The Shaman and the Scientist: My Egoic Mind

So just be aware we're gonna handle this and a mature science backboned since but I know that this subject is probably not for everybody, So just a fair warning that that's what we're gonna be talking about. And we do not advocate the use of psychedelic substances and illicit substances at all in orders you not to do them,

but the science behind them is really fascinating. The current scientific investigations of how they affect our mind and what they can help uncover about how our minds work is totally aim totally in our wheelhouse, so we just had to cover it. We've covered a little bit in the past,

so here another couple of slices from that particular cake. Yeah, and we just couldn't help it because a lot of times we talk about what is consciousness and we'll get deeper into that question in this podcast, but psychedelics, turns out, can help us answer that question or get a little bit closer to what we think consciousness is. Um. But all of this was actually inspired by a talk that you went to, Yes, and you went to in a sense, yeah, yeah,

via the wonderful recording that you took of it. Um. It was a talk at Emory University. Yeah. Yes, it was called four I Am the Black Jaguar. Well, it was part of the four I Am the Black Jaguar exhibit, which is an art exhibit they did having to do

with shamanistic visionary experience in ancient American art. So a lot of ancient American art that depicts things that that you know, it might be jaguars, it might be mushroom men, things of this nature that have something to do with shamanistic traditions, particularly as they relate to m the consumption of psychedelic psychotrophic substances, and a lot of it too, is this unity with nature and this unity of man where the duality, I should say, of of human and

animal and then the bringing together of of these different aspects of our humanness. And the talk that I attended was given by Dr Catherine McLean and also Dr Charles Raison was there as well. But McLean is particularly interesting because she is involved with some really groundbreaking investigations at John Hopkins where they are looking into again how these substances affect the human mind and human consciousness and human perceptions and what that can tell us about how our

brains actually work. Because it's one of the things she pointed out in her talk is that, you know, we're talking about how these things change our consciousness, affect our consciousness, and we already have a difficult time actually saying what human consciousness is and how it works. To get back to the title of the episode, we're talking about the show like the voice she did, so can you do that again on the title of not just the episode,

but of the exhibit before I Am the Black Chack War. Yes, yeh. I was listening to an old Timothy Leary album earlier to get kind of stoked because Larry was first of scientists, then a shaman and anyway, we're gonna get into that a little more. But on the surface of things, you have the shaman in one category, and the scientists and the other. Right, dragging in a lot of stereotypes here, But the shaman, you think of the shaman, you think

of somebody that's spiritual. They're ritualistic, their magical, their heart felt. They might have a really long beard and varying degrees of robes or no robes at all, right, man or woman, Man or woman. Then you have the scientist, which again can be a man or a woman, but logical, meticulous, reasoned, um, with a certain amount of distance between themselves and their

their feelings and the subject matter they're looking into. So we, on the surface of things, we tend to think of these very very different different people and very different modes of perception when it comes to the realities of the world and the realities of the mind. But the curious thing, okay, is that all right? So the shaman he looks inward. Here she looks inward at the mysteries of the soul and human consciousness, and so too, of course, does the

cognitive neuroscientist. So um, you know, the questions of who are we? What's the root cause? Of human suffering, how do we achieve liberation from it? How can we treat mental illness? Questions of these natures nature are on various levels covered by both sides. So while they're they're very different. If you were to form a then diagram, you know, with the two circles with partial overlap, and you had one circle as the shaman, one circle as the the neuroscientists,

there would be a definite overlap there. Now, of course, the shaman helps you explore these questions by bringing into a sacred space, producing a tray of magical substances that, when consumed, alter your perception uh an experience of reality, setting you on a journey of exploration. Meanwhile, the scientist brings you to a lab, right, gives you a pill that might be a pocebo, and then run some tests on you, maybe throws you into a brain imaging machine,

or puts you up to some sensors. Right, these seem like very different scenarios the one might find oneself in. But then there's also some interesting overlap here as well,

particularly a John Hopkins University School of Medicine. That's where again Dr Kathery McClain conducts her research along with a very talented assortment of professionals, and they find themselves not going completely halfway between the shaman and the scientists, but entering a little more into that shamanistic territory because they keep like a calm, meditative space to put the test subjects in when they are given some of these psychedelic substances.

