Katherine MacLean || Open Wide and Say Awe

Doctor McLean is a research scientist, teacher, and meditator in our academic research at UC Davis and John Hopkins University. She studied how psychedelics and mindfulness meditation can promote beneficial, long lasting changes and personality well being and brain function.

In the fall of twenty fifteen, she co founded and began directing the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program in New York, where she has facilitated monthly integration groups for psychedelic users and training workshops for both clinicians and the public. She currently lives on an organic farm and is preparing to be a study therapist on the upcoming Phase three trial MDMA for post traumatic stress disorder. Hey, thanks so

much for chatting with me today, Catherine. Yeah, you're welcome. As we were saying, this is my last hurrah before my second child arrives on planet Earth, so it's a lovely way to end a nice period of work. Well, thank you so much. We're so honored that you are appearing on the podcast. And you know, I haven't talked to you in four years, and I feel like we've both grown tremendously. I'd love to hear about your growth.

I've definitely grown. When you met me in twenty thirteen, that was like one of my first talks I ever gave in public, and I was so shy and nervous and I was literally shocked at the positive reception of it. And I gave it, and I think it was the

right venue, right time, right place. I gave a talk on openness to experience at the Bioethics Forum, and I didn't know there was this whole world of people as the first time I like stepped outside and I gave this public talk, and you were so incredibly warm and welcoming, so many like Richie Davidson was well, there's so many people there met too Ricard et cetera, Jim Fatoman, they'd embraced this research, and then I realized, wow, there is

this world of researchers who actually care about this as well. So anyway, thank you first of all for being so encouraging so early in my career. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think about how much everything has changed just in that four years. Absolutely, yeah, because you know, my openness finding with psilocybin was just kind of hanging out there as a loan, I don't know, like a lone star was just like here it is. You know, no one's ever thought to see if psychedelics change personality, even

though they obviously do. And then since then it's like all their researchers have said, oh, maybe we should keep looking to see if this was just a one off finding or if it's something that's reliable. And I would say, I don't know about Matchu Ricard, he was pretty anti psychedelics, but everyone else was probably warm and open because we've

taken drugs. I was wondering about that. I met. I met some people that that conference that were looking at me, and I was looking in their eyes and I was like, are you tripping right, now. I mean, to this day, that remains one of the not most warm and welcoming audiences ever. And it was good because it was one of my first talks to it and I was so anxious, right, and to realize that people care about these topics. Yeah, definitely. It was so exciting and I discovered your work. Wow,

it opened my mind as well. Right, So you from two thousand and shall we say ten to fourteen? Is that fair? You ve fall? I arrived to the fall of two thousand and nine, okay, And you know, the first few months in a postdoc you're just kind of getting your bearings. And for me, it was a move from California studying meditation to a drug abuse research center at Johns Hopkins, like the most conservative medical institution in the United States. So it took me a few months

to figure out what planet I had landed on. But by twenty ten I was actually doing something that felt productive. Let's just say that, okay, and so fairenop and then and preparing this interview, I was trying to thinking like, what are some sort of moments and then we'll work our way up to present day. But I want you to take me back if you don't mind taking me back to April fifteenth, twenty twelve, when you died. What do you mind? Can do you mind really that in

your head right now? Is that? Would that be too Is it too much? Funny? The part that's missing is the major current of anxiety that was running through my life, because that's part of what died in that whole process. Yeah, so I have to speak about the fear that I felt in a kind of distant way. I can tap into it in little bits and pieces, but it used to be kind of always there in the background. And before that day, I just thought that that's how how I was. I was an anxious person. There are lots

of anxious people. Certain things would make it temporarily go away. That's why I meditated, That's why I dabbled in other you know, psychede like extracurricular activities. That's why I was such a workaholic. And then I met this teacher and he said something to me. On this walking path in the middle of a conference, I visited a waterfall and I sat down and I focused on my breath, and the question popped up in my mind, where am I? And as soon as I asked, where am I. Everything

just dissolved into this vortex of energy. And it was terrifying because I felt like I was about to get sucked into this vortex of energy that didn't care about humans or life on Earth or whether I was going to come back. But when I came back into my body, everything was shining and brilliant, and I felt a lot of gratitude for having a body and being alive, and I saw the Earth as just this paradise of biological life. So it turns out that that was just the preliminary

to death. You know, that was just like a little taste. And then a couple days later, I had given this big talk for me. It was kind of, you know, my first public talk in this arena of talking about psilocybin. And a couple days later, as soon as I stepped on the airplane to go home, that's when I knew I was about to die. Like my foot hit the you know, the little like transition where you're going down the little runway thing and then you get on the airplane.

As soon as my foot went past that threshold, I this thing went through me. I was like, Oh, the plane's going to crash. I'm about to die. I knew it. I knew for sure that if I stayed on the plane, I was going to die. And in that moment getting to my seat, I started panicking. I was like sweating. I was going to come up with some excuse and just like leave, you know, get off the airplane and something. Maybe because of the experience I'd had a few days before.

