:32):
so gorgeous, yeah, and I and I became one with
the music. It was complete merging, and it was incredibly beautiful.
It's the most profound experience of music I'd ever had.
And I felt as though the bow, the horsehair of
the bow, was going over my body. And then at
(18:52):
one point that I was inside the well of this,
you know, this wooden container, and it was so beautiful,
and although it was very sad, I wouldn't call it
a happy experience. It was very sad. It was all
about death. I mean that the piece of music. To me,
it was all about death. But I was completely I
(19:21):
had complete acceptance that had I died and vanished, that
was fine. It was what was meant to be. Something
followed on that death of the self. There was a
continuing consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy
and very hard to put into words. I struggled to
describe it in the book, but it was one of
(19:42):
the most profound experiences of my life.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
The struggle you're having putting your experience into words is
very characteristic of how many people feel after a trip. Right.
They're saying, this is one of the most profound experiences
of my life, and yet when they try and express
it in words, it sounds cliche new ag you know,
everything is love, that sort of thing. It's interesting. I
(20:05):
was interviewing Casey Musgraves, the country music singer maybe episode
of a Slight Change of Plans, about her psychedelic trip,
and I was actually asking whether the ability to create
music in some way was an antidote to her inability
to fully express the profound insights that she had had
using the words that we have at our disposal.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Well, you know, you've just reminded me of one of
the other of the eight characteristics of mystical experience, and
that's ineffability, the fact that these are very hard to
describe because it kind of defies the language we have.
Our language wasn't built to describe these kinds of experiences.
And the other thing that you alluded to is that
(20:48):
there is a tremendous banality to some of the insights,
the profound insights that people have, such as love is
the most important principle in the universe. You know, that
is banal, but it's also profound. And one of the
things you come out of the experience realizing is that
it's a very fine line between banality and profundity. And
(21:09):
one of the things psychedelics does is it takes all
that ironic crust we cover the world with and it
scrapes it off really effectively, and suddenly things appear with
the profundity and beauty of first sight. I mean, awe
at the ordinary is a really you know, a piece
of music, a flower, I mean, And that's another way
(21:33):
in which I think you're recovering the mind of the child.
And that's a wonderful aspect of psychedelic experience.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plants. I'm talking with Michael Polland about how psychedelics
can change our minds. I wanted to hear more about
the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Studies show that when they're
administered and guided clinical settings, they can help with a
(22:06):
surprisingly vast number of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety,
obsessive compulsive disorder, and fear of death.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Now, I was initially kind of suspicious of the you know,
is this some sort of panacea. It's being used for
all these different things. And I remember interviewing Tom Insull,
a psychiatrist, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health,
and I said, isn't this a little weird that all
these different indications are responding to the same kind of treatment,
(22:36):
And he said, well, you're assuming that they're all different,
you know, indications. They may be symptoms of a similar brain.
And that is that a brain that's overly rigid and
it's thinking that's trapped in patterns of rumination. And indeed,
all those things depression, anxiety, obsession, addiction represent people stuck
(22:56):
in loops of destructive thought and behavior, and that what
psychedelics may do is help you break out of that.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
I mean, certainly that's consonant with the use of SSRI's
selective serchonin rep conhibitors rights, OCDA, anxiety, depression, et cetera.
So it would be very reasonable to expect that what
Tom is saying applies in this case. I'm wondering if
you can share some examples of the therapeutic benefits that
(23:24):
can be conferred by psychedelics, in particular people who are
facing what you've referred to as existential distress.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah. Well, the first group of patients I talked to
were cancer patients, and I interviewed quite a few of them.
Patrick Mattis is someone I wrote about in detail in
the book. I never met him, he had died already,
but I spent a lot of time with his wife
and his therapist and learning about his story and reading
his account. And he was a man he was about
my age at the time, and a journalist like me
(23:54):
also who had gotten cancer of the bile ducts. And
his wife noticed the whites of his eyes that turned
very yellow, and he was given a terminal diagnosis and
struggled with that for a long time. It was really
paralyzed by it. He read about this experiment going on
at NYU. He was in New York, and he decided
(24:15):
to enroll in this drug trial to see if this
could help him with his anxiety and depression. His wife
actually was against it because to her it represented giving up,
but he had no intention of doing that. He was
continuing with his at least for a while with his
chemo after the experience, and he did it, and he
had a mystical experience. It was very profound. He described
(24:37):
it in great detail. He explored his body and visited
his cancer. He saw it, and at one moment he
climbed a kind of precipice in his mind and he
looks out and he sees this kind of plane of consciousness,
you know, a vista in front of him, which really
he thought was what would happen to him after he
(24:58):
was after he died, and he had a sense this
was where he was going. It wasn't frightening. He was
he would be okay to go there, but he wasn't ready.
He still wanted more time with his wife, and he
kind of turned back and he came out of the
experience a changed man and he had I forget how
(25:19):
much time it was. It was like another eleven months
where he was able to have great pleasure in life.
He would spend his days walking along the Brooklyn Pier,
checking out new restaurants, had really good periods of time
with his wife, and at a certain point decided to
stop his chemo, which was really debilitating, and he wanted
(25:41):
the clarity that would come with just living out his
last months without medicine in his body. And he died
a death of acceptance. People I interviewed described his room
at Mount Sinai as like having this glow.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
He was.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Incredibly settled and happy, and all the staff of the
hospital would want to come by this room to get
you a taste of this man who was approaching death
with such equanimity. So it was, you know, it was incredible.
