Episode 136
How your mind works on mushrooms
Whether it's problem-solving an issue, coming up with a new product, or making a mark on the world, our personal vision of success often needs new ideas. But what if you’re stuck in a rut?
What if the usual ways of “shaking the snow globe” just won’t cut it any more?
What if the way forward isn't the state of our business plan but the state of our consciousness?
On this episode, Carlos and Laurence welcome Dr David Luke, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, for an enlightening conversation.
He’s published over 100 academic papers, including ten books, and is also a co-founder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness. His research includes altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics.
Why? Because there’s an ever-increasing body of renewed research into the use of these substances to help nudge our brains out of our habitual thinking patterns.
But you don't need to take drugs to access the states of mind they trigger.You can feel more creative, less inhibited, and more connected to yourself, others, and the natural world.You just need to know how your mind truly works.
Discover how altered states can:
- Disrupt habitual thought patterns to spark innovative ideas
- Increase neuroplasticity and open the door to personal growth
- Foster a deeper connection to yourself, others, and the natural world
Links
Transcript
Dr.
Carlos:David Luke is associate professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich.
Carlos:And I'm gonna read from his LinkedIn bio 'cause there's some things here that I really quite like.
Carlos:His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena, and altered states of consciousness.
Carlos:I'm already sucked in.
Carlos:Really curious about that.
Carlos:And when he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, doing DMT field experince, experiments, observing weather control with Mexican shamans, he directs the ecology, Cosmist Unconsciousness Salon at the Institute of Ecotechnics London.
Carlos:And there's other stuff there, but even that just, there is a smorgasbord of delight in just reading that, which I hope is what we're gonna get from this conversation.
David:Thanks Carlos and Laurence.
David:I think I just, I kind of, uh, doubled around with my own pain, like a bit of a neurochemistry play set in my youth as a teenager and, you know, wanna try and understand some of those experiences.
David:And so somewhat naively went away and studied psychology, expecting to get lots of answers, and of course after a three year degree, learn absolutely nothing about the psychedelic experience, uh, but you know, lots about kind of more.
David:A normal mainstream psychology.
David:Uh, so, you know, accidentally, I guess I was compelled to stay in the academy and just put in what I thought was missing for me at least.
David:Uh, and I guess what really excites me about this work is, well, when I started out doing it, it was kind of career suicide as was studying parapsychology.
David:So I committed double career power suicide, uh, as well.
David:But now, you know, psychedelics are a hot button topic, which is great.
David:So that's really amazing and it's great to see that kind of huge sea change that's occurred in around the study of psychedelics and, you know, potential uses.
David:But I think, you know, the ideas around parapsychology and transpersonal psychology are still somewhat languishing.
David:Uh, and for me, I think, uh, psychedelics are a brilliant bridge, uh, into these worlds between science and the world of what we might call shamanism or, you know, indigenous worldviews and perspectives.
David:You know, contrasting indigenous wisdom against Western kind of knowledge based systems.
David:And, uh, I see psychedelics as a brilliant bridge in, in kind of bringing these two worlds together.
Carlos:So maybe to begin with, for anyone who's listening who isn't necessarily familiar with some of these terms, are you able to provide a five-year-old's description or explanation of parapsychology transpersonal psychology?
David:Yeah, yeah.
David:So parapsychology is the study of those experiences which at face value they look like they defy our kind of current understanding of the limits of the mind and brain.
David:Such that they seemingly, they study the seeming experiences of people kind of obtaining information from beyond space and time, without the usual five senses.
David:So like, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition occasionally psychokinesis, which is affecting the world directly with your mind.
David:And also things like out of body experiences, near death experiences, afterlife, communications, mediumship.
David:And transpersonal psychology also involves all of those experiences because they come into this bigger umbrella of the transpersonal, which is those experiences which take us beyond our normal everyday ego identity into a sense of deeper connection with some kind of other, be that another person or, another being or species or, something spiritual.
David:two things.
Carlos:No, that's really useful.
Carlos:I really, well, at least for me, uh, 'cause I can get very judgy about this stuff.
Carlos:And think, uh, is that, not sure.
Carlos:Uh, and so to satisfy that kind of cynical side of me.
