David Yaden || The Science of Self-Transcendent Experiences

It's great to have David Yeayden on the podcast. Doctor Yeayden is a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine. His research focus is on the psychology, neuroscience, and pharmacology of transformative and self transcendent experiences. He is currently focusing on the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. His scientific and scholarly work has been covered by The New York Times, The Wallstreet Journal, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and MPR.

And in addition to one of my most valued colleagues, I'm also honored to call him a friend. Hey, David, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. Hey, thanks for having me. This was a long time in the coming, wasn't it. Yeah, we've been talking about this

for years. I think now we sure have. Well, it's about time we start to talk about your work on here, because it's it's really transformative work, and it truly is, and I think it'll be helpful to a lot of people in this day and age where they're they're all, they're all, we're all stuck in the insecurity, anxiety kind of level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, and let's let's help them transcend. How about that? I like that? Yeah,

I like that idea. I'm curious whether you think that there is any applicability of transcendent experiences in terms of

what's going on right now. So I'm I'm usually pretty skeptical that my work can be applied in any kind of straightforward way, but I just had a conversation with my wife where she thinks that these kinds of experiences might be really important right now, that when a lot of people are isolated, Yeah, when people are isolated, they start to get in their head a lot, and so people get in the state they start catastrophizing, right, Yeah, I think so, And what goes along with any kind

of depressive or anxious style rumination is a lot of self focus. So a lot of these catastrophizing thoughts are very much oriented around oneself. And we know that when you're focused on yourself a lot in a negative way, that well being is reduced and even depression or anxiety can follow. So I think in that sense, self transcendent experiences do orient us outward beyond the self, which could be helpful. Whoa, whoa, whoa David, So you said self

transcendent experiences, we haven't defined that yet? Now, can can you define that? You wrote this one of my favorite papers ever? Your lead author of this great paper, maybe you could talk abotle about who your co authors were and how you how you found them, Like, how did how did you all come together to write this review paper on self treansent experiences and and kind of come with a consensus definition. Yeah, thanks for saying that that. That was a long time in coming, that that paper.

I worked on that for years actually, and it really was an honor to work with these researchers. My co author is on that paper. They're kind of a dream team I think on the topic, and I learned a lot about even just how to write an academic paper. But certainly a ton about self transcendent experiences. So the second author on the paper is Jonathan Height, who I'm

guessing you've had on here before. Yes, yes, you know he's He's thought and written a lot about why we have these self transcendent experiences from sort of an evolutionary perspective. He's also defined several emotions that involve a self transcendent aspect. There was Ralph Hood, who was one of the earliest researchers to study mystical experiences which involve a deep sense of unity or feeling completely at one with all things. Dave Vago who does a lot of the neuroscience of Okay, great,

and then lastly Andrew Newberg who's on here too. Okay great. So you know all these people and what we did was well talk all about Andrew Neuberg's work, if you don't mind. Yeah. So I've worked a lot with Andy Neuberg. He's a radiologist and he was really pioneering. He was one of the first scientists to put meditators and veteran contemplatives into a neuroimaging scanner and to see what's going

on in the brain during deep states of unity. So we're writing a book together at the moment that will describe self transcendent and spiritual experiences from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience. So in this paper, what we did was we defined self transcendent experience. So we said, these are transient mental states that involved decreased attention to the

self and deep feelings of connectedness. And we then went through the psychological literature identified existing mental states measurable constructs that involve decreased attention of the self and increased feelings of connectedness, things like mindfulness, flow, AWE, peak experience, and mystical experience. So these states differ in a lot of ways, but they are united in that they each involve decreased attention to the self and increased feelings of connectedness, and

they exist on a spectrum of intensity. So obviously mindfulness and flow are not as intense or as potentially transformative as something like a peak experience or a mystical experience, which involves deep feelings of unity. So in order to in order to trigger these transcendent experiences, do you have to reduce your focus on yourself? Like like have you done the study to show that those who scribe score high in narcissism tend to report less transcendent experiences in