And at one point his wife sent me a photograph
of him snapped like three or four days before his death,
(26:20):
and he was very thin, wearing the hospital smock, and
he had an oxygen clip in his nose and he
was beaming. So that you had a profound effect on me.
And I interviewed a great many patients about their experiences,
and there were a lot of common denominators. One was
(26:41):
a kind of a confrontation with death and a confrontation
with one's cancer, and in most cases it made people
much more accepting of their death. So I think it
has a powerful application there for people with life changing diagnoses,
and obviously not just cancer, I mean someone with an
als diagnosis or any number of other terminal diagnoses. I
(27:05):
was kind of sold on it for that use, and
because we have so little to offer people, you know,
we give them morphine which dulls their minds, and this
clarifies their minds, so you know, hopefully this will become common.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah. You know, Patrick's story reminds me of the most
stirring powerful part of your book, which is learning that
many people believe that the insights that they've tapped into
while they're on these psychedelic trips do represent objective truths
about the universe, right, this noedic quality, and that you know,
they're not just dismissing their insights as these zany things
(27:39):
that they had while they were high. They see their
experience as as this kind of window into some more
accurate view of reality. You know, take Patrick who believes
that he's confronted what his afterlife will look like, and
to me, it raises some very interesting philosophical and moral questions.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
I struggle with that, and I asked some of the
researchers about this, and I got a range of answers.
I mean, one is, you know, well, we don't really
know what happens after someone dies, and it's not for
us to tell our patients what happens after someone dies.
But I would say, you know, well, maybe what you're
administering is a delusion to people. And I remember one
(28:23):
researcher said, hey, if it works, who cares it? Took
a purely pragmatic view.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
That's my camp for what it's worth.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Really.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah. Absolutely, As someone who studies cognitive science and believes
I guess I have a very reductionist view of life.
But I am of the mind that all we are
are subjective states, and so in the throes of a
terminal illness, if you can be brought relief by believing
the afterlife is one thing, great, you've reduced suffering. But again,
not everybody has my exceedingly reductionist view of human existence.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, and I think it's something that needs to be explored.
I mean, I think that there are many ethical issues
raised by psychedelics, but it's also important to understand that
it's not the researchers that are planting this image of
the afterlife, and it's not the pill. The pill is
just is a catalyst for thoughts and fantasies and images.
(29:17):
They're not priming you to have an afterlife experience. They
may be priming you a little bit to have a
mystical experience in the way they prepare you. I mean
that needs to be looked at. But everything that happens
on a psychedelic experience is the product of your mind
and to some extent, your expectations and your setting. I mean,
(29:38):
we know about set and setting.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Very suggestible, yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Very suggestible, But it's really your creation. This isn't mind control.
So if that's where somebody's mind takes them and that's
a helpful place, it's hard to argue with that. I mean,
I mean, I tend to agree with you, but you know,
I mean people might have ethical qualms about that, But
I come back to the fact that there's no information
(30:02):
in the molecule, right, It's all what your mind is creating.
It's subjective states.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah, it's about maybe a reframing for skeptics or people
who might have some concerns, is that it is essentially
a creative exploration into the types of things that could
reassure an individual person. Right, It's like, yeah, what would
pacify Patrick in this very specific situation and his mind
(30:30):
engages with that.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
You know what's interesting there is you're healing yourself, right,
I mean, and in fact, that is a large part
what happens. I mean, these are this is a very
non interventionist therapy. The therapists say nothing during the experience
except would you like a glass of water or a
snack or need to go to the bathroom. It really
they let your mind go where your mind wants to go.
(30:53):
It is a kind of self exploration, self healing, and
you know, there's so much more we need to learn
about it.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
For scaredy cats like me, Michael, who will almost certainly
never be willing to do a psychedelic trip. Are there
ways of approximating the effects of psychedelics through other means?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yes? There are. The most interesting one I came across
is something called holotropic breath work. This was devised by
Stan Groff, who was a psychiatrist who was doing a
lot of psychedelic therapy in the sixties, and once the
drugs were made illegal, he wanted to find a legal
way to get the same results because he was getting
amazing results with his patients, and borrowing from many different traditions,
(31:36):
including yogic breathing techniques, he came up with this way
of inducing a trance state that is very much like psychedelics.
I did it once, and you basically have this pattern
of breathing that I think hyperventilates you. You're breathing very
fast and exhaling more than you're inhaling, and they're playing
(31:57):
very loud, rhythmic drumming, and after a certain amount of time,
a few minutes, you enter into this state where you
can do that breathing without trying to. You're on your back,
but you're dancing, all your limbs are moving. It's the
strangest thing that you could induce this trance and you
have the kind of imagery that you do on psychedelic experience.
(32:19):
And I did it, and I felt like I'd run
a marathon when it was over. It was a very
intense experience. No drugs involved, whatsoever, What is it doing
in the brain. I think it may in fact be
doing the same thing to the default mode network, because
you're probably starving the brain of oxygen. But yes, there
are non pharmacological ways to get similar effects.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I do wonder whether we as humans would be more
tolerant of non pharmacological states that actually rival the psychedelic
ones if they're negative, if they're not drug induced, Like
there's somehow this bias against the drug induced bad trip.