I'm not really sure what kept me on the plane. And it was a total surrender to the moment that I had no control over, and I just meditated on my breath as if each breath was the last breath, and the moment of death was actually kind of anticlimactic. I thought something would happen, and it said nothing happened. It was just like a switch flipped, and I remember opening my eyes and looking out the window and being like, oh,

that was it. And so ever since that moment, I mean, there were several months of adjusting to the reality of having died but still being alive. And then once that all settled down, it was like a big chunk of that fear that I had been living with was gone, but a lot of the other parts of me were still around. The best sits, hopefully the best met, and then you know, I've been invited to surrender at different

points since then. It hasn't ever been so dramatic. But each time I surrender a little bit more and more that anxiety goes away. I haven't gotten rid of all of it. I'd like to say I have, but you're still human. I'm still human. The aliens haven't come with their mothership to take me off into some distant paradise yet. I don't know if that's waiting to know that your body snatched, the body snatchers didn't take you in that moment. How do you know that for sure? Yeah? You know.

Someone asked me that fairly recently. I was back in December, or someone I met in Boulder, Colorado, said, you know, I was curious about that death experience, and so I recounted it again. He's like, how do you know you're not dead? I was like, I don't. I guess the virtual reality simulation could still be running quite effectively. Yeah,

I'm not really sure. So the thing that I found interesting about that experience that you described in your wonderful TEDx talk, which I wish more people watched, I was shocked that it wasn't like five billion, you know, listens or watches, So hopefully this psychotic podcast can get it

out there to brought our audience. But I was saying I found particularly interesting the whata you described is as you felt unreal afterwards for a while, which really contrasts with the noetic feeling that William James talked about, as these experiences tend to make you feel realer than real. And David Yiden did this wonderful study finding that people after mystic experiences tend to report that the world feels realer than real. So how do you reconcile that with

how you just the way you felt right afterwards. Well, I'm curious what. So a lot of my reading and training up until that point was through Buddhist mental training, and in particular the Tibetan kind of book of Living and Dying, which talks about these bardoes that people can end up in after they die. And so I wonder, you know, for the Tibetans, what they talk about is that there is a period of unreality that happens after

death where the soul is temporarily very confused. And the whole point of meditating and training your mind while you're alive is so that at the moment of the death, you're not confused and you're able to transition either to Nirvana if you're really lucky, or choose a next life so that it's not just something happening to you. And typically what they say is that when people die, they

often just black out. They black out, they have no memory of the transition, and then they're born, and then all of the suffering that they've always had in their whole history, all the different lives, the suffering just can use. And it's pretty pathetic because there's no way out. But if you can be aware of the transition and you don't just black out, you have some memory like, oh, I died, this is the Bardo. I can't be distracted. I have to pay attention. Then you have some choice

over the next life that you create. And perhaps it's because I was primed in that type of philosophy or that type of worldview, that I felt like I was in a bardo, and that bardo was full of both fearful and enticing distractions, and I felt like, oh, I haven't done enough training for this, Like I've done just enough that I didn't black out, right, you know, I didn't completely lose consciousness. That's good, huh, I guess so. But at the time I was like, can't I just

have lost consciousness and started over again as a baby? Like? Why am I aware of this craziness that I'm in right now? So I do think that that priming had a lot to do with it. Just wanted to take this moment to thank you all for your support of the podcast over the years. It's been a real privilege to do this podcast for you all for over the past three and a half years. If you'd like to further support the podcast, I wanted to let you know a few things you could do to help make this

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incredible support of the show over the years. You know, I do this show for you all because I truly love sharing my enthusiasm and love of the mind, brain in creativity. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, so, I think that you raise a really interesting point about the necessity to help people process the experience and also integrate it into who they are, because you know, yes, a part of you dined, but you're still Catherine Clean, Like you're still in the same body, and your brain

didn't fundamentally reorganize. Maybe it did, but connectivity or the brain can't reorganize like a second. Yeah, I also think the thing worth pointing out too is that, and I've seen this in people who have mystical experiences after psychedelics, it's harder for people who are skeptical or like trained

in science or atheists to integrate a mystical experience. And I think for me that was my primary training as well, Like I dabbled in meditation and psychedelics, but I was primarily a scientist who believed that everything could be known, and like, if you die, you physically are dead. You don't get to keep walking around. And so I think there were two parts of my mind that were battling, you know, the part that knew I had died and the part that was like, no one else really believes this.

My scientific colleagues are like, so what, you just like took a drug when you were out in Arizona. I'm like, no, it was sober. This thing happened on an airplane and they're like what and like so there was a lot of that kind of doubt and like you're crazy thing that I had to kind of reconcile. You're like Mully on the one hand, and what was it X files?

Who are the two characters that represent that? Okay, well I'm trying to reconcile what you experienced with, Like, you know, the Mystical Experiences questionnaire that you have, for instance, had one of the facets is positive emotions, Right, So it seems like once you surrendered fully and accepted it and kind of got shed your scientific baggage, so to speak, then the world did things snapped into like what you do, tend to find and most people when they have these experiences,

right like it was, it was ultimately a very positive experience. Right. I want to make that quick. It just took about seven months. Okay, you know I was living in Baltimore, I was working at Johns Hopkins. It could have been easier if I just did a full rhmdass and just said, sorry, guys, I'm changing my name. I'm going to live in India. I don't care before right, No, because think about it, that's what he did when he had his mystical awakening. He just didn't go back to that life. He just

he literally died. He changed his name. So it could just be also that it's like, well, you know, I went back, and I was haunting the life that I was going to leave anyway, So of course it was going to be terrible and uncomfortable until I finally left. You know. It's like they talk about in Tibetan mythology.

