Roland Griffiths & David Yaden || The Scientific Psychedelics Revolution and Embracing Mortality: An Ode to Joy

Griffiths and David Yaden on the show. Doctor Roland Griffiths is a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioral science and director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He has authored over four hundred scientific publications and has trained more than sixty

postdoctoral research fellows. His initial two thousand and six publications on psilocybin is often attributed as the catalyst for the reinitiation of psychedelic research after decades of halted drug research. I also have on the show doctor David Yayden, who's an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

working in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness research. His research focus is on transformative experiences that can result in long term changes and how they can temporarily alter consciousness and self. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and MPR. In this really rich and poignant episode, I talked to doctor Griffiths and doctor Gayden about the

latest research on psychedelics. They answer some of my burning questions such as what are the common characteristics of a mystical experience? Are hallucinations necessary for a transformative experience? How do psychedelics affect our brain? We also touch on the topics of mindfulness, religion, mental illness, and creativity as they share about the latest developments in the field. Also, we

talk about doctor Griffith's own mortality. He was recently dignosed with a terminal illness and we discussed what that means for how he lives his life and for the research he's conducted in his whole life and the lens and through what he sees it all now. It was a really emotional, poignant, meaningful episode for me, and I'm sure you will find it meaningful as well. So, without further ado, I bring you, doctor Roland Griffiths and doctor David Jayden.

Hey Roland, Hey Scott, Yeah, good to see you. Yeah, it's nice to find me meet you. Doctor Griffiths. Yeah, nice to meet you, Scott. Well, Okay, Roland, I would love to start out by talking to you for a second and find out a little bit more about how you even got into this field that you're in. You know, what was your PhD dissertation about these sorts of things? Oh? So my PhD was psychopharmacology University of Minnesota. The essentially coming out of a Scinarian background of all things, which

is very divergent from where I find myself now. So it was experimental analysis of behavior and it was psychopharmacology. And I did in graduate school both animal research, which was my primary thesis work in psychopharmacology, but I also did some work with humans in behavior modification and substance abuse. I then went on I went directly from graduate school to a assistant professor position at Johns Hopkins, where I've been out for half a century fifty years this year,

and split my time between doing animal research and human research. Again, it was on behavioral pharmacology, and most of this work was focused on drugs of addiction, mood altering drugs, but the funding came primarily from the nationalists on drug abuse, so we got very interested in measures of relative reinforcing efficacy or abuse liability. We developed a number of techniques to assess those. So that's that's a little bit of a bio of where I came from. Like, give me

a little more of the human in you. Why were you interested in these topics? What is it about you that dovetails with what you do? Let's see if I wind myself back to college. I did an internship program at a statemental hospital, became interested in their research program, ran a study in rats on memory work, and then in college I also did I was a psychology major, and I ended up doing RNA transfer. I don't know

if you remember that as an interesting area. So I was interested in psychology and basic science physiological psyche and when it came to applying for graduate schools, University of Minnesota had a very attractive fellowship program in psychopharmacology, which incidentally is kind of the predecessor to neuroscience. I mean, in this case, it was an interdisciplinary program between pharmacology and psychology and neuroscience came out of that with a

broader interdisciplinary base, so there was a pragmatic element to that. Frankly, it was a really attractive offer out of graduate school. But I really enjoyed the process of science, of trying to figure out how things worked, and that just was very intriguing from me to me from the get go.

In fact, that's kind of characterized my scientific career. I've gone with what I find most interesting, and so there was a pragmatic element and a random element about getting involved in drugs and behavior, but it allowed me to do all kinds of interesting things with drugs and behavior and looking at mood altering drug cool What were you like in middle school? Were you bookish? Were you in gifted education? Were you sporty? Were you very popular? I've

never heard this one. I'm really interested to hear the answer to this one. I went to an all boys prep school, so shut down some opportunities in the social realm, you know. I think I was always a serious student. I took classes seriously. I was in with that. Yeah. I did swim competitively in high school and college and enjoyed that. I think I tended to be a very

serious student. I enjoyed learning things. Let me just say Roland and I have been recording conversations about his scientific career, his life, his interests. I have to say, we've never talked about this, and so it's good. It's funny that that, Scott, that you went exactly there to a subject that has never cross my mind to ask about. And I don't think that we've discussed at all. We haven't. We haven't. There's a human behind every set of research, you know, and I try to do that. I try to do

that on my podcast. To understand that human, Well I can I can testify it to my being very much human. You can verify that. What was the major in college? Well, I started off engineering, and then I wasn't particularly good at that, nor did I find it very interesting. And then I stumbled into psychology, and for a while I was psychology pre med, but just trying to figure out how people work, you know, was really interesting to me. So I was really drawn to psychology as a major.

At the end of college, I actually was torn about whether I was going to go to graduate school or off to the Peace Corps. And I'd applied to the Peace Corps been accepted but then this opportunity for this very attractive fellowship came up and I ended up taking that. And so that I think of as one of those very divergent points where no telling where I'd be had I gone off to at that time Chad Africa to dig wells in the Peace Corps. Well, we're very appreciative

that you stayed the path you did. But let me just speak as long as we were talking about that early history, and we're going to get to spirituality and growing up. Spirituality did not play any particular role in my life. I flunked out of confirmation class in sixth grade and there was no there there for me. So with respect to that, there's really no particular interest or content to spirituality growing up. And I would say through at least college, Oh well, go on. So what happened

after college or around college? Was there something that happened? You're teasing, You're teasing something there and implicitly no. Well, let's see. So in graduate school I actually became intrigued with meditation just as a there was some sense, particularly coming from this deeply held sense with the experimental analysis, that we really discount subjective effects or subjective accounts, and that there was really something intriguing about the idea of

exploring interstates. And there was the time of Indian meditation teacher who was in town and who and with whom some of my good friends started learning meditation from. And I was really intrigued by that that there was something about my interiority that I was basically pretty ignorant of, and I didn't understand meditation from where I was being trained in terms of in terms of the peromounal analysis.

