Psychedelics Playlist: The Manifested Mind, Part 5

ultimately what this episode is about. What what are some examples of the stuff that's going on in our century, in the twenty one century regarding psychedelics, like with the Friday Thirteenth movies. Part five is a new beginning. Yeah, that's right, it's the Psychedelic Research Revival. So yeah, So we've been teasing this, I guess throughout the past four episodes that at some point we're going to talk about research that's taken place on the clinical significant of psychedelics

in the twenty first century. After some of the veil of stigma has lifted from from psychedelic assisted therapy and psychedelic for treating various conditions. UM, So to quickly look at one important study, I think this would be a good place to start, from the early days of the twenty first century psychedelic renaissance. I just checked and this one has been cited seven hundred and eighty nine times

now according to Google scholar. This is a study from Roland Griffith's, William Richards, Una Macon and Robert Jesse And this was published in Psychopharmacology and the year two thousand six called Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. And I think we'll we will talk more about spiritual significance as we

go on, maybe later in the episode. But UH, to give a brief summary, Basically, psilocybin has been used for religious purposes for centuries, but what does it actually do? Uh? This research for suit a similar line of inquiry to the marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen sixty two, which we

talked about in the third episode of the series. This was dosing people with psychedelics and then letting them loose in to church basically well seminary students, and so they were there you know, to learn about the divine and to become ministers. I guess probably. And they were there for the Good Friday service in this church, and some were given psilocybin and some were given an active placebo. I think it was niacin, which causes tingling and flushing

and so. In. In that that experiment, they did find that the people who had been given the psilocybin for this religious service reported having largely reported having these very profound and positive mystical experiences while on psilocybin that they

believed largely changed their lives for the better. Right, not just memorable experiences, but life changing experiences and believed subjectively to be spiritually significant to religious people, right, not not just a situation of where it's like, oh yeah, I saw something or or felt something and it kind of made me think about some religious concepts. I was already turning over in my head. You know. It was it was it was like an order of magnitude beyond that. Yeah.

Uh So this study from two thousand and six it was to study whether psilocybin causes people to have these same types of experience as mystical or religious experiences that they rate as positive and profound when compared to a placebo. And this was a double blind study using high doses of psilocybin and an active placebo control. The active placebo they used in this case was not niacin. It was methyl finitate hydrochloride, which stimulates the central nervous system. It's

a stimulant. And I could be wrong, but I think this one also what they definitely injected it, right, I think so because you do so. Actually I'm not sure, Okay, a lot of these a lot of these studies, they do end up injecting it just because it's fast acting and also sometimes a little stronger, I mean a lot stronger too, because it's just hitting me like that as opposed to you know, gradually coming up. That's and yeah,

that does happen in some studies. I did not know the methodical administration here, but so quote, volunteers completed questionnaires assessing drug effects and mystical experiences immediately after and two months after sessions. And then they also say that community observers rated changes in the volunteers attitudes and behavior, so they didn't just ask people their own subjective impressions of how they've changed. They also asked other people, Hey, how

has Jeffrey changed? Right, So it's not just Scrooge saying oh yeah, I'm totally cool with cratch It. Now you're like you're actually asking cratch It, Hey, what do you think about Scrooge? Just like, oh, yeah, he's totally different now. I don't know. He must have he took something Christmas Eve. Didn't you write something once about how Scrooge was on d MT? Yeah? Yeah, I and I can't be there. I'm sure I'm not the only person to make this commentary,

but I feel like, um, a Christmas Carol. The story of Evanezer Scrooge is like such a psychedelic experience, Like really he had. I mean, he has a supernatural experience that makes him reassess his life and his life choices and ultimately changes his trajectory. And I think it has a tremendous amount in common with some of the psychedelic experiences we've been discussing. Yeah, I think I think that's about right. It was that bad potato that he ate, right,

you know what he says. It was like a bit of cheese or meat that had gone off. Okay, so results of this experiment, the the updates sort of on the marsh Chapel model the author's right quote, Psilocybin produced a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods,

including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At two months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experiences having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes

rated by community observers. So the authors write that that the life change is experienced by people who took psilocybin in this study are similar to the changes reported by people who have spontaneous mystical experiences without drugs that change their lives. Quote. The ability to occasion such experiences perspectively will allow rigorous scientific investigations of their causes and consequences. And this kind of comes back to William James territory here, right,

because this is not just a study about psilocybin. It's not just well, what can psilocybin do? It sort of opens a doorway of generally studying the religious brain to studying what's happening in our brains when we have a self described mystical experience, and how do these experiences work

