Speaker 1: Pushkin Hey Slight Changers. Last week we aired an episode
Speaker 1: with renowned author and journalist Michael Pollan. It was all
Speaker 1: about consciousness, the concept of self, and how we perceive, feel,
Speaker 1: and make sense of the world around us. That was
Speaker 1: actually Michael's second time on A Slight Change of Plans.
Speaker 1: He first joined me a few years ago to talk
Speaker 1: about psychedelics and how they can shift our consciousness and
Speaker 1: help us find meaning in entirely new ways. These conversations
Speaker 1: are so linked in my mind. In fact, Michael said
Speaker 1: that the seed for his new book was planted by
Speaker 1: his psychedelic exploration. So today we're sharing that episode with you.
Speaker 1: We really hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 2: I suddenly saw myself from outside, and I saw myself
Speaker 2: kind of explode in this cloud of blue post it notes,
Speaker 2: you know, like confetti, and they came down to the
Speaker 2: ground and they kind of masked in this pool of
Speaker 2: blue paint, and that was me. I had complete acceptance
Speaker 2: that had I died and vanished, that was fine. It
Speaker 2: was what was meant to be. There was a continuing
Speaker 2: consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy and
Speaker 2: very hard to put into words.
Speaker 1: That's renowned author Michael Pollan. He's talking about how a
Speaker 1: guided psychedelic trip on psilocybin, a molecule found in mushrooms,
Speaker 1: helped him see his mortality through an entirely new lens.
Speaker 2: This is a very non interventionist therapy. The therapists say
Speaker 2: nothing during the experience except would you like a glass
Speaker 2: of water or a snack or need to go to
Speaker 2: the bathroom. It really they let your mind go where
Speaker 2: your mind wants to go. It is a kind of
Speaker 2: self exploration, self healing.
Speaker 1: On today's show, we hear from Michael Pollan about how
Speaker 1: plants have the power to change our minds. I'm Maya
Speaker 1: Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a
Speaker 1: show about who we are and who we become in
Speaker 1: the face of a big change. I'm fascinated by the
Speaker 1: kinds of experiences that can drastically change our perspectives, and
Speaker 1: guided psychedelic trips have the potential to do just that.
Speaker 1: While psychedelics aren't legal in the US, they have been
Speaker 1: used in certain clinical trials and have delivered powerful therapeutic
Speaker 1: benefits for people struggling with things like addiction, depression, and
Speaker 1: existential distress. So what's happening to our brains under their
Speaker 1: influence that gives rise to these remarkable changes. Michael's written
Speaker 1: two books that explore the answer to this question, How
Speaker 1: to Change Your Mind, and this is Your Mind on Plants.
Speaker 1: And so today we dig into the science of psychedelics.
Speaker 1: We started off by discussing the somewhat astonishing fact that
Speaker 1: basically every culture in the world has discovered psychoactive plants.
Speaker 1: They contain molecules that can alter human consciousness. We're talking
Speaker 1: about the morphine and the opium poppy, and the caffeine
Speaker 1: and coffee and tea. Michael says, there are a few
Speaker 1: explanations for why we're so drawn to these substances. For starters,
Speaker 1: they can provide pain, relief and stave off boredom.
Speaker 2: But then I think that there are more profound uses
Speaker 2: to which people have put these psychoactive plants. And I'm
Speaker 2: talking here about the more powerful ones, the ones we
Speaker 2: call psychedelics, and that is for access to other realms,
Speaker 2: other dimensions of reality, and afterworld and underworld and religious visions,
Speaker 2: essentially mystical experiences that are at the heart of a
Speaker 2: great many religions. And it may well be that it
Speaker 2: was these psychedelic substances that opened up that way of thinking,
Speaker 2: that gave people the visions that were interpreted in such
Speaker 2: a way as to underwrite whole religions. And we just
Speaker 2: think of the artists who were influenced by psychoactives, you know,
Speaker 2: new metaphors, new insights, or scientific discoveries. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: a great many scientific discoveries that trace to psychedelic use.
Speaker 2: I think of it as the natural history of imagination.
Speaker 2: But it sure is interesting to think about.
Speaker 3: It is, and I mean it is striking to me that.
Speaker 1: It 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 well,
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.
Speaker 2: Experience, and we seek transcendence. Of course, not just through drugs.