their lives. That would be a neat study, right, Yeah, well, I think actually in your work speaks to that at least a little bit. I think that you found that people who scored high on yourself actualization scale, yes, were more likely to have had one of these self transcendent experiences or what Maslow would call a peak experience. You know, there's so many different terms that have been thrown around

to describe these experiences. You know, William James one hundred years ago called them mystical experiences, and you know, we call them self transcendent experiences, and of course Maslow called them peak experiences. You know, I think Maslow had a really important role in the history of psychology on this topic too, because William James, you know, he's the person that I usually go to in terms of a philosophical

foundation for studying these kinds of experiences. But you've really highlighted how important Maslow is on this topic for me. And I think what Maslow did was he took away the explicitly religious or spiritual terminology from this topic and really emphasize the fact that believers and non believers have these experiences, and that religious or spiritual beliefs aren't a necessary component of having one of these profound self transcendent experiences. Wow.

So even before William James, I mean, the history has not treated self transcend experiences very kindly. Right. So Freud, I forget what the quote is, but someone asked him about, you know, what are these these kind of oceanic experiences that I'm experiencing? And Freud's is something like it's an

erotic return to the womb or something that. Yeah. Yeah, And that was even after William James had published The Varieties of Religious Experience, and so Freud was kind of out there in left field doing his own thing, you know. And in this chapter where Freud talks about these as and you're right, you know, he calls them these oceanic feelings of boundlessness and he says, you know, personally, I've never had one of these experiences, but they're very strange.

They sound strange, and something like they fit poorly in our idea of psychology something like that, where he just said, these seems strange and they don't seem to fit with his notion of normalcy and so he just sort of reflexively branded them as pathological, and that was very influential. It was very influential. Yeah, and even William James's notion of these things, he tended to focus more on the

religious aspects surrounding it. I feel like what your work is really contributing in one way, and it contributes in a lot of ways, But in one way, is your secularizing spirituality right? You're showing that these trends and experiences can happen, we can, any of us can access them, regardless of what God we believe in. Is that right?

That's right? And I see my work as very descriptive, like people are already having these experiences across all belief and non belief systems, so across every religion, among agnostic and among atheists. You know, Sam Harris talks about his self transcendent or even spiritual. I think he calls it experience, and of course he's very much an atheist. So I think that that's right, that these experiences do occur across belief systems, and in some ways they are equal opportunity.

In that way, they're equal opportunity. And also I really love this this phrase. You say that the all experience awe, and I always have trouble pronouncing that word, but the all experience is the every person's spiritual experience. Is that right? Is that what you call it? Yeah? I like that term. You know. When I am giving lectures, I will often ask the audience the same questions that Gallup puts out,

and you know this big polling company. Gallup will say, have you ever felt a religious or mystical experience that changed your life? Questions like this, and they're phrased slightly different in different years, but generally, very reliably, you'll get about thirty percent of people saying I completely agree with that statement. I've definitely had a really intense life changing experience. But you know, and my interest is to explain and

explore and study those really intense experiences. But that leaves a lot of people out. And so right after that, usually I say, okay, who here has had an experience of AWE from you know, a mind blowing idea sweeping natural scenery, amazing art or music. And then usually every hand in the audience goes up. And so I think aw gives a sense for what these experiences are all about, because probably right now about a third of your listeners are saying, yes, I've had one of these experiences, please

tell me more. And then two thirds of your listeners might be saying, what are you talking about? What on earth is this experience? And so all I think helps to give a sense for what these very intense experiences can feel like. Hey, everyone, if you find the themes we cover on the Psychology Podcast interesting and enlightening, you might be interested in my new book, Transcend, The New

Science of Self Actualization. The book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences, and deep fulfillment. I believe we could still manage to have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that make life worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances. We can choose growth. For more.

