How Psychedelics Can Change Our Minds

Michael Pollen. He's talking about how a guided psychedelic trip on psilocybin molecule found in mushrooms helped him see his mortality through an entirely new lens. This is a very non interventionist therapy. The therapists say nothing during the experience except would you like a glass of water or a snack or need to go to the bathroom. It really they let your mind go where your mind wants to go.

It is a kind of self exploration, self healing. On today's show, we hear from Michael Pollen about how plants have the power to change our minds. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of Plans a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. I'm fascinated by the kinds of experiences that can drastically change our perspectives, and guided

psychedelic trips have the potential to do just that. While psychedelics aren't legal in the US, they have been used in certain clinical trials and have delivered powerful therapeutic benefits for people struggling with things like addiction, depression, and existential distress. So what's happening to our brains under their influence that gives rise to these remarkable changes. Michael's written two books that explore the answer to this question, How to Change

Your Mind and This is Your Mind on Plants. And so today we dig into the science of psychedelics. We started off by discussing the somewhat astonishing fact that basically every culture in the world has discovered psychoactive plants. They contain molecules that can alter human consciousness. We're talking about the morphine and the opium poppy, and the caffeine and coffee and tea. Michael says there are a few explanations for why we're so drawn to these substances, for starters,

they can provide pain, relief and stave off boredom. But then I think that there are more profounds to which people have put these psychoactive plants. And I'm talking here about the more powerful ones, the ones we call psychedelics, and that is for access to other realms, other dimensions of reality and afterworld and underworld, and religious visions essentially mystical experiences that are at the heart of a great

many religions. And it may well be that it was these psychedelic substances that opened up that way of thinking, that gave people the visions that were interpreted in such a way as to underwrite whole religions. And we just think of the artists who were influenced by psychoactives, you know, new metaphors, new insights, or scientific discoveries. I mean, there's a great many scientific discoveries that traced to psychedelic use. I think of it as the natural history of imagination.

But it sure is interesting to think about it is, and I mean it is striking to me that it just appears like normal consciousness isn't enough for us humans, right, Like we're not sated by it. And look, there's obviously a continuum, and I fall closer to the risk averse. I'm more of a boring person who seems I feel

totally fulfilled by my current realm of consciousness. I know lots of other people have a much more exploratory mindset, but it is striking that across all cultures there is some itch for something beyond our everyday conscious experience, and we seek transcendence. Of course, not just through drugs. Extreme sports and intense periods of physical activity can do it releasing drugs in the brain. Basically, I mean, we can drug ourselves in all sorts of ways. Fasting does it, dance,

ecstatic dance, rhythm, drumming. I think the desire for a transcendence goes really deep, and it's interesting. I mean, do other creatures have it? We know that some other animals do like to change consciousness from their you know, their elephants love alcohol apparently and apparently birds. Will you favor cannabis seeds over all different kinds seems to addle them

a little bit. But transcendence, that idea that you know that there is another, there is another realm of existence, another way to be, is something that I think is a deep human desire. Yeah, I'm wondering, Michael, if you can give us a quick history lesson, because in recent years there's been a huge resurgence of interest in the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics for people with anxiety, depression, addiction,

terminal illness. What's been responsible for this shift? Well, you know, one of the big surprises in researching psychedelics was discovering how much research had been done during this period, from the late forties through the mid sixties and the fifties. It was, you know, a really vibrant field of research with some very promising results using LSD and psilocybin to treat alcoholism and of life anxiety, things like that. It was completely respectable, and then the work stops in the

late sixties early seventies. There is a tremendous backlash under President Nixon, and the culture kind of turns against them. There's a backlash and the media, which had been incredibly positive about psychedelics turns on a dime, and so the research stops. The way it gets restarted is really a

function of a couple things. One is, you have a group of psychiatrists therapists of other kinds who never lost faith in the fact that these were powerful therapeutic agents, and in fact, some of them were working with them underground, and people in that world started kind of plotting the return of psychedelics. And then in the early nineties they

