May 15, 2023 • 41 mins
More than a third of us admit to having had a spiritual experience. We might have been profoundly moved by a sunset or a painting; or felt that we've connected with our god or with the entire world around us. Such events can be transformative - bringing positive change to our lives and increasing our happiness - but some experiences aren't so great.
In front of a live audience in Washington DC, David Yaden of Johns Hopkins University tells Dr Laurie Santos about his work examining what effect spiritual experiences have on us and how things like meditation and psychedelic drugs can bring about these powerful transformational episodes.
David Yaden is the author of: The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. I don't want to spoil
the illusion, but the life of podcast hosts often is
pretty far from glamorous. Normally, I record this show in
my closet surrounded by pillows and mattresses to keep out
all the noise of the trains that run by my
Boston apartment. But not today.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The Happiness Lab has hit the road, and what a
venue We've come to, the sixth and I Historic Synagogue
in Washington, DC. Not only do we have.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
A beautiful venue and a gray crowd, but bringing the
Happiness Lab Live show to DC also allowed me to
book a guest that I have been wanting to interview
for a long time. Our guest today is doctor David Jayden.
David is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness
Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. David did
(01:13):
his doctoral training in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania,
where he explored which mental states and interventions led to
lasting positive impacts on our happiness and well being. Since
starting his own lab, he's begun studying the psychology of
states of consciousness that most people think of as among
the most meaningful moments in their lives. Specifically, he's a
world expert and what we often refer to as spiritual
(01:34):
transformative or self transcendent experiences, including those that come from
the use of psychedelic substances, and he's recently co authored
a book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience Twenty first
Century Research and Perspectives. You all are in for such
a big treat listening to David today, because I think
of him as the twenty first century embodiment of a
scholar that I love, William James, You're going to hear
(01:57):
more about today, and so for all these reasons, I'm
so so glad that David accepted my invitation to be
part of our first.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Ever DC Happiness Lab Live that please join me and
giving a warm.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Welcome to David Daily.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So, David, as I mentioned in my introduction, you study
these experiences that people report to be some of the
most important moments of their lives. But we kind of
have very little scientific information about these transcending experiences, and
so I wanted to just start off with some definitions.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
What do we mean by spiritual experiences here.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yeah, these experiences go under many labels, So you've mentioned
a few self, transcendent, transformative, mystical, and spiritual experience. We
chose spiritual experience for the book because we ran a
survey and we ask people what do you call these
experiences in spiritual ones? So we stuck it in the book.
But we do offer a definition. It's a two parter.
A spiritual experience is a substantially altered state of consciousness
(02:51):
that involves a seeming perception of an unseen.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Order of some kind.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
So let me break that down first, substantially altered state
of consciousness, so this is an overall shift in cognition, affect,
and perception. So we feel qualitatively different than normal. We
know something has changed from our ordinary waking consciousness, but
that's very broad. That happens in all kinds of different
(03:17):
ways fevers, falling, asleep, et cetera. So you need the
second part of the definition, which involves a seeming perception
of an unseen order of some kind. That sounds really convoluted,
but basically it's as if you're seeing something that you
don't normally see. But that's really important, and so for
(03:38):
many people that's God. For some people, that's an underlying
unity of all things. For some people it's entropy even
and scientific sorts of concepts. But it seems as though
you're seeing something that you don't normally see. That's important.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, And so give our audience a sense of what
some of these experiences might be like, like, have them
kind of walk through what it might feel like.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
So I think when a lot of people hear the
term spiritual experience, it will bring something to mind in
their own life. So I'm wondering if we could try
to bring up one of those experiences. So I think
one way to do this is put your feet flat
on the floor, put your hands on your thighs, take
(04:21):
a nice and deep breath in, close your eyes, and
as you breathe out, just try to call to mind
a memory of what you think a spiritual experience might
mean for you, and don't think too hard about it.
Just let something come up. It could be a very
(04:42):
profound and obvious experience that maybe changed your life in
some way. For others, it might be more subtle and
just a deeply meaningful experience of mindfulness or awe or
gratitude and any of those are just fine. So as
(05:05):
you let just one memory come up, see if you
can feel into that experience. Try to remember how your
body felt, what you were feeling, what you're thinking, what
you're seeing, even smelling, and then try to remember how
it impacted your life. And as you do, you can
(05:29):
take a nice and deep breath in and as you
let it out, you can open your eyes back to
the room.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I'm kind of curious, as you all and the audience
were doing that show of hands, how many folks had
an experience that they could go to that they really remembered.
It's about maybe half a third to half at least.
Is that common when you do exercises like this?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah, so there have been a number of big gallop poles,
like who here has heard of gallop holes?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
So big? Everybody?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
So that.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Gallup will ask in slightly different terminology. They'll say, have
you ever been close to a powerful spiritual force that
seemed to lift you out of yourself? So the wording
is often different, but the rates of endorsement are surprisingly
similar across the US and the UK, and across decades
and across like changes in terminology. So what percentage of
(06:29):
the US population do you think would answer yes to
the question have you had a profound spiritual experience?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Scream out your answers and I'll translate them. Seventeen forty five,
eleven twenty five, that's what sixty.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Sixty sixty eighty. Yeah, okay, so twelve to eighty was
the range. That's really good.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
That means I have something useful to tell you about,
because that's a really that's a lot of uncertainty, and
unlike lots of things in psychology, there's a very precise
answer to this question, which is thirty five percent. If
anyone guess thirty five percent, you'll get a free book.
So come up to see me after. So it looks
like there was someone But this is really fascinating. I
think that thirty five percent, So you know, one out
(07:18):
of every three people will say, yes, I've had one
of these experiences. So if it wasn't you, someone you
know will have had one of these experiences and we
don't talk about them, and we'll probably get into the
reasons for that.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, And my understanding from seeing some of your other
interviews is that this is actually one of the reasons
you get interested in the psychological nature of these experiences
that you had one of these moments yourself too.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Do you want to share?
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Yeah, So we say research is mesearch often and in
psychology it's usually you have a lot of it or
you have none of it. So I had one of
these experiences. This was under no psychoactive substances of any kind,
and I wasn't engaging in any kind of deliberate practice
(08:03):
like meditation or anything. This was totally spontaneous, which is
the most common category for these experience is actually it
was during a sort of difficult time in my life,
though I think I was looking for myself, trying to
think about what I wanted to do with my future.
It was during a kind of a transitional period, which
is also a common trigger of these experiences. But I
(08:23):
was lying in my dorm room bed. I began to
feel heat in my chest, which initially thought was indigestion, heartburn,
really cafeteria food.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
You know, I was an undergrad.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
But this feeling of heat began to spread and get
pretty intense and eventually covered my entire body.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And this is where it gets a bit strange.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
So at that point of voice in my mind said
this is love, at which point I go out of
my awareness of my body, maybe into my mind, and
it's as if I can see three hundred and sixty
degree boundless horizon stretching out in every direction, and a
kind of intricate fabric that I felt fully part of.
(09:10):
So after what was probably just a few minutes but
felt like hours or days had passed, this feeling of
love reached the absolute boiling point. So it was as
much love as I could possibly take. I opened my eyes.
My body is laughing and crying at the same time.
Everything seems new. I feel much better about myself, my future.
(09:35):
I overwhelmed with love for friends and family. I do
the classic like I'm calling to say I love you
to many people, and it felt as if I had
just experienced the most important moment of my life. But
most of all, I was wondering what the fuck just
happened to me? I had no reference point, and of
(09:55):
course the thought occurs my going quote unquote crazy, Is
this symptom of a mental disorder?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Was that? God?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
What?