Carlos:Would you be able to then maybe give us a bit of a brief tour of, I know the neuroscience, the brain, how the brain works is according to, you know, your perspective and point of view?
David:Yeah.
David:Well, I think there's a lot we do not know about neuroscience and about consciousness.
David:I think we're only beginning to delve into this.
David:You know, consciousness itself was a dirty word in the academy for most of the 20th century.
David:In fact, it's only in the last two decades or so, uh, that with the, the rise of interest in neuroscience, the consciousness itself has allowed to be even spoken about in the hallowed halls of the academies.
David:So we've got a lot to learn, not least because the brain is the most complex object that we know of in the universe.
David:And consciousness has completely defied any kind of full rational understanding or explanation.
David:So, you know, we really do not know very much in my opinion.
David:I certainly don't know very much so, but you know, we do know that there is a relationship between.
David:Brain activity and consciousness, right?
David:And, we are beginning to map the nature of that relationship, in terms of like the neural correlates of consciousness.
David:something happens in the brain, something changes in your state of consciousness.
David:And psychedelics, and other psychoactive drugs, but especially psychedelics are a brilliant tool for exploring the relationship between the brain and mind because they have such kind of profound changes on our state of consciousness.
David:And we know somewhat about the underlying neural mechanisms at work when we perturb the brain with a chemical.
Carlos:What that did is like, just made me look at it from another angle, is, uh, maybe talking about this idea, and this is something that I would get confused with, is the difference between the brain and the mind, this idea of consciousness, and I'm gonna start saying even soul for some people, and then the physical things that happen.
David:Yeah.
David:I mean there's a fairly good one-to-one relationship between what happens in the brain and states of conscience.
David:But we don't, Fully understand that hasn't been fully mapped.
David:The more we understand about the brain, the more complex it gets, uh, unfortunately.
David:So it's kind of like a chime era, you know?
David:The more we understand, the less we actually know or realize how complex it really is.
David:But yeah, the problem being that we have this kind of somewhat mechanical, like organic mechanic, uh, object, the brain.
David:And then we have this kind of undefinable abstract consciousness which is, doesn't seemingly, uh, conform to the properties of a material object.
David:Uh, it's thoughts.
David:It's what we call quaia which, uh, you know, philosophers and.
David:neuroscientists recently, but philosophers for thousands of years have agonized over the nature of the relationship between the brain, and the mind.
David:You know, what we experience and what's going on in this kind of lump of, uh, organic matter we have in our heads.
Carlos:And I'm mentioning it 'cause I'm curious about this.
Carlos:'cause I wrote recently my kind of take on the triune brain and this model of the reptilian brain, the limbic brain and the neocortical or the cortical brain.
Carlos:And I was pulled up on that.
Carlos:I was like, this's too simplistic.
Carlos:Yeah, isn't actually work like that.
Carlos:And on one hand it's like, oh, I thought I knew what was happening to now they're like, do you know it's a bit more complicated.
Carlos:But there is an aspect of this, as I understand it, when certain parts of your brain are damaged or something, then sudden ways that you perceive the world change.
Carlos:And there, like you said, there's a correlation there, and I'm leading somewhere with this, but I just wanted to just pick up on that, that even though the consciousness is some complex thing that comes out of interactions in the brain.
Carlos:There are different parts of the brain that do different things that then affect how we perceive or act in the world.
David:Yes.
David:I'd agree with that to an extent because it's all, interconnected in very, very complex ways.
David:You know, there's trillions of cells and there, there are functional components of different parts of the brain.
David:And yes, of course if you damage certain parts of the brain, from neurology we understand there are clear consequences often for cognition and consciousness.
David:And yet it's not just a kind of unidirectional action whereby, you know, brain produces consciousness because our conscious thoughts can also change our brain activity as well.
David:So as well as there being bottom up effects from the brain to the mind, the mar there's top down effects from the mind to the brain as well.
David:And we know that from placebo effects, the effects of hypnosis, et cetera, et cetera.
David:And you know, the more we study the brain, the more complex it gets.
David:As I pointed out earlier, some recent genome sequencing, hasn't been completed yet, and they first did it on, on rodents, I think, and they found not only there a few hundred different types of neuroreceptor sites in the brain, there are several thousand and they just began doing that process on humans and they're finding thousands of neurotransmitter sites that we were unaware of.