kind of got a signal from the FDA. There was a bureaucrat there in charge of drug development, and he basically sends a signal to researchers that, look, we're going to just treat psychedelics like any other drug. If you've got a good experiment, if you've got a good indication, you think it's going to be useful for We're not going to discriminate against it. The key moment, I think, though, comes when Bob Jesse, who is an interesting character. He's

not a doctor or a therapist. He's a computer engineer at Oracle who had experiences with psychedelics. Dad had convinced him of their value, and he reaches out to a man named Roland Griffith, who is a very well respected psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins, you know, the leading medical institution in the country, and they cook up this study and it's not a clinical study, it's not a therapeutic study

at all. It's an effort to see whether you could induce a mystical type experience in someone with a high dose of psilocybin. Mystical type experience is something that role and is personally very interested in. And they do this study that's published in two thousand and six, and it's the craziest study. I mean, the title is something like psilocybin can occasion mystical type experience in healthy, normal people

or something like that. And for me to see these words mystical experience in the pages of a medical journal was just so mind blowing. And what is the hallmark of a mystical experience? Good question, I had no idea. But it involves a transcendence of space and time, a euphoric feeling or feeling of intense well being, a dissolution of ego, followed by a sense of merging with something larger than yourself. You feel connected to nature or other people,

or the universe of the divinity. And they found that of the two thirds of people who had this mystical experience, they reported enduring changes in their sense of well being going out six weeks or eight weeks or something. And in a follow up study they found that aspects of their personality, specifically openness, the trait of openness increased, and that's quite striking because in general, personality doesn't change in adults. So this study really is the foundation on which subsequent

work has been done. And by looking at these results that there seemed to be an improvement in well being, the idea occurred, well, we should try this with cancer patients. We should try this with people who have what the psychiatrists call existential distress over their diagnosis or the proximity of death. And that became the first clinical trial that the people at Hopkins did, and it was duplicated at

the same time at YU. Yeah. You know what's notable about some of these controlled studies is that participants report that their guided experiences on psychedelics are totally singular in nature, right, that they count among the top most meaningful experiences they've ever had. And I'd love to dig into the neuroscience just a bit so we can understand what is giving rise to these exceptional subjective states. Well, the honest answer is,

we don't really know. We have some really interesting hints, but there's a lot more work to be done. A researcher in England named Robin Carhart Harris put people in an fMRI machine and injected them with psilocybin in one trial and LSD in another, and he found something very interesting. Where he expected to see a kind of explosion of activity mirroring the extraordinary visual effects and emotional effects, he actually found the most notable thing was a quieting of

activity in one particular network. And this network, which I had never heard of, is the default mode network. The default mode network is the part of your brain that's most active when you're not doing anything. It's where your brain goes. It's the default and it was discovered when they were doing fMRI tasks of other kinds and they

had to get the baseline. So they tell people don't do anything, don't think about anything, or try not to think about anything, just lie there, and it turns out their brains lit up and all sorts of stuff went on, and a lot of it involved self reflection, worry rumination, thinking about the future, or thinking about the past. The default mode network seems to be involved with creating this

projection or illusion that we have a self. It's involved in time travel, the ability to think about the future and the past, which if you think about it, you need if you're going to have a sense of self. Our sense of self is what's happened to us in the past and what we hope will happen in the future, or what we think might happen to us in the future.

It's also involved in something called theory of mind. That's the ability to imagine the thoughts of other people, to understand that other people have thoughts, have a subjectivity, have an interiority. That's a big deal. And it's involved in what's called the narrative self. That the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we take new events and kind of weave them into that narrative. So you know, to the extent the self has an address in the brain, it appears to be in this network.

And this network gets very quiet under psychedelics and in the minds of very experienced meditators and you know Robin. Then you know correlated reports of ego dissolution and people can describe that's it's quite a wild experience. You observe your sense of self completely melting or crumbling. I had once happened to me when people reported that they had the most precipitous drops in activity and the default mode network. So that's one of the findings really of psychedelic science already.