It seemed like an empty kind of exercise because there was there'd be no validating what was going on in the interior. And when I went to my first meditation classes, this Hindu oriented meditation teacher was talking started talking about the underlying physiology, you know, the chakra system and the nadis and stuff like that, and I thought, well, this

makes no sense from what I know about physiology. And one part of me just wanted to walk out the door because the guy was either ignorant or a fraud. But what I was also able to kind of respect is that there's this methodology that is meditation that's been passed down for thousands of years, and it's survived and so there might be a there there, There might be something interesting, and he just may not have the language

to discy. And so I took those teachings as kind of metaphorical, you know, pay attention to your heart chakra, and so I was able to translate that. But frankly, when I got into meditation, it was a hurdle too high to clear for me. And that's the case with many people beginning meditation practice, and I just couldn't engage. There was nothing a particular meaning there for me, so I quickly dropped it. But then speeding up twenty five years later, after being at Hopkins for a while, that's

when I got re engaged with meditation. Something took off, and that opened up this whole field of investigation for me, an interest in interior experience and spirituality in particular. Wow, I will talk much more deeply about that, leader. I'd like to just turn the spotlight to David Yden for a second. Doctor David Yiden, Nice to see you here. Great to see Scott. How in the world did you get interested in these topics? Yeah, so, I know that's

a long story. It is. I'll give you the briefer version. The cliff notes I think there was some similarity though with some of Roland's path, although some differences as well. I was raised religious but became questioner at a very young age, at the early teens, probably an atheist really at that point, although I saw a great value in the community aspect of religion. That continued on until my

experience in college, which didn't begin with meditation. It came on as a spontaneous experience that I was undeserving of and that I wasn't looking for it. It came to me, and I feel intense attitude for this experience, an experience that came to me in the midst of looking for

direction in life. That experience became the direction essentially. So Scott, I know you and I have talked about this, maybe we've talked about it before, even on your podcast, But this was a spontaneous experience that occurred on my dorm room bed and had all of the qualities of a mystical type experience. It occurred not in the context of

any psychoactive substance and no practice whatsoever. This was really, I think, purely spontaneous, although maybe it could be considered a transitional period in life, which is a somewhat common

trigger of these experiences. But basically this experience, as I say, became my fascination, almost an obsession, I would say, and trying to understand what this experience was, what happened to me, and this led me through comparative religion, religious studies, philosophy briefly after this experience became a full on believer in religious spiritual type phenomenon. It was really my study of philosophy that brought me into an agnosticism, which is I

consider myself now an agnostic. My curiosity was not being addressed by scholarly work or philosophical work. It was only scientific work that really felt like a way forward. And so I moved into neuroscience and finally, well not finally, but psychology, which I did my doctoral work in and where I met you Scott, and then psychopharmacology with Roland, ultimately leading to the the study of psychedelics. Those are the cliff notes you can drill down into to any

of those themes. Well, what were you like in middle school?

Were you? Were you spiritual at all? No? No, middle school I would have been deeply questioning probably the kind of social conventional religion that I was raised in and at that point probably beginning to mostly reject explicitly religious doctrine as an article of faith, but as I said, really remaining very sympathetic to religion in its community aspect, at least in the community I was involved in and found actually quite a lot of meaning and value in

that community. But in terms of beliefs, I was very much questioning. I would say I was marked by a lot of questioning throughout well, really my entire life, I suppose, maybe defined by that in some ways. Thank you to you for telling us tell me a little bit about that background there. It makes me wonder, Roland, do you think you've ever had in your life a something that resembles the kind of experience David had that we can put the label mystical experience on it, but we still

don't really know exactly what it is. Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, just to pick up where I left off, So about twenty five years ago, I had a good friend who started getting involved with a meditation group here in Baltimore. It was City Yoga, It's actually a international group, and she got me intrigued about trying meditation again, and this

time something was different. I engaged with it. I don't know if I had changed, whether the instruction set was different enough, but I started meditating and having interesting experiences

that I didn't formally have. And this kind of yoga, it's out of a tonric tradition, puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of experience, emergent experience out of the meditation practice, which stands in really real contracts stark contrast to other forms of meditation that will tell you forget about those experiences, don't pay any attention to them. But sid of yoga in fact puts a lot of

emphasis on that and effect prizes experiences. And that started happening within this tradition to me, and I became very intrigued about that. It was kind of opening this window into interior landscape that I actually I didn't know how to make sense of it. I felt some deep longing

for it, I recognized well. I actually initially found it very confusing and disorienting because I didn't know how much of what I was experience was similar to what one would experience in any meditation tradition, or whether it was specific to this meditation tradition. It felt like it rhymed with religious experience at some level, and because at that point I was so entirely ignorant of both meditation and religious tradition that I had a lot of catching up

to do. But certainly there were early experiences that verged on mystical type experiences, but not full out mystical experiences. But I subsequently, as I deepened my meditation practice, I certainly had some of those experiences. And I certainly also now at this point, have had some of those experiences with psychedelics. So I'm absolutely confident that those kinds of experiences occur, and that's part of the fascination now I have for investigating the nature of those experiences and their