David:You know, it used to be thought that, when I was learning psychology that, you know, uh, the conduction of signals always goes one way down a neuron.
David:Recent research.
David:it can actually go the other way as well, you know, is .It So like the more we find we have to kind of keep revising our theories.
David:And, you know, psychedelics, just bringing it back to that, uh, you know, like psilocybin, the first, one of the first neuro imaging studies they did, uh, with imperial people looking to see what happens under the influence of psilocybin, now, every.
David:One of those scientists would have guessed that if you look at someone's brain and the influence of a psychedelic, there's gonna be more brain activity because you know, there's more experience, right?
David:People are kind of overwhelmed with experience.
David:There's all this kind of, all these dramatic changes going on and perceptions and thoughts and emotions and meaning, and sense of body and time and space.
David:And yet actually the big surprise was there was no increase in brain activity anywhere.
David:In fact, there was an actual decrease in brain activity in some key hub regions in the brain.
David:So like, again, we have to kind of constantly revise what we know and understand.
David:Uh, and I think we're still at the very early stages of all of that in many ways.
Carlos:I did a fascinating demonstration of that, as I understand when we were having the talk, you were getting people in the crowd.
Carlos:You're getting people to like shout at each other across the audience and you know, just talk to each other, and it was just a crazy noise.
Carlos:And then you got everyone to the, just talk to the person next to them in hushed tones.
Carlos:And that was the, for me, this kind of demonstration of on the effects of psychedelics is this kind of just low buzz, pardon the pun.
Carlos:But yeah, this whole hum of brain activity rather than spikes of activity or increased spikes in certain places.
Carlos:Will that, did I get that right?
David:I'll, uh, embellish a little bit in that, um, so yes, concurrent with this idea that there's no increase in activity, but a reduction of activity in this key hub region.
David:At the same time, we see a massive increase in the amount of connectivity.
David:So there's less overall activity, the brain is kind of quieter on a gross level if you like.
David:But there is more parts of the brain communicating with each other.
David:So instead of just a few parts of the brain shouting at each other as my crude analogy, which we demonstrated, uh, in person, when everybody became my brain in the audience, we have the whole brain or the whole audience kind of whispering to every other part of the brain in a way.
David:It's what we call hyper connectivity.
David:So yeah, just like, more activity doesn't necessarily mean more experience.
David:And actually it's about the quality and the amount of connections going on across the brain, which increases dramatically under the influence of psilocybin and other psychedelics.
David:And we think that probably gives rise to experiences of insights or, perhaps creative problem solving or, accessing lost memories or even experiences of synesthesia, which we see quite commonly.
David:So people having a blending of the senses.
David:So you see shapes, no, wait a minute.
David:You see shapes anyway.
David:sounds perhaps right?
Carlos:I'd like to move into the, this whole thing on creativity, 'cause you're talking about hyperconnectivity and maybe talk a bit more about that.
Carlos:Uh, should we start with just you maybe sharing a bit about your research around this and, yeah, what you did, what you found?
David:I mean, I can't say too much about this, unfortunately.
David:It's the kind of bane of my life.
David:We did this study a quite a long time ago, but, uh, only some of the more boring or basic findings have been reported.
David:ie the pharmaco and kinetics and safety and tolerability.
David:But effectively we had a bunch of very bright people, some top level scientists, early career scientists from some of the best universities in the UK, uh, with PhDs in physics, math, biology, engineering, nuclear fluid dynamics, you name it.
David:And um, they came to our lab with a view to enhancing their creative problem solving, you know, around a particular.
David:Domain specific problem, ie something that they were working on that they didn't have an answer to and that there is no known answer to, right?
David:'Cause they're at the cutting edge of their field.
David:And we gave them LSD and uh, they, they thought about their problems some of the time, at least when they weren't trying to work out how to tie their shoe laces badly.
David:Um, and that's what we kind of found is that, you know, psychedelics seemingly enhance some cognitive functions, but, you know, deter others, ie, they deter this normal, everyday logical linear A follows B kind of thinking, which enables us to cross the road and tie our shoelaces and all those useful everyday things.
David:Uh, and also come to usually kind of logical solutions to normal, everyday problems.
David:But that doesn't necessarily work well for very tough theoretical, complex problems, uh, where we perhaps need a different kind of thinking, uh, a less linear kind of thinking.