Speaker 2: Extreme sports and intense periods of physical activity can do
Speaker 2: it releasing drugs in the brain basically, I mean, we
Speaker 2: can drug ourselves in all sorts of ways. Fasting, does it, dance,
Speaker 2: ecstatic dance, rhythm, you know, drumming. I think the desire
Speaker 2: for transcendence goes really deep, and it's interesting. I mean,
Speaker 2: do other creatures have it. We know that some other
Speaker 2: animals do like to change consciousness from their you know,
Speaker 2: their elephants love alcohol apparently, and apparently birds will you know,
Speaker 2: favor cannabis seeds over all different kinds seems to addle
Speaker 2: them a little bit. But transcendence, that idea that you
Speaker 2: know that there is another there is another realm of existence,
Speaker 2: another way to be, is something that I think is
Speaker 2: a deep human desire.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, Michael, if you can give us a quick
Speaker 1: history lesson, because in recent years there's been a huge
Speaker 1: resurgence of interest in the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics for
Speaker 1: people with anxiety, depression, addiction, terminal illness. What's been responsible
Speaker 1: for this shift?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, one of the big surprises in researching
Speaker 2: psychedelics was discovering how much research had been done during
Speaker 2: this period from the late forties through the mid sixties,
Speaker 2: and the fifties, it was a really vibrant field of research,
Speaker 2: with some very promising results using LSD and psilocybin to
Speaker 2: treat alcoholism, end of life anxiety, things like that. It
Speaker 2: was completely respectable, and then the workstops in the late
Speaker 2: sixties early seventies, there is a tremendous backlash under President Nixon,
Speaker 2: and the culture kind of turns against them. There's a
Speaker 2: backlash and the media, which had been incredibly positive about
Speaker 2: psychedelics turns on a dime, and so the research stops.
Speaker 2: The way it gets restarted is really a function of
Speaker 2: a couple things. One is, you have a group of
Speaker 2: psychiatrists therapists of other kinds who never lost faith in
Speaker 2: the fact that these were powerful therapeutic agents, and in fact,
Speaker 2: some of them were working with them underground, and people
Speaker 2: in that world started kind of plotting the return of psychedelics.
Speaker 2: And then in the early nineties they kind of got
Speaker 2: a signal from the FDA. There was a bureaucrat there
Speaker 2: in charge of drug development, and he basically sends a
Speaker 2: signal to researchers that, look, we're going to just treat
Speaker 2: psychedelics like any other drug. If you've got a good experiment.
Speaker 2: If you've got a good indication, you think it's going
Speaker 2: to be useful for we're not going to discriminate against it.
Speaker 2: The key moment, I think comes when Bob Jesse, who
Speaker 2: is an interesting character. He's not a doctor or a therapist.
Speaker 2: He's a computer engineer at Oracle who had experiences with
Speaker 2: psychedelics that had convinced him of their value. And he
Speaker 2: reaches out to a man named Roland Griffith, who is
Speaker 2: a very well respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, you know,
Speaker 2: the leading medical institution in the country, and they cook
Speaker 2: up this study and it's not a clinical study. It's
Speaker 2: not a therapeutic study at all. It's an effort to
Speaker 2: see whether you could induce a mystical type experience in
Speaker 2: someone with a high dose of psilocybin. Mystical type experience
Speaker 2: is something that Roland is personally very interested in, and
Speaker 2: they do this study that's published in two thousand and
Speaker 2: six and it's the craziest study. I mean, the title
Speaker 2: is something like psilocybin can occasion mystical type experience in healthy,
Speaker 2: normal people, something like that. And for me to see
Speaker 2: these words miss stick experience in the pages of a
Speaker 2: medical journal. Was just so mind blowing.
Speaker 3: And what is the hallmark of a mystical experience?
Speaker 2: Good question. I had no idea, but it involves a
Speaker 2: transcendence of space and time. Are euphoric feeling or feeling
Speaker 2: of intense well being, a dissolution of ego, followed by
Speaker 2: a sense of merging with something larger than yourself. You
Speaker 2: feel connected to nature or other people or the universe
Speaker 2: of the divinity. And they found that of the two
Speaker 2: thirds of people who had this mystical experience, they reported
Speaker 2: enduring changes in their sense of well being going out
Speaker 2: six weeks or eight weeks or something. And in a
Speaker 2: follow up study they found that aspects of their personality,
Speaker 2: specifically openness, the trait of openness increased, And that's quite
Speaker 2: striking because in general the personality doesn't change in adults.
