The Shaman and the Scientist: Hallucination

So just on the last podcast, just want to let everyone know off the top of the podcast if you didn't get it from the title or the description, Yes, we're gonna be talking about psychedelic substances in this episode, but we're gonna be talking about them largely from scientific standpoint, and from the standpoint is some very exciting and very important research that continues to go on right now into how these substances affect the human mind and what those

effects can actually reveal about the inner workings of the human mind and potentially aid us in dealing with some very real mental problems, mental ailments, etcetera. And again this was borne out of the exhibit for I Am the Black Jaguar, which is at Emory University, and uh, there was a talk there that you attended with doctor Katherine McClain and doctor Charles Raison at this very topic. Yes,

fascinating topic. Dr Katherine McClain involved in a lot of this exciting research at John Hopkins where they're they're taking individuals, they're exposing them to these various psychedelic substances and then uh, interacting with them, getting their perspectives on on what they're feeling and what's happening, looking at their brain, using radioactive tracers to observe exactly how this is affecting their mind.

Lots of fascinating research, and as we discussed in the last podcast, we're in at an interesting stage in the sort of ebb and flow of psychedelic research. Psychedelic research, it makes it sound kind of silly, but research into psychede ex and how they affect the mind, because this is all this sort of kicked off in the fifties mid fifties, but by the end of the sixties took a dive to basically nothing because of the politics and the cultural bash backlash, and he didn't really get picked

didn't pick up again. Until the nineties, and finally achieving some level of of steam again in the Dan of the twenty one century. But of course, a lot of these substances have been in use for thousands of years through shamanic practices in various parts of the world. What we're talking about here are anthony ogenic substances, uh, psychoactive

substances used in religious or spiritual context. Yeah. To put it in a Simpson's standpoint, Homer Simpson takes peyote and then he talks to a space coyote, uh that talks to him and helps him deal with his problems. That's kind of I mean, that's the pop culture simpsons simplified version of shamantic experience where some wise person a holy man or woman in a traditional setting that also you know,

probably engages in various cultural traditional medicines. They give you a magical substance one of these, you know, the mushroom or the vine of ayahuassa, and then you take it. The shaman probably takes it to probably in higher doses, and then guide you on the experience. Yeah. And actually I had read that shamans were sometimes picked for their ability to bring on these states of these altered states

of consciousness. Um by doing it actually just on their very own and not necessarily using any sort of substances.

So uh, they were definitely looking for people who had this ability to expand their minds into access at part of their minds that that that we don't normally use during the day, right or throughout the day, I should say, so, here's this idea that comes online that perhaps hallucinating is natural to humans, right, because you've had it in these rituals for thousands of years, we've had it in practice in this attempt to try to get a better understanding

of our place in the world. But also you have something called d m T which is naturally occurring in nature die methyl trip to me yea. And this was this was first synthesized by British chemists in the nineteen thirties. It has a psychotropic properties that were discovered twenty years later by Hungarian born chemist Stephen Sarah but then intent two Nobel laure Julius axel Rod he discovered d MT

in human brain tissue. Okay, leading us back to the idea, this isn't something you just synthesize, this is something that is is in the mind that exists already up. So this led to speculation that the compound plays a role

in psychosis. People research that possibility and eventually abandoned it again because of all the backlash against research into psychedelics anyway, but this was the beginning of our understanding of what d m T is and and what role it plays in these experiences, the shamanistic experiences, because it's always been a part of our brain, and it's present in plants such as that the yeah, exactly, and so we're when we talk about it being present in the brain, we're

talking about trace amounts of these d m T molecules. So obviously it's not any sort of amount that's going to, uh say, allow us to accidentally start tripping because somehow there was some sort of trigger that occurred. But it does lead people to question why d m T is

