Making Sense - Sam Harris - #177 — Psychedelic Science

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00:06:06.980 okay and now for today's podcast today i'm speaking with roland griffiths roland is a professor in

00:06:17.060 the departments of psychiatry and neurosciences at the johns hopkins university school of medicine

00:06:22.420 his principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral

00:06:27.940 and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs he is the author of over 380 journal articles

00:06:33.860 and book chapters and has trained more than 50 post-doctoral research fellows he has been a

00:06:39.300 consultant to the national institutes of health to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the

00:06:43.700 development of new psychotropic drugs and as a member of the expert advisory panel on drug

00:06:48.580 dependence for the world health organization he's conducted extensive research with sedative hypnotics

00:06:54.820 caffeine and other drugs and in 1999 he initiated a research program investigating the effects of

00:07:01.860 the classic psychedelic psilocybin that included studies in healthy volunteers in beginning and

00:07:07.620 long-term meditators and in religious leaders and much of the resurgence in psychedelic research

00:07:15.780 is certainly due to him and the work he's been spearheading at johns hopkins as you'll hear and roland

00:07:22.340 and i cover a lot of ground here with respect to the current state of research on psychedelics

00:07:28.420 we discuss the history of prohibition against their use the clinical and scientific promise of psilocybin

00:07:35.460 and mescaline and lsd and dmt and mdma and other compounds we talk about the risks associated with

00:07:42.820 these drugs the role of set and setting in determining a person's experience we talk about bad trips the

00:07:50.660 difference between psychedelics and drugs of abuse mdma and neurotoxicity and we talk about the

00:07:57.140 experiences people have experiences of unity and sacredness and love and apprehensions of truth

00:08:04.580 we talk about the long-term consequences of psychedelic experience synthetic versus natural compounds

00:08:12.260 the prospects of devising new drugs micro dosing the research being done on psilocybin and long-term

00:08:20.340 meditators the experience of encountering other apparent beings while on these drugs psilocybin

00:08:27.220 treatment for addiction and other topics and in my afterward i discussed the first psychedelic

00:08:34.340 experience i've had in 25 years i actually took a large dose of psilocybin about a week after i recorded

00:08:45.300 this conversation with roland so this is an unusual addendum and while i had planned to do this for

00:08:53.780 quite some time you will notice that the timing of my conversation with roland was certainly auspicious

00:09:01.460 and now without further delay i bring you roland griffiths

00:09:04.900 i am here with roland griffiths roland thanks for joining me pleased to join you sam well this is

00:09:13.700 great you know i've been wanting to talk to a scientist who has seized the moment which seems to

00:09:19.940 come around once every other generation to study psychedelics and you know you are i think the most

00:09:27.700 prominent person in the field at the moment so it's really an honor to get you here let's just

00:09:34.580 talk for a moment about your scientific background and the work you're doing at johns hopkins and just

00:09:40.420 set the set the stage for this conversation well sam first of all let me just say i'm just delighted to

00:09:45.780 join you i'm a fan of your podcast found it very interesting and there's such a convergence i feel of

00:09:53.860 my interests in this whole area and some of yours that i'm excited to talk about it nice so let's see

00:10:01.540 with respect to my background i'm trained in psychopharmacology pharmacology and experimental

00:10:09.540 psychology i came to hopkins in 19 in the early 1970s and have been focusing on research on

00:10:20.420 psychoactive drugs primarily drugs of abuse and so much of my early career both in animal research and

00:10:28.180 human research was focusing on various mood-altering psychoactive drugs primarily those for which drug

00:10:37.780 dependence is a is an issue and a problem and about 25 years ago i started a meditation practice i'd been

00:10:51.540 interested in meditation for a long time had tried it in graduate school and found that it was extraordinarily

00:11:01.380 difficult three minutes felt like three hours and i was a pretty rapid dropout but about 25 years ago

00:11:10.100 i got reintroduced i don't know what was different but it was different and all of a sudden there was kind

00:11:17.860 of a depth of experience that was just truly intriguing to me i might say that my original training

00:11:27.940 was in experimental analysis of behaviors skernarian psychology if you will that tends to discount the

00:11:37.780 importance of subjective experience but despite that i i thought just the basic methodology of meditation and

00:11:50.580 approach and approach appealed to me because i certainly had this strong sense that there was there was

00:11:57.220 something to know about this kind of internal sense of subjectivity or whatever that was and although the

00:12:08.500 explanations that were given by the people in in meditation didn't correspond in any sense to the

00:12:17.060 neurophysiology or biology i was learning i was able to kind of discount that and take it as

00:12:25.460 metaphor because uh you know clearly these procedures had been developed over thousands of years and i thought to

00:12:33.380 myself surely there there must be is something of value and if i can treat it as metaphor what can i learn and

00:12:40.980 so that was my that's how i kind of reconciled my scientific materialism worldview with what it was to

00:12:49.940 you know learn about subjectivity what i did have as i got involved with meditation is significant and salient

00:12:59.300 experiences that got me deeply intrigued about the nature of these kinds of experiences and what the

00:13:06.500 implications were and and whether or not that should change some of my own priorities well how how i'm

00:13:14.980 spending my time and so there was actually a period of time after that that i really contemplated dropping

00:13:25.300 out of science going off to india as you did for a period of time going off and uh and just enmeshing

00:13:34.020 myself in this world of meditation and internal inquiry so what year was it that you uh first got exposed to

00:13:43.780 meditation let's see i think it was 1993. 93 so yeah so um at the time you said you were uh you considered

00:13:55.380 going to india what made that door uh not open for you well i had this great job people

00:14:04.660 i had uh respect and a job i had employees here at hopkins if i had walked away from it i would have

00:14:15.060 dropped a lot of responsibilities i would have left a lot of people in the lurch

00:14:19.540 and you know perhaps i just wasn't quite ready to make that radical uh change walk away from my

00:14:28.260 entire life life situation but you were getting into your graduate work in the 60s you said and so

00:14:36.740 and so this was after i assume this was after um timothy leary and richard albert were fired from harvard

00:14:43.540 and the stigma around studying psychedelics had already come crashing down yes but at that point

00:14:50.260 you were not yet into meditation right so you would you have been a candidate for somebody as someone who

00:14:55.860 would have wanted to study those compounds or it just wasn't on your radar at all let's see how could

00:15:01.540 one not have been curious about that i mean so no i i think i i would have been curious but because it

00:15:09.060 wasn't a viable option and i didn't run in crowds that were deeply impressed with the effects of

00:15:17.700 psychedelics it just wasn't a particularly important option for me to to track and then very early on

00:15:30.180 i ended up through good fortune making connection with several different people that really

00:15:38.980 prompted me to think about psychedelics and kind of reintroduced me to the older literature on

00:15:45.620 psychedelics with which i was kind of vaguely familiar but even when i went off to

00:15:53.220 graduate school in the late 60s psychedelics as an area of research had just been pulled off the

00:16:01.620 board and in fact it was a third rail for people who were interested in developing careers

00:16:08.260 in psychopharmacology or pharmacology if you expressed interest in that it uh marginalized you and in a

