Speaker 1: People say all kinds of things about psychedelics, well being
Speaker 1: in spirituality that are totally not based in evidence at all,
Speaker 1: and our pretty outrageous claims. And so I think providing scientific,
Speaker 1: unbiased evidence, just entering this information into the public sphere
Speaker 1: can have a lot of benefit in terms of reigning
Speaker 1: in the sorts of statements and claims that people make. Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Roland
Speaker 1: Griffiths and David Yaden on the show. Doctor Roland Griffiths
Speaker 1: is a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioral science and
Speaker 1: director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at
Speaker 1: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has authored over
Speaker 1: four hundred scientific publications and has trained more than sixty
Speaker 1: postdoctoral research fellows. His initial two thousand and six publications
Speaker 1: on psilocybin is often attributed as the catalyst for the
Speaker 1: reinitiation of psychedelic research after decades of halted drug research.
Speaker 1: I also have on the show doctor David Yayden, who's
Speaker 1: an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Speaker 1: working in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness research. His
Speaker 1: research focus is on transformative experiences that can result in
Speaker 1: long term changes and how they can temporarily alter consciousness
Speaker 1: and self. His work has been covered by The New
Speaker 1: York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New
Speaker 1: York Magazine, and MPR. In this really rich and poignant episode,
Speaker 1: I talked to doctor Griffiths and doctor Gayden about the
Speaker 1: latest research on psychedelics. They answer some of my burning
Speaker 1: questions such as what are the common characteristics of a
Speaker 1: mystical experience? Are hallucinations necessary for a transformative experience? How
Speaker 1: do psychedelics affect our brain? We also touch on the
Speaker 1: topics of mindfulness, religion, mental illness, and creativity as they
Speaker 1: share about the latest developments in the field. Also, we
Speaker 1: talk about doctor Griffith's own mortality. He was recently dignosed
Speaker 1: with a terminal illness and we discussed what that means
Speaker 1: for how he lives his life and for the research
Speaker 1: he's conducted in his whole life and the lens and
Speaker 1: through what he sees it all now. It was a
Speaker 1: really emotional, poignant, meaningful episode for me, and I'm sure
Speaker 1: you will find it meaningful as well. So, without further ado,
Speaker 1: I bring you, doctor Roland Griffiths and doctor David Jayden.
Speaker 1: Hey Roland, Hey Scott, Yeah, good to see you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nice to find me meet you. Doctor Griffiths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nice to meet you, Scott. Well, Okay, Roland, I would
Speaker 1: love to start out by talking to you for a
Speaker 1: second and find out a little bit more about how
Speaker 1: you even got into this field that you're in. You know,
Speaker 1: what was your PhD dissertation about these sorts of things? Oh?
Speaker 1: So my PhD was psychopharmacology University of Minnesota. The essentially
Speaker 1: coming out of a Scinarian background of all things, which
Speaker 1: is very divergent from where I find myself now. So
Speaker 1: it was experimental analysis of behavior and it was psychopharmacology.
Speaker 1: And I did in graduate school both animal research, which
Speaker 1: was my primary thesis work in psychopharmacology, but I also
Speaker 1: did some work with humans in behavior modification and substance abuse.
Speaker 1: I then went on I went directly from graduate school
Speaker 1: to a assistant professor position at Johns Hopkins, where I've
Speaker 1: been out for half a century fifty years this year,
Speaker 1: and split my time between doing animal research and human research. Again,
Speaker 1: it was on behavioral pharmacology, and most of this work
Speaker 1: was focused on drugs of addiction, mood altering drugs, but
Speaker 1: the funding came primarily from the nationalists on drug abuse,
Speaker 1: so we got very interested in measures of relative reinforcing
Speaker 1: efficacy or abuse liability. We developed a number of techniques
Speaker 1: to assess those. So that's that's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a bio of where I came from. Like, give me
Speaker 1: a little more of the human in you. Why were
Speaker 1: you interested in these topics? What is it about you
Speaker 1: that dovetails with what you do? Let's see if I
Speaker 1: wind myself back to college. I did an internship program
Speaker 1: at a statemental hospital, became interested in their research program,
Speaker 1: ran a study in rats on memory work, and then
Speaker 1: in college I also did I was a psychology major,
Speaker 1: and I ended up doing RNA transfer. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you remember that as an interesting area. So I
Speaker 1: was interested in psychology and basic science physiological psyche and
Speaker 1: when it came to applying for graduate schools, University of
Speaker 1: Minnesota had a very attractive fellowship program in psychopharmacology, which
Speaker 1: incidentally is kind of the predecessor to neuroscience. I mean,
Speaker 1: in this case, it was an interdisciplinary program between pharmacology
Speaker 1: and psychology and neuroscience came out of that with a
Speaker 1: broader interdisciplinary base, so there was a pragmatic element to that. Frankly,
Speaker 1: it was a really attractive offer out of graduate school.
Speaker 1: But I really enjoyed the process of science, of trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how things worked, and that just was
Speaker 1: very intriguing from me to me from the get go.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's kind of characterized my scientific career. I've
Speaker 1: gone with what I find most interesting, and so there
Speaker 1: was a pragmatic element and a random element about getting
Speaker 1: involved in drugs and behavior, but it allowed me to
Speaker 1: do all kinds of interesting things with drugs and behavior
Speaker 1: and looking at mood altering drug cool What were you
Speaker 1: like in middle school? Were you bookish? Were you in
Speaker 1: gifted education? Were you sporty? Were you very popular? I've
Speaker 1: never heard this one. I'm really interested to hear the
Speaker 1: answer to this one. I went to an all boys
Speaker 1: prep school, so shut down some opportunities in the social realm,
Speaker 1: you know. I think I was always a serious student.
Speaker 1: I took classes seriously. I was in with that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I did swim competitively in high school and college and
Speaker 1: enjoyed that. I think I tended to be a very
Speaker 1: serious student. I enjoyed learning things. Let me just say
Speaker 1: Roland and I have been recording conversations about his scientific career,
Speaker 1: his life, his interests. I have to say, we've never
Speaker 1: talked about this, and so it's good. It's funny that that, Scott,
Speaker 1: that you went exactly there to a subject that has
Speaker 1: never cross my mind to ask about. And I don't
Speaker 1: think that we've discussed at all. We haven't. We haven't.
Speaker 1: There's a human behind every set of research, you know,
Speaker 1: and I try to do that. I try to do
Speaker 1: that on my podcast. To understand that human, Well I
Speaker 1: can I can testify it to my being very much human.
Speaker 1: You can verify that. What was the major in college? Well,
Speaker 1: I started off engineering, and then I wasn't particularly good
Speaker 1: at that, nor did I find it very interesting. And
Speaker 1: then I stumbled into psychology, and for a while I
Speaker 1: was psychology pre med, but just trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how people work, you know, was really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: So I was really drawn to psychology as a major.
Speaker 1: At the end of college, I actually was torn about
Speaker 1: whether I was going to go to graduate school or
Speaker 1: off to the Peace Corps. And I'd applied to the
Speaker 1: Peace Corps been accepted but then this opportunity for this
Speaker 1: very attractive fellowship came up and I ended up taking that.
Speaker 1: And so that I think of as one of those
Speaker 1: very divergent points where no telling where I'd be had
Speaker 1: I gone off to at that time Chad Africa to
Speaker 1: dig wells in the Peace Corps. Well, we're very appreciative
Speaker 1: that you stayed the path you did. But let me
Speaker 1: just speak as long as we were talking about that
Speaker 1: early history, and we're going to get to spirituality and
Speaker 1: growing up. Spirituality did not play any particular role in
Speaker 1: my life. I flunked out of confirmation class in sixth
Speaker 1: grade and there was no there there for me. So
Speaker 1: with respect to that, there's really no particular interest or
Speaker 1: content to spirituality growing up. And I would say through
Speaker 1: at least college, Oh well, go on. So what happened
Speaker 1: after college or around college? Was there something that happened?