David:And that the psychedelics seemingly a very good for that.
David:It's what we call divergent thinking, where you can take old ideas and memories or bits of knowledge and mash them together in novel ways, often in different formats as well.
David:So you might actually visualize a mathematical problem in a kind of visual way instead of it just being a formulation.
David:And so we found that a lot of our scientists felt like they'd had some kind of breakthrough.
David:Some of them were able to immediately verify that by sketching down what it was they were trying to.
David:Solve and then kind of computer designing it, 3D, printing it, patenting it, and then it later being developed by kind of NASA and MIT in one of the cases.
David:So we find that, you know, this kind of divergent thinking which is probably stimulated by this kind of hyperconnectivity of the brain, can be really useful for kind of insight, creative problem solving not necessarily a good state of consciousness for testing those ideas.
David:You want to be in a more normal, everyday sober state of consciousness, but for generating possible solutions, you know, that kind of, state of consciousness seems to be quite fruitful.
David:And we've got evidence for that, you know, from, at least a few kind of anecdotes and case studies, maybe like people like Carrie Mullis, Who won the Nobel Prize for biochemistry, I believe for discovering PCR, Polymerase Chain Reaction, which is you can take a single strand of DNA and replicate it,
David:the basis of all genetic testing, research, genome sequencing, forensic genetics, everything uses PCR, even, uh, yeah, covid tests, of course PCR tests.
David:So we rightly won the Noble Prize.
David:But afterwards, he said, well, I've basically taken loads of LSD and I was able to kind of fly alongside the strands of the DNA molecule at a molecular level and see what was going on, you know?
David:And that's one of these brilliant other advantages to having these psychedelic experiences for creative problem solving is that they can often change your perspective.
David:Uh, what's called perspectivism in Brazilian anthropology is how, uh, the epistemology, if you like, of Amerindian cult is how you obtain knowledge that's epistemology.
David:And for a lot of am, Amerindian, I don't like that word, but you know, shorthand, uh, indigenous people of the Americas, one of their underlying principles of how you, un, obtain knowledge is if you wanna understand something, you turn into that thing, Thereby you understand its properties and its principles.
David:It's kind of a state of hyper subjectivity, which is diametrically opposed to our classic scientific reductive objectivity, right?
David:And it may not give you.
David:A truthful answer, but it gives you a different perspective which is, can be very useful.
David:And if you permit me, you know, one of our participants in our study was a biologist, Merlin Sheldrake had been working on the relationship between this fungus and a plant, uh, which was, you know, quite unique in that the plant, unlike 99% of other plants, doesn't photosynthesize,
David:it has no chlorophyll and it seemingly gets all of his energy directly from the fungus and was presumed to be parasitic on the fungus.
David:Merlin had spent three years studying this at Cambridge for his PhD.
David:He wasn't really sure.
David:He came to our lab, he took LSD and he turned into the fungus, right?
David:And he said, and we're like, well that's great, you know, and how was it, you know?
David:Hoping he'd had some insight.
David:And he said, I.
David:Slimy and we're like, oh my God, we've wasted all our precious LSD.
David:But you know, he later published this fantastic book, Entangled Life, where he talks about his experience and how it, given him a change of perspective, some fresh insights which he could pursue in the usual objective way, uh, into the nature of this relationship.
David:And even change perspective on, you know, how we can do biology and how we can even do science in that this kind of per protectivism can be useful for creative problem solving in that he'd been thinking about this problem for three years as Merlin Sheldrake the human, uh, and still didn't really know.
David:And then having that experience of not being a human anymore, of being a fungus, gave him a whole new, fresh insight into a preexisting problem.
David:Uh, so, you know, again, we see that this kind of.
David:Indigenous worldviews, right?
David:Or cosmologies, epistemologies, whatever you want to call them, may be fruitful for things like creative problem solving, particularly around ecological issues.
Laurence:I find it fascinating, I think well first thing that came to mind when you first talking was just how many people struggle to get their ideas down when they're in that heightened state, because obviously they're great for divergent thinking, but actually just capturing that, 'cause I can imagine, I dunno, like the next day going, what was that thing that I just scribbled down and.
Carlos:Are you talking from personal experience here, Laurence?