You can visit Transcend hyphenbook dot com. A's transcend hyphenbook dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and the word book. If you get a chance to read the book, it'd be great if you could leave a review on Amazon, tweet about it, or share the book with friends. I truly hope this book can help people get through these tough times and realize that we all have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within us than we

ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, so, all, Well, I've had the great pleasure of working with you a little bit on this topic and trying to understand how we could capture it scientifically. I think both William James and Masow would have been very proud of us, I hope in the spirit upon which we did it. Can you describe a little bit about this research on all like, where are we at right now? What's the current state of research on all? Well? Yeah, so I want to

I think just contextualize that a little bit. So self transcendent experiences the way I've described them as this umbrella term that includes this spectrum of intensity and AWE is what we'd call a variety of self transcendent experience, So just to position it on this spectrum our scale, which we also worked with Daker Keltner, who's one of the real amazing researchers on AWE and helped to kickstart this

whole little subfield on this very interesting emotion. I think what we were trying to do there is to get away from measures that simply say have you felt awe or are you feeling awe and using that particular term, because then so much rides on one's own interpretation of

that particular term. So our scale, I think it's thirty items, six different factors, and it never once mentions the word awe, and it captures all of these really interesting components that are involved in the experience of awe, which is this very rich experience. You know, people call it a complex emotion because it's not merely positive or negative. It's am

be valent. It's both positive and negative. Even though we find that usually people report positive experiences of awe, there's at least this little feeling of being overwhelmed or even slightly fearful sometimes. Yeah, you found that there was a correlation with the emotion fearful rate or anxious. Yeah, which is really unusual in emotion research to have those both

of those things happening. So AWE is generally defined as in terms of its appraisal dimensions, Like what triggers awe is a perception of vastness and a need for accommodation, And so that perception of vastness can be perceptual like seeing the Grand Canyon, for example, or conceptual like listening to a mind blowing ted talk or one of your other podcasts episodes hopefully awe inducing for some people, and then a need to accommodate that so to mentally process

it in some way. And so that was part of the definition that John Hyde and Daker Keltner stipulated when they defined AWE. But we also include in this six factor measure other dimensions of the experience of AWE, like altered time perception, so time feels like it dilates during these experiences or slows down, physiological changes, the eyes slightly widened,

the jaw slightly loosened. You might feel some chills or goosebumps, not a feverish way, no, no, in it chills up your spine, you know, after an amazing movie kind of experience, okay, And then crucially diminished attention to the self and increased feelings of connectedness. And those last two are what make it a self transcendent experience. And so I think people can can take this measure on your website. Yeah, yeah, they go self actualization tests dot com. Yeah, it should

be listed there. Do you like that. Yeah, that's great. No, that's exactly right. They could take the all experience questionnaire. So how does all differ from like, from flow? It seems like there's some subtle differences there. Not all, not all self transent experiences are equal, right, Yeah, I think there a lot of these various mental states that we put under this umbrella of self transcendent experience are more

different than alike. So if a flow experience, you know, generally you're engaging in a challenging task and you're absorbed in that task, and some people who are experiencing flow say that time speeds up, So there seems to be some difference in the time is altered in both cases, but maybe in different directions. Well that's really interesting, it is. Yeah, and I'm not an expert on flow as much, but there does seem to be at least a similar kind

of altered time perception. There does seem to be this decrease of attention on the self. And then in flow, you know, there's not much evidence on feelings of connectedness beyond the self to other people, but you do see a little bit of evidence about flow in a communal kind of context being potentially more impactful than experiencing flow alone. I think there's just one paper on that, so I wouldn't focus too much on that. Well, flow in groups, right.

Oh that's well, that's interesting, especially considering our current state as the day that this is recorded is in March twenty eighth, and people are self isolating in the room and trying to get into a full experience. And I wonder how they can use virtual technologies like all just being like online, you know, to to increase increase that in a group sort of way. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, seeking out community digitally I think

will be really important during this time. But I think also unplugging deliberately will be important during this time as well. You know, most self transcendent experiences are triggered when people are alone, and so the way in which I often have a mini self transcendent experience is just going for a walk along the river. I miss going on walks with you, David. I know, usually we'd have these conversations

sitting on a park bench in Rittenhouse Square in Philly. Yeah. Well, things have really have really changed in the world since then, since those days. Let's I just want to talk more about these triggers of self transcending, Like, what can we do? Let's try to just like make this as practical as possible for listeners who want to have trends and experiences and feel like it's not possible under such situations that they're under. Can you give some people some hope that

it is possible. I don't know that I can. Yeah, I don't want to be glib during this time and suggest that it's just a great time to experience self transcendence.