It's like ghosts go back and haunt their home and their family and their their body, even until the body is all burned up, and until the family said hey, you're dead, you're not part of this anymore, like you have to go. And instead my Hopkins family was like, stay here, don't die, don't go away. So it's very confusing. You know, they weren't following the protocol. So interesting they weren't followed the protocol. Well, you can't blame them. No,

you're a loveable person, Catherine. Don't blame yourself for that. So the title of your talk your tech cycles Open Wide, And say, awe, I thought that was so brilliant. First of all, I love that title. I know, is it appropriate to use a completely ridiculous pun for a TED talk? Oh? I think not only is it appropriated, it's very on

brand of Ted. So since then, like there has been this, like you said, yeah, there's been a just a flurry of research, and particularly on potential interventions and ways of using psychedelics responsibly for a wide variety of human suffering forms of human suffering. Would you mind detailing some of that research? Sure? So when I was at Hopkins, we were still primarily studying healthy volunteers and the kind of the approach from a safety and IRB perspective was that

these are still dangerous chemicals. They're illegal, they are abused by the public. We don't know if they're safe, so it's best to keep studying them in healthy people until we get a sense of whether the drug is beneficial or not. And then I think it became pretty obvious that not only was psilocybin relatively safe, but it was actually benefiting people. Even healthy people who didn't have much

room to change were changing in a positive direction. And so kind of while I was at Hopkins, things started shifting toward a like a kind of a medicalization model. I think all the researchers saw the writing on the wall and they said, you know, if this chemical is ever going to be available to the public, it's probably

not going to be legalized outright. It might be legalizing some kind of you know, narrow fashion, you know, for people with certain conditions, but it's never going to really be available to accept to a privileged elite unless we come up with a diagnosis and start testing whether it can help those people with that diagnosis. And so, you know, it's kind of what is like strategy driven research, you know, And it was always hard for me to kind of

manage those two sides. You know, there was the discovery oriented research what can psychedelics do to the body and brain? And then there was what can psychedelics do practically that would make the medical establishment change its view on whether this drug is a medicine. And so one of the ways that that was starting to be tested was in cancer patients. And so some of the old research was that both LSD and psilocybin decreased what's called existential distress.

And it's the kind of fear, that real terror that I had on the airplane right before I died. And that kind of anxiety is not touched by benzodiazepines. It's not touched by psychotherapy. Well, Ervian Yolam's form of psychotherapy, it's touched by oh, interesting, existential psychotherapy. Is this right? Well yeah, but when people are in an ICU and they're getting you know, ten minutes with a psychiatrist once

a day, it's not really going to know. You're totally write mean it's not meanstream, but I mean, if Yollm had his way, it would be meanstream. Right. So let's just say, if you haven't been training your whole life to prepare for existential distress, you're going to be completely

sideswiped by it. And when you find yourself in a doctor's office or in ICU, you're going to have these experiences where you're lonely, you're terrified, you're in a lot of pain, and the only drug right now that helps with that is morphine and people just end up being sedated into death. And so that's amazing pain relief, it's amazing, you know, psychic pain relief, but it doesn't really do much for people who want to be present for those moments.

And so, you know, the old research suggested that LSD could reduce physical and psychic pain for terminal patients or people in an ICU environment, and both Nyu and Hopkins decided to run kind of parallel cancer studies based on a preliminary study done at Harbor UCLA by Charlie Grobe and Alicia Danforth showing that psilocybin reduced this kind of

anxiety in cancer patients. So kind of fast forward, Nyu and Hopkins both found amazing results for psilocybin when given to people who were facing cancer, and at the same time, they kind of learned along the way that the FDA said, well, existential distress isn't a diagnosis. You're never going to get a new drug prescribed for existential distress, which is hilarious because that's like the main thing that we're all dealing with. They're like, no, sorry, that's not a condition. It's not

a health condition of what we recognize. And so then the kind of shift was towards depression. And now all of a sudden, you hear everyone talking about psilocybin for major depression, and that's kind of like where I start

to get a little bit skeptical. It seems like we've moved away from the inherently what does this drug seem to do for people, which is reduce kind of existential or kind of purpose life meaning spiritual distress or anxiety, to like, oh, maybe it just reduces depression and anxiety of any form. And so that's kind of one path

that has been developing. The other path is MDMA for trauma, which is its own kind of category, but it's the MDMA is the ecstasy chemical basically, but in its pure form, and those kind of set of trials are way more directed and specific and extremely effective for severe PTSD, and so you know, MDMA is less a strategy for PTSD. You know, it's not a strategy for legalizing MDMA. It actually really works for people who've had untreatable PTSD. Amazing. Yeah,

and it's also amazing that it's at phase three. That's pretty high. Well, right, So, I mean, you know, when Rick Doblin founded this nonprofit called MAPS twenty five years ago, he founded it to make MDMA a prescribable medicine, but not because he just wanted MDMA to be legal, but because it had already been shown to be so effective for trauma and for couple's therapy and for various other

forms of therapy. And so we're at phase three now because there's been twenty five years of kind of tedious, slow, careful progress. And if you contrast that to the phase three, the proposed phase three trials of psilocybin for depression, it feels very different to me. It feels like one is very calculated and careful and really targeting the thing that

the drug is good for. And with psilocybin for depression, it feels like it's just let's see if this peg fits in this hole, Like we've got this problem of depression and we want to see if this drug solves that problem. And I'm a little bit skeptical of jumping too far ahead. Well, I appreciate that skepticism, especially for something so I'm potentially important. You want to get it,

do it right, so that that's admirable. I'm trying to understand because I didn't know that, like ecstasy was considered a psychedelic, Is it in that class? Like does it actually it doesn't cause sort of hallucinations, does it. Well, it's an interesting question. Michael Pollin, you know, said right up front in his new book that everyone's raving about that MDMA just categorically is not a psychedelic. But if you ask different people and different researchers, you get different answers.