in the brain, what sort of role it's playing. And it should be noted that d m T is closely related to seratonin, which is the naturally occurring neurotransmitter that psychedelics effect so widely, and the pharmacology of d m T is similar to that of other well known psychedelics, So there's definitely a relationship going on there. It's just a question of again, what sort of role might d m T play in the mind? UM. There have been some people who say that it's produced by the penny

on gland, but we don't know that for sure. Yes, don't go stealing pennil glands thinking you're going you're triggering. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. It leads us to this question about whether or not hallucinations or something that are produced normally in nature, and whether or not hallucination is something that humans are supposed to do. UM. I bring this up because there's a two thousand eleven study at Whole University in the uk UM which has to

do with hallucinating colors. Now. UH scientists asked a group of pre screened people to look at a set of gray patterns and try to visualize color. Eleven members of the group had been identified as highly susceptible to hypnosis UH, and then seven of these subjects were not susceptible at all. The study found that all subjects who were easily hypnotized reported seeing a range of colors even while not under hypnosis.

In other words, their brain was hallucinating colors um and then m R I scans corroborated this and showed that the parts of the brain linked color perception lit up when they saw in otations imaginary hues of colors. So you have this idea coming online that you know there are parts of the brain that can work in conjunction

to create the reality. And we talked about this a thousand times that what we construct is reality is uh, I should say, rather, our perception really is an approximation of reality, and that each of us is looking at the world in a completely different way. We're just sort of all agreeing on a couple of things to make

sure we have some continuity in life. Now, it's interesting you mentioned that because on the subject of b MT, the subject of any of these substances, one of the things that Dr Catherine mcclaim brought up, specifically stressing the research environment that they use at John Hopkins where they have they don't just inject people with these psychedelic substances and then put them into like a padded room or something tomorrow, right, they have a they have a really

calming um space that has some you know, abstract art, has some Buddhas has some other really just a spiraitual iconographies some comfy couches, and they do a certain amount of priming too, because they don't want to throw somebody into some read nightmare trip, you know, they want to

send them on a more or less positive trip. They can't guarantee it, but they did find that on I believe psilocybin that outside of a clinical environment, about thirty of the people would say that they had a mystical experience inside of the experiment. When when they were controlling the the environment in which they were taking, you know, and surrounding them with this kind of mystical and calming stuff, they would see a seventy percent of the test subjects

reported having a mystical experience. So what you're saying is again a lot of it is suggestion, right, and yeah, and going into it with with certain expectations as well. You kind of see that with d MT as well, because I was looking at some of these accounts of of what d m T is like and um. In a letter to Alan Ginsburg, William Burrows described his own And it's of course important to know that William Burrows did a lot of things. I did a lot a

lot of drugs. He did a lot of drugs, so he's he's maybe not the you know, a pure test subject. But he reported like the first time he took it, it was he he felt himself turning into a half man, half woman and that he was space time traveling. Whereas your buddy John Horrigan, author of Rational Mysticism, he had a totally well not a totally different experience, but he

had a different take on the experience. Yeah, he took some ayahuasca because he is very interested and at the time of writing his book Rational Mysticism, was trying to get to the bottom of what is a spiritual experience? You know, what's going on in the brain, what's going on with you know, scientist, what's going on with Shalman's and uh So he had the ayahuasca trip and it was not um It was not probably pleasurable. It did not seem like it was for him. But was it

mind altering? Did it open up his perception that it seems to have done. Yeah, he said, quote after I threw up, I had a cosmic panic attack in which I was menaced by a malevolent day glow hued polyhedra. Have no desire to repeat this experience. So there you go, kids, if you're thinking about doing the ayahuasca. UM. But it is really important. And this is what McClean says, particularly in her talk at Emery when she was speaking about therapeutic effects of psilocybern which is um. If you think

about it as shrooms. You probably heard it on the street shrooms um. She had was saying that it is very important to try to guide the person into having a sort of breakthrough with the experience and having as pleasurable experience as they possibly can't aka not having a bad trip. Yeah, And that's a part of the whole shamanistic deal too, is that the ideas that you had