And like I said, a lot of times, I'm very skeptical that my work can be applied in a straightforward way at least, so I usually see my work as very descriptive, like I'm trying to understand these experiences that people are already having and to do the research that's possible to do on them and to understand them, and to help people understand themselves after they've had one of these experiences. So I don't think a lot about application.

And so sometimes the question, you know, how can we have these experiences in our everyday life worries me because there hasn't been a lot of great research on interventions that induce self transcending experiences in a day to day kind of way. You know. I think that there are ways in which we can seek out awe, little moments of awe right through the day, even like little moments of gratitude, little moments of gratitude. I think practicing mindfulness.

I mean, for me, that's one of the few practices that just very reliably makes me feel better afterwards. And I never want to do it, but I'm always glad that I did. Well. Yeah, like me too, Me too. Yeah, we've we've kind of you and I have tried to get each other, I think, to continue that practice and exercise. I think we've we've texted each other to encourage that practice.

We have we have. Okay, So psychedelics there, this is a really hot topic in psychology and and and really making there's some rapid progress being made with even some of the colleagues you'll be working with or that you do work with at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Is that right? Can you? Can you talk a lot about your colleagues there and what they're doing on the front lines of psychedelic experiences. The science of psychedelic experiences. Sound sounds sexy,

doesn't it. That sounds great? Yeah, it's it's it's such fascinating work. And I've I've cited this research from this lab at Johns Hopkins for years because they've seemingly done what I thought was impossible. You know, Like I said, there's just not good evidence on interventions to induce self

transcendent experience. And while I was at the University of Pennsylvania doing my doctorate, I did several studies trying to induce self transcendent experiences in the lab, you know, awe videos, virtual reality study, even non invasive brain stimulation, and none of them really worked because they're all so subtle and real.

Self transcendent experiences are dramatic and often transformative. And this lab at Johns Hopkins has been administering a psychedelic substance, which is psilocybin, and what they've found is that they can very reliably induce very intense self transcendent experiences, which they call mystical experiences because they're at that intense end

of the spectrum. Subjects in these studies will report feelings of complete unity and the self momentarily disappearing entirely, and very very intense subjective experiences, and the experiences their affects seem to really persist over time, So at two months and even eighteen month follow ups, you have increases in well being, in pro social behavior, and in less addictive

behavior and less depression. So these seem like they're the most powerful positive intervention that's been discovered so far, and the results seem to be highly replicable. They've done over a dozen studies, So I'm really excited to have joined this team at Hopkins now and to help understand why these experiences seem to have such long lasting beneficial impacts

on those people who have had them. I can't wait to see what you discover and to get you back on the podcast someday to further elaborate on what you've just got you and your colleagues have discovered. Yeah, the psychedelics is so interesting. Some of the research I've seen shows that the best combination is psychedelics with mindfulness, meditation, or some sort of cognitive processing where you integrate it

into your life in some way. So Katherine MacLean has quit her academic position I believe in is devoting her life to helping people integrate those experiences into their lives. Yeah, So I mean it's a psychopharmacology lab, and so to get up to speed with psychopharmacology, I'm reading textbooks on psychopharmacology and the first one that I read was Catherine Maclean's, and I have all the marginalia from her underlining certain things. I've never met her, but I feel like I know

her a little bit from her underlinings. She was on this podcast. Oh wow, great, So you already know everybody. I know everybody who's worth knowing that. That's right. Yeah, I mean, I think that this area just has an extraordinary amount of potential for transforming psychiatry and psychotherapy in the next decade. You know. I think that within the next five to ten years, you're psychiatrist will be able

