- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve Paulson, and this is "Luminous," a podcast series about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." One of the remarkable things about psychedelics is how they can transform your outlook on life. A chronically-depressed person might suddenly find a sense of meaning and purpose. A terminally-ill cancer patient may come to realize that dying does not have to be terrifying. These are the kinds of therapeutic benefits you often hear about. Well, recently a group of researchers found something else that's really quite amazing. A psychedelic trip can actually change your fundamental belief system.
- [Chris] What we found was that a single psychedelic experience when people were undergoing group experiences, generated this lasting reduction of physicalism. So they rejected the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is material or physical.
- [Steve] That's a big deal.
- [Chris] I would agree.
- [Steve] I mean, people's fundamental view of what reality is changes after one psychedelic experience?
- [Chris] Totally. And they then endorsed panpsychism, so the idea that everything in the universe is conscious.
- [Steve] This is Chris Timmermann, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London. So think about that for a moment. One psychedelic trip can turn your entire belief system upside down, which might sound like a great idea if you're fed up with a materialist paradigm that tends to rule science, but it does raise some big ethical questions if you're running clinical trials with psychedelics, is it really okay to convert atheists into panpsychists? This is the kind of messy, complicated terrain that Chris Timmermann likes to think about. He leads the DMT Research Group at Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research, and what's so intriguing about his work is how he brings together neuroscience with his interest in philosophy, especially phenomenology, what's actually happening in our minds during a psychedelic experience. I caught up with Chris when he came to Madison for a conference, and we had a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation on everything from fractals and ayahuasca ceremonies, to whether scientists who study psychedelics should talk openly about their own experiences. Oh, and we also got into that small question of what psychedelics can tell us about the nature of reality. So if you like big ideas, especially at that juncture where science and philosophy meet, I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. So we mostly hear about psychedelic studies of psilocybin and MDMA, not so much about DMT, I would say. Why are you, particularly, I mean, you focused especially on DMT, why?
- [Chris] Yes. Well, DMT is special for different reasons. One of them, one of the main reasons why I find it so interesting is that it induces a very significant alteration of consciousness, perturbations of our day-to-day experience where we deconstruct the ways in which we usually navigate and understand the world, and instead, a different world of experience arises, and it's incredibly engaging and interacting. So from that perspective, it's a particularly intriguing state of consciousness to understand and investigate the minds.
- [Steve] Is this different than, you know, classic psilocybin or MDMA experiences?
- [Chris] It's different in its reliability. DMT, you inject it, for example, in a lab study, and it will induce this change of consciousness. People will be in that different reality within two minutes, and they will be out of that by 10 to 12 minutes of the experience. So you can really map that whole state in that brief period of time, and you can, at the same time, study what are the biological mechanisms that are undergoing the physiological mechanisms, and so on. That's one of the reasons. The other reason is that I am from Latin America, I'm from Chile. There is an important Indigenous aspect to this study of DMT. It is part of the history and the culture of Latin America, because DMT is part of ayahuasca, this combination or misuse of plants that can be found in the Amazon, that when combined induce this longer-lasting DMT experiences, and that experience is associated to a specific set of belief systems and narratives and practices, that have to do with Latin American folklore. So it's an important part, I guess, from my cultural identity, which is why I think is so interesting, that's the other bit of why I find it relevant.
- [Steve] So is ayahuasca the thing that you are most interested in studying? Sort of the effects of ayahuasca in all its neuroscientific effects as well as sort of the more, the phenomenological side?
- [Chris] It's a very intriguing and fascinating, and certainly very meaningful for lots of individuals, but I'd say in general, not necessarily. I'd say it's really the component of all these different things that I'm fascinating. But yeah, and in DMT, it's a particularly interesting one, and as of late we've started to do a bit of research on 5-methoxy DMT, or 5-MeO-DMT, which is a kind of like a cousin of DMT, because while it shares a similarity in the name, really the effects are quite different in certain regards, is still short-acting, very intense experience, but while under N,N-DMT people feel that they engage with a very rich visual world of experience, what happens in 5-MeO-DMT, it seems that it's just this massive deconstruction of the sense of self, of these narratives and models that we build about ourselves. And people have these incredibly strong and meaningful ego dissolution or deathlike experiences.
- [Steve] Well, I've heard people describe, I mean, on a 5-MeO-DMT trip, essentially like a near death experience.
- [Chris] Yeah, I think I, yeah, I think I saw some, like a brief snippet with Christof Koch.
- [Steve] Yeah, that's his experience. We talked about that, and that's how he describes it. He says, "Yeah, you know, I had a near death experience." It was his 5-MeO-DMT, that's what he says, yeah.
- [Chris] Yeah, yeah. So the comparison has been made between near death experience as specifically 5-MeO-DMT, because it has that quality of death that some people report, because I mean, this is speculative, but one can think that when one is faced with a massive perturbation of all the structures of the minds, you know, what comes to the fore is this idea of death or, you know, the end of it all somehow.
- [Steve] Why did you get so interested in psychedelics in the first place?