Speaker 1: You're teasing, You're teasing something there and implicitly no. Well,
Speaker 1: let's see. So in graduate school I actually became intrigued
Speaker 1: with meditation just as a there was some sense, particularly
Speaker 1: coming from this deeply held sense with the experimental analysis,
Speaker 1: that we really discount subjective effects or subjective accounts, and
Speaker 1: that there was really something intriguing about the idea of
Speaker 1: exploring interstates. And there was the time of Indian meditation
Speaker 1: teacher who was in town and who and with whom
Speaker 1: some of my good friends started learning meditation from. And
Speaker 1: I was really intrigued by that that there was something
Speaker 1: about my interiority that I was basically pretty ignorant of,
Speaker 1: and I didn't understand meditation from where I was being
Speaker 1: trained in terms of in terms of the peromounal analysis.
Speaker 1: It seemed like an empty kind of exercise because there
Speaker 1: was there'd be no validating what was going on in
Speaker 1: the interior. And when I went to my first meditation classes,
Speaker 1: this Hindu oriented meditation teacher was talking started talking about
Speaker 1: the underlying physiology, you know, the chakra system and the
Speaker 1: nadis and stuff like that, and I thought, well, this
Speaker 1: makes no sense from what I know about physiology. And
Speaker 1: one part of me just wanted to walk out the
Speaker 1: door because the guy was either ignorant or a fraud.
Speaker 1: But what I was also able to kind of respect
Speaker 1: is that there's this methodology that is meditation that's been
Speaker 1: passed down for thousands of years, and it's survived and
Speaker 1: so there might be a there there, There might be
Speaker 1: something interesting, and he just may not have the language
Speaker 1: to discy. And so I took those teachings as kind
Speaker 1: of metaphorical, you know, pay attention to your heart chakra,
Speaker 1: and so I was able to translate that. But frankly,
Speaker 1: when I got into meditation, it was a hurdle too
Speaker 1: high to clear for me. And that's the case with
Speaker 1: many people beginning meditation practice, and I just couldn't engage.
Speaker 1: There was nothing a particular meaning there for me, so
Speaker 1: I quickly dropped it. But then speeding up twenty five
Speaker 1: years later, after being at Hopkins for a while, that's
Speaker 1: when I got re engaged with meditation. Something took off,
Speaker 1: and that opened up this whole field of investigation for me,
Speaker 1: an interest in interior experience and spirituality in particular. Wow,
Speaker 1: I will talk much more deeply about that, leader. I'd
Speaker 1: like to just turn the spotlight to David Yden for
Speaker 1: a second. Doctor David Yiden, Nice to see you here.
Speaker 1: Great to see Scott. How in the world did you
Speaker 1: get interested in these topics? Yeah, so, I know that's
Speaker 1: a long story. It is. I'll give you the briefer version.
Speaker 1: The cliff notes I think there was some similarity though
Speaker 1: with some of Roland's path, although some differences as well.
Speaker 1: I was raised religious but became questioner at a very
Speaker 1: young age, at the early teens, probably an atheist really
Speaker 1: at that point, although I saw a great value in
Speaker 1: the community aspect of religion. That continued on until my
Speaker 1: experience in college, which didn't begin with meditation. It came
Speaker 1: on as a spontaneous experience that I was undeserving of
Speaker 1: and that I wasn't looking for it. It came to me,
Speaker 1: and I feel intense attitude for this experience, an experience
Speaker 1: that came to me in the midst of looking for
Speaker 1: direction in life. That experience became the direction essentially. So Scott,
Speaker 1: I know you and I have talked about this, maybe
Speaker 1: we've talked about it before, even on your podcast, But
Speaker 1: this was a spontaneous experience that occurred on my dorm
Speaker 1: room bed and had all of the qualities of a
Speaker 1: mystical type experience. It occurred not in the context of
Speaker 1: any psychoactive substance and no practice whatsoever. This was really,
Speaker 1: I think, purely spontaneous, although maybe it could be considered
Speaker 1: a transitional period in life, which is a somewhat common
Speaker 1: trigger of these experiences. But basically this experience, as I say,
Speaker 1: became my fascination, almost an obsession, I would say, and
Speaker 1: trying to understand what this experience was, what happened to me,
Speaker 1: and this led me through comparative religion, religious studies, philosophy
Speaker 1: briefly after this experience became a full on believer in
Speaker 1: religious spiritual type phenomenon. It was really my study of
Speaker 1: philosophy that brought me into an agnosticism, which is I
Speaker 1: consider myself now an agnostic. My curiosity was not being
Speaker 1: addressed by scholarly work or philosophical work. It was only
Speaker 1: scientific work that really felt like a way forward. And
Speaker 1: so I moved into neuroscience and finally, well not finally,
Speaker 1: but psychology, which I did my doctoral work in and
Speaker 1: where I met you Scott, and then psychopharmacology with Roland,
Speaker 1: ultimately leading to the the study of psychedelics. Those are
Speaker 1: the cliff notes you can drill down into to any
Speaker 1: of those themes. Well, what were you like in middle school?
Speaker 1: Were you? Were you spiritual at all? No? No, middle
Speaker 1: school I would have been deeply questioning probably the kind
Speaker 1: of social conventional religion that I was raised in and
Speaker 1: at that point probably beginning to mostly reject explicitly religious
Speaker 1: doctrine as an article of faith, but as I said,
Speaker 1: really remaining very sympathetic to religion in its community aspect,
Speaker 1: at least in the community I was involved in and
Speaker 1: found actually quite a lot of meaning and value in
Speaker 1: that community. But in terms of beliefs, I was very
Speaker 1: much questioning. I would say I was marked by a
Speaker 1: lot of questioning throughout well, really my entire life, I suppose,
Speaker 1: maybe defined by that in some ways. Thank you to
Speaker 1: you for telling us tell me a little bit about
Speaker 1: that background there. It makes me wonder, Roland, do you
Speaker 1: think you've ever had in your life a something that
Speaker 1: resembles the kind of experience David had that we can
Speaker 1: put the label mystical experience on it, but we still
Speaker 1: don't really know exactly what it is. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just to pick up where I left off, So about
Speaker 1: twenty five years ago, I had a good friend who
Speaker 1: started getting involved with a meditation group here in Baltimore.
Speaker 1: It was City Yoga, It's actually a international group, and
Speaker 1: she got me intrigued about trying meditation again, and this
Speaker 1: time something was different. I engaged with it. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I had changed, whether the instruction set was
Speaker 1: different enough, but I started meditating and having interesting experiences
Speaker 1: that I didn't formally have. And this kind of yoga,
Speaker 1: it's out of a tonric tradition, puts a lot of
Speaker 1: emphasis on the importance of experience, emergent experience out of
Speaker 1: the meditation practice, which stands in really real contracts stark
Speaker 1: contrast to other forms of meditation that will tell you
Speaker 1: forget about those experiences, don't pay any attention to them.
Speaker 1: But sid of yoga in fact puts a lot of
Speaker 1: emphasis on that and effect prizes experiences. And that started
Speaker 1: happening within this tradition to me, and I became very
Speaker 1: intrigued about that. It was kind of opening this window
Speaker 1: into interior landscape that I actually I didn't know how
Speaker 1: to make sense of it. I felt some deep longing
Speaker 1: for it, I recognized well. I actually initially found it
Speaker 1: very confusing and disorienting because I didn't know how much
Speaker 1: of what I was experience was similar to what one
Speaker 1: would experience in any meditation tradition, or whether it was
Speaker 1: specific to this meditation tradition. It felt like it rhymed
Speaker 1: with religious experience at some level, and because at that
Speaker 1: point I was so entirely ignorant of both meditation and
Speaker 1: religious tradition that I had a lot of catching up
Speaker 1: to do. But certainly there were early experiences that verged
Speaker 1: on mystical type experiences, but not full out mystical experiences.
