Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb. Julie Douglas is on vacation
Speaker 1: this week, so we're taking the opportunity to re air
Speaker 1: our Scientists and the Shaman pair of episodes. These deal
Speaker 1: with psychedelics, the history of psychedelics, and also our ability
Speaker 1: to turn to these substances to better understand how the
Speaker 1: mind works and possibly create some ailments from a scientific standpoint.
Speaker 1: So I hope you listen to part one. If not,
Speaker 1: go back and listen to that one, then come back
Speaker 1: to to this point in this podcast and enjoy Part two.
Speaker 1: I just want to let everyone know off the top
Speaker 1: of the podcast you didn't get it from the title
Speaker 1: or the description. Yes, we're gonna be talking about psychedelic
Speaker 1: substances in this episode, but we're gonna talking about them
Speaker 1: largely from scientific standpoint, and from the standpoint is some
Speaker 1: very exciting and very important research that continues to go
Speaker 1: on right now into how these substances affect the human
Speaker 1: mind and what those effects can actually reveal about the
Speaker 1: inner workings of the human mind and potentially aid us
Speaker 1: in dealing with some very real mental problems, mental ailments,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And again this was borne out of the
Speaker 1: exhibit for I Am the Black Jaguar, which is at
Speaker 1: Emory University, and there was a talk there that you
Speaker 1: attended with doctor Katherine McClain and doctor Charles Raison about
Speaker 1: this very topic, Yes, fascinating topic. Doctor Katherine McClain involved
Speaker 1: in a lot of this exciting research at John Hopkins
Speaker 1: where they're they're taking individuals, they're exposing them to these
Speaker 1: various psychedelic substances and then uh interacting with them, getting
Speaker 1: their perspectives on on what they're feeling and what's happening,
Speaker 1: looking at their brain, using radioactive tracers to observe exactly
Speaker 1: how this is affecting their mind. Lots of fascinating research,
Speaker 1: and as we discussed in the last podcast, we're in
Speaker 1: at an interesting stage in the sort of ebb and
Speaker 1: flow of psychedelic research. Psychedelic research. It makes it sound
Speaker 1: kind of silly, but research into psychedelics and how they
Speaker 1: affect the mind, because this is all this sort of
Speaker 1: kicked off in the fifties, mid fifties, but by the
Speaker 1: end of the sixties took a dive to basically nothing
Speaker 1: because of the politics and the cultural backlash, backlash, and
Speaker 1: he didn't really get picked didn't pick up again until
Speaker 1: the nineties and finally achieving some level of of steam
Speaker 1: again in at the dawn of the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: But of course, a lot of these substances have been
Speaker 1: in use for thousands of years through shamanic practices in
Speaker 1: various parts of the world. What we're talking about here
Speaker 1: are anthony ogenic substances, uh, psychoactive substances used in religious
Speaker 1: or spiritual context. Yeah. To put it in a Simpsons standpoint,
Speaker 1: Homer Simpson takes peyote and then he talks to a
Speaker 1: space iote that talks to him and helps him deal
Speaker 1: with his problems. That's kind of I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: pop culture Simpsons simplified version of shamantic experience where some
Speaker 1: wise person a holy man or woman in a traditional
Speaker 1: setting that also you know, probably engages in various cultural
Speaker 1: traditional medicines. They give you a magical substance one of these,
Speaker 1: you know, the mushroom or the vine of iawassa, and
Speaker 1: then you take it. The shaman probably takes it too,
Speaker 1: probably in higher doses, and then guide you on the experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and actually I had read that Shamans were sometimes picked
Speaker 1: for their ability to bring on these states of these
Speaker 1: altered states of consciousness, um by doing it actually just
Speaker 1: on their very own and not necessarily using any sort
Speaker 1: of substances. So, uh, they were definitely looking for people
Speaker 1: who have this ability to expand their minds into access
Speaker 1: a part of their minds that that that we don't
Speaker 1: normally use during the day, right or through out the day,
Speaker 1: I should say, So, here's this idea that comes online
Speaker 1: that perhaps hallucinating is natural to humans, right, because you've
Speaker 1: had it in these rituals for thousands of years, we've
Speaker 1: had it in practice in this attempt to try to
Speaker 1: get a better understanding of our place in the world.
Speaker 1: But also you have something called d m T which
Speaker 1: is naturally occurring in nature. Die methyl trip to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this was this was first synthesized by British chemists
Speaker 1: in the nineties. It has a psychotropic properties that were
Speaker 1: discovered twenty years later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah.