- [Chris] I've always been fascinated by the minds. My primary interest in psychology and in neuroscience is really trying to understand what is going on. Which actually I find it, you know, when one thinks of the philosophy of it all, or, you know, from the field of phenomenology, for example, is really an important question. You know, the phenomenological tradition, for example, states that everything about reality, although it seems naively as if it's going out there, you know, our jobs, our families, our countries are, whatever it is, it is always a relationship between the experience that one has and that object outside in the world and in the environment. So really, the primacy of lived experience pervades every single aspect of, one could say reality in a way.
- [Steve] But you can study all of that without psychedelics.
- [Chris] But psychedelics are so much more interesting.
- [Steve] So it's really the non-ordinary states of consciousness that you're interested in.
- [Chris] Well, a lot of the non-ordinary, so psychedelics and meditation, I'm interested in the idea of perturbation. So in science-
- [Steve] And when you say perturbation, what do you mean?
- [Chris] A significant alteration of that.
- [Steve] Okay.
- [Chris] So within science, having a perturbational approach to understand the system is a classical way of understanding what it is that's happening, you poke the, it's like the curious kid that pokes the animal to understand what is going on there. I think that's the image that comes to mind when, why is it that a perturbation of consciousness is meaningful? So yeah, I think is a very valuable means to access that. It may be that is really, you are deconstructing the mind. You are somehow, while in psychedelic experience, a lot of it can be about adding stuff and content, if you look at things from a bit more of a detached view and not get so fascinated with the content, what is happening is that you are deconstructing these aspects that make up our everyday world and reality.
- [Steve] When you say deconstruct, are you talking about like stripping away sort of how we ordinarily think the mind works? You're kind of just like, "Let's get rid of all of that and let's see what's still there"? Is that sort of what you're talking about?
- [Chris] Exactly, that is what I'm talking about. You know, the whole idea around this idea of the predictive brain. So the idea of the predictive brain is that our experience of reality, although it seems as if it's a fixed thing out there, is more like this dance or conversation that our brains and our models that we have of experience are having with this environment. So it's this idea that within ourselves, we carry these predictions of the world, these narratives, these models of the world, and they actually make up our experience of the world as well. So if you perturb that sort of structure of models and narratives, you are possibly able to maybe gauge into some of the fundamental features that makes us human beings, for example, or those fundamental qualities that pervade all experiences.
- [Steve] Now, the phrase that a lot of people use in this field is, you know, you're knocking out the default mode network. Do you use that language, default mode network?
- [Chris] Sometimes, yeah. So it's interesting because default mode network is, you would say that at a experiential level, you know, we have this thing happening in the brain, right? Which is all of these areas that you look at fMRI that are co-activating, these are correlated brain areas, that would give you a sense that there's a network operating there. So that happens in the brain. And then what happens in the field of cognitive neuroscience is that then researchers do a bunch of tasks to try to understand what are the so-called functions related to that default mode network. The issue is that at the experiential level, at a more intimate subjective level, we don't quite understand what the default mode network signifies. I tend to think that it signifies these high-level narratives, the mind wandering thinking patterns that we make up of everyday reality that are somehow associated or linked to this default mode network. So yeah, you would say that that sits at the top of this hierarchy of what would make a sense of self, or that relates to a sense of self. It relates to our capacity to project ourselves in the future, remember the past, think about our relationships, all of these things that make up the mind that detaches from the here and now. And some of it relates to the sense of self. So yeah, you deconstruct that many times in psychedelic experiences or you're perturbing it in a significant kind of way.
- [Steve] So it sounds like you want to sort of know what's in the mind if you strip away the self. Is that fair to say?
- [Chris] That is part of it.
- [Steve] But why does that interest you?
- [Chris] You know, for example, this idea of the sense of self, especially this idea of a narrative sense of self, our identity is somewhat who's separate from other people, sometimes even our communities, is a fairly modern idea of what it means to be a human being. And therefore, the fact that you can somehow take away that in a psychedelic experience might tell us something that is more universal about what it is to be a human being. It might help us understand what it is to be a human being.
- [Steve] I mean, that's interesting. Because I think most people would say human beings have always had a sense of self, and people say that in western culture, it's a more pronounced sense of self, we're more individualistic. But you would think everyone, all humans have a sense of self, but you're saying maybe that's not true?
- [Chris] Maybe that's not true in the way that we understand I think a sense of self, right? So especially this idea of the narrative sense of self, the stories of the sense of self that relate to our memories of who we are, our childhood, and so on. If you look at some Indigenous cultures, there's a much more stronger emphasis placed on the idea of relationality, right? That being in the world doesn't have to do so much between, you know, the nodes of the cells that are connecting in this community network, but about the links that are connecting the nodes. And this sort of relational quality between individuals and between individuals and the natural environment plays a much stronger, apparently plays a much stronger role in the qualities of lived experience than in these stories that we've built in the western environments.
- [Steve] Yeah, so coming back to your personal interest in this whole field of psychedelics, does it come out of personal experience too?
- [Chris] Oh, I tend to not discuss the personal experience things in-
- [Steve] In public media.
