May 22, 2020 • 50 mins
What are psychedelics? How have these substances influenced human minds and culture? What exactly do they invoke in the brain and how could a renaissance of scientific study into their properties improve our lives? In this series of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe explore the world of entheogens.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And here it is the
fifth and final installment in our series on psychedelics. We
(00:26):
made it to part five, right, Part five. Then we'll
move on to some other topics and probably come back
around to other episodes that involve psychedelics in the future,
because there's just so much research going on, and that's
ultimately what this episode is about. What what are some
examples of the stuff that's going on in our century,
in the twenty one century regarding psychedelics, like with the
Friday Thirteenth movies. Part five is a new beginning. Yeah,
(00:49):
that's right, it's the Psychedelic Research Revival. So yeah, So
we've been teasing this, I guess throughout the past four
episodes that at some point we're going to talk about
research that's taken place on the clinical significant of psychedelics
in the twenty first century. After some of the veil
of stigma has lifted from from psychedelic assisted therapy and
psychedelic for treating various conditions. UM, So to quickly look
(01:13):
at one important study, I think this would be a
good place to start, from the early days of the
twenty first century psychedelic renaissance. I just checked and this
one has been cited seven hundred and eighty nine times
now according to Google scholar. This is a study from
Roland Griffith's, William Richards, Una Macon and Robert Jesse And
this was published in Psychopharmacology and the year two thousand
(01:35):
six called Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial
and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. And I think
we'll we will talk more about spiritual significance as we
go on, maybe later in the episode. But UH, to
give a brief summary, Basically, psilocybin has been used for
religious purposes for centuries, but what does it actually do? Uh?
(01:58):
This research for suit a similar line of inquiry to
the marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen sixty two, which we
talked about in the third episode of the series. This
was dosing people with psychedelics and then letting them loose
in to church basically well seminary students, and so they
were there you know, to learn about the divine and
to become ministers. I guess probably. And they were there
(02:21):
for the Good Friday service in this church, and some
were given psilocybin and some were given an active placebo.
I think it was niacin, which causes tingling and flushing
and so. In. In that that experiment, they did find
that the people who had been given the psilocybin for
this religious service reported having largely reported having these very
(02:43):
profound and positive mystical experiences while on psilocybin that they
believed largely changed their lives for the better. Right, not
just memorable experiences, but life changing experiences and believed subjectively
to be spiritually significant to religious people, right, not not
(03:03):
just a situation of where it's like, oh yeah, I
saw something or or felt something and it kind of
made me think about some religious concepts. I was already
turning over in my head. You know. It was it
was it was like an order of magnitude beyond that. Yeah.
Uh So this study from two thousand and six it
was to study whether psilocybin causes people to have these
same types of experience as mystical or religious experiences that
(03:25):
they rate as positive and profound when compared to a placebo.
And this was a double blind study using high doses
of psilocybin and an active placebo control. The active placebo
they used in this case was not niacin. It was
methyl finitate hydrochloride, which stimulates the central nervous system. It's
a stimulant. And I could be wrong, but I think
(03:46):
this one also what they definitely injected it, right, I
think so because you do so. Actually I'm not sure, Okay,
a lot of these a lot of these studies, they
do end up injecting it just because it's fast acting
and also sometimes a little stronger, I mean a lot
stronger too, because it's just hitting me like that as
opposed to you know, gradually coming up. That's and yeah,
that does happen in some studies. I did not know
(04:06):
the methodical administration here, but so quote, volunteers completed questionnaires
assessing drug effects and mystical experiences immediately after and two
months after sessions. And then they also say that community
observers rated changes in the volunteers attitudes and behavior, so
they didn't just ask people their own subjective impressions of
(04:28):
how they've changed. They also asked other people, Hey, how
has Jeffrey changed? Right, So it's not just Scrooge saying
oh yeah, I'm totally cool with cratch It. Now you're
like you're actually asking cratch It, Hey, what do you
think about Scrooge? Just like, oh, yeah, he's totally different now.
I don't know. He must have he took something Christmas Eve.
Didn't you write something once about how Scrooge was on
d MT? Yeah? Yeah, I and I can't be there.
(04:50):
I'm sure I'm not the only person to make this commentary,
but I feel like, um, a Christmas Carol. The story
of Evanezer Scrooge is like such a psychedelic experience, Like
really he had. I mean, he has a supernatural experience
that makes him reassess his life and his life choices
and ultimately changes his trajectory. And I think it has
a tremendous amount in common with some of the psychedelic
(05:13):
experiences we've been discussing. Yeah, I think I think that's
about right. It was that bad potato that he ate, right,
you know what he says. It was like a bit
of cheese or meat that had gone off. Okay, so
results of this experiment, the the updates sort of on
the marsh Chapel model the author's right quote, Psilocybin produced
a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods,
(05:37):
including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At
two months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experiences having substantial
personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience
sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes
rated by community observers. So the authors write that that
(06:01):
the life change is experienced by people who took psilocybin
in this study are similar to the changes reported by
people who have spontaneous mystical experiences without drugs that change
their lives. Quote. The ability to occasion such experiences perspectively
will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences.
(06:23):
And this kind of comes back to William James territory here, right,
because this is not just a study about psilocybin. It's
not just well, what can psilocybin do? It sort of
opens a doorway of generally studying the religious brain to
studying what's happening in our brains when we have a
self described mystical experience, and how do these experiences work
(06:46):
to change behavior? As they often do? But again, this
is a different sort of experiment than a lot of
the other stuff we've been hinting at, because it's the
kind of subjective positive experience we've heard reported anecdotally so
many times for people have an encounter with something something
profound and ineffable, that is a is a meaningful emotional
(07:07):
experience for them causes them to reflect on their life
in ways that might change their behavior in their habits. Um.
But what about the more clinical, more clinically significant uses
like modern research using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders, addiction,
and other issues. Yeah, and and this is where we're
seeing just a lot of tremendous research taking place. Yeah. Uh,
(07:31):
and um, we're still i think, on the on the
cusp of it, like we're still in the early days,
but exactly. Yeah, but but we Yeah, we are seeing
a lot of progress and a lot of promising, uh,
promising results. One of the key figures in the modern
research of psychedelic addiction research is a man by the
name of Dr Stephen Ross of the n Y u
(07:52):
psilocybin cancer anxiety study. We We mentioned him in a
previous episode already, Paul and Michael Paulan discusses his work
at length in his book. And as I mentioned already,
he was one of the panelists at the two thousand
nineteen World Science Festival, which I was in attendance for.
Uh and uh This talk, by the way from the
World Science Festival should be available online at some point
(08:12):
um in the months ahead. I'm not sure when, but
when it goes up, I'll make sure I share it
on our social so people can view it. Because it
was a great talk cover some of what we're talking
about here and have been talking about that gets into
other areas as well. UM so uh. Dr Stephen Ross
discussed how psychedelics were not a part of his training
(08:32):
in psychiatry and the study of addiction. Um and and
like when you when you see pictures of him and
you see him in person, um, you know he he
doesn't fit. You don't look at him and say like, oh,
there's a psilocybin research tree. If he doesn't look like
Willie Nelson's right, he doesn't look like Terence McKenna or
Timothy Learry. He looks just like a like just an
everyday human being. Um. And if you're said, if you're
(08:54):
told that that he's a you know, a professional or
an academic, you know, you wouldn't instantly think psilocybin. But anyway,
he discuss discussed, you know, this wasn't part of his training,
despite the fact the psychedelics were such a huge part
of psychology for a while. And uh, he says that
all the research findings from the fifties and sixties were
still out there, quote hiding in plain sight. And and
(09:15):
when he you know, he looked closer, he saw, you know,
you had this high success rate. Um using you know,
mainly it was like LSD with alcohol addiction is the
one that I think really caught his his attention. But
but yeah, we had these we had these really promising
results from the original period of modern psychedelic research. And
so he thought, well, let's let's try it again. Let's
(09:37):
see what else we can learn. How can we we
actually move on from what they had learned decades ago. Uh.
The only problem is that, there were, of course huge
administrative hurdles to studying it. But he was able to
push through with an initial focus on terminal cancer patient
studies alleviating end of life anxiety via psilocybin. Yeah, and
(09:58):
this is a big important early thing, I think, also
from the mid two thousands. Yeah. His initial work though,
actually took place at the n y U Dental School
because Bellevue and the n y U Cancer Center wanted
to just stay to stay clear of it because it was,
you know, still it was early days getting back into
and igniting what would become this renaissance of research. So
(10:19):
there was still even in the scientific and medical community,
something of a stigma around psychedelics, even for clinical uses. Yeah,
I mean even you know, even today, like in the
culture at large, I feel like there's still you still
have to push through that, right, Um, Like you still
have to, you know, get to the point where you're
not using the phrase magic mushrooms in the science headline,
(10:42):
right uh. And we're not there yet. I mean, it's
still the popular press reporting about it. It plays up
the kind of you know, hey, or you having depression symptoms,
maybe you should try dropping acid, a new study says,
And and it's understandable that would be the reaction for
so many of us, because again we're coming on the
heels of of the moral panic and so many of these, uh,
(11:07):
these ideas about what LSD and psilocybin are. But that's
another attitude actually that we were just hinting at. That's
not even it's not even the same as the moral
panic that looks at psychedelics as this sort of culture
destroying threat, you know, that's going to turn your children
into acts murderers. It's more the kind of the trivialization
(11:30):
of the psychedelic experience that looks at it not necessarily
as this horrible threatening thing, but as this like ho
ho ho, you know, oh, here's the stoner coming to
take the psychedelics. Yeah, Which it's kind of twofold, right.
On one hand, like maybe that's a necessary part of
of its transformation and and maybe that's one way it
survives through the through the decades of darkness there. But
(11:55):
on the other hand, it does it hurts the potential
of it, right because it creates a idea that it
is purely recreational, that is pure hallucination and fireworks and
just and there's nothing of value there, certainly not not
medically valuable, right, or I mean even within the recreational use.