Speaker 2: So this study really is the foundation on which subsequent
Speaker 2: work has been done. And by looking at these results
Speaker 2: that there seemed to be an improvement and well being,
Speaker 2: the idea occurred, well, we should try this with cancer patients.
Speaker 2: We should try this with people who have what the
Speaker 2: psychiatrists call existential distress over their diagnosis or the proximity
Speaker 2: of death, and that became the first clinical trial that
Speaker 2: the people at Hopkins did, and it was duplicated at
Speaker 2: the same time at NYU.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know what's notable about some of these controlled studies
Speaker 1: is that participants report that their guided experiences on psychedelics
Speaker 1: are totally singular in nature, right, that they count among
Speaker 1: the top most meaningful experiences they've ever had. And I'd
Speaker 1: love to dig into the neuroscience just a bit so
Speaker 1: we can understand what is giving rise to these exceptional
Speaker 1: subjective states.
Speaker 2: Well, the honest answer is, we don't really know. We
Speaker 2: have some really interesting hints. There's a lot more work
Speaker 2: to be done. A researcher in England named Robin Carhart
Speaker 2: Harris put people in an fMRI machine and injected them
Speaker 2: with psilocybin in one trial and LSD in another, and
Speaker 2: he found something very interesting. Where he expected to see
Speaker 2: a kind of explosion of activity mirroring the extraordinary visual
Speaker 2: effects and emotional effects, he actually found the most notable
Speaker 2: thing was a quieting of activity in one particular network.
Speaker 2: And this network, which I had never heard of, is
Speaker 2: the default mode network. The default mode network is the
Speaker 2: part of your brain that's most active when you're not
Speaker 2: doing anything. It's where your brain goes. It's the default
Speaker 2: and it was discovered when they were doing fMRI tasks
Speaker 2: of other kinds and they had to get the baseline,
Speaker 2: so they'd tell people don't do anything, don't think about anything,
Speaker 2: or try not to think about anything, just lie there,
Speaker 2: and it turns out their brains lit up and all
Speaker 2: sorts of stuff went on, and a lot of it
Speaker 2: involved self reflection, worry, rumination, thinking about the future, thinking
Speaker 2: about the past. The default mode network seems to be
Speaker 2: involved with creating this projection or illusion that we have
Speaker 2: a self. It's involved in time travel, the ability to
Speaker 2: think about the future and the past, which, if you
Speaker 2: think about it, you need if you're going to have
Speaker 2: a sense of self. Our sense of self is what's
Speaker 2: happened to us in the past and what we hope
Speaker 2: will happen in the future, or what we think might
Speaker 2: happen to us in the future. It's also involved in
Speaker 2: something called theory of mind. That's the ability to imagine
Speaker 2: the thoughts of other people, to understand that other people
Speaker 2: have thoughts, have a subjectivity, have an interiority. That's a
Speaker 2: big deal and it's involved in what's called the narrative self,
Speaker 2: the story we tell ourselves of who we are and
Speaker 2: how we take new events and kind of weave them
Speaker 2: into that narrative. So, you know, to the extent the
Speaker 2: self has an address in the brain, appears to be
Speaker 2: in this network. And this network gets very quiet under
Speaker 2: psychedelics and in the minds of very experienced meditators and
Speaker 2: you know Robin, then you know correlated reports of ego dissolution,
Speaker 2: and people can describe that it's quite a wild experience.
Speaker 2: You observe your sense of self completely melting or crumbling.
Speaker 2: I had it once happened to me when people reported
Speaker 2: that they had the most precipitous drops in activity in
Speaker 2: the default mode network. So that's one of the findings
Speaker 2: really of psychedelic science already. That is significant, I think
Speaker 2: for our understanding of consciousness and the self. But it's
Speaker 2: not the only theory of what's going on. There are
Speaker 2: people who aren't sold on the default mode. We're hoping
Speaker 2: to get some more precise answers to these questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, in addition to, you know, some of
Speaker 1: the therapeutic effects. It is so compelling that this basic
Speaker 1: research can help us further understand what brain structures are
Speaker 1: associated with our sense of self.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's another area to investigate, too, is what psychedelics
Speaker 2: might teach us about the consciousness of children. You may
Speaker 2: know Alison Gopnik.
Speaker 3: Alison, Yes, I'm such a fan of hers.