- [Chris] Because-
- [Steve] Well, why is that? Because, I mean, just, like, I get it, of course. And yet, more and more neuroscientists who study this are starting to talk about their personal experience. I'm just sort of curious about your, why you don't wanna go there?
- [Chris] So the main reason, so I think that there's various reasons. So I come from an understanding that first-person experience in neuroscience is crucial for us to understand neuroscience or to understand biology, and that we've neglected this in science for a long, long time. Lived experience. So I find that, at a theoretical level, first-person experience is very important. However, in the field of psychedelics, there has been, I think, an over-fetishization of the individual experiences, especially of the researchers themselves, that has led, in many instances, to complicated social scenarios, because sometimes scientists are figures of some degree of public authority in some regards.
- [Steve] And yet, on the other hand, I mean, I'm just guessing that 98% of the scientists who study psychedelics have had their experiences. I mean, you know, why would you be in the field if you don't, for any length of time? And there's even a very real question of should you be in this field if you haven't had those experiences? I mean, it's sort of like, is it just gonna be too sort of alien, like, what you're studying there? So is it the question of credibility or that there's then too much of an emphasis on like the experience of the scientist is going to color the research then?
- [Chris] There is some concerns that there could bias in the kind of research that people do when they have their own experiences, or I would say when they're too fascinated about their own experiences. You know, going back to this idea of the sense of self and the importance of the sense of self, it has been playing also a strong, very, very strong role in the modern application of psychedelics in western settings with the idea, for example, of psychonautics when there's the individual who has this kind of like hero journey in their own psychedelic experiences, and they can reach all these kind of limits. It's almost like extreme sports, right? There's something going on there also with the fascination of an extreme sort of amount of psychedelics that a person can do. I think that that's a bit distracting from the kind of research that we can do when we focus too much on that. Now, when it comes to the importance of someone having their own psychedelic experience, I think this is fundamental, for example, to people who are training to be psychedelic therapists. It makes a lot of sense, right? So how could you be a good pilot if you've never flown before a plane? That would be kind of an analogy for that. For research, I think a variety of experiences can be somewhat helpful. You know, people having a very skeptical view can sometimes promote good science.
- [Steve] What are the questions you wanna figure out about DMT?
- [Chris] About DMT, well, there are several questions. The main question relates to why is it that this compound, a specific molecule induces some of these very idiosyncratic experiences that appear to have a profound way in which not only people have acute experiences of ayahuasca or DMT, but also in the way that they shape their worldviews and they shape their reality, so to speak, like these high-level narratives about how, you know, what is the fundamental nature of reality? So I'm interested in understanding that at a very broad level. Another aspect that I think is very crucially important is that when people are having these DMT experiences, they have experiences of seeing entities or beings.
- [Steve] You certainly hear that in ayahuasca stories, yeah.
- [Chris] Right? And so you hear it when people are having, they're having their DMT in their room and they're smoking DMT, and they talk about seeing aliens or stuff like this. And then you go to Indigenous contexts where ayahuasca is used, and they tell you, "No, no, the use of ayahuasca helps us to communicate with the spirits of the jungle because we are establishing a relationship with the spirits in these natural worlds and environment." So from that point of view is you can see a commonality at a cultural perspective. How is it that a molecule is able to induce these experiences is a completely fascinating one. And it really provides an intriguing bridge between what would be the world of chemistry and biology and the intimate, subjective world of human experience.
- [Steve] Why do you think DMT can induce visions of giant serpents, for instance?
- [Chris] Well, we don't know for sure, but we have some hints around that. Some of this hints relate to the notion or the idea that the action of DMT is particularly pronounced in these areas and systems of the brain that have to do with imagination, have to do with our ability to bring up worlds or realities of experience that have to do with, again, detaching us from the here and now, and as well appear to be related to systems in the brain that are somewhat linked to dreaming. So it's almost as if, I mean, a good useful metaphor to try to understand this, I think, is that our experiences in the world and the way that we take in these experiences and concepts, they make up the primary raw materials via which then in the DMT experience, they get reutilized and modulated in many, many different ways, that would give rise to these kind of experiences, these immersive experiences.
- [Steve] Do you think that's more true with DMT than, I don't know, psilocybin or LSD, or, I mean, to have these kinds of animalistic visions, for instance?
- [Chris] The data seems to suggest that is the case for sure, yeah.
- [Steve] And you think there's something that's triggered in the brain, in the, I don't know, the neuroreceptors or whatever that leads to those visions?
- [Chris] Well, there is certainly a neural correlate, I would presume, in the same way that you and me, having a conversation also ignites a part in your brain that has to do with social cognition or having a sense of presence in your experience of another person. So there would be a neural correlate related to that. But I think you're going on whether or not that completely explains away the experience. Now, I would say, I don't know, I am agnostic in that regard. And why is that? Because ultimately, the causality around these experiences is very hard to determine.
- [Steve] Can I just say I appreciate your scientific caution and maybe even skepticism, I don't know if that's the right word. I'm guessing you have a hunch about this. I mean, really, the question is this just kind of, you know, fireworks generated in the brain, or is there actually some connection to some other dimension of consciousness or of reality, I mean, isn't that the underlying question?