a guide, there's a certain desired experience. That is then the attempt to create this experience via surroundings, via priming, via a certain story or narrative or our mythos surrounding that experience Versus somebody you know who just I don't know. Is that a concert and somebody passes them something and

they take it totally different experiences. One is steeped in expectations and priming, in the idea that you're going on a journey, you're attempting to get somewhere perhaps change something about you, figure something out, and the other is taking something and seeing what happens and watching fireworks. As we've been discussing in this episode in the Other Shaman and the Scientist episode, our consciousness is not this really not

this set thing. You know. Um, Like I said, you can look at a puppy or a cat and it'll change the way you're thinking and the way you're looking at reality. You know, you can you have a cup of coffee and your things are gonna sharpen or fade

in terms of your perception. The warmth from the cup of coffee will inform your ideas about the person you're talking to you right exactly, And according to Dr Katherine McLean in this talk that I attended and you attended in the form of an iPhone, I was inside really tiny and um, if you feel in your head around the sort of third eye area and sort of between your between your eyes back behind in middle frontal part of the brandan midfrontal cortex just buried there in the

in the in the brain meat. Uh. There are two structures to play a key ro in maintaining our sense of self in time and space. I mean too vital that like, those are the big ones, right in terms of like how who I am and how I'm perceiving reality? How old am I? Where? Where do I fit in with time? Where do I fit in with space? I mean, that's like the basic stuff right there. Well, remember that was some of the meat of being a person when

we talked about personhood. Disability to imagine yourself in the past, the present, in the future. Yea, So personhood itself you can you can isolate to a certain part of the brain that is susceptible to changes. Something to keep in mind when we're talking about not only how hallucinations and how psychedelics skew the experience of self and uh in in the outside world, but also just how susceptible to change are more or less default understanding of self in

the outside world is okay? So McClain also brings into question. I think I mentioned before that consciousness may not be as coherent as we think it is. So um what she shared with everybody is that there's something that makes us even more tricky, and that's the introduction of a

drug called salvia de norium and um. In an experiment in they had volunteers take this drug, this hallucination, and what they found is that all of these people, all of them hallucinated that they had interactions with entities while on salvia, little men, elves, that kind of thing we're talking and I mean, we're really getting into the whole territory of of of paranoral experience and in spirits and and godlings and whatever else you might want to encounter

in the woods. Now, that's not that I mean, that's weird, right, just because people had, you know, hallucinations specifically about entities. What's weird about this is that when they then had subsequent trips on salvia, they revisited those scenarios and those entities and other words, there's entities became somewhat of a

part of the continuum of consciousness. Yeah, turned to the same I mean, I'm instantly reminded of dreams, of course, because we're talking about how crazy that the idea of encountering an entity is, and it's you know, and I imagine a number of people's minds are going a little wonky with just the idea of just who I'm They someone took a substance and then they encountered this being that wasn't real but seemed to have uh you know,

seemed to act of its own volition. Of course, we were constantly having dreams at night in which we interact with things and essentially entities. We've all interacted with unreal people and unreal things and our dreams. But it is always were very often difficult to return to a dream. Whenever we have even just a motif returns and subsequent dream, it's something that's noteworthy much less the encountered with an

exact same being or entity. So then that sort of blurs the line again between what what is illusion was reality and what we construct as reality. No, of course, I'm not saying that everybody should go out there and hallucinate and find an entity is and then have conversations with it. I'm just saying that I think it's interesting that it's now coated as a memory and it's part of the continuum, right. And it's worth noting McLean's study was it was a small number of people she said

for this, than which she had entities. And you do encounter plenty of cases where people have claimed to have taken uh salvia and they do not experience entities. So yeah. True. Yeah, so this is not a guaranteed ticket to fairyhood, no no. But of course our takeaway was, you know, hey, you you find some sort of being and then you pick up the conversation a couple of weeks later with that person in your head. This is a vital part, of course,

