Christopher Timmermann - The Neurophenomenology of the DMT State

[Music] which is a great initiative and very happy that things are working for you you know you're having this symposium and things are up and running so that's super nice to hear all these initiatives are super good evening in this point in time so as Ivar was mentioning I'm part of the genetic research where I'm doing my PhD on and I met with community MP for those of you who don't know EMTs it's a psychedelic drug which is known for its very potent subjective effects so I've been doing this PC for the past few years but also going very deeply into what is the phenomenology about what is this objective experience of this DMT State I'm also part of the research for the diversity of consciousness which Martin Fortier founded market for terrible speed later on today so let's begin so when we're attempting to charts or generate a map off all right can you really if I speak like this but wait I don't have to leave this so when we're at something to understand what the psychedelic state is we're confronted in a very difficult territory we're trying to charge we're trying to map uncharted territory we're trying to go into states of consciousness that we don't fully understand and the challenges that are related to this charting of the territory comes primarily from two sources the first deals with phenomenology or subjective experience subjective experience even outside of the realm of psychedelic research it's something that even though we have a naive understanding of it it is quite quite difficult to fully grasp in a disciplined scientific fashion and this is mainly because many of our actions even the micro most detailed highly granular aspects of our experience happen beyond the threshold of normal awareness and consciousness when you add now the well-documented aspect that the psychedelic states are known for their instability they're known for somehow happening in a register that it's beyond or you know many times at least our ability to register or symbolize into our system of language what it's happening this challenge of studying subjective experience becomes double anyway because the increases in a significant manner the second big challenge has to do with neuronal activity or brain activity and this deals with it with the fact that neuroscience is a relatively new scientific field of study and when we think about the third and probably the biggest challenge is how do we combine how do we make sense of how subjective experience relates to brain activity is one of also the biggest challenge today in the field of psychology and neuroscience how do we make sense of brain data what what does it mean that a brain region is activated that a circuit is activated so building that bridge to attempt to narrow the gap between subjective experience and biological information is not easy so this is the basically the the stuff that I'm going to refer to about in the talk I'm going to talk about the DMT experience in terms of subjective effects in terms of physiological activity or neuronal activity more specifically and the actual neuro phenomenology so how do we breach those and I'm also going to end with pointing out how I think by your results that DMT can actually be used as a tool to help us narrow the bridge alright so starting at a bit at the beginning what is into your and anything it'll tryptamine it says serotonergic psychedelic drug if we look at the molecules and it doesn't matter when we look at the molecules on your upper right part of the screen you can see that the molecule of DMT and serotonin are highly similar just so they they share high similarity and one of the main differences if these two methyl the top end of the molecule which means that well basically this high similarity points to the fact that probably has a strong effect in consciousness or returning as a neurotransmitter that is involved in many aspects of conscious experience we also know evidence points for the fact that there is an edginess generation of DMT in the human body we don't know why that is there might be not any significant reason but evidence certainly points towards that there's a wealth literature on that if you're interesting in investigating are you not a wealth but there is some literature on it and it's also a component on Ohio Wasco ayahuasca is this Amazonian brew that contains both beta-carbolines and the tea in combination DMT when it's ingested orally it doesn't work because it's mostly broken down by an enzyme in the gut in the Amazon in a way they found a way through the combination of beta-carbolines the action of this enzyme in the cup in the guts inhibits the action of ayahuasca and Syngenta you just orally you know the effects of the interior lights and this is a nice depiction of effects of ayahuasca by the people work by Paulo da Matta you go pal my name is a Peruvian shaman that turned into a painter later in his life so it was his also relevant because apparently there are there's a clinical significance to his potential use for depression at least preliminary findings are showing so far going back to the MT though the first person to discover deity was Stephen sorry in the 1950s he synthesizes the EMT himself after he was neglected the possibility to use so this being but he had a strong intuition of violence after reading some literature on the effects of coma which is just enough that was used in Colombia in the literature who's interested he synthesized it himself and he tried it on himself until he described some of the effects so some of the first things that he describes even in the 1950s are some of these very extravagant reports of the drug so for example participants mentioning things like their room is full of spirits or I have arrived in front of Mir to quiet some big gods they gaze at me and not in a friendly manner I think they are welcoming me into this new world this is Egypt what wonder these are the sons of the Sun and I am finally home I saw strange creatures Dwarfs or something they were