What a lot of these enthusiasts have been emphasizing is
(12:16):
like spiritual significance, ability to change habits and and have
profound emotional experiences, not like the frivolous, trivial party drug
kind of approach. So Rossa's studies ended up using psilocybin
rather than LSD. LSD had been the primary substance in
previous trials, but psilocybin made more sense for a number
(12:37):
of reasons. So it's it's less stigmatized, has less political
badge baggage, it's easier to obtain, it's gentler, and it
also doesn't last longer than a researcher's work day. I
think that's that's something that's worth driving home and a
lot of this, you know, the LSD trip just takes
up so much more time and people need to get
home right. A number of studies, though, have have looked
(12:58):
at this, have examined uh end of life anxiety and
cancer depression and to what extent psilocybin could alleviate this condition,
and there there have been some we've been seeing some
rapid success. Yeah, you can imagine why this is fruitful,
just given people subjective experiences what they report about high
(13:18):
doses of psilocybin and LSD trips. A common thing is
reduced fear of death afterwards, the like. Again, this is
just anecdotal, but the thing people often say is like
I went through ego dissolution. You know, I I went
to this place where I was having experience, but there
was no me anymore, there was no self. And people
(13:38):
often talk of this in terms of some analogy of death,
you know, it's like ego death or something like, I
felt what it would be like to die or to
to have me not exist anymore, and I didn't mind.
It didn't feel bad in a way. It actually felt
peaceful and good. I mean, obviously, it also sounds I'm
sure counterintuitive to a lot of people, because yeah, you
(14:00):
might you might think, well, I'm if I'm on my deathbed,
or I'm you know, I'm facing a terminal illness or whatever.
The you know, particular situation is like this sounds like
a horrible time to take a mind altering drug. But
I think, you know, based on what we've been discussing
on the show, I think there's strong evidence for the
counter argument, like, no, this is the time to take
a mind altering job, especially because it seems like it
(14:20):
might have this ability to reduce death anxiety, to reduce
the sensation that the fact that you will die is
a horrible thing. Right, So effectiveness with psilocybin in these
situations it's something like with the placebo at like and
again we're not just talking about psilocybin itself, but rather,
(14:42):
you know, the result of a lot of set and
setting um priming the individual for the experience, having the
experience of the mind alterning experience, you know, guiding them
through it, helping them then to consolidate it all on
the other side. And again it's not the substance itself,
but the state of mind that the substance creates that
see is to be useful for psychiatric improvement, the experience,
(15:04):
not just the compound acting within the body. Right, It's
not take two of these and call me in the morning.
It's take two of these. Um, let me tell you
what's gonna happen. I'm gonna be there while it happens,
and then we're gonna spend time unpacking it afterwards. Now
it also gets into the research also gets into other
areas though, so it gets into just treat looking at
possible treatments for depression, and Ross says that the work
(15:26):
is promising there, but thus far the work hasn't been
too broad. On the addiction front, researchers are making headway
to treat addiction issues with not only alcohol but also tobacco, opiates, crack, cocaine,
and other substances. But in all of this, Ross stresses
that is often the case in any of these studies,
more research is required. Uh, you know. Even he admits
(15:48):
that in some cases the findings are almost too good
to be true. We just have to we have to
keep going, like you know, there's no point where you're
just like, all right, that's it. Psychedelics are are good
across the board. Let's just let's just you know, prescribe
them in every instance. Well, I mean, I do think
that there are there. We're tending toward a future where
(16:09):
we're gonna have more confidence in the results than we
have now. There are a lot of promising basically pilot studies.
In fact, I think maybe it would be good to
just talk through a few examples of recent studies. But
maybe we should do that after we come back from
a break. Thank alright, we're back, alright, So I thought
(16:29):
it would be good to just look at a few
examples of what these pilot studies on psychedelic clinical use
of psychedelics in recent years has been. And a good
place to turn here is a pretty recent meta analysis
of clinical research on psychedelics by Albert Garcia, Remew Brennan,
Carisguard and Peter Addie. Uh This was in Experimental and
(16:50):
Clinical Psychopharmacology in twenty sixteen called Clinical Applications of Hallucinogens.
And so this is like a meta review of all
the existing research out there right now. And they've got
a great just table in this paper that summarizes findings
from a bunch of existing clinical research up to the
year sixteen. And so I thought we could just go
(17:11):
through here and cite some examples from the categories of
treatment you were talking about a little while ago. And
so one thing is a couple of studies that looked
at the treatment of alcoholism. One is Bogan shoots at
all from and this tested psilocybin enhanced therapy therapy sessions. Specifically,
it was a type of therapy I had not heard of,
I think, called motivational enhancement therapy. Robert, are you familiar
(17:33):
with the uh NO? I don't believe. Yeah, but it's
some kind of therapy. Uh. And so like many of
the other studies, this is not just looking at taking
a drug in isolation, but taking the psychedelic in concert
with some kind of therapy or or session with a
counselor or therapist. I believe Michael Pollen pointed out there
they tend to be a par of therapists. You tend
(17:54):
to have like a male a therapist and a female therapist. Yeah. Yeah,
in most of these studies. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so this
is uh, this was to treat alcohol dependence in this study,
and they found quote, significant reduction in self reported drinking
days and heavy drinking days for thirty two weeks after
psilocybin administration compared to baseline. Another study by Krebs and
(18:19):
Johansson in was a meta analysis of previous research on
LSD assisted therapy or counseling, and it found across a
total sample size of more than five hundred participants that
a single dose of LSD, which was two d to
eight hundred micrograms paired with alcoholism treatment found uh quote
(18:40):
that that therapy produced significantly reduced reports of alcohol misuse.
That follow up compared to a control group receiving treatments
without the psychedelics. So so it really there are several
studies now showing that it really does seem to be
working with alcoholics. There are also a number of studies,
as you mentioned, about depression. For example, car Harris at
(19:00):
all In tested psilocybin quote in a supportive setting on
patients with treatment resistant unipolar major depression, and it found
significant reductions and self reported depressive symptoms from one week
to three months after treatment. According to one scoring method
for depression symptoms, eight of twelve participants showed complete remission
(19:21):
of depression symptoms after one week and five of twelve
showed complete remission after three months. And these results are
twenty milligrams of psilocybin um. So I think that's interesting
because one thing it shows there is something that I
think has showed up in a few other studies, is
that again, while these compounds appear very promising, they're not
(19:43):
a cure all and they don't appear to last forever.
It appears like they do have an effect, Uh, the
effect seems to be very positive, but the effect fades
over time, and this might be a thing where some
applications of psychedelics and the clinical setting, maybe something that
is a like a type of arapy that you would
repeat at intervals over time, the same way that you
(20:03):
would repeatedly visit a therapist for psychotherapy sessions, right or
certainly the same way that in a lot of these
traditional science societies one would, um would continually go to
the shaman or would partake of psychedelic substance as a
part of a regularly occurring religious observance. Another study on
depression was Osorio at all Infen. They tested ayahuasca for
(20:28):
recurrent major depressive disorder UH. This, like some of the others,
was open labels so not placebo controlled as test group
of six so like many of these small groups, but
found significant reductions in reports of depressive symptoms after one,
seven and twenty one days. Um and and Michael Pollen
has an interesting section in his book How to Change
(20:49):
Your Mind about Treating Depression with Psychedelics, in which he
talks to the psychologist Rosalind Watts, who she she so
she talks about these master themes discovered in studies about
what's going on with depression. And I just wanted to
read a couple of sections from Pollen's book that I
thought were interesting concerning these these master themes. Quote the
(21:11):
first was that volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a
state of disconnection, whether from other people, from their earlier selves,
their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values,
or nature. Several referred to living in a mental prison,
others to being stuck in endless circles of rumination they
(21:33):
likened to mental gridlock. I was reminded of Carhart Harris's
hypothesis that depression might be a result of an overactive
default mode network, the site in the brain where rumination
appears to take place. And so, of course you know
what might be going on there is that we we've
talked about psychedelics as having at least metaphorically being these
(21:53):
boundary dissolvers that they, you know, seem a kind of
ultimate remedy for symptoms related to disconnection. That they encourage
the sensation of being connected to other and all things,
and to other people and to the environment and all
these things that people feel disconnected or cut off from. UH.
(22:13):
And then going to the second master theme that Rosalind
Watts explains to Pollen. Quote the second master theme was
a new access to difficult emotions, emotions that depression often
blunts or closes down completely. What hypothesizes that the depressed
patient's incessant rumination constricts his or her emotional repertoire in
(22:35):
in other cases, the depressive keeps emotions at bay because
it's too painful to experience them. Uh So, like often
I think a lay person's understanding of depression might be,
uh like that you feel intense sadness, you know, like
this this really intense single emotion, which is not exactly
(22:57):
what depression seems to be. Like, I mean, I always
come back to, um, was it was it C. S.
Lewis that referred to depression as the black dog, like
this this kind of thing that would come and like
just weigh him down. Um, you know, I always come
back to those kind of descriptions. Do those feel more
accurate when when you're experiencing depression or when you're encountering
(23:18):
some of the depression it's not just like uncontrolled weeping,
you know it is it is more in line with
this disconnection we're talking about, this feeling of being trapped
within something or within yourself. In some ways, I think
it can be thought of as a sort of like
a hyperd motivated state, yea where it can just be
difficult to do anything or to feel anything. And I
(23:42):
guess hopefully, hopefully more people were aware of that. Now.
I feel like the messaging about what depression is is
is better today than it was like when when when
I was you know, a kid, or when I was
in high school. You know, yeah, I don't think we
had a good idea of it. I think you had
like occasional to be like a newsweek article about it,
but it wasn't really something that was particularly discussed in school.
(24:05):
As I recall, Yeah, that does seem like something that's
very important, like helping people understand what depression is, and
like being able to recognize the symptoms so that it
can be diagnosed, rather than you know, people just thinking
like what's wrong with me? Now. Come back to a
couple of other areas mentioned in this meta analysis of
(24:27):
of recent research on the clinical use of psychedelics. One
is studying obsessive compulsive disorder, so moreno at All in
sixteen did a double blind experiment with psilocybin to treat
obsessive compulsive disorder, and they found quote marked reductions on
the Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, which is a scoring
scale for for those symptoms for all participants during one
(24:50):
or more psilocybin sessions, and these effects lasted for at
least twenty four hours, though they're not sure how long
after that. Obviously, I think it would be less use
full in a clinical setting, for if it only treated
something while you were on the drug. Right, it's more
important to look at like these kinds of lasting changes
(25:10):
that come about from an experience, but we don't know
how long the changes might be operant on obsessive compulsive here. Uh.