And so for some individuals, MDMA is a classic psychedelic in terms of their subjective experience. It certainly has slightly different chemical actions in the brain, and it's not typically categorized along with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT mescaline. Those are kind of the classic psychedelics. But if you ask so there's this kind of underground chemist named Sasha Shulgin, and

if you asked him, basically DM. Well, he had a DEA license to develop new chemicals in a lab that he was running in California, like a tiny like hermit, you know, right behind his house with his wife. And what he was actually doing with that lab is coming up with new psychedelics every day and trying them out. I see, I see. So he came up with thousands of variations on LSD, DMT. So he would take the kind of core chemical that was known and try to

come up with something better. And at the end of the day, he didn't really come up with anything better. And MDMA he didn't discover it, but he came up with a very fast way of creating it. And he always said that MDMA was like this miracle chemical that

nothing was better then. And I'm kind of like very much pair phrasing, because obviously he had appreciation for lots of chemicals, but there were very few chemicals that he tried and worked with and was like, we should be using this instead of the ones that are available, and MDMA was one of them. And so it seems to me from my own experience from reading the you know research, I mean, there's an eighty percent remission rate at one year in people who've never successfully been treated for PTSD.

So they, you know, get a few doses of MDMA along with psychotherapy, and then a year later, eighty percent of them are still PTSD free, and so it's like,

this is a disease that's untouchable. The average I think the average amount of suffering was something on the order of almost twenty years that people had severe PTSD without any relief and had tried all of these other you know, therapies and chemicals, and and yet this kind of unassuming serotonin drug MDMA that isn't fully psychedelic, so it's actually not as scary as some of the classic ones, and so scare I guess the feeling of too much love

of right. So yeah, some people call it an intactogen, an empathogen, you know, giving rise to sensations of empathy. But yeah, it can be you know, I kind of I considered it a psychedelic because I think at the end of the day, it opens people up in a similar way. How do psychopaths feel when they take MDMA. That is a great question. I don't know if anyone's

done that study. Yet someone should really do that stuff, like go to a prison high level security prison, those who like committed the most terrific murders and give them MDMA and like measure their I don't know, various markers of empathy. I don't know how you do. What was that study they did with sociopaths. It was like an empathy brain imaging study, and it was like training people to be more able to identify emotions and facial expressions. And the sociopaths were like, now I know better how

to mimic emotions. Yeah, yeah, I know. Like so that's cognitive empathy, not effective empathy. But we would want to see whether or not the MDMA really actually changes their mirror neuron structure, you know, I mean, I do know.

You know, it's an interesting question. I think if if you had to pick one drug to give to someone who's an actual sociopath or psychopath or even just like a full blown narcissist, MDMA would probably be the safest one to start with, because you're not going to really trigger a ton of those ego defenses, you know that, Like, oh, I'm starting to blend with everything around me, and that's scary,

and so I'm just going to shut down absolutely. And I'm thinking because a lot of psychopaths are known in the literature to lack serotonin, like it's almost non existent in a way. So I mean, the results are obviously more complex than that, and any scientists listeners will give you a thousand caveats, but it's just interesting to think of what that can do, and also think about the brain. And I know that that's not a topic that you know, you're skeptical as well about some of the brain research,

but I'm really interested. I'm just curio. I'm ravenously curious about what is the mechanism that explains this amazing effect. And it seems like all roads keep coming back to the default mode network. And I have been critical myself of how that research has been represented in that literature because I've spent my not my entire career, but a good chunk of my career studying the default mode network

is a wonderfully positive thing. It related to creativity, and here I'm reading all these you know, Pollin's whole last chapters about how you know, like the hero of the story was like the quieting of the default network, and that kind of was like a stab to my hest because I feel like it's such a gross over simplification, a very very broad, complex brain network that has many components to it, and do you know what I mean? And to kind of just say like, that's what cured me.

I saw enlightenment because the default mode network is important for perspective taking, it's important for compassion. You know. It doesn't make sense to me to say like we've since the deal, you know, since it once, we've learned how to use our executive network to suppress it. So I

think things are more complex than that. No, And I think, you know, I was temporarily kind of in that default mode honeymoon phase when jud Brewer published his finding that long term meditators were able to kind of quiet their default mode network, and then Robin Carhart, Harris and London published the psilocybin finding and it was like the same

exact exact regions, same pattern. But then I was like, well, that's the beginning, and so then how do we bring the tools of neuroscience to bear on this question that it's like, we found a pattern, Now what does that pattern mean? And my skepticism is more have we actually done that? You know, I mean to have one or two labs in the entire world trying to tackle this question is ludicrous, Like tons of neuroscientists should be involved, We should be bringing in, you know, like people like

you and Jonathan Schooler who studied creativity. Jonathan Schooler actually reached out to me and said, I'd love to start studying psilocybin and creativity. And then his university is like, well, we're not a medical school and we're not taking the risk. Did his research in the Imagination Institute? Yels Yeah, no. And so there's a whole field of understanding that, in my view, having been trained in psychology is actually a lot more nuanced and theoretically driven than drug abuse research.