black and moved about so this fascinating reports that we found subjects they southern the 1950s and DMT was researched in the following decades to a certain extent in both human and animal experiments however from the 70s to the 90s the research was done until Rick Strassman reignited psychedelic human psychedelic research in the u.s. used it for the first time after many years and he gave it intravenously in a way trying to emulate the effects of smoking so when the empties moved its effects are very very short the last usually under 10 minutes and a very important phenomenal experience arises so going back to this idea how can we you know understand the subjective experience in neurophysiology and how can we use the empty as a tool of exploration of you know consciousness research or if you will the narrowing the gap between subjective and neurological activity and the basic idea in general is that we're gonna be looking at it I'm gonna show you the way that we've been looking at it from both a static perspective and a dynamic perspective how are we incorporating time in the way that we look at experience and that we look at brain activity and how about how the use of time itself can help us understand how this bridge may be developed right so this is a very so online you can find some simulations virtual simulations people do off the DMT experience this is just to show you a bit what some of his most notorious visual effects appear you can see there's strong sense of geometry and this kind of like fractal like expansion of movement on the geometry severely a homer clearly states although the index of course can vary quite a lot the visual effects remain some of the most striking aspects of the experience and this has been documented by what has been called as visionary artists artists like depict the experience and you have a nice sort of like parallel between an artist coming from Western cultural origin alex great and somebody like to mention before polymer Ingo who comes from a non-western or indigenous sort of perspective about normally you look at the visual the visionary aspect of it remains quite striking if we look at general effects the few studies that have been done in modern times with humans we can basically refer to the effects as consisting of effects in the body in the somatic effects how they generate strong visual imagery and the contents of the imagery and those effects which are usually characterized by these encounters with entities or presences people usually telling this experience that there's this strong sense of otherness in the experience are no longer that the contents are arising from their own one sort of like psyche but there's a strong confrontation with something else something different and also an enhanced sense of reality there's this feeling that some since have in this experiences or you can find reports online that people usually have a strong sense that the experience is more real than real that they're somehow being confronted with something fundamental about consciousness or life so we have these very interesting the clear subjective effect and we know that they have been in a unique temporal fashion they have dynamic shifts so DMT with its short Direction duration of action has its characteristic by this fact that it induces dynamic shift of experience experience that changes quite constantly and we're interested in using this to understand what's happening in the brain all right so what did we do we already did a study a pilot study on the empathy to study the effects of movements now gonna show you some of the results the things that we found so just to show you a bit the design in simplified of it so we we needed to establish what was a safe dose to give inside of the scanner before we went into the scanner so we use electroencephalography so it's a method to capture brain activity by the use of lectures that capture electrical activity generated by the Newlands and we gave different doses of DMT to participants but we went in a safe fashion so we started with what we thought was low dose so milligrams intravenously a placebo to a group participant we characterized the effects we saw that they were safe so we moved into a medium those 14 milligrams we did the same thing we all right it's safe but it's we're not quite getting at the the experiences that will really answer you know what are these characteristic we're trying to look for so we increased to something of a medium to a high dose or a high dose there is variability between people in these experiences and placebo and with that we have a total of 13 participants as we said we explored both the subjective aspect and the neurological aspects this is what the research environments look like so itself it's a clinical sort of setting but as the literature shows we know quite well how this the contextual factors are crucial for safety in the experience and when I speak about conceptual factors the usual that are named are this idea of sense setting so set being the mindset what the person brings to the experience how the person is feeling and that they the mood the anxiety also personality traits those structural factors the history of the person that's the set the setting is the actual physical characteristics in which the experience is taking place in this case it was some medical environments but we worked a lot on covering all the medical equipments as much as possible we had mood lights to generate the nice atmosphere big candles in there big plants which I don't think you can see but overall quite a relaxing chill space and we also try to avoid any sort of like induction of any sort of experience as much as possible we try to neutralize this as much so we for example have this very nice soothing sort of equal this it's not our I mean is to be considered artwork but it's like fabric on the wall and we had a massive discussion about you know what is what is it gonna be about is it gonna have Shh is he gonna have like circles fractals or whatever so we just went for the fuzzier