- [Chris] That seems to be the underlying question, no longer underlying. Again, I'm agnostic, I don't know. I mean, I would say that there is an important, of course, a component of biology in these experiences. The causal thing that ignites it appears to be very much related to a drug, right? I mean, without the drug, there is no experience. So there is a biological causal mechanism happening there. At the same time, when we look at how psychedelics experiences work, you know, one way, we were talking about this before we started, is that we refer to them as non-specific amplifiers. So that means that the cultural context in which those experiences occur have a significant influence on the qualities of that experience as well. So therefore, we are confronted in a very complicated question around causal mechanisms, because you have, on the one hand, the biological chemical mechanism happening in the side of the brain, but at the other hand, you have a causal mechanism happening at the level of context surrounding that experience.
- [Steve] Well, let me ask you about that. I mean, for instance, the typical ayahuasca experience, I don't know if this is a typical or not, but very common is, you know, it's in a ritualistic setting often with a group of people led by a shaman.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Steve] And the question is, how much is the setting all of that, putting aside the drug itself, but, you know, that whole cultural context, how much of that is shaping the experience?
- [Chris] Exactly. So we don't know to what extent that is shaping it, but we know it's strong and we have some evidence suggesting that that is the case. For example, we know that the level of preparedness people have, so that temporal context of that experience has a massive impact on the kind of emotional qualities that that experience will have. Traits of individuals will have an impact on whether or not people report a spiritual experience happening. And it certainly seems to be the case from anthropological evidence that if one is immersed in an Indigenous sort of cultural context, more of these cultural memes related to that Indigenous culture will emerge.
- [Steve] So, I mean, there might be a scenario where you don't actually take the DMT, but you have the whole, you participate in the whole ceremony.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Steve] You'd have some effects.
- [Chris] You would have some effects, but I would doubt that they would be as strong as if you would have the psychedelic. And in fact, there is some evidence in which they try to trick people and say, "Look, this is LSD," and they go to a party, and then they give them rating scales about how strongly they're tripping. And there are some effects, but it's not really the effects of psychedelic experience. And that seems to be the case because it seems that psychedelics enhance suggestibility, they enhance also this quality of taking in these elements of context and making them real in your own experience. So it's kind of tricky, this idea of non-specific amplifiers because it doesn't tell you much about, you know, what is really fundamentally going in that experience.
- [Steve] Yeah.
- [Chris] But it certainly seems to put, I think, a lot into question our understanding, of, for example, what causes a specific kind of experiences. And it puts into question the usual dichotomies, the usual way in which we split our understanding between the internal and the external, for example, when it comes to the causes of any kind of experience, not just a psychiatric experience.
- [Steve] Let me ask you about another dimension that's very common in ayahuasca experiences, and that's people throwing up.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Steve] And a lot of people say the purging is both a physical and a spiritual cleansing.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Steve] How much is that part of the ayahuasca experience? I mean, how much do you, have there been studies of like how much that shapes the experience itself?
- [Chris] There's been qualitative studies around purging and the kind of impact that it has on the quality of that experience. We don't see it happening so much when we give DMT alone in lab conditions. Actually, we don't see it at all. Nobody has ever purged, at least purged understood as just vomiting, right? Because if you talk to some Indigenous cultures, purging is not just the vomiting. Purging is the yawning, purging is the tears, purging is an idea of a cathartic element that is happening at the level of the body, a somatic sort of element of purging. So it seems that that quality of purging has been linked a lot with this experience of letting go, at least by western individuals who are purging in these sort of ceremonial contexts, and letting go of what? Well, that is an intriguing question that requires further research, but it seems to be about letting go of trauma. Some people might qualify, for example, that, you know, relate, that have an intention of treating certain mental health aspects, depending on the context that letting go could be letting go of demons, for example, according to specific syncretic uses of ayahuasca, in which they combine elements of the Christian tradition of saints and demons and so on, with some of the animistic worldviews of Indigenous knowledge. So they say like, "Oh no, you have a mental health problem. It's because you've had an intake of specific kind of spirits and demons within your system, and you need to purge them, and the ayahuasca is gonna help you in that process." So it can shape that experience.
- [Steve] I mean, but partly what you're saying is that a psychedelic experience is not necessarily just something that happens in your head, you know, it's not just a thing.
- [Chris] 100%.
- [Steve] I mean, there's a bodily aspect to this.
- [Chris] Well, not only a bodily aspect, I think this is connecting it a bit with what we were talking about before, is this notion that the experience is shaped not just by the brain, also not just by the body. The body plays a humongous role, especially around the idea of purging, but also the context. The ceremony has an impact in the experiences. A skilled shaman who is helping people in an ayahuasca experience, has the cultivation of specific kinds of know-how around holding that space in a safe and effective way that could be incomparable to those of a contemporary sort of psychedelic therapies, who's attending a one-year course in masters in psychedelic therapy, for example. So this is the fascinating thing I think about psychedelics in general is that they really bring to the fore this notion that the mind is not something that just resides in the brain, but it's embedded within these larger systems that make up our worlds.