causes and consequence. Sure, scientifically, what do you think are some of the most replicable common characteristics across these experiences? Maybe name two, I mean name three, three? Name three? I think three? Three I think are in my mind the most important features for the enduring worldview changes that

can come about. And so one is what's characterized as a sense of unity, But it could be that everything is connected, it could be that everything is empty, it could be experienced as avoid They're both introvertive and extrovertive features. Of that, but essentially it's everything connected, and that's accompanied by this sense of preciousness, preciousness beyond belief. You want

to use religious language, it would be sacredness. There's something intensely important about that experience, deserving of awe or reverence. And then the final feature is the sense that that experience is more real and more true than every day waking consciousness. It's coming across with this authoritative value of truth. And so my sense is with those features, if you package them together, you have this sense we're all connected

and we're not different. It's precious and it's absolutely true, and you thereby have the seeds for remarkable change going forward. In my mind right right now, although we have a lot of research to do to further unpack it, that really describes this experience for me. Thank you for describing that. David, did you want to add anything to that or do you think that captures it from your perspective? Your perspective as well. I think I would agree with those features

that that Roland mentioned. As Roland was talking, I was checking off whether they fit with the experience I described that occurred in my college years. They all fit exactly. There's a number of other features that were included in my experience that that Roland didn't mention. But the question was what are the main replicable features? I suspect some people may have experiences in which connectedness isn't necessarily the

overriding feature. But even in those, even if someone feels connected, feels the presence of God or void or something, there's other sort of phenomenological features that can play a dominant role. If you were to pose the question did you feel more connected to that entity or object or to others around you? I think most people would would indeed say yes.

So I agree that there's something about these experiences that seem to pierce through this perceived isolation where often it feels as if there's me and then there's everything else and everyone else, And during these experiences it seems to dramatically alter. There's this figure ground reversal where all of a sudden you feel not apart from but part of

the rest of what's going on. And so I should point out there's a real deep and long standing scholarly debate on this exact question, which is are there replicable features across these experiences, across all cultures and across history.

Some say the perennialists say, these experiences are all the same everywhere and for everyone, and they're interpreted differently, whereas on the other hand, the cultural constructivists will say, no, if you read these accounts, they're all different across cultures

and there's no similarity. This strikes me very much as an empirical question and one that's tractable and seems obvious to me that these are two extremes, that there will be common clusters of subjective features that will be identifiable, and what will need to happen is probably a field wide, very large initiative to try to understand what those common clusters are and how they vary across cultures. Probably similar to personality psychology really, I mean in terms of identifying

the Big Five. I mean, this was decades long and involved hundreds of researchers and hundreds of thousands of participants, and Scott you know more about the history of that research than I do. But I suspect something very large, some kind of very large initiative will be required to really drill down and find the shared features of these experiences, in which aspects bury across cultures. Yeah, you have that

unitary continuum, right. I'm really curious to what extent we can reliably differentiate this from mental illness, because I think a big part of your work has been showing that this does not belong in the realm of mental illness.

Like Freud called these experiences a regression to the womb or an infantile regression to the womb or something like that, And a big part of the work both are doing is showing that these are very positive experiences for a lot of people, even if there may be some fear mixed in or anxiety, that they're ultimately positive and they create transformative changes that are in a positive direction for the person. So how do you differentiate though, this state

from menia? For instance? That's one state that I think of in particular. When I think of this, I think, well, how's it different from menia? Well, I think the first thing to say is it's both. These experiences are associated with positive outcomes and psychopathological outcomes, and in some cases these things can be mixed in complicated ways in terms

of the outcomes from these experiences. I mean, and so this is again an empirical question that can be quantified to some extent in terms of the proportionality of how many of these kinds of experiences end up having positive impacts, how many are purely negative, and how many are mixed. And this kind of empirical approach, I think is what's required.

There's some preliminary evidence here, but I'll just say I need to give a shout out to William James, who was century ago made the case that we need to study these experiences empirically to get a sense of the proportionality, and that he very much mentioned that positive and pathological outcomes can flow from these experiences. In the intervening decades,

I think that insight was lost. You mentioned Freud no personal experience of having one of these moments, but he assumed that it was associated with psychopathology, collecting no data. Carl Jung, on the other hand, had these experiences, became basically an enthusiast and wasn't collected data either, but assume that these were the key to mental health. And I think both of these are extreme perspectives, wholly positive or

completely pathological, and importantly not involving actual evidence. So now I think we're at the point where we can go back to James's initial approach and collect evidence. And so the evidence that has been collected so far, I think presents a picture where these kinds of experiences are surprisingly

prevalent in the normal population. Estimates range anywhere from depending on the level of intensity of the experience, anywhere between say fifteen percent or so to thirty five percent people who will endorse having had one of these kinds of experiences. There's a number of gallop poles and social general social survey polls on this issue. And when you collect data on people who have had one of these experiences, they

endorse them overwhelmingly as positive. So the vast majority of these experiences seem to result in increased well being, more of a social or altruistic impulse, and a deeply felt sense of meaning that it's persisting. Some people say the experience was simply confusing and they derive no benefit, and some require therapeutic care processing the experience in psychotherapy sessions,

and some require hospitalization. That's actually quite rare, but I think important to mention because what the data allows us to present is a more nuanced understanding of these experiences that isn't purely pathological or purely positive, but something like mostly posit, but by no means always positive. Yeah, fair enough, Roland. Do you want to jump in there. Yeah, I agree

with what David's saying. There, let's see and you ask specifically that how these are differentiated from mental illness with the hallucinogens you know in LSD in particular, I mean, it was originally put forth as a psychotomometic that is a compound that would be of interest to psychiatrists and psychologists because it seemed to mimic psychotic process and there

certainly is some truth to that. To the acute effects, that's just a very limited description of these experiences, and with psychedelics in particular, I mean, the primary mystical experience is just one of any number of kinds of experiences one can have with these compounds. So it's a subset of the much larger range of experiences that people have.