Speaker 1: But I subsequently, as I deepened my meditation practice, I
Speaker 1: certainly had some of those experiences. And I certainly also
Speaker 1: now at this point, have had some of those experiences
Speaker 1: with psychedelics. So I'm absolutely confident that those kinds of
Speaker 1: experiences occur, and that's part of the fascination now I
Speaker 1: have for investigating the nature of those experiences and their
Speaker 1: causes and consequence. Sure, scientifically, what do you think are
Speaker 1: some of the most replicable common characteristics across these experiences?
Speaker 1: Maybe name two, I mean name three, three? Name three?
Speaker 1: I think three? Three I think are in my mind
Speaker 1: the most important features for the enduring worldview changes that
Speaker 1: can come about. And so one is what's characterized as
Speaker 1: a sense of unity, But it could be that everything
Speaker 1: is connected, it could be that everything is empty, it
Speaker 1: could be experienced as avoid They're both introvertive and extrovertive features.
Speaker 1: Of that, but essentially it's everything connected, and that's accompanied
Speaker 1: by this sense of preciousness, preciousness beyond belief. You want
Speaker 1: to use religious language, it would be sacredness. There's something
Speaker 1: intensely important about that experience, deserving of awe or reverence.
Speaker 1: And then the final feature is the sense that that
Speaker 1: experience is more real and more true than every day
Speaker 1: waking consciousness. It's coming across with this authoritative value of truth.
Speaker 1: And so my sense is with those features, if you
Speaker 1: package them together, you have this sense we're all connected
Speaker 1: and we're not different. It's precious and it's absolutely true,
Speaker 1: and you thereby have the seeds for remarkable change going forward.
Speaker 1: In my mind right right now, although we have a
Speaker 1: lot of research to do to further unpack it, that
Speaker 1: really describes this experience for me. Thank you for describing that. David,
Speaker 1: did you want to add anything to that or do
Speaker 1: you think that captures it from your perspective? Your perspective
Speaker 1: as well. I think I would agree with those features
Speaker 1: that that Roland mentioned. As Roland was talking, I was
Speaker 1: checking off whether they fit with the experience I described
Speaker 1: that occurred in my college years. They all fit exactly.
Speaker 1: There's a number of other features that were included in
Speaker 1: my experience that that Roland didn't mention. But the question
Speaker 1: was what are the main replicable features? I suspect some
Speaker 1: people may have experiences in which connectedness isn't necessarily the
Speaker 1: overriding feature. But even in those, even if someone feels connected,
Speaker 1: feels the presence of God or void or something, there's
Speaker 1: other sort of phenomenological features that can play a dominant role.
Speaker 1: If you were to pose the question did you feel
Speaker 1: more connected to that entity or object or to others
Speaker 1: around you? I think most people would would indeed say yes.
Speaker 1: So I agree that there's something about these experiences that
Speaker 1: seem to pierce through this perceived isolation where often it
Speaker 1: feels as if there's me and then there's everything else
Speaker 1: and everyone else, And during these experiences it seems to
Speaker 1: dramatically alter. There's this figure ground reversal where all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you feel not apart from but part of
Speaker 1: the rest of what's going on. And so I should
Speaker 1: point out there's a real deep and long standing scholarly
Speaker 1: debate on this exact question, which is are there replicable
Speaker 1: features across these experiences, across all cultures and across history.
Speaker 1: Some say the perennialists say, these experiences are all the
Speaker 1: same everywhere and for everyone, and they're interpreted differently, whereas
Speaker 1: on the other hand, the cultural constructivists will say, no,
Speaker 1: if you read these accounts, they're all different across cultures
Speaker 1: and there's no similarity. This strikes me very much as
Speaker 1: an empirical question and one that's tractable and seems obvious
Speaker 1: to me that these are two extremes, that there will
Speaker 1: be common clusters of subjective features that will be identifiable,
Speaker 1: and what will need to happen is probably a field wide,
Speaker 1: very large initiative to try to understand what those common
Speaker 1: clusters are and how they vary across cultures. Probably similar
Speaker 1: to personality psychology really, I mean in terms of identifying
Speaker 1: the Big Five. I mean, this was decades long and
Speaker 1: involved hundreds of researchers and hundreds of thousands of participants,
Speaker 1: and Scott you know more about the history of that
Speaker 1: research than I do. But I suspect something very large,
Speaker 1: some kind of very large initiative will be required to
Speaker 1: really drill down and find the shared features of these experiences,
Speaker 1: in which aspects bury across cultures. Yeah, you have that
Speaker 1: unitary continuum, right. I'm really curious to what extent we
Speaker 1: can reliably differentiate this from mental illness, because I think
Speaker 1: a big part of your work has been showing that
Speaker 1: this does not belong in the realm of mental illness.
Speaker 1: Like Freud called these experiences a regression to the womb
Speaker 1: or an infantile regression to the womb or something like that,
Speaker 1: And a big part of the work both are doing
Speaker 1: is showing that these are very positive experiences for a
Speaker 1: lot of people, even if there may be some fear
Speaker 1: mixed in or anxiety, that they're ultimately positive and they
Speaker 1: create transformative changes that are in a positive direction for
Speaker 1: the person. So how do you differentiate though, this state
Speaker 1: from menia? For instance? That's one state that I think
Speaker 1: of in particular. When I think of this, I think, well,
Speaker 1: how's it different from menia? Well, I think the first
Speaker 1: thing to say is it's both. These experiences are associated
Speaker 1: with positive outcomes and psychopathological outcomes, and in some cases
Speaker 1: these things can be mixed in complicated ways in terms
Speaker 1: of the outcomes from these experiences. I mean, and so
Speaker 1: this is again an empirical question that can be quantified
Speaker 1: to some extent in terms of the proportionality of how
Speaker 1: many of these kinds of experiences end up having positive impacts,
Speaker 1: how many are purely negative, and how many are mixed.
Speaker 1: And this kind of empirical approach, I think is what's required.
Speaker 1: There's some preliminary evidence here, but I'll just say I
Speaker 1: need to give a shout out to William James, who
Speaker 1: was century ago made the case that we need to
Speaker 1: study these experiences empirically to get a sense of the proportionality,
Speaker 1: and that he very much mentioned that positive and pathological
Speaker 1: outcomes can flow from these experiences. In the intervening decades,
Speaker 1: I think that insight was lost. You mentioned Freud no
Speaker 1: personal experience of having one of these moments, but he
Speaker 1: assumed that it was associated with psychopathology, collecting no data.
Speaker 1: Carl Jung, on the other hand, had these experiences, became
Speaker 1: basically an enthusiast and wasn't collected data either, but assume
Speaker 1: that these were the key to mental health. And I
Speaker 1: think both of these are extreme perspectives, wholly positive or
Speaker 1: completely pathological, and importantly not involving actual evidence. So now
Speaker 1: I think we're at the point where we can go
Speaker 1: back to James's initial approach and collect evidence. And so
Speaker 1: the evidence that has been collected so far, I think
Speaker 1: presents a picture where these kinds of experiences are surprisingly
Speaker 1: prevalent in the normal population. Estimates range anywhere from depending
Speaker 1: on the level of intensity of the experience, anywhere between
Speaker 1: say fifteen percent or so to thirty five percent people
Speaker 1: who will endorse having had one of these kinds of experiences.
Speaker 1: There's a number of gallop poles and social general social
Speaker 1: survey polls on this issue. And when you collect data
Speaker 1: on people who have had one of these experiences, they
Speaker 1: endorse them overwhelmingly as positive. So the vast majority of
Speaker 1: these experiences seem to result in increased well being, more
Speaker 1: of a social or altruistic impulse, and a deeply felt
Speaker 1: sense of meaning that it's persisting. Some people say the
Speaker 1: experience was simply confusing and they derive no benefit, and
Speaker 1: some require therapeutic care processing the experience in psychotherapy sessions,
Speaker 1: and some require hospitalization. That's actually quite rare, but I
Speaker 1: think important to mention because what the data allows us
Speaker 1: to present is a more nuanced understanding of these experiences
Speaker 1: that isn't purely pathological or purely positive, but something like
Speaker 1: mostly posit, but by no means always positive. Yeah, fair enough, Roland.
