Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. So
Speaker 1: today I'm really excited at Catherine MacLean on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor McLean is a research scientist, teacher, and meditator in
Speaker 1: our academic research at UC Davis and John Hopkins University.
Speaker 1: She studied how psychedelics and mindfulness meditation can promote beneficial,
Speaker 1: long lasting changes and personality well being and brain function.
Speaker 1: In the fall of twenty fifteen, she co founded and
Speaker 1: began directing the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program in
Speaker 1: New York, where she has facilitated monthly integration groups for
Speaker 1: psychedelic users and training workshops for both clinicians and the public.
Speaker 1: She currently lives on an organic farm and is preparing
Speaker 1: to be a study therapist on the upcoming Phase three
Speaker 1: trial MDMA for post traumatic stress disorder. Hey, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for chatting with me today, Catherine. Yeah, you're welcome.
Speaker 1: As we were saying, this is my last hurrah before
Speaker 1: my second child arrives on planet Earth, so it's a
Speaker 1: lovely way to end a nice period of work. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much. We're so honored that you are
Speaker 1: appearing on the podcast. And you know, I haven't talked
Speaker 1: to you in four years, and I feel like we've
Speaker 1: both grown tremendously. I'd love to hear about your growth.
Speaker 1: I've definitely grown. When you met me in twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: that was like one of my first talks I ever
Speaker 1: gave in public, and I was so shy and nervous
Speaker 1: and I was literally shocked at the positive reception of it.
Speaker 1: And I gave it, and I think it was the
Speaker 1: right venue, right time, right place. I gave a talk
Speaker 1: on openness to experience at the Bioethics Forum, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know there was this whole world of people as
Speaker 1: the first time I like stepped outside and I gave
Speaker 1: this public talk, and you were so incredibly warm and welcoming,
Speaker 1: so many like Richie Davidson was well, there's so many
Speaker 1: people there met too Ricard et cetera, Jim Fatoman, they'd
Speaker 1: embraced this research, and then I realized, wow, there is
Speaker 1: this world of researchers who actually care about this as well.
Speaker 1: So anyway, thank you first of all for being so
Speaker 1: encouraging so early in my career. Yeah, it's kind of
Speaker 1: amazing to think about how much everything has changed just
Speaker 1: in that four years. Absolutely, yeah, because you know, my
Speaker 1: openness finding with psilocybin was just kind of hanging out
Speaker 1: there as a loan, I don't know, like a lone
Speaker 1: star was just like here it is. You know, no
Speaker 1: one's ever thought to see if psychedelics change personality, even
Speaker 1: though they obviously do. And then since then it's like
Speaker 1: all their researchers have said, oh, maybe we should keep
Speaker 1: looking to see if this was just a one off
Speaker 1: finding or if it's something that's reliable. And I would say,
Speaker 1: I don't know about Matchu Ricard, he was pretty anti psychedelics,
Speaker 1: but everyone else was probably warm and open because we've
Speaker 1: taken drugs. I was wondering about that. I met. I
Speaker 1: met some people that that conference that were looking at me,
Speaker 1: and I was looking in their eyes and I was like,
Speaker 1: are you tripping right, now. I mean, to this day,
Speaker 1: that remains one of the not most warm and welcoming
Speaker 1: audiences ever. And it was good because it was one
Speaker 1: of my first talks to it and I was so anxious, right,
Speaker 1: and to realize that people care about these topics. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: It was so exciting and I discovered your work. Wow,
Speaker 1: it opened my mind as well. Right, So you from
Speaker 1: two thousand and shall we say ten to fourteen? Is
Speaker 1: that fair? You ve fall? I arrived to the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand and nine, okay, And you know, the
Speaker 1: first few months in a postdoc you're just kind of
Speaker 1: getting your bearings. And for me, it was a move
Speaker 1: from California studying meditation to a drug abuse research center
Speaker 1: at Johns Hopkins, like the most conservative medical institution in
Speaker 1: the United States. So it took me a few months
Speaker 1: to figure out what planet I had landed on. But
Speaker 1: by twenty ten I was actually doing something that felt productive.
Speaker 1: Let's just say that, okay, and so fairenop and then
Speaker 1: and preparing this interview, I was trying to thinking like,
Speaker 1: what are some sort of moments and then we'll work
Speaker 1: our way up to present day. But I want you
Speaker 1: to take me back if you don't mind taking me
Speaker 1: back to April fifteenth, twenty twelve, when you died. What
Speaker 1: do you mind? Can do you mind really that in
Speaker 1: your head right now? Is that? Would that be too
Speaker 1: Is it too much? Funny? The part that's missing is
Speaker 1: the major current of anxiety that was running through my life,
Speaker 1: because that's part of what died in that whole process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I have to speak about the fear that I
Speaker 1: felt in a kind of distant way. I can tap
Speaker 1: into it in little bits and pieces, but it used
Speaker 1: to be kind of always there in the background. And
Speaker 1: before that day, I just thought that that's how how
Speaker 1: I was. I was an anxious person. There are lots
Speaker 1: of anxious people. Certain things would make it temporarily go away.
Speaker 1: That's why I meditated, That's why I dabbled in other
Speaker 1: you know, psychede like extracurricular activities. That's why I was
Speaker 1: such a workaholic. And then I met this teacher and
Speaker 1: he said something to me. On this walking path in
Speaker 1: the middle of a conference, I visited a waterfall and
Speaker 1: I sat down and I focused on my breath, and
Speaker 1: the question popped up in my mind, where am I?
Speaker 1: And as soon as I asked, where am I. Everything
Speaker 1: just dissolved into this vortex of energy. And it was
Speaker 1: terrifying because I felt like I was about to get
Speaker 1: sucked into this vortex of energy that didn't care about
Speaker 1: humans or life on Earth or whether I was going
Speaker 1: to come back. But when I came back into my body,
Speaker 1: everything was shining and brilliant, and I felt a lot
Speaker 1: of gratitude for having a body and being alive, and
Speaker 1: I saw the Earth as just this paradise of biological life.
Speaker 1: So it turns out that that was just the preliminary
Speaker 1: to death. You know, that was just like a little taste.
Speaker 1: And then a couple days later, I had given this
Speaker 1: big talk for me. It was kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: my first public talk in this arena of talking about psilocybin.
Speaker 1: And a couple days later, as soon as I stepped
Speaker 1: on the airplane to go home, that's when I knew
Speaker 1: I was about to die. Like my foot hit the
Speaker 1: you know, the little like transition where you're going down
Speaker 1: the little runway thing and then you get on the airplane.
Speaker 1: As soon as my foot went past that threshold, I
Speaker 1: this thing went through me. I was like, Oh, the
Speaker 1: plane's going to crash. I'm about to die. I knew it.
Speaker 1: I knew for sure that if I stayed on the plane,
Speaker 1: I was going to die. And in that moment getting
Speaker 1: to my seat, I started panicking. I was like sweating.
Speaker 1: I was going to come up with some excuse and
Speaker 1: just like leave, you know, get off the airplane and something.
Speaker 1: Maybe because of the experience I'd had a few days before.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure what kept me on the plane.
Speaker 1: And it was a total surrender to the moment that
Speaker 1: I had no control over, and I just meditated on
Speaker 1: my breath as if each breath was the last breath,
Speaker 1: and the moment of death was actually kind of anticlimactic.
Speaker 1: I thought something would happen, and it said nothing happened.