And those psychologists aren't allowed to tackle these questions because they're not in medical schools. They're not trained to kind

of have pharmacies that manage schedule one drugs. And so I think like we're at a point where the psychedelic researchers need to step out of their little drug abuse you know, cocoon and start asking for help from actual experts in other fields and be like, we have these big basic findings, but we don't have the training or the way of thinking about the brain and the mind that you do, and so what does your field say about this pattern? And like what else should we be testing,

what outcome measures, what ways of probing the brain? Not just if the whole default mode basically quiets during a peak psychedelic experience, that's fine, but like what about at the end of the psychedelic experre or the next morning, or like a week later. Exactly if you walked around with a quiet, a fully quiet default move network, you would actually have very very low compassion because you would not be able to take the perspective of anyone else

other than yourself. Well, I want to stop you there, because you just described a bunch of zen masters. I know, not a bunch, but I think that's been a problem, right, Yeah, Like, well, people try to keep up that peak experience and then they end up being assholes. They totally become assholes or

can be. And this is a really important point about enlightened assholes, let's call them, because you can start feeling superior to others after these experiences, because you feel like, wow, I've reached this level of pure oneness that all these chumps haven't reached yet, you know, like, and you can

become a maniacal guru and that can happen. It's not like, you know, like we're allowed to like question that and say, like, just because you're a guru, you're allowed to question whether or not you're doing good as a girl, right, Yeah, And you've got that going on with psychedelics too. You

have the kind of same narcissistic shamans. You know, they are kind of permanently in this because they're taking psychedelics so frequently, they're kind of permanently in this frame of reality where they are at the center and everything else is kind of a projection of that self. And so it's like it's certainly a stage along the path to enlightenment.

But as a good friend told me, he's like, if you see a signpost and you're like, oh, I've got to this point on the path, you don't like hang out at that rest stop, You like stay there for a little while, and then you keep going. I think for a lot of people, once they've gotten beyond that initial fear of selfishness and then their self becomes so big, then the fear goes away. But it's like, no, there's something even beyond that that's even scarier to give up,

and that's you being at the center of anything. Yeah, I'm now wondering if you put psychopaths on this stuff, do they become even more psychopaths maybe? I mean we've seen that in the psychedelic community unfortunately. So actually it might have the opposite effect. That's actually like it might just amplify whatever you are. That's another interesting hypothesis. We can forgeate lots of hypotheses about what's possible that it

certainly needs to be more research about it. Something that does seem to be going on with the MDMA POSTMAK stress disorder link that I want to say in linking it to the default mode network, that I think is probably very very valid. There is a part of the default mode network that is associated with rumination, you know, medial prefontal cortex. There are certain areas that you can get stuck in, you can rummage around in your medial prefonted cortex in a negative way, and that could be

associated that's associated with neuroticism, the personality trait neuroticism. But the most interesting thing is not just the default mode network or even one part of the default network. It's the interactions between multiple large scale networks. So the action is really in how much is your executive attention network

regulating the default mode network. That's the important question. The question isn't have you quieted your default mode network as it's being pitched in the psychedelic literature and the meditation literature. So John Cabotzen writes about this all the time as well,

and I think it's such an oversimplification. The real question is how much have you trained, through meditation practices your executive network to be able to regulate your attention so that you can use your default mode network when you want to have empathy and compassion for others and imagination and creativity, and you can suppress it when you're ruminating too much. I think that's the level of nuance that the field needs done, right. Yeah, it's like cognitive flexibility, Yeah, yeah,

that's right, emotional resilience. Like when Matchier Ricard was asked by Tanya Singer in a study to generate empathy for people who are suffering, he said, it's unbearable. I can't do this. I'm feeling so much pain right now, And she said, well, can you generate compassion? He said, I could do that forever, And so it's like he could do the thing that was unpleasant and give feedback about like,

oh no, I just tried to do that. I have control over that mental faculty, and I'm not going to do that anymore because it's causing me a lot of suffering. Give me a new task to do. And I think, you know, I think with the psychedelic community, I've seen that kind of cognitive flexibility in people who really maybe are open to begin with, become more open, but then don't just hang out in that fantasy world. They actually figure out practically ethically, like what should I do with

this openness? What should I where should I be putting my efforts? And I think with you know, people who are suffering, like with PTSD or depression, just giving them a little bit of a boost and openness isn't going to do it. It's like they need the framework after the experience to know how to act differently in the world, how to think differently every day. I mean, because otherwise

you're just talking about another form of morphine. But instead of for the body, it's like for our ruminative minds. It's like we give our ruminative minds this break and it feels great, and then of course that mind comes back unless you figure out a way to live differently. And so you know, Pollen talks about, you know, losing his ego. That's you know, Robin's big thing is ego dissolution.

So in a culture where ego is so problematic, like we've created selves that are so anxiety ridden, so selfish, so fearful, that of course, just obliterating that for a moment feels amazing. But like maybe there's a different form of self that needs to be created in the aftermath that is a healthy ego. That's like a healthy form of using like you're saying, all these normal faculties, and we don't want to just create zombies who feel good. It's like, we want to create people who are actually

helping the planet and helping each other. So that's funny that you used beautiful. I love everything you're saying. First all, that's funny to use a rezoldies got. I got a little bit of heat for a big think talk that I gave, you know, you know, the big think thing. Yeah, And I gave a little thing where I said, I said, have you ever been away these mindfulness like conferences that you look at the room, they all going zombies like, I don't think they're like that creative in that moment.