sort of like simplest thing that you can imagine all right so another results what it would find that we can look at the results like you mentioned before from two perspectives one is Hispanic perspectives so we can look you know we can think of it this way you have a very nice experience a walk in the park that they after it snowed and you can think of your experience is just a memory just one single memory you like the kind of memory you have through two years and you just think of one image right it's starting in time it provides an overview how are the dynamic perspective allows you to capture their ethnicity you know how it changes over time how it you know what are the transitions in that experience what's the temporal aspect that we're so interested about so we're gonna start with a static perspective it's just a usual way of looking at it you kind of like make an average of what's happening over time in terms of subjective effects we've found that imagery was the most significant aspect increased so here you have the full scale presented see elementary and complex imagery in quite enhanced but also a hex in the body a strong sense of these embodiments certain point participants no longer sense that they were you know present in the in a in a typical employee fashion well they forgot about their body or their body became completely irrelevant at some point and we also found strong increases in what's called this the spirits of all aspects of the experience so in these scales you can find so this is the altered states of consciousness scale which possibly t-mobile mentioned quite a lot in his presentation but it's a usual scale that we use and it was developed not only for just psychedelic States are also different altered states of consciousness so we find this experience of unity enhance the spirits of experience or the blissful States quite strongly enhance however when we look at specific phenomenological features he's found that there's a strong enhancement of this item.i experience a different reality or they mentioned this was just the one that was most strongly rated by everyone geometrical patterns and useful bodily sensations feeling this place from one's own body experiencing presences entities and so on so this characteristic aspect that keeps popping up in different reports and different experiments we also captured lead in in our experiment which was also quite interesting so in terms of typical effects that we found in participants from the interviews in terms of oddly effect is strong rush or abrasion at the onset was commonly mentioned a sense of distorted bodily perception and distortion of public boundaries into the environment this sense that no longer there was a separation to the person and the environment in a embodied somatic sense even in a location sort of sense but there was more of a spontaneity in folding or this expansion of all the boundaries which is kind of nicely illustrated in this how it's free [Music] so this is our example of simple visual imagery so participants were asked to draw the most significant visual aspect of their experience here you can see some examples are bad so golden geometric patterns Stirling geometric colors geometrical patterns that were moving way too fast to observe anything so there's even this kinetic sort of element that was being enhanced at the doses were enhance as well and these were different participants it's important to really know that every single participant mentioned something about geometry being generated during the experience if you have examples of transitions from simple to complex imagery how you go from simple geometrical patterns and there's a subsequence unfolding into more complex sort of like symbolic like you cannot have a type of imagery so at first is more sort of like geometrical lattice and then popping up of actual objects which have a higher semantic value in them in this case I think it was like the perception of a living eye that was you know quite magnetic and the participant felt that he was moving towards it in stoppable sort of fashion these are examples of complex imagery sense of being transported was also quite having this sense of jumping into another dimension that felt very geometric almost like a lunch card so this progression from simple to complex imagery and then no long also beyond that this idea that you're in that other sort of around sense of receiving information is also commonly notice so everything that you could ever possibly sees right in front of you I understood time I was being shown the interconnectedness and finally this idea of sense of presence encountering the entities so this is an example notorious example from participants so there were beings there that wouldn't allow me to trespass putting a lot of pressure for me to stay on this side and there were shadows of presences taking care of me as if I had had an accident moving at great speed around me and chanting waving their hands they were putting their hands on me as if they were human so proper experiences of this sense of encountering certainly something different something else that's not coming from inside but at times could have been a bit frightening for participants all right so now going into neurological activity brain rhythms and the MT so in the study of consciousness the use of the EEG or the electroencephalogram has been commonly used as I mentioned before the EEG allows us to capture how electrical activity related to brain activity is captured in the brain how you know how it's reflecting that and we do that by placing electrodes in it that are on a cap on the head of the participant now this gives rise to different frequencies to these different rhythms of the brain as the literature shows which is quite extensive and as also someone mentioned this interplay between excitation and emission gives rise to these different oscillatory patterns as well as you know things that were finding out more in recent years like signatures of criticality power loss that were also somehow related