Speaker 1: It was just like a switch flipped, and I remember
Speaker 1: opening my eyes and looking out the window and being like, oh,
Speaker 1: that was it. And so ever since that moment, I mean,
Speaker 1: there were several months of adjusting to the reality of
Speaker 1: having died but still being alive. And then once that
Speaker 1: all settled down, it was like a big chunk of
Speaker 1: that fear that I had been living with was gone,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the other parts of me were
Speaker 1: still around. The best sits, hopefully the best met, and
Speaker 1: then you know, I've been invited to surrender at different
Speaker 1: points since then. It hasn't ever been so dramatic. But
Speaker 1: each time I surrender a little bit more and more
Speaker 1: that anxiety goes away. I haven't gotten rid of all
Speaker 1: of it. I'd like to say I have, but you're
Speaker 1: still human. I'm still human. The aliens haven't come with
Speaker 1: their mothership to take me off into some distant paradise yet.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's waiting to know that your
Speaker 1: body snatched, the body snatchers didn't take you in that moment.
Speaker 1: How do you know that for sure? Yeah? You know.
Speaker 1: Someone asked me that fairly recently. I was back in December,
Speaker 1: or someone I met in Boulder, Colorado, said, you know,
Speaker 1: I was curious about that death experience, and so I
Speaker 1: recounted it again. He's like, how do you know you're
Speaker 1: not dead? I was like, I don't. I guess the
Speaker 1: virtual reality simulation could still be running quite effectively. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure. So the thing that I found
Speaker 1: interesting about that experience that you described in your wonderful
Speaker 1: TEDx talk, which I wish more people watched, I was
Speaker 1: shocked that it wasn't like five billion, you know, listens
Speaker 1: or watches, So hopefully this psychotic podcast can get it
Speaker 1: out there to brought our audience. But I was saying
Speaker 1: I found particularly interesting the whata you described is as
Speaker 1: you felt unreal afterwards for a while, which really contrasts
Speaker 1: with the noetic feeling that William James talked about, as
Speaker 1: these experiences tend to make you feel realer than real.
Speaker 1: And David Yiden did this wonderful study finding that people
Speaker 1: after mystic experiences tend to report that the world feels
Speaker 1: realer than real. So how do you reconcile that with
Speaker 1: how you just the way you felt right afterwards. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm curious what. So a lot of my reading and
Speaker 1: training up until that point was through Buddhist mental training,
Speaker 1: and in particular the Tibetan kind of book of Living
Speaker 1: and Dying, which talks about these bardoes that people can
Speaker 1: end up in after they die. And so I wonder,
Speaker 1: you know, for the Tibetans, what they talk about is
Speaker 1: that there is a period of unreality that happens after
Speaker 1: death where the soul is temporarily very confused. And the
Speaker 1: whole point of meditating and training your mind while you're
Speaker 1: alive is so that at the moment of the death,
Speaker 1: you're not confused and you're able to transition either to
Speaker 1: Nirvana if you're really lucky, or choose a next life
Speaker 1: so that it's not just something happening to you. And
Speaker 1: typically what they say is that when people die, they
Speaker 1: often just black out. They black out, they have no
Speaker 1: memory of the transition, and then they're born, and then
Speaker 1: all of the suffering that they've always had in their
Speaker 1: whole history, all the different lives, the suffering just can use.
Speaker 1: And it's pretty pathetic because there's no way out. But
Speaker 1: if you can be aware of the transition and you
Speaker 1: don't just black out, you have some memory like, oh,
Speaker 1: I died, this is the Bardo. I can't be distracted.
Speaker 1: I have to pay attention. Then you have some choice
Speaker 1: over the next life that you create. And perhaps it's
Speaker 1: because I was primed in that type of philosophy or
Speaker 1: that type of worldview, that I felt like I was
Speaker 1: in a bardo, and that bardo was full of both
Speaker 1: fearful and enticing distractions, and I felt like, oh, I
Speaker 1: haven't done enough training for this, Like I've done just
Speaker 1: enough that I didn't black out, right, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't completely lose consciousness. That's good, huh, I guess so.
Speaker 1: But at the time I was like, can't I just
Speaker 1: have lost consciousness and started over again as a baby? Like?
Speaker 1: Why am I aware of this craziness that I'm in
Speaker 1: right now? So I do think that that priming had
Speaker 1: a lot to do with it. Just wanted to take
Speaker 1: this moment to thank you all for your support of
Speaker 1: the podcast over the years. It's been a real privilege
Speaker 1: to do this podcast for you all for over the
Speaker 1: past three and a half years. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: further support the podcast, I wanted to let you know
Speaker 1: a few things you could do to help make this
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Speaker 1: on iTunes. This would help make the show more prominent
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Speaker 1: so far, we've been able to increase the audio quality substantially,
Speaker 1: So your donations really do go to helping to make
Speaker 1: the show a better listening experience. Thanks again if your
Speaker 1: incredible support of the show over the years. You know,
Speaker 1: I do this show for you all because I truly
Speaker 1: love sharing my enthusiasm and love of the mind, brain
Speaker 1: in creativity. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I think that you raise a really interesting point about
Speaker 1: the necessity to help people process the experience and also
Speaker 1: integrate it into who they are, because you know, yes,
Speaker 1: a part of you dined, but you're still Catherine Clean,
Speaker 1: Like you're still in the same body, and your brain
Speaker 1: didn't fundamentally reorganize. Maybe it did, but connectivity or the
Speaker 1: brain can't reorganize like a second. Yeah, I also think
Speaker 1: the thing worth pointing out too is that, and I've
Speaker 1: seen this in people who have mystical experiences after psychedelics,
Speaker 1: it's harder for people who are skeptical or like trained
Speaker 1: in science or atheists to integrate a mystical experience. And
Speaker 1: I think for me that was my primary training as well,
Speaker 1: Like I dabbled in meditation and psychedelics, but I was
Speaker 1: primarily a scientist who believed that everything could be known,
Speaker 1: and like, if you die, you physically are dead. You
Speaker 1: don't get to keep walking around. And so I think
Speaker 1: there were two parts of my mind that were battling,
Speaker 1: you know, the part that knew I had died and
Speaker 1: the part that was like, no one else really believes this.
Speaker 1: My scientific colleagues are like, so what, you just like
Speaker 1: took a drug when you were out in Arizona. I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: it was sober. This thing happened on an airplane and
Speaker 1: they're like what and like so there was a lot
Speaker 1: of that kind of doubt and like you're crazy thing
Speaker 1: that I had to kind of reconcile. You're like Mully
Speaker 1: on the one hand, and what was it X files?
Speaker 1: Who are the two characters that represent that? Okay, well
Speaker 1: I'm trying to reconcile what you experienced with, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: the Mystical Experiences questionnaire that you have, for instance, had
Speaker 1: one of the facets is positive emotions, Right, So it
Speaker 1: seems like once you surrendered fully and accepted it and
Speaker 1: kind of got shed your scientific baggage, so to speak,
Speaker 1: then the world did things snapped into like what you do,
Speaker 1: tend to find and most people when they have these experiences,
Speaker 1: right like it was, it was ultimately a very positive experience. Right.
Speaker 1: I want to make that quick. It just took about
Speaker 1: seven months. Okay, you know I was living in Baltimore,
Speaker 1: I was working at Johns Hopkins. It could have been
Speaker 1: easier if I just did a full rhmdass and just said, sorry, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm changing my name. I'm going to live in India.
Speaker 1: I don't care before right, No, because think about it,
Speaker 1: that's what he did when he had his mystical awakening.
Speaker 1: He just didn't go back to that life. He just
Speaker 1: he literally died. He changed his name. So it could
Speaker 1: just be also that it's like, well, you know, I
Speaker 1: went back, and I was haunting the life that I
Speaker 1: was going to leave anyway, So of course it was
Speaker 1: going to be terrible and uncomfortable until I finally left.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like they talk about in Tibetan mythology.