And Kathery McClain in this talk at Emory actually spoke a bit about her role as a kind of guide for these people too, because they end up trying to to color their experiences to a to an extent, you know, to to guide their trip, as it were, in a

direction that's more positive so that they can study it. Yeah, we talked about this a bit in our podcast about hallucinogens and stage four cancer patients who were taking hallucinogens in an effort to try to um get over this huge obstacle of fear that was really actually um just sort of affecting them on a level where they were like deer in the headlights. They couldn't even operate in the space of their lives anymore. And so um, you know, we've talked about this idea where in a lab setting

you want to have a level of trust. You want to make it as comforting as possible. And so the researchers, the scientists are, as you say, taking on this persona of guide, of spiritual guide to a certain extent, because they have to guide people through this. And I think it's really interesting that Kathleen McClain is also a Buddhist and she does kind of inhabit that space of the Shloman from time to time, heavy in the meditation and

all that. And I can't help to think about another past podcast, UM having to do with magicians and neuroscience, because again you've got neuroscience looking at magicians, UM, looking at these hundreds of years old practices and trying to learn something about reality and illusion on how our mind tricks us. And what is so central to this idea of mind trickery, I think, is something called the monkey mind.

And probably a lot of you out there are familiar with this concept that this constant chatter in our brains um can sometimes hamstring us when we're trying to accomplish things in our lives UM. And of course this all points back to the question of consciousness and this idea about whether or not consciousness is actually a static thing. Now McLain and her talk says, I'm not quite sure consciousness is something that is coherent. Um. But again it's this idea of trying to get into what's going on

in these three pounds of computation material in our brains. UM. She says. You know, it's hard to to really try to pin it down and figure out what's going on. She says, we can't explain normal consciousness in terms of neuroscience, so explaining altered states of consciousness is even more difficult. And UM, I also wanted to point this out too, as we begin to delve into consciousness and the monkey mind. UM.

I've brought this up before. There was a study by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, and they actually developed an iPhone app that would track people's um waking states and their ability to concentrate and so on and so forth, and something like a people participated in this study and what they found was that mind wandering is

something that takes up half of our time. And that seems pretty big, but when you step back and you look at it throughout the day, you know, how when you're not speaking, when you're not um doing something that really requires you to fire in all four cylinders. What are you doing your daydreaming? Right? So, hence you've got this monkey mind, and hence you have this idea that maybe some of those consciousness points back to this chatter

in our brains. Yeah. There you see that this represented various ways to another out modes of thought outside of science. There's always a classic vision of the guy with a demon on one shoulder and an angel on the other, these little voices that are chattering at him saying you should be doing this, No, you should be doing this. You should steal that candy bar. No, you should pay for that candy bar with with hard earned money. Can you steal it? Um? I always try and compromise still

half of it by the other half. But it's the classic more dilemma, whether to steal the candy bar. But then you also have people like new age guru Akarta who calls it the go a mind, and you see that term thrown around a lot as well, this idea that it's a this this mode of thinking that's very tied into who I am, what my story is. We've talked about that before. When we're talking about storytelling, the power of storytelling, and how we all kind of see

our lives in this mode of story. I am the central character in my story, and these are the obstacles I am up against. These are the things I have achieved, and these are the things that I've lost. Um So it's this default mode network, as it's called in the

scientific papers. Not to be confused with Depeche mode network, because that's that would waver between just can't get enough in black celebration, Whereas the default mode network is again this this this sort of idol thinking zone, and you know, it's it's it's in it's better states, it's introspective, it's daydreaming, and it's worst states. It's depressive. It's that that demon on your shoulder beating you up and saying, oh, these

are the things that that I don't have anymore. These are the things about me to suck and and then and I'm never going to succeed and this kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, this is where when we start talking about consciousness and defining the eye of ourselves, you start to look at the default mode network because this is where you have your pastiche of memories, feelings, and thoughts and

again that chatter that me, me, me. What we're talking about when we talk about the default mode network is the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial parietal cortex, and the medial temporal lobes. The idea, there's a couple of different theories about what they're doing. UM. The idea is that these associations between these different parts of the brain are the brain's baseline of processing and information, where we consolidate

experiences and we prepare to react to the environment. The second theory is that it also facilitates stream of conscious thought, also known as stimulus independent thought, which I think is really interesting to note. Stimulus independent thought meaning you're not even aware of your surroundings. You're just chattering, chattering, chattering to me. I think of it as like, you know, driving to work every day and I pull into the parking lot and go, oh, how did I get here?

I don't really have a memory of that because I was so consumed with my own thoughts. UM. So sort of stuff that you see in daydreaming. Again, keep in mind that half of our day is spent in this state of daydreaming. UM, And it's important not hear It also totally takes you out of your surroundings. You know, like on your your drive to work, if you kind of go into autopilot mode and suddenly you're there, because it's like you weren't actually on that drive to work.

You were wrapped up in these thoughts of what happened yesterday or what's going to happen, and with the rest of your day, uh, totally wrapped up in your thought life. You everything else in your surroundings, be it you know, the the highway on the drive to work, or a beautiful park or the love of your family, all of it just kind of fades as this inner dialogue kicks up.