I've gone to a lot of Zen retreats, and at the end of the day, the insights that I have I've brought into my life are because I decided to be creative about the process in my own mind rather than just follow what the teacher was saying. Yeah, and you know, my husband always gives me a hard time.

I'll like come back from a retreat and be like, this is like what happened during the interview, And He's like, why do you sit in an interview with someone who's so much more trained than you and not just like listen to them. You're like challenging them. You're like being confrontational, You're getting angry. I'm like, cuz I'm only there for seven days. I like really want to find out what the f is going on. Yeah, it's great. I mean you're a great example of what I think there needs

to be more of in science among scientists. Is this balance of the spiritual, experiential openness and the intellectual curiosity. Is that why we bonded? Probably didn't we like instantly bond Yeah? No, And I think there's you know, it's that old saying of like drinking the kool aid. I think unfortunately it happened in mindfulness. And actually I think the most successful people in that meditation research world have graduated from that initial period of just mindfulness is good

for everything. Yeah, and I know a lot of people who are, you know, asking the tough questions now. But in the psychedelic research world, it's like everyone would rather keep drinking the kool aid of like let's just keep showing how this is good for people and not really talking about how it's bad because that scares people. And like it's just like eyes on the prize, let's get something legalized or made into a medicine. And that's not

even the most interesting question to me. It's like we should be as critical about the psychedelic findings as anything otherwise. It's like, what's the long term goal for this area of science? I mean, so we end up with a new drug? Who cares? Yeah, you're raising truly important points. You know, we both have those hats, Like we could spend an hour talking about how much we love drugs and meditation because we both do. I don't know, I don't know if I don't want to speak for you,

and I haven't done that. May drugs, I should say, but meditation I particularly really helped. I did an eight week MBSR course and it really helped me with my generalized anxiety disorder. So I can clearly see the benefit of that. But here's the thing, and I know that you agree with this. A fully integrated human being, a fully functioning human in Carl Rogers's sense or self actualization and Maslow sense, is not simply a reduction of anxiety.

It's not like an integration. A fully integrated person is one where you have all of yourselves are harmoniously integrated. But you don't like neglect any of thoseselves. You don't like treat the neuroticism used to have as the redhead stepchild. I never put it that way before, but I'm saying, you don't say, like, Okay, we're going to like banish them. You know, I use meditation, so I can now banish

that to this attic. I don't know why I'm using this metaphor, but that's still you know, that was a big part of who I was, and in certain instances that it can actually be beneficial to have that. There are things I want to be fearful of in life. There are things I want to be anxious about, you know. I want to be able to have a metacognitive view and take it is as wisdom and perspective. But you know, some of that is part of wisdom is keeping some of that anxiety. What do you think of what I

just said? Am I making any sense at all? No? Absolutely? And I you know, I had this conversation with it's it was actually a really funny moment. So I was dropping my husband off at Silent Retreat and our daughter came with us. She's she was two and a half at the time. She's almost three. So it's like prime survival years. Like you're just whatever anxiety I used to have about myself and most of it was just fantasy

or like nightmare. Now it's actually directed to like is my child alive moment to moment, Like am I about to like make some mistake in vigilance or emotion regulation that's going to cause her harm? So this is a totally different category. But like, I'm so happy I have that form of anxiety. So we go up to this Buddha center. I have this amazing sit you know, I'm like oh so stable, no fear, completely at ease, loving,

blah blah blah. And then later that night she gets hives all over her body and we have to go to the er because we're in the middle of nowhere and like none of the like because no one else there has kids. The residents are just like, oh, well,

you know, is this really a big deal? Making yes two and a half and like we don't know why she's you know, So I'm like panicking And if someone said to you in that moment, just meditate when you want to slap them, well, right, So I was kind of getting more and more escalated because I was just like, somebody should be panicking with me, like this is the moment. Yes.

So the next day I asked the Buddhist teacher, I'm like, you know that fear that I felt on the plane, that I thought I made so much progress in understanding and just the tiniest shift in circumstances and that all that terror comes back, I'm panicking. And he said, well,

but you still made the right decision. It's like you didn't forget how to make decisions, like that emotion was causing you to be vigilant enough to make this decision that could have been life or death, and I said, I guess I just thought that all of this meditation eventually, like I would stop feeling that panic. And he's like, Oh, the point is actually that in those moments of panic, you can just let go and surrender into what is

happening and just do what needs to be done. And sometimes that means taking charge, and sometimes it means somebody else has to do this because I can't do it. But it's not like you're going to be like perfectly adjusted to every possible scenario and like, you know, like Jesus being nailed to the cross and be like I'm fine with this, you know, total equanimity. I think that I really like that distinction. I like that a lot. Cool, so so many exciting things I want to talk to

you about that. I'm going to be respectful of your time, and so, you know, maybe you could tell me some of your more recent research or like follow ups, Like can we talk about this seven year follow up? Yeah, that's pretty amazing. I'm so grateful to the team of people that I worked with when I was a grad student, because so Cliff Sarin had this amazing vision to study Western meditators as if they were, you know, monastics in India. He was inspired by a trip to India. He connected

up with Alan Wallace, who was the meditation teacher. They wanted to study people for a year, and all of the funders were like, hmmm, we could maybe do a month,