Speaker 4 (10:06):
And so I was kind of confused, and it set
me on a reading binge essentially through comparative religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology,
and now I guess psychopharmical.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
It's still going.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
I'm still trying to figure it out, basically, and that's
what I do, that's what I focus on, and that's
why I mean.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I love sharing this story in part just because it's
such a profound experience to hear about, but it also
kind of highlights some of the stuff that I know
in your research you found tends to be pretty typical
of these experiences. And so one of the things you
mentioned is this idea of like this sort of feeling
of love, a sort of sense of connection, you're sort
of hearing voices. Interestingly, these spiritual experiences.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Tend to be pretty social.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
They have this kind of sense of connection, and so
talk about maybe either why that is, but what are
some of the psychological consequences of that.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
We know that one of the most important contributors to
well being happiness is social connectedness. These experiences are almost
a kind of introvertive social connectedness, because people feel a
very profound sense of connection to other people, to their environment,
even all of existence in some more intense kinds of experiences.
(11:19):
And it's not just as if they feel connected to
their physical surroundings. There's a kind of social element to it.
So there's this concept of mind perception. When you look
at me, without having to think about it, you're reflexively
perceiving mind in this flesh body that's flapping around, but
not to my chair and not to the wall. But
(11:41):
during these experiences, we're more likely to perceive mind in
other human beings but also in things like the chair
in the wall, and everything seems alive in a sense.
And so it's like a massive social connection moment. So
it's a way to feel huge amount of connectedness all
at one time and in a very intense way.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And another piece of the intensity of these experiences is
that in lots of cases they can be just super profound,
and definitely in rare cases they can lead people not
to to feel differently in that moment, but to kind
of alter the course of how people feel in the
long term, like sometimes even changing their lives. These experiences
can be in some sense like morally transformative.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, so sometimes these experiences don't have much of an impact,
but sometimes for some people they seem to have very
long lasting results for years, even decades, or an entire lifetime.
There's an example of a man named Bill who was
neglectful of his family, describes himself as pretty abusive due
(12:41):
to his very very severe alcoholism. He undergoes a kind
of psychedelics therapy using scopolamine several times with no real effect,
but the third time, just beforehand, he interacts with a
number of people part of this group to like a
religious organization, and he has this full blown spiritual experience
(13:02):
that allows him to be sober for basically the rest
of his life. And this is Bill Wilson. This is
the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, on which all twelve step
programs are based, and spiritual experience are at the very
very heart of these twelve step programs. So for some people,
these experiences, while they may not last very long, they
(13:22):
have a hugely lengthy impact on their life.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And another future of these experiences is this kind of
altered state of consciousness, which I think, when you're a
nerdy scientist like us, begs this naturalistic explanation that gets
kind of complicated. You know, as you mentioned in your
own experiences, you're wondering, is this God? Is this the
kind of thing that we don't as scientists tend to
try to dig into. These things kind of seem outside
(13:46):
the purview of normal scientific research. And so one question
is like, how do we take a naturalistic approach to
stuff that feels perhaps by definition so supernatural.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Yeah, as scientists, we need to study what we can measure,
and there are many aspects of these experiences that we
can measure. But there are some kinds of interpretations of
these experiences that are simply all the table scientifically, and
we leave those to philosophers and theologians and individuals' own
interpretations and their own conscience and faith. Essentially, So when
(14:20):
we study these kinds of experiences, we take a methodologically
agnostic approach, and so we say, let's look at what
we can study. We can study what people say about them,
what triggered the experience, how they felt during the experience,
what happens in the brain and the body during the experience,
how it seems to impact people's lives, how it changes
their behavior.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
So all of that is on the table.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
The question of ultimately where these experiences come from. Is
it from a supernatural realm or a god or is
it just the brain? Ultimately, that's not a question that
I think we can answer scientifically.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
But one of the questions we can answer scientifically is
trying to just kind of categorize these experiences, and it
turns out that even that seemingly simple scientific question is
really really tricky because of a strange feature of these
experiences that they're really varied.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
That's why you call your book the Varieties of Spiritual Experience,
And so give me a sense of the like spectrum
of these things. We talked about some of the extreme
ones where you know it's changing your life, it's sort
of morally transformative. Like what does the other side of
the spectrum look like?
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Yeah, so for some people, these experiences can be quite
negative and are in fact related to mental illness and
can lead to mental illness. So don't want to portray
these experiences as always positive. They're very intense, and they
can go in different directions for different people. There's a
long history in treating them as merely parts of mental illness,
(15:45):
and a lot of my research is oriented towards correcting
that because actually most people benefit from these experiences, and
some people benefit tremendously so in terms of the impact
that they have on people's lives. There are varieties in
terms of intensity, Like when we went through that imaginal exercise,
some people probably had really transformative experiences in mind, other
(16:06):
people may have thought about looking at a really amazing
paintings somewhat less intense. So they vary in terms of intensity.
They also vary in terms of the content of the experience.
We've talked about. If you ask people, have you had
a spiritual experience, about thirty five percent of the population
we'll say yes, And you can make further subdivisions within that.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
The main three subdivisions.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
So the first one is feeling as if you're connected
to an all pervasive, sort of all powerful, non physical
mind of some kind, a kind of God or divinity.
The second one is unity, so people feel deeply connected
to everything and everyone around them. The third, and this
is where things get a bit strange, is non physical
(16:49):
entities or ghosts. So we didn't go looking for ghost stories,
but they came to us. So if you ask people
have you had a spiritual experience, many people will say yes,
and it was a ghost experience. Now, being a little glib,
but these experiences can be very profound. There was a
study in swe that found that over fifty percent of
(17:12):
recently bereaved spouses will have a experience of a visage
or a ghost of their recently deceased spouse, and that
most people view these experiences as meaningful and beneficial and
helpful in the morning process.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And so I think we're going to talk more about
what these variations mean. But as we're talking about this,
I'm realizing that as we start talking about varieties, we
should be sure to give credit to the scholar who
kind of came up with this notion of varieties. You
called your book the Varieties of Spiritual Experience, but that
was kind of a kickback to the scholar who first
started the empirical study of spiritual experiences in general. And
(17:52):
so when we get back from the break, we're going
to do a deep dive into that scholar's story. Was
David's academic forefather who started studying transcendent moments first, the
themed nineteenth century psychologist William James. We're going to hear
a little bit about James's story and how he became
interested in all these phenomena, and I we're going to
learn how his work laid the foundation for some of
the biggest scientific breakthroughs we're seeing in spiritual experiences today,
(18:16):
including in the domain of psychedelics and happiness.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
The Happiness Lab and live in DC. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And so, David, many of the most famous accounts of
spiritual experiences are pretty old, in our oldest texts and
our oldest religious works. But it was only in the
nineteenth century that researchers really started studying these phenomena from
more of a scientific perspective. It was really until the
pioneering work of one of psychology's great scholars, William James.
And I know, David that you're kind of like a
(18:55):
William James super fan, but he's kind of not as
famous as a lot of older psychologists that we think
of Freud or Young or something like that. Why not
and why is that kind of an oversight?
Speaker 4 (19:05):
I'm so glad we get to talk about William James well,
because a lot of people don't. They want to skip
over the history. And this is like the most exciting thing.
And I should say we name the book as an
homage to William James's original book, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
because we want people to go back and read the original.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
It's not like a copyright the error.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
So I was in a cab going to Countway Library,
which is a medical library and it's the only place
in the world that has a chapter from Carl Jung's
autobiography that was cut by the editor, and you have
to go there in person, put on these gloves, and
actually handle the manuscript in person. And this deleted chapter
(19:50):
is all about Carl Jung's relationship with William James. And
why that matters is because most people see Carl Jung
as Freud's protege and really just carrying forward Freudian thought
and then they split, but really they're kind of talking
about very similar things. What this chapter shows is that
Carl Jung Ung's later work was a huge debt to
(20:11):
William James's work, and he essentially became Jamesian. So I
was in a cab and I was telling this exact
same story and the cast of characters involved are Sigmund Freud,
Carl Jung, and William James. And the cab driver said,
I definitely know Freud. I think I've heard of Jung.
I've never heard of the other guy, and that I
think is pretty common.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
And David started weeping in the cab. That is absurd.
That is so absurd.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I mean it was true of me before I became
a psychologist as well, of course, but it's not only absurd,
it's bizarre. So at the time of his death, William
James was called the most famous academic in the world
by Bertrand Russell. He had been the president of the
American Psychological Association and American Philosophical Association.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
He's a professor at Harvard.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
He made huge contributions in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, psychiatry.