to prescribe a psychedelic session. So I talk a lot about this with my wife because she's a psychiatrist, and I, you know, it's just such an extraordinary experience and intervention. And I think we're at a very precarious point in the research because I think that it needs to be done extremely carefully, and the Johns Hopkins group has done such an incredible job of keeping it very very rigorous

and doing you know, only randomized controlled trials. And I just really hope that that degree of rigor remains, and more than anything, I hope that it helps us to understand just why self transcendent experiences are so psychologically beneficial. Good good, Yeah, I want to know why they are. I want to know what is this link here between these experiences and lowering your fear of death like that.

It seems like that's a common theme, right, that people who go through these experiences suddenly don't aren't so fearful of losing their self forever. Yeah, it's a really interesting you know, Michael Pollin's book How to Change Your Mind was really impactful, I think on a cultural level in terms of communicating the science of the psychedelic research. And what he comes down on is he says that the sense of self loss is what's really important this kind

of ego dissolution. But what I'm finding in my research, and what we've found you and I in some of our studies, is that it's not so much the self loss, but rather the connectedness that seems to be driving the well being. And you know, a lot of this is still correlational, so it's difficult to tease these mediators apart. But a lot of my recent research is focused on this, and these experiences involve both less attention on the self

and increased feelings of connection. They're highly correlated, but only connection seems to be really correlated with beneficial outcomes related to well being, and that's surprising, I think, and I think that Michael Pollen and a lot of researchers are maybe barking up the wrong tree in terms of ego dissolution, and that really this feeling of social connectedness is where

the real action is at. I agree. Yeah, they focus so much on the default mode network and silencing that network, and that's one of my favorite networks in the brain. I call it the imagination network, you know, or the social imagination network. They seem to think that if we quell that, then we're stopping with our self narratives. But there's lots of positive things to have those aspects of

the self for creativity and meaning making, right. Yeah, you know, I think we're at such an early phase of the research that we're doing a lot of extrapolation from very preliminary evidence, and so I agree that the focus on the default mode network, I think, is something that will probably not continue to be very helpful in terms of

scientifically understanding just why these experiences are so beneficial. My prediction is that we'll see that these processes related to social connectedness and attachment will end up being the real mediator of at least some of the therapeutic benefits. What is connection in that model, it seems to me more having to do with like a universal connection with the human species. Then you're in group connection. Have you teased

that a part at all? Yeah, it is spoken about in that way, and we do see really high correlations with Yeah, when people say I feel this pervading sense of connectedness, you know, usually well, if they're religious, they mean including God. If they're not religious, then not. But usually this feeling of connectedness with the world, with all of life, with all of humanity, and with close others.

But interestingly, if you do a path model, which is something I did in my dissertation, and you control for all these different kinds of connectedness, the remaining predictor is

feelings of connectedness with close others. So we talk about this really global, big, far out kind of connectedness in terms of these experiences, but I think that the benefit probably lies much closer to home than we realize, you know, how do these kinds of experiences reset or reinvigorate the kinds of connections that we already have with loved ones, with friends and family. That's something that I think I'd really like to investigate in the next few years, is

how these experiences impact our connection with close others. Let's say, when you read some of the accounts of these experiences with that in mind, it really begins to stand out how much people talk about feeling grateful for their friends and their family as a result of these experiences. And I think we might be glossing over that a little bit and focusing more on the really far out subjective phenomenological fireworks associated with the experience and forgetting about the

stuff that's really close to home. That's that's exactly right. Yeah, No, I agree that sometimes we focus on psychedelic the experience of like hallucinating and seeing fairies and I don't know, whatever the things you see? Have you so have you done? Have you done? LSD David? And what was the experience like for you? Well? Yeah, well, I want to follow

up on your your first thing there. I think the aesthetics of psychedelia, I think are really changing from you know what you're talking about, and in terms of seeing things or this whole far out tied I kind of aesthetic will be more and more about everyday this, you know, treatment rooms, hardwood floors, taking time to watch sunsets, I don't know, basic everyday nos and deep appreciation of that.