But if I were to achieve that psychological state through
natural means, somehow, I'm more okay with the idea of
it going sour or being scary.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah. Well, you know, we have a prejudice against exogenous drugs,
but there are ways to rug yourself without them, and
this is one. There may be risks though to doing that.
We haven't talked about risk, but one of the really
striking things about the classical psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin
and DMT is that there is no lethal dose. You
(33:24):
can't overdose on these drugs, and you can overdose on
all sorts of over the counter drugs. There is no
risk of addiction either. I mean, I'm not trying to
sell you on anything maya oh, nor.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
You haven't sold me on anything. I'm still not going
to do it.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
But the risks, such as they are are. There are
psychological risks. People do get into psychological trouble, especially when
they don't pay enough attention to set and setting, and
they don't do it with a guide, and they don't
do it in a safe environment. It can be you know,
it can be terrifying, and so you do have to
keep that in mind. But when I you know, I
(34:00):
came to it late and I did my due diligence.
I was not a twenty year old, you know, with
no proper sense of.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
You're a whole freaking book on it. No one's going
to be able to meet with you on that front
in terms of doing your due diligence.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Well, but I wanted to make sure it was safe,
and I really did look at all the research and
convince myself this wasn't a stupid or irresponsible thing to do.
There are legal risks we should point out. Unless you're
in a drug trial, you know, you go to a
university and enter. But aside from that, I convinced myself
that the benefits would probably outweigh the risks, and I
(34:34):
certainly feel that way having done it.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
I'd love to ask you a more personal question about
the long term impact psychedelics have had on your own life.
What are some enduring changes you've had in your perspective
or your personality ever since?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
You know. I think the big thing is I acquired
and it was during that episode of ego dissolution or
you know, dissolution of self that I described a little
more perspective on my ego or self. I identified with it.
I thought I was that person, that voice, and I've
come to see that it's one voice among several in
(35:13):
my mind, and that I don't necessarily have to listen
to it, and that sometimes I can recognize that my
ego is up to his old tricks and he's being
hypercritical or needlessly worrying, and I can kind of get
some distance on it. And I find that very useful.
It's exactly the kind of insight you might or practice
you might get out of conventional psychotherapy. But I got
(35:37):
it in the course of an afternoon, you know, and
that was very useful. If you ask my wife, she
would tell you that the experiences have made me more open,
more emotionally available things like that. I'm not sure I can,
you know, I necessarily see that, but it has opened
up this space of curiosity about myself and self exploration,
(35:58):
and I found it very useful. I mean every time
I've done it, you know, I learned things about myself
I didn't know before, and that's incredibly valuable, and especially
at my age. I'm in my sixties. Now you sort
of think that that process, you know, would have slowed
or ended, but not at all. It's actually been intensified
by this.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Okay, now you're selling me a little bit in the
last minute, Folks. He gets me while I'm weak in vulnerable. No,
this is awesome. Thank you so much, Michael.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Oh my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to you. I
hope we can do this in person next time.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive
produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes
Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guerra, our senior editor,
Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rosstek our producer, and
Neil LaBelle our executive producer. Luis Scara wrote a theme song,
and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change
(37:13):
of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big
thanks to everyone there, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee
tal Mallatt and Heather Fame and of course a very
special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight
Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Mayah Schunker. See
you next week.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
So how does this sound? I think I'm on the
proper microphone. Why are the three legs of this microphone
not the same length.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
We like to introduce logic puzzles into the mic setup, Michael,
So if you can figure out the three leg problem,
that's actually part of the challenge. Oh god, this is
a admissions ticket to the interview.
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Today, I'm bringing you a
new episode from one of my favorite podcasts. It's another
Pushkin industry show called A Slight Change of Plans, hosted
by my former student, doctor Maya Shunker. In this episode,
Maya speaks with author Michael Pollin about a topic of
growing interest and happiness studies, the science of psychedelics. Michael
(00:37):
and Maya explore how these powerful chemicals work and how
guided psychedelic trips have the power to change our perspective
and our overall well being. And while I have you here,
just a reminder that our Giving Tuesday campaign is still
on until the end of the month. You can join
me and other Happiness Lab listeners in helping the people
of Gobobo in Rwanda through GiveDirectly dot org slash happiness.
(00:59):
Just five or ten bucks could really help a person
in need, so consider being generous. It'll help your happiness.
That's give directly dot org slash happiness now onto the episode.
If you like it, you can check out A Slight
Change of Plans wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I suddenly saw myself from outside and I saw myself
kind of explode in this cloud of blue post it notes,
you know, like confetti, and they came down to the
ground and they kind of masked in this pool of
blue paint. And that was me. I had complete acceptance
that had I died and vanished, that was fine. It
(01:49):
was what was meant to be. There was a continuing
consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy and
very hard to put into words.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That's renowned author Michael Pollan. He's talking about how a
guided psychedelic trip on psilocybin, a molecule found in mushrooms,
helped him see his mortality through an entirely new lens.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
This is a very non interventionist therapy. The therapists say
nothing during the experience except would you like a glass
of water or a snack or need to go to
the bathroom. It really they let your mind go where
your mind wants to go. It is a kind of
self exploration, self healing.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
On today's show, we hear from Michael Pollan about how
plants have the power to change our minds. I'm Maya
Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a
show about who we are and who we become in
the face of a big change I'm fascinated by the
(02:58):
kinds of experiences that can drastically change our perspectives, and
guided psychedelic trips have the potential to do just that.