And then another thing is tobacco dependence. I guess that
goes into similar category to alcohol dependence. But Johnson at
all in tested psilocybin paired with cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT,
and they found quote biologically verified smoking abstinence in eight
(25:32):
percent of volunteers at a six month follow up, as
assessed by exhaled breath, carbon monoxide and you'urine cottoning levels.
I'm not sure what cotening is. It's probably some downstream
thing of nicotine. But the authors here also listed a
couple more studies showing that both psilocybin and LSD assisted
psychotherapy were linked with decreased anxiety and depression symptoms and
(25:53):
people who were facing life threatening illnesses and cancer. But
we we should, I think, acknowledge, as we've mentioned several times,
that we're still in the early stages of the psychedelic
research renaissance because a lot of these studies have small samples.
A lot of them are small samples, a lot of
them are like open labels, so they're not placebo controlled,
people know what they're getting, uh, and you know, they're
(26:16):
not necessarily randomized controlled and all that. So I think
the future looks bright. But as you were saying a
little while ago, to invoke this much hated scientific cliche,
much much more research is needed, and specifically it's more
rigorous and larger, more statistically powerful research is needed. I
can only imagine too, that rescheduling these substances would also
(26:37):
help broaden some of these studies hugely. Yeah, I mean
it's you're talking about small study sizes, but with a
schedule one narcotic that has that has had, you know,
a lot of taboos associated with it, even for clinical
and research purposes. Yeah, exactly, And so to some up
I think where where we stand. I want to quote
from the discussion section of that that meta meta assis
(27:00):
by Garcia remu at all quote. The psychedelics including LSD, psilocybin,
mescal and d m T, and the d MT containing
admixture ayahuasca, have shown promise in treating a range of
psychological disorders for which currently available treatments are often insufficient,
such as mood, substance use, and anxiety disorders. These studies
(27:21):
have mostly been conducted in small, relatively homogeneous samples, limiting
the generalizability of their findings. However, safety and feasibility of
psychedelic facilitated treatment models have been established by these initial studies,
paving the way for further investigation in larger, more diverse
samples using randomized controlled designs. So essentially, these small studies
(27:43):
up front have been very important in establishing protocols, UH
demonstrating legitimacy and safety of these methods of research. And
we're sort of on the way now to look and
see what the results are once we try this with
lots more people, in more settings and and more rigorous methods. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to take another break, and
(28:04):
when we come back. We're gonna get more into the
you know, some of the possible future scenarios for psychedelic use,
and we're gonna we're gonna kind of take this in
both the grand direction in a very mundane direction. We're
gonna look at uh, psychedelics as a as a radio
for speaking to God, and also we're gonna look at
(28:25):
micro dosing. Okay, thank you, Alright, we're back. So we've
talked a little bit about about the religious experience and
psychedelics already. Sure, the March Chapel experiments of nine two
with psilocybin on on seminary students and in a good
(28:46):
Friday service, and then the follow up study, the two
thousand and six study by Griffith's at All It looked
at mystical or religious experiences people had on psilocybin and
found that people did view these as profound, significant experiences
and that they were positive. Yeah, and we see all
these different examples of of this kind of thinking, this
kind of interpretation of of psychedelic experiences that people have had.
(29:10):
You know, Terence McKenna, who we talked about in some
of the earlier episodes, certainly he got into some of
these more elaborate ideas of saying, like the machine elves,
but I mean in food of the Gods. He discusses this,
this idea of that the possibility of the holy other,
and we see that in other people's writings as well.
Huxley wrote of the mind at large. Uh. And then
(29:32):
we even have these various uh, you know, other religious
encounters to consider things that are maybe seemingly like a
little less grandiose in terms of just you know, how
the writers using them. Uh. One of these examples being
a cancer patient Dina Baser, who describes feeling quote bathed
(29:53):
in God's love during her experience as part of a
two thousand, ten n y U cancer anxiety study. By
the way, she also made an appearance of that World
Science Festival talk she was in the audience. This is
a really interesting point because actually Paullen interviews Beser for
his book and How to Change Your Mind and mentions
this experience interestingly, at least to me. He points out
(30:15):
that despite her belief that she was bathed in God's love,
that's a quote. Bezer does not believe that God exists,
so to quote from pollen quote during the climax of
a journey that extinguished her fear of death. Beser described
being bathed in God's love, and yet she emerged with
her atheism intact, and he wonders how it's possible like
(30:36):
to hold these contradictory ideas at the same time. Eventually,
he writes, quote, not only was the flood of love
she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any
individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous a
form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of
such a gift? God might be the only word in
(30:58):
the language big enough. And I think that's really interesting.
It's like we don't have the language to describe these
experiences without keying on other signs pointing to the unsayable
and the indescribable, and religious words are the words that
seem to fit that best and fall most within reach,
even if we don't. I mean, some people do mean
(31:19):
them exactly in their traditional sense, but a lot of
people on psychedelics use these words without meaning them in
their traditional sense, but still because they're the only word
they can find to suggest what they felt. Yeah, now,
and now they had just to critique Paul and a
little bit. I mean, I would argue that, uh, most
(31:40):
of us have uh contradictory ideas in our head. You know,
I think there are a lot of us that both
believe and don't believe in a god or some sort
of spiritual model. So we probably have multiple spiritual models
regarding some you know, vague aspect of the metaphysical realm
floating around our head right alongside like a a very
(32:01):
like stern scientific interpretation as well. But but that's that's
kind of beside the point. But uh, but but I
do think that I do think his interpretation is really
interesting here, and I think that the baser is a
story is his interesting. You know, we we often encounter
this idea of glimpsing God, or if not a God
(32:23):
or a deity or a goddess or something, glimpsing what
is often referred to as the ultimate reality um which
which of course this gets into. You know, this is
not new to the psychedelic realm. Like this is something
as a as a very old consideration in Hinduism as well,
the idea of like seeing through the veil of illusion
and like seeing the world as it really is, and
(32:46):
so one doesn't have to take a psychedelic in order
to have this experience, but it certainly seems to be
one of the pathways to to to having it. UH
So we there's actually another Roland Griffith's study that comes
out comes up and this is what this one is
actually is from this year from nineteen. This is from JOHNS.
Hopkins and it was published in PLS one, and it
(33:08):
looked at data from four thousand, two hundred and eighty
five people worldwide who responded to online advertisements to complete
one of two fifty minute online surveys about God encounter experiences.
And it particularly asked about encounters with the Ultimate Reality
or God or divine beings you know, like angels, etcetera,
(33:30):
that sort of thing of those. Uh. Four thousand, two
hundred eighty five individuals. One thousand, one hundred and eighty
four attributed their experiences to psilocybin um. One thousand, two
hundred fifty one said they took LSD, four hundred thirty
five UH said they took ayahuasca, six hundred and six
said they took D m T. In total, three thousand,
(33:51):
four hundred seventy six individuals responded to the psychedelic survey
uh part of the study, and then eight hundred nine
responded to the non drugs say, uh, it's you know,
zeroing in on people who are uh claiming to have
had some sort of divine experience encounter without the aid
of a of a psychedelic But it is interesting to
(34:12):
look at the numbers the way they fall out here
because in both studies, seventy of people said it was
among the most meaningful events of their lives, which I
guess shouldn't be that surprising. If you encounter something that
you perceive as being the ultimate reality or a God
or an angel or what have you, like, it better
be memorable, right, Yeah, I met God, but it wasn't
(34:32):
a big deal. Yeah, you don't want to be like,
oh yeah I met God. I don't know why that
didn't come up before. Oh yeah I saw an angel? Yeah, um,
and then frank, god was kind of boring. But then
they're also these differing factors to like. So seventy percent
said that there was communication involved, So not only do
they behold the divine or behold the objective reality, they
(34:55):
also had some sort of communication with it. Seventy five
reported there being this this air of benevolence to it,
reported a sense of intelligence, uh, se reported sacredness, and
seventy described an eternal nature to it. So it was
you know that this is something that has always been
(35:16):
and always will be. Now, obviously these are just these
are subjectively applied labels. It's the sense to which people
thought these words applied to their experience. But we still
learned something from asking people these kind of questions. Yeah, uh,
to keep going here. Seventy reported a decreased fear of
death in the psychedelic group, fifty seven percent in the
(35:37):
non drug group. Interesting, in both groups, fifteen percent said
that it was the most psychologically challenging experience of their life.
Of the psychedelic group described it as the ultimate reality,
fifty nine percent of the non drug group described an
encounter with a god or an angelic beings. So I
think that's interesting. I'll come back to that. The people
(35:59):
that had asy cadelic experience, they tended to they were
more likely to describe it as just a like they
saw through the veil, They saw the universe or the
world as it really is, whereas the non drug group
were more inclined to encounter a being. Now, Griffith says
that there's a lot more to explore here. You know,
(36:20):
he's he's not drawing any ultimate conclusions from any of this, uh,
but you know, some of the things to tease out
might be, like, you know, what factors may pre predispose
one to have these interpretations like um, Like I wonder,
for example, if the tendency UH to interpret it as
the ultimate reality over a God, goddess, angel encounter in
(36:43):
the psychedelic experience has more to do with the religious
ideals of the individual, you know, like here's somebody that
they took LST or took psilocybin, so maybe they weren't
like super religious, or it has something to do maybe
with the you know, the dissolution of boundaries uh in
the you know, the pressing down of the ego, the
the the turning off of the default mode network for
(37:05):
a little bit. So maybe you're you're less inclined for
this experience to be boiled into this egoic entity and
you're more likely to have this broader, dissolved experience. But
then at the same time, I mean, you know, McKenna
and others have talked about encountering and other while you know,
having a you know, a rather intense trip. So and
(37:27):
I guess it basically comes down to their multiple factors
involved here, and it will be interesting to see how
how future studies might tease that out and determine like,
you know what, what is impacting the scenario versus the
other and ultimately like you know what is the you know,
how each can be beneficial, the the psychedelic experience or
the like purely non drug religious experience. Well, when you
(37:49):
encounter some kind of reality beyond that with which you
were familiar. Yeah, what what tends to be correlated with
people believing that there is an entity there, like a
person or a mind or something versus just some kind
of plane of existence or or you know, state of
truth or I mean you sound kind of silly when
(38:10):
you start trying to put it into words yet again, right,
but I mean it is worth pointing out that, um,
you know, you're still looking at you know, seventy in
both studies saying that there was communication. So it's it's
like something is communicating with that there's some sort of communication,
but maybe it's you know, it's it's less directed, it's
less tied to an individual. H But anyway, it was,
(38:33):
you know, an interesting study to look at. And again
this was this is Roland Griffiths who we talked about earlier,
and that that earlier religious study going from two thousand six. Yes,
so that's one sort of grandiose way of looking at
the future of psychedelics and psychedelic research, right, figuring out
how we interpret the divine and how they could even
be as psychedelics can be used as part of some
(38:55):
sort of religious experience, like not only uh, you know,
the traditional religious experiences, maybe some sort of new religious experience. Well, yeah,
I'm curious to see how the idea of psychedelically prompted
religious experience squares with traditional beliefs in dogmas, because there
are very different attitudes that people can come at this with.