00:16:16.020 way that wasn't professionally helpful so i never really gave it any thought until until i had some of

00:16:23.540 these experiences started rereading that literature and then becoming really intrigued about whether or

00:16:33.620 not the kinds of experiences that were being described really happened and i have to say i went into this as

00:16:42.980 as a as a real skeptic i was delighted with my meditation practice i was doing that exploration but i also was

00:16:53.620 a full professor at hopkins with an international reputation and clinical pharmacology and so thought

00:17:00.500 if anyone had a shot at getting a study approved through not only my irb but fda and dea

00:17:11.140 you know i would have a reasonable shot at doing so and so through funding in part provided from

00:17:21.460 a group called the council on spiritual practices in california with bob jesse as leader there and in part

00:17:31.300 through reallocating funding from a grant i had from the national institute on drug abuse we undertook a

00:17:39.140 study of psilocybin in healthy volunteers who had never before experienced a psychedelic

00:17:48.420 and we did the study with a positive control it was a high dose of methylphenidate that's ritalin

00:17:56.420 that has an onset and a duration of action pretty similar to

00:18:02.180 psilocybin and because it's a stimulant that produces uh mood elevating effects and because these

00:18:10.180 people were naive to the effects of psychedelics we thought it was a plausible positive control

00:18:18.340 this is a better control than was used in the famous good friday experiment at harvard where

00:18:24.580 i think it was psilocybin they were given and then i think they were given a placebo and

00:18:29.220 the difference between psilocybin and placebo is apparently fairly stark

00:18:35.300 it's very stark they gave uh niacin i believe oh they did okay but but nonetheless it's stark i mean

00:18:41.460 that just produces some local flushing and it's it's actually a deep problem in studying psychedelics

00:18:49.140 because the very nature of their experience is to produce radical changes in the nature of

00:18:56.340 subjective experience so blinding is deeply embedded in this area as a as a methodological

00:19:05.700 problem but we we also bent over backwards we gave people instructions that were misleading with respect

00:19:15.140 to the all the drug conditions that could be administered they were told that they could

00:19:19.540 receive up to i think it was 13 different psychoactive compounds they were told they'd have two or three

00:19:26.980 sessions at least one of which would include a moderately high dose of psilocybin but in fact all we were

00:19:36.580 comparing is methylphenidate and psilocybin under conditions that blurred those those effects and some

00:19:45.380 people got two doses of methylphenidate and only subsequently got psilocybin and then the other

00:19:51.700 kind of tricky thing we did is we kept our guide staff their clinical staff completely blind to the design so

00:19:59.780 they didn't know the design either and under those conditions it was remarkable that well what wasn't

00:20:10.980 remarkable is we give oh well let me just describe this the setup so the setup which is really built on

00:20:20.260 work that was done in the 50s and 60s to presumably optimize psychedelic experiences for meaningful effects

00:20:30.420 is one in which rapport and trust is developed with the volunteer through about eight hours of contact

00:20:37.780 prior to the first session and then sessions are comprised of coming in to a living room like

00:20:46.020 environment the volunteer is with two people with whom he or she has spent eight hours

00:20:55.860 reviewing kind of life life situation they come in they have a low-fat breakfast they take a capsule we give

00:21:05.060 psilocybin in the form of a capsule although psilocybin is the active ingredient in the

00:21:11.300 magic mushroom this is synthesized psilocybin they take a capsule and we ask them to lay on a couch use eye

00:21:21.380 shades and headphones through which they listen to a program of music and the instruction is to

00:21:28.340 to pay attention to your inner experience this is not a therapeutic talk guided session per se this is an

00:21:38.100 opportunity to we would say explore the nature of mind as it comes forth and so that's the basic

00:21:47.460 setup not surprisingly what happens is what we would have expected to happen based on

00:21:55.300 everything we know about psychedelics there are changes in visual perceptual phenomena kind of illusions there's

00:22:03.860 changes in emotionality both positive and negative fearful changes in cognitive processes but what was

00:22:14.340 of interest to me having gotten interested in meditation and spiritual experience was the extent to which these

00:22:23.140 experiences read out as similar to mystical type experiences that have been reported by mystics and religious

00:22:32.180 figures throughout the ages and as you mentioned there was a very nice study done at harvard back in the 1960s

00:22:42.500 that seemed to show that psilocybin given to seminary students produced some of these kinds of effects that

00:22:50.420 although the methodology of that study lacked a number of features that we were able to correct for

00:22:59.140 i mean it was a group study and it might be that the investigators were using their own supply of

00:23:04.420 psilocybin well they did uh so that yeah they they were dosing right along with the volunteers and the

00:23:12.260 whole thing was done as a group and so it was not as methodologically tight as as what we would have

00:23:19.220 expected today that's one approach to blinding that you can take just take the drug along with everybody

00:23:25.060 then you lose track of who's in which condition so i want to get into discussing the these various

00:23:32.820 compounds and the clinical applications and the and their different spectrum of effects but before we

00:23:39.540 do i just want to give a a plug for the center that you're currently running at johns hopkins and if

00:23:45.460 you can just describe what's happening there and i should say that you and i were put together

00:23:49.780 by my friend tim ferris who i think has recently put his shoulder to the wheel in helping to raise

00:23:56.180 money for for your center and and tim is a um has found psychedelics to be incredibly helpful to him of

00:24:02.420 late and i'm very grateful for him for putting us together so yeah and and we're grateful to him and a

00:24:10.180 a number of the other philanthropists including the stephen and alexander cohen foundation for funding

00:24:17.220 what amounts to the first center for psychedelic studies it's actually called the center for psychedelic

00:24:26.260 and consciousness research to be established in the united states and we're deeply grateful for the

00:24:35.140 support that amounted to 17 million dollars for us to extend and expand our program so we have been

00:24:43.940 doing research now with psychedelics that started with that first study i mentioned comparing psilocybin

00:24:50.420 and methafenidate and that started in about 2000 so we've been at this for 20 years but there's been virtually no

00:25:00.500 funding or just very little funding at the federal level for this kind of uh research so it's all been

00:25:07.700 philanthropic and we've just been doing it with uh nickels and dimes and bootlegging time and goodwill

00:25:17.300 you know from other kinds of projects to support this and so this establishment of the center really allows us to

00:25:25.060 put our shoulders to the wheel and i'm grateful to have a whole set of very competent colleagues here at

00:25:34.980 johns hopkins matt johnson and fred barrett and albert garcia romeo and natalie who case on all of whom are

00:25:44.660 deeply interested in this area and with the funding of this we can devote full-time effort

00:25:52.340 to these projects and what we're envisioning is that funding at the federal level will be forthcoming

00:26:02.900 it's still going to take a little bit of time but the results that we're seeing are just so promising on

00:26:10.100 any number of domains be it therapeutic or neuroscience that i think that federal agencies

00:26:18.900 nih in particular will will have to get into the game i think the development of the center and

00:26:26.500 contributions made by tim ferris have been integral in terms of making that happen nice nice so i guess i

00:26:36.260 want to say a few more words about the context that you're you're working in we've been alluding to this