Speaker 1: But then in two Nobel Laurea Julius axel Rod he
Speaker 1: discovered d MT in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us
Speaker 1: back to the idea, this isn't something you just synthesize,
Speaker 1: this is something that is in the mind that exists already.
Speaker 1: Uh So this led to speculation that the compound plays
Speaker 1: a role in psychosis. People research that possibility and eventually
Speaker 1: abandoned it again because of all the the backlash against
Speaker 1: research into psychedelics. Anyway, but this was the beginning of
Speaker 1: our understanding of what d m T is and what
Speaker 1: role it plays in these experiences, the shamanistic experiences, because
Speaker 1: it's always been a part of our brain and it's
Speaker 1: present in plants such as the the iawassa. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 1: And so when we talk about it being present in
Speaker 1: the brain, we're talking about trace amounts of these d
Speaker 1: MT molecules. So obviously it's not any sort of amount
Speaker 1: that's going to, uh say, allow us to accidentally start
Speaker 1: tripping because somehow there was some sort of trigger that occurred.
Speaker 1: But it does lead people to question why d m
Speaker 1: T is in the brain, what sort of role it's playing.
Speaker 1: And it should be noted that d m T is
Speaker 1: closely related to seratonin, which is the naturally occurring neurotransmitter
Speaker 1: that psychedelics effect. So widely, and the pharmacology of d
Speaker 1: m T is similar to that of other well known psychedelics,
Speaker 1: so there's definitely a relationship going on there. It's just
Speaker 1: a question of again, what sort of role might be
Speaker 1: empty play in the mind. UM. There have been some
Speaker 1: people who say that it's produced by the penny on gland,
Speaker 1: but we don't know that for sure. Yes, don't go
Speaker 1: stealing pennial glands thinking you anything. Yeah, that's true. That's
Speaker 1: a good point. It leads us to this question about
Speaker 1: whether or not hallucinations are something that are produced normally
Speaker 1: in nature, and whether or not hallucination is something that
Speaker 1: humans are supposed to do. UM. I bring this up
Speaker 1: because there's a two thousand eleven study that whole university
Speaker 1: in the uk UM which has to do with hallucinating colors. Now, UH,
Speaker 1: scientists ask a group of pre screened people to look
Speaker 1: at a set of gray patterns and try to visualize color.
Speaker 1: Eleven members of the group have been identified as highly
Speaker 1: susceptible to hypnosis UH, and then seven of these subjects
Speaker 1: were not susceptible at all. The study found that all
Speaker 1: subjects who were easily hypnotized reported being a range of
Speaker 1: colors even while not under hypnosis. In other words, their
Speaker 1: brain was hallucinating colors um and then m R I
Speaker 1: scans corroborated this and showed that the parts of the
Speaker 1: brain linked color perception lit up when they saw in
Speaker 1: quotations imaginary hues of colors. So you have this idea
Speaker 1: coming online that you know there are parts of the
Speaker 1: brain that can work in conjunction to create the reality.
Speaker 1: And we talked about this a thousand times that what
Speaker 1: we construct is reality is uh, I should say, rather,
Speaker 1: our perception really is an approximation of reality, and that
Speaker 1: each of us is looking at the world in a
Speaker 1: completely different way. We're just sort of all agreeing on
Speaker 1: a couple of things to make sure we have some
Speaker 1: continuity in life. Now, it's interesting you mentioned that because
Speaker 1: on the subject of d MT, the subject of any
Speaker 1: of these substances, one of the things that Dr Catherine
Speaker 1: mcclaim brought up, specifically stressing the research environment that they
Speaker 1: use at John Hopkins where they have they don't just
Speaker 1: inject people with these psychedelic substances and then put them
Speaker 1: into like a padded room or something tomorrow. Right, they
Speaker 1: have a they have a really calming um space that
Speaker 1: has some you know, abstract art, has some Buddhas has,
Speaker 1: some other religious or spiritual iconographies, some comfy couches. And
Speaker 1: they do a certain amount of priming too, because they
Speaker 1: don't want to throw somebody into stance from a nightmare trip,
Speaker 1: you know, they want to send them on a more
Speaker 1: or less positive trip. They can't guarantee it, but they
Speaker 1: did find that on I believe psilocybin, that outside of
Speaker 1: a clinical environment, about thirty of the people would say
Speaker 1: that they had a mystical experience inside of the experiment.