He started the first psychology lab in North America. So
he's this towering figure who was also a member of
the most famous family in America. He grew up with
Emerson and Thereaux sitting around the dinner table. His brother
Henry James became basically the most influential novelist of the time.
(21:20):
His sister Alice James became a famous feminist diarist, so
massively influential.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
And somewhat forgotten.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
And I think that that's a big mistake, because I
think William James really laid the foundation for the study
of these experiences, and did so in a way that
was much more evidence based and nuanced than either Freud
or Young. So William James wanted there to be rigorous
empirical research on these experiences, Freud and Young did something
very different. So Freud looked at these experiences and he said,
(21:51):
these sound weird. He's like, these don't fit with our
picture of psychology. He said, he's never had one of
these experiences, and so therefore they must be related to
mental illness. And he even offered an explanation, or he
tried to. He said, these oceanic feelings of oneness are
actually memories of being in your mother's womb that are
repressed that are coming to awareness. So any psychologists would
(22:13):
think that's completely absurd. We know that the memory doesn't
work like that. So Freud said, these are parts of
mental illness and they don't really have value. Their delusional Basically,
Jung thought that they were the key to mental health.
So he almost went to the entire opposite perspective, and
he thought these experiences are so important that he's going
(22:34):
to put them at the center of his system of psychotherapy.
Called them numinous experiences and probably didn't really emphasize the
risks and the fact that these experiences often don't result
in long lasting change, at least not for everybody. And
he thought that they were verritical in the sense that
they were showing us a true picture of reality. So
(22:54):
those are very different perspectives, and William James's view is
I think.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
The correct one.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
We should look to the evidence learn about these experiences,
and we should set aside philosophical and theological questions that
we can't answer zience typically.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
And one of my favorite things about the story of
how William James got interested in these experiences is that
his kind of big fory into talking about them happened
at an event a lot like this, right.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, So the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, essentially the TED
Talk of the day. This lecture series becomes the book
The Varieties of Religious Experience, and at the end of
it they apparently sang for He's a jolly good fellow,
which is like the equivalent of a standing ovation at
a TED talk.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
I guess it's kind of fun. I was gonna have
you do it.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
So now fast forward, you know, one hundred plus years,
and the scholars today are still using some of the
same traditions that James did, right, I mean, functionally, his
naturalistic approach is kind of what you've done with your
famous varieties corpus.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
You know, so talk about kind.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Of the goal of that work to really catalog these experiences.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, so one of William James's students, Edwin Starbuck, did
a survey of people in New England at the time.
Have you had feelings of oneness? Have you had feelings
of divine aid? And tabulated how many people said yes.
And so this was a rudimentary what we call cross
sectional survey. We've now done these kinds of surveys, but
(24:31):
we ask a whole lot of questions about what triggered
these experiences, what kind of experience it was, what people
felt during the experience, and then how it impacts their life.
And so we ask a whole lot of questions, and
we put these questions to thousands of people, not just
a few dozen like they did back in the day.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And so what are we learning from some of these surveys?
I mean, one of the big questions is like, where
do these kinds of experiences come from? You know, what
are we learning about how they tend to emerge in
these surveys?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
The ultimate origin, whether it comes from God or the
brain or somewhere else. And you know, again we set
that question aside when we study it. I should also
mention people, people of every religious faith, people are spiritual
but not religious. Agnostics and atheists all have these experiences,
and in fact, some atheists will have a full blown
(25:20):
experience of God, they'll just choose afterwards to interpret it
as a brain event rather than God experience. So what
causes these experiences? A lot of things, So things like prayer, meditation,
solitude in nature, maybe those are more expected, less expected
being near death, grief, transitional periods in life, and then
(25:41):
psychedelic experiences as well.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
What do all those things share in common. I'm not
exactly sure.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
If you know the answer, let me know afterwards, because
I'm really trying to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And so, you know, in James's day, we kind of
just had these statistical techniques where we could kind of
ask people about these experiences and try.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
To catalog them.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But James would be so excited to the access that
we have nowadays in terms of new techniques for looking
at these things. And one of the things that we
can use, and I know that you have used, is
looking at activity in the brain. To I don't understand
what's happening in the brain when people experience these altered states.
And so talk about how researchers are starting to use
neuroscientific techniques to get at the mechanisms of these experiences
(26:20):
and also some of the particular challenges of that work
that you might not think of ahead of time.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
It's pretty difficult to have one of these experiences on command,
let alone lying in a neuroimaging scanner, a noisy, uncomfortable
neuroimaging scanner.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
But researchers are doing this.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
So my co author in the book, Andy Neuberg, was
a pioneer in putting Franciscan nuns and Tibetan meditators. These
are veteran contemplatives. These are people who practice prayer or
meditation for hours a day for many years, who say
that they're able to put themselves into this deep feeling
of unity more or less on command if given some time.
(27:00):
And so when these people were putting themselves into this
state and they were in the scanner at the same time,
what was found is a particular region of the brain
was inhibited or less activated, the temporal parietal junction, a
region of the brain doesn't matter, and this region is
(27:21):
less active than normal. And you have to be careful
about drawing conclusions in this way. But this region is
often associated with mapping the boundaries between yourself and everything else,
and so it makes good neurological sense that when people
are feeling this sense of unity, that this boundary modeling
region is turned down.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And I know this is all preliminary work, so as
we talk about these findings, you know, it's hard to
say what we know for sure because there's so few studies.
But there are other neuroscientific studies looking at what's happening
in the autonomic nervous system when we're having some of
these experiences, and so bracketed autonomic nervous systems something we
talk about a bunch on the podcast. This is two
sets of systems that kind of go back and forth
(28:02):
between our sort of fight or flight threat response, like
a tiger jumps out the sympathetic nervous system response, and
the opposite sister response of kind of rest and digest,
our sort of parasympathetic calming response. And usually the autonomic
nervous system has these two poles, like one is active
any one time you're either in tiger is jumping out
of you fight or flight mode, or you're kind of
(28:23):
chillin rest and digest mode. That's what's typical, But what
are some of these early neuroscience studies starting to show
about what happens in the autonomic nervous system when we're
having some of these experiences.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
I can't resist telling this little historical anecdote. So the
stress response, the sympathetic response, was discovered by one of
William James's students, Walter Cannon.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
William James fan it's so cute. Look at how his
face like that. You're going to cut this, I know.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
And then the other the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response,
was discovered in the same lab by Herbert Benson in
his group.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
So kind of funny, William James, super important.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Now you'll never forget anybody.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Yeah, So these different branches stress response, sympathetic, relaxation response, parasympathetic.
It's generally the case that one on and the other
one is essentially off. But during certain experiences, and it
seems like spiritual experiences might be such a case, there's
what's called a paradoxical response, where they both seem to
be activated at the same time. There are other contexts
(29:23):
in which this occurs as well, like orgasm, for example,
and some scientists think that these spiritual experiences, while otherwise
quite different from an orgasm, may involve some of the
same underlying physiology.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
It's just a theory, and.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So all that stuff is really new but exciting, right,
because now we have these techniques and the promise of
these techniques for looking at these experiences. But when we
get back from the break, we're going to talk about
another modern window that we have into the nature of
self transcendent experiences. We're going to start talking about psychedelic drugs.
The Happiness Lab Live in DC will turn to the
science of psychedelics in just a moment, So, David, we're
(30:06):
going to start talking about psychedelic substances in I think
in some ways it might feel weird to talk about
psychedelics and the context of other spiritual experiences, Like on
the one hand, we're talking about nuns or having these
religious experiences, and we're talking about them in the same
breath as like tripping on LSD at some like festival. Right.