to change behavior? As they often do? But again, this is a different sort of experiment than a lot of the other stuff we've been hinting at, because it's the kind of subjective positive experience we've heard reported anecdotally so many times for people have an encounter with something something profound and ineffable, that is a is a meaningful emotional experience for them causes them to reflect on their life

in ways that might change their behavior in their habits. Um. But what about the more clinical, more clinically significant uses like modern research using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders, addiction, and other issues. Yeah, and and this is where we're seeing just a lot of tremendous research taking place. Yeah. Uh, and um, we're still i think, on the on the cusp of it, like we're still in the early days,

but exactly. Yeah, but but we Yeah, we are seeing a lot of progress and a lot of promising, uh, promising results. One of the key figures in the modern research of psychedelic addiction research is a man by the name of Dr Stephen Ross of the n Y u psilocybin cancer anxiety study. We We mentioned him in a previous episode already, Paul and Michael Paulan discusses his work

at length in his book. And as I mentioned already, he was one of the panelists at the two thousand nineteen World Science Festival, which I was in attendance for. Uh and uh This talk, by the way from the World Science Festival should be available online at some point um in the months ahead. I'm not sure when, but when it goes up, I'll make sure I share it

on our social so people can view it. Because it was a great talk cover some of what we're talking about here and have been talking about that gets into other areas as well. UM so uh. Dr Stephen Ross discussed how psychedelics were not a part of his training in psychiatry and the study of addiction. Um and and like when you when you see pictures of him and you see him in person, um, you know he he doesn't fit. You don't look at him and say like, oh,

there's a psilocybin research tree. If he doesn't look like Willie Nelson's right, he doesn't look like Terence McKenna or Timothy Learry. He looks just like a like just an everyday human being. Um. And if you're said, if you're told that that he's a you know, a professional or an academic, you know, you wouldn't instantly think psilocybin. But anyway, he discuss discussed, you know, this wasn't part of his training, despite the fact the psychedelics were such a huge part

of psychology for a while. And uh, he says that all the research findings from the fifties and sixties were still out there, quote hiding in plain sight. And and when he you know, he looked closer, he saw, you know, you had this high success rate. Um using you know, mainly it was like LSD with alcohol addiction is the one that I think really caught his his attention. But but yeah, we had these we had these really promising results from the original period of modern psychedelic research. And

so he thought, well, let's let's try it again. Let's see what else we can learn. How can we we actually move on from what they had learned decades ago. Uh. The only problem is that, there were, of course huge administrative hurdles to studying it. But he was able to push through with an initial focus on terminal cancer patient studies alleviating end of life anxiety via psilocybin. Yeah, and this is a big important early thing, I think, also

from the mid two thousands. Yeah. His initial work though, actually took place at the n y U Dental School because Bellevue and the n y U Cancer Center wanted to just stay to stay clear of it because it was, you know, still it was early days getting back into and igniting what would become this renaissance of research. So there was still even in the scientific and medical community,

something of a stigma around psychedelics, even for clinical uses. Yeah, I mean even you know, even today, like in the culture at large, I feel like there's still you still have to push through that, right, Um, Like you still have to, you know, get to the point where you're not using the phrase magic mushrooms in the science headline, right uh. And we're not there yet. I mean, it's

still the popular press reporting about it. It plays up the kind of you know, hey, or you having depression symptoms, maybe you should try dropping acid, a new study says, And and it's understandable that would be the reaction for so many of us, because again we're coming on the heels of of the moral panic and so many of these, uh, these ideas about what LSD and psilocybin are. But that's

another attitude actually that we were just hinting at. That's not even it's not even the same as the moral panic that looks at psychedelics as this sort of culture destroying threat, you know, that's going to turn your children into acts murderers. It's more the kind of the trivialization of the psychedelic experience that looks at it not necessarily as this horrible threatening thing, but as this like ho ho ho, you know, oh, here's the stoner coming to

take the psychedelics. Yeah, Which it's kind of twofold, right. On one hand, like maybe that's a necessary part of of its transformation and and maybe that's one way it

survives through the through the decades of darkness there. But on the other hand, it does it hurts the potential of it, right because it creates a idea that it is purely recreational, that is pure hallucination and fireworks and just and there's nothing of value there, certainly not not medically valuable, right, or I mean even within the recreational use.