But also to underscore what David said, I mean, there are risks associated with these experiences, whether they're whether they're engendered by psychedelics or whether they occur in absence of psychedelics. Some people go on to have very disturbing psychological consequences, depression and anxiety with the psychedelics. One concern is precipitation of schizophrenia frankly and during psychotic illness, but that is not the psychedelics alone. There's a literature on how meditation

can also produce very disruptive and enduring negative experiences. He's got current low rates. There is a rhyme with respect to the nature of the phenomenology of these states and mental illness. And it's actually for that reason that I think psychiatry in particular has been very slow to warm up once again to interest in research with psychedelics because they're accustomed to seeing psychopathology at its worse, and they're also seeing new on set cases of mental disorders that

people are attributing to psychedelics. And so my experience and getting involved in this research and actually reintroducing the legitimacy of these kinds of studies being done in healthy volunteers without histories of psychedelic use. Psychiatry establishment in particular was very skeptical initially, I think, for understandable and good reasons.

But all that being said, to place them in and in a limited framework of DSM four diagnostic categories is to throw the literally the baby out with a Bath. Let me just teck onto that I really appreciate that role and brought it back to your question, Scott, which is how to differentiate these from mental illness? And I promise I'll stop bringing up William James after this mention, but it's an important one and a pretty deep issue, which is the definition of mental illness. And Hopkins has

a history in psychiatry. Adolph Meyer is known to be the kind of founder of modern psychiat is at Hopkins, and a lot of his work kind of went into what we now know as the DSM. And the definition of mental disorder is outcome oriented as to involve suffering for oneself and others and dysfunction in order for something to count as a mental disorder. And actually this comes

directly and explicitly from William James. So William James's philosophy of pragmatism is all about the value of something is determined by the outcomes that flow from it. William James sent his graduate students to work with Adolf Meyer, and Adolf Meyer specifically and explicitly credited James to his view

for his view on mental disorders. So you have to look at the outcomes that flow from any experience in order to determine whether or not it should be considered psychopathological, psychopathological, or a mental disorder or mental illness. And so people have these experiences like Roland described, like I described, and they may sound unusual, but in fact, if there's positive outcomes flowing from these mental states, it's inappropriate to define

it in terms of a mental disorder. So I think to answer your question, Scott, you have to look at the outcomes. If the outcomes are negative, involving suffering for oneself or other or dysfunction in life, then we call it mental illness. But if it's if the outcomes are positive, we call it something else. Thank you. That's a really good clarification. So far, we focused on these experiences agnostic whether or not you use psychedelics or not to activate them.

But let's go a little bit deeper into psychedelics and kind of where we're at right now. As a potential activator of these experiences, would you say that on the whole your research, modern day research has validated Timothy Leary like if Timothy Leary like came back, you know, they are the ghost of Timothy Leary's here and he's listening to our podcast. Would he smile knowing what you all

are finding? I think he would in some respects. The first study that I ended up publishing and we initiated research like I was describing with psychedelics after my getting involved with meditation and being curious about altered states of consciousness, not knowing exactly and thinking that that was a priority for me in my life to kind of understand what

was going on here. It led to immediate dissociate creation, a bit of a midlife crisis, I would say, with respect to what I was doing as a well established international reputation psychopharmacologists and drug abuse pharmacology, when that ceased to have the kind of the magnitude of interest and curiosity for me than this quest to understand something more about the nature of interiority and in particular these kinds

of experiences. So we ran that first study, and I went into it rather a skeptic because I hadn't had at that point any meaningful experience with psychedelics and was skeptical about the psychedelic enthusiasts who seemed so enthralled with these effects. And Timothy very certainly would have been one

of those back in the day. So also that initial study just laid the groundwork in dovetailed with this very conversation, and that was that most people studied had these mystical type experiences and reported and enduring positive changes and moods, attitudes, and behavior months after having had the experience. And that

was totally intriguing to me on several different levels. And number one just my own personal interest in these kinds of experiences and what they mean, but two scientifically, that all of a sudden we were opening the doorway to prospective study of these kinds of experiences, because up to that point we were looking at naturalistically occurring experiences. But you can't run prospective science on that. You need to you need to be able to randomize conditions in order

to infer causality. And psychedelics provide this kind of unique tool because it's a high probability that you can occasion these kinds of experiences, and therefore you can manipulate conditions, you can randomize groups. So scientifically, I kind of immediately recognized it as this untapped field because these drugs hadn't been studied for years, and so that that drew me in on the scientific front. But also at the personal level of curiosity. But Roland, I kind of think of

you as the anti Timothy Leary in other ways. I don't. I don't. I'm glad that we don't talk that much about Timothy Leary anymore. Actually haven't heard that name for a long time, because I think the field has moved on, which is a good thing, because Timothy Leary really kind of abandoned a careful skeptical attitude in his scientific work, and I think that that's just absolutely essential, and was an evangelist for recreational use, which I think is highly problematic.