And by pointing out the parts of the brain, I think that's the really amazing part here is that you know, on one hand, we're talking about the devil and angel on your soldiers, we're talking about grasping in the Buddhist sense for for things that you want or don't have, and and all of this this inner and kind of

spiritual stuff. But we can actually look at the brain and and look at the part the network that lights up when when this kind of thinking takes place, right and this this kind of thinking does need to happen, right, because it is balancing this sense of self and this ego, and again it's giving us some sort of um consciousness or idea of ourselves through this process. The problem, of course, is when there's hyperactivity in this area. It's like like

when a dog has some sort of problem on its skin. Right, it's gonna lick, it's gonna know a little bit. But then it gets out of hand when that gnawing and that looking never stops, when it turns into self harm. And certainly we see that time and time again in patients who have a variety of mental problems, where we see that that see this heightened activity in this default mode network. Yeah, and according to Dr Charles Grayson, who is also part of that talk, people with depression exhibit

hyperactivity in the default mode network. So, as you say, it's fascinating because you can literally point to that brain scan and you can see that hyperactivity and you can see that it's the cause of some of this depression. Because now think about that chattering in this um, this idea of that that chattering is absolutely involved with self and worry. So what you have going on is is this sort of midline chatter that is encouraging a person

to turn inward. And then in addition to that hyperactive default mode network, it becomes more and more entangled with the anterior singular cortex, which is responsible for the fear response. So not only do you have this turning in word, you now have a fear factor that's involved, and this can contribute really heavily to depression. So we bring all of this up because this is really important in terms of um some experiments with hallucinogens and perhaps relieving this depression.

This quieting the default mode network as well as meditation, right, and before we get that, do, of course need to stress. The thing about the default mode network is that under normal situations, it's more active during rest than it is during cast performance. So it's it's when you're in that uh, that easy state of driving to work a road that you travel every day, or you're waiting on something, you're just sitting around, it's it's like the screen saver of

your mind. But if you're busy, if you are just vigorously trying to get something done at the last minute, or you're in that state of flow the job or a hobby that you love, or certainly if you're engaging saying yoga where you're you're totally in your body and not in your mind, we see that network shut down to a certain extent. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up,

because there is this idea of getting outside of yourself. Right, So if you're doing something that's in a state of flow, then you're getting outside of that chatter and that that mind, and you're quieting the default mode network. Now, this is where we're gonna get a little more back into into psychedelics. And I just want to do a quick note about the nature of psychedelicis just reminded about what we're talking

about here. Okay, uh for the most part, especially as far as shamanistic practices go, you know, ancient spiritual practices that date back long before ability to create synthetic drugs. We're talking about naturally occur ring substances such as psilocybin, mushrooms, iowa, sa vines. We're talking about peyote, cacti, and other naturally occurring psychoactics, active substances in vegetation in animals, um you know, toads, centipedes, what have you. And then when taken they have the

potential to alter vultually every level of awareness and experience. Now, some of you listening may have had some sort of experiences with this kind of altered state of mind, either naturally occurring or due to illness or any other lucid dreaming, sometimes dreaming, and sometimes in this chac But for for a lot of a lot of other people, you may think you may hear about, you know, tripping on psychedelics, and you instantly think of the movie Fear and Loathing

in Las Vegas, or any number of movies that have attempted to show an altered state of of awareness and perception. It's kind of kind of like Hollywood tripping. And it's important to note that while yes, if one took enough of certain hallucinogens, they could have this kind of very visual, crazy fantastic experience of dinosaurs climb ending out of the walls and all that. Yes, that's that's possible, but that's not that in and of itself, is just like one

slice of the cake. There are a lot of other modes of perception and modes of understanding that can be altered by psychedelics. We're talking about changes in your awareness of your own body of visual peculiarities, audible peculiarities, strangeness and thought and perception, in the experience of time and self. So pretty much any way that we think or see the world can be tweaked, you know, because when we

talked again earlier, like what is consciousness? All right, Well, what do we know about how we think and what our brain is. We know that their chemical processes, that biological processes, and it's subject to change. You can change the way you think by looking at a puppy or or or a cat. We've talked about that before. They're there are all sorts of ways to tweak what you're experiencing and how you're experiencing the world and how you're

constructing this world that you perceive. We talked about, you know, the whole child versus adult. The child has this lamplight of view of the world and that the human has the flashlight view. I mean, all of this is we're talking about changes in perception and these substances, and depending on what a person takes, how much they take, and also an individual's particular biochemistry, it'll it'll affect that person