Speaker 1: It's like ghosts go back and haunt their home and
Speaker 1: their family and their their body, even until the body
Speaker 1: is all burned up, and until the family said hey,
Speaker 1: you're dead, you're not part of this anymore, like you
Speaker 1: have to go. And instead my Hopkins family was like,
Speaker 1: stay here, don't die, don't go away. So it's very confusing.
Speaker 1: You know, they weren't following the protocol. So interesting they
Speaker 1: weren't followed the protocol. Well, you can't blame them. No,
Speaker 1: you're a loveable person, Catherine. Don't blame yourself for that.
Speaker 1: So the title of your talk your tech cycles Open Wide,
Speaker 1: And say, awe, I thought that was so brilliant. First
Speaker 1: of all, I love that title. I know, is it
Speaker 1: appropriate to use a completely ridiculous pun for a TED talk? Oh?
Speaker 1: I think not only is it appropriated, it's very on
Speaker 1: brand of Ted. So since then, like there has been this,
Speaker 1: like you said, yeah, there's been a just a flurry
Speaker 1: of research, and particularly on potential interventions and ways of
Speaker 1: using psychedelics responsibly for a wide variety of human suffering
Speaker 1: forms of human suffering. Would you mind detailing some of
Speaker 1: that research? Sure? So when I was at Hopkins, we
Speaker 1: were still primarily studying healthy volunteers and the kind of
Speaker 1: the approach from a safety and IRB perspective was that
Speaker 1: these are still dangerous chemicals. They're illegal, they are abused
Speaker 1: by the public. We don't know if they're safe, so
Speaker 1: it's best to keep studying them in healthy people until
Speaker 1: we get a sense of whether the drug is beneficial
Speaker 1: or not. And then I think it became pretty obvious
Speaker 1: that not only was psilocybin relatively safe, but it was
Speaker 1: actually benefiting people. Even healthy people who didn't have much
Speaker 1: room to change were changing in a positive direction. And
Speaker 1: so kind of while I was at Hopkins, things started
Speaker 1: shifting toward a like a kind of a medicalization model.
Speaker 1: I think all the researchers saw the writing on the
Speaker 1: wall and they said, you know, if this chemical is
Speaker 1: ever going to be available to the public, it's probably
Speaker 1: not going to be legalized outright. It might be legalizing
Speaker 1: some kind of you know, narrow fashion, you know, for
Speaker 1: people with certain conditions, but it's never going to really
Speaker 1: be available to accept to a privileged elite unless we
Speaker 1: come up with a diagnosis and start testing whether it
Speaker 1: can help those people with that diagnosis. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of what is like strategy driven research, you know,
Speaker 1: And it was always hard for me to kind of
Speaker 1: manage those two sides. You know, there was the discovery
Speaker 1: oriented research what can psychedelics do to the body and brain?
Speaker 1: And then there was what can psychedelics do practically that
Speaker 1: would make the medical establishment change its view on whether
Speaker 1: this drug is a medicine. And so one of the
Speaker 1: ways that that was starting to be tested was in
Speaker 1: cancer patients. And so some of the old research was
Speaker 1: that both LSD and psilocybin decreased what's called existential distress.
Speaker 1: And it's the kind of fear, that real terror that
Speaker 1: I had on the airplane right before I died. And
Speaker 1: that kind of anxiety is not touched by benzodiazepines. It's
Speaker 1: not touched by psychotherapy. Well, Ervian Yolam's form of psychotherapy,
Speaker 1: it's touched by oh, interesting, existential psychotherapy. Is this right?
Speaker 1: Well yeah, but when people are in an ICU and
Speaker 1: they're getting you know, ten minutes with a psychiatrist once
Speaker 1: a day, it's not really going to know. You're totally
Speaker 1: write mean it's not meanstream, but I mean, if Yollm
Speaker 1: had his way, it would be meanstream. Right. So let's
Speaker 1: just say, if you haven't been training your whole life
Speaker 1: to prepare for existential distress, you're going to be completely
Speaker 1: sideswiped by it. And when you find yourself in a
Speaker 1: doctor's office or in ICU, you're going to have these
Speaker 1: experiences where you're lonely, you're terrified, you're in a lot
Speaker 1: of pain, and the only drug right now that helps
Speaker 1: with that is morphine and people just end up being
Speaker 1: sedated into death. And so that's amazing pain relief, it's amazing,
Speaker 1: you know, psychic pain relief, but it doesn't really do
Speaker 1: much for people who want to be present for those moments.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, the old research suggested that LSD
Speaker 1: could reduce physical and psychic pain for terminal patients or
Speaker 1: people in an ICU environment, and both Nyu and Hopkins
Speaker 1: decided to run kind of parallel cancer studies based on
Speaker 1: a preliminary study done at Harbor UCLA by Charlie Grobe
Speaker 1: and Alicia Danforth showing that psilocybin reduced this kind of
Speaker 1: anxiety in cancer patients. So kind of fast forward, Nyu
Speaker 1: and Hopkins both found amazing results for psilocybin when given
Speaker 1: to people who were facing cancer, and at the same time,
Speaker 1: they kind of learned along the way that the FDA said, well,
Speaker 1: existential distress isn't a diagnosis. You're never going to get
Speaker 1: a new drug prescribed for existential distress, which is hilarious
Speaker 1: because that's like the main thing that we're all dealing with.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, sorry, that's not a condition. It's not
Speaker 1: a health condition of what we recognize. And so then
Speaker 1: the kind of shift was towards depression. And now all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you hear everyone talking about psilocybin for
Speaker 1: major depression, and that's kind of like where I start
Speaker 1: to get a little bit skeptical. It seems like we've
Speaker 1: moved away from the inherently what does this drug seem
Speaker 1: to do for people, which is reduce kind of existential
Speaker 1: or kind of purpose life meaning spiritual distress or anxiety,
Speaker 1: to like, oh, maybe it just reduces depression and anxiety
Speaker 1: of any form. And so that's kind of one path
Speaker 1: that has been developing. The other path is MDMA for trauma,
Speaker 1: which is its own kind of category, but it's the
Speaker 1: MDMA is the ecstasy chemical basically, but in its pure form,
Speaker 1: and those kind of set of trials are way more
Speaker 1: directed and specific and extremely effective for severe PTSD, and
Speaker 1: so you know, MDMA is less a strategy for PTSD.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not a strategy for legalizing MDMA. It
Speaker 1: actually really works for people who've had untreatable PTSD. Amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's also amazing that it's at phase three. That's
Speaker 1: pretty high. Well, right, So, I mean, you know, when
Speaker 1: Rick Doblin founded this nonprofit called MAPS twenty five years ago,
Speaker 1: he founded it to make MDMA a prescribable medicine, but
Speaker 1: not because he just wanted MDMA to be legal, but
Speaker 1: because it had already been shown to be so effective
Speaker 1: for trauma and for couple's therapy and for various other
Speaker 1: forms of therapy. And so we're at phase three now
Speaker 1: because there's been twenty five years of kind of tedious, slow,
Speaker 1: careful progress. And if you contrast that to the phase three,
Speaker 1: the proposed phase three trials of psilocybin for depression, it
Speaker 1: feels very different to me. It feels like one is
Speaker 1: very calculated and careful and really targeting the thing that
Speaker 1: the drug is good for. And with psilocybin for depression,
Speaker 1: it feels like it's just let's see if this peg
Speaker 1: fits in this hole, Like we've got this problem of
Speaker 1: depression and we want to see if this drug solves
Speaker 1: that problem. And I'm a little bit skeptical of jumping
Speaker 1: too far ahead. Well, I appreciate that skepticism, especially for
Speaker 1: something so I'm potentially important. You want to get it,
Speaker 1: do it right, so that that's admirable. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: understand because I didn't know that, like ecstasy was considered
Speaker 1: a psychedelic, Is it in that class? Like does it
Speaker 1: actually it doesn't cause sort of hallucinations, does it. Well,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting question. Michael Pollin, you know, said right
Speaker 1: up front in his new book that everyone's raving about
Speaker 1: that MDMA just categorically is not a psychedelic. But if
Speaker 1: you ask different people and different researchers, you get different answers.