Speaker 1: Do you want to jump in there. Yeah, I agree
Speaker 1: with what David's saying. There, let's see and you ask
Speaker 1: specifically that how these are differentiated from mental illness with
Speaker 1: the hallucinogens you know in LSD in particular, I mean,
Speaker 1: it was originally put forth as a psychotomometic that is
Speaker 1: a compound that would be of interest to psychiatrists and
Speaker 1: psychologists because it seemed to mimic psychotic process and there
Speaker 1: certainly is some truth to that. To the acute effects,
Speaker 1: that's just a very limited description of these experiences, and
Speaker 1: with psychedelics in particular, I mean, the primary mystical experience
Speaker 1: is just one of any number of kinds of experiences
Speaker 1: one can have with these compounds. So it's a subset
Speaker 1: of the much larger range of experiences that people have.
Speaker 1: But also to underscore what David said, I mean, there
Speaker 1: are risks associated with these experiences, whether they're whether they're
Speaker 1: engendered by psychedelics or whether they occur in absence of psychedelics.
Speaker 1: Some people go on to have very disturbing psychological consequences,
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety with the psychedelics. One concern is precipitation
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia frankly and during psychotic illness, but that is
Speaker 1: not the psychedelics alone. There's a literature on how meditation
Speaker 1: can also produce very disruptive and enduring negative experiences. He's
Speaker 1: got current low rates. There is a rhyme with respect
Speaker 1: to the nature of the phenomenology of these states and
Speaker 1: mental illness. And it's actually for that reason that I
Speaker 1: think psychiatry in particular has been very slow to warm
Speaker 1: up once again to interest in research with psychedelics because
Speaker 1: they're accustomed to seeing psychopathology at its worse, and they're
Speaker 1: also seeing new on set cases of mental disorders that
Speaker 1: people are attributing to psychedelics. And so my experience and
Speaker 1: getting involved in this research and actually reintroducing the legitimacy
Speaker 1: of these kinds of studies being done in healthy volunteers
Speaker 1: without histories of psychedelic use. Psychiatry establishment in particular was
Speaker 1: very skeptical initially, I think, for understandable and good reasons.
Speaker 1: But all that being said, to place them in and
Speaker 1: in a limited framework of DSM four diagnostic categories is
Speaker 1: to throw the literally the baby out with a Bath.
Speaker 1: Let me just teck onto that I really appreciate that
Speaker 1: role and brought it back to your question, Scott, which
Speaker 1: is how to differentiate these from mental illness? And I
Speaker 1: promise I'll stop bringing up William James after this mention,
Speaker 1: but it's an important one and a pretty deep issue,
Speaker 1: which is the definition of mental illness. And Hopkins has
Speaker 1: a history in psychiatry. Adolph Meyer is known to be
Speaker 1: the kind of founder of modern psychiat is at Hopkins,
Speaker 1: and a lot of his work kind of went into
Speaker 1: what we now know as the DSM. And the definition
Speaker 1: of mental disorder is outcome oriented as to involve suffering
Speaker 1: for oneself and others and dysfunction in order for something
Speaker 1: to count as a mental disorder. And actually this comes
Speaker 1: directly and explicitly from William James. So William James's philosophy
Speaker 1: of pragmatism is all about the value of something is
Speaker 1: determined by the outcomes that flow from it. William James
Speaker 1: sent his graduate students to work with Adolf Meyer, and
Speaker 1: Adolf Meyer specifically and explicitly credited James to his view
Speaker 1: for his view on mental disorders. So you have to
Speaker 1: look at the outcomes that flow from any experience in
Speaker 1: order to determine whether or not it should be considered psychopathological, psychopathological,
Speaker 1: or a mental disorder or mental illness. And so people
Speaker 1: have these experiences like Roland described, like I described, and
Speaker 1: they may sound unusual, but in fact, if there's positive
Speaker 1: outcomes flowing from these mental states, it's inappropriate to define
Speaker 1: it in terms of a mental disorder. So I think
Speaker 1: to answer your question, Scott, you have to look at
Speaker 1: the outcomes. If the outcomes are negative, involving suffering for
Speaker 1: oneself or other or dysfunction in life, then we call
Speaker 1: it mental illness. But if it's if the outcomes are positive,
Speaker 1: we call it something else. Thank you. That's a really
Speaker 1: good clarification. So far, we focused on these experiences agnostic
Speaker 1: whether or not you use psychedelics or not to activate them.
Speaker 1: But let's go a little bit deeper into psychedelics and
Speaker 1: kind of where we're at right now. As a potential
Speaker 1: activator of these experiences, would you say that on the
Speaker 1: whole your research, modern day research has validated Timothy Leary
Speaker 1: like if Timothy Leary like came back, you know, they
Speaker 1: are the ghost of Timothy Leary's here and he's listening
Speaker 1: to our podcast. Would he smile knowing what you all
Speaker 1: are finding? I think he would in some respects. The
Speaker 1: first study that I ended up publishing and we initiated
Speaker 1: research like I was describing with psychedelics after my getting
Speaker 1: involved with meditation and being curious about altered states of consciousness,
Speaker 1: not knowing exactly and thinking that that was a priority
Speaker 1: for me in my life to kind of understand what
Speaker 1: was going on here. It led to immediate dissociate creation,
Speaker 1: a bit of a midlife crisis, I would say, with
Speaker 1: respect to what I was doing as a well established
Speaker 1: international reputation psychopharmacologists and drug abuse pharmacology, when that ceased
Speaker 1: to have the kind of the magnitude of interest and
Speaker 1: curiosity for me than this quest to understand something more
Speaker 1: about the nature of interiority and in particular these kinds
Speaker 1: of experiences. So we ran that first study, and I
Speaker 1: went into it rather a skeptic because I hadn't had
Speaker 1: at that point any meaningful experience with psychedelics and was
Speaker 1: skeptical about the psychedelic enthusiasts who seemed so enthralled with
Speaker 1: these effects. And Timothy very certainly would have been one
Speaker 1: of those back in the day. So also that initial
Speaker 1: study just laid the groundwork in dovetailed with this very conversation,
Speaker 1: and that was that most people studied had these mystical
Speaker 1: type experiences and reported and enduring positive changes and moods, attitudes,
Speaker 1: and behavior months after having had the experience. And that
Speaker 1: was totally intriguing to me on several different levels. And
Speaker 1: number one just my own personal interest in these kinds
Speaker 1: of experiences and what they mean, but two scientifically, that
Speaker 1: all of a sudden we were opening the doorway to
Speaker 1: prospective study of these kinds of experiences, because up to
Speaker 1: that point we were looking at naturalistically occurring experiences. But
Speaker 1: you can't run prospective science on that. You need to
Speaker 1: you need to be able to randomize conditions in order
Speaker 1: to infer causality. And psychedelics provide this kind of unique
Speaker 1: tool because it's a high probability that you can occasion
Speaker 1: these kinds of experiences, and therefore you can manipulate conditions,
Speaker 1: you can randomize groups. So scientifically, I kind of immediately
Speaker 1: recognized it as this untapped field because these drugs hadn't
Speaker 1: been studied for years, and so that that drew me
Speaker 1: in on the scientific front. But also at the personal
Speaker 1: level of curiosity. But Roland, I kind of think of
Speaker 1: you as the anti Timothy Leary in other ways. I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm glad that we don't talk that much
Speaker 1: about Timothy Leary anymore. Actually haven't heard that name for
Speaker 1: a long time, because I think the field has moved on,
Speaker 1: which is a good thing, because Timothy Leary really kind
Speaker 1: of abandoned a careful skeptical attitude in his scientific work,
Speaker 1: and I think that that's just absolutely essential, and was
Speaker 1: an evangelist for recreational use, which I think is highly problematic.
