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