(39:16):
I mean some people, I think some people look at
the psychedelic experience and say, oh, this proof of God,
you know, because all these people take these compounds, have
experiences of meeting another higher power or something like that.
It's got you know, the consistency of these reports indicates
there's got to be a real being up there that
that people are encountering. And then people come at it
(39:36):
from completely the opposite way and say Look, if you know,
if people are taking drugs that are causing them to
have these experiences, that would tend to show that the
experience is something going on in the brain and not
like an actual spiritual being or entity up there that
that's doing something right, Like why would that entity only
be communicating with people are primarily communicating with people who
(39:59):
have taking a certain compound into their brains. And it's
interesting that this exact same reality causes completely opposite reactions. Yeah, yeah,
that to one person it is uh, you know, faith
in God restored, and the other it may be a
sign that there was nothing there to begin with. So yeah,
(40:20):
we'll be interesting to see how I see what kind
of light future research sheds on this issue. Well, though,
I also want to make clear that, at least from
my perspective, I mean, I don't think that even if
you don't think that there are actual other entities out
there that people are encountering on these drugs, that doesn't
mean that the mystical experience is not fascinating and useful
(40:41):
and revealing. If we are encountering other entities, even if
they're not like ghosts or some kind of being that acts,
you know, outside of our control, we are encountering something
inside our mind that is a latent potential there. Yeah,
and if you're communicating with that, even if you're just
communicating with yourself, well, uh there, there could be something
of value there. Um. So so that's kind of the
(41:05):
grandiose view into the future, you know, communicating with with God,
envisioning God and communicating with the self, etcetera. On the
other end of the spectrum, uh, Silicon Valley bros. Micro dosing.
So I don't want to be too judgmental, but yeah,
I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, So I mean obviously,
like the intended um goal with micro dosing is not
(41:29):
to uh justify the ways of God's to man, but
to rather like be a little better your job, right,
creative in your job. So we touched on this in
the last episode of Well I Guess the uh the
episode prior to the last episode, uh and uh, and
I wondered if any research had looked at whether Silicon
Valley types would actually benefit from micro dosing to enhance
(41:51):
creativity or novel thinking. Micro dosing, by the way, the
idea is generally there's no like, you know, definite definition,
but generally it's taking one tenth of a tripping dose
of a psychedelic, So you're not having a you know,
perceptually altered experience or not in any significant way. It's
more just kind of like thinking, this kind of loosens
(42:12):
the mind a little bit, right, Yeah, just kind of
like not shaking the snow globe of the brain all
the way up, but just kind of like giving it
a little shuffle and then like doing an eight hour
work day. So anecdotal evidence would indicate that it elevates
mood and mental acuity. But then ultimately, what do we
have in terms of studies, Well, we don't have much,
but there was there there was actually a study that
(42:34):
came out this year that looked into this a bit um,
looking at micro dosing in rats. It was a University
of California Davis study headed up by Dr David Olsen,
and they micro dosed rats with d m T. So
they gave them one tenth of the estimated hallucinogenic dose
in rats. So that's one milligram per kilogram of body
(42:55):
weight every third day for two months. And this is
you know, again more or less andreed one tenth of
a tripping dose. They treated them for two weeks and
then began studying mood, anxiety, and cognitive function over a
two day period. And these were the basic results. An
improved ability to overcome fear UH, antidepressant effects associated with
reduced immobility, and no obvious impairments or improvements in cognitive
(43:19):
function or social ability. Then, but there were also some
potential downsides. They observed significantly increased body weight in male
rats and neuronal atrophy and female rats. This despite the
fact that a previous study from Olson and company had
shown that a single high dose of d MT and
I should a single high dose of d MT showed
increased your own old growth. So again, this is one
(43:43):
of those studies that is not is just the beginning
of a story rather than anything like an end to it.
More study is needed, but it ultimately shows that there
may be some quantitative benefits to micro dosing, but there
also may be some key risks, and Olsen says that
that likely dose frequency and length of time are going
to be key here to whether we're talking about a
(44:04):
therapeutic dose or a potentially harmful effect. Yeah, and of course,
as always, you know, rats are not humans and our
brains are working very differently. But yeah, this is an
interesting indication of what might be going on. I'm especially
interested in in the idea of overcoming fear and to
what extent if that's an analogy for what's going on
with micro dosing and human brains. Uh. If I don't
(44:28):
know that, it could be that there's some kind of
like positive disinhibition quality. I mean, this is something I think, Uh,
people have thought about alcohol before. You know that that, like,
sometimes people drink alcohol at parties because it makes them
more sociable. You know, you feel disinhibited. A lot of
the kind of like fear that would keep you inside
(44:49):
your shell goes away. But then of course there are
tons of negative effects that come with alcohol. You know
that that also, like it might make you less inhibited
and and better at us socializing with people you don't
know very well, but also makes you stupid erth just
like you're not at your peak in every possible way.
And I would be interested to see if there are
(45:10):
ways in which small doses of psychedelics could be relevantly
disinhibiting without having some of the negative effects that come
with other disinhibitory drugs like alcohol. Now, obviously there's a
great deal to focus on in this episode about you know,
clinical research and and it is essential, but you know,
I don't think it's our only means of looking at psychedelics. UM.
(45:31):
Michael Pollen and others. They point out that the psilocybin
is not marijuana, and we can't really look to a
you know, one to one comparison on how decriminalization or
legalization will or even should proceed in regard to psilocybin,
for example. But but another, you know, I think important
note here is that even if we're not seeing, even
(45:52):
if we were not seeing all these potential benefits for therapy, UM,
are there enough negatives in place to rationalize the continue
you to illegal status of psychedelic substances. I mean, I
would think about it more from the other direction. I'm like, well,
are those negative effects enough that it should be illegal
and punished by police officers and law enforcement community and
the justice system for people to just have some? I
(46:16):
don't know. I mean it seems to me more like
the reasoning should be that there should be a really
good reason to make things illegal, not there should be
a good reason to make them not illegal. Yeah, And
I mean especially I mean we were talking about plants
too and fun guy, and you know, to what extent
should we outlaw fungus um, you know, or multiple species
of fungus you know, and especially if we're we're talking
(46:37):
about like all the other things that happened when you
outlaw substance. You you know, you you take these and
you these these things and you leave their traffic, their trade,
and their culture to fringe, underground and criminal elements. Um.
You know, because one of the issues with a lot
of illicit drugs is that by making them illicit, we
limit our ability to regulate them, to effectively educate people
(46:58):
about them, and to help people when they encounter problems,
be that problem a challenging trip or something like um,
you know, uh, addiction to a substance like cocaine. I
was actually looking at a study recently taught looking at
legalization of marijuana uh and in UH in the areas
they were looking at how it it lessened cases of
(47:20):
underage use just because since it was available legally but
it was regulated, um, there were fewer people below the
appropriate age acquiring the substance. That's interesting, So uh, you
know that easily we could do you could do a
whole episode, multiple episodes, just talking about all these issues
and drug legalization and regulation, what should be what should
(47:42):
be illegal, and what shouldn't be illegal, not only in
terms of substances, but pretty much anything within a given society. Um.
But um, I mean, hopefully in these episodes we've given
everybody some food, some food for thought, uh God, some
food of the gods for thought on that topic. Uh
and in gen role, hopefully you know, we've provided everyone
of a bit more information about the history, nature, and
(48:04):
reality of psychedelics so that you can make up your
own minds about it, or even change your mind if
you so wish. All right, So there you have it, psychedelics. Uh.
It only took us five episodes, but here we are,
and I feel I feel frustrated because we still like,
there's so much stuff we wanted to get to that
we never did. I just remembered we were going to
(48:24):
come back to the stuff about adult personality change the
psychedelics that. Uh, maybe we can explore that in a
future episode. Absolutely. Yeah, this is one of those rich
topics where you you know, the more you look into it,
the more stuff you bring up, the more you realize
you're missing out. And not even exploring. So if we
didn't talk about your favorite sub topic or issue in psychedelics, sorry,
(48:45):
we we just didn't get to it right. So we
would obviously love to hear from anybody. So if there's
there's a particular part of this five part journey that
you would love to hear a future episode on, you
want a deeper dive, you want to come back to it,
let us know about that. Uh. If you have general
thoughts right into us. Also, if you have you know,
particulars about your own experiences with any of these substances
(49:07):
or even with just uh, you know, hallucinatory experiences that
are not tied to psychedelic use, uh, feel free to
share those with us. And if you want to remain
anonymous on a future listener mail episode, you can make
a note of that as well, and we will definitely
honor that. Uh. In the meantime, heading over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's
where we'll find all the episodes of the show. If
(49:29):
you want to support our little show here, the best
thing you can do is to rate and review us
wherever you have the power to do so, and make
sure that you have subscribed huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer, Maya Cole. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
(50:01):
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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listen to your favorite shows.
My welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you welcome
to Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And here it is the
fifth and final installment in our series on psychedelics. We
(00:26):
made it to part five, right, Part five. Then we'll
move on to some other topics and probably come back
around to other episodes that involve psychedelics in the future,
because there's just so much research going on, and that's
ultimately what this episode is about. What what are some
examples of the stuff that's going on in our century,
in the twenty one century regarding psychedelics, like with the
Friday Thirteenth movies. Part five is a new beginning. Yeah,
(00:49):
that's right, it's the Psychedelic Research Revival. So yeah, So
we've been teasing this, I guess throughout the past four
episodes that at some point we're going to talk about
research that's taken place on the clinical significant of psychedelics
in the twenty first century. After some of the veil
of stigma has lifted from from psychedelic assisted therapy and
psychedelic for treating various conditions. UM, So to quickly look
(01:13):
at one important study, I think this would be a
good place to start, from the early days of the
twenty first century psychedelic renaissance. I just checked and this
one has been cited seven hundred and eighty nine times
now according to Google scholar. This is a study from
Roland Griffith's, William Richards, Una Macon and Robert Jesse And
this was published in Psychopharmacology and the year two thousand
(01:35):
six called Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial
and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. And I think
we'll we will talk more about spiritual significance as we
go on, maybe later in the episode. But UH, to
give a brief summary, Basically, psilocybin has been used for
religious purposes for centuries, but what does it actually do? Uh?
(01:58):
This research for suit a similar line of inquiry to
the marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen sixty two, which we
talked about in the third episode of the series. This
was dosing people with psychedelics and then letting them loose
in to church basically well seminary students, and so they
were there you know, to learn about the divine and
to become ministers. I guess probably. And they were there
(02:21):
for the Good Friday service in this church, and some
were given psilocybin and some were given an active placebo.
I think it was niacin, which causes tingling and flushing
and so. In. In that that experiment, they did find
that the people who had been given the psilocybin for
this religious service reported having largely reported having these very
(02:43):
profound and positive mystical experiences while on psilocybin that they
believed largely changed their lives for the better. Right, not
just memorable experiences, but life changing experiences and believed subjectively
to be spiritually significant to religious people, right, not not
(03:03):
just a situation of where it's like, oh yeah, I
saw something or or felt something and it kind of
made me think about some religious concepts. I was already
turning over in my head. You know. It was it
was it was like an order of magnitude beyond that. Yeah.
Uh So this study from two thousand and six it
was to study whether psilocybin causes people to have these
same types of experience as mystical or religious experiences that
(03:25):
they rate as positive and profound when compared to a placebo.
And this was a double blind study using high doses
of psilocybin and an active placebo control. The active placebo
they used in this case was not niacin. It was
methyl finitate hydrochloride, which stimulates the central nervous system. It's
a stimulant. And I could be wrong, but I think
(03:46):
this one also what they definitely injected it, right, I
think so because you do so. Actually I'm not sure, Okay,
a lot of these a lot of these studies, they
do end up injecting it just because it's fast acting
and also sometimes a little stronger, I mean a lot
stronger too, because it's just hitting me like that as
opposed to you know, gradually coming up. That's and yeah,
that does happen in some studies. I did not know
(04:06):
the methodical administration here, but so quote, volunteers completed questionnaires
assessing drug effects and mystical experiences immediately after and two
months after sessions. And then they also say that community
observers rated changes in the volunteers attitudes and behavior, so
they didn't just ask people their own subjective impressions of
(04:28):
how they've changed. They also asked other people, Hey, how
has Jeffrey changed? Right, So it's not just Scrooge saying
oh yeah, I'm totally cool with cratch It. Now you're
like you're actually asking cratch It, Hey, what do you
think about Scrooge? Just like, oh, yeah, he's totally different now.
I don't know. He must have he took something Christmas Eve.
Didn't you write something once about how Scrooge was on
d MT? Yeah? Yeah, I and I can't be there.
(04:50):
I'm sure I'm not the only person to make this commentary,
but I feel like, um, a Christmas Carol. The story
of Evanezer Scrooge is like such a psychedelic experience, Like
really he had. I mean, he has a supernatural experience
that makes him reassess his life and his life choices
and ultimately changes his trajectory. And I think it has
a tremendous amount in common with some of the psychedelic
(05:13):
experiences we've been discussing. Yeah, I think I think that's
about right. It was that bad potato that he ate, right,
you know what he says. It was like a bit
of cheese or meat that had gone off. Okay, so
results of this experiment, the the updates sort of on
the marsh Chapel model the author's right quote, Psilocybin produced
a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods,
(05:37):
including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At
two months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experiences having substantial
personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience
sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes
rated by community observers. So the authors write that that
(06:01):
the life change is experienced by people who took psilocybin
in this study are similar to the changes reported by
people who have spontaneous mystical experiences without drugs that change
their lives. Quote. The ability to occasion such experiences perspectively
will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences.
(06:23):
And this kind of comes back to William James territory here, right,
because this is not just a study about psilocybin. It's
not just well, what can psilocybin do? It sort of
opens a doorway of generally studying the religious brain to
studying what's happening in our brains when we have a
self described mystical experience, and how do these experiences work
(06:46):
to change behavior? As they often do? But again, this
is a different sort of experiment than a lot of
the other stuff we've been hinting at, because it's the
kind of subjective positive experience we've heard reported anecdotally so
many times for people have an encounter with something something
profound and ineffable, that is a is a meaningful emotional
(07:07):
experience for them causes them to reflect on their life
in ways that might change their behavior in their habits. Um.
But what about the more clinical, more clinically significant uses
like modern research using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders, addiction,
and other issues. Yeah, and and this is where we're
seeing just a lot of tremendous research taking place. Yeah. Uh,
(07:31):
and um, we're still i think, on the on the
cusp of it, like we're still in the early days,
but exactly. Yeah, but but we Yeah, we are seeing
a lot of progress and a lot of promising, uh,
promising results. One of the key figures in the modern
research of psychedelic addiction research is a man by the
name of Dr Stephen Ross of the n Y u
(07:52):
psilocybin cancer anxiety study. We We mentioned him in a
previous episode already, Paul and Michael Paulan discusses his work
at length in his book. And as I mentioned already,
he was one of the panelists at the two thousand
nineteen World Science Festival, which I was in attendance for.
Uh and uh This talk, by the way from the
World Science Festival should be available online at some point
(08:12):
um in the months ahead. I'm not sure when, but
when it goes up, I'll make sure I share it
on our social so people can view it. Because it
was a great talk cover some of what we're talking
about here and have been talking about that gets into
other areas as well. UM so uh. Dr Stephen Ross
discussed how psychedelics were not a part of his training
(08:32):
in psychiatry and the study of addiction. Um and and
like when you when you see pictures of him and
you see him in person, um, you know he he
doesn't fit. You don't look at him and say like, oh,
there's a psilocybin research tree. If he doesn't look like
Willie Nelson's right, he doesn't look like Terence McKenna or
Timothy Learry. He looks just like a like just an
everyday human being. Um. And if you're said, if you're
(08:54):
told that that he's a you know, a professional or
an academic, you know, you wouldn't instantly think psilocybin. But anyway,
he discuss discussed, you know, this wasn't part of his training,
despite the fact the psychedelics were such a huge part
of psychology for a while. And uh, he says that
all the research findings from the fifties and sixties were
still out there, quote hiding in plain sight. And and
(09:15):
when he you know, he looked closer, he saw, you know,
you had this high success rate. Um using you know,
mainly it was like LSD with alcohol addiction is the
one that I think really caught his his attention. But
but yeah, we had these we had these really promising
results from the original period of modern psychedelic research. And
so he thought, well, let's let's try it again. Let's
(09:37):
see what else we can learn. How can we we
actually move on from what they had learned decades ago. Uh.
The only problem is that, there were, of course huge
administrative hurdles to studying it. But he was able to
push through with an initial focus on terminal cancer patient
studies alleviating end of life anxiety via psilocybin. Yeah, and
(09:58):
this is a big important early thing, I think, also
from the mid two thousands. Yeah. His initial work though,
actually took place at the n y U Dental School
because Bellevue and the n y U Cancer Center wanted
to just stay to stay clear of it because it was,
you know, still it was early days getting back into
and igniting what would become this renaissance of research. So
(10:19):
there was still even in the scientific and medical community,
something of a stigma around psychedelics, even for clinical uses. Yeah,
I mean even you know, even today, like in the
culture at large, I feel like there's still you still
have to push through that, right, Um, Like you still
have to, you know, get to the point where you're
not using the phrase magic mushrooms in the science headline,
(10:42):
right uh. And we're not there yet. I mean, it's
still the popular press reporting about it. It plays up
the kind of you know, hey, or you having depression symptoms,
maybe you should try dropping acid, a new study says,
And and it's understandable that would be the reaction for
so many of us, because again we're coming on the
heels of of the moral panic and so many of these, uh,
(11:07):
these ideas about what LSD and psilocybin are. But that's
another attitude actually that we were just hinting at. That's
not even it's not even the same as the moral
panic that looks at psychedelics as this sort of culture
destroying threat, you know, that's going to turn your children
into acts murderers. It's more the kind of the trivialization
(11:30):
of the psychedelic experience that looks at it not necessarily
as this horrible threatening thing, but as this like ho
ho ho, you know, oh, here's the stoner coming to
take the psychedelics. Yeah, Which it's kind of twofold, right.
On one hand, like maybe that's a necessary part of
of its transformation and and maybe that's one way it
survives through the through the decades of darkness there. But
(11:55):
on the other hand, it does it hurts the potential
of it, right because it creates a idea that it
is purely recreational, that is pure hallucination and fireworks and
just and there's nothing of value there, certainly not not
medically valuable, right, or I mean even within the recreational use.