Speaker 1: And so for some individuals, MDMA is a classic psychedelic
Speaker 1: in terms of their subjective experience. It certainly has slightly
Speaker 1: different chemical actions in the brain, and it's not typically
Speaker 1: categorized along with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT mescaline. Those are
Speaker 1: kind of the classic psychedelics. But if you ask so
Speaker 1: there's this kind of underground chemist named Sasha Shulgin, and
Speaker 1: if you asked him, basically DM. Well, he had a
Speaker 1: DEA license to develop new chemicals in a lab that
Speaker 1: he was running in California, like a tiny like hermit,
Speaker 1: you know, right behind his house with his wife. And
Speaker 1: what he was actually doing with that lab is coming
Speaker 1: up with new psychedelics every day and trying them out.
Speaker 1: I see, I see. So he came up with thousands
Speaker 1: of variations on LSD, DMT. So he would take the
Speaker 1: kind of core chemical that was known and try to
Speaker 1: come up with something better. And at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, he didn't really come up with anything better.
Speaker 1: And MDMA he didn't discover it, but he came up
Speaker 1: with a very fast way of creating it. And he
Speaker 1: always said that MDMA was like this miracle chemical that
Speaker 1: nothing was better then. And I'm kind of like very
Speaker 1: much pair phrasing, because obviously he had appreciation for lots
Speaker 1: of chemicals, but there were very few chemicals that he
Speaker 1: tried and worked with and was like, we should be
Speaker 1: using this instead of the ones that are available, and
Speaker 1: MDMA was one of them. And so it seems to
Speaker 1: me from my own experience from reading the you know research,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's an eighty percent remission rate at one
Speaker 1: year in people who've never successfully been treated for PTSD.
Speaker 1: So they, you know, get a few doses of MDMA
Speaker 1: along with psychotherapy, and then a year later, eighty percent
Speaker 1: of them are still PTSD free, and so it's like,
Speaker 1: this is a disease that's untouchable. The average I think
Speaker 1: the average amount of suffering was something on the order
Speaker 1: of almost twenty years that people had severe PTSD without
Speaker 1: any relief and had tried all of these other you know,
Speaker 1: therapies and chemicals, and and yet this kind of unassuming
Speaker 1: serotonin drug MDMA that isn't fully psychedelic, so it's actually
Speaker 1: not as scary as some of the classic ones, and
Speaker 1: so scare I guess the feeling of too much love
Speaker 1: of right. So yeah, some people call it an intactogen,
Speaker 1: an empathogen, you know, giving rise to sensations of empathy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it can be you know, I kind of
Speaker 1: I considered it a psychedelic because I think at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, it opens people up in a
Speaker 1: similar way. How do psychopaths feel when they take MDMA.
Speaker 1: That is a great question. I don't know if anyone's
Speaker 1: done that study. Yet someone should really do that stuff,
Speaker 1: like go to a prison high level security prison, those
Speaker 1: who like committed the most terrific murders and give them
Speaker 1: MDMA and like measure their I don't know, various markers
Speaker 1: of empathy. I don't know how you do. What was
Speaker 1: that study they did with sociopaths. It was like an
Speaker 1: empathy brain imaging study, and it was like training people
Speaker 1: to be more able to identify emotions and facial expressions.
Speaker 1: And the sociopaths were like, now I know better how
Speaker 1: to mimic emotions. Yeah, yeah, I know. Like so that's
Speaker 1: cognitive empathy, not effective empathy. But we would want to
Speaker 1: see whether or not the MDMA really actually changes their
Speaker 1: mirror neuron structure, you know, I mean, I do know.
Speaker 1: You know, it's an interesting question. I think if if
Speaker 1: you had to pick one drug to give to someone
Speaker 1: who's an actual sociopath or psychopath or even just like
Speaker 1: a full blown narcissist, MDMA would probably be the safest
Speaker 1: one to start with, because you're not going to really
Speaker 1: trigger a ton of those ego defenses, you know that, Like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm starting to blend with everything around me, and that's scary,
Speaker 1: and so I'm just going to shut down absolutely. And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking because a lot of psychopaths are known in
Speaker 1: the literature to lack serotonin, like it's almost non existent
Speaker 1: in a way. So I mean, the results are obviously
Speaker 1: more complex than that, and any scientists listeners will give
Speaker 1: you a thousand caveats, but it's just interesting to think
Speaker 1: of what that can do, and also think about the brain.
Speaker 1: And I know that that's not a topic that you know,
Speaker 1: you're skeptical as well about some of the brain research,
Speaker 1: but I'm really interested. I'm just curio. I'm ravenously curious
Speaker 1: about what is the mechanism that explains this amazing effect.
Speaker 1: And it seems like all roads keep coming back to
Speaker 1: the default mode network. And I have been critical myself
Speaker 1: of how that research has been represented in that literature
Speaker 1: because I've spent my not my entire career, but a
Speaker 1: good chunk of my career studying the default mode network
Speaker 1: is a wonderfully positive thing. It related to creativity, and
Speaker 1: here I'm reading all these you know, Pollin's whole last
Speaker 1: chapters about how you know, like the hero of the
Speaker 1: story was like the quieting of the default network, and
Speaker 1: that kind of was like a stab to my hest
Speaker 1: because I feel like it's such a gross over simplification,
Speaker 1: a very very broad, complex brain network that has many
Speaker 1: components to it, and do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: And to kind of just say like, that's what cured me.
Speaker 1: I saw enlightenment because the default mode network is important
Speaker 1: for perspective taking, it's important for compassion. You know. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to me to say like we've since
Speaker 1: the deal, you know, since it once, we've learned how
Speaker 1: to use our executive network to suppress it. So I
Speaker 1: think things are more complex than that. No, And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I was temporarily kind of in that default
Speaker 1: mode honeymoon phase when jud Brewer published his finding that
Speaker 1: long term meditators were able to kind of quiet their
Speaker 1: default mode network, and then Robin Carhart, Harris and London
Speaker 1: published the psilocybin finding and it was like the same
Speaker 1: exact exact regions, same pattern. But then I was like, well,
Speaker 1: that's the beginning, and so then how do we bring
Speaker 1: the tools of neuroscience to bear on this question that
Speaker 1: it's like, we found a pattern, Now what does that
Speaker 1: pattern mean? And my skepticism is more have we actually
Speaker 1: done that? You know, I mean to have one or
Speaker 1: two labs in the entire world trying to tackle this
Speaker 1: question is ludicrous, Like tons of neuroscientists should be involved,
Speaker 1: We should be bringing in, you know, like people like
Speaker 1: you and Jonathan Schooler who studied creativity. Jonathan Schooler actually
Speaker 1: reached out to me and said, I'd love to start
Speaker 1: studying psilocybin and creativity. And then his university is like, well,
Speaker 1: we're not a medical school and we're not taking the risk.
Speaker 1: Did his research in the Imagination Institute? Yels Yeah, no.
Speaker 1: And so there's a whole field of understanding that, in
Speaker 1: my view, having been trained in psychology is actually a
Speaker 1: lot more nuanced and theoretically driven than drug abuse research.