Speaker 1: And I think he made a lot of metaphysical assumptions
Speaker 1: about the nature of the experience and wasn't able to
Speaker 1: hold them in a questioning or bracketed kind of suspension
Speaker 1: of unknowingness. And I think Roland, you do do all
Speaker 1: of those things. I mean, you insist on a careful
Speaker 1: empirical approach that acknowledges benefits as well as risks. You
Speaker 1: do bracket things that can't be addressed scientifically, and you're
Speaker 1: not promoting you know, widespread non conscientious use. So and
Speaker 1: I admire tremendously all of those things in you, and
Speaker 1: I seek to follow in that mold. So I really
Speaker 1: do see you as a kind of anti Timothy Learria,
Speaker 1: a skeptical Timothy Larry. Yeah, David, I agree. I don't
Speaker 1: identify with Timothy Larry. But Scott's question was would Timothy
Speaker 1: Larry be surprised, And I think the answer would be no.
Speaker 1: He you know, he really got the core that these
Speaker 1: experiences are transformative, and then of course he he went
Speaker 1: off the rail, both scientifically and in terms of his
Speaker 1: own involvement in that. But I think the core of
Speaker 1: what draws you and I into this area of interest
Speaker 1: is precisely what he was expanding about and trying to
Speaker 1: push into culture and I and again I agree with
Speaker 1: you and attributing metaphysical truths to it. It's just that
Speaker 1: we we can't embrace. But the core of this, that
Speaker 1: these compounds kind occasion, these profound life transformative experiences, you know,
Speaker 1: is exactly what draws me and I think you into this,
Speaker 1: And I would argue it drew him into it. What
Speaker 1: are some of the most exciting developments in the field,
Speaker 1: as you two see it right now for the future.
Speaker 1: Let's talk the future of psychedelics right now, the science
Speaker 1: of it, so I'll start, and there's just so much
Speaker 1: to say about I know, it's a very vibrant field
Speaker 1: right now. Well let's see, I guess, yeah, there's so
Speaker 1: much to say. Because we can run prospective studies now
Speaker 1: with psychedelics, Virtually all areas of research are open for investigation,
Speaker 1: be it at neuroscience level, psychological level, therapeutics, personality, dispositional
Speaker 1: characteristics that feed into the nature of the experiences, both
Speaker 1: their causes genetically and otherwise and their consequences behaviorally and otherwise.
Speaker 1: All of that is open for investigation. And you could
Speaker 1: also get into visual perceptual phenomena and different cognitive processing.
Speaker 1: So it's a hugely rich area for investigation. I think
Speaker 1: my interest, in David's interest, and what we're really talking
Speaker 1: about here is the nature of these transformative experience says
Speaker 1: that occur and what's exciting about that. Well, when I
Speaker 1: first came upon those experiences, frankly, I didn't anticipate the
Speaker 1: strength and the magnitude of the kinds of effects that
Speaker 1: we saw and the curious feature that people were attributing
Speaker 1: these enduring positive changes to them. So I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of the core. That's the core observation, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: where's that going. The neuroscience of this is opening up
Speaker 1: in very exciting ways, and so the correlates of these
Speaker 1: experiences are under intense investigation with in terms of brain function,
Speaker 1: brain network, all the kinds of imaging methodologies that we
Speaker 1: have available. And my question is about the neuroscience of
Speaker 1: this stuff, is that when I read Michael Pollin's book,
Speaker 1: it sort of seemed like the big triumphant moment for
Speaker 1: him was when he quieted his default mode network when
Speaker 1: he had his brain scanned. I believe it was by
Speaker 1: you and your team, and he's like, I won the
Speaker 1: game of life because my default mode network is silent.
Speaker 1: And I just want to say I come from it
Speaker 1: from a creativity research perspective where I have been arguing
Speaker 1: for the last fifteen years extalling the merits of activation
Speaker 1: of the default mode network, like that I published with
Speaker 1: my colleagues, and like Nature neuroscience, showing that to the
Speaker 1: extent we can activate our default mode network is the
Speaker 1: extent to which we can show our highest heights of
Speaker 1: creative thinking and imagination. So I would love to reconcile
Speaker 1: all this with you once and for all, so I
Speaker 1: can kind of wrap my head around how to integrate
Speaker 1: the two literatures. Does that make sense? Well, the question does?
Speaker 1: I don't think I can provide you a coherent answer.
Speaker 1: So let's see number one. We did not do the
Speaker 1: scanning on Michael pok okayle. See. I think that the
Speaker 1: explanation that the effects of the psychedelics, you know, are
Speaker 1: due to the wideting and the default mode network was
Speaker 1: taken up very quickly within the community. It kind of
Speaker 1: had some face validity to it, kind of bringing you
Speaker 1: into the present moment. It converged with some findings and
Speaker 1: long term meditators that showed decreased activity in the default
Speaker 1: mode network. But it surely is much much more complex
Speaker 1: than that, and so and there are a number of
Speaker 1: other now proposals for different network processes that might be
Speaker 1: key to some of these effects of the psychedelics. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean that it has been a
Speaker 1: replicable kind of phenomenon. But if you think of what
Speaker 1: our primitive understanding about how the brain works, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, we're nowhere close to understanding consciousness, and it
Speaker 1: surely must be greater than just tamping down a single
Speaker 1: network that results in these kinds of enduring effects. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I can't provide you any better answer
Speaker 1: than that. David, do you have other thoughts about that?
Speaker 1: I think I just agree with what you're saying, and
Speaker 1: that it was taken up very quickly, but is way
Speaker 1: too simplistic of an understanding. This idea that the default
Speaker 1: mode network going offline explains the acute subjective effects of psychedelics,
Speaker 1: and the equating of the default mode network with the
Speaker 1: ego and going offline results in ego dissolution. I think
Speaker 1: all of that is painting in massive brushstrokes and is
Speaker 1: way overly simplistic, And I would say we're at such
Speaker 1: a early level of understanding that I encourage not embracing
Speaker 1: that narrative because it will surely be much more complicated.
Speaker 1: I mean, all kinds of things will tamp down the
Speaker 1: default bone network, including focusing on anything and also including
Speaker 1: my most psychoactive substances. So it's simply too general of
Speaker 1: a finding to be much of an explanation in the
Speaker 1: realm of psychedelic subjective effects or therapeutic effects. I'm really
Speaker 1: pleased to hear that, you know, because I'm trying to
Speaker 1: reconcile that, like Andrew Newberg's findings. It's really showing that
Speaker 1: there are other areas that represent self, other spatial orientation
Speaker 1: that's not default mode. So now your thing can be
Speaker 1: reduced to default mode. And I guess from a journalist's perspective,
Speaker 1: maybe that was a good story, you know, but I
Speaker 1: guess I've just been more critical about that being the
Speaker 1: main narrative, especially considering, you know, creativity requires being able
Speaker 1: to jam in the stream of consciousness and you know
Speaker 1: when you you know, and being able to access those
Speaker 1: personal episodic memories that come from the default mode network,
Speaker 1: as well as projecting yourself into the future. I would
Speaker 1: just say, I think that's an exciting frontier to integrate
Speaker 1: the psychedelic science with creativity research and the neuroscience of
Speaker 1: this stuff, you know. I mean, that's what I was
Speaker 1: saying earlier. There's so many different directions creativity is certainly
Speaker 1: and then what's really drawn the cultural attention is the
Speaker 1: therapeutic use of these compounds, and it turns out that
Speaker 1: that looks very, very powerful, and we don't know what
Speaker 1: the limits are. They have yet to undergo the final
Speaker 1: stamp of approval from FDA, and I would hope that
Speaker 1: that would be forthcoming, but that's a gauntlet of studies
Speaker 1: that need to be conducted. It looks like the first
Speaker 1: approvable applications, at least for the classic psychedelics like psilocybin LSD,
Speaker 1: will be depression or treatment resistant depression. Our initial clinical
Speaker 1: study was in cancer patients with a life threatening cancer diagnosis,
Speaker 1: and there these experiences were hugely effective at decreasing enduringly
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety. And I actually think that that's one
Speaker 1: of the most powerful applications. But there's also cigarettes, there
Speaker 1: are also the addictions and perhaps a number of other
Speaker 1: psychiatric disorders. So that that's very exciting. But what completely
Speaker 1: germane to our conversation, but I think is more interesting,
Speaker 1: more exciting from where I sit, more consequential in the
Speaker 1: long run, is understand the causes and consequences of these
Speaker 1: experiences in healthy participants, and to the extent that these
Speaker 1: kinds of experiences can change worldview, the sense of interconnectedness
Speaker 1: of all people and all things in an enduring way.