That is significant, I think for our understanding of consciousness and the self. But it's not the only theory of what's going on. There are people who aren't sold on the default mode. We're hoping to get some more precise answers to these questions. Yeah, I mean, in addition to you some of the therapeutic effects. It is so compelling that this basic research can help us further understand what

brain structures are associated with our sense of self. Yeah, there's another area to investigate too, is what psychedelics might

teach us about the consciousness of children. You may know Alison Gopnick Alison Yes yea such a fan of hers, and she studies child consciousness and problem solving, and she's convinced that the psychedelic experience is as close as adults get to the mind of the child and the way of thinking and the kind of what she describes as the lantern consciousness, as opposed to the consciousness of adults, which is very focused in linear children taking information from

all different sides, which allows for a different kind of creativity, and she thinks that there's a retrogression and psychedelic consciousness that closely resembles that of children. So that's a whole other avenue of exploration. That's very exciting. Yeah, I love her quote that babies and children are basically tripping all the time. What a lovely, colorful way of saying it. This was an insight she had when her granddaughter was born.

I love that. Yeah. You know you mentioned that you did have the experience of feeling your ego dissolved, and I know you did try psychedelics while you were writing your book. You say that you felt your sense of self scattered to the wind like a blizzard of post its. And I'm wondering, can you just paint a scene of the many ways in which ego dissolusion expressed itself during your trips. It was such an interesting, strange experience. I

was really not prepared for it. So I had a fairly high dose psilocybin experience guided by an underground guide somebody I really trusted. And I mentioned that because if you're going to let go to the extent of allowing your sense of self to completely vanish, you're going to have to feel very safe and very comfortable. And I did,

you know, under her guidance. And anyway, at a certain point, well into the experience, she offered me what's called a booster dose, and I figured in for a diamond for a dollar. I was doing this for my book, actually, and so I said sure, and I ate another research purposes, strictly for research purposes, you know, in the interest of my readers, because and it really was because I was although I was very curious, I was very afraid to

do psychedelics, you know, I didn't. I didn't do this till I was like in my late fifties, and I had a lot of fear of what could happen. I had read the stories of you know, bad trips, and I didn't know what. Also, you can discover really unpleasant

things about yourself. And anyway, at this point, I suddenly saw myself from outside, and I saw myself kind of explode in this cloud of post it notes, blue post it notes, you know, like confetti, and they came down to the ground and they kind of masked in this pool of blue paint. And that was me. And I was absolutely sure it was me. But I was perceiving it from this new perspective that I had never experienced before. I don't know quite what it was. It wasn't me.

It was very equable, disinterested. It had no problem with what had happened. I didn't feel threatened in any way, and that was me. I was gone and that was fine, but I was still aware. And it was the first time it ever occurred to me that you could have awareness without self, which is something Buddhists and Hindus will tell you about. But you know, that seemed very far from my experience. And then what happens when you don't have a self is that that you merge with everything

around you. And in this case, what I merged with was a piece of music. And she put on Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite number two in D minor, which is a very sad piece of music, so gorgeous. Yeah, and I became one with the music. It was complete merging, and it was incredibly beautiful. It's most profound experience of music I'd ever had. And I felt as though the bow, the horsehairer of the bow was going over my body.

And then at one point that I was inside the well of this you know this wooden container and it was so beautiful, and although it was very sad, I wouldn't call it a happy experience. It was very sad. It was all about death. I mean that the piece of music. To me, it was all about death. But I was completely I had complete acceptance that had I died and vanished, that was fine. It was what was meant to be something. Something followed on that death of

the self. There was a continuing consciousness of some kind. I know it sounds crazy and very hard to put into words. I struggled to describe it in the book, but it was one of the most profound experiences of my life. The struggle you're having putting your experience into words is very characteristic of how many people feel after

a trip. Right. They're saying, this is one of the most profound experiences of my life, and yet when they try and express it in words, it sounds cliche new ag you know, everything is love, that sort of thing.