What a lot of these enthusiasts have been emphasizing is like spiritual significance, ability to change habits and and have profound emotional experiences, not like the frivolous, trivial party drug kind of approach. So Rossa's studies ended up using psilocybin rather than LSD. LSD had been the primary substance in previous trials, but psilocybin made more sense for a number of reasons. So it's it's less stigmatized, has less political badge baggage, it's easier to obtain, it's gentler, and it

also doesn't last longer than a researcher's work day. I think that's that's something that's worth driving home and a lot of this, you know, the LSD trip just takes up so much more time and people need to get home right. A number of studies, though, have have looked at this, have examined uh end of life anxiety and cancer depression and to what extent psilocybin could alleviate this condition, and there there have been some we've been seeing some

rapid success. Yeah, you can imagine why this is fruitful, just given people subjective experiences what they report about high doses of psilocybin and LSD trips. A common thing is reduced fear of death afterwards, the like. Again, this is just anecdotal, but the thing people often say is like I went through ego dissolution. You know, I I went to this place where I was having experience, but there

was no me anymore, there was no self. And people often talk of this in terms of some analogy of death, you know, it's like ego death or something like, I felt what it would be like to die or to to have me not exist anymore, and I didn't mind. It didn't feel bad in a way. It actually felt

peaceful and good. I mean, obviously, it also sounds I'm sure counterintuitive to a lot of people, because yeah, you might you might think, well, I'm if I'm on my deathbed, or I'm you know, I'm facing a terminal illness or whatever. The you know, particular situation is like this sounds like

a horrible time to take a mind altering drug. But I think, you know, based on what we've been discussing on the show, I think there's strong evidence for the counter argument, like, no, this is the time to take a mind altering job, especially because it seems like it might have this ability to reduce death anxiety, to reduce the sensation that the fact that you will die is

a horrible thing. Right, So effectiveness with psilocybin in these situations it's something like with the placebo at like and again we're not just talking about psilocybin itself, but rather, you know, the result of a lot of set and setting um priming the individual for the experience, having the experience of the mind alterning experience, you know, guiding them through it, helping them then to consolidate it all on

the other side. And again it's not the substance itself, but the state of mind that the substance creates that see is to be useful for psychiatric improvement, the experience, not just the compound acting within the body. Right, It's not take two of these and call me in the morning. It's take two of these. Um, let me tell you what's gonna happen. I'm gonna be there while it happens,

and then we're gonna spend time unpacking it afterwards. Now it also gets into the research also gets into other areas though, so it gets into just treat looking at possible treatments for depression, and Ross says that the work is promising there, but thus far the work hasn't been too broad. On the addiction front, researchers are making headway to treat addiction issues with not only alcohol but also tobacco, opiates, crack, cocaine,

and other substances. But in all of this, Ross stresses that is often the case in any of these studies, more research is required. Uh, you know. Even he admits that in some cases the findings are almost too good to be true. We just have to we have to keep going, like you know, there's no point where you're just like, all right, that's it. Psychedelics are are good across the board. Let's just let's just you know, prescribe them in every instance. Well, I mean, I do think

that there are there. We're tending toward a future where we're gonna have more confidence in the results than we have now. There are a lot of promising basically pilot studies. In fact, I think maybe it would be good to just talk through a few examples of recent studies. But maybe we should do that after we come back from a break. Thank alright, we're back, alright, So I thought it would be good to just look at a few examples of what these pilot studies on psychedelic clinical use

of psychedelics in recent years has been. And a good place to turn here is a pretty recent meta analysis of clinical research on psychedelics by Albert Garcia, Remew Brennan, Carisguard and Peter Addie. Uh This was in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology in twenty sixteen called Clinical Applications of Hallucinogens. And so this is like a meta review of all

the existing research out there right now. And they've got a great just table in this paper that summarizes findings from a bunch of existing clinical research up to the year sixteen. And so I thought we could just go through here and cite some examples from the categories of treatment you were talking about a little while ago. And so one thing is a couple of studies that looked at the treatment of alcoholism. One is Bogan shoots at

all from and this tested psilocybin enhanced therapy therapy sessions. Specifically, it was a type of therapy I had not heard of, I think, called motivational enhancement therapy. Robert, are you familiar with the uh NO? I don't believe. Yeah, but it's some kind of therapy. Uh. And so like many of the other studies, this is not just looking at taking a drug in isolation, but taking the psychedelic in concert with some kind of therapy or or session with a

counselor or therapist. I believe Michael Pollen pointed out there they tend to be a par of therapists. You tend to have like a male a therapist and a female therapist. Yeah. Yeah, in most of these studies. Yeah. Interesting. Um, so this is uh, this was to treat alcohol dependence in this study, and they found quote, significant reduction in self reported drinking days and heavy drinking days for thirty two weeks after

psilocybin administration compared to baseline. Another study by Krebs and Johansson in was a meta analysis of previous research on LSD assisted therapy or counseling, and it found across a total sample size of more than five hundred participants that a single dose of LSD, which was two d to eight hundred micrograms paired with alcoholism treatment found uh quote that that therapy produced significantly reduced reports of alcohol misuse.