Speaker 2: And she studies child consciousness and problem solving, and she's
Speaker 2: convinced that the psychedelic experience is as close as adults
Speaker 2: get to the mind of the child and the way
Speaker 2: of thinking and the kind of what she describes as
Speaker 2: the lantern consciousness, as opposed to the spotlight consciousness of adults,
Speaker 2: which is very focused and linear. Children take in information
Speaker 2: from all different sides, which allows for a different kind
Speaker 2: of creativity. And she thinks that there's a retrogression in
Speaker 2: psychedelic consciousness that closely resembles that of children. So that's
Speaker 2: a whole other avenue of exploration that's very exciting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love her quote that babies and children are basically
Speaker 1: tripping all the time.
Speaker 3: Yes, what a lovely, colorful way of saying it.
Speaker 2: And this was an insight she had when her granddaughter
Speaker 2: was born.
Speaker 3: I love that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know, you mentioned that you did have the experience
Speaker 1: of feeling your ego dissolved. And I know you did
Speaker 1: try psychedelics while you were writing your book. You say
Speaker 1: that you felt your sense of self scattered to the
Speaker 1: wind like a blizzard of post its. And I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: can you just paint a scene of the many ways
Speaker 1: in which ego dissolution expressed itself during your trips.
Speaker 2: It was such an interesting, strange experience. I was really
Speaker 2: not prepared for it. So I had a fairly high
Speaker 2: dose psilocybin experience guided by an underground guide, somebody I
Speaker 2: really trusted. And I mentioned that because if you're going
Speaker 2: to let go to the extent of allowing your sense
Speaker 2: of self to completely vanished, you're going to have to
Speaker 2: feel very safe and very comfortable. And I did, you know,
Speaker 2: under her guidance and anyway, at a certain point, well
Speaker 2: into the experience, she offered me what's called a booster dose,
Speaker 2: and I figured in for a dime, in for a dollar.
Speaker 2: I was doing this for my book, actually, and so
Speaker 2: I said sure, and I ate.
Speaker 3: Another research purposes, strictly for.
Speaker 2: Research purposes, you know, in the interest of my readers,
Speaker 2: because it really was because I was although I was
Speaker 2: very curious, I was very afraid to do psychedelics.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I didn't do this till I was like in my
Speaker 2: late fifties, and I had a lot of fear of
Speaker 2: what could happen. I had read the stories of you know,
Speaker 2: bad trips, and I didn't know what. Also, you can
Speaker 2: discover really unpleasant things about yourself and anyway, at this point,
Speaker 2: I suddenly saw myself from outside and I saw myself
Speaker 2: kind of explode in this cloud of post it notes,
Speaker 2: blue post it, you know, like confetti, and they came
Speaker 2: down to the ground and they kind of masked in
Speaker 2: this pool of blue paint. And that was me. And
Speaker 2: I was absolutely sure it was me, but I was
Speaker 2: perceiving it from this new perspective that I had never
Speaker 2: experienced before. I don't know quite what it was. It
Speaker 2: wasn't me. It was very equable, disinterested. It had no
Speaker 2: problem with what had happened. I didn't feel threatened in
Speaker 2: any way. And that was me. I was gone and
Speaker 2: that was fine, But I was still aware. And it
Speaker 2: was the first time it ever occurred to me that
Speaker 2: you could have awareness without self, which is something Buddhists
Speaker 2: and Hindus will tell you about. But you know that
Speaker 2: seemed very far from my experience. And then what happens
Speaker 2: when you don't have a self is that you merge
Speaker 2: with everything around you. And in this case, what I
Speaker 2: merged with was a piece of music. And she put
Speaker 2: on Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite number two in D minor,
Speaker 2: which is a very sad piece of music.
Speaker 3: So gorgeous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I and I became one with the music.
Speaker 2: It was complete merging and it was incredibly beautiful. It's
Speaker 2: the most profound experience of music I'd ever had. And
Speaker 2: I felt as though the bow, the horsehair of the bow,
Speaker 2: was going over my body. And then at one point
Speaker 2: that I was inside the well of this, you know,
Speaker 2: this wooden container, and it was so beautiful. And although
Speaker 2: it was very sad, I wouldn't call it a happy experience.
Speaker 2: It was very sad. It was all about death. I
Speaker 2: mean that the piece of music. To me, it was
Speaker 2: all about death. But I was completely I had complete
Speaker 2: acceptance that had I died, I had and vanished. That
Speaker 2: was fine, it was what was meant to be. Something
Speaker 2: followed on that death of the self. There was a
Speaker 2: continuing consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy
Speaker 2: and very hard, to put into words. I struggled to
Speaker 2: describe it in the book, but it was one of
Speaker 2: the most profound experiences of my life.