While psychedelics aren't legal in the US, have been used
in certain clinical trials and have delivered powerful therapeutic benefits
for people struggling with things like addiction, depression, and existential distress.
(03:20):
So what's happening to our brains under their influence that
gives rise to these remarkable changes. Michael's written two books
that explore the answer to this question, How to Change
Your Mind and This is Your Mind on Plants. And
so today we dig into the science of psychedelics. We
started off by discussing the somewhat astonishing fact that basically
(03:40):
every culture in the world has discovered psychoactive plants. They
contain molecules that can alter human consciousness. We're talking about
the morphine and the opium poppy and the caffeine in
coffee and tea. Michael says, there are a few explanations
for why we're so drawn to these substances. For starters,
they can provide pain, relief and stave off boredom.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
But then I think that there are more profound uses
to which people have put these psychoactive plants. Talking here
about the more powerful ones, the ones we call psychedelics,
and that is for access to other realms, other dimensions
of reality and afterworld and underworld, and religious visions essentially,
(04:24):
you know, mystical experiences that are at the heart of
a great many religions. And it may well be that
it was these psychedelic substances that opened up that way
of thinking, that gave people the visions that were interpreted
in such a way as to underwrite whole religions. And
(04:44):
we just think of the artists who were influenced by psychoactives,
you know, new metaphors, new insights, or scientific discoveries. I mean,
there's a great many scientific discoveries that trace to psychedelic use.
I think of it as the natural history of imagination.
But it sure is interesting to think about.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
It is, and I mean it is striking to me
that it just appears like normal consciousness isn't enough for
us humans, right, Like we're not sated by it. And look,
there's obviously a continuum. And I fall closer to the
risk averse. I'm more of a boring person who seems
(05:23):
I feel totally fulfilled by my current realm of consciousness.
I know lots of other people have a much more
exploratory mindset, but it is striking that across all cultures
there is some itch for something beyond our everyday conscious experience, and.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
We seek transcendence. Of course, not just through drugs. Extreme
sports and intense periods of physical activity can do it
releasing drugs in the brain basically, I mean, we can
drug ourselves in all sorts of ways. Fasting, does it, dance,
ecstatic dance, rhythm, you know, drumming. I think the desire
for transcendence goes really deep, and it's interesting. I mean,
(06:02):
do other creatures have it? We know that some other
animals do like to change consciousness from their Elephants love
alcohol apparently and apparently birds will you know, favor cannabis
seeds over all different kinds seems to addle them a
little bit. But transcendence, that idea that you know that
(06:23):
there is another, there is another realm of existence, another
way to be, is something that I think is a
deep human desire.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, I'm wondering, Michael, if you can give us a
quick history lesson because in recent years, there's been a
huge resurgence of interest in the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics
for people with anxiety, depression, addiction, terminal illness. What's been
responsible for this shift.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Well, you know, one of the big surprises in researching
psychedelics was discovering how much research had been done during
this period from the late forties through the mid sixties
and the fifties. It was, you know, a really vibrant
field of research with some very promising results using LSD
and psilocybin to treat alcoholism, end of life anxiety, things
(07:12):
like that. It was completely respectable, and then the work
stops in the late sixties early seventies, there is a
tremendous backlash under President Nixon, and the culture kind of
turns against them. There's a backlash and the media, which
had been incredibly positive about psychedelics turns on a dime,
(07:32):
and so the research stops. The way it gets restarted
is really a function of a couple things. One is,
you have a group of psychiatrists therapists of other kinds
who never lost faith in the fact that these were
powerful therapeutic agents, and in fact, some of them were
working with them underground, and people in that world started
(07:54):
kind of plotting the return of psychedelics. And then in
the early nineties they kind of got a signal from
the FDA. There was a bureaucrat there in charge of
drug development, and he basically sends a signal to researchers that, look,
we're going to just treat psychedelics like any other drug.
If you've got a good experiment, if you've got a
(08:15):
good indication, you think it's going to be useful for
We're not going to discriminate against it. The key moment,
I think, though, comes when Bob Jesse, who is an
interesting character. He's not a doctor or a therapist. He's
a computer engineer at Oracle who had experiences with psychedelics
(08:35):
that had convinced him of their value. And he reaches
out to a man named Roland Griffith, who is a
very well respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, you know, the
leading medical institution in the country, and they cook up
this study and it's not a clinical study, it's not
a therapeutic study at all. It's an effort to see
(08:57):
whether you could induce a mystical type experience in someone
with a high dose of psilocybin. Mystical type experience is
something that Roland is personally very interested in, and they
do this that's published in two thousand and six, and
it's the craziest study. I mean, the title is something
like psilocybin can occasion mystical type experience in healthy, normal people,
(09:20):
something like that. And for me to see these words
mystical experience in the pages of a medical journal was
just so mind blowing.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
And what is the hallmark of a mystical experience?