That follow up compared to a control group receiving treatments without the psychedelics. So so it really there are several studies now showing that it really does seem to be working with alcoholics. There are also a number of studies,

as you mentioned, about depression. For example, car Harris at all In tested psilocybin quote in a supportive setting on patients with treatment resistant unipolar major depression, and it found significant reductions and self reported depressive symptoms from one week to three months after treatment. According to one scoring method for depression symptoms, eight of twelve participants showed complete remission of depression symptoms after one week and five of twelve

showed complete remission after three months. And these results are twenty milligrams of psilocybin um. So I think that's interesting because one thing it shows there is something that I think has showed up in a few other studies, is that again, while these compounds appear very promising, they're not a cure all and they don't appear to last forever.

It appears like they do have an effect, Uh, the effect seems to be very positive, but the effect fades over time, and this might be a thing where some applications of psychedelics and the clinical setting, maybe something that is a like a type of arapy that you would repeat at intervals over time, the same way that you would repeatedly visit a therapist for psychotherapy sessions, right or certainly the same way that in a lot of these

traditional science societies one would, um would continually go to the shaman or would partake of psychedelic substance as a part of a regularly occurring religious observance. Another study on depression was Osorio at all Infen. They tested ayahuasca for

recurrent major depressive disorder UH. This, like some of the others, was open labels so not placebo controlled as test group of six so like many of these small groups, but found significant reductions in reports of depressive symptoms after one,

seven and twenty one days. Um and and Michael Pollen has an interesting section in his book How to Change Your Mind about Treating Depression with Psychedelics, in which he talks to the psychologist Rosalind Watts, who she she so she talks about these master themes discovered in studies about what's going on with depression. And I just wanted to read a couple of sections from Pollen's book that I

thought were interesting concerning these these master themes. Quote the first was that volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a state of disconnection, whether from other people, from their earlier selves, their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values, or nature. Several referred to living in a mental prison, others to being stuck in endless circles of rumination they

likened to mental gridlock. I was reminded of Carhart Harris's hypothesis that depression might be a result of an overactive default mode network, the site in the brain where rumination appears to take place. And so, of course you know what might be going on there is that we we've talked about psychedelics as having at least metaphorically being these boundary dissolvers that they, you know, seem a kind of

ultimate remedy for symptoms related to disconnection. That they encourage the sensation of being connected to other and all things, and to other people and to the environment and all these things that people feel disconnected or cut off from. UH. And then going to the second master theme that Rosalind Watts explains to Pollen. Quote the second master theme was a new access to difficult emotions, emotions that depression often

blunts or closes down completely. What hypothesizes that the depressed patient's incessant rumination constricts his or her emotional repertoire in in other cases, the depressive keeps emotions at bay because it's too painful to experience them. Uh So, like often I think a lay person's understanding of depression might be, uh like that you feel intense sadness, you know, like this this really intense single emotion, which is not exactly

what depression seems to be. Like, I mean, I always come back to, um, was it was it C. S. Lewis that referred to depression as the black dog, like this this kind of thing that would come and like just weigh him down. Um, you know, I always come

back to those kind of descriptions. Do those feel more accurate when when you're experiencing depression or when you're encountering some of the depression it's not just like uncontrolled weeping, you know it is it is more in line with this disconnection we're talking about, this feeling of being trapped within something or within yourself. In some ways, I think it can be thought of as a sort of like a hyperd motivated state, yea where it can just be

difficult to do anything or to feel anything. And I guess hopefully, hopefully more people were aware of that. Now. I feel like the messaging about what depression is is is better today than it was like when when when I was you know, a kid, or when I was in high school. You know, yeah, I don't think we had a good idea of it. I think you had like occasional to be like a newsweek article about it, but it wasn't really something that was particularly discussed in school.

