M&M Clips: Phenomenology & neuroscience of psychedelic experiences & death

so one of the other things i want to touch on in part because i've had many conversations about this subject although probably not in the way that we'll discuss it is psychedelics so psychedelics have become much more culturally prominent recently they've been sort of revitalized in certain ways there's lots of interesting scientific research going on with them but you know as people know either from direct experience or from reading about other people's direct experience the psychedelics have very interesting and powerful effects on the contents of consciousness oftentimes you take a psychedelic especially at a high dose and you experience things that you didn't even know were on the menu before and i'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the phenomenology of psychedelics in connection with some of the things we were talking about earlier what are we learning about what's going on in the brain when someone ingests the psychedelic and how does that start to relate to some of the things we were talking about previously in terms of the reducing valve uh that the brain access to use huxley's term so you want me to talk about the phenomenal phenomenological side of things not the neuroscientific side of things why don't we uh why don't we try and take them uh uh in sequence there so okay what kinds of things tend to happen in a psychedelic experience and then how does that tie to some of these neuroscientific findings yeah i've done many psychedelic experiences and i consider myself lucky to have only started doing them when i was already in my 30s as a mature adult otherwise i i don't know what i would have made of it i i'm not sure they would have been productive and useful they are certainly not for fun it's a hard curriculum it's hard work it's not something you do for fun and if you do that for fun then you're not really doing it and you're taking a very light dose if you think you can go to a concert after taking psilocybin so you don't know what a real psilocybin trance is if you're doing it that way um i have done a few um that doesn't give me the right to say that i know the truth the truth about psychedelics because once you've been there you know that that's an infinite world but my takeaways are the following there is a lot a lot a lot more about my own intermentation a world of rich imagery rich cognitive associations rich feelings a rich imagination that is completely beyond metacognitive access in an ordinary state of consciousness stuff that i do not know i have in me and i would never have known if i hadn't done a psychedelic trip i would only have known that during the process of death which does the same thing psychedelics do reduce an impaired brain activity um so a lot more has been reviewed to me explicitly about my own inner fantasizing my own inner needs that are fulfilled through fantasy uh my own inner yearnings uh how much i love certain people for instance becomes very evident what i actually yearn for in my life as opposed to my little egoic plan of the achievements i need to have in the coming 10 years psychedelics show you what you really really want how you really really are from within how you really really feel and much of this stuff is stuff that we rather not know we don't want to know that stuff about ourselves it makes us feel inappropriate or ashamed makes us fear ourselves there is a monster within and psychedelics can show you that monster as well so that's one the other thing i think it showed me is that certain aspects of the psychedelic experience are way too alien to be mine they aren't mine are they fantasies yes but they are not my fantasies they are the instrumentation of the field of subjectivity around me they are the numenor they are part of what nature is in essence as opposed to how nature presents itself to me through my sense organs they are the thing in itself part of the thing in itself and the thing in itself going on out there is weird you know to to it's the difference between to perceive nature and to be nature and psychedelics give you a hint into what it is to be nature beyond yourself what it is like to be nature just beyond just yourself and it's mighty weird and at the same time extraordinarily familiar and that's a very characteristic cognitive dissonance in the deep psychedelic trance that the thing that is most alien most anxiety-inducing most discombobulating at the same time it's the thing that's closest to you the most familiar the most primordial that which you knew at the very beginning of time when you've forgotten that which is the real you and at the same time so incredibly alien now that stuff is not minus bernardo castro that stuff is the recognition of nature's mind through my cognitive apparatus but that stuff is not me and and and it may ask me well how do you know it's not you well go there yourself come back and tell me that that stuff was you it surpasses any conceivable notion of a personal self it surpasses all of our categories all of them so that's the second thing and the third takeaway message and the most important and in my opinion from my psychedelic experiences is that mind concuss its own sense of reality you can be in a psychedelic trance and in that trance you are in the pleiades talking to aliens and you have a feeling of hyper reality you cannot help but tell yourself this is actually happening it feels so much more concrete vivid self-consistent continuous reliable palpable than ordinary reality it feels much more real than real it's what people usually say you know if you have your friends trip they come back saying wow man far out that was more real than real yes that's the sense but were you physically in a reality outside mind talking to aliens in the play it is outside mind no you are not if somebody were next to you you would be lying on that bed all along so what tells you is that our sense of reality is not objective it doesn't come from outside mind our sense of reality is endogenous therefore the real insight from the psychedelic trance is not that the trance is real in the sense of being outside of mind it's not it's a creation of mind but what it's telling you is that this right now is a creation of mind as well that your sense of reality right now you're feeling of the continuity the the the the fact that the world seems to be autonomous