or dissociated brainless illustrator but now we're gonna focus on on brain rhythms passivity so we know that different states of consciousness have been associated to these different neural signatures to different brain rhythms so typical examples of that are how for participants someone you know is with an eg cap on they close their eyes and they start to relax you start to see the alpha pattern in the alpha wave being significantly enhanced so for example George Bush a key is a researcher that has studied the brain regions quite a lot he interprets you know this alpha sort of state as a state in which there's an active disengagement from the environment there's a disconnect happening there's a more than doggedness processors you're no longer engaging with the outside world that you're looking somehow inward same way and then you have different sort of rhythms for different things as well for example the beat pattern has been associated to action observation motor preparation motor engagements and so on and the lower frequencies more associated to different dream states with dream patterns so in terms of this brain rhythms what do we see in the DMT state when we look at this average sort of like static image we see that all these brain you know most of these brain rhythms go down so specifically the Delta Theta which are low rhythms as well as the Alpha and the beta but focusing specifically on the Alpha rhythm and when it's increased signaling this active disengagement from the environment we see that the empty space a massive reduction we'll see and it's happening all over the brain and this can be interpreted in a way as there is some sort of like Bodley and sensory boosts in addition there is in the sense oriole registers there's a complete disinhibition there appears to be a complete engagement with the external environment this is just looking at the neural data without any subjective data making that inference so in a way it's speculative making that connection but it's you know a feasible reasonable explanation and it's also a very nonspecific one you know it's just you're just engaging with the environment so it can mean many things right so we'll go back with this when we're looking at the dynamic sense of looking at bringing through alright so when we think about somebody mentioned information integrated information theory in the previous presentation so eluding a bit to the work of Jude autonomy and colleagues we have you know by using the EEG we have the opportunity as well because of the nice temporal resolution that it has it allows us to capture at the millisecond level what's happening in the brain and this is a privileged way to understanding you know so understanding the brains in terms of ideas complexity or in terms of the idea of information how much information is being processed so the popular integrated information theory postulates in a way that in order for for us to have conscious experience we need a sufficient amount of integrated integration of information and information of brain activity so if information is scattered in the brain is not localized in a proper sort of way this is associated to lower levels of justice or to a disruption of actual conscious states like what happens under anesthesia right the interesting thing is that there are now methods that attempt to probe into this so by having the brain with the magnetic poles and combined and testing the spread of the activity with the EEG measures have been developed to understand the expense of this complexity measures and to quantify different conscious states the interesting thing is that the measure actually works to certain to actually predict how much you know the level of responsiveness if we think of consciousness as a binary sort of scale that goes from unconsciousness to consciousness and granted that is very simplistic but if you look at it in this scale this actually kind of works which is quite interesting so we were not studying in the brain or people were under DMT unfortunately but we weren't however using measures that have been derived and generated by colleagues and this was a analysis that was done with the help of Michael sharpener at the time now it's at the University of Geneva and basically by using the Lempel Ziv algorithm which is a compression algorithm we're able to also detect the amount of brain reporters the amount of information that's in the brain and I guess a simplified way that this could be explained is that the by using this algorithm we separate the amount of information in the brain into a binary they mentioned so as a digital the sort of thing like zeros and ones you then make a dictionary of the different possibilities of the zeros and ones and the extent of the dictionary is an index of this length or this measure of complexity so the redder the brain the more red it is the richer it is in terms of information in a broad sense when you think about this measure so they're looking at brain activity like this and by the way if somebody hasn't noticed yet this is the nose these are the ears and it's not necessary to it sometimes people don't get it right away so what we find is an increase in in this measure of complexity under DMT we look at it in this time average sort of fashion all right so very much in coherence with southern stock we make the inference that this corresponds possibly to an enhanced repertory of different brain States when we look at the electrical activity directly generate but humans and this is quite consistent with what we found with other psychedelic drugs like psilocybin Penn St and also ketamine very courteously in which is an anesthetic that has like Mike effects and contrary to what we see in states of reduced consciousness like for example in the non REM sleep largely associated to either lacquer dreams or dreams are not colorful in a way or not you know what David or in state of anesthesia when there is loss of consciousness so in a way it ties into this narrative that in a way in a simplified way that psychedelics are sort