Speaker 1: The struggle you're having putting your experience into words is
Speaker 1: very characteristic of how many people feel after a trip.
Speaker 1: Right They're saying, this is one of the most profound
Speaker 1: experiences of my life, and yet when they try and
Speaker 1: express it in words, it sounds cliche, new ag. You know,
Speaker 1: everything is love, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: It's interesting.
Speaker 1: I was interviewing Casey Musgraves, 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.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you've just reminded me of one of
Speaker 2: the other of the eight characteristics of mystical experience, and
Speaker 2: that's ineffability, the fact that these are very hard to
Speaker 2: describe because it kind of defies the language we have.
Speaker 2: Our language wasn't built to describe these kinds of experiences.
Speaker 2: And the other thing that you alluded to is that
Speaker 2: there is a tremendous banality to some of the insights,
Speaker 2: the profound insights that people have, such as love is
Speaker 2: the most important principle in the universe. You know, that
Speaker 2: is banal, but it's also profound. And one of the
Speaker 2: things you come out of the experience realizing is that
Speaker 2: it's a very fine line between banality and profundity. And
Speaker 2: one of the things psychedelics does is it takes all
Speaker 2: that ironic crust we cover the world with and it
Speaker 2: scrapes it off really effectively, and suddenly things appear with
Speaker 2: the profundity and beauty of for site, I mean, awe
Speaker 2: at the at the ordinary is a really you know,
Speaker 2: a piece of music, a flower, I mean, And and
Speaker 2: that's another way in which I think you're recovering the
Speaker 2: mind of the child. And that's a wonderful aspect of
Speaker 2: psychedelic experience.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
Speaker 1: of plants. I'm talking with Michael Polland about how psychedelics
Speaker 1: can change our minds. I wanted to hear more about
Speaker 1: the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Studies show that when they're
Speaker 1: administered in guided clinical settings. They can help with a
Speaker 1: surprisingly vast number of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety,
Speaker 1: obsessive compulsive disorder, and fear of death.
Speaker 2: Now, I was initially kind of suspicious of of the
Speaker 2: you know, is this is this some sort of panacea.
Speaker 2: It's being used for all these different things. And I
Speaker 2: remember interviewing Tom Insul, a psychiatrist's former head of the
Speaker 2: National Institute of Mental Health, and I said, isn't this
Speaker 2: a little weird that all these different indications are responding
Speaker 2: to the same kind of treatment, And he said, well,
Speaker 2: you're assuming that they're all different, you know, indications. They
Speaker 2: may be symptoms of a similar brain. And that is
Speaker 2: that a brain that's overly rigid and it's thinking that's
Speaker 2: trapped in patterns of rumination. And indeed, all those things depression, anxiety, obsession,
Speaker 2: addiction represent people stuck in loops of destructive thought and behavior,
Speaker 2: and that what psychedelics may do is help you break
Speaker 2: out of that.
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly that's consonant with the use of SSRI's
Speaker 1: selective search on and reuptic conhibitors, Right, yeah, OCDA, anxiety, depression,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So it would be very reasonable to expect
Speaker 1: that what Tom is saying applies in this case.
Speaker 3: I'm wondering if you can.
Speaker 1: Share some examples of the therapeutic benefits that can be conferred
Speaker 1: by psychedelics, in particular people who are facing what you've
Speaker 1: referred to as existential distress. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the first group of patients I talked to were
Speaker 2: cancer patients, and I interviewed quite a few of them.
Speaker 2: Patrick Metis is someone I wrote about in detail in
Speaker 2: the book. I'd never met him, he had died already,
Speaker 2: but I spent a lot of time with his wife
Speaker 2: and his therapist and learning about his story and reading
Speaker 2: his account. And he was a man, he was about
Speaker 2: my age at the time, and a journalist like me also,
Speaker 2: who had gotten cancer of the bile ducts. And his
Speaker 2: wife noticed the whites of his eyes that turned very yellow,
Speaker 2: and he was given a terminal diagnosis and struggled with
Speaker 2: that for a long time and was really paralyzed by it.