00:26:41.140 but we really have lost a full generation if not a generation and a half of research on these compounds

00:26:50.340 because of the backlash that occurred against their you know fairly indiscriminate use in the 60s

00:26:58.020 and what happened is there were thousands of papers being written in the i guess the 40s and the 50s and

00:27:05.060 and early 60s on the effects of lsd and mescaline and psilocybin and and their clinical promise and

00:27:11.300 their promise for psychopharmacology and then the 60s happened and that was to some degree engineered by

00:27:20.580 timothy leary and richard albert's attitude toward essentially putting this stuff in the water which

00:27:26.820 you know given how transformative these drugs have been for so many people the temptation is understandable

00:27:34.980 it did seem like a sacrament had been discovered that could cure society of all of its ills at least

00:27:42.580 you could well imagine it seemed that way from the perspective of people who were being

00:27:47.300 were finding these drugs so transformative and so there was you know very little discipline around

00:27:52.900 keeping these drugs merely within research channels and then we sort of know what we uh we we can see

00:28:00.740 the effects with everyone uh you know growing their hair long and painting flowers on their faces and

00:28:06.180 dancing in the streets and so the backlash against all of that put these drugs on you know schedule one and

00:28:16.260 it became illegal to do research with them and roland when did the total prohibition begin to lift

00:28:25.220 so the total prohibition began to lift with some early studies done by rick straussman who gave

00:28:34.420 dmt dimethyltryptamine which is chemically related to

00:28:39.700 psilocybin it's one of the active ingredient in ayahuasca which is used in south america and he got

00:28:47.300 permission to give dmt to people who had previously used dmt and he did that in the early 90s our approval

00:28:59.860 was the first that fda granted to give a a reasonably high dose of a psychedelic to people

00:29:07.940 who had never before used a psychedelic and so that we considered to be

00:29:14.740 important step and actually a breakthrough because if you're going to really evaluate the effects of

00:29:19.860 these drugs you can't introduce a selection bias of those people who have tried and and want to try

00:29:27.860 again right you have right skewed the population uh mightily and so we got our approval back in 2000

00:29:37.940 but you're right you know it's a it's actually a very interesting story that these drugs became

00:29:46.500 unavailable functionally for any human research for a period of decades and i just wonder you know in the

00:29:54.500 history of modern science what analogies of that sort have occurred you know where has

00:30:03.780 an area of really promising and interesting research been halted in its tracks with a prohibition

00:30:11.460 to stop entirely you know maybe chemical warfare or germ warfare but very possibly not so it's actually

00:30:19.940 very interesting i think from a history of science point of view and it actually may speak

00:30:26.900 precisely to the power of these compounds and their effects and their potential ability to destabilize

00:30:36.260 existing cultural institutions because if if you actually think back i mean these drugs

00:30:41.220 drugs psilocybin and mescaline and dmt have been used very possibly for thousands of of years but usually

00:30:52.100 they're used in cultural contexts that are ritualized and control their use in a very structured manner often

00:31:02.420 for religious or divinatory or healing

00:31:05.380 purposes and so it could be that that yeah if you let these compounds out into culture at large they

00:31:16.260 can destabilize cultural institutions and and that may be a part of what happened in the 1960s so

00:31:24.980 you know in addition to the antics of timothy leary and his you know advocacy for widespread

00:31:34.260 use you know it interacted with an anti-establishment anti-war movement you know nixon

00:31:41.940 is reported to have declared timothy leary at one point the most dangerous man in

00:31:47.300 in america and so there was a a weird convergence you know politically in terms of funding in terms of

00:31:57.380 legal structure that just wiped out research and then interestingly that reached into the academic

00:32:05.860 institutions and and they bought into that there was such a a media frenzy that emphasized the potential

00:32:15.140 risks of these compounds and there really are risks and i certainly wouldn't want anyone to to

00:32:21.540 misunderstand that but they're and there really are risks but they're they certainly are not at the level

00:32:27.380 that no human research should be done with them yeah let's hit that point of disclaimer up front

00:32:35.860 so we're going to talk about kind of two aspects of this they're the clinical applications

00:32:41.380 for addiction and depression and ptsd and end-of-life anxiety and there's also just

00:32:48.100 the fact that these drugs as you say many of them have millennia of usage for the betterment of

00:32:58.500 already well people right so this is not just a matter of treating clinical issues but we should

00:33:07.620 acknowledge that not everyone should take psychedelics and there are conditions under which

00:33:15.700 it is unwise to take them and there's a a lot to talk about with respect to the the set and the

00:33:24.180 setting in which one uses these drugs and you know how to use them safely and i want to talk about the

00:33:31.780 prospect that any one of these compounds could be physically toxic i think that the data are not perhaps

00:33:38.740 perfectly clear there but they suggest that the problem of danger here is not so much a matter of

00:33:44.180 physical toxicity but the potential that someone could have a very bad experience on one or another

00:33:50.260 of these drugs and that that is just psychologically destabilizing and you know obviously if you're not

00:33:56.660 in a physical setting where you know you are looked over by somebody who is not on the drug with you or

00:34:04.020 maybe there's the prospect that you can wander out of your house or you know out into nature and do 0.96

00:34:10.020 something dangerous and stupid so you know feel free to sound a note of caution here roland and 0.97

00:34:16.500 and then well then we'll begin talking about the different compounds and how they may be different 0.99

00:34:22.340 physically and and psychologically yeah good so with respect to adverse effects so we're able to manage

00:34:30.020 this in our research setting because we very carefully screen people we prepare them for these sessions

00:34:37.780 they're in the presence of two sitters throughout the day long session we meet with them after the sessions

00:34:45.700 and then and then subsequently follow them up and under those conditions we actually haven't had any

00:34:54.180 very significant adverse events at all however in absence of all those parameters there are risks the

00:35:02.580 first and and most probable one is that people will become terrified and engage in dangerous behavior they

00:35:13.780 can run out into traffic people can jump off of cliffs or jump out of windows it does happen they can put

00:35:21.220 themselves or others at risk even life-threatening risk and they're you know homicides and suicides

00:35:28.500 that can occur it's low probability but it does occur the other most salient risk and one that we protect

00:35:37.460 against and for which there's the empirical evidence is circumstantial but it's something that we're very cautious

00:35:46.660 about the idea is that people who have vulnerability to psychotic process people who may be at risk for

00:35:55.380 developing schizophrenia may be at increased risk for development of such disorders with a high

00:36:05.380 dose of a psychedelic and so there are reports of people you know particularly in their you know late

00:36:12.900 teens or early 20s that coincide with the the most probable time of onset of psychotic

00:36:20.340 disorder who take a psychedelic and you know are subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic and they

00:36:28.340 attribute the onset of that to having taken the psychedelic and that's a lifelong nightmare from which

00:36:37.460 there's no simple recovery so that's you know that's a very important cautionary note do you

00:36:43.780 screen out let's say someone has a first order relative suffering from schizophrenia do you screen

00:36:50.340 them out of your research protocol what's the actual criteria yeah we do and we're probably we may

00:36:55.940 be overly conservative but i think that's the way to proceed we'll screen out second degree relatives 1.00