But the reason you think this is okay is that
you've argued in your book is that a lot of
(30:27):
the experiences that people self describe on psychedelics seem pretty
indistinguishable from the more spiritual realm. So give me some
examples of why that seems to be the case.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
I should first start out by saying, psychedelic substances have
been used in indigenous communities for spiritual religious purposes for
centuries and potentially millennia, and so the associations that our
culture has with psychedelics, sixties and tied I and things
like that will be very, very different in other cultures
(30:57):
where this association between spiritual type experiences and psychedelic experiences
is totally normal. But yeah, in our culture it does
maybe seem strange. But it's been noticed for a long
time that there's similarities in the reports of some psychedelic
experiences in some of these spiritual experiences. So there was
a scholar named Houston Smith, and when he was lecturing
(31:18):
at Princeton, he used to write on the board one
experience that was triggered by psychedelics and then another experience
that was triggered spontaneously, and he would ask the students
guess which one was triggered by the psychedelic and no
one could. I mean, it was fifty to fifty, just
a chance. And when you read these accounts, there are
many in the book they just seem indistinguishable. You wouldn't
(31:42):
be able to tell was that triggered by meditation or
psychedelic or spontaneously. That's important data that leads us to
believe that there might be something about psychedelics that will
allow us to discover more about the underlying psychopharmacology of
spiritual experiences in general, or at the very least use
(32:02):
psychedelics to model these kinds of experiences that were so
interested in studying, not just in a correlational survey way,
but actually inducing them in the lab.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
I mean, you've described the benefit that scientists might get
from psychedelics, But my guess is other people who are
sitting out there might be thinking, hang on, I could
you know, wait to kind of spontaneously have one of
these experiences that are so transformative and maybe we will
change my life forever, or I could take a substance
that might get me there. And I think this leads
to this sort of natural question, which is, like our
(32:32):
psychedelics just a super fast way to get these intense
spiritual experiences, a kind of quick quick fix to enlightenment,
maybe even happiness. But you've argued that before we can
even answer that question, we need to become more careful
historians of what happened the last time we started exploring
these questions with psychedelics, and so give us a kind
of quick glimpse into the history of psychedelic research kind
(32:55):
from where we started to where we wound up today.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
Yeah, so there does seem to be some promise for
psychedelic compounds and the experiences that they create, and this
results in statements psychedelics can cure mental illness or solve
the climate crisis, these outrageous claims.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
And that one that was literally in a news article.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Yeah. What's frustrating about that is the experiment has been run.
I mean, in the nineteen sixties there was widespread use
of psychedelics and here we are. It's not as if
everything became a utopia. And so this idea of oh,
just distribute psychedelics and the world will be healed, I
(33:41):
find just well, i'll just say, empirically implausible. And so
I think we have an opportunity as a society to
treat these compounds with more respect this timing around, and
to be a little bit more careful or a lot
more careful, and to do better science.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
So with that Karen Place. So far, what do we
know about how these things work and the POTENTI I'll
promise they might have for some therapeutic benefits.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
So at our lab at Johns Hopkins, we do quite
a lot of research with psilocybin. So, psilocybin is a
serotonergic psychedelic. It's one of the psychedelics. And by the way,
I should say, when I talk about psychedelics, I'm not
talking about MDMA or ketamine. So MDMA we call it empathogen,
(34:33):
and ketamine we call it dissociative anesthetics. So when I
say psychedelic, I mean serotonergic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, DMT,
and mescaline. So we do a lot of work with
these serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin. And the way we do
it is we bring in participants who are interested in
having one of these experiences. We screen them, so we
(34:57):
screen out people who have a personal or family history
of psychotic disorders or cardiac issues. We go through extensive
prep sessions so people can learn about what the psychedelic
experience might be like and to build some trust with
two of their guides who follow them through the whole
process on the session day. We just had one today,
and these two guides will be in the session room
(35:19):
with the participant.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
There's music playing.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
The participant wears headphones and eye shades and lies on
a couch, and the experience lasts about six hours, and
two to three hours in they'll be peak intensity. People
report a lot of different kinds of experiences throughout that
six hour period, some of which look very much like
(35:44):
the kinds of experiences that I'm interested in, deep feelings
of unity, other kinds of spiritual experiences happening in that context,
which are often highly valued. So what we're seeing is
that many people are reporting profoundly positive experiences. The majority
of participants are saying this is among the most meaningful
(36:05):
moments of their entire life. And we're seeing benefits to
well being that last many months, boosted attitudes about self
and life, overall well being, pro social attitudes, and these
are self reported and also confirmed by observers. This is
quite promising and as a well being intervention, maybe among
(36:28):
the most potent positive interventions ever discovered. There are, though risks,
so not everyone has a great time. There's always about
ten to twenty percent of the sample that has experiences
dominated by anxiety and fear, and who would prefer never
to have the experience. Again, we're generally not seeing adverse
events that can't be resolved through psychotherapy in the laboratory setting,
(36:51):
but as we do more studies, we will certainly see that,
and in observational studies we see people do have adverse events.
So psychedelics can result in behaviors that are unusual, and
if they're taken in unsafe settings, can result in physical harm.
I've heard stories of people running into traffic, so physical
(37:11):
safety is important. People can also be taken advantage of,
and so social safety is extremely important as well, and
abuses can and do occur.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
I'm guessing that at least some of the people listening
right now have either tried psychedelics or maybe you're thinking
about trying it. Does your work provide any advice for
some best practices with engaging in these substances. Do we
have a sense from the research yet how best to
kind of try them out if you're interested.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
I am a researcher that works in a medical school,
and so our research on psychedelics is generally trying to
quantify their risk benefit ratio to look at their potential
as treatments, but I'm also beginning to look more and
more at their potential for enhancing well being. I think
though the way I look at this is very descriptive.
(37:58):
I'm trying to understand the benefits and the risks, and
so even though some of these findings sound quite positive,
I'm not promoting psychedelic use. They're also illegal in most places.
Some places they are legal, and I guess from a
harm reduction perspective, if someone was going to use a
psychedelic I would really strongly advocate to learn a bit
(38:23):
about what to expect about the experience and to do
it in a safe setting physically and socially.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And so as you look ahead, you know, five ten
years from now, you know, what do you see on
the horizon, What do you think are going to be
some of the most important steps and kind of understanding
you know how these substances work and the potential that
they have.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
So I think quantifying that risk benefit ratio is so important.
This is a potent intervention, which from the perspective of
learning to enhance well being, is very valuable potentially because
I think we need new ways forward. If we want
to try to learn how to enhance well being, but
(39:02):
there are real risks, and we need to be able
to provide information to people so that they can make
an educated decision about what to engage with the psychedelic
I would say one of the more exciting directions is
this question that's emerging in the field, which is does
the trip matter at all? Can you take the trip
or the acute subjective effects of psychedelics out and still benefit?
(39:25):
And actually, there's hundreds of millions of dollars being poured
into this question right now, So there's a lot of
people trying to take the acute subjective effects or the
trip out of psychedelics and use it as a treatment,
which I am all for. That's interesting scientifically, could be
valuable clinically. But I think what's important to me is
that the psychedelic experience isn't demonized again, because for decades
(39:50):
we've had propaganda about how these are terrible experiences, and
what we're seeing from the data are that these experiences
are for most people quite positive and can be extremely profound,
And so I'm concerned that we really stay grounded in
the actual data and what people are saying about these
(40:10):
experiences and not just try to take the subjective effects out.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
So David, I really just see you as this modern
day embodiment of William James. You're taking the next step
and really trying to understand these spiritual experiences using kind
of the best techniques we have scientifically. I hope we
come back in one hundred plus years and we're having
yet another event where someone is singing for your successor
he's a jolly good fellow.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Oh, I have to do the whole song good. That
was good to carry it.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
The Happiness Lab Live was co written by Ryan Delay
and was produced by Ryan Delay and Britney Brown.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
The show was mastered by.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Evan Biola, and our original music was composed.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
By Zachary Silver. Special stakes to.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
The team and our great Happiness Lie venue, the sixth
and nine historic Senega DC, to our amazing site engineer
at Jason Gramble and Toronald Young Junior who set us
off on our path.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Finally thanks to this.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Amazing live studio audience. I'd also like to thank le
tom Ala, Jasmine Prez, Kerrie Brody, Gretta Cone, Eric Sandler,
Carly mcgliori, Morgan Ratner, Jason Wakeberg, my agent Ben Davis,
Doug Singer at w E, and the rest of the
Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab Live was brought to you
(41:39):
by Pushkin Industries and buy Me Doctor Lauries he
Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. I don't want to spoil
the illusion, but the life of podcast hosts often is
pretty far from glamorous. Normally, I record this show in
my closet surrounded by pillows and mattresses to keep out
all the noise of the trains that run by my
Boston apartment. But not today.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
The Happiness Lab has hit the road, and what a
venue We've come to, the sixth and I Historic Synagogue
in Washington, DC. Not only do we have.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
A beautiful venue and a gray crowd, but bringing the
Happiness Lab Live show to DC also allowed me to
book a guest that I have been wanting to interview
for a long time. Our guest today is doctor David Jayden.