Speaker 2: He read about this experiment going on at NYU he
Speaker 2: was in New York, and he decided to enroll in
Speaker 2: this drug trial to see if this could help him
Speaker 2: with his anxiety and depression. His wife actually was against
Speaker 2: it because to her. It represented giving up, but he
Speaker 2: had no intention of doing that. He was continuing with
Speaker 2: his at least for a while with his chemo after
Speaker 2: the experience. And he did it, and he had a
Speaker 2: mystical experience. It was very profound. He described it in
Speaker 2: great detail. He explored his body and visited his cancer.
Speaker 2: He saw it, and at one moment he climbed a
Speaker 2: kind of precipice in his mind and he looks out
Speaker 2: and he sees this kind of plane of consciousness, you know,
Speaker 2: a vista in front of him, which really he thought
Speaker 2: was what would happen to him after he was after
Speaker 2: he died, and he had a sense this was where
Speaker 2: he was going. It wasn't frightening. He was he would
Speaker 2: be okay to go there, but he wasn't ready. He
Speaker 2: still wanted more time with his wife, and he kind
Speaker 2: of turned back. And he came out of the experience
Speaker 2: a changed man and he had I forget how much
Speaker 2: time it was. It was like another eleven months where
Speaker 2: he was able to have great pleasure in life. He
Speaker 2: would spend his days walking along the Brooklyn Pier, checking
Speaker 2: out new restaurants, had really good periods of time with
Speaker 2: his wife and at a certain point decided to stop
Speaker 2: his chemo, which was really debilitating, and he wanted the
Speaker 2: clarity that would come with just living out his last
Speaker 2: months without medicine in his body, and he died a
Speaker 2: death of acceptance. People I interviewed described his room at
Speaker 2: Mount Sinai as like having this glow. He was incredibly
Speaker 2: settled and happy, and all the staff of the hospital
Speaker 2: would want to come by this room to get you
Speaker 2: a taste of this man who was approaching death with
Speaker 2: such equanimity. So it was, you know, it was incredible.
Speaker 2: And at one point his wife sent me a photograph
Speaker 2: of him snapped like three or four days before his death,
Speaker 2: and he was very very thin, wearing the hospital smock,
Speaker 2: and he had an oxygen clip in his nose and
Speaker 2: he was beaming. So that, you know, had a profound
Speaker 2: effect on me. And I interviewed a great many patients
Speaker 2: about their experiences, and there were a lot of common denominators.
Speaker 2: One was a kind of a confrontation with death and
Speaker 2: a confrontation with one's cancer, and in most cases it
Speaker 2: made people much more accepting of their death. So I
Speaker 2: think it has a powerful application there for people with
Speaker 2: life changing diagnoses and obviously not just cancer, I mean
Speaker 2: someone with an als diagnosis or any number of other
Speaker 2: terminal diagnoses. I was kind of sold on it for
Speaker 2: that use. And because we have so little to offer people,
Speaker 2: you know, we give them morphine which dulls their minds,
Speaker 2: and this clarifies their minds. So you know, hopefully this
Speaker 2: will become common.
Speaker 3: 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 noedic quality, and that you know,
Speaker 1: they're not just dismissing their insights as these zany things
Speaker 1: that they had while they were high.
Speaker 3: They see their experience.
Speaker 1: As as this kind of window into some more accurate
Speaker 1: view of reality. You know, take Patrick, who believes that
Speaker 1: he's confronted what his afterlife will look like, and to me,
Speaker 1: it raises some very interesting philosophical and moral questions.
Speaker 2: I struggle with that, and I asked some of the
Speaker 2: researchers about this, and I got a range of answers.
Speaker 2: I mean, one is, you know, well, we don't really
Speaker 2: know what happens after someone dies, and it's not for
Speaker 2: us to tell our patients what happens after someone dies.
Speaker 2: But I would say, you know, well, maybe what you're
Speaker 2: administering is a delusionion to people. And I remember one
Speaker 2: researcher said, hey, if it works, who cares? It? Took
Speaker 2: a purely pragmatic view.
Speaker 3: That's my camp for what it's worth.
Speaker 1: Really.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, As someone who studies cognitive science and believes I
Speaker 1: guess I have a very reductionist view of life. But
Speaker 1: I am of the mind that all we are are
Speaker 1: subjective states, and so in the throes of a terminal illness,
Speaker 1: if you can be brought relief by believing the afterlife
Speaker 1: is one thing. Great, you've reduced suffering. But again, not
Speaker 1: everybody has my exceedingly reductionist view of human existence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's something that needs to be explored.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think that there are many ethical issues
Speaker 2: raised by psychedelics. But it's also important to understand that
Speaker 2: it's not the researchers that are planting this image of
Speaker 2: the afterlife, and it's not the pill. The pill is
Speaker 2: just is a catalyst for thoughts and fantasies and images.