Speaker 1: And those psychologists aren't allowed to tackle these questions because
Speaker 1: they're not in medical schools. They're not trained to kind
Speaker 1: of have pharmacies that manage schedule one drugs. And so
Speaker 1: I think like we're at a point where the psychedelic
Speaker 1: researchers need to step out of their little drug abuse
Speaker 1: you know, cocoon and start asking for help from actual
Speaker 1: experts in other fields and be like, we have these
Speaker 1: big basic findings, but we don't have the training or
Speaker 1: the way of thinking about the brain and the mind
Speaker 1: that you do, and so what does your field say
Speaker 1: about this pattern? And like what else should we be testing,
Speaker 1: what outcome measures, what ways of probing the brain? Not
Speaker 1: just if the whole default mode basically quiets during a
Speaker 1: peak psychedelic experience, that's fine, but like what about at
Speaker 1: the end of the psychedelic experre or the next morning,
Speaker 1: or like a week later. Exactly if you walked around
Speaker 1: with a quiet, a fully quiet default move network, you
Speaker 1: would actually have very very low compassion because you would
Speaker 1: not be able to take the perspective of anyone else
Speaker 1: other than yourself. Well, I want to stop you there,
Speaker 1: because you just described a bunch of zen masters. I know,
Speaker 1: not a bunch, but I think that's been a problem, right, Yeah, Like, well,
Speaker 1: people try to keep up that peak experience and then
Speaker 1: they end up being assholes. They totally become assholes or
Speaker 1: can be. And this is a really important point about
Speaker 1: enlightened assholes, let's call them, because you can start feeling
Speaker 1: superior to others after these experiences, because you feel like, wow,
Speaker 1: I've reached this level of pure oneness that all these
Speaker 1: chumps haven't reached yet, you know, like, and you can
Speaker 1: become a maniacal guru and that can happen. It's not like,
Speaker 1: you know, like we're allowed to like question that and say, like,
Speaker 1: just because you're a guru, you're allowed to question whether
Speaker 1: or not you're doing good as a girl, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you've got that going on with psychedelics too. You
Speaker 1: have the kind of same narcissistic shamans. You know, they
Speaker 1: are kind of permanently in this because they're taking psychedelics
Speaker 1: so frequently, they're kind of permanently in this frame of
Speaker 1: reality where they are at the center and everything else
Speaker 1: is kind of a projection of that self. And so
Speaker 1: it's like it's certainly a stage along the path to enlightenment.
Speaker 1: But as a good friend told me, he's like, if
Speaker 1: you see a signpost and you're like, oh, I've got
Speaker 1: to this point on the path, you don't like hang
Speaker 1: out at that rest stop, You like stay there for
Speaker 1: a little while, and then you keep going. I think
Speaker 1: for a lot of people, once they've gotten beyond that
Speaker 1: initial fear of selfishness and then their self becomes so big,
Speaker 1: then the fear goes away. But it's like, no, there's
Speaker 1: something even beyond that that's even scarier to give up,
Speaker 1: and that's you being at the center of anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm now wondering if you put psychopaths on this stuff,
Speaker 1: do they become even more psychopaths maybe? I mean we've
Speaker 1: seen that in the psychedelic community unfortunately. So actually it
Speaker 1: might have the opposite effect. That's actually like it might
Speaker 1: just amplify whatever you are. That's another interesting hypothesis. We
Speaker 1: can forgeate lots of hypotheses about what's possible that it
Speaker 1: certainly needs to be more research about it. Something that
Speaker 1: does seem to be going on with the MDMA POSTMAK
Speaker 1: stress disorder link that I want to say in linking
Speaker 1: it to the default mode network, that I think is
Speaker 1: probably very very valid. There is a part of the
Speaker 1: default mode network that is associated with rumination, you know,
Speaker 1: medial prefontal cortex. There are certain areas that you can
Speaker 1: get stuck in, you can rummage around in your medial
Speaker 1: prefonted cortex in a negative way, and that could be
Speaker 1: associated that's associated with neuroticism, the personality trait neuroticism. But
Speaker 1: the most interesting thing is not just the default mode
Speaker 1: network or even one part of the default network. It's
Speaker 1: the interactions between multiple large scale networks. So the action
Speaker 1: is really in how much is your executive attention network
Speaker 1: regulating the default mode network. That's the important question. The
Speaker 1: question isn't have you quieted your default mode network as
Speaker 1: it's being pitched in the psychedelic literature and the meditation literature.
Speaker 1: So John Cabotzen writes about this all the time as well,
Speaker 1: and I think it's such an oversimplification. The real question
Speaker 1: is how much have you trained, through meditation practices your
Speaker 1: executive network to be able to regulate your attention so
Speaker 1: that you can use your default mode network when you
Speaker 1: want to have empathy and compassion for others and imagination
Speaker 1: and creativity, and you can suppress it when you're ruminating
Speaker 1: too much. I think that's the level of nuance that
Speaker 1: the field needs done, right. Yeah, it's like cognitive flexibility, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, emotional resilience. Like when Matchier Ricard was asked
Speaker 1: by Tanya Singer in a study to generate empathy for
Speaker 1: people who are suffering, he said, it's unbearable. I can't
Speaker 1: do this. I'm feeling so much pain right now, And
Speaker 1: she said, well, can you generate compassion? He said, I
Speaker 1: could do that forever, And so it's like he could
Speaker 1: do the thing that was unpleasant and give feedback about like,
Speaker 1: oh no, I just tried to do that. I have
Speaker 1: control over that mental faculty, and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: do that anymore because it's causing me a lot of suffering.
Speaker 1: Give me a new task to do. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, I think with the psychedelic community, I've seen
Speaker 1: that kind of cognitive flexibility in people who really maybe
Speaker 1: are open to begin with, become more open, but then
Speaker 1: don't just hang out in that fantasy world. They actually
Speaker 1: figure out practically ethically, like what should I do with
Speaker 1: this openness? What should I where should I be putting
Speaker 1: my efforts? And I think with you know, people who
Speaker 1: are suffering, like with PTSD or depression, just giving them
Speaker 1: a little bit of a boost and openness isn't going
Speaker 1: to do it. It's like they need the framework after
Speaker 1: the experience to know how to act differently in the world,
Speaker 1: how to think differently every day. I mean, because otherwise
Speaker 1: you're just talking about another form of morphine. But instead
Speaker 1: of for the body, it's like for our ruminative minds.
Speaker 1: It's like we give our ruminative minds this break and
Speaker 1: it feels great, and then of course that mind comes
Speaker 1: back unless you figure out a way to live differently.
Speaker 1: And so you know, Pollen talks about, you know, losing
Speaker 1: his ego. That's you know, Robin's big thing is ego dissolution.
Speaker 1: So in a culture where ego is so problematic, like
Speaker 1: we've created selves that are so anxiety ridden, so selfish,
Speaker 1: so fearful, that of course, just obliterating that for a
Speaker 1: moment feels amazing. But like maybe there's a different form
Speaker 1: of self that needs to be created in the aftermath
Speaker 1: that is a healthy ego. That's like a healthy form
Speaker 1: of using like you're saying, all these normal faculties, and
Speaker 1: we don't want to just create zombies who feel good.
Speaker 1: It's like, we want to create people who are actually
Speaker 1: helping the planet and helping each other. So that's funny
Speaker 1: that you used beautiful. I love everything you're saying. First all,
Speaker 1: that's funny to use a rezoldies got. I got a
Speaker 1: little bit of heat for a big think talk that
Speaker 1: I gave, you know, you know, the big think thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I gave a little thing where I said, I said,
Speaker 1: have you ever been away these mindfulness like conferences that
Speaker 1: you look at the room, they all going zombies like,
Speaker 1: I don't think they're like that creative in that moment.