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Good question, I had no idea, but it involves a
transcendence of space and time. Are euphoric feeling or feeling
of intense well being, a dissolution of ego followed by
a sense of merging with something larger than yourself. You
feel connected to nature or other people or the universe
(09:53):
of the divinity. And they found that of the two
thirds of people who had this mystical experience, they reported
enduring changes in their sense of well being going out
six weeks or eight weeks or something. And in a
follow up study they found that aspects of their personality,
specifically openness, the trait of openness increased, And that's quite
(10:17):
striking because in general, personality doesn't change in adults. So
this study really is the foundation on which subsequent work
has been done. And by looking at these results that
there seemed to be an improvement and well being, the
idea occurred, well, we should try this with cancer patients.
(10:37):
We should try this with people who have what the
psychiatrists call existential distress over their diagnosis or the proximity
of death. And that became the first clinical trial that
the people at Hopkins did, and it was duplicated at
the same time at NYU.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Yeah. You know, what's notable about some of these controlled
studies is that participants report that their guided experiences on
psychedelics are totally singular in nature, right, that they count
among the top most meaningful experiences they've ever had. And
I'd love to dig into the neuroscience just a bit
so we can understand what is giving rise to these
(11:15):
exceptional subjective states.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, the honest answer is, we don't really know. We
have some really interesting hints, but there's a lot more
work to be done. A researcher in England named Robin
Carhart Harris put people in an fMRI machine and injected
them with psilocybin in one trial and LSD in another,
and he found something very interesting. Where he expected to
(11:42):
see a kind of explosion of activity mirroring the extraordinary
visual effects and emotional effects, he actually found the most
notable thing was a quieting of activity in one particular network.
And this network, which I had never heard of, is
the default mode network. The default mode network is the
(12:02):
part of your brain that's most active when you're not
doing anything. It's where your brain goes. It's the default
and it was discover when they were doing fMRI tasks
of other kinds and they had to get the baseline.
So they tell people don't do anything, don't think about anything,
or try not to think about anything, just lie there,
and it turns out their brains lit up and all
sorts of stuff went on, and a lot of it
(12:23):
involved self reflection, worry, rumination, thinking about the future, thinking
about the past. The default mode network seems to be
involved with creating this projection or illusion that we have
as self. It's involved in time travel, the ability to
think about the future and the past, which, if you
think about it, you need if you're going to have
(12:45):
a sense of self. Our sense of self is what's
happened to us in the past, and what we hope
will happen in the future, or what we think might
happen to us in the future. It's also involved in
something called theory of mind. That's the ability to imagine
the thoughts of other people, to understand that other people
have thoughts, have a subjectivity, have an interiority. That's a
big deal, And it's involved in the what's called the
(13:09):
narrative self, the story we tell ourselves of who we
are and how we take new events and kind of
weave them into that narrative. So you know, to the
extent the self has an address in the brain, it
appears to be in this network. And this network gets
very quiet under psychedelics and in the minds of very
(13:33):
experienced meditators and you know Robin. Then you know correlated
reports of ego dissolution, and people can describe that it's
quite a wild experience. You observe your sense of self
completely melting or crumbling. It once happened to me when
(13:54):
people reported that they had the most precipitous drops in
activity in the default mode network. So that's one of
the findings really of psychedelic science already that is significant,
I think for our understanding of consciousness and the self.
But it's not the only theory of what's going on.
There are people who aren't sold on the default mode.
We're hoping to get some more precise answers to these questions.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
Yeah, I mean, in addition to some of the therapeutic effects,
it is so compelling that this basic research can help
us further understand what brain structures are associated with our
sense of self.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Yeah. There's another area to investigate, too, is what psychedelics
might teach us about the consciousness of children. You may
know Alison Gopnik.
Speaker 3 (14:44):
Allison, Yes, I'm such a fan of hers.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
And she studies child consciousness and problem solving, and she's
convinced that the psychedelic experience is as close as adults
get to the mind of the child and the way
of thinking and the kind of what she describes as
the lantern consciousness, as opposed to the spotlight consciousness of adults,
(15:07):
which is very focused in linear. Children take in information
from all different sides, which allows for a different kind
of creativity, and she thinks that there's a retrogression in
psychedelic consciousness that closely resembles that of children, So that's
a whole other avenue of exploration. That's very exciting.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Yeah. I love her quote that babies and children are
basically tripping all the time. Yes, what a lovely, colorful
way of saying it.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
This was an insight she had when her granddaughter was born.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
I love that. Yeah. You know you mentioned that you
did have the experience of feeling your ego dissolved, and
I know you did try psychedelics while you were writing
your book. You say that you felt your sense of
self scattered to the wind like a blizzard of post its.
And I'm wondering, can you just paint a scene of
the many ways in which ego dissolution expressed itself during
(16:01):
your trips.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
It was such an interesting, strange experience. I was really
not prepared for it. So I had a fairly high
dose psilocybin experience guided by an underground guide, somebody I
really trusted. And I mentioned that because if you're going
to let go to the extent of allowing your sense
of self to completely vanish, you're going to have to
(16:25):
feel very safe and very comfortable. And I did you
know under her guidance, and anyway, at a certain point
well into the experience. She offered me what's called a
booster dose, and I figured in for a dime, in
for a dollar. I was doing this for my book, actually,
and so I said sure, and I ate.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Another my research purposes, strictly for.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Research purposes, you know, in the interest of my readers,
because it really was because I was although I was
very curious, I was very afraid to do psychedelics, you know.