And I think he made a lot of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the experience and wasn't able to hold them in a questioning or bracketed kind of suspension of unknowingness. And I think Roland, you do do all of those things. I mean, you insist on a careful empirical approach that acknowledges benefits as well as risks. You do bracket things that can't be addressed scientifically, and you're

not promoting you know, widespread non conscientious use. So and I admire tremendously all of those things in you, and I seek to follow in that mold. So I really do see you as a kind of anti Timothy Learria, a skeptical Timothy Larry. Yeah, David, I agree. I don't

identify with Timothy Larry. But Scott's question was would Timothy Larry be surprised, And I think the answer would be no. He you know, he really got the core that these experiences are transformative, and then of course he he went off the rail, both scientifically and in terms of his own involvement in that. But I think the core of what draws you and I into this area of interest is precisely what he was expanding about and trying to push into culture and I and again I agree with

you and attributing metaphysical truths to it. It's just that we we can't embrace. But the core of this, that these compounds kind occasion, these profound life transformative experiences, you know, is exactly what draws me and I think you into this, And I would argue it drew him into it. What are some of the most exciting developments in the field, as you two see it right now for the future.

Let's talk the future of psychedelics right now, the science of it, so I'll start, and there's just so much to say about I know, it's a very vibrant field right now. Well let's see, I guess, yeah, there's so

much to say. Because we can run prospective studies now with psychedelics, Virtually all areas of research are open for investigation, be it at neuroscience level, psychological level, therapeutics, personality, dispositional characteristics that feed into the nature of the experiences, both their causes genetically and otherwise and their consequences behaviorally and otherwise.

All of that is open for investigation. And you could also get into visual perceptual phenomena and different cognitive processing. So it's a hugely rich area for investigation. I think my interest, in David's interest, and what we're really talking about here is the nature of these transformative experience says

that occur and what's exciting about that. Well, when I first came upon those experiences, frankly, I didn't anticipate the strength and the magnitude of the kinds of effects that we saw and the curious feature that people were attributing these enduring positive changes to them. So I think that's kind of the core. That's the core observation, and so yeah,

where's that going. The neuroscience of this is opening up in very exciting ways, and so the correlates of these experiences are under intense investigation with in terms of brain function, brain network, all the kinds of imaging methodologies that we have available. And my question is about the neuroscience of this stuff, is that when I read Michael Pollin's book, it sort of seemed like the big triumphant moment for him was when he quieted his default mode network when

he had his brain scanned. I believe it was by you and your team, and he's like, I won the game of life because my default mode network is silent.

And I just want to say I come from it from a creativity research perspective where I have been arguing for the last fifteen years extalling the merits of activation of the default mode network, like that I published with my colleagues, and like Nature neuroscience, showing that to the extent we can activate our default mode network is the extent to which we can show our highest heights of

creative thinking and imagination. So I would love to reconcile all this with you once and for all, so I can kind of wrap my head around how to integrate the two literatures. Does that make sense? Well, the question does? I don't think I can provide you a coherent answer. So let's see number one. We did not do the scanning on Michael pok okayle. See. I think that the explanation that the effects of the psychedelics, you know, are due to the wideting and the default mode network was

taken up very quickly within the community. It kind of had some face validity to it, kind of bringing you into the present moment. It converged with some findings and long term meditators that showed decreased activity in the default mode network. But it surely is much much more complex than that, and so and there are a number of other now proposals for different network processes that might be key to some of these effects of the psychedelics. So I don't know. I mean that it has been a

replicable kind of phenomenon. But if you think of what our primitive understanding about how the brain works, I mean, you know, we're nowhere close to understanding consciousness, and it surely must be greater than just tamping down a single network that results in these kinds of enduring effects. So I don't know. I can't provide you any better answer than that. David, do you have other thoughts about that?

I think I just agree with what you're saying, and that it was taken up very quickly, but is way too simplistic of an understanding. This idea that the default mode network going offline explains the acute subjective effects of psychedelics, and the equating of the default mode network with the

ego and going offline results in ego dissolution. I think all of that is painting in massive brushstrokes and is way overly simplistic, And I would say we're at such a early level of understanding that I encourage not embracing that narrative because it will surely be much more complicated. I mean, all kinds of things will tamp down the default bone network, including focusing on anything and also including

my most psychoactive substances. So it's simply too general of a finding to be much of an explanation in the realm of psychedelic subjective effects or therapeutic effects. I'm really pleased to hear that, you know, because I'm trying to reconcile that, like Andrew Newberg's findings. It's really showing that there are other areas that represent self, other spatial orientation that's not default mode. So now your thing can be

reduced to default mode. And I guess from a journalist's perspective, maybe that was a good story, you know, but I guess I've just been more critical about that being the main narrative, especially considering, you know, creativity requires being able to jam in the stream of consciousness and you know when you you know, and being able to access those personal episodic memories that come from the default mode network,

as well as projecting yourself into the future. I would just say, I think that's an exciting frontier to integrate the psychedelic science with creativity research and the neuroscience of this stuff, you know. I mean, that's what I was saying earlier. There's so many different directions creativity is certainly and then what's really drawn the cultural attention is the therapeutic use of these compounds, and it turns out that that looks very, very powerful, and we don't know what

the limits are. They have yet to undergo the final stamp of approval from FDA, and I would hope that that would be forthcoming, but that's a gauntlet of studies that need to be conducted. It looks like the first approvable applications, at least for the classic psychedelics like psilocybin LSD,

will be depression or treatment resistant depression. Our initial clinical study was in cancer patients with a life threatening cancer diagnosis, and there these experiences were hugely effective at decreasing enduringly depression and anxiety. And I actually think that that's one of the most powerful applications. But there's also cigarettes, there are also the addictions and perhaps a number of other