Speaker 1: I've gone to a lot of Zen retreats, and at
Speaker 1: the end of the day, the insights that I have
Speaker 1: I've brought into my life are because I decided to
Speaker 1: be creative about the process in my own mind rather
Speaker 1: than just follow what the teacher was saying. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, my husband always gives me a hard time.
Speaker 1: I'll like come back from a retreat and be like,
Speaker 1: this is like what happened during the interview, And He's like,
Speaker 1: why do you sit in an interview with someone who's
Speaker 1: so much more trained than you and not just like
Speaker 1: listen to them. You're like challenging them. You're like being confrontational,
Speaker 1: You're getting angry. I'm like, cuz I'm only there for
Speaker 1: seven days. I like really want to find out what
Speaker 1: the f is going on. Yeah, it's great. I mean
Speaker 1: you're a great example of what I think there needs
Speaker 1: to be more of in science among scientists. Is this
Speaker 1: balance of the spiritual, experiential openness and the intellectual curiosity.
Speaker 1: Is that why we bonded? Probably didn't we like instantly
Speaker 1: bond Yeah? No, And I think there's you know, it's
Speaker 1: that old saying of like drinking the kool aid. I
Speaker 1: think unfortunately it happened in mindfulness. And actually I think
Speaker 1: the most successful people in that meditation research world have
Speaker 1: graduated from that initial period of just mindfulness is good
Speaker 1: for everything. Yeah, and I know a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are, you know, asking the tough questions now. But
Speaker 1: in the psychedelic research world, it's like everyone would rather
Speaker 1: keep drinking the kool aid of like let's just keep
Speaker 1: showing how this is good for people and not really
Speaker 1: talking about how it's bad because that scares people. And
Speaker 1: like it's just like eyes on the prize, let's get
Speaker 1: something legalized or made into a medicine. And that's not
Speaker 1: even the most interesting question to me. It's like we
Speaker 1: should be as critical about the psychedelic findings as anything otherwise.
Speaker 1: It's like, what's the long term goal for this area
Speaker 1: of science? I mean, so we end up with a
Speaker 1: new drug? Who cares? Yeah, you're raising truly important points.
Speaker 1: You know, we both have those hats, Like we could
Speaker 1: spend an hour talking about how much we love drugs
Speaker 1: and meditation because we both do. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I don't want to speak for you,
Speaker 1: and I haven't done that. May drugs, I should say,
Speaker 1: but meditation I particularly really helped. I did an eight
Speaker 1: week MBSR course and it really helped me with my
Speaker 1: generalized anxiety disorder. So I can clearly see the benefit
Speaker 1: of that. But here's the thing, and I know that
Speaker 1: you agree with this. A fully integrated human being, a
Speaker 1: fully functioning human in Carl Rogers's sense or self actualization
Speaker 1: and Maslow sense, is not simply a reduction of anxiety.
Speaker 1: It's not like an integration. A fully integrated person is
Speaker 1: one where you have all of yourselves are harmoniously integrated.
Speaker 1: But you don't like neglect any of thoseselves. You don't
Speaker 1: like treat the neuroticism used to have as the redhead stepchild.
Speaker 1: I never put it that way before, but I'm saying,
Speaker 1: you don't say, like, Okay, we're going to like banish them.
Speaker 1: You know, I use meditation, so I can now banish
Speaker 1: that to this attic. I don't know why I'm using
Speaker 1: this metaphor, but that's still you know, that was a
Speaker 1: big part of who I was, and in certain instances
Speaker 1: that it can actually be beneficial to have that. There
Speaker 1: are things I want to be fearful of in life.
Speaker 1: There are things I want to be anxious about, you know.
Speaker 1: I want to be able to have a metacognitive view
Speaker 1: and take it is as wisdom and perspective. But you know,
Speaker 1: some of that is part of wisdom is keeping some
Speaker 1: of that anxiety. What do you think of what I
Speaker 1: just said? Am I making any sense at all? No? Absolutely?
Speaker 1: And I you know, I had this conversation with it's
Speaker 1: it was actually a really funny moment. So I was
Speaker 1: dropping my husband off at Silent Retreat and our daughter
Speaker 1: came with us. She's she was two and a half
Speaker 1: at the time. She's almost three. So it's like prime
Speaker 1: survival years. Like you're just whatever anxiety I used to
Speaker 1: have about myself and most of it was just fantasy
Speaker 1: or like nightmare. Now it's actually directed to like is
Speaker 1: my child alive moment to moment, Like am I about
Speaker 1: to like make some mistake in vigilance or emotion regulation
Speaker 1: that's going to cause her harm? So this is a
Speaker 1: totally different category. But like, I'm so happy I have
Speaker 1: that form of anxiety. So we go up to this
Speaker 1: Buddha center. I have this amazing sit you know, I'm
Speaker 1: like oh so stable, no fear, completely at ease, loving,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. And then later that night she gets
Speaker 1: hives all over her body and we have to go
Speaker 1: to the er because we're in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: and like none of the like because no one else
Speaker 1: there has kids. The residents are just like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, is this really a big deal? Making yes
Speaker 1: two and a half and like we don't know why
Speaker 1: she's you know, So I'm like panicking And if someone
Speaker 1: said to you in that moment, just meditate when you
Speaker 1: want to slap them, well, right, So I was kind
Speaker 1: of getting more and more escalated because I was just like,
Speaker 1: somebody should be panicking with me, like this is the moment. Yes.
Speaker 1: So the next day I asked the Buddhist teacher, I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know that fear that I felt on the plane,
Speaker 1: that I thought I made so much progress in understanding
Speaker 1: and just the tiniest shift in circumstances and that all
Speaker 1: that terror comes back, I'm panicking. And he said, well,
Speaker 1: but you still made the right decision. It's like you
Speaker 1: didn't forget how to make decisions, like that emotion was
Speaker 1: causing you to be vigilant enough to make this decision
Speaker 1: that could have been life or death, and I said,
Speaker 1: I guess I just thought that all of this meditation eventually,
Speaker 1: like I would stop feeling that panic. And he's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: the point is actually that in those moments of panic,
Speaker 1: you can just let go and surrender into what is
Speaker 1: happening and just do what needs to be done. And
Speaker 1: sometimes that means taking charge, and sometimes it means somebody
Speaker 1: else has to do this because I can't do it.
Speaker 1: But it's not like you're going to be like perfectly
Speaker 1: adjusted to every possible scenario and like, you know, like
Speaker 1: Jesus being nailed to the cross and be like I'm
Speaker 1: fine with this, you know, total equanimity. I think that
Speaker 1: I really like that distinction. I like that a lot. Cool,
Speaker 1: so so many exciting things I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about that. I'm going to be respectful of your time,
Speaker 1: and so, you know, maybe you could tell me some
Speaker 1: of your more recent research or like follow ups, Like
Speaker 1: can we talk about this seven year follow up? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty amazing. I'm so grateful to the team of
Speaker 1: people that I worked with when I was a grad student,
Speaker 1: because so Cliff Sarin had this amazing vision to study
Speaker 1: Western meditators as if they were, you know, monastics in India.
Speaker 1: He was inspired by a trip to India. He connected
Speaker 1: up with Alan Wallace, who was the meditation teacher. They
Speaker 1: wanted to study people for a year, and all of
Speaker 1: the funders were like, hmmm, we could maybe do a month,
Speaker 1: and so they compromised a three month retreat. We collected
Speaker 1: tons of dat over that three months, and then the
Speaker 1: really brilliant thing was to keep following people up the
Speaker 1: five month follow up, then a year and a half,
Speaker 1: and then seven years later we sent everybody laptops and
Speaker 1: questionnaires and we found out, like, what do people look
Speaker 1: like seven years after doing this really life changing thing
Speaker 1: meditating for three months straight? And I can't really take
Speaker 1: credit for any of the vision around the seven year
Speaker 1: follow up, because you know, it's like I was gone
Speaker 1: in you know, a few months after I started my postdoc.