I didn't do this till I was like in my
late fifties, and I had a lot of fear of
what could happen. I had read the stories of you know,
bad trips, and I didn't know what. Also, you can
(17:08):
discover really unpleasant things about yourself. And anyway, at this point,
I suddenly saw myself from outside, and I saw myself
kind of explode in this cloud of post it notes,
blue post it notes, you know, like confetti, and they
came down to the ground and they kind of masked
(17:28):
in this pool of blue paint. And that was me.
And I was absolutely sure it was me, but I
was perceiving it from this new perspective that I had
never experienced before. I don't know quite what it was.
It wasn't me it was very equable, disinterested. It had
no problem with what had happened. I didn't feel threatened
(17:51):
in any way, and that was me. I was gone
and that was fine, but I was still aware. And
it was the first time it ever occurred to me
that you could have awareness without self, which is something
Buddhists and Hindus will tell you about. But you know,
that seemed very far from my experience. And then what
(18:11):
happens when you don't have a self is that that
you merge with everything around you. And in this case,
what I merged with was a piece of music. And
she put on Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite number two in
D minor, which is a very sad piece of music,
(18:32):
so gorgeous, yeah, and I and I became one with
the music. It was complete merging, and it was incredibly beautiful.
It's the most profound experience of music I'd ever had.
And I felt as though the bow, the horsehair of
the bow, was going over my body. And then at
(18:52):
one point that I was inside the well of this,
you know, this wooden container, and it was so beautiful,
and although it was very sad, I wouldn't call it
a happy experience. It was very sad. It was all
about death. I mean that the piece of music. To me,
it was all about death. But I was completely I
(19:21):
had complete acceptance that had I died and vanished, that
was fine. It was what was meant to be. Something
followed on that death of the self. There was a
continuing consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy
and very hard to put into words. I struggled to
describe it in the book, but it was one of
(19:42):
the most profound experiences of my life.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
The struggle you're having putting your experience into words is
very characteristic of how many people feel after a trip. Right.
They're saying, this is one of the most profound experiences
of my life, and yet when they try and express
it in words, it sounds cliche new ag you know,
everything is love, that sort of thing. It's interesting. I
(20:05):
was interviewing Casey Musgraves, the country music singer maybe episode
of a Slight Change of Plans, about her psychedelic trip,
and I was actually asking whether the ability to create
music in some way was an antidote to her inability
to fully express the profound insights that she had had
using the words that we have at our disposal.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Well, you know, you've just reminded me of one of
the other of the eight characteristics of mystical experience, and
that's ineffability, the fact that these are very hard to
describe because it kind of defies the language we have.
Our language wasn't built to describe these kinds of experiences.
And the other thing that you alluded to is that
(20:48):
there is a tremendous banality to some of the insights,
the profound insights that people have, such as love is
the most important principle in the universe. You know, that
is banal, but it's also profound. And one of the
things you come out of the experience realizing is that
it's a very fine line between banality and profundity. And
(21:09):
one of the things psychedelics does is it takes all
that ironic crust we cover the world with and it
scrapes it off really effectively, and suddenly things appear with
the profundity and beauty of first sight. I mean, awe
at the ordinary is a really you know, a piece
of music, a flower, I mean, And that's another way
(21:33):
in which I think you're recovering the mind of the child.
And that's a wonderful aspect of psychedelic experience.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plants. I'm talking with Michael Polland about how psychedelics
can change our minds. I wanted to hear more about
the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Studies show that when they're
administered and guided clinical settings, they can help with a
(22:06):
surprisingly vast number of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety,
obsessive compulsive disorder, and fear of death.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Now, I was initially kind of suspicious of the you know,
is this some sort of panacea. It's being used for
all these different things. And I remember interviewing Tom Insull,
a psychiatrist, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health,
and I said, isn't this a little weird that all
these different indications are responding to the same kind of treatment,
(22:36):
And he said, well, you're assuming that they're all different,
you know, indications. They may be symptoms of a similar brain.
And that is that a brain that's overly rigid and
it's thinking that's trapped in patterns of rumination. And indeed,
all those things depression, anxiety, obsession, addiction represent people stuck
(22:56):
in loops of destructive thought and behavior, and that what
psychedelics may do is help you break out of that.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
I mean, certainly that's consonant with the use of SSRI's
selective serchonin rep conhibitors rights, OCDA, anxiety, depression, et cetera.
So it would be very reasonable to expect that what
Tom is saying applies in this case. I'm wondering if
you can share some examples of the therapeutic benefits that
(23:24):
can be conferred by psychedelics, in particular people who are
facing what you've referred to as existential distress.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Yeah. Well, the first group of patients I talked to
were cancer patients, and I interviewed quite a few of them.