- [Steve] You're listening to "Luminous," our podcast about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm talking with Chris Timmermann, the neuroscientist at Imperial College who leads the DMT Research Group. I'm Steve Paulson. Can I ask you a really basic question? What is a psychedelic experience? I mean, what makes that different than any other kind of, I don't know, non-ordinary state of mind?
- [Chris] Right, so the classic definition of it, if you look at the typical papers, the landmark papers, is that, you know, a psychedelic experience is that which is related to a significant alteration of perception, emotion, and cognition.
- [Steve] You could get that in meditation though, right?
- [Chris] Yeah, maybe? I need to go to these dojos. No, no, but yeah, I mean, I guess it can be achieved with a good degree of practice and in the right context in meditation as well as in a range of other experiences, right? The psychedelics have been described as non-specific amplifiers, right? So that they amplify contents of or structures of the mind that were already present there before, or they can amplify things of context that are out there, for example, in a ceremony, the shaman singing, there's a tiger coming and the tiger appears in the experience, and so on. But as I was mentioning to you before we started, I don't think this fully explains some of the specificity of psychedelics. Now, when we speak about psychedelics, I'm referring here to the classic psychedelic substances such as LSD, DMT, mescaline, and psilocybin. One thing that we see that, for example, in my studies with DMT, we've given over 100 administrations, I think 99% of people, because there might be a couple instances where they don't say this, people see geometrical patterns, geometrical patterns and fractals.
- [Steve] What is a fractal just for, you know, people who aren't very, very up on their geometry?
- [Chris] So fractals refer to forms or shapes that have what you call scale-free properties. So where a small part of a shape is repeated in larger scales in a repeated fashion.
- [Steve] Okay.
- [Chris] A good intuition of what a fractal is is these broccoli, there's this kind of broccoli, the fractal broccoli, you can type that in your computers while you're hearing this, put fractal broccoli, and you'll have a hint of a psychedelic experience. Or a tree has fractal properties. You find fractal properties all around nature, actually. So we find that that experience of geometries and fractals appear to be some very reproducible in these high-dose psychedelic experiences. If you go to a museum in my country in Chile, and you look at the tablets in which some of the Indigenous populations used to use DMT 2,000 years ago, you will find very similar geometries and fractals. If you go to a museum in Mexico linked to the use of peyote, you will see Indigenous art with geometries and fractals. So it seems that there is a specific quality of psychedelics that is related to these visual experiences that are particularly relevant around geometries. And this is where it gets really fascinating. We don't have a full understanding of where the geometries and fractals are coming, but the best of our guesses via computational modeling and so on, is that these are manifesting areas of the brain that have a geometrical organization, which is really kind of cool in a kind of esoteric way, because it's almost as if you are turning your eyes from the outside to the inside of the brain. And it kind of plays an interesting sort of twist on this idea that psychedelics are inducing hallucinations, things that are not necessarily real.
- [Steve] I mean, isn't this a hallucination?
- [Chris] What you're talking about?
- [Steve] Maybe we have to define what a hallucination is.
- [Chris] Well, maybe not when it comes to the geometries and fractals, maybe when it comes to the geometries and fractals, you are getting a possibly warped experience of biological structures of your brain to a certain extent. Whether or not the experience is a hallucination depends very much, I would say on the preparation, the cultivation of certain traits that the person has when they go into that experience, how people make sense of that experience, that can change the narrative of that experience and how that experience is being guided by a facilitator or a shaman. I think those aspects can certainly modulate to what extent a person is having what you would call a delusion or not, even when all those things are controlled, some aspects of the experience can be true, some aspects of that experience are not necessarily true.
- [Steve] So explain what you mean with some might be true and some might be delusional.
- [Chris] Well, it really depends on what we define as truth or at least valuable information. I can give you an example. We've had patients undergoing psychedelic therapy with magic mushrooms, in which most of the subjects, they have meaningful, valuable insights about their own personalized biography and relationships. They realize things that they weren't aware of before, and that is incredibly helpful for mental health. A few, very few participants can have false memories appearing. And those false memories can sometimes relate to instances of abuse, for example. In some cases, those have been turned out to be false.
- [Steve] This is like the whole debate over recovered memory, as an adult, suddenly, you know, people think they remembered they were abused as a two-year-old, three-year-old, something like that. And the question is, did it really happen?
- [Chris] Exactly, exactly. There was a similar thing happening with hypnosis like 20, 30 years ago, and there were legal cases related that when they use hypnosis as evidence in court, so this can lead to important issues, right? Whether or not the experience is real at that personally meaningful level of individuals. So I would argue that yes, the experience can be true and useful in many regards. Let's say, for example, the case of geometries, an element of it that seems to be piercing behind a veil that's fascinating. At the level of valuable information for the individual, that can be definitely valuable and true for that individual in the way that they make meaning out of the world.
- [Steve] Why would seeing incredible geometric patterns have personal meaning?
- [Chris] So I was referring more about the memories that have-
- [Steve] Oh, okay. You're talking, okay, you're talking about the memories, you're not talking about the fractals.
- [Chris] But I can also answer that one, why not?
- [Steve] Okay, okay, sure.