and so they compromised a three month retreat. We collected tons of dat over that three months, and then the really brilliant thing was to keep following people up the five month follow up, then a year and a half, and then seven years later we sent everybody laptops and questionnaires and we found out, like, what do people look like seven years after doing this really life changing thing

meditating for three months straight? And I can't really take credit for any of the vision around the seven year follow up, because you know, it's like I was gone in you know, a few months after I started my postdoc. My brain was just like, you know, you like dump out one part of your brain that used to study eg and you start studying drugs instead. And now I've dumped up downtown like both of those parts of my brain, and I've become a mom and I'm like around psychedelic

people all the time. So that kind of plasticity. It's just like it's really hard to maintain that kind of persistence in academia to get kind of follow up like that. And so Tony Zenesco and brand and King were the two grad students who kind of carried the torch for that follow up, and we just published that basically after seven years, the amount of change that people got better at a response inhibition task you press a button every time you see a long line, and then you withhold

the button press when you see a short line. That people got better at that within the first month and a half, two months of meditation, and seven years later they're still just as good at that. I'm going to say, stupid task. You know. It's like when I came up with this task, I'm like, oh, it's just a measure of response and ambition. Who cares? But it predicts success and happiness in all sorts of different domains of life.

And they're still good at it seven years later, and they're not practicing this task, you know, they're just living their lives. And the kind of the other cool finding is that there's a certain amount of cognitive decline in controlling your responses. So you're less good at response and ahibition as you age, and the more you meditate in that seven year follow up, the less you show that cognitive decline on the task. And so it's like, oh, you know, you invest that really intense time of training

may not have to be three months. You know, we saw the benefits after only about a month and a half. Then if you keep up a regular practice, your brain has changed basically permanently, so that then you get a laptop in the mail, you do this little task and you're just as good at it as when you're in a monastic environment basically. And on top of that all

these questionnaire measures. I mean, you can kind of debate the questionnaire measures because you know, once you filled out questionnaires a bunch of times, you kind of know you maybe remember what your answers are. But let's just assume people are being honest and that they're not just kind of generating the answers that they think we want. The changes in personality, the changes in well being, the changes in kind of mindfulness and resilience and empathy, all of

those are still there at seven years as well. Some of them have dropped off, but yeah, we call it adaptive functioning because kind of all of these adaptions psychological measures increase with meditation, and they're still hanging out at this high level seven years later. Some people in the literature have written that like personality is cast in stone after thirty years of life, after your first thirty years of life, and or that it tends to be relatively stable.

I should say, but there are lots of like therapy has been shown in this great that Ben Roberts did this review paper showing there are methods that really show substantial personality change, like CBT, certain forms of therapy, and it looks like we can add meditation to this list of something that could cause long lasting personality change. So that's great, all right. So Colin DeYoung is an I know, he's another like openness obsessed person and he's also obsessed

with destroying the myth of stable personality. He's like, yeah, yeah, So we talked about that a lot. And how you know Colin, Yeah, I know. I mean I've never met him in person, but I know him in the age of you know, virtually knowing people through all sorts of funny you know, social media, And he's my biggest collaborator on openness. Yeah, and he and I wanted to write a review on openness and psychedelics and just because I couldn't get my ish together because I don't acadeem me anymore.

I'm like, I'm clearly not writing this, like it's never going to happen. But other people kind of stepped up, so other labs have been doing more openness research and writing the reviews that I wanted to write. So that's great. I like love it when you know I have a good idea and someone else does it. Now, well, that's your ego dissolution talking. And also just like enjoying life talking. It's like, there's a good idea that should help people,

and can someone else do it? But no. Colin and I were talking about how it is still unusual that you could change personality so dramatically in like generally stable healthy people, either overnight with a chemical like psilocybmin or over the course of a month and a half with meditation. Yeah. I mean yeah, if you go through a divorce or if you go through like a major life event, your personality might change. If you're super depressed and then you

get cured, your neuroticism will go down. You know, your extraversion will go up, but openness is not typically one of those things that seems to increase randomly after people

have life experiences. And yet it's been this reliable finding in the psychedelic literature, the cool finding with the you know, even though I'm skeptical about the depression trials, in the trial, in an open label trial with depressed volunteers, their openness increased and the amount of increase in openness was related to the decrease in depression symptoms. And so in that paper that I was just one of the co authors,

David Ritzo was the lead author from London. He basically said, you know, neuroticism going down, an extra version going up in depressed people when they're not depressed is kind of a typical finding. But you don't really see openness all the time going up. And so it does seem like whatever's going on with openness, whatever that indicates, is something that we should be tackling more head on and trying to understand what does this self reported openness mean, you know,

in people's lives, how long does it last? In the Hopkins that I did, it lasted fourteen months, you know, with depressed individuals, maybe it kind of goes back to baseline after you know, their symptoms come back. In the MDMA trial, it lasted for years, so again these like long term follow ups that you know, these are not just I feel better for a few weeks. Absolutely, it's exciting. David Yane and I recently created an all Experienced scale,

which I can't wait to share with you. All experience. Yeah, yeah, that has like six facets of it so people can like know is what I had is at all? Yea all experience like the theory of Everything scale. It's like it's a measure that measures everything. Would that's my next project? But yeah, the number one predictor of the all experience I have trouble saying. I don't know how to say

all without saying all because I'm from Philly. But yeah, the all experience, as you know, number one personality predictors openness to experience. It's just that you know this openness to me and which has fascinating me. It's the one that is most consistently correlated with a wide range of self transcendent experiences. Like where does the term wonder fit? Yeah?