00:37:01.780 if anyone has a second degree relative with a psychotic illness we'll screen them out right now we ran a

00:37:10.820 large survey study in almost 2 000 people describing their worst experience after taking psilocybin and the

00:37:20.260 results of that were interesting so now this isn't a population estimate in so far as these are people who

00:37:28.660 who came upon our advertisement online were willing to spend an hour completing a really detailed

00:37:36.580 questionnaire anonymously and they were completing it with regard to their very worst experience but of

00:37:44.100 that group 11 percent reported putting themselves or others at risk for physical harm three percent sought

00:37:52.100 medical help and 10 percent reported enduring adverse psychological symptoms lasting more than a year and about eight

00:38:02.580 percent of those sought out treatment so there's a you know there's a significant population of people who

00:38:09.460 at least are claiming that they had this terrible experience and a year later they're still seeking out

00:38:17.060 help for what they view as some kind of psychological problem depression or psychotic or you know thinking

00:38:26.180 disorders that they're attributing to that now that's not you know tight causality but it fits in line with

00:38:35.300 the kinds of things that we should be concerned about and makes us apprehensive about premature

00:38:44.660 widespread use of these compounds in the general population right with respect to your point about

00:38:52.660 physical toxicity it's true that's that's incredibly limited so it'd be very hard to overdose with these

00:39:02.340 compounds they don't produce drug seeking behavior they're not considered classic drugs of abuse in fact if

00:39:12.260 one takes them repeatedly one becomes tolerant to their effects that is the effects uh reduce there's no

00:39:19.940 withdrawal symptoms we can't get animals to self-administer reliably psychedelics and that in and we have

00:39:28.500 paradigms which are very predictive of abuse liability of compounds in humans and and most of those come out

00:39:36.820 simply negative with psychedelics so they're not classic drugs of abuse just a word to the wise you need

00:39:44.260 to remove the cocaine dispenser in the cage before you give them the psilocybin dispenser

00:39:49.060 yeah so so the probability of getting animals to self-administer cocaine is well at least in our studies

00:39:58.740 in baboons is virtually a hundred percent there's not you know under the right conditions mammals are

00:40:05.380 designed in such a way that you make cocaine available to them and they're going to take it and

00:40:12.660 that's not the case with psychedelics as far as the pharmacology there is it thought that these just don't

00:40:20.660 drive the dopamine system do we think dopamine is simply not involved or it's just not involved to the degree

00:40:29.860 that drugs of abuse drive it well let's see so the pharmacology of psychedelics is very different than most of

00:40:36.260 those classic drugs of abuse and and most of them are thought to have their reinforcing effects mediated

00:40:43.780 either immediately or downstream through some kind of dopaminergic mechanism the psychedelics differ with

00:40:52.500 respect to having dopaminergic effects lsd is one that is said to be very promiscuous pharmacologically and

00:41:00.820 it does have some dopaminergic effects but certainly not to an extent that would drive

00:41:07.860 self-administration of the type that we see with other drugs that being said i i should say that mdma

00:41:15.300 ecstasy which is not a classic psychedelic does serve as a a reinforcer in laboratory animals does have a

00:41:24.580 dopaminergic component to it so they're very different kinds of compounds well well actually

00:41:31.460 let's start with mdma because this is the one where you know rumors of its toxicity have seemed

00:41:38.580 most indelible and you know ironically i think these rumors originate or at least they were amplified from

00:41:48.180 your own institution from johns hopkins i think it was george ricarte who published a paper which

00:41:54.340 now if i'm not mistaken is viewed as being somewhat under the shadow of either political

00:42:01.780 topspin or you know some other less than rigorous line of thinking about mdma and its place in the

00:42:10.500 culture what what's your current understanding of the physical toxicity of mdma so mdma has been

00:42:17.780 associated with neurotoxicity and and that's indisputable george ricarte has done a lot of

00:42:23.940 of that work but so have others so in pre-clinical studies mdma is neurotoxic to serotonergic systems

00:42:35.780 and that's been pretty clearly demonstrated the issue about george ricarte retraction of an article was

00:42:43.780 one it was a study published in science in which he published a study and then subsequently found that

00:42:51.940 the drug that the drug that he thought he had been giving and had published as mdma was in fact

00:42:58.820 methamphetamine and there's no issue that methamphetamine would produce that kind of

00:43:05.780 toxicity but i think that one misstep on his part has kind of blown out of proportion a little bit so

00:43:14.980 there re there really is the toxicity but the issue there with respect to humans is whether the dosing

00:43:22.660 parameters that produce those kinds of effects in laboratory animals are relevant to therapeutic

00:43:30.100 use of mdma right and that's a deeply contentious issue within that area fda has allowed therapeutic

00:43:41.060 trials with mdma to go forward i think under the assumption that the doses given of mdma and the

00:43:51.220 number of times that it's given that's really up to three occasions are going to very likely be under any

00:44:00.420 threshold to detect neurotoxicity however there are studies that have looked at people who have used mdma

00:44:10.100 extensively these are people using high doses in rave situations where they're using enormous doses and

00:44:17.620 they're using them repeatedly and there's some indication of memory problems and other sorts of

00:44:24.900 dysfunctionality it's not a clean slate there is potential for toxicity we don't know the extent of it

00:44:34.740 but what we do know is that's very different than the classic psychedelics that is psilocybin lsd

00:44:43.460 dmt and mescaline that are not associated with any such toxicity and for reference here so what is

00:44:50.980 considered the the appropriate human dose for mdma let's see well i think the clinical doses that are being

00:44:58.820 used range from about 75 milligrams to to 125 i think right i know clinically in europe they use

00:45:09.940 higher doses the protocols that are running right now sponsored by maps the multidisciplinary association

00:45:17.700 for psychedelic studies give mdma twice they'll start with a dose of something like 75 and then give a

00:45:25.140 booster dose uh an hour later but that's around the range so yeah i mean mdma is again not a classic

00:45:35.460 psychedelic what's the the term of jargon now that we like is it called an empathogen is that

00:45:42.900 achieved currency yeah that's one of the terms is the love drug and actually uh you yourself have

00:45:50.260 have testified to life-changing experience with yeah with mdma and so that effect is remarkable for that

00:45:59.220 sense of unbounded love and open-heartedness that emerges under that experience and it's being shown to

00:46:10.340 be quite effective in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and those are the clinical trials that are

00:46:18.340 ongoing now under the sponsorship of the maps group and they're proceeding and their effect sizes look

00:46:26.500 very large and promising such that we might expect approval of mdma as a medicine in anywhere four to

00:46:39.540 six years yeah so just linger on the on the prospect of toxicity for another second so i guess the

00:46:47.060 allegations i've heard here one is that the studies that showed neurotoxicity in rodents were under doses

00:46:56.100 that were just you know as you say not analogous to human use i don't know what the factor of

00:47:02.740 multiplication was there but you know much larger doses than would be analogous in a human body and i guess

00:47:10.100 the rave data could be confounded by what else ravers are up to you know dancing for 12 hours straight

00:47:17.860 and not drinking water what you know i mean there's issues with overheating what's your sense of given