on varying levels. Yes, So I think it's interesting to introduce it like that because there are various ways, as you say, we can change our perception, and you can sort of do it a little bit or a lot, and certainly through something like psilocybin, that is something that will get you into that spot where you are sort of blowing open the doors of perception. And that is why scientists use it, because they are trying to figure out how it is interacting with the brain, what it's

doing um to personality as well. So we talked about the default mode network and depression. Then it makes sense that neuroscientists want to look at psilocybin and see what

sort of effect it has on the human brain. Yeah. Now, another interesting thing about research into this, and we've stopped in this in the past, and around the mid fifties, twin science really got got interested in psychedelics and and that's also you know, you saw the the advent of LSD in that age, and you also saw of course,

the rise of the counterculture and all that. So by the end of the nineteen sixties you saw the the end of actual research into this because it started off people were looking into Okay, what are these chemicals doing, how are they affecting the mind. And then you have Timothy Leary out there, but you know, again initially approaching things from a more scientific standpoint, but then becoming more and more of a cultural figure and more of the

shaman and less of the scientists. And then eventually you have people like John C. Lily who are just taking LSD in there in the tank next to the apartment in which the dolphin lives, so that he can communicate with the dolphin people, and and subsequently losing his funding because eventually it just gets so natty that they pull

his funding. So you're right, it starts to get clouded with this idea that it's not a good idea to research this culturally, politically, it just falls off until basically, I'm saw the dawn of the twenty century and and so we that's where we are now a decade and some change into that. Yeah, the nineties really saw a resurgence in this, and particularly the last couple of years too, we've seen a ton of data coming online about this um.

But when we talk about the default mode network and depression in psilocybin, it's important to talk about someone named David Jane Nutt. He is a psychiatrist at the Imperial College of London and his team recruited fifteen healthy people, people that they made sure to scan beforehand, and they are that they were sound and mind and body UM. And then they also wanted to make sure that these

people had previous experience taking ho lucinogens. This is key and this is something that McLean brought up in her talk as well. Because you're bringing people into experiment UM, you know how their brains work and how they perceive things in the state. You don't want to be to introduce them to it for the first time because that

can be a very overwhelming and frightening experience. Better that the that the test subjects have some experience with this altered state of awareness, some sort of context, so that they can study the effects of it better. Over a two day period, the researchers monitored activity in the brains of these volunteers as they land a scanner for up to an hour. On the first day, participants received an

intravenous shot of the placebo solution UH. The next day, they got a shot of psilocybin that was dozed to peak about UH let me see about four minutes, and then was mostly over At about thirty minutes. We're trying

to short short amount of time here. Yeah, because the traditional you know, hippie way of taking these in the shamanistic way of taking these substances, of course, just to eat it, which then is a gradual absorption, gradual shrip that without grad you know, thinking hippie, you know, anyone who would say, pick one of these things in the natural world and then eat it, that is going to be a slower uptake and then a slower fall off. But this is introduced with I V. So it's just

like a rocket ship. On a side note too, it's probably really obvious to the participants which was the placebo in which was the actual psilocybin in this case. Don't you think I have to guess there's not much of

a placebo effect? Yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely. So all of the participants described kaleidoscope vision with images of bright and angular shapes um the rush of the first tend to thirty seconds and do some fear nuts said, but positive feelings then swept over them, and many participants said that the benefits of the experience were profound, and they felt that they had moved on from where they had

been um. So what they found when they were scanning the brains of these participants was a decrease in both blood flow and metabolism in several key areas after injection. So we're talking about the anterior singulate cortex, So that was the one that I mentioned that has a lot to do with the the fear and pain response. And

also they saw that default mode network quieting itself. So what they found is that here is this way that you can dial on hyperactivity or activity in general in this area of the brain and perhaps relieve depression through

this process. And on one level, I mean, how into your own problems can you be if the wall is breathing right, that's true, there's not a lot of mimim going on, and it is interested Along those lines, one of the things that mcclaimntioned is how a lot of this research she feels needs to get out of the lab and deal with because traditionally, shamanistically they're not taking these substances and then watching twin peaks in the basement,

you know, they're they're not shutting their eyes and playing in some headphones. Now they're taking them in nature. They're they're experiencing the natural world through these substances. Granted, they're experiencing an altered understanding and experience of the natural world, but it's a rather different kettle fish than taking it

inside of a closed environment. So again, someone is suddenly becoming more aware of what's around them and outside of themselves, as opposed to that same saddled story about who they are and what their their deal is. Now there's still the question about how long this um this can actually affect person, and that's what they're trying to still go through this data and figure out if these are long

term meaningful changes in terms of alleviating depression. And we'll talk more about that in in part two of this episode. So I did want to mention that there's another way to go about quieting the default mode network, and right now it seems to be the best way to go about it in terms of sustaining long term, meaningful changes to your brain. And this is through meditation, yes, and this is yeah, this is really fascinating. We spoke earlier.