It's interesting interviewing Casey Musgrave's the country music singer and a previous episode of A Slight Change of Plans about her psychedelic trip, and I was actually asking whether the ability to create music in some way was an antidote to her inability to fully express the profound insights that she had had using the words that we have at

our disposal. Well, you know, you've just reminded me of one of the other of the eight characteristics of mystical experience, and that's ineffability, the fact that these are very hard to describe because it kind of defies the language we have. Our language wasn't built to describe these kinds of experiences. And the other thing that you alluded to is that there is a tremendous banality to some of the insights, the profound insights that people have, such as love is

the most important principle in the universe. You know, that is banal, but it's also profound. And one of the things you come out of the experience realizing is that it's a very fine line between binality and profundity. And one of the things psychedelics does is it takes all that ironic crust we cover the world with and it scrapes it off really effectively, and suddenly things appear with

the profundity and beauty of first sight. I mean, awe at the at the ordinary is a really you know, a piece of music, a flower, I mean, And that's another way in which I think you're recovering the mind of the child. And that's a wonderful aspect of psychedelic experience. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plants. I'm talking with Michael Pollen about how psychedelics can change our minds. I wanted to hear more about

the therapy cutic benefits of psychedelics. Studies show that when they're administered and guided clinical settings, they can help with a surprisingly vast number of mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and fear of death. Now, I was initially kind of suspicious of the you know, is this some sort of panacea. It's being used for all these

different things. And I remember interviewing Tom Insel, former a psychiatrist, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, and I said, isn't this a little weird that all these different indications are responding to the same kind of treatment, And he said, well, you're assuming that they're all different, you know, indications. They may be symptoms of a similar brain, and that is that a brain that's overly rigid, and

it's thinking that's trapped in patterns of rumination. And indeed, all those things depression, anxiety, obsession, addiction represent people stuck in loops of destructive thought and behavior, and that what psychedelics may do is help you break out of that. I mean, certainly that's consonant with the use of SSRIs selective serotonin reuptic inhibitors rights. Yeah, OCDA, anxiety, depression, etc. So it would be very reasonable to expect that what

Tom is saying applies in this case. I'm wondering if you can share some examples of the therapeutic benefits that can be conferred by psychedelics, in particular people who are facing what you've referred to as existential distress. Yeah. Well, the first group of patients I talked to were cancer patients, and I interviewed quite a few of them. Patrick Metas is someone I wrote about in detail in the book.

I never met him. He had died already, but I spent a lot of time with his wife and his therapist and learning about his story and reading his account. And he was a man he was about my age at the time that and a journalist like me also who had gotten cancer of the bile ducts, and his wife noticed the whites of his eyes had turned very yellow, and he was given a terminal diagnosis and struggled with that for a long time. It was really paralyzed by it.

He read about this experiment going on at NYU. He was in New York, and he decided to enroll in this drug trial to see if this could help him with his anxiety and depression. His wife actually was against it because to her it represented giving up, but he had no intention of doing that. He was continuing with his at least for a while, with his chemo after the experience, and he did it, and he had a mystical experience. It was very profound. He described it in

great detail. He explored his body and visited his cancer. He saw it, and at one moment he climbed a kind of precipice in his mind and he looks out and he sees this kind of plane of consciousness, you know, a vista in front of him, which really he thought was what would happen to him after he was after he died, and he had a sense this was where he was going. It wasn't frightening. He would be okay

to go there, but he wasn't ready. He still wanted more time with his wife, and he kind of turned back, and he came out of the experience a changed man, and he had I forget how much time it was. It was like another eleven months where he was able

to have great pleasure in life. He would spend his days walking along the Brooklyn Pier checking out new restaurants, had really good periods of time with his wife, and at a certain point decided to stop his chemo, which was really debilitating, and he wanted the clarity that would come with just living out his last months without medicine in his body. And he died a death of acceptance. People I interviewed described his room at Mount Sinai as

like having this glow. He was incredibly settled and happy, and all the staff of the hospital would want to come by this room to get you a taste of this man who was approaching death with such equanimity. So it was, you know, it was incredible. And at one point his wife sent me a photograph of him snapped like three or four days before his death, and he was very thin, wearing the hospital smock, and he had an oxygen clip in his nose and he was beaming,

so that you had a profound effect on me. And I interviewed a great many patients about their experiences, and there were a lot of common denominators. One was a kind of a confrontation with death and a confrontation with one's cancer, and in most cases it made people much more accepting of their death. So I think it has a powerful application there for people with life changing diagnoses, and obviously not just answer, I mean someone with an

als diagnosis or any number of other terminal diagnoses. I was kind of sold on it for that use, and because we have so little to offer people, you know, we give them morphine which dulls their minds, and this clarifies their minds, so you know, hopefully this will become common. Yeah.