Speaker 1: When when they were controlling the the environment in which
Speaker 1: they were taking you know, and surrounding them with this
Speaker 1: kind of mystical and calming stuff, they would see a
Speaker 1: seventy of the test subjects reported having a mystical experience.
Speaker 1: So what you're saying is again a lot of it
Speaker 1: is suggestion, right, and yeah, and going into it with
Speaker 1: with certain expectations as well. You kind of see that
Speaker 1: with the m T as well, because I was looking
Speaker 1: some of these accounts of of what d MT is like,
Speaker 1: and you know, a letter to Alan Ginsburg, William Burrows
Speaker 1: described his own and it's of course important to know
Speaker 1: that William Burrows did a lot of things. I did
Speaker 1: a lot a lot of drugs. He did a lot
Speaker 1: of drugs, So he's maybe not the you know, a
Speaker 1: pure test subject. But he reported like the first time
Speaker 1: he took it, it was he he felt himself turning
Speaker 1: into a half man, half woman and that he was
Speaker 1: space time traveling. Whereas your buddy John Horgan, author of
Speaker 1: Rational Mysticism, he had a totally well not a totally
Speaker 1: different experience, but he had a different take on the experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he took some ayahuasca because he is very interested and
Speaker 1: at the time of writing his book Rational Mysticism, was
Speaker 1: trying to get to the bottom of what is a
Speaker 1: spiritual experience? You know, what's going on in the brain,
Speaker 1: what's going on with you know, scientist, what's going on
Speaker 1: with shaman's and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip
Speaker 1: and it was not um It was not probably pleasurable,
Speaker 1: It did not seem like it was for him. But
Speaker 1: was it mind altering? Did it open up his perception
Speaker 1: that it seems to have done. Yeah, he said, quote
Speaker 1: after I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack
Speaker 1: in which I was menaced by a malevolent day glow
Speaker 1: hued polyhedra. I have no desire to repeat this experience.
Speaker 1: So there we go. Kids. If you're thinking about doing
Speaker 1: that ayahuasca. Um. But it is really important, And this
Speaker 1: is what McClean says, particularly in her talk at Emery
Speaker 1: when she was speaking about therapeutic effects of psilocybrin, which
Speaker 1: is um if you think about it as shrooms. You
Speaker 1: probably heard it on the street shrooms um. She was
Speaker 1: saying that it is very important to try to guide
Speaker 1: the person into having a sort of breakthrough with the
Speaker 1: experience and having as pleasurable experience as they possibly can
Speaker 1: aka not having a bad trip. Yeah. And that's a
Speaker 1: part of the whole shamanistic deal too, is that the
Speaker 1: idea that you had a guide, there's a certain desired experience.
Speaker 1: That is then the attempt to create this experience via surroundings,
Speaker 1: via priming, via a certain story or narrative or or
Speaker 1: mythos surrounding that experience Versus somebody you know who just
Speaker 1: I don't know. Is that a concert and somebody passes
Speaker 1: them something and they take it totally different experiences. One
Speaker 1: is steeped in expectations and priming, in the idea that
Speaker 1: you're going on a journey. You're gonna attempting to get somewhere,
Speaker 1: perhaps change something about you, figure something out. And the
Speaker 1: other is taking something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. Right,
Speaker 1: as we've been discussing in this episode, in the Other
Speaker 1: Shaman and the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this
Speaker 1: really not the set thing. You know. Um, Like I said,
Speaker 1: you can look at a puppy or a cat and
Speaker 1: it'll change the way you're thinking and the way you're
Speaker 1: looking at reality. You know, you can you have a
Speaker 1: cup of coffee and your things are gonna sharpen or
Speaker 1: fade in terms of your perception. The warmth from the
Speaker 1: cup of coffee will inform your ideas about the person
Speaker 1: you're talking to you right exactly, And according to Dr
Speaker 1: Catherine McClean in this talk that I attended and you
Speaker 1: attended in the form of an iPhone, I was inside
Speaker 1: really tiny and um, if you feel in your head
Speaker 1: around this sort of third eye area sort of between
Speaker 1: your between your eyes back behind it, middle frontal part
Speaker 1: of the brain, midfrontal cortex just buried back there in
Speaker 1: the in the in the brain meat U there are
Speaker 1: two structures to play a key ro and maintaining our
Speaker 1: sense of self in time and space, I mean too
Speaker 1: vital that Like, those are the big ones, right in
Speaker 1: terms of like how who I am and how I'm
Speaker 1: perceiving reality? How old am I? Where do I fit
Speaker 1: in with time? Where do I fit in with space?