00:47:24.180 the current state of things of the risk that people run taking mdma i mean let's leave aside i mean again

00:47:32.180 we're gonna we'll finish on a some description of of what would be optimal in terms of people getting

00:47:39.780 access to drugs should we arrive at a future where you know their therapeutic use is very well regulated

00:47:45.860 but so you know leaving aside the concern that you know someone might be taking on the street may not

00:47:52.020 even be mdma what are your concerns about mdma's toxicity and the normal dosage you know let's say

00:48:00.420 in one of these therapeutic trials i don't know it's notable that fda has approved this as a therapeutic

00:48:09.140 agent and so it's below their threshold of concern it if given as you know as suggested it should be

00:48:18.820 inside that protocols that have been approved i don't know what i suspect is there's little risk

00:48:27.780 for low dose very intermittent exposure but that's simply a guess you know our ability to

00:48:36.020 you know to tease out things like long-term neurotoxicity is given just the adaptability of the

00:48:42.420 brain is crude at best yeah let's move on to the classic

00:48:47.940 psychedelics which as you say are lsd psilocybin mescaline and dmt and dmt occurs in a pure form

00:48:57.220 that people you know have smoked or had injected and it also is one of the active components in a

00:49:05.540 traditional drug like ayahuasca and then there's also 5-meo dmt which is how anyone first discovered

00:49:13.620 that this was something you could take has to be a pretty colorful story because this occurs in the

00:49:20.100 secretions of a venomous toad that some some intrepid person wound up smoking at some point

00:49:26.660 in human history how would you like to begin here i'd like to talk about these compounds and their

00:49:31.220 utility and how you view them as different or the same let's see so the classic psychedelics

00:49:38.820 all have a primary site of action and that's serotonin 2a receptor and so that kind of

00:49:47.300 defines them the the ones that have been used most frequently as you say are dmt and mesclin which is

00:49:55.940 active in the peyote cactus used by native american and psilocybin which has certainly been widely used

00:50:04.100 particularly in mexico and other parts of the world as as the magic mushroom and then lsd which is a

00:50:12.500 synthesized compound that was first synthesized in 1943 all of those compounds have their primary

00:50:22.420 site of action at serotonin 2a and there's every reason to believe that most of the interesting

00:50:30.100 effects that they produce are mediated through that receptor signaling pathway and that's been shown

00:50:36.740 through a series of animal studies antagonist studies studies using knockout mice where they

00:50:44.980 knock out serotonin 2a and then human studies where they can give selective antagonists at that

00:50:53.060 receptor site and block the effects of these drugs that being said they're certainly not

00:51:00.020 identical they're more similar than different but they have different onsets they have different

00:51:06.180 duration of actions and in some cases hit well in all cases they also hit different sets of

00:51:14.500 receptors receptors and the most complex of those being lsd that hits a variety of different receptor targets

00:51:24.180 so frustrating to me and those of us interested in this area is that good double-blinded studies have not

00:51:33.060 been conducted that actually compare these drugs so there's a lot of anecdotal reports about differences

00:51:43.460 among these compounds but you know we won't know for sure about those differences until we can give them

00:51:51.380 under adequately blinded conditions to people under uniform conditions of controlling for expectancy

00:52:00.900 but they again they're they're more similar than different they all produce the set of

00:52:07.300 experiences as i described with our initial study with methylphenidate they're going to produce

00:52:12.580 visual illusions and emotionality and cognitive changes but i think that far and away the most interesting

00:52:21.540 area with these drugs is that they produce at least two kinds of very memorable effects

00:52:30.180 one is that they're quite apt to produce under supported conditions under optimized conditions

00:52:36.420 they're likely to produce a constellation of phenomenological effects that really map on to

00:52:45.140 classical mystical type experiences so you know the the description of those and actually

00:52:54.820 psychologists in the psychology of religion who have paid a lot of attention to that and develop

00:52:59.460 questionnaires that probe those kinds of effects and have factor analyzed the components of those

00:53:06.580 effects would suggest that those effects can be described as six kinds of categorical features

00:53:15.540 one being the sense of unity the sense of the interconnectedness of all people and things

00:53:23.780 another is a sense of the preciousness of these experiences some people might use the term

00:53:30.740 of sacredness or sacredness or reverence but there's something compellingly impressively deserving of respect

00:53:39.940 for these experiences there's a sense that's described by william james as the noetic sense the sense that there's

00:53:49.620 something more real and more true about these experiences than everyday waking consciousness

00:53:55.700 and then there are positive mood very often sense of open-heartedness transcendence joy

00:54:04.820 transcendence of time and space where

00:54:08.260 the past and the future collapse into the present moment so it's all about right now space becomes either

00:54:17.220 vast or endless or totally empty and then this sense of ineffability one of the first

00:54:23.700 things that people say after having such an experience is that i can't put it into into words those are the

00:54:32.180 features of something we call the mystical type experience and i i regret that was a branding error on our part

00:54:42.180 to develop a scale with that name because it's an empirically derived scale it doesn't

00:54:47.540 assume yeah any non non-material kind of spiritual realities it's just hard hardcore science and

00:54:57.620 you know we've done the appropriate psychometrics to evaluate that scale there is a justification for it in the sense that

00:55:06.420 these kinds of experiences are the classical contemplative religious mystical experiences which are again the experiences of a human brain

00:55:16.740 under some parameters and

00:55:19.700 it's just a fact that these drugs are not

00:55:22.980 producing experiences that the brain

00:55:25.940 isn't capable of having i mean you would expect

00:55:28.420 somebody somewhere to have experiences

00:55:30.980 precisely of this kind without having ingested one of these compounds because these compounds are just mimicking

00:55:38.020 neurotransmitters or

00:55:39.940 changing their level of of action you know at the synapse and lsd psilocybin mescaline dmt i mean in the case

00:55:47.460 of dmt dmt is already an endogenous neurotransmitter itself whose action i'm not sure we we yet

00:55:54.820 understand in either case whether you're meister eckhart espousing your heretical unity with god

00:56:01.700 or

00:56:02.820 you're somebody who has taken

00:56:04.980 a psychedelic

00:56:06.580 the resulting experience is

00:56:08.740 something the brain is doing

00:56:10.760 absolutely and i mean for me sam that's exactly what makes this

00:56:15.700 so

00:56:16.820 exciting these

00:56:18.420 experiences map on to these naturally occurring

00:56:23.260 mystical type

00:56:25.340 experiences

00:56:26.220 and so the puzzle up up until now has been what are these experiences you know are they

00:56:32.700 believable and and they haven't they haven't been amenable

00:56:37.740 to prospective scientific study because they occur

00:56:43.180 unpredictably and erratically i mean you know it's more probable if someone

00:56:48.620 engages in

00:56:50.140 spiritual austerities or goes on long-term meditation retreats or does prayer practice but

00:56:57.660 by no means are they are they probable and there's some people who are

00:57:02.220 given to interpreting them as a gift of divine grace so of course you can't manipulate them and

00:57:09.260 and what i what i see that we have with psilocybin because

00:57:14.060 we can occasion these experiences in a very high proportion of people that we