and independent of your willing in your wishes all this stuff that seems to ground our sense of reality that's all mental stuff too it's not your mind as an individual human being but this too is mental this too is a kind of trust we are on drugs all the time and you don't need to be on trans owning citizen or dimethyltryptamine you can have a trance on um our main neurotransmitter talk about glutamate no no no serotonin we are tripping on serotonin right now so no we are always on drugs so this too is a kind of trip i think that is the key takeaway message from the psychedelic trip not psychedelic noses not to come back and say i spoke to a real deity outside mind no no no no don't get taken in by your own [ __ ] because on this under psychedelics you have no defense against your mind's perpetua attempt to deceive itself that's what mind does mind communicates to itself by creating deceptive imagery it's the language of mind it's what it does because it is what it is so you're not escaping that in a psychedelic trip but what you can conclude this [ __ ] that's what mine is doing right now and so there's some interesting uh results that have you know started to to percolate up into our awareness around what the brain is actually doing in the psychedelic state versus the normal waking state what are some of the more interesting findings that you've seen so far and how does that tie back into some of our discussion of the most robust and the largest observation so far which is has been repeatedly observed across psychedelic substances and across measurement apparatuses and by substances i mean studies were done with psilocybin which turns into cilicin dmt lsd ketamine and i think a couple of others but the main studies were made with these four substances and measurement apparatuses were fmri meg and eeg so a variety of substances in a variety of measurement apparatuses have led to the same conclusion psychedelics always and only reduce brain activity they don't increase brain activity beyond the error margin of measurement anywhere in the brain that's the largest effect of psychedelics there are other very minor effects as well which the literature is now focusing on because they they sort of remain consistent with physicalist intuitions but the main effect is the opposite of what we would have expected you know before 2012 you would have asked any neuroscientists what do psychedelics do in your brain everybody would say oh they light up your brain like a christmas tree you know both levels would go beyond the charts you know you would be consuming a lot of oxygen in your brain because it would be lit up in order to generate the imagery of the trans which is the richest most intense most significant experiences of one's life actually research done yet i'm failing with remembering the details but research has shown that it consistently scores amongst the five most intense rich memorable significant experiences of one's life one psychedelic trance let alone a whole series of them and we thought the brain lights up like like a christmas tree it's the opposite your brain is less active than when you're dreaming a lot less active than when you are asleep uh it is the best safe model of death we have in the sense that it really brings your brain activity down without killing you and then you get metabolic rebound after now after you metabolize the the the substance you know then blood oxygen levels in the brain increase a lot because your brain is starved but that's the main the main by far the largest and most consistent effect reduction of brain activity yeah and it's it's a very interesting observation it's also i think interesting to think about in terms of this connection between the psychedelic experience and death that many people have drawn throughout time and you know one of the one of the uh particular psychedelics i wanted to ask you about based on one of my own experiences was five methoxy dmt so i'll briefly describe an experience i had and how i start to connect some of the dots here and you know when i had this experience which i spoke about in the very first episode of the podcast it was not the first psychedelic i'd ever tried i had been very experienced at this time but 5 meow dmt had a very different character to it than anything else i had tried and very briefly i'll just say that for the tens of minutes that you're in this trance it leads to what i would describe as a very undifferentiated experience meaning that as opposed to taking other doses of other substances instead of seeing a bunch of crazy stuff and things are moving and things are happening everything goes away and yet somehow there's still this awareness present and so you know with eyes closed it's sort of just dark and with eyes open it was a pure white light and you just immediately kind of have this undifferentiated experience experience of light there are no shapes there are no concepts there's no there's no mental activity happening except this sort of what i would just call pure awareness and then as you relax out of the state that light starts to coalesce into simple colors and then they start to sort of morph and move a little bit and then gradually over the course of 10 or 15 or 20 minutes it coalesces into what eventually just becomes you looking at the room again in the normal way that you do but the first experience i had with it my when i started thinking again tens of minutes of later um my mind immediately went to wow that sounds a lot like every time i've heard someone describe a near-death experience and they say i saw the light or something like that or anytime i've heard you know uh someone really into buddhism or meditation say uh talk about samadhi or this sort of pure undifferentiated state that you can reach at which is usually taken to be the kind of pinnacle pinnacle of of meditative practice and it struck me that i had this sort of undifferentiated experience all of the distinctions all of the concepts all of the colors all the shapes went away temporarily and i was just left with this pure and very very strong feeling of bliss this may be the best word that you could use to describe it and it was very interesting i would love to know what's going on in the brain but i wonder if five mayo in particular is causing these kind of reductions in brain activity and before i get your comment on this bernardo i do want to tie that