- [Chris] Well, because the biological world around us also has that geometrical and fractal display, many times when people have these experiences of geometries and fractals, they deem that they are incredibly beautiful and aesthetic. There is this phenomena of nature connectedness increasing following psychedelic use. And that appears to last over two years, according to some of the research the team at Imperial has done. It seems as if people get more connected to nature, they seem to appreciate more the aesthetic qualities of nature, and they start also relating, or having a sense that they themselves are part of the natural world. This could be related to, in part, these experiences of geometries and fractals that are occurring during the experience that they see that it's part of their own biological making, that can be incredibly meaningful.
- [Steve] So I'll just inject a little bit of personal experience here. So the very first time I ever had sort of a high-dose psilocybin experience, I had exactly what you're talking about, sort of these incredible geometric patterns. And, you know, as I was thinking about that, I was thinking, "Wow, this is sort of, like," the image that first came to mind was I was in a mosque and seeing sort of this ceiling, and then sort of, I thought maybe this was the shape of the sky of the cosmos or something like that. I was sort of trying to figure out like, what did these geometric patterns represent in some way? And, you know, I have no idea. I've never figured it out, so.
- [Chris] Yeah, well, you know, that's a hint.
- [Steve] A hint for what? Tell me.
- [Chris] I mean, no, that's a hint, the idea that you're accessing maybe structures of nature or biology to a certain extent that are beautiful and incredible.
- [Steve] Yeah, you have done studies also of how psychedelic experiences can change people's worldviews. And as, like, they might come in as staunch atheists, materialists, and they don't necessarily end up that way after-
- No.
- [Steve] Psychedelic experiences. Wait, what have you found?
- [Chris] So I was particularly interested in this idea that a single experience can change your outlook on what is the fundamental nature of reality, right? So it seems that these experiences can certainly have a massive impact. So we tested this, we developed a questionnaire called the Metaphysical Beliefs Questionnaire, assessing different sort of, like, metaphysical notions about the ultimate nature of reality. One of them, for example, is physicalism, the typical one associated with science. It doesn't necessarily have to be, but it's the typical one associated with science. Whereas, you know, all things in the universe, including the minds emerge from physical matter.
- [Steve] Right, the mind is just a product of neurons and synaptic connections.
- [Chris] For example.
- [Steve] Right.
- [Chris] The opposite view is called idealism, that really the fundamental nature of everything is mind, consciousness, or the soul, depending on how you call it. And then physical, material stuff are really emerging from that soup of mind that is pervasive and everywhere, that's idealism. And dualism is like, you have both, right? So what we found was that a single psychedelic experience when people were undergoing group experiences, generated this lasting reduction of physicalism. So they rejected the idea that the fundamental nature of reality is material or physical.
- [Steve] This is after one psilocybin experience.
- [Chris] After one psilocybin experience, or one ayahuasca experience in group settings.
- [Steve] That's a big deal.
- [Chris] I would agree.
- [Steve] I mean, people's fundamental view of what reality is changes after one psychedelic experience?
- [Chris] Totally. And they then endorsed panpsychism more strongly. So the idea that everything in the universe is conscious, which is interestingly similar to some animistic perspective that you see in religions cultures, right?
- [Steve] Yeah.
- [Chris] That the world out there is alive, is also mind.
- [Steve] So I have a couple of reactions to that finding. I mean, one is that's totally cool and it seems like a good thing. I mean, if part of the problem that our civilization is facing is we're cut off from nature, if we're more connected with the natural world, all of that, on the other hand, if you're changing someone's view of reality by having a psychedelic experience, it raises some ethical questions. I mean, is that okay to do?
- [Chris] Totally, absolutely, both things can be true. Again, you know, taking the Indigenous perspective of relationality, if relations is all that matters, and our process in life is a way of having this constant conversation with nature, that probably would allow for some more sustainable ways of living in the world, one could argue. At the same time, as you mentioned, the fact that they can change your worldviews can potentially lead to forms of brainwashing or social manipulation.
- [Steve] I mean, this is sort of like taking the red pill in "The Matrix," right?
- [Chris] Taking the red pill in "The "Matrix" with somebody possibly telling you what is the ultimate nature of reality. And this is where the element of risks around psychedelics become particularly prominent, and particularly risky, and problematic.
- [Steve] What is the risk?
- [Chris] That they can be used as tools for social manipulation. And, you know, we have some case examples here and there, some nasty ones like the Manson family in which LSD was used, for example, to do horrible things. I mean, sects and cults in general. So the issue that comes to the forefront in this regard is how do we deal with these issues of consent? Many times when people want to get better out of mental health conditions, such as depression, and they want to have the new therapy, which is psychedelic therapy, they're not necessarily asking for a change in their beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality.
- [Steve] Right, they don't wanna be depressed anymore.
- [Chris] They just don't wanna be depressed. However, many good psychotherapists would argue that every meaningful process of psychotherapy involves a degree of metaphysical change, the way in which we understand the world. What is crucial is that we become aware of these processes so that we enhance mechanisms of consent, when people are undergoing that, this might change your worldview. But also, I think, very importantly, that people engage in psychedelic practice, whether it is underground or overground therapists or people working in ceremonial settings, in western settings, and so on, that they also become aware of their own narratives and how those narratives can then be impinged on everyone who is undergoing that experience to become aware also of the ego inflation mechanisms and temptations that are associated with that. That's also important, very important and very meaningful.