As I recall, Yeah, that does seem like something that's very important, like helping people understand what depression is, and like being able to recognize the symptoms so that it can be diagnosed, rather than you know, people just thinking like what's wrong with me? Now. Come back to a couple of other areas mentioned in this meta analysis of

of recent research on the clinical use of psychedelics. One is studying obsessive compulsive disorder, so moreno at All in sixteen did a double blind experiment with psilocybin to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, and they found quote marked reductions on the Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, which is a scoring scale for for those symptoms for all participants during one or more psilocybin sessions, and these effects lasted for at least twenty four hours, though they're not sure how long

after that. Obviously, I think it would be less use full in a clinical setting, for if it only treated something while you were on the drug. Right, it's more important to look at like these kinds of lasting changes that come about from an experience, but we don't know how long the changes might be operant on obsessive compulsive here. Uh. And then another thing is tobacco dependence. I guess that

goes into similar category to alcohol dependence. But Johnson at all in tested psilocybin paired with cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, and they found quote biologically verified smoking abstinence in eight percent of volunteers at a six month follow up, as assessed by exhaled breath, carbon monoxide and you'urine cottoning levels. I'm not sure what cotening is. It's probably some downstream

thing of nicotine. But the authors here also listed a couple more studies showing that both psilocybin and LSD assisted psychotherapy were linked with decreased anxiety and depression symptoms and people who were facing life threatening illnesses and cancer. But we we should, I think, acknowledge, as we've mentioned several times, that we're still in the early stages of the psychedelic research renaissance because a lot of these studies have small samples.

A lot of them are small samples, a lot of them are like open labels, so they're not placebo controlled, people know what they're getting, uh, and you know, they're not necessarily randomized controlled and all that. So I think the future looks bright. But as you were saying a little while ago, to invoke this much hated scientific cliche, much much more research is needed, and specifically it's more

rigorous and larger, more statistically powerful research is needed. I can only imagine too, that rescheduling these substances would also help broaden some of these studies hugely. Yeah, I mean it's you're talking about small study sizes, but with a schedule one narcotic that has that has had, you know, a lot of taboos associated with it, even for clinical and research purposes. Yeah, exactly, And so to some up

I think where where we stand. I want to quote from the discussion section of that that meta meta assis by Garcia remu at all quote. The psychedelics including LSD, psilocybin, mescal and d m T, and the d MT containing admixture ayahuasca, have shown promise in treating a range of psychological disorders for which currently available treatments are often insufficient,

such as mood, substance use, and anxiety disorders. These studies have mostly been conducted in small, relatively homogeneous samples, limiting the generalizability of their findings. However, safety and feasibility of psychedelic facilitated treatment models have been established by these initial studies, paving the way for further investigation in larger, more diverse

samples using randomized controlled designs. So essentially, these small studies up front have been very important in establishing protocols, UH demonstrating legitimacy and safety of these methods of research. And we're sort of on the way now to look and see what the results are once we try this with lots more people, in more settings and and more rigorous methods. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going to take another break, and

when we come back. We're gonna get more into the you know, some of the possible future scenarios for psychedelic use, and we're gonna we're gonna kind of take this in both the grand direction in a very mundane direction. We're gonna look at uh, psychedelics as a as a radio for speaking to God, and also we're gonna look at micro dosing. Okay, thank you, Alright, we're back. So we've talked a little bit about about the religious experience and

psychedelics already. Sure, the March Chapel experiments of nine two with psilocybin on on seminary students and in a good Friday service, and then the follow up study, the two thousand and six study by Griffith's at All It looked at mystical or religious experiences people had on psilocybin and found that people did view these as profound, significant experiences

and that they were positive. Yeah, and we see all these different examples of of this kind of thinking, this kind of interpretation of of psychedelic experiences that people have had. You know, Terence McKenna, who we talked about in some of the earlier episodes, certainly he got into some of these more elaborate ideas of saying, like the machine elves,

but I mean in food of the Gods. He discusses this, this idea of that the possibility of the holy other, and we see that in other people's writings as well. Huxley wrote of the mind at large. Uh. And then we even have these various uh, you know, other religious encounters to consider things that are maybe seemingly like a little less grandiose in terms of just you know, how

the writers using them. Uh. One of these examples being a cancer patient Dina Baser, who describes feeling quote bathed in God's love during her experience as part of a two thousand, ten n y U cancer anxiety study. By the way, she also made an appearance of that World Science Festival talk she was in the audience. This is a really interesting point because actually Paullen interviews Beser for his book and How to Change Your Mind and mentions

this experience interestingly, at least to me. He points out that despite her belief that she was bathed in God's love, that's a quote. Bezer does not believe that God exists, so to quote from pollen quote during the climax of a journey that extinguished her fear of death. Beser described being bathed in God's love, and yet she emerged with her atheism intact, and he wonders how it's possible like

to hold these contradictory ideas at the same time. Eventually, he writes, quote, not only was the flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous a form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of such a gift? God might be the only word in the language big enough. And I think that's really interesting.