David is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness
Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. David did
(01:13):
his doctoral training in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania,
where he explored which mental states and interventions led to
lasting positive impacts on our happiness and well being. Since
starting his own lab, he's begun studying the psychology of
states of consciousness that most people think of as among
the most meaningful moments in their lives. Specifically, he's a
world expert and what we often refer to as spiritual
(01:34):
transformative or self transcendent experiences, including those that come from
the use of psychedelic substances, and he's recently co authored
a book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience Twenty first
Century Research and Perspectives. You all are in for such
a big treat listening to David today, because I think
of him as the twenty first century embodiment of a
scholar that I love, William James, You're going to hear
(01:57):
more about today, and so for all these reasons, I'm
so so glad that David accepted my invitation to be
part of our first.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Ever DC Happiness Lab Live that please join me and
giving a warm.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Welcome to David Daily.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So, David, as I mentioned in my introduction, you study
these experiences that people report to be some of the
most important moments of their lives. But we kind of
have very little scientific information about these transcending experiences, and
so I wanted to just start off with some definitions.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
What do we mean by spiritual experiences here.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yeah, these experiences go under many labels, So you've mentioned
a few self, transcendent, transformative, mystical, and spiritual experience. We
chose spiritual experience for the book because we ran a
survey and we ask people what do you call these
experiences in spiritual ones? So we stuck it in the book.
But we do offer a definition. It's a two parter.
A spiritual experience is a substantially altered state of consciousness
(02:51):
that involves a seeming perception of an unseen.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Order of some kind.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
So let me break that down first, substantially altered state
of consciousness, so this is an overall shift in cognition, affect,
and perception. So we feel qualitatively different than normal. We
know something has changed from our ordinary waking consciousness, but
that's very broad. That happens in all kinds of different
(03:17):
ways fevers, falling, asleep, et cetera. So you need the
second part of the definition, which involves a seeming perception
of an unseen order of some kind. That sounds really convoluted,
but basically it's as if you're seeing something that you
don't normally see. But that's really important, and so for
(03:38):
many people that's God. For some people, that's an underlying
unity of all things. For some people it's entropy even
and scientific sorts of concepts. But it seems as though
you're seeing something that you don't normally see. That's important.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, And so give our audience a sense of what
some of these experiences might be like, like, have them
kind of walk through what it might feel like.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:00):
So I think when a lot of people hear the
term spiritual experience, it will bring something to mind in
their own life. So I'm wondering if we could try
to bring up one of those experiences. So I think
one way to do this is put your feet flat
on the floor, put your hands on your thighs, take
(04:21):
a nice and deep breath in, close your eyes, and
as you breathe out, just try to call to mind
a memory of what you think a spiritual experience might
mean for you, and don't think too hard about it.
Just let something come up. It could be a very
(04:42):
profound and obvious experience that maybe changed your life in
some way. For others, it might be more subtle and
just a deeply meaningful experience of mindfulness or awe or
gratitude and any of those are just fine. So as
(05:05):
you let just one memory come up, see if you
can feel into that experience. Try to remember how your
body felt, what you were feeling, what you're thinking, what
you're seeing, even smelling, and then try to remember how
it impacted your life. And as you do, you can
(05:29):
take a nice and deep breath in and as you
let it out, you can open your eyes back to
the room.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
I'm kind of curious, as you all and the audience
were doing that show of hands, how many folks had
an experience that they could go to that they really remembered.
It's about maybe half a third to half at least.
Is that common when you do exercises like this?
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah, so there have been a number of big gallop poles,
like who here has heard of gallop holes?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
So big? Everybody?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
So that.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
Gallup will ask in slightly different terminology. They'll say, have
you ever been close to a powerful spiritual force that
seemed to lift you out of yourself? So the wording
is often different, but the rates of endorsement are surprisingly
similar across the US and the UK, and across decades
and across like changes in terminology. So what percentage of
(06:29):
the US population do you think would answer yes to
the question have you had a profound spiritual experience?
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Scream out your answers and I'll translate them. Seventeen forty five,
eleven twenty five, that's what sixty.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Sixty sixty eighty. Yeah, okay, so twelve to eighty was
the range. That's really good.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
That means I have something useful to tell you about,
because that's a really that's a lot of uncertainty, and
unlike lots of things in psychology, there's a very precise
answer to this question, which is thirty five percent. If
anyone guess thirty five percent, you'll get a free book.
So come up to see me after. So it looks
like there was someone But this is really fascinating. I
think that thirty five percent, So you know, one out
(07:18):
of every three people will say, yes, I've had one
of these experiences. So if it wasn't you, someone you
know will have had one of these experiences and we
don't talk about them, and we'll probably get into the
reasons for that.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Yeah, And my understanding from seeing some of your other
interviews is that this is actually one of the reasons
you get interested in the psychological nature of these experiences
that you had one of these moments yourself too.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Do you want to share?
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Yeah, So we say research is mesearch often and in
psychology it's usually you have a lot of it or
you have none of it. So I had one of
these experiences. This was under no psychoactive substances of any kind,
and I wasn't engaging in any kind of deliberate practice
(08:03):
like meditation or anything. This was totally spontaneous, which is
the most common category for these experience is actually it
was during a sort of difficult time in my life,
though I think I was looking for myself, trying to
think about what I wanted to do with my future.
It was during a kind of a transitional period, which
is also a common trigger of these experiences. But I
(08:23):
was lying in my dorm room bed. I began to
feel heat in my chest, which initially thought was indigestion, heartburn,
really cafeteria food.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
You know, I was an undergrad.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
But this feeling of heat began to spread and get
pretty intense and eventually covered my entire body.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
And this is where it gets a bit strange.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
So at that point of voice in my mind said
this is love, at which point I go out of
my awareness of my body, maybe into my mind, and
it's as if I can see three hundred and sixty
degree boundless horizon stretching out in every direction, and a
kind of intricate fabric that I felt fully part of.
(09:10):
So after what was probably just a few minutes but
felt like hours or days had passed, this feeling of
love reached the absolute boiling point. So it was as
much love as I could possibly take. I opened my eyes.
My body is laughing and crying at the same time.
Everything seems new. I feel much better about myself, my future.
(09:35):
I overwhelmed with love for friends and family. I do
the classic like I'm calling to say I love you
to many people, and it felt as if I had
just experienced the most important moment of my life. But
most of all, I was wondering what the fuck just
happened to me? I had no reference point, and of
(09:55):
course the thought occurs my going quote unquote crazy, Is
this symptom of a mental disorder?
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Was that? God?
Speaker 1 (10:05):
What?
Speaker 4 (10:06):
And so I was kind of confused, and it set
me on a reading binge essentially through comparative religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology,
and now I guess psychopharmical.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
It's still going.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
I'm still trying to figure it out, basically, and that's
what I do, that's what I focus on, and that's
why I mean.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
I love sharing this story in part just because it's
such a profound experience to hear about, but it also
kind of highlights some of the stuff that I know
in your research you found tends to be pretty typical
of these experiences. And so one of the things you
mentioned is this idea of like this sort of feeling
of love, a sort of sense of connection, you're sort
of hearing voices. Interestingly, these spiritual experiences.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Tend to be pretty social.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
They have this kind of sense of connection, and so
talk about maybe either why that is, but what are
some of the psychological consequences of that.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
We know that one of the most important contributors to
well being happiness is social connectedness. These experiences are almost
a kind of introvertive social connectedness, because people feel a
very profound sense of connection to other people, to their environment,
even all of existence in some more intense kinds of experiences.