What a lot of these enthusiasts have been emphasizing is
(12:16):
like spiritual significance, ability to change habits and and have
profound emotional experiences, not like the frivolous, trivial party drug
kind of approach. So Rossa's studies ended up using psilocybin
rather than LSD. LSD had been the primary substance in
previous trials, but psilocybin made more sense for a number
(12:37):
of reasons. So it's it's less stigmatized, has less political
badge baggage, it's easier to obtain, it's gentler, and it
also doesn't last longer than a researcher's work day. I
think that's that's something that's worth driving home and a
lot of this, you know, the LSD trip just takes
up so much more time and people need to get
home right. A number of studies, though, have have looked
(12:58):
at this, have examined uh end of life anxiety and
cancer depression and to what extent psilocybin could alleviate this condition,
and there there have been some we've been seeing some
rapid success. Yeah, you can imagine why this is fruitful,
just given people subjective experiences what they report about high
(13:18):
doses of psilocybin and LSD trips. A common thing is
reduced fear of death afterwards, the like. Again, this is
just anecdotal, but the thing people often say is like
I went through ego dissolution. You know, I I went
to this place where I was having experience, but there
was no me anymore, there was no self. And people
(13:38):
often talk of this in terms of some analogy of death,
you know, it's like ego death or something like, I
felt what it would be like to die or to
to have me not exist anymore, and I didn't mind.
It didn't feel bad in a way. It actually felt
peaceful and good. I mean, obviously, it also sounds I'm
sure counterintuitive to a lot of people, because yeah, you
(14:00):
might you might think, well, I'm if I'm on my deathbed,
or I'm you know, I'm facing a terminal illness or whatever.
The you know, particular situation is like this sounds like
a horrible time to take a mind altering drug. But
I think, you know, based on what we've been discussing
on the show, I think there's strong evidence for the
counter argument, like, no, this is the time to take
a mind altering job, especially because it seems like it
(14:20):
might have this ability to reduce death anxiety, to reduce
the sensation that the fact that you will die is
a horrible thing. Right, So effectiveness with psilocybin in these
situations it's something like with the placebo at like and
again we're not just talking about psilocybin itself, but rather,
(14:42):
you know, the result of a lot of set and
setting um priming the individual for the experience, having the
experience of the mind alterning experience, you know, guiding them
through it, helping them then to consolidate it all on
the other side. And again it's not the substance itself,
but the state of mind that the substance creates that
see is to be useful for psychiatric improvement, the experience,
(15:04):
not just the compound acting within the body. Right, It's
not take two of these and call me in the morning.
It's take two of these. Um, let me tell you
what's gonna happen. I'm gonna be there while it happens,
and then we're gonna spend time unpacking it afterwards. Now
it also gets into the research also gets into other
areas though, so it gets into just treat looking at
possible treatments for depression, and Ross says that the work
(15:26):
is promising there, but thus far the work hasn't been
too broad. On the addiction front, researchers are making headway
to treat addiction issues with not only alcohol but also tobacco, opiates, crack, cocaine,
and other substances. But in all of this, Ross stresses
that is often the case in any of these studies,
more research is required. Uh, you know. Even he admits
(15:48):
that in some cases the findings are almost too good
to be true. We just have to we have to
keep going, like you know, there's no point where you're
just like, all right, that's it. Psychedelics are are good
across the board. Let's just let's just you know, prescribe
them in every instance. Well, I mean, I do think
that there are there. We're tending toward a future where
(16:09):
we're gonna have more confidence in the results than we
have now. There are a lot of promising basically pilot studies.
In fact, I think maybe it would be good to
just talk through a few examples of recent studies. But
maybe we should do that after we come back from
a break. Thank alright, we're back, alright, So I thought
(16:29):
it would be good to just look at a few
examples of what these pilot studies on psychedelic clinical use
of psychedelics in recent years has been. And a good
place to turn here is a pretty recent meta analysis
of clinical research on psychedelics by Albert Garcia, Remew Brennan,
Carisguard and Peter Addie. Uh This was in Experimental and
(16:50):
Clinical Psychopharmacology in twenty sixteen called Clinical Applications of Hallucinogens.
And so this is like a meta review of all
the existing research out there right now. And they've got
a great just table in this paper that summarizes findings
from a bunch of existing clinical research up to the
year sixteen. And so I thought we could just go
(17:11):
through here and cite some examples from the categories of
treatment you were talking about a little while ago. And
so one thing is a couple of studies that looked
at the treatment of alcoholism. One is Bogan shoots at
all from and this tested psilocybin enhanced therapy therapy sessions. Specifically,
it was a type of therapy I had not heard of,
I think, called motivational enhancement therapy. Robert, are you familiar
(17:33):
with the uh NO? I don't believe. Yeah, but it's
some kind of therapy. Uh. And so like many of
the other studies, this is not just looking at taking
a drug in isolation, but taking the psychedelic in concert
with some kind of therapy or or session with a
counselor or therapist. I believe Michael Pollen pointed out there
they tend to be a par of therapists. You tend
(17:54):
to have like a male a therapist and a female therapist. Yeah. Yeah,
in most of these studies. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so this
is uh, this was to treat alcohol dependence in this study,
and they found quote, significant reduction in self reported drinking
days and heavy drinking days for thirty two weeks after
psilocybin administration compared to baseline. Another study by Krebs and
(18:19):
Johansson in was a meta analysis of previous research on
LSD assisted therapy or counseling, and it found across a
total sample size of more than five hundred participants that
a single dose of LSD, which was two d to
eight hundred micrograms paired with alcoholism treatment found uh quote
(18:40):
that that therapy produced significantly reduced reports of alcohol misuse.
That follow up compared to a control group receiving treatments
without the psychedelics. So so it really there are several
studies now showing that it really does seem to be
working with alcoholics. There are also a number of studies,
as you mentioned, about depression. For example, car Harris at
(19:00):
all In tested psilocybin quote in a supportive setting on
patients with treatment resistant unipolar major depression, and it found
significant reductions and self reported depressive symptoms from one week
to three months after treatment. According to one scoring method
for depression symptoms, eight of twelve participants showed complete remission
(19:21):
of depression symptoms after one week and five of twelve
showed complete remission after three months. And these results are
twenty milligrams of psilocybin um. So I think that's interesting
because one thing it shows there is something that I
think has showed up in a few other studies, is
that again, while these compounds appear very promising, they're not
(19:43):
a cure all and they don't appear to last forever.
It appears like they do have an effect, Uh, the
effect seems to be very positive, but the effect fades
over time, and this might be a thing where some
applications of psychedelics and the clinical setting, maybe something that
is a like a type of arapy that you would
repeat at intervals over time, the same way that you
(20:03):
would repeatedly visit a therapist for psychotherapy sessions, right or
certainly the same way that in a lot of these
traditional science societies one would, um would continually go to
the shaman or would partake of psychedelic substance as a
part of a regularly occurring religious observance. Another study on
depression was Osorio at all Infen. They tested ayahuasca for
(20:28):
recurrent major depressive disorder UH. This, like some of the others,
was open labels so not placebo controlled as test group
of six so like many of these small groups, but
found significant reductions in reports of depressive symptoms after one,
seven and twenty one days. Um and and Michael Pollen
has an interesting section in his book How to Change
(20:49):
Your Mind about Treating Depression with Psychedelics, in which he
talks to the psychologist Rosalind Watts, who she she so
she talks about these master themes discovered in studies about
what's going on with depression. And I just wanted to
read a couple of sections from Pollen's book that I
thought were interesting concerning these these master themes. Quote the
(21:11):
first was that volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a
state of disconnection, whether from other people, from their earlier selves,
their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values,
or nature. Several referred to living in a mental prison,
others to being stuck in endless circles of rumination they
(21:33):
likened to mental gridlock. I was reminded of Carhart Harris's
hypothesis that depression might be a result of an overactive
default mode network, the site in the brain where rumination
appears to take place. And so, of course you know
what might be going on there is that we we've
talked about psychedelics as having at least metaphorically being these
(21:53):
boundary dissolvers that they, you know, seem a kind of
ultimate remedy for symptoms related to disconnection. That they encourage
the sensation of being connected to other and all things,
and to other people and to the environment and all
these things that people feel disconnected or cut off from. UH.
(22:13):
And then going to the second master theme that Rosalind
Watts explains to Pollen. Quote the second master theme was
a new access to difficult emotions, emotions that depression often
blunts or closes down completely. What hypothesizes that the depressed
patient's incessant rumination constricts his or her emotional repertoire in
(22:35):
in other cases, the depressive keeps emotions at bay because
it's too painful to experience them. Uh So, like often
I think a lay person's understanding of depression might be,
uh like that you feel intense sadness, you know, like
this this really intense single emotion, which is not exactly
(22:57):
what depression seems to be. Like, I mean, I always
come back to, um, was it was it C. S.
Lewis that referred to depression as the black dog, like
this this kind of thing that would come and like
just weigh him down. Um, you know, I always come
back to those kind of descriptions. Do those feel more
accurate when when you're experiencing depression or when you're encountering
(23:18):
some of the depression it's not just like uncontrolled weeping,
you know it is it is more in line with
this disconnection we're talking about, this feeling of being trapped
within something or within yourself. In some ways, I think
it can be thought of as a sort of like
a hyperd motivated state, yea where it can just be
difficult to do anything or to feel anything. And I
(23:42):
guess hopefully, hopefully more people were aware of that. Now.
I feel like the messaging about what depression is is
is better today than it was like when when when
I was you know, a kid, or when I was
in high school. You know, yeah, I don't think we
had a good idea of it. I think you had
like occasional to be like a newsweek article about it,
but it wasn't really something that was particularly discussed in school.
(24:05):
As I recall, Yeah, that does seem like something that's
very important, like helping people understand what depression is, and
like being able to recognize the symptoms so that it
can be diagnosed, rather than you know, people just thinking
like what's wrong with me? Now. Come back to a
couple of other areas mentioned in this meta analysis of
(24:27):
of recent research on the clinical use of psychedelics. One
is studying obsessive compulsive disorder, so moreno at All in
sixteen did a double blind experiment with psilocybin to treat
obsessive compulsive disorder, and they found quote marked reductions on
the Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, which is a scoring
scale for for those symptoms for all participants during one
(24:50):
or more psilocybin sessions, and these effects lasted for at
least twenty four hours, though they're not sure how long
after that. Obviously, I think it would be less use
full in a clinical setting, for if it only treated
something while you were on the drug. Right, it's more
important to look at like these kinds of lasting changes
(25:10):
that come about from an experience, but we don't know
how long the changes might be operant on obsessive compulsive here. Uh.