It's like we don't have the language to describe these experiences without keying on other signs pointing to the unsayable and the indescribable, and religious words are the words that seem to fit that best and fall most within reach, even if we don't. I mean, some people do mean them exactly in their traditional sense, but a lot of people on psychedelics use these words without meaning them in their traditional sense, but still because they're the only word

they can find to suggest what they felt. Yeah, now, and now they had just to critique Paul and a little bit. I mean, I would argue that, uh, most of us have uh contradictory ideas in our head. You know, I think there are a lot of us that both believe and don't believe in a god or some sort of spiritual model. So we probably have multiple spiritual models regarding some you know, vague aspect of the metaphysical realm floating around our head right alongside like a a very

like stern scientific interpretation as well. But but that's that's kind of beside the point. But uh, but but I do think that I do think his interpretation is really interesting here, and I think that the baser is a story is his interesting. You know, we we often encounter this idea of glimpsing God, or if not a God or a deity or a goddess or something, glimpsing what is often referred to as the ultimate reality um which which of course this gets into. You know, this is

not new to the psychedelic realm. Like this is something as a as a very old consideration in Hinduism as well, the idea of like seeing through the veil of illusion and like seeing the world as it really is, and so one doesn't have to take a psychedelic in order to have this experience, but it certainly seems to be one of the pathways to to to having it. UH So we there's actually another Roland Griffith's study that comes out comes up and this is what this one is

actually is from this year from nineteen. This is from JOHNS. Hopkins and it was published in PLS one, and it looked at data from four thousand, two hundred and eighty five people worldwide who responded to online advertisements to complete one of two fifty minute online surveys about God encounter experiences. And it particularly asked about encounters with the Ultimate Reality or God or divine beings you know, like angels, etcetera, that sort of thing of those. Uh. Four thousand, two

hundred eighty five individuals. One thousand, one hundred and eighty

four attributed their experiences to psilocybin um. One thousand, two hundred fifty one said they took LSD, four hundred thirty five UH said they took ayahuasca, six hundred and six said they took D m T. In total, three thousand, four hundred seventy six individuals responded to the psychedelic survey uh part of the study, and then eight hundred nine responded to the non drugs say, uh, it's you know, zeroing in on people who are uh claiming to have

had some sort of divine experience encounter without the aid of a of a psychedelic But it is interesting to look at the numbers the way they fall out here because in both studies, seventy of people said it was among the most meaningful events of their lives, which I guess shouldn't be that surprising. If you encounter something that you perceive as being the ultimate reality or a God or an angel or what have you, like, it better be memorable, right, Yeah, I met God, but it wasn't

a big deal. Yeah, you don't want to be like, oh yeah I met God. I don't know why that didn't come up before. Oh yeah I saw an angel? Yeah, um, and then frank, god was kind of boring. But then they're also these differing factors to like. So seventy percent said that there was communication involved, So not only do they behold the divine or behold the objective reality, they

also had some sort of communication with it. Seventy five reported there being this this air of benevolence to it, reported a sense of intelligence, uh, se reported sacredness, and seventy described an eternal nature to it. So it was you know that this is something that has always been and always will be. Now, obviously these are just these are subjectively applied labels. It's the sense to which people thought these words applied to their experience. But we still

learned something from asking people these kind of questions. Yeah, uh, to keep going here. Seventy reported a decreased fear of death in the psychedelic group, fifty seven percent in the non drug group. Interesting, in both groups, fifteen percent said that it was the most psychologically challenging experience of their life. Of the psychedelic group described it as the ultimate reality, fifty nine percent of the non drug group described an encounter with a god or an angelic beings. So I

think that's interesting. I'll come back to that. The people that had asy cadelic experience, they tended to they were more likely to describe it as just a like they saw through the veil, They saw the universe or the world as it really is, whereas the non drug group were more inclined to encounter a being. Now, Griffith says

that there's a lot more to explore here. You know, he's he's not drawing any ultimate conclusions from any of this, uh, but you know, some of the things to tease out might be, like, you know, what factors may pre predispose one to have these interpretations like um, Like I wonder, for example, if the tendency UH to interpret it as the ultimate reality over a God, goddess, angel encounter in the psychedelic experience has more to do with the religious

ideals of the individual, you know, like here's somebody that they took LST or took psilocybin, so maybe they weren't like super religious, or it has something to do maybe with the you know, the dissolution of boundaries uh in the you know, the pressing down of the ego, the the the turning off of the default mode network for a little bit. So maybe you're you're less inclined for this experience to be boiled into this egoic entity and

you're more likely to have this broader, dissolved experience. But then at the same time, I mean, you know, McKenna and others have talked about encountering and other while you know,