At least that's how my sense of the aesthetics of psychedelics has changed after learning more about the research and the therapeutic potential. Can you tell me about your quite transformative experience that you did have and when you were in college, which in a lot of ways lead to

an interest in this studying this topic. Yeah, so, you know, I have sort of complicated feelings about talking about this experience because I don't want the impression to be that I have some kind of authority on the topic just

because I happened to have one of these experiences. Instead, I think talking about my experience can be helpful in that it just demonstrates why I study what I study, and that it's born out of this deep sense of curiosity, rather than me trying to prove anything one way or the other. In terms of whether there's some religious or

spiritual import of these experiences. Or whether they're delusions because a lot of people, a lot of scientists who study this topic, their bias is very clear and they almost wear it on their sleeve. Yeah, okay, Okay, that caveat aside. Just tell us, tell us. I mean, I appreciate, I appreciate the spirit upon what you're doing. But I think anyone who knows you or is listening to you for more than five minutes knows you're a real, genuine scientist

who is interested in this. So tell the story. Okay. So, yeah, this was during my college years, during undergrad and it you know, the general context, you know, I was sort of searching for myself in some way. I was trying to decide what to do with my life, you know,

as a lot of people are during that time. And so I always wonder whether how much the context really matters, But it definitely did feel as if the experience came on spontaneously, and so it really I was lying on my dorm room bed and I start to feel this heat in my chest, which I initially think is heartburn or something very physical. But this heat slowly begins to

spread over my entire body. Eventually, and at some point in my mind, I hear the words this is love, and so at that point I went entirely into my mind, sort of felt like I went out of my body in some ways, and felt like I could just see three hundred and sixty degrees around myself and I was completely part of this intricate fabric that spread out in every direction. And that feeling, that that warmth, especially in my chest, it felt like it just reached the boiling point.

And after what was probably just a minute or two but felt like days, I opened my eyes and my body was laughing and crying at the same time. And so immediately I feel this sort of wave of love towards everyone around me, especially friends, thinking of family. Everything seemed new, life seemed fa fascinating, and future possibilities opened up in my mind, you know, all of this really amazing stuff. It was just an incredibly profound and meaningful moment.

But more than anything, I was wondering what the hell just happened to me? That was the dominant thought. And you know, I wondered, am I going crazy? Because I had never heard about this experience. I'd never at that

point heard anyone talk about this kind of experience. I'd never even read about it, and that launched me on a several year journey of reading as much as I possibly could about this topic, from religious studies, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and really I'm still reading, you know, I'm still at it. I'm very much still reading about this six experience is just now I'm also doing research on it myself. And what I found is that I'm not alone. You know,

a lot of people have these experiences. Like I was saying before, you know, probably about a third of your listeners will will say I've had something along those lines. You know, that's what the Gallup polls suggest. You know, William James and Maslow have written books where they included dozens and dozens of accounts of people having these experiences. So that was incredibly comforting for me to know that

I wasn't alone. And that's one message I think that I really want to get out there, is that if you've had one of these experiences, you're not alone, You're not going crazy. That these experiences are actually pretty prevalent and usually associated with very positive outcomes. Yeah, so important to emphasize that, and I think your story illustrates that. And I'm just struck by the similarities between the description of your experience and when Catherine McLean. Katherine McLean was

on my podcast. The name of that episode, if people want to see it, is, or I guess hear it is open wide and say awe with Katherine McLean listen to that. Yeah, I think that's also the title of a ted X talk she gave, but that's the title of our podcast chat as well, and she there's such a similarity there in the description of the experience, and it is such a personally, such a personal thing. So, first of all, thank you for being vulnerable enough to

tell that story. I get that, and I understand why you might have some hesitation about telling that story to too many scientists. But you have to understand that scientists aren't the only ones in this world. You know, we have lots of people listening to this podcast that are just everyday human beings that that you know, that that might be terrified by a sort of experience they may have.