Speaker 2: They're not priming you to have an afterlife experience. They
Speaker 2: may be priming you a little bit to have a
Speaker 2: mystical experience in the way they prepare you. I mean
Speaker 2: that needs to be looked at. But everything that happens
Speaker 2: on a psychedelic experience is the product of your mind
Speaker 2: and to some extent, your expectations and your setting. I mean,
Speaker 2: we know about set and.
Speaker 3: Setting very suggestible, yeah.
Speaker 2: Very suggestible, But it's really your creation. This isn't mind control.
Speaker 2: So if that's where somebody's mind takes them and that's
Speaker 2: a helpful place, it's hard to argue with that. I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean I tend to agree with you, but you know,
Speaker 2: I mean people might have ethical qualms about that, But
Speaker 2: I come back to the fact that there's no information
Speaker 2: in the molecule. Right, it's all what your mind is creating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe it's subjective states, Yeah, it's about maybe a
Speaker 1: reframing for skeptics or people who might have some concerns,
Speaker 1: is that it is essentially a creative exploration into the
Speaker 1: types of things that could reassure an individual person. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, what would pacify Patrick in this very
Speaker 1: specific situation and his mind engages with that.
Speaker 2: You know what's interesting there is you're healing yourself, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, and in fact that is a large part
Speaker 2: what happens. I mean these This is a very non
Speaker 2: interventionist therapy. The therapists say nothing during the experience except
Speaker 2: would you like a glass of water or a snack
Speaker 2: or need to go to the bathroom. It really they
Speaker 2: let your mind go where your mind wants to go.
Speaker 2: It is a kind of self exploration, self healing. And
Speaker 2: you know, there's so much more we need to learn
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 2: Yes? There are. The most interesting one I came across
Speaker 2: is something called holotropic breath work. This was devised by
Speaker 2: Dan Groff, who was a psychiatrist who was doing a
Speaker 2: lot of psychedelic therapy in the sixties, and once the
Speaker 2: drugs were made illegal, he wanted to find a legal
Speaker 2: way to get the same results because he was getting
Speaker 2: amazing results with his patients and borrowing from many different traditions,
Speaker 2: including yogic breathing techniques. He came up with this way
Speaker 2: of inducing a trance state that is very much like psychedelics.
Speaker 2: I did it once, and you basically have this pattern
Speaker 2: of breathing that I think hyperventilates you. You're breathing very
Speaker 2: fast and exhaling more than you're inhaling, and they're playing
Speaker 2: very loud, rhythmic drumming, and after a certain amount of time,
Speaker 2: a few minutes, you enter into this state where you
Speaker 2: can do that breathing without trying to. You're on your back,
Speaker 2: but you're dancing, all your limbs are moving. It's the
Speaker 2: strangest thing that you could induce this trance and you
Speaker 2: have the kind of imagery that you do on psychedelic experience.
Speaker 2: And I did it, and I felt like I'd run
Speaker 2: a marathon when it was over. It was a very
Speaker 2: intense experience, no drugs involved whatsoever. What is it doing
Speaker 2: in the brain. I think it may in fact be
Speaker 2: doing the same thing to the default mode network, because
Speaker 2: you're probably starving the brain of oxygen. But yes, there
Speaker 2: are non pharmacological ways to get similar effects.
Speaker 1: I do wonder whether we as humans would be more
Speaker 1: tolerant of non pharmacological states that actually rival the psychedelic
Speaker 1: ones if they're negative, if they're not drug induced, Like
Speaker 1: there's somehow this bias against the drug induced bad trip.
Speaker 1: But if I were to achieve that psychological state through
Speaker 1: natural means, somehow, I'm more okay with the idea of
Speaker 1: it going sour or being scary.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, you know, we have a prejudice against exogenous drugs,
Speaker 2: but there are ways to drug yourself without them, and
Speaker 2: this is one. There may be risks though to doing that.
Speaker 2: We haven't talked about risk, but one of the really
Speaker 2: striking things about the classical psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin
Speaker 2: and DMT is that there is no lethal dose. You
Speaker 2: can't overdose on these drugs, and you can overdose on
Speaker 2: all sorts of over the counter drugs. There is no
Speaker 2: risk of addiction either. I mean, I'm not trying to
Speaker 2: sell you on anything, Maya.