psychiatric disorders. So that that's very exciting. But what completely germane to our conversation, but I think is more interesting, more exciting from where I sit, more consequential in the long run, is understand the causes and consequences of these experiences in healthy participants, and to the extent that these kinds of experiences can change worldview, the sense of interconnectedness of all people and all things in an enduring way. They kind of underwrite the logic of a change in

our in our ethical system. I mean, there's what comes out of these experiences if they occur, right in there and they're and they're supported in aftercare. Is this pro

social sense of mutual caretaking? And frankly, I can't think of a more important thing to be investigating scientifically with the hope that then gets taken into culture because we we actually need to solve this problem otherwise we run the risk of destroying ourselves as a species with all these potentially existential threats that most of them are human created, like nuclear or bioweapons or AI risk or climate change. Yeah, and maybe we bring in some of the work David

and I did on the Late triad. How can this stuff make people better people, better humans? It's a very interesting question to what extends to psychedelics, the hoscin nations of psychedelics, to what extent is that important for the positive transformative experiences, Because, as you know, some people are curious about prescribing for people depression psychedelics that do not activate a houcinogenetic state. And I wanted your thoughts on

that because some people were excited about that. Right. You know, what I think is that there certainly are pharmac and subsequent neuropharmacological features or consequences of administering psychedelics that are relevant to therapeutic effects to the extent that modulates uh gabba system uh uh you know, could be could be

really important. But the most interesting effects, and the ones that we've been talking about, these that result in worldview change and sense of self change, those come, it seems to me, directly out of the experience itself. I mean, that's what people reference, and so it's hard hard to imagine that you would get the kinds of therapeutic effects and the and the deepest kinds of changes that can occur in absence of the subjective effects. It's it's more

than just the visual hallucination. So I mean, it's the whole set of the phenomenology of experience. And so you know, there are psychedelics like five me O d m T which are often described as being experiences avoid of contents of consciousness other than pure awareness, and yet those very likely have similar kinds of transformative effects. So it's really about the subjective phenomenon, the subjective experience of these, And what we don't know is how much, you know, visual

alterations are important to that. My personal thought is that there often can be a distractor, that there are people who get intrigued by what's coming up visually for them, and that's where they place their attention throughout the experience. And for me, that's kind of missing the point, you know. And and there are people we have people in our studies writ down their experiences the evening after their experiences

and they bring that back. And so some people come back with a couple of sheets of paper to describe nothing but what they saw in that experience. And high dose psilocybin is prone to produce a lot of visual effects. There's so much more going on in the experience than that that that I suspect that that can just be

a distraction. I can see how that this research needs to be done for the next at least two hundred years before we understand this, because being able to isolate which components are the most important components is itself a fascinating question. How do you know some of this is in placebo? What it would be even a good control group. I have so many questions, yes, David, go, yeah, yes, well I agree, I'm beating a kind of a critical skeptical nuanced evidence based picture is so important in this

whole area. But yeah, right now, hundreds of millions of dollars from the government and industry are going into the attempt to develop psychedelic like substances that are similar in some ways but lack the acute subjective effects, so they take the trip out, so to speak. And I agree entirely with Roland. There's no question there are certain lower level neurobiological processes that will have therapeutic effect neurogenesis plasticity

related effects, for example. But I find it implausible that if you take away the higher level neurobiological effects associated with conscious experience cognition affect, that you'll see anything like the enduring positive effects that we see in most but not all, participants in psychedelic studies. So for me this is interesting because you know, I'm a psychologist like you. I'm fascinated in what features of the acute subjective effects

matter most and predict positive response. But then there's this fascinating question of like, well, maybe the acute subjective effects don't matter at all, which would see which is so interesting, right, Yeah, And I think it's an important question that I find so fascinating to test of. Well, maybe it's maybe it's the case that the acute subjective effects aren't even necessary.

Like Roland, I find that totally implausible. But you know, as skeptical scientists, we need to ask that question, and we're collaborating with people doing that in rodent research, and we have colleagues looking at this with pairy anesthesia and psychedelics. Find the effort to create non subjective psychedelics worthwhile clinically and scientifically because it would be so interesting to develop these.

But yeah, like Roland, I find it implausible that they'll have any where close to the enduring effects that we see. Even if it were the case that non subjective psychedelics could be created that have equivalent positive effects. Even in that case, I think there's important ethical reasons to at least offer the normal subjective psychedelics due to the profound feelings of meaning and well being related effects associated with

psychedelics as we know them. Roland, you mentioned a lot of things you're excited about for the future, and I thought of forty different threads I'd want to follow up, But I want to just throw all my questions out of the window for a second and get really personal if I may, Because you mentioned one of the first studies you did we're on cancer patients, terminal cancer patients and showing the effectiveness of some of this with them.

Is it true that you reach had a terminal diagnosis? Yeah, a year ago I went in for a screening colonoscopy, thinking myself to be completely healthy. I take care of myself, watch my diet, exercise, and came out with what turns out now to be a stage four cancer diagnosis. So yep, I now I now can empathize with the volunteers that

we treated. Ironically enough and at first therapeutic study, well, I'm glad you can keep a sense of humor, And they say that in a lot of ways that's the most important thing to be able to cope with trauma, at least for me personally, I found sense of humor as one of the most important things. But the thing is, you know your experience. I'd like to know a little bit more about your your own sort of transcendence these days because my heroes Abraham Maslow, David's hero is William James,