You know, Patrick's story reminds me of the most stirring, powerful part of your book, which is learning that many people believe that the insights that they've tapped into while they're on these psychedelic trips do represent objective truths about the universe, right, This no edit quality, and that you know they're not just dismissing their insights as these zany things that they had while they were high. They see their experiences as this kind of window into some more

accurate view of reality. You know, take Patrick who believes that he's confronted what his afterlife will look like, and to me, it raises some very interesting philosophical and moral questions. I struggle with that, and I asked some of the researchers about this, and I got a range of answers. I mean, one is, you know, well, we don't really know what happens after someone dies, and it's not for us to tell our patients what happens after someone dies.

But I would say, you know, well, maybe what you're administering is a delusion to people. And I remember one researcher said, hey, if it works, who cares it? Took a purely pragmatic view. That's my camp for what it's worth. Yeah. Absolutely, as somebody studies cognitive science and believes I guess I

have a very reductionist view of life. But I am of the mind that all we are are our subjective states, and so in the throes of a terminal illness, if you can be brought relief by believing the afterlife is one thing, great, You've reduced suffering. But again, not everybody has my exceedingly reductionist view of human existence. Yeah, and

I think it's something that needs to be explored. I mean, I think that there are many ethical issues raised by psychedelic But it's also important understand that it's not the researchers that are planting this image of the afterlife, and it's not the pill. The pill is just is a catalyst for thoughts and fantasies and images. They're not priming you to have an afterlife experience. They may be priming you a little bit to have a mystical experience in

the way they prepare you. I mean that needs to be looked at. But everything that happens on a psychedelic experience is the product of your mind and to some extent, your expectations and your setting. I mean we know about set and setting. Very suggestible, yeah, very suggestible, But it's really your creation. This isn't mind control. So if that's where somebody's mind takes them and that's a helpful place,

it's hard to argue with that. I mean, I mean, I tend to agree with you, but you know, I mean, people might have ethical qualms about that. But I come back to the fact that there's no information in the in the molecule. Right, It's it's all what your what your mind is creating. Yeah, maybe it's subjective states, Yeah, it's it's about maybe maybe a reframing for skeptics or people who might have some concerns is that it is essentially a creative exploration into the types of things that

could reassure an individual person. Right, It's like, yeah, what what would pacify Patrick in this very specific situation in his mind engages with that. You know what's interesting there is you're healing yourself, um right, I mean, and in fact, that is a large part what happens. I mean, these are this is a very non interventionist therapy. The therapists say nothing during the experience except would you like a glass of water or a snack or need to go

to the bathroom. It's it really They let your mind go where your mind wants to go. It is a kind of self exploration, self healing, and you know, there's there's so much more we need to learn about it. For scaredy cats like me Michael, who will almost certainly never be willing to do a psychedelic trip, are there ways of approximating the effects of psychedelics through other means, Yes, there are. The most interesting one I came across is

something called holotropic breathwork. This was devised by Stan Groff, who was a psychiatrist who was doing a lot of psychedelic therapy in the sixties, and once the drugs were made illegal, he wanted to find a legal way to get the same results because he was getting amazing results with his patients, and borrowing from many different traditions, including yogic breathing techniques, he came up with this way of inducing a trance state that is very much like psychedelics.