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like the basic stuff right there. Well,
Speaker 1: remember that was some of the meat of being a
Speaker 1: person when we talked about personhood. Disability to imagine yourself
Speaker 1: in the past, the present, in the future. Ye, so
Speaker 1: personhood itself you can you can isolate to a certain
Speaker 1: part of the brain that is susceptible to changes. Something
Speaker 1: to keep in mind when we're talking about not only
Speaker 1: how hallucinations and how psychedelics skew the experience of self
Speaker 1: and uh in the outside world, but also just how
Speaker 1: susceptible to change are more or less default understanding of
Speaker 1: self in the outside world is okay. So mcclan also
Speaker 1: brings into question. I think I mentioned this before, that
Speaker 1: consciousness may not be as coherent as we think it is.
Speaker 1: So um, what she shared with everybody is that there's
Speaker 1: something that makes us even more tricky, and that's the
Speaker 1: introduction of a drug called salvia and norium and um
Speaker 1: in an experiment in they had volunteers take this drug,
Speaker 1: this hallucination, and what they found is that all of
Speaker 1: these people, all of them hallucinated that they had interactions
Speaker 1: with entities while on salvia, little men, elves, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing we're talking and I mean we're really getting
Speaker 1: into the whole territory of of paranormal experience here and
Speaker 1: in spirits and and godlings and whatever else you might
Speaker 1: want to encounter in the woods. Now, that's not that
Speaker 1: I mean, that's weird, right, just because people had, you know,
Speaker 1: halluscinations specifically about entities. What's weird about this is that
Speaker 1: when they then had subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited
Speaker 1: those scenarios, and those entities and other words, there's entities
Speaker 1: became somewhat of a part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the people turned to the same I mean, I'm instantly
Speaker 1: reminded of dreams, of course, because we're talking about how
Speaker 1: crazy that the idea of encountering an entity is, and
Speaker 1: it's you know, and imagine a number of people's minds
Speaker 1: are going a little walky with just the idea of
Speaker 1: just who I'm they someone took a substance and then
Speaker 1: they encountered this being. It wasn't real, but seemed to have, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, seemed to act of its own volition. Of course,
Speaker 1: we were constantly having dreams at night in which we
Speaker 1: interact with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with
Speaker 1: unreal people and unreal things in her dreams. But it
Speaker 1: is always or very often difficult to return to a dream.
Speaker 1: Whenever we have even just a m O'Keefe returns and
Speaker 1: subsequent dream, it's something that's noteworthy, much less to be
Speaker 1: encountered with an exact same being or entity. So then
Speaker 1: that sort of blurs the line again between what what
Speaker 1: is illusion was reality and what we construct as reality. No,
Speaker 1: of course, I'm not saying that everybody should go out
Speaker 1: there and hallucinate and find an entity and then have
Speaker 1: conversations with it. I'm just saying that I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting that it's now coated as a memory and it's
Speaker 1: part of the continuum, right, And it's worth noting McLean's
Speaker 1: study was it was a small number of people she
Speaker 1: said for this, than which she had entities. And you
Speaker 1: do encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to
Speaker 1: have taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities.