Speaker 1: They kind of underwrite the logic of a change in
Speaker 1: our in our ethical system. I mean, there's what comes
Speaker 1: out of these experiences if they occur, right in there
Speaker 1: and they're and they're supported in aftercare. Is this pro
Speaker 1: social sense of mutual caretaking? And frankly, I can't think
Speaker 1: of a more important thing to be investigating scientifically with
Speaker 1: the hope that then gets taken into culture because we
Speaker 1: we actually need to solve this problem otherwise we run
Speaker 1: the risk of destroying ourselves as a species with all
Speaker 1: these potentially existential threats that most of them are human created,
Speaker 1: like nuclear or bioweapons or AI risk or climate change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and maybe we bring in some of the work David
Speaker 1: and I did on the Late triad. How can this
Speaker 1: stuff make people better people, better humans? It's a very
Speaker 1: interesting question to what extends to psychedelics, the hoscin nations
Speaker 1: of psychedelics, to what extent is that important for the
Speaker 1: positive transformative experiences, Because, as you know, some people are
Speaker 1: curious about prescribing for people depression psychedelics that do not
Speaker 1: activate a houcinogenetic state. And I wanted your thoughts on
Speaker 1: that because some people were excited about that. Right. You know,
Speaker 1: what I think is that there certainly are pharmac and
Speaker 1: subsequent neuropharmacological features or consequences of administering psychedelics that are
Speaker 1: relevant to therapeutic effects to the extent that modulates uh
Speaker 1: gabba system uh uh you know, could be could be
Speaker 1: really important. But the most interesting effects, and the ones
Speaker 1: that we've been talking about, these that result in worldview
Speaker 1: change and sense of self change, those come, it seems
Speaker 1: to me, directly out of the experience itself. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what people reference, and so it's hard hard to
Speaker 1: imagine that you would get the kinds of therapeutic effects
Speaker 1: and the and the deepest kinds of changes that can
Speaker 1: occur in absence of the subjective effects. It's it's more
Speaker 1: than just the visual hallucination. So I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: whole set of the phenomenology of experience. And so you know,
Speaker 1: there are psychedelics like five me O d m T
Speaker 1: which are often described as being experiences avoid of contents
Speaker 1: of consciousness other than pure awareness, and yet those very
Speaker 1: likely have similar kinds of transformative effects. So it's really
Speaker 1: about the subjective phenomenon, the subjective experience of these, And
Speaker 1: what we don't know is how much, you know, visual
Speaker 1: alterations are important to that. My personal thought is that
Speaker 1: there often can be a distractor, that there are people
Speaker 1: who get intrigued by what's coming up visually for them,
Speaker 1: and that's where they place their attention throughout the experience.
Speaker 1: And for me, that's kind of missing the point, you know.
Speaker 1: And and there are people we have people in our
Speaker 1: studies writ down their experiences the evening after their experiences
Speaker 1: and they bring that back. And so some people come
Speaker 1: back with a couple of sheets of paper to describe
Speaker 1: nothing but what they saw in that experience. And high
Speaker 1: dose psilocybin is prone to produce a lot of visual effects.
Speaker 1: There's so much more going on in the experience than
Speaker 1: that that that I suspect that that can just be
Speaker 1: a distraction. I can see how that this research needs
Speaker 1: to be done for the next at least two hundred
Speaker 1: years before we understand this, because being able to isolate
Speaker 1: which components are the most important components is itself a
Speaker 1: fascinating question. How do you know some of this is
Speaker 1: in placebo? What it would be even a good control group.
Speaker 1: I have so many questions, yes, David, go, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: well I agree, I'm beating a kind of a critical
Speaker 1: skeptical nuanced evidence based picture is so important in this
Speaker 1: whole area. But yeah, right now, hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: dollars from the government and industry are going into the
Speaker 1: attempt to develop psychedelic like substances that are similar in
Speaker 1: some ways but lack the acute subjective effects, so they
Speaker 1: take the trip out, so to speak. And I agree
Speaker 1: entirely with Roland. There's no question there are certain lower
Speaker 1: level neurobiological processes that will have therapeutic effect neurogenesis plasticity
Speaker 1: related effects, for example. But I find it implausible that
Speaker 1: if you take away the higher level neurobiological effects associated
Speaker 1: with conscious experience cognition affect, that you'll see anything like
Speaker 1: the enduring positive effects that we see in most but
Speaker 1: not all, participants in psychedelic studies. So for me this
Speaker 1: is interesting because you know, I'm a psychologist like you.
Speaker 1: I'm fascinated in what features of the acute subjective effects
Speaker 1: matter most and predict positive response. But then there's this
Speaker 1: fascinating question of like, well, maybe the acute subjective effects
Speaker 1: don't matter at all, which would see which is so interesting, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think it's an important question that I find
Speaker 1: so fascinating to test of. Well, maybe it's maybe it's
Speaker 1: the case that the acute subjective effects aren't even necessary.
Speaker 1: Like Roland, I find that totally implausible. But you know,
Speaker 1: as skeptical scientists, we need to ask that question, and
Speaker 1: we're collaborating with people doing that in rodent research, and
Speaker 1: we have colleagues looking at this with pairy anesthesia and psychedelics.
Speaker 1: Find the effort to create non subjective psychedelics worthwhile clinically
Speaker 1: and scientifically because it would be so interesting to develop these.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like Roland, I find it implausible that they'll
Speaker 1: have any where close to the enduring effects that we see.
Speaker 1: Even if it were the case that non subjective psychedelics
Speaker 1: could be created that have equivalent positive effects. Even in
Speaker 1: that case, I think there's important ethical reasons to at
Speaker 1: least offer the normal subjective psychedelics due to the profound
Speaker 1: feelings of meaning and well being related effects associated with
Speaker 1: psychedelics as we know them. Roland, you mentioned a lot
Speaker 1: of things you're excited about for the future, and I
Speaker 1: thought of forty different threads I'd want to follow up,
Speaker 1: But I want to just throw all my questions out
Speaker 1: of the window for a second and get really personal
Speaker 1: if I may, Because you mentioned one of the first
Speaker 1: studies you did we're on cancer patients, terminal cancer patients
Speaker 1: and showing the effectiveness of some of this with them.
Speaker 1: Is it true that you reach had a terminal diagnosis? Yeah,
Speaker 1: a year ago I went in for a screening colonoscopy,
Speaker 1: thinking myself to be completely healthy. I take care of myself,
Speaker 1: watch my diet, exercise, and came out with what turns
Speaker 1: out now to be a stage four cancer diagnosis. So yep,
Speaker 1: I now I now can empathize with the volunteers that
Speaker 1: we treated. Ironically enough and at first therapeutic study, well,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you can keep a sense of humor, And
Speaker 1: they say that in a lot of ways that's the
Speaker 1: most important thing to be able to cope with trauma,
Speaker 1: at least for me personally, I found sense of humor
Speaker 1: as one of the most important things. But the thing is,
Speaker 1: you know your experience. I'd like to know a little
Speaker 1: bit more about your your own sort of transcendence these
Speaker 1: days because my heroes Abraham Maslow, David's hero is William James,
Speaker 1: Mine is Abraham. By the way, Maswell was very skeptical
Speaker 1: of Timothy Leary and they would have heated debates. But anyway,
Speaker 1: and Maslow often spoke of the post mortem life and
Speaker 1: he had a heart attack, and he the doctors told
Speaker 1: him he could have another heart attack at any moment
Speaker 1: that could be it. And he said that living that
Speaker 1: the last couple of months of his life, he felt
Speaker 1: like it was like a post mortem life. He said
Speaker 1: he wished everyone could experience a post mortem life where
Speaker 1: you die and then can come back again and experience
Speaker 1: the world. And he said that he never he viewed
Speaker 1: the world with so much wonder and transcendence, and that
Speaker 1: he saw the miraculous in the every day in those
Speaker 1: last couple of months. And I'm just wondering, how has
Speaker 1: this experience for you personally affected your own sort of
Speaker 1: transcend transcendent experiences in your everyday life. Have you noticed
Speaker 1: a shift at all? Oh enormous shift this whole thing is.