And then another thing is tobacco dependence. I guess that
goes into similar category to alcohol dependence. But Johnson at
all in tested psilocybin paired with cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT,
and they found quote biologically verified smoking abstinence in eight
(25:32):
percent of volunteers at a six month follow up, as
assessed by exhaled breath, carbon monoxide and you'urine cottoning levels.
I'm not sure what cotening is. It's probably some downstream
thing of nicotine. But the authors here also listed a
couple more studies showing that both psilocybin and LSD assisted
psychotherapy were linked with decreased anxiety and depression symptoms and
(25:53):
people who were facing life threatening illnesses and cancer. But
we we should, I think, acknowledge, as we've mentioned several times,
that we're still in the early stages of the psychedelic
research renaissance because a lot of these studies have small samples.
A lot of them are small samples, a lot of
them are like open labels, so they're not placebo controlled,
people know what they're getting, uh, and you know, they're
(26:16):
not necessarily randomized controlled and all that. So I think
the future looks bright. But as you were saying a
little while ago, to invoke this much hated scientific cliche,
much much more research is needed, and specifically it's more
rigorous and larger, more statistically powerful research is needed. I
can only imagine too, that rescheduling these substances would also
(26:37):
help broaden some of these studies hugely. Yeah, I mean
it's you're talking about small study sizes, but with a
schedule one narcotic that has that has had, you know,
a lot of taboos associated with it, even for clinical
and research purposes. Yeah, exactly, And so to some up
I think where where we stand. I want to quote
from the discussion section of that that meta meta assis
(27:00):
by Garcia remu at all quote. The psychedelics including LSD, psilocybin,
mescal and d m T, and the d MT containing
admixture ayahuasca, have shown promise in treating a range of
psychological disorders for which currently available treatments are often insufficient,
such as mood, substance use, and anxiety disorders. These studies
(27:21):
have mostly been conducted in small, relatively homogeneous samples, limiting
the generalizability of their findings. However, safety and feasibility of
psychedelic facilitated treatment models have been established by these initial studies,
paving the way for further investigation in larger, more diverse
samples using randomized controlled designs. So essentially, these small studies
(27:43):
up front have been very important in establishing protocols, UH
demonstrating legitimacy and safety of these methods of research. And
we're sort of on the way now to look and
see what the results are once we try this with
lots more people, in more settings and and more rigorous methods. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to take another break, and
(28:04):
when we come back. We're gonna get more into the
you know, some of the possible future scenarios for psychedelic use,
and we're gonna we're gonna kind of take this in
both the grand direction in a very mundane direction. We're
gonna look at uh, psychedelics as a as a radio
for speaking to God, and also we're gonna look at
(28:25):
micro dosing. Okay, thank you, Alright, we're back. So we've
talked a little bit about about the religious experience and
psychedelics already. Sure, the March Chapel experiments of nine two
with psilocybin on on seminary students and in a good
(28:46):
Friday service, and then the follow up study, the two
thousand and six study by Griffith's at All It looked
at mystical or religious experiences people had on psilocybin and
found that people did view these as profound, significant experiences
and that they were positive. Yeah, and we see all
these different examples of of this kind of thinking, this
kind of interpretation of of psychedelic experiences that people have had.
(29:10):
You know, Terence McKenna, who we talked about in some
of the earlier episodes, certainly he got into some of
these more elaborate ideas of saying, like the machine elves,
but I mean in food of the Gods. He discusses this,
this idea of that the possibility of the holy other,
and we see that in other people's writings as well.
Huxley wrote of the mind at large. Uh. And then
(29:32):
we even have these various uh, you know, other religious
encounters to consider things that are maybe seemingly like a
little less grandiose in terms of just you know, how
the writers using them. Uh. One of these examples being
a cancer patient Dina Baser, who describes feeling quote bathed
(29:53):
in God's love during her experience as part of a
two thousand, ten n y U cancer anxiety study. By
the way, she also made an appearance of that World
Science Festival talk she was in the audience. This is
a really interesting point because actually Paullen interviews Beser for
his book and How to Change Your Mind and mentions
this experience interestingly, at least to me. He points out
(30:15):
that despite her belief that she was bathed in God's love,
that's a quote. Bezer does not believe that God exists,
so to quote from pollen quote during the climax of
a journey that extinguished her fear of death. Beser described
being bathed in God's love, and yet she emerged with
her atheism intact, and he wonders how it's possible like
(30:36):
to hold these contradictory ideas at the same time. Eventually,
he writes, quote, not only was the flood of love
she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any
individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous a
form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of
such a gift? God might be the only word in
(30:58):
the language big enough. And I think that's really interesting.
It's like we don't have the language to describe these
experiences without keying on other signs pointing to the unsayable
and the indescribable, and religious words are the words that
seem to fit that best and fall most within reach,
even if we don't. I mean, some people do mean
(31:19):
them exactly in their traditional sense, but a lot of
people on psychedelics use these words without meaning them in
their traditional sense, but still because they're the only word
they can find to suggest what they felt. Yeah, now,
and now they had just to critique Paul and a
little bit. I mean, I would argue that, uh, most
(31:40):
of us have uh contradictory ideas in our head. You know,
I think there are a lot of us that both
believe and don't believe in a god or some sort
of spiritual model. So we probably have multiple spiritual models
regarding some you know, vague aspect of the metaphysical realm
floating around our head right alongside like a a very
(32:01):
like stern scientific interpretation as well. But but that's that's
kind of beside the point. But uh, but but I
do think that I do think his interpretation is really
interesting here, and I think that the baser is a
story is his interesting. You know, we we often encounter
this idea of glimpsing God, or if not a God
(32:23):
or a deity or a goddess or something, glimpsing what
is often referred to as the ultimate reality um which
which of course this gets into. You know, this is
not new to the psychedelic realm. Like this is something
as a as a very old consideration in Hinduism as well,
the idea of like seeing through the veil of illusion
and like seeing the world as it really is, and
(32:46):
so one doesn't have to take a psychedelic in order
to have this experience, but it certainly seems to be
one of the pathways to to to having it. UH
So we there's actually another Roland Griffith's study that comes
out comes up and this is what this one is
actually is from this year from nineteen. This is from JOHNS.
Hopkins and it was published in PLS one, and it
(33:08):
looked at data from four thousand, two hundred and eighty
five people worldwide who responded to online advertisements to complete
one of two fifty minute online surveys about God encounter experiences.
And it particularly asked about encounters with the Ultimate Reality
or God or divine beings you know, like angels, etcetera,
(33:30):
that sort of thing of those. Uh. Four thousand, two
hundred eighty five individuals. One thousand, one hundred and eighty
four attributed their experiences to psilocybin um. One thousand, two
hundred fifty one said they took LSD, four hundred thirty
five UH said they took ayahuasca, six hundred and six
said they took D m T. In total, three thousand,
(33:51):
four hundred seventy six individuals responded to the psychedelic survey
uh part of the study, and then eight hundred nine
responded to the non drugs say, uh, it's you know,
zeroing in on people who are uh claiming to have
had some sort of divine experience encounter without the aid
of a of a psychedelic But it is interesting to
(34:12):
look at the numbers the way they fall out here
because in both studies, seventy of people said it was
among the most meaningful events of their lives, which I
guess shouldn't be that surprising. If you encounter something that
you perceive as being the ultimate reality or a God
or an angel or what have you, like, it better
be memorable, right, Yeah, I met God, but it wasn't
(34:32):
a big deal. Yeah, you don't want to be like,
oh yeah I met God. I don't know why that
didn't come up before. Oh yeah I saw an angel? Yeah, um,
and then frank, god was kind of boring. But then
they're also these differing factors to like. So seventy percent
said that there was communication involved, So not only do
they behold the divine or behold the objective reality, they
(34:55):
also had some sort of communication with it. Seventy five
reported there being this this air of benevolence to it,
reported a sense of intelligence, uh, se reported sacredness, and
seventy described an eternal nature to it. So it was
you know that this is something that has always been
(35:16):
and always will be. Now, obviously these are just these
are subjectively applied labels. It's the sense to which people
thought these words applied to their experience. But we still
learned something from asking people these kind of questions. Yeah, uh,
to keep going here. Seventy reported a decreased fear of
death in the psychedelic group, fifty seven percent in the
(35:37):
non drug group. Interesting, in both groups, fifteen percent said
that it was the most psychologically challenging experience of their life.
Of the psychedelic group described it as the ultimate reality,
fifty nine percent of the non drug group described an
encounter with a god or an angelic beings. So I
think that's interesting. I'll come back to that. The people
(35:59):
that had asy cadelic experience, they tended to they were
more likely to describe it as just a like they
saw through the veil, They saw the universe or the
world as it really is, whereas the non drug group
were more inclined to encounter a being. Now, Griffith says
that there's a lot more to explore here. You know,
(36:20):
he's he's not drawing any ultimate conclusions from any of this, uh,
but you know, some of the things to tease out
might be, like, you know, what factors may pre predispose
one to have these interpretations like um, Like I wonder,
for example, if the tendency UH to interpret it as
the ultimate reality over a God, goddess, angel encounter in
(36:43):
the psychedelic experience has more to do with the religious
ideals of the individual, you know, like here's somebody that
they took LST or took psilocybin, so maybe they weren't
like super religious, or it has something to do maybe
with the you know, the dissolution of boundaries uh in
the you know, the pressing down of the ego, the
the the turning off of the default mode network for
(37:05):
a little bit. So maybe you're you're less inclined for
this experience to be boiled into this egoic entity and
you're more likely to have this broader, dissolved experience. But
then at the same time, I mean, you know, McKenna
and others have talked about encountering and other while you know,
having a you know, a rather intense trip. So and
(37:27):
I guess it basically comes down to their multiple factors
involved here, and it will be interesting to see how
how future studies might tease that out and determine like,
you know what, what is impacting the scenario versus the
other and ultimately like you know what is the you know,
how each can be beneficial, the the psychedelic experience or
the like purely non drug religious experience. Well, when you
(37:49):
encounter some kind of reality beyond that with which you
were familiar. Yeah, what what tends to be correlated with
people believing that there is an entity there, like a
person or a mind or something versus just some kind
of plane of existence or or you know, state of
truth or I mean you sound kind of silly when
(38:10):
you start trying to put it into words yet again, right,
but I mean it is worth pointing out that, um,
you know, you're still looking at you know, seventy in
both studies saying that there was communication. So it's it's
like something is communicating with that there's some sort of communication,
but maybe it's you know, it's it's less directed, it's
less tied to an individual. H But anyway, it was,
(38:33):
you know, an interesting study to look at. And again
this was this is Roland Griffiths who we talked about earlier,
and that that earlier religious study going from two thousand six. Yes,
so that's one sort of grandiose way of looking at
the future of psychedelics and psychedelic research, right, figuring out
how we interpret the divine and how they could even
be as psychedelics can be used as part of some
(38:55):
sort of religious experience, like not only uh, you know,
the traditional religious experiences, maybe some sort of new religious experience. Well, yeah,
I'm curious to see how the idea of psychedelically prompted
religious experience squares with traditional beliefs in dogmas, because there
are very different attitudes that people can come at this with.