back to some of the stuff we were talking about earlier where a lot of what the brain is doing when it's metabolizing and doing what the brain does it is drawing distinctions between things it's making sensory discriminations it's building the concepts that allow us to label and discriminate between different entities that we perceive as objects and other things and all of that goes away in this particular experience and you know i would love to get your comment on that or hear about any experience you might have with five meow i didn't have any experience with with 5meo no the frog business is not appetizing for me i don't know whether you can get that synthesized legally in the netherlands only in a research context i would imagine um i'm not sure about the netherlands in particular but depending on the jurisdiction um yeah there is there is synthetic five meow dmt and it sometimes is available for research purposes and sometimes it's available for anyone i i never tried five mio um i did have an experience the smell is the same as what you just described but i had that experience with psilocybin psilocybin is is is a strange psychedelic in the sense that you never know what's going to come it can be radically different from one week to the next from one phase of your life to another but there was one experience i had with psilocybin in which i i came back and the the only word the only cultural reference i had that would get anywhere near what i had experienced was the buddhist void the void of buddhism in which there is only mind but mind isn't excited in other words there's only potentiality but there's nothing beyond that and i was in that void and it's a very non-claustrophobic void in the sense that it's unlimited it's not constrained by space and time at all it's it's a moment of eternity if one wants to put it that way and when i started coming back from that which i usually call the re-entry the re-entry from that particular experience was the worst aspect of a psychedelic experience i have ever experienced people talk about you know the lift off which is ego dissolution that can be very hard but you grow into it you become used to it to a point that it it doesn't feel bad at all anymore you're so ready to let go of all of your [ __ ] that when it goes you don't grasp onto it you don't try to hold on to it so i got to a point where i was used to a good dissolution and didn't feel bad at all on a contrary it felt like a great relief you know is letting go of all of your anxieties all of your problems though dissolves dissolves dissolves only what is really important in really real state um but the re-entry from this particular experience of the void i don't know even how to describe that it imagine you're being crushed by a truck except that this truck is as heavy as the moon and it's crushing you for 100 000 years and you're not dying um the level of claustrophobia of reconnecting with the notion of time i remember having the image of a calendar with the five days of week of the week and the two days of weekend i i i remember coming back to that image and thinking my god no i cannot live ruled by this little thing called the weak my life my existence cannot be ruled by this this is so incredibly claustrophobic claustrophobic i couldn't breathe and then i had these images coming back um i drive a black volkswagen passat you know a large sit-down totally black and i had this image of this little thing that was me inside the black box and it needed to be in that black box to have different experiences in other in other words to go from one place to another so you you couldn't have different experiences by just allowing experiences to flow through you you had to to get into that little black metal box and that was so crushing and so crushing as well um it took me i don't know two or three days to accept life again after that because i was when i came back to this i was so crushed i was so depressed i was so um irate with the notion of being alive like inside this little box in space and time that i was dysfunctional for a couple of days and that was one of the trips that sort of sobered me up like oh i have to be careful with this stuff the curriculum is very hard this is no joke these are hard life lessons and they are as hard as they come it's very tough love what what kind of dose was that with uh between five and six dried grams okay so you did you did the heroic dose i've done more i've done eight wow that that's quite a lot so one of the things i do want to talk about here is but i'm very hard-headed nick eight for me probably is four for the regular tripper my my baseline consciousness is very hard to move it's very hard to displace it um so one of the things i do want to talk to you about is the the phenomenology of death and and how you think about it given the frame that that you think and um so i want to say you know one of the things i've talked to people about before is my 5mu experience and one of the ways i start to think about that myself but also help other people think about it who haven't had the experience is is in the following way and and again naturally i think as a biologist so an experience we've all had is going out on a cold day you're not wearing a jacket and it's very cold outside what happens as you walk outside and time passes well some parts of your body start to get pain and start to get very cold and start to get frostbite before other parts right so your body has baked inside of it an order of operations that happens it knows okay well if we only have so much heat to keep the body alive make sure that your brain and your heart and your organs get that heat and you know siphon it away from the tips of your fingers the tips of your toes the tips of your nose first so the body knows so to speak and it will it will allow the least important things for survival to shut off first and preserve the ones that are absolutely essential as long as it can so when we think in that way and we think about metabolism now think about the brain just decaying organically as part of a slow and gradual natural death process right some parts of your brain and the brainstem are controlling your heartbeat they're controlling your breathing if those go offline you're done but all of the fancier stuff so to speak that your cortex is doing creating your ability to have language to discriminate objects based on the