Speaker 1: My brain was just like, you know, you like dump
Speaker 1: out one part of your brain that used to study
Speaker 1: eg and you start studying drugs instead. And now I've
Speaker 1: dumped up downtown like both of those parts of my brain,
Speaker 1: and I've become a mom and I'm like around psychedelic
Speaker 1: people all the time. So that kind of plasticity. It's
Speaker 1: just like it's really hard to maintain that kind of
Speaker 1: persistence in academia to get kind of follow up like that.
Speaker 1: And so Tony Zenesco and brand and King were the
Speaker 1: two grad students who kind of carried the torch for
Speaker 1: that follow up, and we just published that basically after
Speaker 1: seven years, the amount of change that people got better
Speaker 1: at a response inhibition task you press a button every
Speaker 1: time you see a long line, and then you withhold
Speaker 1: the button press when you see a short line. That
Speaker 1: people got better at that within the first month and
Speaker 1: a half, two months of meditation, and seven years later
Speaker 1: they're still just as good at that. I'm going to say,
Speaker 1: stupid task. You know. It's like when I came up
Speaker 1: with this task, I'm like, oh, it's just a measure
Speaker 1: of response and ambition. Who cares? But it predicts success
Speaker 1: and happiness in all sorts of different domains of life.
Speaker 1: And they're still good at it seven years later, and
Speaker 1: they're not practicing this task, you know, they're just living
Speaker 1: their lives. And the kind of the other cool finding
Speaker 1: is that there's a certain amount of cognitive decline in
Speaker 1: controlling your responses. So you're less good at response and
Speaker 1: ahibition as you age, and the more you meditate in
Speaker 1: that seven year follow up, the less you show that
Speaker 1: cognitive decline on the task. And so it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, you invest that really intense time of training
Speaker 1: may not have to be three months. You know, we
Speaker 1: saw the benefits after only about a month and a half.
Speaker 1: Then if you keep up a regular practice, your brain
Speaker 1: has changed basically permanently, so that then you get a
Speaker 1: laptop in the mail, you do this little task and
Speaker 1: you're just as good at it as when you're in
Speaker 1: a monastic environment basically. And on top of that all
Speaker 1: these questionnaire measures. I mean, you can kind of debate
Speaker 1: the questionnaire measures because you know, once you filled out
Speaker 1: questionnaires a bunch of times, you kind of know you
Speaker 1: maybe remember what your answers are. But let's just assume
Speaker 1: people are being honest and that they're not just kind
Speaker 1: of generating the answers that they think we want. The
Speaker 1: changes in personality, the changes in well being, the changes
Speaker 1: in kind of mindfulness and resilience and empathy, all of
Speaker 1: those are still there at seven years as well. Some
Speaker 1: of them have dropped off, but yeah, we call it
Speaker 1: adaptive functioning because kind of all of these adaptions psychological
Speaker 1: measures increase with meditation, and they're still hanging out at
Speaker 1: this high level seven years later. Some people in the
Speaker 1: literature have written that like personality is cast in stone
Speaker 1: after thirty years of life, after your first thirty years
Speaker 1: of life, and or that it tends to be relatively stable.
Speaker 1: I should say, but there are lots of like therapy
Speaker 1: has been shown in this great that Ben Roberts did
Speaker 1: this review paper showing there are methods that really show
Speaker 1: substantial personality change, like CBT, certain forms of therapy, and
Speaker 1: it looks like we can add meditation to this list
Speaker 1: of something that could cause long lasting personality change. So
Speaker 1: that's great, all right. So Colin DeYoung is an I know,
Speaker 1: he's another like openness obsessed person and he's also obsessed
Speaker 1: with destroying the myth of stable personality. He's like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So we talked about that a lot. And how you
Speaker 1: know Colin, Yeah, I know. I mean I've never met
Speaker 1: him in person, but I know him in the age
Speaker 1: of you know, virtually knowing people through all sorts of
Speaker 1: funny you know, social media, And he's my biggest collaborator
Speaker 1: on openness. Yeah, and he and I wanted to write
Speaker 1: a review on openness and psychedelics and just because I
Speaker 1: couldn't get my ish together because I don't acadeem me anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm clearly not writing this, like it's never
Speaker 1: going to happen. But other people kind of stepped up,
Speaker 1: so other labs have been doing more openness research and
Speaker 1: writing the reviews that I wanted to write. So that's great.
Speaker 1: I like love it when you know I have a
Speaker 1: good idea and someone else does it. Now, well, that's
Speaker 1: your ego dissolution talking. And also just like enjoying life talking.
Speaker 1: It's like, there's a good idea that should help people,
Speaker 1: and can someone else do it? But no. Colin and
Speaker 1: I were talking about how it is still unusual that
Speaker 1: you could change personality so dramatically in like generally stable
Speaker 1: healthy people, either overnight with a chemical like psilocybmin or
Speaker 1: over the course of a month and a half with meditation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, if you go through a divorce or
Speaker 1: if you go through like a major life event, your
Speaker 1: personality might change. If you're super depressed and then you
Speaker 1: get cured, your neuroticism will go down. You know, your
Speaker 1: extraversion will go up, but openness is not typically one
Speaker 1: of those things that seems to increase randomly after people
Speaker 1: have life experiences. And yet it's been this reliable finding
Speaker 1: in the psychedelic literature, the cool finding with the you know,
Speaker 1: even though I'm skeptical about the depression trials, in the trial,
Speaker 1: in an open label trial with depressed volunteers, their openness
Speaker 1: increased and the amount of increase in openness was related
Speaker 1: to the decrease in depression symptoms. And so in that
Speaker 1: paper that I was just one of the co authors,
Speaker 1: David Ritzo was the lead author from London. He basically said,
Speaker 1: you know, neuroticism going down, an extra version going up
Speaker 1: in depressed people when they're not depressed is kind of
Speaker 1: a typical finding. But you don't really see openness all
Speaker 1: the time going up. And so it does seem like
Speaker 1: whatever's going on with openness, whatever that indicates, is something
Speaker 1: that we should be tackling more head on and trying
Speaker 1: to understand what does this self reported openness mean, you know,
Speaker 1: in people's lives, how long does it last? In the
Speaker 1: Hopkins that I did, it lasted fourteen months, you know,
Speaker 1: with depressed individuals, maybe it kind of goes back to
Speaker 1: baseline after you know, their symptoms come back. In the
Speaker 1: MDMA trial, it lasted for years, so again these like
Speaker 1: long term follow ups that you know, these are not
Speaker 1: just I feel better for a few weeks. Absolutely, it's exciting.
Speaker 1: David Yane and I recently created an all Experienced scale,
Speaker 1: which I can't wait to share with you. All experience. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that has like six facets of it so people can
Speaker 1: like know is what I had is at all? Yea
Speaker 1: all experience like the theory of Everything scale. It's like
Speaker 1: it's a measure that measures everything. Would that's my next project?
Speaker 1: But yeah, the number one predictor of the all experience
Speaker 1: I have trouble saying. I don't know how to say
Speaker 1: all without saying all because I'm from Philly. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the all experience, as you know, number one personality predictors
Speaker 1: openness to experience. It's just that you know this openness
Speaker 1: to me and which has fascinating me. It's the one
Speaker 1: that is most consistently correlated with a wide range of
Speaker 1: self transcendent experiences. Like where does the term wonder fit? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think of wonder a lot when I think of
Speaker 1: these experiences people have on psychedelics that you know, may
Speaker 1: not be religious experiences at all, the sense of a
Speaker 1: wonder where it feels nice to be small or part
Speaker 1: of than a larger hole and you no longer need
Speaker 1: to be kind of like at the center of everything.