(11:19):
And it's not just as if they feel connected to
their physical surroundings. There's a kind of social element to it.
So there's this concept of mind perception. When you look
at me, without having to think about it, you're reflexively
perceiving mind in this flesh body that's flapping around, but
not to my chair and not to the wall. But
(11:41):
during these experiences, we're more likely to perceive mind in
other human beings but also in things like the chair
in the wall, and everything seems alive in a sense.
And so it's like a massive social connection moment. So
it's a way to feel huge amount of connectedness all
at one time and in a very intense way.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
And another piece of the intensity of these experiences is
that in lots of cases they can be just super profound,
and definitely in rare cases they can lead people not
to to feel differently in that moment, but to kind
of alter the course of how people feel in the
long term, like sometimes even changing their lives. These experiences
can be in some sense like morally transformative.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
Yeah, so sometimes these experiences don't have much of an impact,
but sometimes for some people they seem to have very
long lasting results for years, even decades, or an entire lifetime.
There's an example of a man named Bill who was
neglectful of his family, describes himself as pretty abusive due
(12:41):
to his very very severe alcoholism. He undergoes a kind
of psychedelics therapy using scopolamine several times with no real effect,
but the third time, just beforehand, he interacts with a
number of people part of this group to like a
religious organization, and he has this full blown spiritual experience
(13:02):
that allows him to be sober for basically the rest
of his life. And this is Bill Wilson. This is
the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, on which all twelve step
programs are based, and spiritual experience are at the very
very heart of these twelve step programs. So for some people,
these experiences, while they may not last very long, they
(13:22):
have a hugely lengthy impact on their life.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And another future of these experiences is this kind of
altered state of consciousness, which I think, when you're a
nerdy scientist like us, begs this naturalistic explanation that gets
kind of complicated. You know, as you mentioned in your
own experiences, you're wondering, is this God? Is this the
kind of thing that we don't as scientists tend to
try to dig into. These things kind of seem outside
(13:46):
the purview of normal scientific research. And so one question
is like, how do we take a naturalistic approach to
stuff that feels perhaps by definition so supernatural.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Yeah, as scientists, we need to study what we can measure,
and there are many aspects of these experiences that we
can measure. But there are some kinds of interpretations of
these experiences that are simply all the table scientifically, and
we leave those to philosophers and theologians and individuals' own
interpretations and their own conscience and faith. Essentially, So when
(14:20):
we study these kinds of experiences, we take a methodologically
agnostic approach, and so we say, let's look at what
we can study. We can study what people say about them,
what triggered the experience, how they felt during the experience,
what happens in the brain and the body during the experience,
how it seems to impact people's lives, how it changes
their behavior.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
So all of that is on the table.
Speaker 4 (14:41):
The question of ultimately where these experiences come from. Is
it from a supernatural realm or a god or is
it just the brain? Ultimately, that's not a question that
I think we can answer scientifically.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
But one of the questions we can answer scientifically is
trying to just kind of categorize these experiences, and it
turns out that even that seemingly simple scientific question is
really really tricky because of a strange feature of these
experiences that they're really varied.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
That's why you call your book the Varieties of Spiritual Experience,
And so give me a sense of the like spectrum
of these things. We talked about some of the extreme
ones where you know it's changing your life, it's sort
of morally transformative. Like what does the other side of
the spectrum look like?
Speaker 4 (15:22):
Yeah, so for some people, these experiences can be quite
negative and are in fact related to mental illness and
can lead to mental illness. So don't want to portray
these experiences as always positive. They're very intense, and they
can go in different directions for different people. There's a
long history in treating them as merely parts of mental illness,
(15:45):
and a lot of my research is oriented towards correcting
that because actually most people benefit from these experiences, and
some people benefit tremendously so in terms of the impact
that they have on people's lives. There are varieties in
terms of intensity, Like when we went through that imaginal exercise,
some people probably had really transformative experiences in mind, other
(16:06):
people may have thought about looking at a really amazing
paintings somewhat less intense. So they vary in terms of intensity.
They also vary in terms of the content of the experience.
We've talked about. If you ask people, have you had
a spiritual experience, about thirty five percent of the population
we'll say yes, And you can make further subdivisions within that.
Speaker 3 (16:26):
The main three subdivisions.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
So the first one is feeling as if you're connected
to an all pervasive, sort of all powerful, non physical
mind of some kind, a kind of God or divinity.
The second one is unity, so people feel deeply connected
to everything and everyone around them. The third, and this
is where things get a bit strange, is non physical
(16:49):
entities or ghosts. So we didn't go looking for ghost stories,
but they came to us. So if you ask people
have you had a spiritual experience, many people will say yes,
and it was a ghost experience. Now, being a little glib,
but these experiences can be very profound. There was a
study in swe that found that over fifty percent of
(17:12):
recently bereaved spouses will have a experience of a visage
or a ghost of their recently deceased spouse, and that
most people view these experiences as meaningful and beneficial and
helpful in the morning process.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
And so I think we're going to talk more about
what these variations mean. But as we're talking about this,
I'm realizing that as we start talking about varieties, we
should be sure to give credit to the scholar who
kind of came up with this notion of varieties. You
called your book the Varieties of Spiritual Experience, but that
was kind of a kickback to the scholar who first
started the empirical study of spiritual experiences in general. And
(17:52):
so when we get back from the break, we're going
to do a deep dive into that scholar's story. Was
David's academic forefather who started studying transcendent moments first, the
themed nineteenth century psychologist William James. We're going to hear
a little bit about James's story and how he became
interested in all these phenomena, and I we're going to
learn how his work laid the foundation for some of
the biggest scientific breakthroughs we're seeing in spiritual experiences today,
(18:16):
including in the domain of psychedelics and happiness.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
The Happiness Lab and live in DC. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
And so, David, many of the most famous accounts of
spiritual experiences are pretty old, in our oldest texts and
our oldest religious works. But it was only in the
nineteenth century that researchers really started studying these phenomena from
more of a scientific perspective. It was really until the
pioneering work of one of psychology's great scholars, William James.
And I know, David that you're kind of like a
(18:55):
William James super fan, but he's kind of not as
famous as a lot of older psychologists that we think
of Freud or Young or something like that. Why not
and why is that kind of an oversight?
Speaker 4 (19:05):
I'm so glad we get to talk about William James well,
because a lot of people don't. They want to skip
over the history. And this is like the most exciting thing.
And I should say we name the book as an
homage to William James's original book, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
because we want people to go back and read the original.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
It's not like a copyright the error.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
So I was in a cab going to Countway Library,
which is a medical library and it's the only place
in the world that has a chapter from Carl Jung's
autobiography that was cut by the editor, and you have
to go there in person, put on these gloves, and
actually handle the manuscript in person. And this deleted chapter
(19:50):
is all about Carl Jung's relationship with William James. And
why that matters is because most people see Carl Jung
as Freud's protege and really just carrying forward Freudian thought
and then they split, but really they're kind of talking
about very similar things. What this chapter shows is that
Carl Jung Ung's later work was a huge debt to
(20:11):
William James's work, and he essentially became Jamesian. So I
was in a cab and I was telling this exact
same story and the cast of characters involved are Sigmund Freud,
Carl Jung, and William James. And the cab driver said,
I definitely know Freud. I think I've heard of Jung.
I've never heard of the other guy, and that I
think is pretty common.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
And David started weeping in the cab. That is absurd.
That is so absurd.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I mean it was true of me before I became
a psychologist as well, of course, but it's not only absurd,
it's bizarre. So at the time of his death, William
James was called the most famous academic in the world
by Bertrand Russell. He had been the president of the
American Psychological Association and American Philosophical Association.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
He's a professor at Harvard.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
He made huge contributions in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, psychiatry.
He started the first psychology lab in North America. So
he's this towering figure who was also a member of
the most famous family in America. He grew up with
Emerson and Thereaux sitting around the dinner table. His brother
Henry James became basically the most influential novelist of the time.