Laurence:No, just my experience of being with Carlos in these heightened states
David:You've witnessed.
David:Um, No, it's a really good point.
David:And, you know, we had thought about this in advance, you know, quite concertedly.
David:And so we, we gave them every opportunity to, uh, first of all express their ideas as they were having them and also to then capture them.
David:Uh, so we order audio recorded the whole session.
David:We encouraged them to kind of orate, you know, speak about what was going on what their experiences was.
David:We tried to keep them focused on their, uh, scientific problems instead of you know, some of them occasionally went off a bit on the deep end and just sat there playing with the mood lights, right?
David:But mostly we managed, keep them focused.
David:And we gave them kind of whiteboards and marker pens.
David:Uh, some of them perhaps naively or foolishly attempted to work on their laptops, and we tried to warn them this probably wasn't gonna be advisable, but, you know, they're like, oh yeah, let me just call up my files, and they, you know, they can't even turn on their laptops.
David:Total brainiacs, uh, stumped with the most simple of tasks, but having lots of really, kind of seemingly insightful ideas.
David:So yeah, capturing it is definitely one thing.
David:They didn't have much problem with.
David:Recall.
David:You know, the good thing about these psychedelic experiences are, they're often quite lucid and there's not particularly any amnesia as such, but it, you know, it can, so much can happen in a psychedelic experience that it's hard to recall it all.
David:But certainly people were able to retain the essence of their experience in terms of the insights they had in some cases.
Laurence:I suppose they're going into it with a very specific intention as well.
David:Yeah, absolutely.
David:We made them kind of pre-specify what particular theoretical problems they were gonna work on.
David:The idea would that they have at least one main one and sometimes some ancillary ones as well.
David:And sometimes people would find that they were kind of coming up with ideas about a whole other bunch of problems they hadn't even thought about or realizing that they had a bigger problem that they hadn't thought about, which was why they hadn't got the solution they were looking for in the first place.
David:This research was originally done in the 1960s, but then hadn't been replicated for decades.
David:Uh, and they used some of the early software programmers took part in those studies.
David:And this one guy had written this kind of, you know, massive old school kind of code like this huge computer program and he spent the whole trip mentally running through the computer program and was able to find, you know, dozens of bugs, like just kind of mentally running through the whole thing whilst under the influence of, uh, LSD.
Laurence:And quickly, just with the perspective shift, I'm curious if it was maybe the first time some of them had taken some of these substances?
Laurence:Whether, whether that affected their relationship to their work on a more deeper level, like a, you know, purpose level even.
David:That's an interesting point.
David:So, the majority of people in our study had not taken any psychedelics before.
David:We had a pilot group who were allowed to be non-naive.
David:So we wanted to, so first of all, we did it with a bunch of people who had some experience with psychedelics.
David:You know, because obviously I was gonna iron out any problems, you don't wanna just throw the naive participants in at the deep end, you know, particularly around dosing, you know, what's the optimum dose, uh, between having good ideas and not getting sucked into a mystical kind of rapture.
Laurence:It's like playing pool on, uh, alcohol, isn't it?
Laurence:There's this.
David:Yeah, there's that kind of Goldilocks dose.
David:Yeah, exactly.
David:Exactly that.
David:But yeah, sometimes, I mean, not necessarily in this, uh, study that I'm aware of, but you know, people often do have like big rare orientations, uh, around their motives.
David:Uh, and taking psychedelics.
David:Uh, this is slightly tangential, but in another study we did with a survey looking at people's connections to nature through psychedelics, we found that of 150 people we surveyed, you know, 150 of them said taking psychedelics had made them more, feel more connected to nature.
David:To such an extent, actually that 16%, I know this statistic well, actually said they changed their careers, you know, as a result of their psychedelic experience particularly with psilocybin.
David:Uh, and they changed their career towards something which was more ecologically orientated.
David:So examples were two of the people, uh, had quit whatever jobs they were doing, career paths they on to take up, PhDs in botany.
Carlos:There's a question here from Keith, I think, related to the experience of these people, uh, so we're trying to come up with that is were the prompts given during the experience to trigger, explore the exploration of specific ideas?
Carlos:'Cause you can imagine otherwise they just easily let a drift.
David:Not so much, uh, prompts, but just that, that we'd kind of reorientate them.