of shamanistic experience. One is taking a substance for a spiritual purpose. I mean, because the spiritual um, spiritual accounts, mystical hands are full of people encountering unreal beings. So we can see exactly where that fits in a shatanistic traditions. Well, and like William William Burrows Burrows as Us spoke of the half man, half Woman, I mean, there's all sorts of encounters, of course. Um. But what I wanted to talk about next is this idea of eyes wide shut

and particularly under the influence of ayahuasca. And I find this interesting because in the talk they were talking about how ayahuasca and visual processing get really wonky, because what you're talking about here are the areas of the brain associated with visual processing light. Um, and when you have your eyes open, right you you can see the sort of activity in your brain going on processing that what

they found. Um And this is again McClean talking about this, and the talk is that people who are on ayahuasca with her eyes shut having hallucinations, we're having the same level of activity in their brains um and visually processing as they would in their waking hours and processing the data, which is very different from how we normally processed data when our eyes are closed. Yeah, we're not to that.

Not only was the activity in the brain identical two eyes open there, it was identical to eyes open in an outside environment, in a in a very stimulus filled environment. Uh, they close their eyes and they're they're still encountering that much stimuli. Yeah, Which then it sort of placed this idea, Um, you know that you're the dream of your consciousness is

merging with what your brain is perceiving as reality. Yeah, I mean she she laid out that a lot of this does come down to this breakdown between the sense of self and other, between the self sense of you and the outside world and uh, um and and that's part part of what's at play here now. She and

um and Rason talked about the dangers of ayahuasca. They did talk about how this is not taken lightly, particularly with this kind of psychoactive substance, because you apparently have to prepare your body very well for this type of hallucinogen um. And a lot of this has to do with the amount of serotonin that you already have in

your brains. You don't want to mess with these levels. Um. And I say that not because I don't I think someone's going to do this, but um, this was something that they stressed in their talk, is that this is not stuff to play with. This is stuff that they do in the labs, the stuff that they make sure that people are mind and body prepared for. Because even the amounts of cheese with triglycerides that you eat will

affect the amount of serotonin in your brain. And if you were to then take Ayahuaska and you had a lot of serotonin, you could be very dangerous, can actually lead to death. Um, so you have to make sure that all the levels are correct. Yeah, So, no matter how much you might want to And Timothy Leary's where it's going to billion your journey to God if you have to give up cheese first, I mean, I don't know,

because cheese is great, gonna booyah. What was that part of the sentence a billion, your journey to billion said, buya, your buya journey to guy. Yeah that works too. I guess I think I'm hallucinating. Um alright, So there's again this idea of hallucinations perhaps being a part of the machinery, and particularly when you look at something like meditating monks, to bent monks in particular, there have been accounts all over the place about monks being able to meditate to

such a degree that they begin to hallucinate themselves. So we talked about this before and um with hallucinations having something in common with meditating in terms of quieting the default mode network, this chattering part of your brain. Makes you wonder if again, through meditation you can access the same sort of hallucinatory experience, this realm of dreaming, of lucid dreaming. Even well, it instantly reminds me of Mendala's the idea that the bitten monkst especially will there's sort

of there's the outer Mendola. You know that you see an art depictions, but these are kind of blueprints for a really kind of a thought palace or kind of a memory palace, this kind of mental space that they put their minds in a place now. And I mean that in terms of there's actually like a floor plant, you know, um, and it's a way of containing some very complex spiritual ideas and and so creating this crazy

structure in their head. It seems similar in many ways to the kind of crazy structure one mind encounter, say on D M T or you know, Awassa or one of the one of these substances where one closes their eyes and experiences some sort of amazing architecture or explosions

or what have you. Uh. The difference being, of course, here that the monk is having to work really hard to achieve this level of calm and concentration and uh in meditative state, whereas the individual taking this substance, not to say that it's easy, not to say that it's a necessarily a shortcut, but there's less intense concentration involved

