MICHAEL POLLAN: How do these psychedelics work?
Well, the honest answer is we don't entirely know, but we know a few things. One is they fit a
certain receptor site: the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. And they look a lot like serotonin
if you look at the molecular models of them and, in fact, LSD fits that receptor site
even better than serotonin does and it stays there longer. And that's why the LSD
trip can last 12 hours. What happens after that we don't really know. It's an agonist to
that receptor. So it increases its activity. And this, you know the neuroscientists say lead to
a cascade of effects which is shorthand for don't really know what happens next. But one thing we
do know, or we think we know, is that it appears that one particular brain network is deactivated
or quieted. And that is the default mode network. This was discovered not very long ago by a
researcher in England named Robin Carhart-Harris who was dosing people with psilocybin and LSD
and then sliding them into an MRI machine, to take an FMRI a functional magnetic
resonance image. The expectation I think was that people would see an excitation of many
different networks in the brain. You know, that's what the kind of mental fireworks sort of
foretold, but he was very surprised to discover that one particular network was down-regulated
and that was this default mode network. So what is that? Well, it's a tightly linked
set of structures connecting the prefrontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, to
the deeper older centers of emotion and memory. It appears to be involved in
things like self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute
mental states to others, mental time travel, the ability to project forward in time and
back, which is central to creating an identity, right? You don't have an identity without a memory
and the so-called autobiographical memory, the function by which we construct the story of who we
are by taking the things that happened to us and folding them into that narrative. And that appears
to take place in the posterior cingulate cortex. So, you know, to the extent the ego can be said
to have a location in the brain it appears to be this, the default mode network. It's active when
you're doing nothing. When your mind is wandering. It can be very self-critical, it's where
self-talk takes place. And that goes quiet. And when that goes quiet, the brain is sort of
as one of the neuroscientists put it, let off the leash, because those ego functions, that self idea
is a regulator of all mental activity and kind of, you know, the brain is a hierarchical system and
the default mode network appears to be at the top. It's kind of the orchestra conductor or corporate
executive. And you take that out of the picture, and suddenly you have this uprising from
other parts of the brain and you have networks that don't ordinarily communicate with
one another suddenly striking up conversations. So you might have the visual cortex talking to the
auditory system, and suddenly you're seeing music, or it becomes palpable. You can feel it or smell
it and, you know, synesthesia. So you have this temporary rewiring of the brain, in the absence of
the control of the regulator. And this appears to have, you know, a beneficial effect in terms
of jogging the brain out of bad patterns. SAM HARRIS: The truth is virtually
any experience you can have with psychedelics you can have without
psychedelics. Because all psychedelics do, is modulate the existing neurochemistry of the
brain. They're not doing something that the brain can't do on its own, you're just playing with
neuro-transmitters or mimicking neurotransmitters. I have had the same experience to a more or
less similar degree just through meditation, but it's clear to me that I would never have suspected
that such an experience was possible but for my experimenting with MDMA in the beginning and
it had not been adopted by popular culture as a party drug. So this was coming very much out of
the therapeutic community. People were doing in a closeted way psychotherapy with it. And I took
it as a means of discovering something about the nature of my mind. It was not a social situation.
A friend and I were alone, and we took it together and just had a conversation on this drug. And
what was revelatory about it was that it was an experience of absolute sobriety. There was no
druggie component to it. We just became clearer and clearer and clearer in our thinking and
feeling. And the crucial component of this was a loss of any feeling of self-concern. I
was no longer looking at myself through my friend's eyes. I was no longer worried about
what he was thinking about me. I was no longer subtly correcting course, based on changes I
saw in how he was perceiving what I was saying. There was a whole veneer of fear frankly, that
I didn't know was there that got stripped away. And there was just kind of naked
awareness of the present moment. And what came into that void was a very clear
understanding that I loved him. The feeling that came crashing down to that point it was just, you
know, boundless love for one of my best friends, and absolutely no egoic self-concern, no
possibility for feeling envy, for feeling any kind of petty emotion that separated myself
from him. But then I realized in the next moment, that I would feel this way for anyone who
walked through the door. That there was nothing contingent on our relationship about this feeling.
