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