of like indexing a higher level of consciousness if you think about it in this sort of like one dimensional measure of consciousness from loss of consciousness so high levels of consciousness so that's the static perspective let's now focus on the dynamic perspective you know how can we understand that the empty state in terms of phenomenology and brain activity now in time you know what is happening at its different moment or how is the progression of developing so when we do this and what we have some left the empty in just 10 minutes were able to capture you know what's happening before at the onset of the experience and how it unfolds over time so also detecting these transitions of consciousness what we're interested so what do we do for this in terms of subjective effects we ask we ask for subjective intensity so one participants were under the experience we asked from scale from zero to ten how intense are the effects of the experience of the drug all right so serious no drug effects at all and 10 is the highest possible drug effects that you can imagine and as you can see at the beginning of the experience and this is average across all doses right so at the beginning of the experience you see at the first minute it goes fast very very quickly to a seven and it which is the peak between the second and the third minutes and then there's a gradual sort of you know come back down to the normal state of waking consciousness well we look at spectral activity so when we look at brain rhythms in relationship to this subjective measure we see a very nice you know relationship in that when we see a very nice relationship also localized to the back of the head so the back of the head is very strongly associated to visual effects and we see this very nice correlation have now intensity is a generalized measure it can mean many things right but it's a step forward and it's an old enmeshment so this is another way of showing these results this is a spectrogram so this is the frequency and around 10 Hertz so that yellow band here is referring mostly to this strong alpha effect and in the black line you have the subjective intensity what we find is this very nice correspondence in the drop out in the Alpha and as subjective intensity arises and this you know and then this recovery of the other function also in the opposite way as intensity so we find this very strong correlation very nice correlation all over the brain so the dynamics of alpha waves are mirroring the dynamics of intensity of the experience and when we look at cortical signal diversity the levels if measure the complexity measure we find a similar relationship but in the opposite direction we find a positive correlation in time between subjective intensity and the richness of brain activity of sorts and also we find it localized in the back of the head in the back of the head possibly indexing the visual activity so very nice very nice correlation in a way to you know relate real-time effects and bringing - so yeah yeah yeah line of cortical diversity for those who are interested well you can see there's a bit of a lag here but it's closely following them all right so this is general intensity what is what is this telling it about subjective effects it's still a bit fuzzy right so to attempt to capture you know there would be actual relationship between brain activity you know because trucking about this intensity measure we used a method called micro phenomenology microphone organ ology is a method that was developed by the research group by Francisco Varela in the 1990s and the basic idea is that when we look at subjective experience you know in the tradition of phenomenology and in traditional cognitive neuroscience we have usually approached it from two perspective a first-person approach and a third-person approach so the first person approach has to do with this idea of introspection right so I am by myself looking say for example at a candle and I'm respecting my thoughts as close as possible and then I'm reporting on them the problem with that perspective is that it has several biases at the time that I'm recollecting about my experience and I'm thinking about my experience that recollection is always confounded by thoughts ideas theories that I have other experiences and so on is this sort of naive sort of way of approaching experience when we think about the third-person approach the one used by cognitive neuroscience we usually think of this more top-down so I am the cognitive neuroscience I developed a series of questions I give them to the participant and the participant then take some boxes but then I'm missing a lot of things happening on the side so things that are not related to those dimensions of experience that I'm thinking about as a researcher but those that a Verizon possibly in a more spontaneous sort of fashion so that's the limitation of the third person approach so the idea is the development of a second person approach a mediated way of discipline weighing which we can tackle subjective experience so that we can give it a more stronger sense of scientific validity so the idea you know on one of these methods was in the end the idea of micro phenomenology is that through a specific interview method called the elicitation interview we went back to the experience for the participants and using those intensity ratings that were given again it's different time points we were able to go down into the specifics of what was happening at every moment but not only that they interview method in a way also attempt to tackle those naive biases that we have about experience but really focusing on the sensory cues what's happening at each moment in the lived experience so in a way it's a as I said before it's a discipline way to approach experience and this was the interviews were performed by the firemen here was a friend and collaborator from the University of Oxford and he performed the interview with participants on the day after which was an optimum of course but nonetheless very useful in terms of what