Mine is Abraham. By the way, Maswell was very skeptical of Timothy Leary and they would have heated debates. But anyway, and Maslow often spoke of the post mortem life and he had a heart attack, and he the doctors told him he could have another heart attack at any moment that could be it. And he said that living that the last couple of months of his life, he felt

like it was like a post mortem life. He said he wished everyone could experience a post mortem life where you die and then can come back again and experience the world. And he said that he never he viewed the world with so much wonder and transcendence, and that he saw the miraculous in the every day in those last couple of months. And I'm just wondering, how has this experience for you personally affected your own sort of

transcend transcendent experiences in your everyday life. Have you noticed a shift at all? Oh enormous shift this whole thing is. It's kind of puzzling to me because I wouldn't have known how I might have reacted to diagnosis. But it's been frankly fascinating and enthralling, enlivening, and I find myself in deep gratitude and celebration. Psychologically, what I went through was I got the diagnosis, I went into a period of a feeling that it simply couldn't be true that

there was some sense. It just was in a dream. It didn't make any sense. My wife and I cried a bunch together, and then when it finally came into focus, this is real. I think over a very few number of days, I started exploring all the psychological states that might arise as such a diagnosis. So explored in the middle of one night depression just flattened affect, no meaning at all, and then kind of ran through the menu of psychological states. So there could be you know, denial

or fear, anxiety, resentment of fighting the cancer. And there there could be embrace of some sense of afterlife or connuity of consciousness, which I which would be lovely to embrace. But I'm bred as a skeptic and as a scientist, so I count that as as being incredibly improbable. What really came out for me, and I think I attribute this to my meditation practice and some of the work

that I had done in spirituality. What came to me was, you know, the only, the only posture that made sense was just to lean into gratitude for the preciousness of human life. And you know, it's something that we all, we all know to be true, but for me. The diagnosis brought that into crystal clear focus. So I start reprioritizing things immediately in my life. What's important, you know,

and what's not. Of course i'd done those exercises before, kind of contemplating what would you do if you had a year to live or six months to live or a month, a couple of weeks, a couple of days, a couple of hours. I've done those, but this felt, this felt different, and and what I would say and the other thing that meditation does. So I now come out of I switched from cid of yoga into being

drawn into Buddhist practice, so my mindfulness practice. And so what that practice does is enhance the ability to recognize states of consciousness that emerge and de identify with them. So you're not a voice in your head. There's a sense of knowing that resides behind that, and there's some efficacy.

You have self efficacy in terms of deciding what you're going to where you're going to allow that narrative to go, and how much you believe the narrative structure of what a voice in your head is saying to you, And so you have the ability to choose with that and so that came online very powerfully, and as I mentioned, you know, I could see going down the rabbit hole of depression, anxiety or resentment, but that that struck me as just being really unwise and uncomfortable, and so I've

chosen to go with gratitude and celebration. And but indeed the very nature of these kinds of experiences, that's exactly what they point to, don't they That there's something incredibly precious and celebratory about the fact that we find ourselves to be these highly evolved sentient creatures wandering the face of the earth. You know, we can sense things, we have, we can manipulate things, we hear things, We've developed culture, we've developed science. But most astonishing of all is that

we find ourselves to be aware that we're aware. And there's a huge embedded mystery in that. I mean, it's the it is the hard problem of consciousness, and it's the query about what the hell is going on here? And we don't you know, we don't have an answer that I don't see with respect to consciousness, that we that it may never be answerable. This deeper mystery that really nuzzles up as close to religion as you can get, and the mystery could be synonymous with God. We simply

don't understand it. But isn't that to be something to be deeply curious about and to celebrate? And so that's where I find myself, and peculiarly enough people ask me how I'm doing, and my answer and that of my wife, because we're doing this together, has been, at least to date, never better. I truly feel happier and with more equipoise and gratitude and sense of celebration than I have ever before, despite what no doubt is a huge impact the cancer

and its treatments on my physical will be. Thank you

so much for sharing all that. So Roland mentioned you know people who ask about how he's doing, and I'm one of those people who Roland has to correct on an almost weekly basis, where even as Roland's talking now and getting stinging behind the eyes, sort of tearing up hearing the you know, every time this comes up, I mean, it has this emotional impact, my heart goes out to Roland, to Marla, you know, all of us who know him, and specifically to Roland, and then the words form in

my mouth, which is to express sympathy and empathy. But now Roland has trained me enough to know that I know that Roland is going to immediately deny that that that line of conversation and immediately shift things into what is an inspiring mindset of deep gratitude and presence. We speak multiple times a week, and this mindset, Roland, that you've developed is truly a source of awe and wonder to me and something that I'm trying desperately to learn

from you. Well, I'll stop there, I mean, but this is the opportunity. I mean. So my query is, then, how do we get get to where I am now without having to have general cancer? Ask the same question. Yeah, it's a good empirical question to ask, and I think in principle it's got to be attainable. So I won't be able to finish out the research project, but but maybe the two of you can't. Well that's a nice segue actually into talking about a research fund. Like that segue.