They just can't comprehend it or understand it, and it might be very comforting for them to hear someone else who's gone through it and can say that it's okay. Like, first of all, you're not crazy. And I think that's a big thing, is just in itself saying it doesn't mean that you're crazy. You know, would the DSM at any point of the history of the DSM have classified this kind of experience as a mental illness? Yeah, you know, I think there's still some of this sort of Freudian

hangover suspiciousness about these kinds of experiences. There is a category in the DSM called dissociative experiences, and this is a very broad category, and really any kind of mental state that intrudes onto conscious this and is in any way strange and produces feelings, suffering and dysfunction for people

can fall under this category. And so you know, it's important to note that not all altered states of consciousness are positive or beneficial, and dissociative experiences and self transcendent experiences require more theoretical empirical work to differentiate them, I think. But the biggest differentiator is if you're suffering or feeling dysfunction.

And I should say that if you do have one of these experiences, or any kind of experience that causes substantial suffering and dysfunction, then the best thing you can do is to reach out to a mental health professional and to talk about this experience and what might be going on. Are there going to be psycho counselors at some point? Like are there the psychotherapists who specialize in this?

I think that there are starting to be, you know, JOHNS Hopkins has a number of individuals who have various degrees of clinical training helping people to undergo psychedelic experiences and to process the experience and to explain it to them beforehand. But it's also pioneering at this point, and so I don't think it's been systematized the way that it will be and will need to be going forward.

And so I hope to play a role in helping to create a more systematic approach to what people might expect from these experiences and how they can best integrate them into their lives. And I do think you're you're interested in how to trigger them. I think think you sold yourself short there earlier in our conversation when you said you're not you don't bother yourself that much with the practical applications because you've you've you've put a virtual reality headset on me and had me go fly into

space and it transformed me. So I think that you know, you are interested in the intervention aspect of it, right, I think you're right. I think I think I'm fascinated, particularly with what's happening with psychedelic research. But you know, my main interest with that VR study was to just model it in the lab to understand it better tell us about the study. I mean, not everyone has read it.

Who's listening to this podcast? Yeah, well so so this in this study, we we had people come into our virtual reality lab at the University of Pennsylvania and put

on a headset. And what you would see when you put the headset on is that you'd be floating over the building that the research study was actually being conducted in, and then you would slowly zoom out so that you could see you know, the city block, then all of Philadelphia, than the state, than the country, than the whole world, and you would be you know, in orbit looking looking

at Earth. And we did get people to say uh awe to open up and say ah, you know you see their jaw literally drop, and people would say things like wow, and and it it is onspiring and virtual reality research, I think is fascinating. And you know, Facebook has bought oculus. So I think that all of us will be experiencing a lot more virtual reality in the decades to come, which will be interesting. But you know,

notably that that study didn't work. I mean, it induced awe, but it didn't significantly increase well being or pro social behavior. And so I'm I'm very skeptical of very subtle, small interventions and their capacity to have a real impact on people's lives. But didn't. Churichio Alice Churchio's work shown more positive effects of virtual reality on creativity and stuff. Yeah, yeah, she has shown some stuff on creativity, which I think

is interesting. Yeah, I mean I think that there these are interesting areas and and you know, some people get effects using on inspiring videos that didn't work for me as well, So so basic. I think my work at the University of Pennsylvania was useful in terms of the

work that I did in terms of measurement. But what I'm really excited about now moving to JOHNS Hopkins, is the capacity to study intense interventions, not not subtle interventions, not you know, not watching five or ten minutes of an on inspiring YouTube clip or or even or even putting on VR goggles, but to have a truly transformative experience on the couch in the lab, you know, that's

that's just groundbreaking. I think to study self transcendent experience, I agree, and I think that that would that's a great, an important line of research. So let's just conclude here with your interest in the psychology of philosophy, this is an area that you're you ventured into. Can you tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, So, you know, there's this movement in psychology to do work on samples beyond just college undergraduates or m turk. You know, this

common way that researchers gather data. And so I've gathered a couple of interesting samples, one from the Hadza, which is a hunter gatherer tribe in Tanzania that my colleague Chris Smith gathered there whether they've had experience self transcendent experiences. And the other group is professors of philosophy. And so I was interested in how many of these individuals have

had self transcendent experiences. We measured a whole lot of other psychological traits like personality and well being for example, and numeracy, and to see how those psychological numeracy, how interested you are in numbers, so how comfortable you are dividing fractions? And when you read an article, do you look at the data or do you just read the words?