Speaker 1: So yeah, true, So this is not a guaranteed ticket
Speaker 1: to fairy hood, no no, But of course our takeaway was,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, you you find some sort of being
Speaker 1: and then you pick up the conversation a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks later with that person in your head. This is
Speaker 1: a vital part of course of shamanistic experience, and one
Speaker 1: is taking a substance for a spiritual purpose. I mean,
Speaker 1: because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts, mystical hants are full
Speaker 1: of people encountering unreal beings. So we can see exactly
Speaker 1: where that fits in in a Shutan mystic traditions. Well,
Speaker 1: and like William William Burrows Burrows as Us spoke of
Speaker 1: the half man half woman, I mean, there's all sorts
Speaker 1: of encounters of course. All right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break and when we come back more of the
Speaker 1: scientist and the shaman. What I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: next is this idea of eyes wide shut and particularly
Speaker 1: under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find this interesting
Speaker 1: because in the talk they were talking about how ayahuasca
Speaker 1: and visual processing get really wonky because what you're talking
Speaker 1: about here are the areas of the brain associated with
Speaker 1: visual processing light. Um. And when you have your eyes open, right,
Speaker 1: you you can see the sort of activity in your
Speaker 1: brain going on processing that what they found. Um, And
Speaker 1: this is again mc claim talking about this, and the
Speaker 1: talk is that people who are on ayahuasca with her
Speaker 1: eyeshut having hallucinations were having the same level of activity
Speaker 1: in their brains um and visually processing as they would
Speaker 1: when their waking hours and processing the data, which is
Speaker 1: very different from how we normally processed data when our
Speaker 1: eyes are closed. Yeah. To that, not only was the
Speaker 1: activity in the brain identical two eyes open, they were
Speaker 1: it was identical to eyes open in an outside environment,
Speaker 1: in a in a very stimulus filled environment. Uh, they
Speaker 1: close their eyes and they're they're still encountering that much stimuli. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which then a sort of placed this idea, Um, you
Speaker 1: know that you're the dream of your consciousness is merging
Speaker 1: with what your brain is perceiving as reality. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean she she laid out that a lot of this
Speaker 1: stuffs come down to this breakdown between the sense of
Speaker 1: self and other, between the sense of you and the
Speaker 1: outside world. And uh, um and and that's part part
Speaker 1: of what's a play here now. She and um and
Speaker 1: Raison talked about the dangers of ayahuasca. They did talk
Speaker 1: about how this is not taken lightly, particularly with this
Speaker 1: kind of psychoactive substance, because you apparently have to prepare
Speaker 1: your body very well for this type of hallucinogen um
Speaker 1: and a lot of this has to do with the
Speaker 1: amount of serotonin that you already have in your brains.
Speaker 1: You don't want to mess with these levels. Um. And
Speaker 1: I say that not because I don't I think someone's
Speaker 1: going to do this, but um. This was something that
Speaker 1: they stressed in their talk, is that this is not
Speaker 1: stuff to play with. This is stuff that they do
Speaker 1: in the lab. Is the stuff that they make sure
Speaker 1: that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even
Speaker 1: the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will
Speaker 1: affect the amount of there tonating your brain. And if
Speaker 1: you were to then take ayahuasca and you had a
Speaker 1: lot of serotonin, you could be very dangerous, can actually
Speaker 1: lead to death. Um, So you have to make sure
Speaker 1: that all the levels are correct. Yeah, So, no matter
Speaker 1: how much you might want to In Timothy Leary's word's
Speaker 1: going a billion your journey to God if you have
Speaker 1: to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,
Speaker 1: because cheese is great. Gonna booyah? What was that part
Speaker 1: of the sentence, A billion your journey to go said, booyah?
Speaker 1: Journey to guy. Yeah, that works too. I guess nothing.
Speaker 1: I'm hallucinating. Um, all right, So there's again this idea
Speaker 1: of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery, and
Speaker 1: particularly when you look at something like meditating monks vent
Speaker 1: monks in particular, there have been accounts all over the
Speaker 1: place about months being able to meditate to such a
Speaker 1: degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So we talked
Speaker 1: about this before, and um with hallucinations having something in
Speaker 1: common with meditating in terms of quieting the default mode network,
Speaker 1: this chattering part of your brain. Makes you wonder if again,
Speaker 1: through meditation, you can access the same sort of hallucinatory experience,
Speaker 1: this realm of dreaming, of lucid dreaming. Even well, it
Speaker 1: instantly reminds me of Mendala's the idea that the bitten
Speaker 1: amongst especially will there's sort of the is the outer Mendala.
Speaker 1: You know that you see an art depictions, but these
Speaker 1: are kind of blueprints for a really kind of a
Speaker 1: thought palace or kind of a memory palace, this kind
Speaker 1: of mental space that they put their minds in a
Speaker 1: place now. And I mean that in terms of there's
Speaker 1: actually like a floor plant, you know, and it's a
Speaker 1: way of containing some very complex spiritual ideas and so
Speaker 1: creating this crazy structure in their head. It seems similar
Speaker 1: in many ways to the kind of crazy structure one
Speaker 1: might encounter, say on D M T or you know,
Speaker 1: I LOSSA or one of the one of these substances
Speaker 1: where one closes their eyes and experiences some sort of
Speaker 1: amazing architecture or explosions or what have you. Uh. The
Speaker 1: difference being, of course, here that the monk is having
Speaker 1: to work really hard to achieve this level of calm
Speaker 1: and concentration and in meditative state, whereas the individual taking
Speaker 1: the substance. Not to say that it's easy, not to
Speaker 1: say that it's a necessarily a shortcut, but there's less
Speaker 1: intense concentration involved in reaching that state. Now. I don't
Speaker 1: know if this relates to it specifically in terms of hallucinations,
Speaker 1: but I do know that there's one practice in meditation
Speaker 1: where you um, you essentially try to imagine your own decomposition.