It's funny you mentioned us carrying on stuff. You're establishing a research fund to study these topics, isn't that right? And we can maybe make an announcement here today as well that doctor Yenon might be the first recipient. Yeah, yeah, so this has come directly out of my diagnosis, and indeed it was the process of reworking my will and getting to the point of charitable contributions. And immediately I thought, well,

I'll that's easy. I'll just give to the Effective Charities movement Give Well, which is an organization that's really evaluated different charities and been a go to practice for me to use them. But then I started thinking more deeply, what do I really want to give? And it's precisely what we're talking about, and so there's nothing more important to me personally than this project of personally waking up and being away. That's also the core of what my

research has been focused on, has David. So I thought, you know, maybe I don't have a biggest state. Maybe I could give some funding to Johns Hopkins so that they could sponsor a lecture once a year on psychedelics

and spirituality. And then I thought, you know, I probably have some goodwill in the community just having done what I've done with the psychedelics, So why don't I try to make this a professorship And then kept growing in my mind, Well, yeah, a professorship and then a research fund that would be tagged to that professorship to study

what I'm calling secular spirituality. So it's rigorous empirical research with psychedelics, because that's the best tool we have to study these kinds of experiences with psychedelics aimed at this topic of secular spirituality and well being and healthy volunteers. And so after some considerable work, we put together this packet for Johns Hopkins. It's an endowment and it's targeted

at that question. The beauty of the endowment is that it is managed in perpetuity by Johns Hopkins, which is a very conservative institution, but an institution that for which we can expect is going to last enduring, enduringly or for a very long time until we could come up with thought experiments about what would bring down a major academic institution. But it's it's a pretty good bet for

moving forward. So that concept really excited me. What we're doing is setting up a research program to go after the very questions that I'm most deeply interested in, and questions for which I don't think they'll ever be an ultimate answer. So the inperpetuity makes a lot of sense in this regard. So in coming up with this idea, I would I would have to say that David came to Hopkins. David, is it almost three years ago now, right? Yeah? Yeah, And he came in as a post doc. He's been

promoted to assistant professor. But he's incredibly talented academically, scientifically, he writes, well, he collaborates, well, he's an all around good guy. I must agree with. Yeah. No, No, David's just remarkable. And I mean, and that's why we're having this conversation together. He's intensely interested in these experiences. So the idea of creating an endowment, and I couldn't think of anyone in the world who would be more appropriate to be the first recipient of that award than David.

It just seemed to make a lot of sense. So when I started establishing the endowment, I put a lot of constraints on Hopkins in doing this that you know, they would prefer an endowment that's kind of open ended, they can redirect in any way they want, or they be loose with it. We have really tied them down with respect to having to follow the intent and purposes of the endowment, which are very clearly specified. And my insistence that David Yaden be appointed the first recipient, and

I prevailed. This was a It turned out to be a lot of work. So where we stand now is I'm shooting for twenty million dollars for the endowment. Now that sounds like a huge amount of money, but when it goes into an endowment, it's not because an endowment pays out as a function of the proceeds of the investment, so it pays out at about four percent per year.

And my concept was that the endowment should be able to cover the full salary of a full and senior professor at Johns Hopkins and enough additional research money so that that professor could have an ongoing research program. My expectation is that they would reach out for other funding, but we're kind of creating an engine that moves in perpetuity and that endowment grows over time. So that's the

project and deeply touched that. We already have pledges of fourteen million dollars, so we're trying to close a six million dollar gap, which is still a b a big gap. And at this point, and we can take a look at the we can give the URL for the endowment website, we actually have a graph of pledges, and our pledging has stalled at this point, and so we're trying to

close out that six million dollar shortfall. And for me, it would just be deeply meaningful to me to get that closure while I'm still functional and able to engage and celebrate it. Okay, so what's the link? Don't be gingerly, It's Griffithsfund dot org g r I F f I t h S Fund. One word f U n D dot org. Okay, thank you. We will put that in the show notes as well. Can I just say I

want you to respond to this. I mean, when Roland first told me about this, you know, we had a conversation and turned to my wife bid and told her and we both burst into tears. I mean, it's incredibly huge honor, and it is now my mission in life to become worthy of of this stewarding of Roland's vision. I do not feel deserving of this. It's just a

monumental honor. I think that of the people in the world who are running psychedelic clinical trials, I probably happened to be the only one who has spent their live their life academically studying well being in spirituality. I mean, so these topics which Roland and I share a deep fascination and obsession with, are totally aligned. And it to my absolute shock studying two topics that I've been told many times is career suicide and a liability happens to

be an asset in this case. So it's absolutely amazing that Roland has made this vision of reality in such a brief period of time. And there's so much work to be done on this topic that it will take many generations, and I mean ultimately generations from now. I can imagine a Nobel prize going to this kind of research. Understanding the mechanisms of positive transformative experience and setting it

on that track is profoundly important to me. It also strikes me there's a positive project here and a negative one. The positive project being trying to understand the outcomes, the risks as well as the benefits that these experiences, understanding differences across cultures, how beliefs and expectations play a role, but also this negative project. And people say all kinds of things about psychedelics, well being and spirituality that are totally not based in evidence at all and are pretty

outrageous claims. So I think providing scientific, unbiased evidence, just entering this information into the public sphere can have a lot of benefit in terms of reigning in the sorts of statements and claims that people make. So the work is it's endless and important, and I think that there are real questions that we can truly answer scientifically. Absolutely knowing David as long as I've known David, I can say to you Roland that he will try his best

to make you proud. And I would like to say to whatever degree I can contribute to this, because David and I are already picking up studies together and stuff. I say this with tears of miser now, I will try my best to make you proud. I think the motivation I think we all I'll share is is what it means to carry this ball forward and what it means to humankind. Yeah, so well, but thank you. This might be a good place to just end the podcast

right now, because it's such a special moment. Thank you to both of you so much for the just tremendous work you're doing in the field and and and and not just that, but your humanity, you know, like you're they're they're these things are intertwined in both of you, and I can see that there's a human behind every research study, and I feel like that human matters too, and the way their way of being in the world, I don't really like separating it entirely from the research

that they conduct. And so thanks for being such shiny examples of humanity as well, and thanks for being on my podcast today. Thank you Scott, Thank you, Scott wonderful. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react and way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusychology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page thus Psychology Podcast.

We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.