in reaching that state. I don't know if this relates to it specifically in terms of hallucinations, but I do know that there's one practice in meditation where you um,

you essentially try to imagine your own decomposition. And the idea is not just to you know, get try to figure out what your school would look like, but to try to figure out, you know, how ephemeral life is and how important the present is and um, apparently this is something that is very disturbing because it can take over the imagination parts of your brain, right and as

we had discussed and hallucinating color. Um, sometimes what you're talking about here is just sort of making the inference that this will happen in your mind, taking it and running with it. Yeah, you see that that's actually a motif and cool due to Bettan art and some of the mandala and mandala a can uh creations where you see like flate and bones and oceans of blood and it's not like a morbid death metal celebration of that stuff.

But it's about the ephemeral nature of things and about the the limits of physical existence, right and again trying to get a better awareness of life and opening up your mind a bit um. All right, So there's this idea that this is, you know, speaking of ephemeral nature may not be long lasting, but there's some evidence that the drug use as well as the meditation could have

long term impact. Thinking about Roland Griffins, I believe it's his name, and he is the person we talked about his eleven study of the stage four and cancer patients who were taking um hallucinogens in order to try to vanquish there they're very very obviously, very obviously real fears that were hamstring them in daily life, their anxieties because of their illness and their disease. Um I wanted to

mention it because us. Uh. What they found is that some of these patients, up to two years after their hallucinatory experience were still garnering the positive effects of their experience. In other words, they had a sense of calmness, They felt very expansive. They uh no longer worried so much about their own fate or the fate of others. They just sort of were trying to be present in their daily life. And they think the researchers think that the reason for this may be very similar to how other

memories work. So you've talked about this before. You take out a memory and you examine it, you might change it, tweak it a little bit. It gets stronger in your memory every time you take it out. Well, when the patients went through that experience and they sat down with researchers and went over it again and again, they think that the same thing was happening. They were establishing long term memories that were then um sort of telling them

how they were going to feel about this in the future. Yeah, that s in particular. I remember the one of the keys first of all was preparation. They prepared these individuals for their experience, you know, make sure that the environment, the preconceived notions, the expectations of the of the trip

um were firmly set in place. And then afterwards it was then about taking apart what happened, what the experience, the altered modes of perception and experience that occurred, and you know, basically journaling about it, taking that memory out, looking at it, learning from it, putting it back, and then, like you say, continuing to take it out because every time you take it out, any memory, it's not this little structure sculpted out of rock. It's made out of

clay and multi you know, still malleable clay. And every time you take it out and pod around in your hands, be it, uh, you know, some traumatic memory of childhood or the greatest day of your life. You get it out, you're putting your fingers in it, you're mentioning it around you're changing the shape of it however slightly. Yeah, you're you're resurrecting the neural correlate's right and making them that

much stronger. There's a podcast called Secular Buddhist that mcclaim was on in she was talking again about the ability of there to be long term effects and um, she was talking about a John Hopkins University study that gave a high dose of psilocybe into fifty one adult participants, and thirty of them, she says, went a measurable personality

change that lasted more than a year. Now, when she talks about personality change, they're talking about five different aspects of personality and one of them, um was a trait called openness, and she says that that is the only one that changed with these participants who had the measurable

change over a year long period. Now, she says that of the personality traits that that we know of and we define personality by that, eight percent of that is genetic, and so you're sort of born with you know, these types of personality traits that you're either stronger or weaker in.

So you could be stronger or weaker in openness. And she said that It's very interesting that there's not a lot of tweaking you can do with personality, but with this one trade openness, you could perhaps forge the way um to continue to thrive in in the space of openness with your personality and perhaps even vanquished depression as a result, or continue to have an expansive worldview. Well,

this is weird. I'm kind of maybe it's because we're recording this during the Christmas season, but hearing this, I cannot help but wonder in a Christmas Carol, does even ebone'z er Scrooge do d M t or to or

consume my loss? Because here you have a curmudgeon ly individual, very setting his ways, setting his personality, and then one night he trips his mind out completely and encounters three, no, well four ghosts, right, encounters a uh four separate entities who take him on this fantastic voyage through time and space. And then when he wakes up, what's the big chain?