sensory inputs you're getting to make logical deductions all of this stuff is not strictly necessary you can lay there and breathe and keep your heart beating without doing those things and so i wonder if you know in the in the organic death process that people experience in old age i would suspect and it's answerable in principle right that those higher order networks in the brain doing the fancier stuff are going to shut down first and the things that will generally shut down last if you're having this kind of slow death are the ones that are absolutely essential for respiration and heartbeat and things like this and if that's the case and if what much of those higher order networks are doing are all of this fancy stuff that we take for granted us talking together making distinctions between objects in my visual field and so forth science and philosophy and science and philosophy all of those things would start to go offline while the absolutely essential survival functions were preserved and you would eventually perhaps i think come to some experience not unlike what i in what you just described where things feel void but the brain is still alive for some period of time and you know i i've always wondered and speculated if things like fibromyalgia or things like these high dose psilocybin experiences are essentially putting your neurophysiology into a place that's not unlike what it does when things organically wind down at the time of death and perhaps that's related to why many near-death experiences have these similarities to the types of experiences people have on psychedelics so i'm wondering if you could comment on that and then just talk about death from the perspective of analytical idealism i think what you said is entirely reasonable and it doesn't sound implausible at all uh to my ears i mean a psychedelic is not a threat to your life like code is so it's curious why they have this effect why they reduce brain activity as if you were dying so i'm not sure why that happens that way but clearly it does happen um and i do think it's a it's the best safe model of death we have um i mean short of going to like the flatliners did in the movie that you stop your heart and hope to be resuscitated with psychedelics your heart never stops but your brain largely does that's a good model of death now from analytic idealist perspective the normally function metabolizing body and brain ordinary brain activity all these things are what a strong dissociative process in the mind of nature looks like so they're directly correlated one is the appearance of the other and of course life wants to survive that's that's that's what evolution tells us that the organisms that we have today are the ones that are best capable of staying alive and so in the language of analytic idealism it's a natural thing that alters once formed wants to survive they want to stay as alters why because you know the the the the causal nexus of nature would favor the altars that do as opposed to the altars that don't it's not like there is a law decreed by some agent in nature saying this shall happen thus no it's just what happens to happen and we understand why it happens like that now if an ordinary normal healthy metabolizing body and brain are what a dissociative process looks like then death the end of that body and brain is what the end of dissociation looks like so right if the body is the image of dissociation and the end of the body implies logically uh the end of the dissociation now how would that feel phenomenologically from a first person perspective we think that death implies the sort of the end of consciousness um but we know now that many of the states which we consider unconscious are not unconscious at all syncope is not unconscious you can have rich visual imagery in during the time you are unresponsive um psychedelics trans states the choking game i mean the list is endless that we know that states in which we are unresponsive are accompanied by rich rich inner life so i think the same applies to death because death is the end of the dissociation from a first person perspective what is experienced is an enrichment you cognitively reassociate with your immediate cognitive environment from which you were dissociated just before that um and to put it in colloquial language you remember things you didn't know anymore you will have a sense of identity that spans a much larger area than just your body your inner imagery will become a lot richer than your living human fantasizing could ever be it's a reintegration into a broader cognitive context which could be experienced as something overwhelming imagine if you remember the memories of the universe coming from being a little human being of course it won't want to last long it's like waking up waking up is the end of a dissociative process when you wake up your dream avatar is toast he's dead and but it's the same you it's just that you thought you were the dream avatar but you never were it's the same you that wakes up and then you remember the memories of your life which you didn't remember when you were the dream avatar you were dissociated from the aspects of your mind that did the rest of the dream and had the rest of your memories and ideas and wishes and fears and fantasies and all that good stuff which all comes back to you the moment you wake up i would expect death to be something like that to the power of i don't know 100. other words it's scary stuff i am afraid yeah i mean even the term ego death that people use in the context of psychedelics you know sort of gets at how how jarring the experience can be you know if you're coming up on a large dose of psilocybin you know ego death corresponds basically to some patterns of activity in the brain that are associated with your feelings of individuation and those are going away and a lot of people experience that as oh my body is actually dying even though it isn't in fact dying and it can be frightening if you if you try and fight it and it can have this very liberating feeling if you just sort of relax into it and i wonder if you know a lot of the metaphors that we typically get in religious traditions of heaven and hell or you know huxley famous or famously wrote another essay called heaven and hell that you know the difference those aren't two places you go there are two types of experiences you can have in a state like this depending on