Speaker 1: It's kind of puzzling to me because I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: known how I might have reacted to diagnosis. But it's
Speaker 1: been frankly fascinating and enthralling, enlivening, and I find myself
Speaker 1: in deep gratitude and celebration. Psychologically, what I went through
Speaker 1: was I got the diagnosis, I went into a period
Speaker 1: of a feeling that it simply couldn't be true that
Speaker 1: there was some sense. It just was in a dream.
Speaker 1: It didn't make any sense. My wife and I cried
Speaker 1: a bunch together, and then when it finally came into focus,
Speaker 1: this is real. I think over a very few number
Speaker 1: of days, I started exploring all the psychological states that
Speaker 1: might arise as such a diagnosis. So explored in the
Speaker 1: middle of one night depression just flattened affect, no meaning
Speaker 1: at all, and then kind of ran through the menu
Speaker 1: of psychological states. So there could be you know, denial
Speaker 1: or fear, anxiety, resentment of fighting the cancer. And there
Speaker 1: there could be embrace of some sense of afterlife or
Speaker 1: connuity of consciousness, which I which would be lovely to embrace.
Speaker 1: But I'm bred as a skeptic and as a scientist,
Speaker 1: so I count that as as being incredibly improbable. What
Speaker 1: really came out for me, and I think I attribute
Speaker 1: this to my meditation practice and some of the work
Speaker 1: that I had done in spirituality. What came to me was,
Speaker 1: you know, the only, the only posture that made sense
Speaker 1: was just to lean into gratitude for the preciousness of
Speaker 1: human life. And you know, it's something that we all,
Speaker 1: we all know to be true, but for me. The
Speaker 1: diagnosis brought that into crystal clear focus. So I start
Speaker 1: reprioritizing things immediately in my life. What's important, you know,
Speaker 1: and what's not. Of course i'd done those exercises before,
Speaker 1: kind of contemplating what would you do if you had
Speaker 1: a year to live or six months to live or
Speaker 1: a month, a couple of weeks, a couple of days,
Speaker 1: a couple of hours. I've done those, but this felt,
Speaker 1: this felt different, and and what I would say and
Speaker 1: the other thing that meditation does. So I now come
Speaker 1: out of I switched from cid of yoga into being
Speaker 1: drawn into Buddhist practice, so my mindfulness practice. And so
Speaker 1: what that practice does is enhance the ability to recognize
Speaker 1: states of consciousness that emerge and de identify with them.
Speaker 1: So you're not a voice in your head. There's a
Speaker 1: sense of knowing that resides behind that, and there's some efficacy.
Speaker 1: You have self efficacy in terms of deciding what you're
Speaker 1: going to where you're going to allow that narrative to go,
Speaker 1: and how much you believe the narrative structure of what
Speaker 1: a voice in your head is saying to you, And
Speaker 1: so you have the ability to choose with that and
Speaker 1: so that came online very powerfully, and as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, I could see going down the rabbit hole
Speaker 1: of depression, anxiety or resentment, but that that struck me
Speaker 1: as just being really unwise and uncomfortable, and so I've
Speaker 1: chosen to go with gratitude and celebration. And but indeed
Speaker 1: the very nature of these kinds of experiences, that's exactly
Speaker 1: what they point to, don't they That there's something incredibly
Speaker 1: precious and celebratory about the fact that we find ourselves
Speaker 1: to be these highly evolved sentient creatures wandering the face
Speaker 1: of the earth. You know, we can sense things, we have,
Speaker 1: we can manipulate things, we hear things, We've developed culture,
Speaker 1: we've developed science. But most astonishing of all is that
Speaker 1: we find ourselves to be aware that we're aware. And
Speaker 1: there's a huge embedded mystery in that. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: the it is the hard problem of consciousness, and it's
Speaker 1: the query about what the hell is going on here?
Speaker 1: And we don't you know, we don't have an answer
Speaker 1: that I don't see with respect to consciousness, that we
Speaker 1: that it may never be answerable. This deeper mystery that
Speaker 1: really nuzzles up as close to religion as you can get,
Speaker 1: and the mystery could be synonymous with God. We simply
Speaker 1: don't understand it. But isn't that to be something to
Speaker 1: be deeply curious about and to celebrate? And so that's
Speaker 1: where I find myself, and peculiarly enough people ask me
Speaker 1: how I'm doing, and my answer and that of my wife,
Speaker 1: because we're doing this together, has been, at least to date,
Speaker 1: never better. I truly feel happier and with more equipoise
Speaker 1: and gratitude and sense of celebration than I have ever before,
Speaker 1: despite what no doubt is a huge impact the cancer
Speaker 1: and its treatments on my physical will be. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for sharing all that. So Roland mentioned you
Speaker 1: know people who ask about how he's doing, and I'm
Speaker 1: one of those people who Roland has to correct on
Speaker 1: an almost weekly basis, where even as Roland's talking now
Speaker 1: and getting stinging behind the eyes, sort of tearing up
Speaker 1: hearing the you know, every time this comes up, I mean,
Speaker 1: it has this emotional impact, my heart goes out to Roland,
Speaker 1: to Marla, you know, all of us who know him,
Speaker 1: and specifically to Roland, and then the words form in
Speaker 1: my mouth, which is to express sympathy and empathy. But
Speaker 1: now Roland has trained me enough to know that I
Speaker 1: know that Roland is going to immediately deny that that
Speaker 1: that line of conversation and immediately shift things into what
Speaker 1: is an inspiring mindset of deep gratitude and presence. We
Speaker 1: speak multiple times a week, and this mindset, Roland, that
Speaker 1: you've developed is truly a source of awe and wonder
Speaker 1: to me and something that I'm trying desperately to learn
Speaker 1: from you. Well, I'll stop there, I mean, but this
Speaker 1: is the opportunity. I mean. So my query is, then,
Speaker 1: how do we get get to where I am now
Speaker 1: without having to have general cancer? Ask the same question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good empirical question to ask, and I think
Speaker 1: in principle it's got to be attainable. So I won't
Speaker 1: be able to finish out the research project, but but
Speaker 1: maybe the two of you can't. Well that's a nice
Speaker 1: segue actually into talking about a research fund. Like that segue.
Speaker 1: It's funny you mentioned us carrying on stuff. You're establishing
Speaker 1: a research fund to study these topics, isn't that right?
Speaker 1: And we can maybe make an announcement here today as
Speaker 1: well that doctor Yenon might be the first recipient. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so this has come directly out of my diagnosis, and
Speaker 1: indeed it was the process of reworking my will and
Speaker 1: getting to the point of charitable contributions. And immediately I thought, well,
Speaker 1: I'll that's easy. I'll just give to the Effective Charities
Speaker 1: movement Give Well, which is an organization that's really evaluated
Speaker 1: different charities and been a go to practice for me
Speaker 1: to use them. But then I started thinking more deeply,
Speaker 1: what do I really want to give? And it's precisely
Speaker 1: what we're talking about, and so there's nothing more important
Speaker 1: to me personally than this project of personally waking up
Speaker 1: and being away. That's also the core of what my
Speaker 1: research has been focused on, has David. So I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe I don't have a biggest state. Maybe
Speaker 1: I could give some funding to Johns Hopkins so that
Speaker 1: they could sponsor a lecture once a year on psychedelics
Speaker 1: and spirituality. And then I thought, you know, I probably
Speaker 1: have some goodwill in the community just having done what
Speaker 1: I've done with the psychedelics, So why don't I try
Speaker 1: to make this a professorship And then kept growing in
Speaker 1: my mind, Well, yeah, a professorship and then a research
Speaker 1: fund that would be tagged to that professorship to study
Speaker 1: what I'm calling secular spirituality. So it's rigorous empirical research
Speaker 1: with psychedelics, because that's the best tool we have to
Speaker 1: study these kinds of experiences with psychedelics aimed at this
Speaker 1: topic of secular spirituality and well being and healthy volunteers.