David:Like if we felt they were kind of going off into wherever we're just, you just try to kind of get, remind them about their research question.
David:And so prompt in a way.
David:But it not di you know, it is, there's no kind of, uh, direction from us.
David:It's just really just trying to kind of bring them back.
David:Okay, don't forget about your specific theoretical question you are supposedly working on.
David:But before we, we did that, we let them acclimatize, so we'd give them the first three hours or so to kind of get to 40,000 feet and, uh, get to cruising altitude before we, you know, at let them kind of stabilize their experience a little bit first before we got them working on their problems.
David:But in some cases them had already like, had these aha moments, you know, like literally one guy was within about half an hour of coming up, he was like, I've got it.
David:You know, he kind of had this kind of eureka, kind of almost Archimedes style, like running naked through the corridors.
David:Eureka.
David:Luckily we managed to contain him.
David:But yeah, he was pretty chuffed with that.
Carlos:I was just, uh, laughing at what Steve has said.
Carlos:Steve Lenny is saying psychedelics are very good at highlighting bad career choices.
Carlos:Yeah, if you are questioning your path in, uh, in your profession, maybe drop something and see what happens.
Carlos:I wonder if it also means to highlighting bad life choices and what that would take you as well terms your experience.
Laurence:Well, I guess a lot of it's about connection, isn't it?
Laurence:Connection to the things that we're committing to, whether it's relationships or careers or, or work.
Carlos:I was curious about the analogy of, Anya was talking about the overview effect.
Carlos:You just thought about the 40,000 foot view.
Carlos:And then there's you were talking about being the topic, essentially rather than going out, going in.
Carlos:So there's there, I feel like with, when I was hearing you about becoming the plant, becoming the tree, becoming whatever it is you, becoming the DNA strand, you're really connecting to that experience.
Carlos:And so on one level it's this not so much having a broad view, but just sensing into the experience of the problem.
Carlos:In a sense, you are the problem.
Carlos:I'm imagining this guy was the code.
Carlos:He was just like flying through the code and not even thinking of it necessarily as a, what's coming to my mind.
Carlos:Maybe I'm on something at the moment, but what's coming to my mind rather than spotting the broken code, it's like feeling an itch that needed to be scratched.
Carlos:It's like a visceral experience that was a different way of processing information.
Carlos:That's what I'm, well, that's what's coming for me in the moment when you're talking about these things.
David:Yeah, you intuit it well, and often it's slightly ineffable, slightly somewhat difficult to describe often, but, you know, we try to pre-warn participants that they may get insights in ways in which they didn't imagine, and that's kind of what they all reported as like, oh, it's not how I imagined it, you know?
David:And so often very visual, but also not just like a, like watching a TV or projection.
David:You're like, you are in it, you are part of it, you know?
David:So it's kind of very much a felt, lived experience.
David:For instance, you know, one guy was like Merlin turned into a fungus.
David:Another guy kind of was working on tectonic plates, uh, evolution over millions of years and couldn't, you know, had a bit of a, he couldn't make sense of his data.
David:And he found himself like diving down to the bottom of the ocean and watching the tectonic plates evolving according to his data.
David:And he realized that some of his data was probably wrong.
David:And then if you parsed this data set out, the rest of it made total sense.
David:But they, you know, they didn't necessarily anticipate those kinds of experiences.
David:It's multisensory, kind of immersive, uh, experiences, uh, usually that people are having.
David:Like another one for instance, was working on Higgs boon, like, and his kind of mathematical formulas, you know, his concepts of, uh, gravitational waves was purely mathematical.
David:But then he kind of had this kind of hallelujah, revelatory kind of moment, it's going, I can see the gravitational waves.
David:And it is like, and they were like, well, brilliant.
David:We have no idea what that means, but or if you can.
David:But that's wonderful.
David:You know, it's like, but it was just like it, he apprehended that, that idea in a very different way.
David:In a way in which he didn't imagine he even could imagine.
David:And so he, it changes their relationship to these theoretical problems.
Carlos:So one thing I heard you say in the talk and then even talking about how we experience, uh, these substances, I think one of the challenges I assume most people have with is they don't know what, it isn't clear exactly that we are all gonna have the same experience.
Carlos:And what that experience is predicated in some factors that you shared in your talk.