I did it once, and you basically have this pattern of breathing that I think hyperventilates you. You're breathing very fast and exhaling more than you're inhaling, and they're playing very loud, rhythmic drum and after a certain amount of time, a few minutes, you enter into this state where you can do that breathing without trying to. You're on your back,

but you're dancing, You're all your limbs are moving. It's the strangest thing that you could induce this trance and you have the kind of imagery that you do on psychedelic experience. And I did it, and I felt like I'd run a marathon when it was over. It was a very intense experience, no drugs involved whatsoever. What is it doing in the brain. I think it may in fact be doing the same thing to the default mode network, because you're probably starving the brain of oxygen. But yes,

there are non pharmacological ways to get similar effects. I do wonder whether we as humans would be more tolerant of non pharmacological states that actually rival the psychedelic ones if they're negative, if they're not drug induced, Like there's somehow this bias against the drug induced bad trip. But if I were to achieve that psychological state through natural means, somehow, I'm more okay with the idea of if it going

sour or being scary. Yeah, well, we you know, we have a prejudice against exogenous drugs, but there are ways to drug yourself without them, and this is one. There may be risks though to doing that. We haven't talked about risk. But one of the really striking things about the classical psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin and DMT is that there is no lethal dose. You can't overdose on these drugs, and you can't overdose on all sorts of over the counter drugs. There's no risk of addiction either.

I mean, I'm not trying to sell you on anything. Worry, you haven't sold me on anything. I'm still not going to do it. But the risks, the risks, such as they are, are, there are psychological risks. People do get into psychological trouble, especially when they don't pay enough attention to set and setting, and they don't do it with a guide, and they don't do it in a safe environment. It can be you know, it can be terrifying, and

so you do have to keep that in mind. But when you know, I came to it late and I did my due diligence. I was not a twenty year old, you know, with no proper sense of you're in a whole freaking book on it. No one's going to be able to compete with you on that front in terms of doing your due diligence. Well, but I wanted to make sure it was safe, and I really did look at all the research and convinced myself this wasn't a

stupid or irresponsible thing to do. There are legal risks we should point out, unless unless you're in a drug trial, you know, you go to a university and enter. But aside from that, I convinced myself that the benefits would probably outweigh the risks, and I certainly feel that way having done it. I'd love to ask you a more personal question about the long term impact psychedelics have had on your own life. What are some enduring changes you've

had in your perspective or your personality ever since? You know. I think the big thing is I acquired and it was during that episode of ego dissolution or you know, solution of self that I described a little more perspective

on my ego or self. I identified with it. I thought I was that that person, that voice, and I've come to see that it's one voice among several in my mind, and that I don't necessarily have to listen to it, and that sometimes I can recognize that my ego is up to his old tricks and he's being hypercritical or needlessly worrying, and I can kind of get some distance on it, and I find that very useful.

It's exactly the kind of insight you might or practice, you might get out of conventional psychotherapy, but I got it in the course of an afternoon, you know, and that was very useful. If you ask my wife, she would tell you that the experiences have made me more open, more emotionally available, things like that. I'm not sure I can, you know, I necessarily see that, but it has opened up this space of curiosity about myself and self exploration,

and I found it very ful. I mean, every time I've done it, you know, I learned things about myself I didn't know before, and that's incredibly valuable, and especially at my age. I'm in my sixties now, and you sort of think that that process, you know, would have slowed or ended, but not at all. It's actually been intensified by this. Okay, now, now you're selling me a little bit in the last minute, Folks, he gets me while I'm weak and vulnerable. No, this is awesome. Thank

you so much, Michael. Oh my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to you. I hope we can do this in person next time. Hey, thanks for listening. Next week we'll bring you the story of Korean American journalist un A Lee. She was held captive for one hundred and forty days in North Korea. Her time in captivity taught her that sometimes finding humanity and your enemy can help you survive.

There were some moments that we could connect on a human level, There were some commonalogies that we could understand each other as parents and then also understanding the Korean kirture, and there were moments that we were able to make more talk that was really helpful during that Depenson. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced

by me Maya Shanker. The Slight Change family includes Tyler Greene our senior producer, Jan Guera our senior editor, Then Holiday our sound engineer, Emily Rostak our producer, and Neil LeBell our executive producer. Luis Skara wrote our theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries. So big thanks to everyone there, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, Lee Tall Mulat and Heather Fame, and of course a very

special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week. So how does this sound? I think I'm on the proper microphone. Why are the three legs of this microphone not the same length. We like to introduce logic puzzles into the mic setup, Michael, So if you could figure out the three leg problem, that's actually part of the challenge. Oh god, this is admissions ticket to the interview.