And so then we looked at how those psychological traits on the one hand impact their philosophical views on the other to see if there are any correlations between those things, and one of the strongest that we found was less well being associated with not believing in free will. So if you don't believe in free will, you have less

well being. That was one of our stronger findings. We found a substantial number of philosophers report having had a transformative experience self transcendent experience, and about one out of every four philosophers is taken a psychedelic substance. Well, I'm not surprised with that, but do you found that using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predict non realist and subjectivist subjectivist views of morality anesthetics? What does that even mean?

What does that mean? Well, so an objectivist view would be that there is some fact of the matter. So whether a particular piece of artwork, for example, is beautiful or not, is that's just true? It's a universal truth. It's true for all humans, and it didn't be true even if human beings no human beings existed. Whereas a subjective aesthetics is the idea that what is beautiful changes between people and across cultures. Okay, so your findings translating

this into everyday language, your findings found, findings found. Your findings showed that philosophy professors who do marijuana or psychedelics are more likely to have a very flexible view of morality, an aesthetics, and aesthetics. Because you also found that in morality in the morality to mean right, so that means like subjective, like subjectives view of morality. That sounds like

the Joker has a subjectivist view of morality. Yeah. I don't think that believing that we make that we construct moral views, and that we don't receive them from some divine plan or or from some part of reality that's already constructed in terms of morality, I don't think that that means all of a sudden you go out and

become an immoral person. I don't think. Yeah, but well, the philosopher Laurie Paul had a really good point about these issues, where if you understand that your state of consciousness is flexible, and you see that demonstrated by using a particular substance, then I think it's it's easier to make the imaginative leap that different people see things differently.

So to put it in simple terms, my wife had had a great metaphor where she's like, when you're on a drug, if you see that house plant and it looks like the most beautiful thing ever, and then the next day, when you're not on the drug, it just looks normal, then then you've personally demonstrated to yourself that beauty is to some extent malleable according to your mental state. Yeah. No,

I love that. And does that Is that at odds with the belief that there are evolutionary psychology principles of certain modules that we evolved over the course of human evolution, that we all have certain moral intuitions that we that we share. Would that be an objectivist account? Can you have a subjectivist account and still believe that there are evolutionary principles at play here that it's not all completely subjective? I don't know, is my questch Does my question even

make sense? Well, let's see, I think most people who think that our moral and aesthetic faculties evolved to fit with a particular environment. Would would usually be subjectivists about aesthetics and morality, but not necessarily, because you could imagine that our capacity to sense aesthetic and moral truths is actually tracking something in the real world. You know, that we've evolved to be able to detect something that is

objectively true, in this case, what's right and what's beautiful. Okay, So that's great. I think that's really cool that you're trying to to integrate these these fields and we'll get even individual differences in traits that might predict different views within a completely different field than psychology, not completely different. Yeah,

well I'm learning a lot. You know. I wanted to learn about contempt issues in contemporary analytic philosophy, and my guide through this was my childhood friend who's a philosophy professor, Derek Anderson. You know, he sort of was my tutor in helping to understand what each of these views mean, and we conducted this study together. Well, you have a lot of great collaborators, which is a testament to you and your integrity and the thought that you put into

your work and care that you put into your science. David. It was a real pleasure talking you today, and I'm really excited to get your research out there to a large audience because it really is important and I think a lot of people will benefit from it. Thank you, and you do such a great job of communicating this complicated stuff. It's an honor to be here. So thanks Scott, Thanks David, Thanks for listening to this episode of the

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