Speaker 1: And so after some considerable work, we put together this
Speaker 1: packet for Johns Hopkins. It's an endowment and it's targeted
Speaker 1: at that question. The beauty of the endowment is that
Speaker 1: it is managed in perpetuity by Johns Hopkins, which is
Speaker 1: a very conservative institution, but an institution that for which
Speaker 1: we can expect is going to last enduring, enduringly or
Speaker 1: for a very long time until we could come up
Speaker 1: with thought experiments about what would bring down a major
Speaker 1: academic institution. But it's it's a pretty good bet for
Speaker 1: moving forward. So that concept really excited me. What we're
Speaker 1: doing is setting up a research program to go after
Speaker 1: the very questions that I'm most deeply interested in, and
Speaker 1: questions for which I don't think they'll ever be an
Speaker 1: ultimate answer. So the inperpetuity makes a lot of sense
Speaker 1: in this regard. So in coming up with this idea,
Speaker 1: I would I would have to say that David came
Speaker 1: to Hopkins. David, is it almost three years ago now, right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he came in as a post doc. He's been
Speaker 1: promoted to assistant professor. But he's incredibly talented academically, scientifically,
Speaker 1: he writes, well, he collaborates, well, he's an all around
Speaker 1: good guy. I must agree with. Yeah. No, No, David's
Speaker 1: just remarkable. And I mean, and that's why we're having
Speaker 1: this conversation together. He's intensely interested in these experiences. So
Speaker 1: the idea of creating an endowment, and I couldn't think
Speaker 1: of anyone in the world who would be more appropriate
Speaker 1: to be the first recipient of that award than David.
Speaker 1: It just seemed to make a lot of sense. So
Speaker 1: when I started establishing the endowment, I put a lot
Speaker 1: of constraints on Hopkins in doing this that you know,
Speaker 1: they would prefer an endowment that's kind of open ended,
Speaker 1: they can redirect in any way they want, or they
Speaker 1: be loose with it. We have really tied them down
Speaker 1: with respect to having to follow the intent and purposes
Speaker 1: of the endowment, which are very clearly specified. And my
Speaker 1: insistence that David Yaden be appointed the first recipient, and
Speaker 1: I prevailed. This was a It turned out to be
Speaker 1: a lot of work. So where we stand now is
Speaker 1: I'm shooting for twenty million dollars for the endowment. Now
Speaker 1: that sounds like a huge amount of money, but when
Speaker 1: it goes into an endowment, it's not because an endowment
Speaker 1: pays out as a function of the proceeds of the investment,
Speaker 1: so it pays out at about four percent per year.
Speaker 1: And my concept was that the endowment should be able
Speaker 1: to cover the full salary of a full and senior
Speaker 1: professor at Johns Hopkins and enough additional research money so
Speaker 1: that that professor could have an ongoing research program. My
Speaker 1: expectation is that they would reach out for other funding,
Speaker 1: but we're kind of creating an engine that moves in
Speaker 1: perpetuity and that endowment grows over time. So that's the
Speaker 1: project and deeply touched that. We already have pledges of
Speaker 1: fourteen million dollars, so we're trying to close a six
Speaker 1: million dollar gap, which is still a b a big gap.
Speaker 1: And at this point, and we can take a look
Speaker 1: at the we can give the URL for the endowment website,
Speaker 1: we actually have a graph of pledges, and our pledging
Speaker 1: has stalled at this point, and so we're trying to
Speaker 1: close out that six million dollar shortfall. And for me,
Speaker 1: it would just be deeply meaningful to me to get
Speaker 1: that closure while I'm still functional and able to engage
Speaker 1: and celebrate it. Okay, so what's the link? Don't be gingerly,
Speaker 1: It's Griffithsfund dot org g r I F f I
Speaker 1: t h S Fund. One word f U n D
Speaker 1: dot org. Okay, thank you. We will put that in
Speaker 1: the show notes as well. Can I just say I
Speaker 1: want you to respond to this. I mean, when Roland
Speaker 1: first told me about this, you know, we had a
Speaker 1: conversation and turned to my wife bid and told her
Speaker 1: and we both burst into tears. I mean, it's incredibly
Speaker 1: huge honor, and it is now my mission in life
Speaker 1: to become worthy of of this stewarding of Roland's vision.
Speaker 1: I do not feel deserving of this. It's just a
Speaker 1: monumental honor. I think that of the people in the
Speaker 1: world who are running psychedelic clinical trials, I probably happened
Speaker 1: to be the only one who has spent their live
Speaker 1: their life academically studying well being in spirituality. I mean,
Speaker 1: so these topics which Roland and I share a deep
Speaker 1: fascination and obsession with, are totally aligned. And it to
Speaker 1: my absolute shock studying two topics that I've been told
Speaker 1: many times is career suicide and a liability happens to
Speaker 1: be an asset in this case. So it's absolutely amazing
Speaker 1: that Roland has made this vision of reality in such
Speaker 1: a brief period of time. And there's so much work
Speaker 1: to be done on this topic that it will take
Speaker 1: many generations, and I mean ultimately generations from now. I
Speaker 1: can imagine a Nobel prize going to this kind of research.
Speaker 1: Understanding the mechanisms of positive transformative experience and setting it
Speaker 1: on that track is profoundly important to me. It also
Speaker 1: strikes me there's a positive project here and a negative one.
Speaker 1: The positive project being trying to understand the outcomes, the
Speaker 1: risks as well as the benefits that these experiences, understanding
Speaker 1: differences across cultures, how beliefs and expectations play a role,
Speaker 1: but also this negative project. And people say all kinds
Speaker 1: of things about psychedelics, well being and spirituality that are
Speaker 1: totally not based in evidence at all and are pretty
Speaker 1: outrageous claims. So I think providing scientific, unbiased evidence, just
Speaker 1: entering this information into the public sphere can have a
Speaker 1: lot of benefit in terms of reigning in the sorts
Speaker 1: of statements and claims that people make. So the work
Speaker 1: is it's endless and important, and I think that there
Speaker 1: are real questions that we can truly answer scientifically. Absolutely
Speaker 1: knowing David as long as I've known David, I can
Speaker 1: say to you Roland that he will try his best
Speaker 1: to make you proud. And I would like to say
Speaker 1: to whatever degree I can contribute to this, because David
Speaker 1: and I are already picking up studies together and stuff.
Speaker 1: I say this with tears of miser now, I will
Speaker 1: try my best to make you proud. I think the
Speaker 1: motivation I think we all I'll share is is what
Speaker 1: it means to carry this ball forward and what it
Speaker 1: means to humankind. Yeah, so well, but thank you. This
Speaker 1: might be a good place to just end the podcast
Speaker 1: right now, because it's such a special moment. Thank you
Speaker 1: to both of you so much for the just tremendous
Speaker 1: work you're doing in the field and and and and
Speaker 1: not just that, but your humanity, you know, like you're
Speaker 1: they're they're these things are intertwined in both of you,
Speaker 1: and I can see that there's a human behind every
Speaker 1: research study, and I feel like that human matters too,
Speaker 1: and the way their way of being in the world,
Speaker 1: I don't really like separating it entirely from the research
Speaker 1: that they conduct. And so thanks for being such shiny
Speaker 1: examples of humanity as well, and thanks for being on
Speaker 1: my podcast today. Thank you Scott, Thank you, Scott wonderful.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react and way to something you heard,
Speaker 1: I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusychology
Speaker 1: podcast dot com or on our YouTube page thus Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: We also put up some videos of some episodes on
Speaker 1: our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check
Speaker 1: that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of
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Speaker 1: the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.