(21:20):
His sister Alice James became a famous feminist diarist, so
massively influential.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
And somewhat forgotten.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
And I think that that's a big mistake, because I
think William James really laid the foundation for the study
of these experiences, and did so in a way that
was much more evidence based and nuanced than either Freud
or Young. So William James wanted there to be rigorous
empirical research on these experiences, Freud and Young did something
very different. So Freud looked at these experiences and he said,
(21:51):
these sound weird. He's like, these don't fit with our
picture of psychology. He said, he's never had one of
these experiences, and so therefore they must be related to
mental illness. And he even offered an explanation, or he
tried to. He said, these oceanic feelings of oneness are
actually memories of being in your mother's womb that are
repressed that are coming to awareness. So any psychologists would
(22:13):
think that's completely absurd. We know that the memory doesn't
work like that. So Freud said, these are parts of
mental illness and they don't really have value. Their delusional Basically,
Jung thought that they were the key to mental health.
So he almost went to the entire opposite perspective, and
he thought these experiences are so important that he's going
(22:34):
to put them at the center of his system of psychotherapy.
Called them numinous experiences and probably didn't really emphasize the
risks and the fact that these experiences often don't result
in long lasting change, at least not for everybody. And
he thought that they were verritical in the sense that
they were showing us a true picture of reality. So
(22:54):
those are very different perspectives, and William James's view is
I think.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
The correct one.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
We should look to the evidence learn about these experiences,
and we should set aside philosophical and theological questions that
we can't answer zience typically.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
And one of my favorite things about the story of
how William James got interested in these experiences is that
his kind of big fory into talking about them happened
at an event a lot like this, right.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 4 (23:29):
Yeah, So the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, essentially the TED
Talk of the day. This lecture series becomes the book
The Varieties of Religious Experience, and at the end of
it they apparently sang for He's a jolly good fellow,
which is like the equivalent of a standing ovation at
a TED talk.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
I guess it's kind of fun. I was gonna have
you do it.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
So now fast forward, you know, one hundred plus years,
and the scholars today are still using some of the
same traditions that James did, right, I mean, functionally, his
naturalistic approach is kind of what you've done with your
famous varieties corpus.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
You know, so talk about kind.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Of the goal of that work to really catalog these experiences.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, so one of William James's students, Edwin Starbuck, did
a survey of people in New England at the time.
Have you had feelings of oneness? Have you had feelings
of divine aid? And tabulated how many people said yes.
And so this was a rudimentary what we call cross
sectional survey. We've now done these kinds of surveys, but
(24:31):
we ask a whole lot of questions about what triggered
these experiences, what kind of experience it was, what people
felt during the experience, and then how it impacts their life.
And so we ask a whole lot of questions, and
we put these questions to thousands of people, not just
a few dozen like they did back in the day.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
And so what are we learning from some of these surveys?
I mean, one of the big questions is like, where
do these kinds of experiences come from? You know, what
are we learning about how they tend to emerge in
these surveys?
Speaker 4 (24:59):
The ultimate origin, whether it comes from God or the
brain or somewhere else. And you know, again we set
that question aside when we study it. I should also
mention people, people of every religious faith, people are spiritual
but not religious. Agnostics and atheists all have these experiences,
and in fact, some atheists will have a full blown
(25:20):
experience of God, they'll just choose afterwards to interpret it
as a brain event rather than God experience. So what
causes these experiences? A lot of things, So things like prayer, meditation,
solitude in nature, maybe those are more expected, less expected
being near death, grief, transitional periods in life, and then
(25:41):
psychedelic experiences as well.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
What do all those things share in common. I'm not
exactly sure.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
If you know the answer, let me know afterwards, because
I'm really trying to figure that out.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
And so, you know, in James's day, we kind of
just had these statistical techniques where we could kind of
ask people about these experiences and try.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
To catalog them.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But James would be so excited to the access that
we have nowadays in terms of new techniques for looking
at these things. And one of the things that we
can use, and I know that you have used, is
looking at activity in the brain. To I don't understand
what's happening in the brain when people experience these altered states.
And so talk about how researchers are starting to use
neuroscientific techniques to get at the mechanisms of these experiences
(26:20):
and also some of the particular challenges of that work
that you might not think of ahead of time.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
It's pretty difficult to have one of these experiences on command,
let alone lying in a neuroimaging scanner, a noisy, uncomfortable
neuroimaging scanner.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
But researchers are doing this.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
So my co author in the book, Andy Neuberg, was
a pioneer in putting Franciscan nuns and Tibetan meditators. These
are veteran contemplatives. These are people who practice prayer or
meditation for hours a day for many years, who say
that they're able to put themselves into this deep feeling
of unity more or less on command if given some time.
(27:00):
And so when these people were putting themselves into this
state and they were in the scanner at the same time,
what was found is a particular region of the brain
was inhibited or less activated, the temporal parietal junction, a
region of the brain doesn't matter, and this region is
(27:21):
less active than normal. And you have to be careful
about drawing conclusions in this way. But this region is
often associated with mapping the boundaries between yourself and everything else,
and so it makes good neurological sense that when people
are feeling this sense of unity, that this boundary modeling
region is turned down.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
And I know this is all preliminary work, so as
we talk about these findings, you know, it's hard to
say what we know for sure because there's so few studies.
But there are other neuroscientific studies looking at what's happening
in the autonomic nervous system when we're having some of
these experiences, and so bracketed autonomic nervous systems something we
talk about a bunch on the podcast. This is two
sets of systems that kind of go back and forth
(28:02):
between our sort of fight or flight threat response, like
a tiger jumps out the sympathetic nervous system response, and
the opposite sister response of kind of rest and digest,
our sort of parasympathetic calming response. And usually the autonomic
nervous system has these two poles, like one is active
any one time you're either in tiger is jumping out
of you fight or flight mode, or you're kind of
(28:23):
chillin rest and digest mode. That's what's typical, But what
are some of these early neuroscience studies starting to show
about what happens in the autonomic nervous system when we're
having some of these experiences.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
I can't resist telling this little historical anecdote. So the
stress response, the sympathetic response, was discovered by one of
William James's students, Walter Cannon.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
William James fan it's so cute. Look at how his
face like that. You're going to cut this, I know.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
And then the other the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response,
was discovered in the same lab by Herbert Benson in
his group.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
So kind of funny, William James, super important.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Now you'll never forget anybody.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
Yeah, So these different branches stress response, sympathetic, relaxation response, parasympathetic.
It's generally the case that one on and the other
one is essentially off. But during certain experiences, and it
seems like spiritual experiences might be such a case, there's
what's called a paradoxical response, where they both seem to
be activated at the same time. There are other contexts
(29:23):
in which this occurs as well, like orgasm, for example,
and some scientists think that these spiritual experiences, while otherwise
quite different from an orgasm, may involve some of the
same underlying physiology.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
It's just a theory, and.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So all that stuff is really new but exciting, right,
because now we have these techniques and the promise of
these techniques for looking at these experiences. But when we
get back from the break, we're going to talk about
another modern window that we have into the nature of
self transcendent experiences. We're going to start talking about psychedelic drugs.
The Happiness Lab Live in DC will turn to the
science of psychedelics in just a moment, So, David, we're
(30:06):
going to start talking about psychedelic substances in I think
in some ways it might feel weird to talk about
psychedelics and the context of other spiritual experiences, Like on
the one hand, we're talking about nuns or having these
religious experiences, and we're talking about them in the same
breath as like tripping on LSD at some like festival. Right.