- [Steve] Well, I mean, it's interesting you say that because I mean, there is, I don't know if bias is the right word, but there is a strong tendency in a lot of the clinical trials at western universities that, you know, having a high dose of psilocybin is gonna induce a mystical experience. And for it to be meaningful, you need the mystical experience.
- [Chris] Yeah.
- [Steve] I mean, it sounds kind of good, but on the other hand, I don't know, are people being programmed to have whatever a mystical experience is, and maybe it's being defined by the people running the study.
- [Chris] Yeah, I mean, I would agree that that is very much the explicit case, the explicit case for some, actually, and I think there needs to be more honesty about that, that it is really what you're doing, there's a mechanism, an element of priming that is being promoted in these aspects of preparation, right? With that being said, and with all the good things that come out of a so-called mystical experience, I would argue that it's emerging evidence around other sort of experiential mechanisms that appear to be quite important and relevant for the psychedelic experience to have beneficial outcomes. One of them is, for example, cathartic experiences or emotional breakthrough, the possibility for people to have a wider emotional range of experiences that occur in that sort of altered state. I think this is very important because we tend to neglect that effective or emotional quality that these experiences might have. At the same time, I think that a focus on the so-called mystical can leads to forms of escapism.
- [Steve] Oh, really? Like, sort of like it would, I don't know, in meditation you chase after the peak experience, the profound experience, and maybe you're not dealing with your basic emotional issues?
- [Chris] Exactly. But at the same time, I'd say in meditation, the qualities that are being cultivated are those of remaining grounded, right? And I think that a missing piece still, I think in psychedelic culture, if you wanna call it something like that, is how to cultivate as well that element of being grounded while still having these very profound experiences, experiences of awe and wonder, for example. I don't think you necessarily have to exclude one or the other, but a hyperfocus on just the mystical qualities of that experience can lead into forms of being a bit less grounded in the world and neglecting the importance of working on personal relations, the importance of working on one's own personal issues and favoring the spiritual, mystical state, however it is defined by that individual.
- [Steve] Why do you think psychedelic therapy can be so effective? I mean, why do psychedelics seem to help people with depression, PTSD, addiction, all those kinds of things?
- [Chris] Well, that's a very good question. So far, I mean, the evidence is not conclusive, it's very promising, the evidence, it seems that there's a two-way mechanism that appears to be key. One of it has to do with how these drugs are flexibilizing our brains. They're inducing forms of neuroplasticity at the level of the structure of neurons, but also at the way in how the brain is functioning. It's being more flexible, more fluid, less rigid, the way of the mind and the brain, the way that it operates. But I would argue that that is not the whole story, that's only part of the story. The other elements that is key in the process is that of the therapy itself, the contextual elements surrounding that experience, right? So the preparation of that experience, you have sessions in which people are being promoted to have specific kind of intentions and expectations about the experience. They become prepared about the psychological effects of the substances, and so on. And then after the experience, episodes of integration, right, where the people make sense out of that experience.
- [Steve] Which seems like a huge question. I mean, how do you make sense of that? And what's the role of the facilitator or the therapist in that process?
- [Chris] I feel that it's the crucial, crucial elements. I mean, more and more evidence, for example, shows that the degree of therapeutic alliance, or the capacity of therapists and patients to align their goals for the process of therapy predicts how better people get when they're undergoing psilocybin therapy for depression, for example. Now, the question of therapists, and here we go back to this question of personal experience, right? The preparation of the therapist, I would argue is really fundamental. Now, we don't have data for this yet. We really need to do this kind of experiments. But to understand the kind of transformations that a therapist needs to undergo so that they're able to accompany people in this therapeutic process is really, really important. If you look at the level of preparation that, for example, a shaman would have, it's a lifelong preparation. It is a transformation of the individual that helps individuals then get the most out of this experience, right? And also keep the experience safe. Similar analogy in the context of an ayahuasca ceremony, when an individual feels that it's being possessed by an animal and starts transforming into the animal, is the development and the cultivations of the intuition of that shaman that is able to do effective interventions to keep that very intense experience within safe grounds for that individuals and for everyone around that individual. So I would argue a very similar thing happens for psychedelic therapists and the extent in which these capacity skills and traits are cultivated, I would speculate, really predict the success and the safety of this therapeutic process.
- [Steve] I mean, it sounds like that's an argument for the therapist has to have considerable personal experience in psychedelics. I mean, if you're gonna, if you understand what's happening to the person you're sitting with, you kind of have to have been through that yourself probably multiple times and enough times to kind of process and figure out what it all means.
- [Chris] I would agree. And here is where, again, we can go back to the idea of hallucination or confabulation versus reality, and value in the experiences. If the therapists have had their own trajectory or path around their own psychedelic processes and know the kind of pitfalls that can occur when things appear to be very real and meaningful, for example, but they turn out not to be, they can also provide a form of gradual orientation also in that patient that will also undergo a similar kind of process.