You know, when you when you're looking at the brain and activity in the brain, you can we're able to identify what's happening with this particular network we're identifying this, uh, this default mode network, and then under psilocybin, we're watching the activity there decrease. But then the same thing occurs. The same decreation occurs during meditation. Now it's important to note here that that the similar brain activity in brain scans,

that doesn't mean it's the same experience. So it's not saying that that anyone going into meditation should you know, should be seeing crazy amazing things in their mind. Not to say that there's not that some of that isn't going on, But identical brain scans don't mean the exact same experience for the individual. Yeah, I mean, what it's pointing to you again is that there's just quieting in

this chatter area. Dr Judson Brewer, medical director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic, and his colleagues asked ten experienced meditators and thirteen people with no meditation experience to practice three basic meditation techniques concentration, loving kindness, and choiceless awareness, and the team then used fm R I to observe the participants in brain activity when they were practicing the techniques, and then we are when they were instructed not to

think of anything in particular, So the experience meditators had this decreased activity in the default mode network. Moreover, they found out that this region of their brain was much quieter than in their inexperienced counterparts. So we've talked about

this before. The the idea that you can actually change your brain to a certain extent through meditation, again long term changes, and you'll see this again and again in studies with meditators, is that there's just this ability to concentrate better, to quiet the chattering mind and not wander as much. And I wanted to point this up because again, the mind is going to wander. Half of our days

spent doing this. But there are some studies that point to this idea that if you can be conscious of your own mind wandering, you can actually be a more creative individual. You can harness your thoughts a lot better. So again pointing to this idea of meditation as a way not only to quiet the monkey mind, but also

to access some really novel ways of thinking. Yeah, I mean that's the You listen to various s gurus on this matter, and then that's always like the first step is being able to identify the monkey mind, the mind the devil on your shoulder, whatever however you choose to to see conceive that the default mode network, if you can identify it when it's happening, I mean, that's that's the first big battle that you can actually stop and say, like, what am I doing? What? What are my thoughts doing

right now? Why am I relaying this stupid idea or this silly fear or even this very real fear. Why am I occupying my mind with it at this moment? And what else could I potentially be using it for?

Right Or if you're if you realize that your brain is working to stay on a problem and turning things over and over in your mind, but you know that your mind is wandering and it's dealing with this, then you can kind of have a breakthrough if you have the realization that your mind is doing this, and then instead of sort of going into the feedback loop of negativity that our brains can kind of do with certain stories that we tell ourselves, you catch yourself like, oh,

this is a problem my brain is working on, and you know, maybe there's a solution here. Yeah, Because sometimes sometimes you just need to turn the dryer off and take the clothes out before the cycle finishers, you know, um,

month before they get rankled. On the note of meditation and hallucinations and psychedelic experiences, I will say that in savasana, the period at the end of yoga where one after one is don their yoga exercises for you know, an hour, hour and a half whatever the the link may be. And in this state, you're getting out of your mind,

You're getting engaged in your body. You're shutting down the default mode network just by putting yourself through a lot of physical poses and engaging the physical body rather than the mind. At the end of that, you go into this state where you you either said or you lay back or maybe legs up the wall, and you go into this this meditative state and and on. On a personal note, I regularly see some really crazy stuff during that period, you know, colors, explosions, cloud smoke, that kind

of thing. Occasionally. Um, you know, I see people. I don't interact with them or anything that that would be a different situation. But um, but but I do have these uh these in a sense psychedelic experiences during chava. Know, a lot of people do get this well, and so that's sort of uh, that's sort of a perfect way to segue into what we will talk about in the second podcast, which is this idea of whether or not hallucinations are natural to humans, to all creatures on the world,

on the world, in the world. Um, so something will explore a little bit more. Yeah, so tune in for that. It'll be just another podcast. It's title will be Shaman and the Scientist colon Hallucination and it's gonna pick up with this one left off. Who knows, I mean, it's possibly listen to that one first. Who are we to tell you in what order you listen to our episodes? Um,

you can do what you like. I'm not going to boss you around, but but hey, these are the two episodes that are dealing with this particular except if you have something you would like to share with us, we would love to hear about it, and certainly on a topic like this would depending on what you have to share, we may not be able to share that with the rest of the listeners, but totally game to hear anyone's take or experiences having to do of the subject. You

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