00:57:20.540 prepare and

00:57:22.140 and run through our protocol like 80 percent

00:57:25.820 so

00:57:26.780 that to me speaks to the

00:57:29.260 to the fact that these are biologically normal

00:57:32.940 effects were wired for them

00:57:35.980 if if you will

00:57:36.940 and it

00:57:38.220 and it raises a whole bunch of

00:57:41.740 interesting questions about what

00:57:43.980 what kind of evolutionary selectivity has

00:57:47.100 gone on there if that's the mechanism and presumably that

00:57:50.940 that makes these

00:57:52.460 experiences probable and then what in the world are there functioned both culturally

00:57:58.540 you know and for the survival of our species and

00:58:01.660 and and this is

00:58:03.740 kind of leans into

00:58:05.500 into your interest in

00:58:07.980 the well-being of conscious creatures

00:58:10.300 i think there's i mean i think there's something

00:58:13.260 uniquely interesting about

00:58:16.220 the resulting impact of these experiences

00:58:19.340 because one thing i really haven't talked about

00:58:22.220 is what the cut the long-term consequences of having these kinds of experiences are but

00:58:28.300 you know it turns out that

00:58:30.460 people months after this

00:58:32.780 after this experience if asked

00:58:35.580 how important was that experience or how meaningful was that experience on a

00:58:39.980 on a lifetime scale from

00:58:42.460 you know like a daily experience to once a week once a month once a year once every five years

00:58:48.460 you know 10 most five most single most important or meaningful experience of your life

00:58:53.660 we have about 80 percent 90 percent of people saying it's in the top five

00:59:00.540 most meaningful spiritually significant experiences of their entire

00:59:06.060 lifetime comparing it to the

00:59:08.620 birth of a firstborn child or the death of a parent

00:59:12.460 and that is

00:59:14.380 simply astounding to me so as a

00:59:17.020 clinical pharmacologist who's worked with

00:59:20.140 dozens of psychoactive drugs and given them at high doses to people and i'm accustomed to

00:59:26.220 querying people about their effects

00:59:29.020 that observation

00:59:31.180 literally blew me away because there's something about these experiences that people

00:59:37.180 interpret as having

00:59:39.740 enduring meaning going forward i mean so if you give a

00:59:43.020 high dose of a

00:59:45.100 opiate or sedative or cocaine

00:59:48.780 and ask ask someone a month later tell me about that experience

00:59:52.940 they'll remember it oh yeah you know it's like i got drunk you know we had we're laughing we had

00:59:58.940 fun whatever but it's just it's a memory the people who have these kinds of experiences

01:00:05.980 really talk about

01:00:08.140 the enduring salience of that experience it's not uncommon for people to say you know i

01:00:14.140 continue to think about that experience every day or

01:00:17.740 it's just informed my life

01:00:20.460 going forward and that's the curiosity about

01:00:24.780 about these uh these effects the other component about it that i think is so interesting

01:00:32.060 is that it has this strong positive valence to it very often in a strong pro-social

01:00:41.660 direction so there's something about these experiences i think it's particularly the unity

01:00:47.420 the sense that everything is connected and the profound sense that we're all in this together

01:00:54.060 there's something incredibly humbling

01:00:56.780 about these experiences and if that's coupled with the reverence for it and the truth value of it

01:01:04.460 that this is real more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness that becomes

01:01:10.220 reorganizational in a way that i i think has

01:01:15.260 profound ethical and moral implications

01:01:18.620 yeah yeah i i guess i'm just tempted to echo some of that and i i guess i would put mdma into

01:01:25.580 this class as well just for the purposes of this distinction but the point you make in your your

01:01:33.180 inventory around the the noetic quality of of the experience the fact that something when it when

01:01:39.980 it goes well and again we should always remind people that it's possible to have a bad trip that

01:01:46.540 has a very different character here where and again i leave mdma out of this but with classic

01:01:51.980 psychedelics you can have an experience that is very much like psychosis and when you come down

01:01:58.780 you you are you're having the experience of your your sanity being restored to you but when you have a

01:02:04.300 good experience on let's say lsd and here i would also include mdma it is the experience of something that

01:02:14.540 certainly seems more true more real and when you come down from that place the phenomenon is one of

01:02:25.820 having you know your usual habits of mind your usual preoccupations your the ways in which you

01:02:33.420 tend to use your attention begin to obscure this deeper truth that was laid bare during the the

01:02:42.060 peak of the experience and that's what's so it's among the things that makes these experiences so

01:02:49.260 durably transformative because what you can no longer deny you know after having having seen this

01:02:56.140 is that it's possible or should be possible to live from a much deeper place to be engaged with the

01:03:04.060 present moment in a way that conduces to awe and reverence and a recognition of beauty that by tendency

01:03:14.780 you are disposed to overlook right and and it's just you're viewing your life through this this kind of

01:03:22.300 scrim of discursive thinking and judgment and reactivity and self-talk and for reasons which

01:03:31.180 you're beginning to understand pharmacologically that gets held in abeyance for a time and you have this

01:03:39.820 full-on collision with the intrinsic beauty of consciousness in the present it can't just become a

01:03:46.780 memory because it becomes a reference point hence the the very common experience of seeking out

01:03:53.340 meditation and other techniques of changing one's engagement with the present moment because they're

01:03:59.180 both legal and you know they they have fewer risks you know when when used at libidum the transformative

01:04:06.940 power of of even one experience is not really mysterious once you've had it yeah but let me just comment that

01:04:16.780 is relatively rare i mean when we consider the millions of young people who got exposed to

01:04:23.420 psychedelics back in the 60s it was only a very tiny fraction that that were drawn into meditation and

01:04:31.580 going off on a path of seeking for most people under these kinds of conditions the experience is if not

01:04:40.460 uncomfortable even if it's transcendent there there's no conceptual frame there's no way to understand

01:04:47.900 it and so it's very often just put in a box and forgotten about it and that's that's where that's my

01:04:56.460 enthusiasm so we have actually studied now psychedelics in beginning meditators and in long-term

01:05:02.540 meditators because i think there's a convergence of those practices i think that both are complementary

01:05:11.740 approaches to exploration of the nature of mind and meditation it seems to me is the tried and true

01:05:19.820 course but it's a very difficult indeed to to reach some of those states and and sustain them i think of

01:05:28.940 psychedelics is the crash course and i think optimally some wise conjoint use of them may be the the best

01:05:41.420 approach to producing sustained senses of of well-being and appreciation is there any reason to prefer

01:05:51.820 naturally occurring compounds like the psilocybin in magic mushrooms or the mescaline in peyote

01:05:58.780 over lsd or mdma or is it is the distinction between what is synthesized and what is naturally occurring

01:06:07.980 spurious and if so what do you see the prospects of our devising new compounds that are even

01:06:15.660 more interesting in terms of their effects well let's see so with respect to synthesize

01:06:22.300 let's just take psilocybin is there a difference between synthesized psilocybin and psilocybin delivered

01:06:28.860 in the form of mushrooms you know we don't know they have they've never been compared head to head