- [Steve] It's a reality check.
- [Chris] It's kind of a reality check, yeah. It's a way to heal in a meaningful relationship as well. So this relational element in the process of psychedelic therapy, I really think is key.
- [Steve] So given that, and now that in the United States at least, you know, it looks like various psychedelics are gonna get FDA approval, there is the question of what kind of training should therapists get who are actually sitting with people going through these experiences? I mean, is there, like, what would be the ideal therapeutic training?
- [Chris] So I think here there's a lot that we can learn from classic psychotherapy schools, like psychoanalysis or family system therapy, where really, it is well understood that what one cultivates is not just a form of what you would call declarative knowledge or learning, where you're just doing a little of a checklist of your concepts that you know in your head, but it's the cultivation of that individual, the embodied cultivation of that person. You're cultivating intuition, you are transforming as an individual is what we refer to with some colleagues as a form of apprenticeship really, that is what you would need to have that sort of safety and efficacy when dealing with others undergoing that state. You know, it's a bit seems to be lacking in the contemporary training programs that appear to be out there about one year training, two years max.
- [Steve] Are there formal training programs? I guess they're just starting, but I mean, it seems like a bit of a wild west out there in terms of what kind of credentials or what kind of training you need if you're gonna be a psychedelic therapist.
- [Chris] Oh yeah, it is a bit of a wild west. There's many different alternatives. None of them ensures any form of certification so far. You have some that are more respectable than others because they have been historically linked to the use of these substances in studies, for example, MAPS trainings, and so on, whereas others are more appearing out of the blue.
- [Steve] What do you see, just to kind of wrap up here, what do you see as the big question still out there about, for people who are studying psychedelics? I mean, whether it's from the neuroscience perspective or from the phenomenological perspective, I mean, what are the big questions out there that we still need to figure out?
- [Chris] So I think that the essential questions still very much remain alive and incredibly relevant. So one is whether or not psychedelics can provide true insights about who we are as human beings. Is it true that psychedelics are somehow revealing aspects of the mind? That is important for us as human beings to understand, I think, in general, why is it that we have cultivated these relationships with these substances for so many generations?
- [Steve] It's interesting you would say that's a big, 'cause I think most people who are in the field would say, "Yes, of course, that's the whole point."
- [Chris] It's a hypothesis. I mean, it's in the same way that I would still say that the question stands around meditation. Does meditation actually provide a more accurate insight about the human mind? I tend to think yes, but I think we still need to figure that a bit better. And then the other question is still a very fundamental question is, are these insights valuable? Is it valuable to understand one's own mind? Does it really promote some form of health? Some would argue that maybe some form of ignorance promotes health.
- [Steve] What would be the argument that ignorance would promote health?
- [Chris[ Well, I think that there's an Interesting sort of idea popping up recently that, for example, we live in a culture that has reified the idea of trauma a bit too much, for example, and that we have become hyper-vocalized around the idea of personal suffering and trauma. And therefore that produces a bit of a looping effect in which, you know, there's a hyper-focus on that.
- [Steve] So maybe it'd be better to forget in some situations.
- [Chris] Or for example, that it reifies, yes, or for example, that it reifies, and yeah, by the way, there are some therapies that aim to do that, that as soon as you get traumatized, you need to have a specific kind of, sort of deleting all of that memory formation. The other is that, in a way, these are experiences that also, while they appear to induce ego dissolution experiences, they can also reinforce narratives about ourselves and a sense of individuality. It seems that, for example, loneliness appears to be an incredible predictor of decreased mental health, one of the strongest predictions that you can have, and therefore understanding ourselves as embedded within larger communities appears to be more significant, whether or not psychedelics promote forms of loneliness or reduce it, I think is dependent very much on the context in which they're used.
- [Steve] Oh, that's interesting. I guess I would've intuitively thought they reduce loneliness, but you're saying the opposite might happen as well?
- [Chris] It seems that it reduces it in collective settings when people are having experiences in these community environments. But when people are having psychonautic experiences, you know, and I've met a lot of these individuals, sometimes, you know, having DMT experiences three times a week alone in the rooms, it seems to be promoting a sense of solipsism in which they're building their own worlds and looping in their own little systems, and so on. That doesn't seem very healthy from a external perspective.
- [Steve] That's fascinating.
- I think so too.
- [Steve] Thank you, this has been fun.
- [Chris] Yeah, I agree, thank you very much.
- [Steve] That's Chris Timmermann, a neuroscientist at Imperial College, where he leads the DMT Research Group at the Center for Psychedelic Research. You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the Podcast Feed where you will meet a lot of amazing people, including Gul Dolen, the neuroscientist who's given MDMA to octopuses, Eric Davis talking about the history of LSD in the psychedelic underground, and Spring Washam, who's both a Buddhist teacher and a healer who works with plant medicines. "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Joe Harkey is our technical director, Sarah Hopeful did the sound design for this episode, and Angelo Bautista is our digital producer. I'm Steve Paulson. Be well, and join us again next time.
- [Narrator] PRX.