But the reason you think this is okay is that
you've argued in your book is that a lot of
(30:27):
the experiences that people self describe on psychedelics seem pretty
indistinguishable from the more spiritual realm. So give me some
examples of why that seems to be the case.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
I should first start out by saying, psychedelic substances have
been used in indigenous communities for spiritual religious purposes for
centuries and potentially millennia, and so the associations that our
culture has with psychedelics, sixties and tied I and things
like that will be very, very different in other cultures
(30:57):
where this association between spiritual type experiences and psychedelic experiences
is totally normal. But yeah, in our culture it does
maybe seem strange. But it's been noticed for a long
time that there's similarities in the reports of some psychedelic
experiences in some of these spiritual experiences. So there was
a scholar named Houston Smith, and when he was lecturing
(31:18):
at Princeton, he used to write on the board one
experience that was triggered by psychedelics and then another experience
that was triggered spontaneously, and he would ask the students
guess which one was triggered by the psychedelic and no
one could. I mean, it was fifty to fifty, just
a chance. And when you read these accounts, there are
many in the book they just seem indistinguishable. You wouldn't
(31:42):
be able to tell was that triggered by meditation or
psychedelic or spontaneously. That's important data that leads us to
believe that there might be something about psychedelics that will
allow us to discover more about the underlying psychopharmacology of
spiritual experiences in general, or at the very least use
(32:02):
psychedelics to model these kinds of experiences that were so
interested in studying, not just in a correlational survey way,
but actually inducing them in the lab.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
I mean, you've described the benefit that scientists might get
from psychedelics, But my guess is other people who are
sitting out there might be thinking, hang on, I could
you know, wait to kind of spontaneously have one of
these experiences that are so transformative and maybe we will
change my life forever, or I could take a substance
that might get me there. And I think this leads
to this sort of natural question, which is, like our
(32:32):
psychedelics just a super fast way to get these intense
spiritual experiences, a kind of quick quick fix to enlightenment,
maybe even happiness. But you've argued that before we can
even answer that question, we need to become more careful
historians of what happened the last time we started exploring
these questions with psychedelics, and so give us a kind
of quick glimpse into the history of psychedelic research kind
(32:55):
from where we started to where we wound up today.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
Yeah, so there does seem to be some promise for
psychedelic compounds and the experiences that they create, and this
results in statements psychedelics can cure mental illness or solve
the climate crisis, these outrageous claims.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
And that one that was literally in a news article.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Yeah. What's frustrating about that is the experiment has been run.
I mean, in the nineteen sixties there was widespread use
of psychedelics and here we are. It's not as if
everything became a utopia. And so this idea of oh,
just distribute psychedelics and the world will be healed, I
(33:41):
find just well, i'll just say, empirically implausible. And so
I think we have an opportunity as a society to
treat these compounds with more respect this timing around, and
to be a little bit more careful or a lot
more careful, and to do better science.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
So with that Karen Place. So far, what do we
know about how these things work and the POTENTI I'll
promise they might have for some therapeutic benefits.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
So at our lab at Johns Hopkins, we do quite
a lot of research with psilocybin. So, psilocybin is a
serotonergic psychedelic. It's one of the psychedelics. And by the way,
I should say, when I talk about psychedelics, I'm not
talking about MDMA or ketamine. So MDMA we call it empathogen,
(34:33):
and ketamine we call it dissociative anesthetics. So when I
say psychedelic, I mean serotonergic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, DMT,
and mescaline. So we do a lot of work with
these serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin. And the way we do
it is we bring in participants who are interested in
having one of these experiences. We screen them, so we
(34:57):
screen out people who have a personal or family history
of psychotic disorders or cardiac issues. We go through extensive
prep sessions so people can learn about what the psychedelic
experience might be like and to build some trust with
two of their guides who follow them through the whole
process on the session day. We just had one today,
and these two guides will be in the session room
(35:19):
with the participant.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
There's music playing.
Speaker 4 (35:22):
The participant wears headphones and eye shades and lies on
a couch, and the experience lasts about six hours, and
two to three hours in they'll be peak intensity. People
report a lot of different kinds of experiences throughout that
six hour period, some of which look very much like
(35:44):
the kinds of experiences that I'm interested in, deep feelings
of unity, other kinds of spiritual experiences happening in that context,
which are often highly valued. So what we're seeing is
that many people are reporting profoundly positive experiences. The majority
of participants are saying this is among the most meaningful
(36:05):
moments of their entire life. And we're seeing benefits to
well being that last many months, boosted attitudes about self
and life, overall well being, pro social attitudes, and these
are self reported and also confirmed by observers. This is
quite promising and as a well being intervention, maybe among
(36:28):
the most potent positive interventions ever discovered. There are, though risks,
so not everyone has a great time. There's always about
ten to twenty percent of the sample that has experiences
dominated by anxiety and fear, and who would prefer never
to have the experience. Again, we're generally not seeing adverse
events that can't be resolved through psychotherapy in the laboratory setting,
(36:51):
but as we do more studies, we will certainly see that,
and in observational studies we see people do have adverse events.
So psychedelics can result in behaviors that are unusual, and
if they're taken in unsafe settings, can result in physical harm.
I've heard stories of people running into traffic, so physical
(37:11):
safety is important. People can also be taken advantage of,
and so social safety is extremely important as well, and
abuses can and do occur.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
I'm guessing that at least some of the people listening
right now have either tried psychedelics or maybe you're thinking
about trying it. Does your work provide any advice for
some best practices with engaging in these substances. Do we
have a sense from the research yet how best to
kind of try them out if you're interested.
Speaker 4 (37:35):
I am a researcher that works in a medical school,
and so our research on psychedelics is generally trying to
quantify their risk benefit ratio to look at their potential
as treatments, but I'm also beginning to look more and
more at their potential for enhancing well being. I think
though the way I look at this is very descriptive.
(37:58):
I'm trying to understand the benefits and the risks, and
so even though some of these findings sound quite positive,
I'm not promoting psychedelic use. They're also illegal in most places.
Some places they are legal, and I guess from a
harm reduction perspective, if someone was going to use a
psychedelic I would really strongly advocate to learn a bit
(38:23):
about what to expect about the experience and to do
it in a safe setting physically and socially.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
And so as you look ahead, you know, five ten
years from now, you know, what do you see on
the horizon, What do you think are going to be
some of the most important steps and kind of understanding
you know how these substances work and the potential that
they have.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
So I think quantifying that risk benefit ratio is so important.
This is a potent intervention, which from the perspective of
learning to enhance well being, is very valuable potentially because
I think we need new ways forward. If we want
to try to learn how to enhance well being, but
(39:02):
there are real risks, and we need to be able
to provide information to people so that they can make
an educated decision about what to engage with the psychedelic
I would say one of the more exciting directions is
this question that's emerging in the field, which is does
the trip matter at all? Can you take the trip
or the acute subjective effects of psychedelics out and still benefit?
(39:25):
And actually, there's hundreds of millions of dollars being poured
into this question right now, So there's a lot of
people trying to take the acute subjective effects or the
trip out of psychedelics and use it as a treatment,
which I am all for. That's interesting scientifically, could be
valuable clinically. But I think what's important to me is
that the psychedelic experience isn't demonized again, because for decades
(39:50):
we've had propaganda about how these are terrible experiences, and
what we're seeing from the data are that these experiences
are for most people quite positive and can be extremely profound,
And so I'm concerned that we really stay grounded in
the actual data and what people are saying about these
(40:10):
experiences and not just try to take the subjective effects out.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
So David, I really just see you as this modern
day embodiment of William James. You're taking the next step
and really trying to understand these spiritual experiences using kind
of the best techniques we have scientifically. I hope we
come back in one hundred plus years and we're having
yet another event where someone is singing for your successor
he's a jolly good fellow.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
Oh, I have to do the whole song good. That
was good to carry it.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
The Happiness Lab Live was co written by Ryan Delay
and was produced by Ryan Delay and Britney Brown.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
The show was mastered by.
Speaker 2 (40:59):
Evan Biola, and our original music was composed.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
By Zachary Silver. Special stakes to.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
The team and our great Happiness Lie venue, the sixth
and nine historic Senega DC, to our amazing site engineer
at Jason Gramble and Toronald Young Junior who set us
off on our path.
Speaker 3 (41:16):
Finally thanks to this.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Amazing live studio audience. I'd also like to thank le
tom Ala, Jasmine Prez, Kerrie Brody, Gretta Cone, Eric Sandler,
Carly mcgliori, Morgan Ratner, Jason Wakeberg, my agent Ben Davis,
Doug Singer at w E, and the rest of the
Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab Live was brought to you
(41:39):
by Pushkin Industries and buy Me Doctor Lauries he
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