Patrick Mattis is someone I wrote about in detail in
the book. I never met him, he had died already,
but I spent a lot of time with his wife
and his therapist and learning about his story and reading
his account. And he was a man he was about
my age at the time, and a journalist like me
(23:54):
also who had gotten cancer of the bile ducts. And
his wife noticed the whites of his eyes that turned
very yellow, and he was given a terminal diagnosis and
struggled with that for a long time. It was really
paralyzed by it. He read about this experiment going on
at NYU. He was in New York, and he decided
(24:15):
to enroll in this drug trial to see if this
could help him with his anxiety and depression. His wife
actually was against it because to her it represented giving up,
but he had no intention of doing that. He was
continuing with his at least for a while with his
chemo after the experience, and he did it, and he
had a mystical experience. It was very profound. He described
(24:37):
it in great detail. He explored his body and visited
his cancer. He saw it, and at one moment he
climbed a kind of precipice in his mind and he
looks out and he sees this kind of plane of consciousness,
you know, a vista in front of him, which really
he thought was what would happen to him after he
(24:58):
was after he died, and he had a sense this
was where he was going. It wasn't frightening. He was
he would be okay to go there, but he wasn't ready.
He still wanted more time with his wife, and he
kind of turned back and he came out of the
experience a changed man and he had I forget how
(25:19):
much time it was. It was like another eleven months
where he was able to have great pleasure in life.
He would spend his days walking along the Brooklyn Pier,
checking out new restaurants, had really good periods of time
with his wife, and at a certain point decided to
stop his chemo, which was really debilitating, and he wanted
(25:41):
the clarity that would come with just living out his
last months without medicine in his body. And he died
a death of acceptance. People I interviewed described his room
at Mount Sinai as like having this glow.
Speaker 3 (25:55):
He was.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Incredibly settled and happy, and all the staff of the
hospital would want to come by this room to get
you a taste of this man who was approaching death
with such equanimity. So it was, you know, it was incredible.
And at one point his wife sent me a photograph
of him snapped like three or four days before his death,
(26:20):
and he was very thin, wearing the hospital smock, and
he had an oxygen clip in his nose and he
was beaming. So that you had a profound effect on me.
And I interviewed a great many patients about their experiences,
and there were a lot of common denominators. One was
(26:41):
a kind of a confrontation with death and a confrontation
with one's cancer, and in most cases it made people
much more accepting of their death. So I think it
has a powerful application there for people with life changing diagnoses,
and obviously not just cancer, I mean someone with an
als diagnosis or any number of other terminal diagnoses. I
(27:05):
was kind of sold on it for that use, and
because we have so little to offer people, you know,
we give them morphine which dulls their minds, and this
clarifies their minds, so you know, hopefully this will become common.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah. You know, Patrick's story reminds me of the most
stirring powerful part of your book, which is learning that
many people believe that the insights that they've tapped into
while they're on these psychedelic trips do represent objective truths
about the universe, right, this noedic quality, and that you know,
they're not just dismissing their insights as these zany things
(27:39):
that they had while they were high. They see their
experience as as this kind of window into some more
accurate view of reality. You know, take Patrick who believes
that he's confronted what his afterlife will look like, and
to me, it raises some very interesting philosophical and moral questions.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
I struggle with that, and I asked some of the
researchers about this, and I got a range of answers.
I mean, one is, you know, well, we don't really
know what happens after someone dies, and it's not for
us to tell our patients what happens after someone dies.
But I would say, you know, well, maybe what you're
administering is a delusion to people. And I remember one
(28:23):
researcher said, hey, if it works, who cares it? Took
a purely pragmatic view.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
That's my camp for what it's worth.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Really.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
Yeah. Absolutely, As someone who studies cognitive science and believes
I guess I have a very reductionist view of life.
But I am of the mind that all we are
are subjective states, and so in the throes of a
terminal illness, if you can be brought relief by believing
the afterlife is one thing, great, you've reduced suffering. But again,
not everybody has my exceedingly reductionist view of human existence.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
Yeah, and I think it's something that needs to be explored.
I mean, I think that there are many ethical issues
raised by psychedelics, but it's also important to understand that
it's not the researchers that are planting this image of
the afterlife, and it's not the pill. The pill is
just is a catalyst for thoughts and fantasies and images.
(29:17):
They're not priming you to have an afterlife experience. They
may be priming you a little bit to have a
mystical experience in the way they prepare you. I mean
that needs to be looked at. But everything that happens
on a psychedelic experience is the product of your mind
and to some extent, your expectations and your setting. I mean,
(29:38):
we know about set and setting.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Very suggestible, yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
Very suggestible, But it's really your creation. This isn't mind control.
So if that's where somebody's mind takes them and that's
a helpful place, it's hard to argue with that. I mean,
I mean, I tend to agree with you, but you know,
I mean people might have ethical qualms about that, But
I come back to the fact that there's no information
(30:02):
in the molecule, right, It's all what your mind is creating.
It's subjective states.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
Yeah, it's about maybe a reframing for skeptics or people
who might have some concerns, is that it is essentially
a creative exploration into the types of things that could
reassure an individual person. Right, It's like, yeah, what would
pacify Patrick in this very specific situation and his mind
(30:30):
engages with that.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
You know what's interesting there is you're healing yourself, right,
I mean, and in fact, that is a large part
what happens. I mean, these are this is a very
non interventionist therapy. The therapists say nothing during the experience
except would you like a glass of water or a
snack or need to go to the bathroom. It really
they let your mind go where your mind wants to go.