your orientation to it i would love to think that this is the case that hell is ego dissolution because then there is nothing to worry about i mean you've been there a few times like me after a while ego death is no longer an issue it's not hard anymore because you don't fight it and if you don't fight it it has no energy it doesn't come to get you it's just the first time when you think you are actually going to disappear because you think you are your ego so when your ego goes when that that little knot of associations that you know the default mode network in the brain when that begins to to unravel you think my god that's me and i'm going to go no no no you are the thing that is observing that this solution once you've been through that gauntlet a few times it's no longer a gauntlet so i don't think that's it i don't that that's certainly not my reason for being afraid of death my ego dissolve i know glad shed it i gladly let my personal identity go because it's so claustrophobic i just don't feel claustrophobic all the time because i get used to it but you go to the void and you come back and you go like this is not a pleasant state this ego stuff um so i'm pretty okay with that but i have had trips that i could describe as equally um cathartic and hellish and the the difference between pleasure and pain disappears in those experiences it there isn't that's a duality anymore that you can only talk about intensity i had an experience once it was a high dose trip and went deeping it was not only high dose i was wearing a mind machine i had done breathing exercises i had i don't know i controlled my diet for a week before that trip it was when i thought you know gloves are off i'm going to go as deep into this rabbit hole as i can go i was on holidays so i had read billions of paper a lot of papers i had read in anticipation i had my doctor to whom i told what i was going to do i had him give me and is ekg cg the heart uh ekg for the heart yeah for the heart and the check of my liver function because i wanted to make sure i would come back from that um i went really deep in and after you pass ego dissolution after you pass the fantastic visual hallucinations and the aliens and the parallel universes and all that and then you pass the void and you keep going and there is something at the base of the fountain there is something at the very root of minds the very root of existence it is the ultimate um now you understand that whatever i say now is nonsense because it cannot be captured in words so i'll not talk about it i'll talk around it um and basically hand wave trying to give you at least a smell of more or less what that felt like at that fountain it was like a multi-hyper-dimensional fractal pattern was unfolding it came from a singularity and nothing and it began to unfold and it unfolds based only on itself there's never anything coming from the outside itself unfolds um but the richness of this unfolding is beyond anything that can be conceived in an ordinary state of consciousness and at the same time it's nothing that unfolding comes from nothing the inside there is nothing and out of the nothing comes all of that um and at some point witnessing that i was still telling myself narratives it was one of those trips in which we maintain some level of metacognition amazingly enough and at some point i was telling myself this is going to fry my mind uh i a human mind cannot confront this in other words be aware of it and survive it it is it is too entropic um the diversity of states is so massive that you cannot maintain any sense of structural or dynamical integrity not that it's random in the sense that neuroscience is trying to study psychedelics no no the anthropic brain hypothesis knowing entropy levels rise what they mean is noise unstructured noise that's not it at all it was immensely structured immensely structured but structured in such a way that the diversity of states that would arise from that continuously unfolding structure to become acquainted with that was to die was to lose your internal integrity to lose everything that defines you as a mind and that was death that was real death not ego death that is the death of a fry in a frying pan um it's it's really going to blow you to pieces if you maintain your attention on that yeah and my fear is that hell and heaven are both that that is it that's the fountainhead it's both hell and heaven and i understand how and why it can be both because it's simultaneously terrifying and beyond delightful it's cathartic it's of a level of beauty that even the word beauty is like we need another word that's cosmic beauty it's it's beyond anything yeah and it kills you if you stare at it strangely enough i feel like i know exactly what you are talking around here because uh in my five meow experience and again talking around it it was quite similar i think i s there was this thing and only this thing there was no even perception of myself being there to see it but somehow this thing that somehow didn't have a shape was vibrating or shaking with such intensity that it felt like not only every scene of experience that i was about to come back into was coming from it but every possible scene of every possible experience that could be was just sort of violently shaking out of this thing and again the word thing doesn't mean like a shape that i saw it was just this sort of i mean it was just almost just like seeing light and it was just like everything was wiggling out of it if i if i you will understand it because you probably you've been there i see it but uh people who have never been there will not understand it so for the sake of those who can sense the smell the reason the fires of hell burn you it's because they are unspeakably beautiful they are heavenly the fires of hell are heavenly and that's why they burn because they are unspeakably beautiful it's a beauty that dissolves you

Channel: Mind & Matter Podcast

Views: 1,433

Keywords: Psychedelics, Psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT, Magic Mushrooms, Psilocybe Mushrooms, Death, Dying, Near-Death Experience, Idealism, Neuroscience, Psychedelic Experience, Consciousness, Perception, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Bernardo Kastrup, Nick Jikomes, Mind & Matter, Science, Science Podcast

Id: jVBvQfQ-dFU

Length: 36min 31sec (2191 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022