Speaker 1: That's part of the all experience, the all experience, for sure.
Speaker 1: But it seems like openness is a trait like preps
Speaker 1: people for that, like, like you know, it's like both
Speaker 1: a precursor and a postcursor. I don't know is the
Speaker 1: postcursor word, but it's something that can make it more
Speaker 1: likely that you'll get into the experiences. But also it's
Speaker 1: something that these experiences affect as well. So it's a
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating thing. And a lot of it seems to
Speaker 1: me to be about absorption. It's about absorption. It's about
Speaker 1: shifting your perspective so that you are as fully absorbed
Speaker 1: in the moment as possible, and that seems to be
Speaker 1: kind of the key thing going on there. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had a friend who actually studies she's one of the
Speaker 1: researchers who studies MDMA in cancer patients and in autistic adults.
Speaker 1: She's a brilliant researcher. And when she came to my
Speaker 1: farm and I took her back into the woods, she's like,
Speaker 1: I'm having a beauty attack. I love it, you know.
Speaker 1: And she's like, this is this is what happens to
Speaker 1: me because I'm so open, I'm so empathic, like things
Speaker 1: just could flow in. And she's like, if it's such
Speaker 1: a beautiful experience, I like can't even filter to think about, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a beautiful experience I'm having. It's just like overwhelming.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Can I use that? Can I use
Speaker 1: that in my book? That'd be a great like subsection
Speaker 1: hanging from anxiety attack to beauty attack. Yeah, Oh, that's
Speaker 1: just wonderful. I'm real admirer of what you're doing, and
Speaker 1: I support your transition from researcher to healer. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell listeners to websites. One to go to
Speaker 1: ww dot Psychedelic program dot com, which is all about
Speaker 1: quote raising awareness and reducing risks of psychedelics, education, psychotherapy,
Speaker 1: and community. And also your personal website ww dot Catherine
Speaker 1: McLean K A T h e r I N E
Speaker 1: m A c l e a n dot org, which
Speaker 1: is what you're all about is quote psychedelic integration, meditation, training,
Speaker 1: and more. The exclamation plant. It's something I would do,
Speaker 1: I know, right. I was like, more is actually the
Speaker 1: bigger part of it. But I was like, there there
Speaker 1: are great terms more that I do that I do anyway,
Speaker 1: but that and more is you know a lot. So
Speaker 1: you'd help with individual psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, evaluation, consultation, you
Speaker 1: help people integrate. Could you end this podcast day by
Speaker 1: just talking a little bit about what your vision of real,
Speaker 1: true psychedelic integration looks like. Hmmm, well, I have to
Speaker 1: say the thing that I've been most inspired by is
Speaker 1: the work that this group is doing down in Jamaica,
Speaker 1: which is one of the only countries in the world
Speaker 1: where mushrooms are legal. And it's kind of because everything
Speaker 1: is legal in Jamaica, and so they are kind of
Speaker 1: pros and cons to a completely deregulated country. But once
Speaker 1: you get down to this you know, remote part of
Speaker 1: Jamaica and Treasure Beach, it's a very open, kind of progressive,
Speaker 1: welcoming culture and mushrooms go wild there. And this guy,
Speaker 1: Eric Osborne, started a pretty humble enterprise where people come
Speaker 1: down mostly from the States and from Europe and they
Speaker 1: partake in mushroom experiences and then they go home. And
Speaker 1: several months ago I was invited down there as a
Speaker 1: guest to give a talk about my research, and I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, a group of twenty people having an extremely
Speaker 1: high dose experience with almost no anxiety, none of the
Speaker 1: paranoia like freak outs that I saw at Hopkins, and
Speaker 1: instead they kind of came out of this with a
Speaker 1: really deep sense of community of you know, empowerment in themselves.
Speaker 1: And then you know, they go home into their lives
Speaker 1: and there's a bit of a vacation effect, so the
Speaker 1: effect doesn't maybe last. But I'm kind of curious to
Speaker 1: understand how those kind of community mushroom experiences could rival
Speaker 1: the clinical model that I was trained in, because I
Speaker 1: was just shocked at how how high the doses were
Speaker 1: and how much people were not scared about what was
Speaker 1: happening to them. And some of these people had never
Speaker 1: taken psychedelics before, or maybe just a handful of times,
Speaker 1: certainly not at those high doses. We just did a
Speaker 1: women's retreat there in March, same thing. You know, this
Speaker 1: amazing camaraderie in community, and so I'm beginning to think
Speaker 1: that if there is a key to integration. It's that
Speaker 1: sense of community and like who is your tribe? And
Speaker 1: so you can have a peak experience, you know, you
Speaker 1: can fill out questionnaires, you can you know, have a
Speaker 1: reduction in certain symptoms. But ultimately, after people go home,
Speaker 1: they're not talking about the mushrooms. They're talking about the
Speaker 1: people they met. And I think the same thing could
Speaker 1: happen in meditation. It's not the technique that you're doing.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not just going to beat yourself up
Speaker 1: every morning sitting in front of an altar, you know,
Speaker 1: being like why am I not enlightened yet? It's like
Speaker 1: go out into the world and like find the people
Speaker 1: who make you feel like you know you're here for
Speaker 1: a reason and your life has meaning. And so I think,
Speaker 1: you know, the whether the clinical models end up being
Speaker 1: effective or not, I think we have to address this
Speaker 1: issue of community and when people have peak experiences, figure
Speaker 1: out a way for them to give back almost immediately.
Speaker 1: And so one project that I was super proud of
Speaker 1: is call I started this thing called Psychedelic Good Samaritan Training,
Speaker 1: or basically it's like you take the experience you have
Speaker 1: and then figure out how to start helping others like
Speaker 1: right away, not once you're perfected. Just like assume that
Speaker 1: you're not never going to get perfected. You know, you're
Speaker 1: always going to be who you are, but you can
Speaker 1: start helping other people. And because you've had a psychedelic experience,
Speaker 1: maybe you're like more comfortable in environments where most people
Speaker 1: don't want to go, like soup kitchens or refugee camps
Speaker 1: or hospice or nursing homes, which are like hell on
Speaker 1: earth for a lot of people. You know, the people
Speaker 1: who work there are stressed out, the people who are
Speaker 1: living there have dementia, they're very sick. No one wants
Speaker 1: to go volunteer there. It's really hard. But like maybe
Speaker 1: the psychedelic experience is so opening that you're like I'll
Speaker 1: go in there, like I can bring some creativity and
Speaker 1: love into this place. And so we had a group
Speaker 1: of people in Brooklyn actually do that for a month
Speaker 1: and it was really really fun and so kind of
Speaker 1: that's my those are my kind of two perspectives now,
Speaker 1: is like how can we use these peak experiences to
Speaker 1: help people create community that's healthy and also be like
Speaker 1: better human beings, like actually in action in the world,
Speaker 1: not just figuring out how to be a little bit
Speaker 1: less anxious, all right, Love that it sounds to me
Speaker 1: like in Buddha terms, that's real proponent of the Bisotva path. Yes,
Speaker 1: absolutely to your psychedelic experience. And I just want to
Speaker 1: end there and say thanks again for the great work
Speaker 1: you're doing to make the world a better place. You
Speaker 1: are welcome. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react
Speaker 1: in some way to something you heard, I encourage you
Speaker 1: to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please a reading
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