we what he found so this is an example of a participant that goes through the interview method when so you can see here details that at the beginning of the experience the participants experiences nausea and green lights by the way what you see in the background is a graph of the intensity ratings right and the Queen so the arrows point towards how these experiences were involving over time so there at the beginning this sense of nausea moving lights then difficulty breathing intensity intense pressure and walls of Lights ensue thoughts in confusion arise later on between the first and third minutes then more relaxed breathing between the third and the fourth yeah they're looking at pink lights then the operation of leaving shadows and then these entities or shadows start having a ritual and chanting and dancing around the participant and so on so the idea is really capturing the unfolding of the experience in a much more detailed fashion in a disciplined fashion in this second person approach right so then what we did we took this interviews and Raphael was conducted this independently of my work looking at the other data and yeah what we need to really transpose this into numbers so let's doing that so why don't you just rate the intensity after dimensions you captured in a scale from zero to three so zero being no effects and three being the highest intensity so he found spontaneously this three common dimensions of experience across participants which related to a visual experience above the experience and an emotional cognitive experience and then he waited each of these corresponding to each different minutes now this is a first approach it has its limitations of course but this is what he found in a general sense so the visual domain is this red curve here and you can find how it follows is sort of like more difficult fashion distribution but stronger at the beginning of the experience and then fading away the body effects in swing very strongly at the first minute when the first minute and then fading out to then build up again so this is actually the moment in which people have this sense that they're losing your sense above the awareness thing and once these sensory aspects the immersive aspects of sensory registers start coming down this sense of emotional activity or metacognitive thoughts start arising so making sense out of the experience having some sort of emotional reactions of it so we use this and we took a brain data over time and we found that visual activity was mostly related to these decreases in alpha and decreases in beta bodily activity was mostly associated to decreases in better activity while the emotional activity we're going to find any correspondence this ties quite nicely to what we know about decreases in alpha and other psychedelic drugs related to simple hallucinations and the effects of ayahuasca also localized in the occipital areas of the brain II know but it's a nice very nice correspondence between you know the Alpha pattern and visual activity when we look at beta corresponding to strong visual effects and we look at the literature we find also a nice correspondence with bodily related cognitive functions like action observation or motor performance there's even some comparison in a way to the literature that we know of you know possible mirror mirror like functions in New Orleans near New Orleans functions right so the idea that when you're observing an action you get a similar brain response to when you're actually performing that action so a very nice response between beta and actual observation more performance in a way relating to these increases in bodily effects and when we look at the complexity measures this you know information measures with flying a strong correspondence with visual activity bodily activity and with emotional activities in a way a bit less specific but we find that there's an indexing of emotional activity only with this measure of brain activity and this relates quite nicely as I think celeb mentioned on the previous talk have how you find in mood disorders there's a you know a reduction in the possibility of brain States or the repertoire of brain states may be emotional reactivity as this possibility of enhancing your repertoire of different emotional states relating to what we see in the 20 minutes of the DMT experience so that those others also far our current research is doing a simultaneous fMRI PG study so no longer just looking at the brain in terms of its temporal sort of like super-nice brain frequency doing but also looking at brain areas neuronal sector neuronal circuits and this wide array of possibilities that fMRI analysis allow so in a way to summarize a bit the idea that we're trying to do here with the DMT experiment pretty much anchored in the tradition of neuro phenomenology or the research program of neural phenomenology is that what we look at both of these fields of scientific inquiry the the aspect about phenomenology or experience and brain activity what we need is you know what the program suggests as the optimal way to go forward is that we need to act in terms of mutual constraints so no longer seem brain activity in isolation from experience and no longer seeing experience in isolation from brain activity but really finding a way in which brain activity constrain how I focus on experience and looking at experience in a way in which I can constrain my view of brain activity and this hopefully will also allow us to understand better why are the actual Irani mechanisms behind some of the incredible suggestions that have been made regarding the you know these experiential facts about clinical applications of psychedelic drugs and with that I'd like to thank everyone involved in the study participate in the study planification design carrying out of the all the research as well as support and funding specifically the Chilean government confronts my PhD I'm Anna fielding the vector foundation Prabhakar Harris they did not rob Beach and all my colleagues at Imperial and collaborators thank