It was not justified by my friendship with him. This was the way I felt for every other conscious
being. It frankly blew my mind. And it took me years for me to integrate this understanding
of this possibility into my intellectual life. JASON SILVA: There was a great essay written by
Timothy Leary that I think is fabulous, a piece in the '60s called ""Programming the Psychedelic
Experience,"" in which he defined the psychedelic experience as a period of increased reactivity
to stimuli, both from within and from without. So there's this increased suggestibility. It's
almost like we dissolve the boundaries and the filters that keep us from sort of being flooded
by sense impressions. And so one is in a kind of delicate suggestible state. So you wouldn't
wanna be like driving or having to worry about crossing the street with a red light
or a green light when you're tripping. But the psychotherapeutic use of being in a state of
increased adjustability is that if you pattern the input signals, if you sequence and control
what you're subjected to during this period of heightened sensibility to stimuli, you could
steer awareness towards useful spaces of mind. You could navigate that evanescent
flux of sensation and perception that Erik Davis says is all we have and all we
are, towards places of ecstatic illumination. Text: Who can benefit from
the use of psychedelics? HARRIS: For some people taking a drug is the only way
they're gonna notice that it's possible to have a very different experience of the world. They're
sufficiently lumping and uninquisitive about the nature of their own minds. That if you tell
them to meditate, if you teach the mindfulness, you tell them how to follow their breath, they
will look inside for 30 seconds or 30 minutes and see nothing of interest, and walk away feeling
that there's no there there. Either it doesn't work for them or that everyone else must be just
faking it, or it requires a certain talent and a certain degree of luck, therefore, to have
enough concentration, to connect with any quote spiritual practice, the first time or
even the 10th time or even after a year of attempting it, because it's just these practices
are difficult. And the conditioning of our minds to just ceaselessly talk is deep. So where
drugs have been indispensable for many people is in advertising the possibility of a change
in consciousness. And so I don't think they're durable methods for people that you, I don't
think you need or should just keep taking drugs month after month, year after year as a mode of
spiritual inquiry. But there's certainly a period in many people's lives at the beginning where you
wouldn't have, you wouldn't even see a glimmer of reason to suspect that a radical change in the
nature of your experience would be possible. POLLAN: Many of the disorders that psychedelics
appears to treat well, are manifestations of a stuck brain. A brain that is locked in loops, a
mind that's telling itself destructive stories. Like I can't get through the day without a
cigarette. I'm unworthy of love. My work is shit. You know, these kind of evidence of habitual
thinking in a really negative loop are relieved. And it may be that an overactive ego is what
punishes us. And that relief from that dictator is exactly what some people need to free themselves
from habits, mental habits and behavioral habits. I remember talking to smoking addicts, and one in
particular, cause I was a little baffled at how could a single psychedelic experience break
you know, what was a lifelong or a very, you know, very long-term 30-year smoking
habit in a woman who was 60. She was Irish, she was a book editor, and she wanted to quit
smoking and had tried everything without success. And she had a psilocybin trip. This was at Johns
Hopkins. And she said, ""I sprouted wings. And I flew all through European history and I saw
the battle of Waterloo and saw Shakespeare, and I died three times, and I saw the smoke from my
body rise from the Ganges on the funeral pyres. And I thought to myself 'there's so many
amazing things to do and see in the world that it was really stupid to kill yourself with
smoking.'"" And she stopped. Now, I was very struck by the fact that surely she had had that
insight before, that life is too interesting to shorten it by smoking. But for some reason, in
the midst of the psychedelic trip, those seemingly ordinary even banal insights take on an
authority. They're sticky, they're sturdy. And they're suddenly something that doesn't just
seem like an insight or an opinion. It seems like a revealed truth, you know, absolute knowledge.
And this is very common on psychedelics. And it's very common in the mystical experience.
William James said that the Noetic quality is what he called it. This idea that what you learn in
that experience, has a special absolute authority, it's just a factor in mystical experience. So
this is what I think allows many of the addicts to break their habit. The kind of resolution that
most of us make every day and break the next day, becomes something that they can actually live
by. And I thought that was quite extraordinary. And I heard that from many people and they would
all say the same thing. I realized, you know, I acquired a new perspective on the scene
of my life. It was like the camera had been pulled further back than it's ever been. And
I saw myself and I saw what I was doing. And I realized this is really stupid. So perspective.
I mean a perspectival shift can be very powerful. Other indications that the drugs show promise for, and this is psilocybin mostly that's the
psychedelic that's been studied the most, depression, anxiety, obsession, addiction.
There've been trials of alcoholics, of cocaine addicts and smokers, all showing great promise.