Speaker 1: And the idea is not just to you know, get
Speaker 1: try to figure out what your school would look like,
Speaker 1: but to try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral
Speaker 1: life is and how important the present is. And um,
Speaker 1: apparently this is something that is very disturbing because it
Speaker 1: can take over the imagination parts of your brain. Right,
Speaker 1: and as we had discussed and hallucinating color. Um, sometimes
Speaker 1: what you're talking about here is just sort of making
Speaker 1: the inference that this will happen in your mind, taking
Speaker 1: it and running with it. Yeah, you see that. That's
Speaker 1: actually a motif and cool dual of Tibetan art and
Speaker 1: some of the Mandala and Mandala a can Uh creations
Speaker 1: where you see like flight and men and bones and
Speaker 1: oceans of blood. And it's not like a morbid death
Speaker 1: metal celebration of that stuff. But it's about the ephemeral
Speaker 1: nature of things and about the the limits of physical existence, right,
Speaker 1: and again trying to get a better awareness of life
Speaker 1: and opening up your mind a bit. All right, So
Speaker 1: there's this idea that this is, you know, speaking of
Speaker 1: ephemeral nature may not be long lasting, but there's some
Speaker 1: evidence that the drug use as well as the meditation
Speaker 1: could have long term impact. Thinking about Roland Griffins, I
Speaker 1: believe it's his name, and he is the person we
Speaker 1: talked about his eleven study of the stage four and
Speaker 1: cancer patients who were taking um hallucinogens in order to
Speaker 1: try to vanquish their they're very very obviously, very obviously
Speaker 1: real fears that were hams treating them in daily life,
Speaker 1: their anxieties because of their illness and their disease. UM.
Speaker 1: I wanted to mention it because, uh, what they found
Speaker 1: is that some of these patients up to two years
Speaker 1: after their hallucinatory experience were still garnering the positive effects
Speaker 1: of their experience. In other words, they had a sense
Speaker 1: of calmness, They felt very expansive. They uh no longer
Speaker 1: worried so much about their own fate or the fate
Speaker 1: of others. They just sort of were trying to be
Speaker 1: present in their daily life. And they think the researchers
Speaker 1: think that the reason for this may be very similar
Speaker 1: to how other memories work. So you've ad about this
Speaker 1: Before you take out a memory and you examine it,
Speaker 1: you might change it, tweak it a little bit. It
Speaker 1: gets stronger in your memory every time you take it out. Well,
Speaker 1: when the patients went through that experience and they sat
Speaker 1: down with researchers and went over it again and again,
Speaker 1: they think that the same thing was happening. They were
Speaker 1: establishing long term memories that were then um sort of
Speaker 1: telling them how they were going to feel about this
Speaker 1: in the future. Yeah, the the that studying in particular,
Speaker 1: I remember, the one of the key first of all
Speaker 1: was preparation. They prepared these individuals for their experience, you know,
Speaker 1: make sure that the environment, the preconceived notions, the expectations
Speaker 1: of the of the trip um were firmly set in place.
Speaker 1: And then afterwards it was then about taking apart what happened,
Speaker 1: what the experienced, the altered modes of perception and experience
Speaker 1: that occurred, and you know, basically journaling about it, taking
Speaker 1: that memory out, looking at it, learning from it, putting
Speaker 1: it back, and then like you say, continuing to take
Speaker 1: it out. Because every time you take it out, any memory,
Speaker 1: it's not this little structure sculpted out of rock. It's
Speaker 1: made out of clay and multi you know, still malleable clay,
Speaker 1: and every time you take it out and pod around
Speaker 1: in your hands, be it uh, you know, some traumatic
Speaker 1: memory of childhood or the greatest day of your life.