I think of wonder a lot when I think of these experiences people have on psychedelics that you know, may not be religious experiences at all, the sense of a wonder where it feels nice to be small or part of than a larger hole and you no longer need to be kind of like at the center of everything. That's part of the all experience, the all experience, for sure. But it seems like openness is a trait like preps people for that, like, like you know, it's like both

a precursor and a postcursor. I don't know is the postcursor word, but it's something that can make it more likely that you'll get into the experiences. But also it's something that these experiences affect as well. So it's a pretty fascinating thing. And a lot of it seems to me to be about absorption. It's about absorption. It's about shifting your perspective so that you are as fully absorbed in the moment as possible, and that seems to be

kind of the key thing going on there. Yeah, I had a friend who actually studies she's one of the researchers who studies MDMA in cancer patients and in autistic adults. She's a brilliant researcher. And when she came to my farm and I took her back into the woods, she's like, I'm having a beauty attack. I love it, you know. And she's like, this is this is what happens to me because I'm so open, I'm so empathic, like things

just could flow in. And she's like, if it's such a beautiful experience, I like can't even filter to think about, Oh, this is a beautiful experience I'm having. It's just like overwhelming. Oh my god. Can I use that? Can I use that in my book? That'd be a great like subsection hanging from anxiety attack to beauty attack. Yeah, Oh, that's just wonderful. I'm real admirer of what you're doing, and I support your transition from researcher to healer. And I

wanted to tell listeners to websites. One to go to ww dot Psychedelic program dot com, which is all about quote raising awareness and reducing risks of psychedelics, education, psychotherapy, and community. And also your personal website ww dot Catherine McLean K A T h e r I N E m A c l e a n dot org, which is what you're all about is quote psychedelic integration, meditation, training, and more. The exclamation plant. It's something I would do, I know, right. I was like, more is actually the

bigger part of it. But I was like, there there are great terms more that I do that I do anyway, but that and more is you know a lot. So you'd help with individual psychotherapy, group psychotherapy, evaluation, consultation, you help people integrate. Could you end this podcast day by just talking a little bit about what your vision of real,

true psychedelic integration looks like. Hmmm, well, I have to say the thing that I've been most inspired by is the work that this group is doing down in Jamaica, which is one of the only countries in the world where mushrooms are legal. And it's kind of because everything is legal in Jamaica, and so they are kind of pros and cons to a completely deregulated country. But once you get down to this you know, remote part of Jamaica and Treasure Beach, it's a very open, kind of progressive,

welcoming culture and mushrooms go wild there. And this guy, Eric Osborne, started a pretty humble enterprise where people come down mostly from the States and from Europe and they

partake in mushroom experiences and then they go home. And several months ago I was invited down there as a guest to give a talk about my research, and I saw, you know, a group of twenty people having an extremely high dose experience with almost no anxiety, none of the paranoia like freak outs that I saw at Hopkins, and instead they kind of came out of this with a really deep sense of community of you know, empowerment in themselves.

And then you know, they go home into their lives and there's a bit of a vacation effect, so the effect doesn't maybe last. But I'm kind of curious to understand how those kind of community mushroom experiences could rival the clinical model that I was trained in, because I was just shocked at how how high the doses were and how much people were not scared about what was happening to them. And some of these people had never taken psychedelics before, or maybe just a handful of times,

certainly not at those high doses. We just did a women's retreat there in March, same thing. You know, this amazing camaraderie in community, and so I'm beginning to think that if there is a key to integration. It's that sense of community and like who is your tribe? And so you can have a peak experience, you know, you can fill out questionnaires, you can you know, have a reduction in certain symptoms. But ultimately, after people go home,

they're not talking about the mushrooms. They're talking about the people they met. And I think the same thing could happen in meditation. It's not the technique that you're doing. You know, you're not just going to beat yourself up every morning sitting in front of an altar, you know, being like why am I not enlightened yet? It's like go out into the world and like find the people who make you feel like you know you're here for

a reason and your life has meaning. And so I think, you know, the whether the clinical models end up being effective or not, I think we have to address this issue of community and when people have peak experiences, figure out a way for them to give back almost immediately. And so one project that I was super proud of is call I started this thing called Psychedelic Good Samaritan Training, or basically it's like you take the experience you have and then figure out how to start helping others like

right away, not once you're perfected. Just like assume that you're not never going to get perfected. You know, you're always going to be who you are, but you can start helping other people. And because you've had a psychedelic experience, maybe you're like more comfortable in environments where most people don't want to go, like soup kitchens or refugee camps or hospice or nursing homes, which are like hell on

earth for a lot of people. You know, the people who work there are stressed out, the people who are living there have dementia, they're very sick. No one wants to go volunteer there. It's really hard. But like maybe the psychedelic experience is so opening that you're like I'll go in there, like I can bring some creativity and

love into this place. And so we had a group of people in Brooklyn actually do that for a month and it was really really fun and so kind of that's my those are my kind of two perspectives now, is like how can we use these peak experiences to help people create community that's healthy and also be like better human beings, like actually in action in the world, not just figuring out how to be a little bit less anxious, all right, Love that it sounds to me

like in Buddha terms, that's real proponent of the Bisotva path. Yes, absolutely to your psychedelic experience. And I just want to end there and say thanks again for the great work you're doing to make the world a better place. You are welcome. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com.

That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please a reading and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.