And Scrooge he's more open, Right, he opens the window and he's calling out to children in the street that normally he would just want to beat with a stick, but now he's saying, oh, look, what day is this young chap and uh, and then it's uh, and then his life is changed. I mean, he's still scrooge, like you say, a lot of his personality is still gonna be set in stone, but there's that portion on that openness that has that has been altered by the experience.

You're right, He's probably still going to be somewhat thrifty, right, but maybe he's just gonna be a little bit more open in his heart and more available to people, hopefully a year from that experience. That's awesome. I've never really thought about it. I don't know. I guess I say it's the Christmas time around it, and it's and then talking about all this psychedelic experience and how it can

considerably change somebody suddenly. Well, speaking of those four spirit guides, I wanted to close out with a quote from John Horrigan, who talks about how there's his resurgence and hallucinat chick drugs and scientific inquiry and uh, rather scientific inquiry. He's as I applaud the psychedelic renaissance with this caveat. Uh. Spiritual texts often emphasize the dangers of mystical experiences, whether

they're generated by drugs, fasting, meditation, or other means. That is the theme of an old Talmudic tale in which four rabbis are brought into the presence of God, one becomes a heretic, one goes crazy, one dropstead, and one returns home with his faith affirmed. So I think it's his point of saying, all of this is very interesting, but we should not approach this lightly because what we're talking about here is the mind, and while it's very

fertile ground um, it is also very fragile. Yeah, it's it's powerful stuff. The effects can be long lasting and can can literally change who you are. So if you end up going down any of those routes, again, we don't advise it. We don't condone the use of any of these substances, but do put some thought into it and realize that you're you're talking about some really powerful agents that affect who you are at a very basic level. All right, And if you you want to find out

more about these topics, I'm sure you do. Uh. We have a number of articles on how stuff works dot Com about it. We have an article about l s D. We have an article about psychedelic mushrooms, a number of articles about how the mind works in terms of things that we've referenced in this podcast, and now there's if you live in the Atlanta area, the Jaguar exhibit will probably be gone by the time you hear this, or or certainly will be gone long term. But check out

what Emory's doing because they're always having fascinating exhibits. They always do a big Tobad exhibit every year. They're always bringing in really top shelf presenters to share something in the arts and the sciences, something culturally, something historic, really cool place, a great university in terms of stuff that you can obtain without traveling to Atlanta. The book by

John Horgan, Rational Mysticism, Yeah, very good. I think it was written in two thousand three, two thousand and four, but a lot of the research is still very much um cutting edge or what people are building on some of the stuff that he goes through. It's very interesting. And then on on on that flicks the d MT documentary d MT the Spirit Molecule that's available for streaming there, as well as a number of Ted talks that get into you know, just how the brain works and uh.

And then if you want something just a little cheesier. There's some there's some great, some great horror movies about people taking these substances and turning into mindless killers. There's a great movie called Blue Sunshine. It's uh, kind of a cheesy but but a very interesting horror flick about like former flower children who in who ten years later all start losing their hair entering into psychotic psychotic killers because they took some sort of tainted LSD back in

the day. So uh, anyway, it's all up there if you want to explore it. Um As for getting in touch with us again, we would love to hear from anyone who has thoughts on this particular topic, given the nature of this subject, but we may not be able to share everything to share with us with the rest of the listeners that we're still happy to hear from everybody. You can find us on Facebook. You can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to blow your mind on

both of those. You can also find us on Twitter, where our handle is below the mind, and you can always drop us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot Com brought to you by the two twelve Toyota camera. It's ready. Are you