And there're future trials for eating disorders. And, you know, a new trial of obsessive-compulsive
is being planned. So this is a very exciting time. And again, the drugs still have to go further
to prove themselves in larger groups of people. And we have to figure out exactly the
optimal way to offer it to people, but we've got some new tools and we've had
so little innovation in mental healthcare, since the early nineties, really since, you know,
the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants, whose effectiveness is starting to fade and
fail. And I don't think people fully realize how lousy the tools we have to treat
psychiatric illness are right now, and how many side effects they have. They
put on weight. They cost people their libido, they're hard to get off of,
and they only treat symptoms. BEN GOERTZEL: There's a tremendous amount
of insight that can be plumbed using these various substances. There's also a lot of risks
there, as with most valuable things. I mean, I've had friends and family members,
you know, literally, be pushed over the verge of insanity by excessive and poorly thought
out use of psychedelics. So I mean, it's a great potential benefit and a great potential risk. And
I think it's generally a terrible thing that these substances are illegal in most modern governments
because that means that we're not developing the right set of cultural institutions to guide people
in really productive use of these substances. Text: The history of psychedelics. SILVA: There's a lot of talk nowadays
about the psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics. We're kind of going through a
psychedelic renaissance. It's been a while since the 1960s. These substances have been
repressed, but, you know mankind has been using and experimenting with entheogenic or
God facilitating substances for millennia. POLLAN: Psychedelics have been used in societies,
in Central America and South America, and the old world as well for thousands of years. And they
were used in healing, as a sacrament in religions, for divination and purposes like that. So
there's an ancient history of psychedelics that goes way back. And then there is the kind of
mid-century, 20th-century history, which begins with Albert Hoffman, who is a brilliant chemist
with the Sandoz company in Switzerland. And he in effect invents LSD. First in 1938 but
he doesn't know what he has yet. But then in 1943 in the middle of World War II, he got
this premonition that this was a particularly interesting and beautiful molecule and he should
take a second look at it. And he resynthesized it and accidentally ingested some of it perhaps
through his skin or by touching his eye, and realized that this was a powerful
psychoactive molecule. Sandoz is the company he worked for really didn't know what
was it good for? How could you use this drug? How could you monetize it as we would say? So
Sandoz does something very interesting. They organize, you know, basically a
crowd-searched research project, where they offer LSD to any researcher, therapist
who wants it for free. And this led to this very fertile period of research in the '50s. LSD
becomes, it's considered by many a psychiatric wonder drug. So here you have this very
exciting promising period of research, that's going on without any government
interference, without a lot of controversy, but in the '60s everything goes haywire. And
what happens in the '60s, is that basically the drugs escaped the lab and become a very important
ingredient in the creation of the counterculture. Timothy Leary has something to do with this. He is
a psychologist who ends up at Harvard in 1960, but the summer before he gets there he is introduced
to psilocybin while in Mexico and has a profound experience. He was by the pool in Cuernavaca
and he said he learned more in those four hours on psilocybin than he'd learned 15 years as a
therapist. But, like several people who've studied psychedelics, Leary gets intoxicated by them,
by the promise, not just to heal but to change society. And this is a very dangerous thought.
And Leary then becomes a psychedelic evangelist, you know, turn on, tune in, drop out. Everybody
should use acid. If we can turn on 4 million people we can blow the mind of America. And it
becomes very threatening to the powers that be. I mean, Richard Nixon called Leary the most
dangerous man in America. He felt that LSD and other drugs were sapping the will of American
boys to fight in Vietnam. And he may well have been right. I mean LSD encourages people to think
for themselves, to not accept the frames of social values, the games that we play socially, and in
important ways LSD did fuel the counterculture and was very threatening to adult society, and to the
powers that be. By the end of the decade, they're made illegal, a schedule one drug beginning in
1970. The research gradually atrophies and dies by the mid-seventies, early seventies, which is
unprecedented in science, that you would have this incredibly promising avenue of inquiry, scientific
inquiry, that's stopped for reasons that have nothing to do with the science. I think there's a
lot more we need to learn, but beginning in 1999, with some private funding from some
people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, Johns Hopkins undertakes to begin
studying psychedelics again. So profound effects from a single application
of a non-toxic drug is a big deal. And I think portends a potential revolution
in the way we practice mental healthcare.
Pollan is also on Ezra Klein's podcast this week talking about psilocybin legalization, etc.
Submission statement: Sam Harris and other experts discussing the effect, history, and present applications of psychedelics.
Lex Fridman just released this podcast; interview with a psychedelics researcher at Johns Hopkins
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lex-fridman-podcast/id1434243584#episodeGuid=https%3A%2F%2Flexfridman.com%2F%3Fp%3D4468
Same thing as always wondered. I’m sorry if this is too outside the scope of this post. Most psychedelics are illegal in the US, right? Has Sam ever addressed the moral issues on that?
The link between marijuana and psychedelics has always seemed substantial. Would ecstasy and some 10-plus designer drugs have any affinity here? And if psychedelics are legalized, would we next look in their direction for consideration? (heading towards the call to legalize all drugs)