having a you know, a rather intense trip. So and I guess it basically comes down to their multiple factors involved here, and it will be interesting to see how how future studies might tease that out and determine like, you know what, what is impacting the scenario versus the other and ultimately like you know what is the you know, how each can be beneficial, the the psychedelic experience or

the like purely non drug religious experience. Well, when you encounter some kind of reality beyond that with which you

were familiar. Yeah, what what tends to be correlated with people believing that there is an entity there, like a person or a mind or something versus just some kind of plane of existence or or you know, state of truth or I mean you sound kind of silly when you start trying to put it into words yet again, right, but I mean it is worth pointing out that, um, you know, you're still looking at you know, seventy in

both studies saying that there was communication. So it's it's like something is communicating with that there's some sort of communication, but maybe it's you know, it's it's less directed, it's less tied to an individual. H But anyway, it was, you know, an interesting study to look at. And again this was this is Roland Griffiths who we talked about earlier,

and that that earlier religious study going from two thousand six. Yes, so that's one sort of grandiose way of looking at the future of psychedelics and psychedelic research, right, figuring out how we interpret the divine and how they could even be as psychedelics can be used as part of some sort of religious experience, like not only uh, you know,

the traditional religious experiences, maybe some sort of new religious experience. Well, yeah, I'm curious to see how the idea of psychedelically prompted religious experience squares with traditional beliefs in dogmas, because there are very different attitudes that people can come at this with.

I mean some people, I think some people look at the psychedelic experience and say, oh, this proof of God, you know, because all these people take these compounds, have experiences of meeting another higher power or something like that. It's got you know, the consistency of these reports indicates there's got to be a real being up there that

that people are encountering. And then people come at it from completely the opposite way and say Look, if you know, if people are taking drugs that are causing them to have these experiences, that would tend to show that the experience is something going on in the brain and not like an actual spiritual being or entity up there that that's doing something right, Like why would that entity only be communicating with people are primarily communicating with people who

have taking a certain compound into their brains. And it's interesting that this exact same reality causes completely opposite reactions. Yeah, yeah, that to one person it is uh, you know, faith in God restored, and the other it may be a sign that there was nothing there to begin with. So yeah, we'll be interesting to see how I see what kind

of light future research sheds on this issue. Well, though, I also want to make clear that, at least from my perspective, I mean, I don't think that even if you don't think that there are actual other entities out there that people are encountering on these drugs, that doesn't mean that the mystical experience is not fascinating and useful

and revealing. If we are encountering other entities, even if they're not like ghosts or some kind of being that acts, you know, outside of our control, we are encountering something inside our mind that is a latent potential there. Yeah, and if you're communicating with that, even if you're just communicating with yourself, well, uh there, there could be something of value there. Um. So so that's kind of the grandiose view into the future, you know, communicating with with God,

envisioning God and communicating with the self, etcetera. On the other end of the spectrum, uh, Silicon Valley bros. Micro dosing. So I don't want to be too judgmental, but yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, So I mean obviously, like the intended um goal with micro dosing is not to uh justify the ways of God's to man, but to rather like be a little better your job, right,

creative in your job. So we touched on this in the last episode of Well I Guess the uh the episode prior to the last episode, uh and uh, and I wondered if any research had looked at whether Silicon Valley types would actually benefit from micro dosing to enhance creativity or novel thinking. Micro dosing, by the way, the idea is generally there's no like, you know, definite definition, but generally it's taking one tenth of a tripping dose of a psychedelic, So you're not having a you know,

perceptually altered experience or not in any significant way. It's more just kind of like thinking, this kind of loosens the mind a little bit, right, Yeah, just kind of like not shaking the snow globe of the brain all the way up, but just kind of like giving it a little shuffle and then like doing an eight hour work day. So anecdotal evidence would indicate that it elevates

mood and mental acuity. But then ultimately, what do we have in terms of studies, Well, we don't have much, but there was there there was actually a study that came out this year that looked into this a bit um, looking at micro dosing in rats. It was a University of California Davis study headed up by Dr David Olsen, and they micro dosed rats with d m T. So they gave them one tenth of the estimated hallucinogenic dose in rats. So that's one milligram per kilogram of body

weight every third day for two months. And this is you know, again more or less andreed one tenth of a tripping dose. They treated them for two weeks and then began studying mood, anxiety, and cognitive function over a two day period. And these were the basic results. An improved ability to overcome fear UH, antidepressant effects associated with reduced immobility, and no obvious impairments or improvements in cognitive function or social ability. Then, but there were also some

potential downsides. They observed significantly increased body weight in male rats and neuronal atrophy and female rats. This despite the fact that a previous study from Olson and company had shown that a single high dose of d MT and I should a single high dose of d MT showed increased your own old growth. So again, this is one of those studies that is not is just the beginning of a story rather than anything like an end to it.