Speaker 1: Oh no worry, you haven't sold me on anything. I'm
Speaker 1: still not going to do it.
Speaker 2: But the risks, such as they are are, there are
Speaker 2: psychological risks. People do get into psychological trouble, especially when
Speaker 2: they don't pay enough attention to set and setting and
Speaker 2: they don't do it with a guide, and they don't
Speaker 2: do it in a safe environment. It can be you know,
Speaker 2: it can be terrifying, and so you do have to
Speaker 2: keep that in mind. But when you know, I came
Speaker 2: to it late, and I did my due diligence. I
Speaker 2: was not a twenty year old, you know, with no
Speaker 2: proper sense of right.
Speaker 3: I hate a whole freaking book on it.
Speaker 1: No one's going to be able to compete with you
Speaker 1: on that front in terms of doing your due diligence.
Speaker 2: Well, but I wanted to make sure it was safe,
Speaker 2: and I really did look at all the research and
Speaker 2: convince myself this wasn't a stupid or irresponsible thing to do.
Speaker 2: There are legal risks we should point out unless you're
Speaker 2: in a drug trial, you know, you go to a
Speaker 2: university and enter. But aside from that, I convinced myself
Speaker 2: that the benefits would probably outweigh the risks, and I
Speaker 2: certainly feel that way having done it.
Speaker 1: I'd love to ask you a more personal question about
Speaker 1: the long term impact psychedelics have had on your own life.
Speaker 3: What are some enduring.
Speaker 1: Changes you've had in your perspective or your personality ever since?
Speaker 2: You know, I think the big thing is I acquired
Speaker 2: And it was during that episode of ego dissolution or
Speaker 2: you know, dissolution of self, that I described a little
Speaker 2: more perspective on my ego or self. I identified with it.
Speaker 2: I thought I was that person, that voice, and I've
Speaker 2: come to see that it's one voice among several in
Speaker 2: my mind, and that I don't necessarily have to listen
Speaker 2: to it, and that sometimes I can recognize that my
Speaker 2: ego is up to his old tricks and he's being
Speaker 2: hypercritical or needlessly worrying, and I can kind of get
Speaker 2: some distance on it. And I find that very useful.
Speaker 2: It's exactly the kind of insight you might or practice
Speaker 2: you might get out of conventional psychotherapy. But I got
Speaker 2: it in the course of an afternoon, you know, and
Speaker 2: that was very useful. If you ask my wife, she
Speaker 2: would tell you that the experiences have made me more open,
Speaker 2: more emotionally available, things like that. I'm not sure I can,
Speaker 2: you know, I necessarily see that, but it has opened
Speaker 2: up this space of curiosity about myself and self exploration.
Speaker 2: And I found it very useful. I mean, every time
Speaker 2: I've done it, you know, I learned things about myself.
Speaker 2: I didn't know before, and that's incredibly valuable, especially at
Speaker 2: my age. I'm in my sixties now, and you sort
Speaker 2: of think that that process, you know, would have slowed
Speaker 2: or ended, but not at all. It's actually been intensified
Speaker 2: by this.
Speaker 3: Oh, now you're selling me a little bit in the
Speaker 3: last minute, Folks. He gets me while I'm weak and vulnerable. No,
Speaker 3: this is awesome. Thank you so much, Michael.
Speaker 2: Oh my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to you. I
Speaker 2: hope we can do this in person next time.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: go back and listen to last week's episode. Michael and
Speaker 1: I recorded it in front of a live audience in Berkeley.
Speaker 1: We had so much fun talking about how Michael got
Speaker 1: into the topic of consciousness in the first place and
Speaker 1: what it feels like to be inside his brain. We'll
Speaker 1: drop a link to it in today's show notes, and
Speaker 1: of course we'll be back next week with another episode
Speaker 1: of A Slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then.
Speaker 1: A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive
Speaker 1: produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes
Speaker 1: our showrunner Alexander Garratin, Our editor Daphne Chen, our lead
Speaker 1: producer Megan Lubin, our associate producer Sonia Gerwitt, and our
Speaker 1: sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme
Speaker 1: song and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight
Speaker 1: Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so
Speaker 1: big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very
Speaker 1: special thanks to Jimmy Lee