01:06:36.140 people have strong opinions uh that surely there are differences as a pharmacologist i doubt that

01:06:45.820 there are meaningful differences there's a theoretically a possibility something like

01:06:49.660 psilocybin also has other potentially psychoactive tryptamines in it so there there could be some

01:06:56.940 qualitative differences you mean you mean the mushroom may have things in addition to psilocybin

01:07:02.380 yes yeah it does we we know it does and some of those are psychoactive but you know how those

01:07:08.060 interact with psilocybin and whether they're at doses sufficient to alter the nature of the effects is

01:07:16.940 is unknown yeah actually you're answering a slightly different question which i which i should have asked

01:07:22.540 but yeah i was i was taking it sort of as a given that that you know synthesizing psilocybin is getting

01:07:28.860 you the the real molecule okay and it would be the same as what's in the mushroom but i guess the

01:07:33.260 some people might have a bias or at least imagine that there's there's good reason to to prefer

01:07:40.380 a chemistry that you know we've evolved around right so these are compounds that that have been in in

01:07:48.620 plants and even in ourselves for millions of years and then there are molecules that people just invent

01:07:57.980 right and and have whatever effects they have and you have someone like sasha schulgen who was you 0.50

01:08:04.940 know holed up in his lab and in berkeley just cranking out new psychedelics you know many of

01:08:11.020 which i think he's the only person on earth who ever took so what do you think about that i mean in

01:08:17.020 terms of just pure innovation in this space pharmacologically let's see so as a psychopharmacologist

01:08:24.220 i i i think the prospects are just remarkable i mean they're they're probably thousands of variants of

01:08:31.900 these that can be synthesized and examined and there are going to be differences among them i don't have

01:08:38.940 any strong api or reason to think that that the naturally occurring substances are are going to be

01:08:46.700 better than than synthesized compounds but i you know i suppose that may be the case but i just see

01:08:55.980 this area is just ripe for an explosion of investigation of the nature of these effects

01:09:03.900 the nature of mind if you will the nature of consciousness you know i sometimes feel because

01:09:10.780 we were able to reinitiate these studies in in naive people after this you know decades long hiatus

01:09:19.420 you know i feel kind of like rip van winkle you know waking up with the tools of science today and and

01:09:27.740 everything that could have been done and that wasn't done for several decades and and what i see is the

01:09:35.260 prospects for this just to continue to unfold unless somehow this project goes off the off the rails

01:09:44.300 prematurely and we get a a societal clamp down on on these compounds which i think would be tragic as

01:09:52.860 far as i'm concerned there's so much to learn about the nature of human experience the nature of

01:09:59.740 consciousness but in particular the implications for ethical and moral behavior i think is preeminent for

01:10:09.100 me as i think it it is for you i'm sure because of your interest in moral landscape and and meditation

01:10:17.260 and i think there's something unique about these experiences that shine a bright light on the nature

01:10:23.900 of consciousness although we don't understand it and that it's something to do with the deepest roots of

01:10:32.220 the moral and ethical behavior that comes out of this understanding that is just that comes so

01:10:42.700 clearly through these experiences that we're all in this together we're all one of the things that

01:10:49.100 just strikes me about these experiences is that one is confronted with the unlikely fact that here we

01:11:01.580 we find ourselves as these highly evolved creatures over millions of years who can navigate the world we have

01:11:11.980 vision we can manipulate things we've developed mathematics and language

01:11:19.500 and ways of thinking we've developed science but the most amazing piece of this is that we

01:11:27.020 are aware that we're aware and we don't have a reason an answer for that as you and and your wife

01:11:36.700 has wonderfully written in her book conscious you know the hard problem of consciousness is not solved but

01:11:43.340 what is apparent when one is deeply contemplating that is the mystery of that and the sense of the enormity of

01:11:53.740 the of that mystery the gratitude for me at least that arises from being gifted this opportunity to

01:12:03.100 to to exist in this playground of consciousness the wonder of what what in the world does that mean and

01:12:11.900 kind of the humility of that and then recognizing that all

01:12:16.940 all conscious beings share that we're all kind of entrapped this is what we know

01:12:24.460 this is the only thing that we know is that we're conscious right it's the only thing we're

01:12:29.660 really certain of and and once you recognize of that of yourself

01:12:35.980 it's humbling and then you recognize it in other people and there's this sense that

01:12:43.340 geez we're we are in this together we need to take care of ourselves

01:12:47.580 and one another if we're going to survive as a species and there's something just so uplifting about

01:12:54.700 that i'm guessing that's the you know that's what guides you and your interest in developing

01:13:04.060 you know the waking up app and teaching people the prospect of investigating the nature of consciousness

01:13:12.060 and the nature of self and i think these super powerful tools yeah go right along that same line

01:13:19.980 yeah well so one of the features of the psychedelic experience that people find so

01:13:25.340 transformative and it's the one that's directly targeted by meditation is this suppression

01:13:33.260 or cutting through of the sense of self again we we have to issue the the obvious caveats there

01:13:40.620 there are ways in which a sense of self can be eroded or destabilized which are not optimal and and are

01:13:47.180 not what we're talking about here but there's a a loss of self which really is synonymous with

01:13:53.420 you know the center of the bullseye from a contemplative point of view and is is the thing that can

01:13:59.820 sometimes you know even often happen with some psychedelics which which is so notable that you just you

01:14:06.060 experience i mean it is the thing that that allows for the unity experiences of the kind you described

01:14:14.060 there's no longer a boundary between the knower and the known you're no longer standing on the side of

01:14:20.060 the world looking in your for a moment or if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast you'll

01:14:28.060 need to subscribe at sam harris.org you'll get access to all full-length episodes of making

01:14:32.940 sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content including bonus episodes early days in terms of

01:14:38.700 the and the conversations i've been having on the waking up app one the making sense podcast seems to be

01:14:43.580 that and relies entirely on listeners structures in the brain that have been described now linked

01:14:48.060 together in a construct called the default mode network which is a series of midline areas in the

01:14:55.100 brain which come online preferentially when people are whether when their minds are wandering when

01:15:01.100 they're just thinking quietly to themselves and not really on a task and these regions are further

01:15:08.620 invoked when you give someone a task that is explicitly self-referential when they have to think

01:15:13.180 about whether you know adjectives apply to themselves or have to think about um you know some kind of

01:15:20.460 narrative reconstruction of something that refers to them and so this is it seems to be again in the

01:15:28.220 studies that have been done that meditation diminishes activity in these in this network and

01:15:35.180 and psilocybin does as well i guess i'm asking you is has the research been done on lsd and and mescaline

01:15:43.260 and dmt do we know what they do to the default mode network lsd uh also decreases functioning in the default

01:15:51.260 mode network i believe dmt does in as ayahuasca but i'm i'm uncertain but it does it does seem to be a

01:16:01.580 relatively uh robust finding across a number of different investigations and it makes wonderful

01:16:12.220 sense because it really is connected with the sense of self-referential processing and that's

01:16:18.620 decreased or in long-term meditators it's decreased under psilocybin interestingly activity in the default

01:16:26.220 mode network is increased in depression and psilocybin is being evaluated for treatment of