you very much for your attention we have time we're gonna start from the online once the first one is how does the phenomenology of intravenously administered DMT stand in relation to early administered ayahuasca so the main difference is the is the fact that ayahuasca usually lasts for the six and six four to eight hours speaking and the fact that there are other drugs may ask so there are good reasons and there are claims to think that it's not just disinhibited DMT in the body ayahuasca but the components of divine therefore by no idea was to actually first ingest the line have an important play in subjective effects that hasn't been extensively studied yet but it's definitely an open question now the visionary aspects are definitely in ayahuasca so there are strong similarities but there are claims about possibly you know how clinical you know effects are mainly you know are more possible with ayahuasca possibly because of the length of the duration but also possibly because it has these other compounds that can work in antidepressant sort of fashion and the next question asks what do you make of the lack of increase change in the subjective factor meaning how does that relate to the fact that you find the most extreme changes in brain activity in occipital regions well in there the first is that the the ASC that looks at meaning we find that's like [Music] the super sinner so the scale of meaning here we do find it significantly enhanced but it's not as enhances the other ones which can mean many different things the first that one is that the sub scales are not necessarily comparable between each other I mean what does that say you know we like meaning you know the precedence of meanings related to complex imagery how are you really going to normalize the intensity across them also the scale meaning relates to alter the meaning of presence so when you're looking at with your eyes open to external stuff like that glass and maybe that glass in the you know in the LSD or the silent state somehow encompassing the wealth of life in the water that it contains that is an altered meaning oppressive that I can possibly have under this psilocybin on the SD state under the empty people have their eyes closed so it's a strong limitation for that sub scale and not necessarily relate to that occipital areas of the skull we haven't done any source sort of localization to look at brain areas but we have very good resist to think that they mostly relate to visual effects in sensory effects well the generation of meaning which it's very contrived sort of like cognitive sort of constructs to relate to brain activity is possibly more related to higher-order areas which happen you know in more anterior parts of the brain yes thanks for the great talk I'm curious about two things one have you guys considered doing these types of studies with shamans from the Amazon forest area and because I haven't heard of any real studies done with shamans and second why aren't there any plants in the clinical setting photo it didn't seem to have any plants any life so regarding the question of the studies was shannon's and personally well not engage in that but there are plans to do that for example working for Terra will speak later on in this afternoon he's doing some studies with Shannon's not direct brain activity as far as I know although it is stand corrected on that and there are some other plants from other research groups there was recently a news feed on the psychedelic Trek group in combination with Brazilian researchers may be doing actual neurological beauty studies which challenge in terms of clinical applications that is a possibility in the future but it depends on how the anticip Minister I personally believe that the short acting you know 10 minutes blast of the MT it's very difficult to use unless you have a highly structured manualized setting in which you're gonna mister it possibly continuous infusion could allow for a better possibility on that keeping people in that the empty space for a longer time and not blasting them off into the most intense part of it but just sort of gradually generating this sort of like also an offset can you go back to the slide where you correlate decrease in alpha and the subjective experience because I have a question about this thing basically my question yes so is there an increase in theta is it is it significant that's a good question so it appears like this right I'm asking this because you know there is there are these own studies by a till turn with you know anticholinergic and what they found is that there was an increase in theta and Delta and so one interpretation could be that this increasing theta is when people lose less CDT so you know they they are not I mean I don't know about the subjective effect but these people reports sometime that they they don't know that they are hallucinating so they take it at face value this would be very similar to what happens you know enormously trimming and anticholinergic intoxication and so the theta increase could explain that but so is it significant is it real so when you look at single so thanks for the question fantastically is exactly what you're looking at at the moment and when you look at single subjects in the high dose some of them have this increase in theta like incredibly strong that's possibly driving this group average that you can see here however one would look at the group in terms of analysis we see that effects were failing away and that is possibly because of your intuition and it's kind of my feeling as well that there is a moment in the experience when the immersion is so deep and you know people actually reported that they forget that they're in an experimental setting in a way that's very similar to the idea of loosening this reality criteria they're anticholinergics and possibly this increase in theta indexing that now some of the analysis that have done like very very recently said I'm teasing apart the fractal component of the signal also the power law sort of component of the