Speaker 1: You get it out, you're putting your fingers in it,
Speaker 1: you're mentioning it around, You're changing the shape of it
Speaker 1: however slightly. Yeah, you're you're resurrecting the neural correlates, right,
Speaker 1: and making them that much stronger. There's a podcast called
Speaker 1: Secular Buddhist that McClain was on and she was talking
Speaker 1: again about the ability of there to be long term
Speaker 1: effects and um, she was talking about an John Hopkins
Speaker 1: University study that gave a high dose of psilocyb into
Speaker 1: adult participants and thirty of them, she says, went a
Speaker 1: measurable personality change that lasted more than a year. Now,
Speaker 1: when she talks about personality change, they're talking about these
Speaker 1: five different aspects of personality and one of them, um,
Speaker 1: was a trait called openness, and she says that that
Speaker 1: is the only one that changed with these participants who
Speaker 1: have the measurable change over a year long period. Then
Speaker 1: she says that of the personality traits that we know
Speaker 1: of and we define personality by that of that is
Speaker 1: genetic and so you're sort of born with you know,
Speaker 1: these types of personality traits that you're either stronger or
Speaker 1: weaker in, so you could be stronger or weaker in openness.
Speaker 1: And she said that it's very interesting that there's not
Speaker 1: a lot of tweaking you can do with personality, but
Speaker 1: with this one trait, openness, you could perhaps forge the
Speaker 1: way um to continue to thrive in a in the
Speaker 1: space of openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished
Speaker 1: depression as a result, or continue to have an expansive worldview. Well,
Speaker 1: this is weird. I'm kind of maybe it's because we're
Speaker 1: recording this during the Christmas season, but hearing this, I
Speaker 1: cannot help the wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even
Speaker 1: ebone'z er Scrooge do d M T or to or consumes?
Speaker 1: Because here you have a curmudgeonally individual, very setting his way,
Speaker 1: setting his personality, and then one night he trips his
Speaker 1: mind out completely and encounters three U four ghosts, right,
Speaker 1: encounters uh four separate entities who take him on this
Speaker 1: fantastic voyage through time and space. And then when he
Speaker 1: wakes up, what's the big chain? And Scrooge he's more open. Right,
Speaker 1: he opens the window and he's calling out to children
Speaker 1: in the street that normally he would just want to
Speaker 1: beat with a stick. But now he's saying, oh, look
Speaker 1: what day it is, this young chap and the and
Speaker 1: then it's and then his life is chained. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's still scrooge, like you say, a lot of his
Speaker 1: personality is still gonna be set in stone, but there's
Speaker 1: that portion on that openness that has that has been
Speaker 1: altered by the experience. You're right, He's probably still going
Speaker 1: to be somewhat thrifty, right, but maybe he's just gonna
Speaker 1: be a little bit more open in his heart and
Speaker 1: more available to people. Hopefully a year from that experience
Speaker 1: US awesome. I've never really thought about it never either.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I guess I say it's the Christmas
Speaker 1: time around the and then talking about all this psychedelic
Speaker 1: experience and how it can conceivably change somebody suddenly. Well,
Speaker 1: speaking of those four spirit guides, I wanted to close
Speaker 1: out with a quote from John Horrigan, who talks about
Speaker 1: how there's his resurgence and hallucinogic drugs and scientific inquiry
Speaker 1: and uh rather scientific inquiry. He says, I applaud the
Speaker 1: psychedelic renaissance with this caveat h. Spiritual texts often emphasize
Speaker 1: the dangers of mystical experiences, whether they're generated by drugs, fasting, meditation,
Speaker 1: or other means. That is the theme of an old
Speaker 1: Talmudic tale in which four rabbis are brought into the
Speaker 1: presence of God, one becomes a heretic, one goes crazy,
Speaker 1: one drops dead, and one returns home with his faith affirmed.
Speaker 1: So I think it's his point of saying, all of
Speaker 1: this is very interesting, but we should not approach this
Speaker 1: lightly because what we're talking about here is the mind,
Speaker 1: and while it's very fertile ground um, it is also
Speaker 1: very fragile. So there you have it, the scientist and
Speaker 1: the shame. And we were really proud of the subpair
Speaker 1: of episodes, so again we just wanted to share them
Speaker 1: with everyone again and for many of our our newer
Speaker 1: listeners to share them for the first time. If you
Speaker 1: have some feedback you'd like to share on this particular
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Speaker 1: possible future episodes that we have not even recorded yet, well,
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