More study is needed, but it ultimately shows that there may be some quantitative benefits to micro dosing, but there also may be some key risks, and Olsen says that that likely dose frequency and length of time are going to be key here to whether we're talking about a therapeutic dose or a potentially harmful effect. Yeah, and of course, as always, you know, rats are not humans and our brains are working very differently. But yeah, this is an

interesting indication of what might be going on. I'm especially interested in in the idea of overcoming fear and to what extent if that's an analogy for what's going on with micro dosing and human brains. Uh. If I don't know that, it could be that there's some kind of like positive disinhibition quality. I mean, this is something I think, Uh, people have thought about alcohol before. You know that that, like, sometimes people drink alcohol at parties because it makes them

more sociable. You know, you feel disinhibited. A lot of the kind of like fear that would keep you inside your shell goes away. But then of course there are tons of negative effects that come with alcohol. You know that that also, like it might make you less inhibited and and better at us socializing with people you don't know very well, but also makes you stupid erth just like you're not at your peak in every possible way.

And I would be interested to see if there are ways in which small doses of psychedelics could be relevantly disinhibiting without having some of the negative effects that come with other disinhibitory drugs like alcohol. Now, obviously there's a great deal to focus on in this episode about you know, clinical research and and it is essential, but you know, I don't think it's our only means of looking at psychedelics. UM.

Michael Pollen and others. They point out that the psilocybin is not marijuana, and we can't really look to a you know, one to one comparison on how decriminalization or legalization will or even should proceed in regard to psilocybin, for example. But but another, you know, I think important note here is that even if we're not seeing, even if we were not seeing all these potential benefits for therapy, UM, are there enough negatives in place to rationalize the continue

you to illegal status of psychedelic substances. I mean, I would think about it more from the other direction. I'm like, well, are those negative effects enough that it should be illegal and punished by police officers and law enforcement community and the justice system for people to just have some? I don't know. I mean it seems to me more like the reasoning should be that there should be a really good reason to make things illegal, not there should be

a good reason to make them not illegal. Yeah, And I mean especially I mean we were talking about plants too and fun guy, and you know, to what extent should we outlaw fungus um, you know, or multiple species of fungus you know, and especially if we're we're talking about like all the other things that happened when you outlaw substance. You you know, you you take these and you these these things and you leave their traffic, their trade,

and their culture to fringe, underground and criminal elements. Um. You know, because one of the issues with a lot of illicit drugs is that by making them illicit, we limit our ability to regulate them, to effectively educate people about them, and to help people when they encounter problems, be that problem a challenging trip or something like um,

you know, uh, addiction to a substance like cocaine. I was actually looking at a study recently taught looking at legalization of marijuana uh and in UH in the areas they were looking at how it it lessened cases of underage use just because since it was available legally but it was regulated, um, there were fewer people below the

appropriate age acquiring the substance. That's interesting, So uh, you know that easily we could do you could do a whole episode, multiple episodes, just talking about all these issues and drug legalization and regulation, what should be what should be illegal, and what shouldn't be illegal, not only in terms of substances, but pretty much anything within a given society. Um. But um, I mean, hopefully in these episodes we've given everybody some food, some food for thought, uh God, some

food of the gods for thought on that topic. Uh and in gen role, hopefully you know, we've provided everyone of a bit more information about the history, nature, and reality of psychedelics so that you can make up your own minds about it, or even change your mind if you so wish. All right, So there you have it, psychedelics. Uh. It only took us five episodes, but here we are, and I feel I feel frustrated because we still like, there's so much stuff we wanted to get to that

we never did. I just remembered we were going to come back to the stuff about adult personality change the psychedelics that. Uh, maybe we can explore that in a future episode. Absolutely. Yeah, this is one of those rich topics where you you know, the more you look into it, the more stuff you bring up, the more you realize you're missing out. And not even exploring. So if we didn't talk about your favorite sub topic or issue in psychedelics, sorry, we we just didn't get to it right. So we

would obviously love to hear from anybody. So if there's there's a particular part of this five part journey that you would love to hear a future episode on, you want a deeper dive, you want to come back to it, let us know about that. Uh. If you have general thoughts right into us. Also, if you have you know, particulars about your own experiences with any of these substances or even with just uh, you know, hallucinatory experiences that are not tied to psychedelic use, uh, feel free to

share those with us. And if you want to remain anonymous on a future listener mail episode, you can make a note of that as well, and we will definitely honor that. Uh. In the meantime, heading over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's

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