01:16:34.540 depression so it it makes this wonderful story but i guess i would also underscore you know what a

01:16:41.740 primitive understanding we have the nature of self and consciousness and it's it's surely going to be

01:16:49.980 way more complex than that but it's but that's a a level of analysis and consistency of finding that's

01:16:56.700 really captured the imagination and is explicable it it's a great start but we have a long ways to go

01:17:05.660 before we understand it right yeah i mean the the other confound here i would introduce is that from

01:17:12.460 my point of view from the point of view of meditation and the the loss of self that is experienced

01:17:18.460 there it need not be associated with anything changing at the level of the the contents of

01:17:25.820 consciousness really i mean you can have a very ordinary entirely sober uh non-psychedelic awareness of

01:17:33.660 your the visual scene say and you know if you know how to be mindful of the the intrinsic selflessness of

01:17:43.260 consciousness well then it's just obvious that there's no subject in the head being aware of the

01:17:50.300 visual scene there's simply the visual scene and that experience can be had you know the the sense of

01:17:56.220 self can really be dissected out of conscious experience in a way that doesn't entail many of the other

01:18:04.300 effects that that are classically associated with psychedelics i mean there's a lot more you get

01:18:09.260 on psychedelics in addition to a loss of self if indeed you get that at all depending on your

01:18:17.020 experience yeah i let's see i absolutely agree i you know i think one really interesting area of future

01:18:25.020 investigation is to look at low dose psychedelics under under conditions of meditation yeah actually i meant to

01:18:34.220 ask you that because obviously micro dosing is very much in vogue what's your understanding of

01:18:41.180 that and attitude toward it i don't think i don't think we really understand anything about uh micro dosing

01:18:49.900 it's you know there's there's no science behind it i mean there's but it is in vogue it's i don't doubt

01:18:57.660 that there are effects there it's a difficult kind of a project to undertake scientifically because in

01:19:07.740 order to do it you need permission to give people psychedelics and let them out in the wild and i think

01:19:17.180 most review committees are going to be reluctant to do that allow that but i i think that needs needs to be

01:19:25.580 done there was i don't know if you saw the recent study of we've done a study in long-term meditators

01:19:31.980 we haven't published it yet but there was a recent study of uh psilocybin given to people on a buddhist uh

01:19:41.020 retreat it was uh i think it's a six-day retreat and half the group got psilocybin on day five they got a

01:19:50.220 moderate dose of psilocybin but not a micro dose the other half half didn't and they produce all the

01:19:57.580 kinds of effects that we would expect and and the kinds of effects that we've seen in long-term

01:20:02.780 meditators that actually people find that it deepens their practice they're more engaged with it in the

01:20:11.100 case of the retreat the deeper the experience on psilocybin the more positive enduring effects they had it

01:20:20.380 at four months and and that's what we found that in spite of the fact that people may have tens of

01:20:26.300 thousands of hours of experience with meditation that nonetheless they find these experiences to be

01:20:35.500 informative and interesting in ways that they find useful for their most most people useful for their

01:20:45.660 contemplative practice they're less likely however to find them discontinuous with anything that they

01:20:54.220 might have expected out of out of their contemplative experience because they're accustomed to

01:21:01.500 understanding the nature of mind the nature of appearances of objects in mind and de-identifying with

01:21:09.420 those so they're i think of long-term meditators uh if they come out out of certain contemplative

01:21:16.940 conditions are advantaged in terms of being able to learn from these experiences uniquely and what i'm

01:21:26.860 intrigued with is what you know what could be made of low dose repeated low dose experiences under conditions

01:21:36.460 where people were really taking them into contemplative practice and trying to learn further about the

01:21:43.500 nature of of mind what do you make of the fact that dmt is endogenous to the brain and also that the

01:21:52.220 the the pharmacology of it seems unique in that i now speak as one who's never taken dmt i've never

01:22:01.260 taken ayahuasca and i've never smoked dmt but apparently smoking dmt gives you not only

01:22:07.820 what is reputed to be the most intense psychedelic experience but the time course is incredibly short

01:22:14.140 i mean it's like a 10 minute experience as opposed to 10 hours with something like lsd and

01:22:21.980 again this is a compound that already exists in the body how do you think about that phenomenon you

01:22:28.780 know i don't know there's you know there's some a lot of speculation that maybe that accounts for near

01:22:34.860 death experiences or prophetic experiences but it's it's arguable whether dmt occurs in concentrations

01:22:44.060 sufficient to produce effects but i can tell you it's it's really an interesting compound we we just

01:22:53.100 have completed actually i'm writing up right now a pretty large survey study in which we were asking

01:22:59.980 people who had experience with dmt and reported this phenomena that seems most probable with dmt although it

01:23:08.460 occurs with other psychedelics of encountering a seemingly autonomous entity yeah and so terence

01:23:15.500 mckenna spoke a lot about the machine elves and so i was just deeply curious about that because we had

01:23:23.340 actually also earlier had conducted this survey of of experiences that people interpreted as encountering

01:23:31.020 god or god of their understanding well this was dmt encountering entities and i was i was prepared to

01:23:41.020 believe based on what i had read about these kinds of experiences that they were going to be

01:23:46.220 bizarre dysphoric uh kinds of experiences you know often unpleasant uh rick straussman talks about

01:23:54.860 people feeling like they're being experimented on or you know there could be insectoid kind of bizarre

01:24:02.300 creatures if i recall correctly from his book his book is titled the dmt the spirit molecule

01:24:07.900 uh at least one person felt that they were being raped by a crocodile yeah which doesn't immediately

01:24:14.460 recommend itself no but here's this really kind of was fascinating to me never so number one so this was like

01:24:23.820 over 2 000 people you know when we posted this thing people were just dying to you know give an hour to

01:24:32.700 tell tell us about this experience so there's this group of people who've had experiences that are you

01:24:39.260 know dying to try to explain them and and so one thing that comes out is that there there was no modal

01:24:47.660 description of the nature of the nature of that entity you know it was most often described as a

01:24:52.620 being or a guide or a spirit most people felt like they communicated uh with that entity they described the

01:25:02.300 predominant uh emotions that they and the entity experienced as love kindness and joy that was a

01:25:10.860 surprise uh they but they felt this much like our god encounter survey when we asked them what attributes

01:25:20.860 does this did this entity have uh and and and let me just say they're saying that this entity was more

01:25:28.700 real than everyday waking consciousness they believed that this entity existed it continued to exist

01:25:35.500 after the experience profoundly changed their basic conception of reality we asked them what attributes do they

01:25:44.220 attribute to this being and the top ones were intelligence consciousness and benevolence

01:25:49.980 so it it very much like the god encounter survey and a great factoid for you sam is that

01:26:01.660 those among those who identified as atheists before that significantly dropped to about a third so people who

01:26:12.460 who considered themselves to be atheists were less likely to identify as such pathogens and i take that 0.99

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01:26:25.820 you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast and to other subscriber-only

01:26:30.860 content including bonus episodes and amas and the conversations i've been having on the waking up app

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 02, 2019

#177 — Psychedelic Science

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