signal from the asymmetry part of it because when you look at the power spectrum in the EEG so all this activity here is basically there's good reasons to think this is the combination of two different components one is this one over ready components like the fractal part of the signal and the asila tory party signal when you tease this apart also i've done this analysis and what i'm seeing is that when you tease them apart you see as a matter of fact increases in this lower frequency range so there are very good reasons to think that is the case and it's my expectation and cautious expectation now that we're getting all people high doses inside of this camera so it's it's definitely interesting yeah so certain schools of philosophy of a greater emphasis on the interactive and relational aspects of phenomenology so I'm wondering how you're conducting the experiment or how you are guiding your participants to have this experience might influence your results so are you telling them to have their eyes closed are you sort of encouraging them to have a more internal experience and I'm wondering if you might have different outcomes if you told them to interact more with their environment interact more with their environment doing the experience for the recollection of it yeah so if you manipulate the setting I see that you have a controlled setting which is I guess standard for what you are doing but I can imagine it be more different if you're doing it in a forest or some other settings yeah possibly very very possible but that may tell you more about the setting the effects of the drug in different settings that maybe the society the compound of the technique possibly right so if you take the antenna for this is different than you particularly like in the research lab yeah do you think it might I mean okay just between opening your eyes we're not opening your eyes and also respect expect some difference right oh yeah that is certainly possible so there's something about the you know the the interview method that it's it's you know where you're accessing intimate aspects about people's experiences so and this is like if this first run what Raphael did so there was an encouragement to close device and there was an encouragement for examples of people to use them you know the present tense will they're recollecting the experience so it has this sort of sense of embodied sort of recollection right so you're in it again you're relieving if you like putting a play in the film that was there but there is variability of course in my experience conducting the interviews now with the same method actor I've memorized and is that there's a it works quite well and it works it's not doesn't seem to induce something there's a careful aspect about not pushing people towards certain things and we also keep the experience in a level of detail in which we're just trying to map the progression of these different dimensions of experience without necessarily going into you know super specific moments although some of those very specific moments we didn't capture and generally we try to keep it as commbuys as possible of course there are several limitations of humanity so but their findings about the lowering of the beta it seemed like it was the biggest effects on beta we're like on the top center of the head which I think you know I work on animals so I'm not hundred percent sure about this but I think that that's you know something like somatosensory motor and premotor regions and is was there any like differences between different parts of the somatic motor math in the in the changes in beta and and did you look at the tightener the dynamics of the experience because you know beta is in the motor of the motor cortex at least it's known to be as you said known to be associated motor preparation then it kind of there's a transient decreasing beta like you know with the initiation of voluntary movement and you know I was how do you were finding to beta relate to that was good I'm just fitting in the beta literature a bit more now because it just popped up in the results there's a pretty good question I would love to know if you know you could look into the somatic map but I'm really wondering if you can do even that with everything right with the EEG is it's very different difficult that's it is mostly because the spatial information is just very bad I haven't I haven't wanted to look at the sources because you know without structural scan of the brain it's a bit contrived to do so maybe I should do it anyway I don't know I'll try to look into it but I certainly won't find something by correspondence light the feet area or the hunter and there will be super nice 24 notes this is the dynamic paint curve right the two ones so we found a suddenly complete decrease and then you know this sort of like build up again on the on the specific literature I'm not for their work to respond that question that you get at range increase its attention increase it what moment alright well I think it relates to that very much I mean there's the strong link to be made possibly on somatic effects and motor effect where the people like to achieve you know they're moving in any way during the experience over they like really just like completely still some people do move but the people that move thanks proof from the analysis just too many artifacts in the aging yeah so but it's interesting some people other deep and I would say most people in their DMT invited completely flat it's just completes and it kind of course possibly said you have partly dissociation at some points kind of out of time but maybe you're not quite more questions later since we're gonna have a panel at the end but for now we have to end this let's think [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Amsterdam Psychedelic Research Association

Views: 13,300

Keywords: ParadigmLost, APRA, Christopher Timmermann, ALIUS, DMT, Psychedelic, Neurophenomenology

Id: p66i9RFqgMw

Length: 63min 4sec (3784 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019