(39:16):
I mean some people, I think some people look at
the psychedelic experience and say, oh, this proof of God,
you know, because all these people take these compounds, have
experiences of meeting another higher power or something like that.
It's got you know, the consistency of these reports indicates
there's got to be a real being up there that
that people are encountering. And then people come at it
(39:36):
from completely the opposite way and say Look, if you know,
if people are taking drugs that are causing them to
have these experiences, that would tend to show that the
experience is something going on in the brain and not
like an actual spiritual being or entity up there that
that's doing something right, Like why would that entity only
be communicating with people are primarily communicating with people who
(39:59):
have taking a certain compound into their brains. And it's
interesting that this exact same reality causes completely opposite reactions. Yeah, yeah,
that to one person it is uh, you know, faith
in God restored, and the other it may be a
sign that there was nothing there to begin with. So yeah,
(40:20):
we'll be interesting to see how I see what kind
of light future research sheds on this issue. Well, though,
I also want to make clear that, at least from
my perspective, I mean, I don't think that even if
you don't think that there are actual other entities out
there that people are encountering on these drugs, that doesn't
mean that the mystical experience is not fascinating and useful
(40:41):
and revealing. If we are encountering other entities, even if
they're not like ghosts or some kind of being that acts,
you know, outside of our control, we are encountering something
inside our mind that is a latent potential there. Yeah,
and if you're communicating with that, even if you're just
communicating with yourself, well, uh there, there could be something
of value there. Um. So so that's kind of the
(41:05):
grandiose view into the future, you know, communicating with with God,
envisioning God and communicating with the self, etcetera. On the
other end of the spectrum, uh, Silicon Valley bros. Micro dosing.
So I don't want to be too judgmental, but yeah,
I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, So I mean obviously,
like the intended um goal with micro dosing is not
(41:29):
to uh justify the ways of God's to man, but
to rather like be a little better your job, right,
creative in your job. So we touched on this in
the last episode of Well I Guess the uh the
episode prior to the last episode, uh and uh, and
I wondered if any research had looked at whether Silicon
Valley types would actually benefit from micro dosing to enhance
(41:51):
creativity or novel thinking. Micro dosing, by the way, the
idea is generally there's no like, you know, definite definition,
but generally it's taking one tenth of a tripping dose
of a psychedelic, So you're not having a you know,
perceptually altered experience or not in any significant way. It's
more just kind of like thinking, this kind of loosens
(42:12):
the mind a little bit, right, Yeah, just kind of
like not shaking the snow globe of the brain all
the way up, but just kind of like giving it
a little shuffle and then like doing an eight hour
work day. So anecdotal evidence would indicate that it elevates
mood and mental acuity. But then ultimately, what do we
have in terms of studies, Well, we don't have much,
but there was there there was actually a study that
(42:34):
came out this year that looked into this a bit um,
looking at micro dosing in rats. It was a University
of California Davis study headed up by Dr David Olsen,
and they micro dosed rats with d m T. So
they gave them one tenth of the estimated hallucinogenic dose
in rats. So that's one milligram per kilogram of body
(42:55):
weight every third day for two months. And this is
you know, again more or less andreed one tenth of
a tripping dose. They treated them for two weeks and
then began studying mood, anxiety, and cognitive function over a
two day period. And these were the basic results. An
improved ability to overcome fear UH, antidepressant effects associated with
reduced immobility, and no obvious impairments or improvements in cognitive
(43:19):
function or social ability. Then, but there were also some
potential downsides. They observed significantly increased body weight in male
rats and neuronal atrophy and female rats. This despite the
fact that a previous study from Olson and company had
shown that a single high dose of d MT and
I should a single high dose of d MT showed
increased your own old growth. So again, this is one
(43:43):
of those studies that is not is just the beginning
of a story rather than anything like an end to it.
More study is needed, but it ultimately shows that there
may be some quantitative benefits to micro dosing, but there
also may be some key risks, and Olsen says that
that likely dose frequency and length of time are going
to be key here to whether we're talking about a
(44:04):
therapeutic dose or a potentially harmful effect. Yeah, and of course,
as always, you know, rats are not humans and our
brains are working very differently. But yeah, this is an
interesting indication of what might be going on. I'm especially
interested in in the idea of overcoming fear and to
what extent if that's an analogy for what's going on
with micro dosing and human brains. Uh. If I don't
(44:28):
know that, it could be that there's some kind of
like positive disinhibition quality. I mean, this is something I think, Uh,
people have thought about alcohol before. You know that that, like,
sometimes people drink alcohol at parties because it makes them
more sociable. You know, you feel disinhibited. A lot of
the kind of like fear that would keep you inside
(44:49):
your shell goes away. But then of course there are
tons of negative effects that come with alcohol. You know
that that also, like it might make you less inhibited
and and better at us socializing with people you don't
know very well, but also makes you stupid erth just
like you're not at your peak in every possible way.
And I would be interested to see if there are
(45:10):
ways in which small doses of psychedelics could be relevantly
disinhibiting without having some of the negative effects that come
with other disinhibitory drugs like alcohol. Now, obviously there's a
great deal to focus on in this episode about you know,
clinical research and and it is essential, but you know,
I don't think it's our only means of looking at psychedelics. UM.
(45:31):
Michael Pollen and others. They point out that the psilocybin
is not marijuana, and we can't really look to a
you know, one to one comparison on how decriminalization or
legalization will or even should proceed in regard to psilocybin,
for example. But but another, you know, I think important
note here is that even if we're not seeing, even
(45:52):
if we were not seeing all these potential benefits for therapy, UM,
are there enough negatives in place to rationalize the continue
you to illegal status of psychedelic substances. I mean, I
would think about it more from the other direction. I'm like, well,
are those negative effects enough that it should be illegal
and punished by police officers and law enforcement community and
the justice system for people to just have some? I
(46:16):
don't know. I mean it seems to me more like
the reasoning should be that there should be a really
good reason to make things illegal, not there should be
a good reason to make them not illegal. Yeah, And
I mean especially I mean we were talking about plants
too and fun guy, and you know, to what extent
should we outlaw fungus um, you know, or multiple species
of fungus you know, and especially if we're we're talking
(46:37):
about like all the other things that happened when you
outlaw substance. You you know, you you take these and
you these these things and you leave their traffic, their trade,
and their culture to fringe, underground and criminal elements. Um.
You know, because one of the issues with a lot
of illicit drugs is that by making them illicit, we
limit our ability to regulate them, to effectively educate people
(46:58):
about them, and to help people when they encounter problems,
be that problem a challenging trip or something like um,
you know, uh, addiction to a substance like cocaine. I
was actually looking at a study recently taught looking at
legalization of marijuana uh and in UH in the areas
they were looking at how it it lessened cases of
(47:20):
underage use just because since it was available legally but
it was regulated, um, there were fewer people below the
appropriate age acquiring the substance. That's interesting, So uh, you
know that easily we could do you could do a
whole episode, multiple episodes, just talking about all these issues
and drug legalization and regulation, what should be what should
(47:42):
be illegal, and what shouldn't be illegal, not only in
terms of substances, but pretty much anything within a given society. Um.
But um, I mean, hopefully in these episodes we've given
everybody some food, some food for thought, uh God, some
food of the gods for thought on that topic. Uh
and in gen role, hopefully you know, we've provided everyone
of a bit more information about the history, nature, and
(48:04):
reality of psychedelics so that you can make up your
own minds about it, or even change your mind if
you so wish. All right, So there you have it, psychedelics. Uh.
It only took us five episodes, but here we are,
and I feel I feel frustrated because we still like,
there's so much stuff we wanted to get to that
we never did. I just remembered we were going to
(48:24):
come back to the stuff about adult personality change the
psychedelics that. Uh, maybe we can explore that in a
future episode. Absolutely. Yeah, this is one of those rich
topics where you you know, the more you look into it,
the more stuff you bring up, the more you realize
you're missing out. And not even exploring. So if we
didn't talk about your favorite sub topic or issue in psychedelics, sorry,
(48:45):
we we just didn't get to it right. So we
would obviously love to hear from anybody. So if there's
there's a particular part of this five part journey that
you would love to hear a future episode on, you
want a deeper dive, you want to come back to it,
let us know about that. Uh. If you have general
thoughts right into us. Also, if you have you know,
particulars about your own experiences with any of these substances
(49:07):
or even with just uh, you know, hallucinatory experiences that
are not tied to psychedelic use, uh, feel free to
share those with us. And if you want to remain
anonymous on a future listener mail episode, you can make
a note of that as well, and we will definitely
honor that. Uh. In the meantime, heading over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's
where we'll find all the episodes of the show. If
(49:29):
you want to support our little show here, the best
thing you can do is to rate and review us
wherever you have the power to do so, and make
sure that you have subscribed huge thanks as always to
our excellent audio producer, Maya Cole. If you would like
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
(50:01):
to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radio's
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