(30:53):
It is a kind of self exploration, self healing, and
you know, there's so much more we need to learn
about it.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
For scaredy cats like me, Michael, who will almost certainly
never be willing to do a psychedelic trip. Are there
ways of approximating the effects of psychedelics through other means?
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yes? There are. The most interesting one I came across
is something called holotropic breath work. This was devised by
Stan Groff, who was a psychiatrist who was doing a
lot of psychedelic therapy in the sixties, and once the
drugs were made illegal, he wanted to find a legal
way to get the same results because he was getting
amazing results with his patients, and borrowing from many different traditions,
(31:36):
including yogic breathing techniques, he came up with this way
of inducing a trance state that is very much like psychedelics.
I did it once, and you basically have this pattern
of breathing that I think hyperventilates you. You're breathing very
fast and exhaling more than you're inhaling, and they're playing
(31:57):
very loud, rhythmic drumming, and after a certain amount of time,
a few minutes, you enter into this state where you
can do that breathing without trying to. You're on your back,
but you're dancing, all your limbs are moving. It's the
strangest thing that you could induce this trance and you
have the kind of imagery that you do on psychedelic experience.
(32:19):
And I did it, and I felt like I'd run
a marathon when it was over. It was a very
intense experience. No drugs involved, whatsoever, What is it doing
in the brain. I think it may in fact be
doing the same thing to the default mode network, because
you're probably starving the brain of oxygen. But yes, there
are non pharmacological ways to get similar effects.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I do wonder whether we as humans would be more
tolerant of non pharmacological states that actually rival the psychedelic
ones if they're negative, if they're not drug induced, Like
there's somehow this bias against the drug induced bad trip.
But if I were to achieve that psychological state through
natural means, somehow, I'm more okay with the idea of
it going sour or being scary.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah. Well, you know, we have a prejudice against exogenous drugs,
but there are ways to rug yourself without them, and
this is one. There may be risks though to doing that.
We haven't talked about risk, but one of the really
striking things about the classical psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin
and DMT is that there is no lethal dose. You
(33:24):
can't overdose on these drugs, and you can overdose on
all sorts of over the counter drugs. There is no
risk of addiction either. I mean, I'm not trying to
sell you on anything maya oh, nor.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
You haven't sold me on anything. I'm still not going
to do it.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
But the risks, such as they are are. There are
psychological risks. People do get into psychological trouble, especially when
they don't pay enough attention to set and setting, and
they don't do it with a guide, and they don't
do it in a safe environment. It can be you know,
it can be terrifying, and so you do have to
keep that in mind. But when I you know, I
(34:00):
came to it late and I did my due diligence.
I was not a twenty year old, you know, with
no proper sense of.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
You're a whole freaking book on it. No one's going
to be able to meet with you on that front
in terms of doing your due diligence.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Well, but I wanted to make sure it was safe,
and I really did look at all the research and
convince myself this wasn't a stupid or irresponsible thing to do.
There are legal risks we should point out. Unless you're
in a drug trial, you know, you go to a
university and enter. But aside from that, I convinced myself
that the benefits would probably outweigh the risks, and I
(34:34):
certainly feel that way having done it.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
I'd love to ask you a more personal question about
the long term impact psychedelics have had on your own life.
What are some enduring changes you've had in your perspective
or your personality ever since?
Speaker 2 (34:51):
You know. I think the big thing is I acquired
and it was during that episode of ego dissolution or
you know, dissolution of self that I described a little
more perspective on my ego or self. I identified with it.
I thought I was that person, that voice, and I've
come to see that it's one voice among several in
(35:13):
my mind, and that I don't necessarily have to listen
to it, and that sometimes I can recognize that my
ego is up to his old tricks and he's being
hypercritical or needlessly worrying, and I can kind of get
some distance on it. And I find that very useful.
It's exactly the kind of insight you might or practice
you might get out of conventional psychotherapy. But I got
(35:37):
it in the course of an afternoon, you know, and
that was very useful. If you ask my wife, she
would tell you that the experiences have made me more open,
more emotionally available things like that. I'm not sure I can,
you know, I necessarily see that, but it has opened
up this space of curiosity about myself and self exploration,
(35:58):
and I found it very useful. I mean every time
I've done it, you know, I learned things about myself
I didn't know before, and that's incredibly valuable, and especially
at my age. I'm in my sixties. Now you sort
of think that that process, you know, would have slowed
or ended, but not at all. It's actually been intensified
by this.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Okay, now you're selling me a little bit in the
last minute, Folks. He gets me while I'm weak in vulnerable. No,
this is awesome. Thank you so much, Michael.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Oh my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to you. I
hope we can do this in person next time.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive
produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes
Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guerra, our senior editor,
Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, Emily Rosstek our producer, and
Neil LaBelle our executive producer. Luis Scara wrote a theme song,
and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change
(37:13):
of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big
thanks to everyone there, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee
tal Mallatt and Heather Fame and of course a very
special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight
Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Mayah Schunker. See
you next week.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
So how does this sound? I think I'm on the
proper microphone. Why are the three legs of this microphone
not the same length.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
We like to introduce logic puzzles into the mic setup, Michael,
So if you can figure out the three leg problem,
that's actually part of the challenge. Oh god, this is
a admissions ticket to the interview.
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