Carlos:Do, you know, talk a bit more about, you know, it isn't like, oh, I take this and suddenly I'm gonna have the same experience as someone else.
Carlos:It isn't so predictable.
Carlos:There's something else we need to consider.
David:No you're absolutely right.
David:Uh, though, interestingly there are some, you know, there are some styles of experience that people have, like going back to this idea of perspectivism and, and turning into something.
David:Uh, I've done some, probably the only research on this and the survey work, and we found that 25% of people taking ayahuasca report this experience of turning into another species, even 10% of people on LSD, right?
David:Which doesn't have any kind of cultural cosmology attached to it that says you're gonna turn into another species.
David:People still have these experiences.
David:So there's seemingly something inherent about the psychedelic experience, which can give you access to those kinds of experiences, although they're not guaranteed, you know, not even necessarily very prevalent, but they are possible.
David:Synesthesia is also very common.
David:Uh, something like 50 or 60% of people on classic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca will have experiences of synesthesia, you know, a blending of the at some point in their psychedelic career, and maybe not in the first go.
David:Typically seeing sounds which is, explains a lot about the close relationship between psychedelics and music and parties and festivals.
David:You know,, uh, some of those original.
David:In fact, the only applied use of this maybe might help with kind of regaining your sense of smell, we don't know.
David:But one of the first people to really use this and possibly the only person to use this in an applied way was a guy called Owsley Stanley the third, who was a underground LSD chemist in the 1960s, in fact probably produced the highest quantity of LSD.
David:He made millions of doses of LSD, which he used to distribute through his band that he was a sound engineer for, the Grateful Dead.
David:Uh, and they kind of like invented the idea of these immersive light shows where you're trying to marry the visual bits with the music.
David:Because Stanley himself had, he was doing his classic sound engineering job and he'd mixed his two research interests together and was obviously taking a lot of LSD and he could, he was doing a sound check and he could see the music coming out of the speakers and he was like, oh, wow.
David:So he did the sound check according to not what it sounded like, but what it looked like.
David:Which probably explains a lot about the Grateful Dead, because even if they sound
Laurence:No, I know why they've got such a big, loyal following.
David:Exactly.
David:You're taking up LSD, it doesn't matter what they sound like.
David:So, uh, yeah, synesthesia is often, but again, not everybody has these experiences and also like increased mental imagery, like things become much more vivid and visible and often geometric patterns.
David:Some people we are discovering in the last five or six years it's been given a name.
David:There's about 2% of the population have a condition called aphantasia, uh, maybe more.
David:Uh, and that is they have no visual mental imagery, right?
David:So like, you know, if I say most people like, can you imagine a double decker bus and they can see in their mind's eye.
David:People, they cannot do that whatsoever.
David:And even if they take very high doses of very potent psychedelics, it seems most of them still don't get any visual mental imagery, you know,
David:I worked with this one guy, he had taken DMT, which is intensely powerful, it over a thousand times and never seen a thing, right?
David:So, you know, there are very many different cognitive styles and potential experiences that people can have with psychic.
David:So they're not entirely predictable, but there are certain kind of, syndromes that we see if you like.
Carlos:I remember you mentioning something about the, it's also your own history psychologically as well as where you are and the the environment.
Laurence:Well, that's what I was gonna ask you about, like sort of trauma or things that people have, like tried to push away how these experiences can bring things to the fore for people.
David:Yeah, absolutely.
David:That as well.
David:And that's, you know, potentially how that could be one of the mechanisms by which people have psychotherapeutic benefit.
David:It could also be how people often have bad trips as well.
David:So like, you know, unresolved trauma.
David:Can and commonly does resurface during psychedelic experience.
David:You know, it can give you access to kind of repressed, suppressed, forgotten memories.
David:Which in, in a, in a right context, you know, if you're doing it within a psychotherapeutic envelope in a held way, you can address that material and work through it and hopefully, you know, help resolve some of the issues arising from it.
David:Now we don't know that is for certain the mechanism, but you know, often like old traumas can arise and people can find increased relief from them.
David:People can have all kinds of revelations, about bodily and psychological issues.
David:and those insights help them alleviate some of the symptoms.
David:Or in some cases, people feel that they've had complete remission of symptoms, you know.
David:So for instance, in the treatment of depression or anxiety, often psychedelics will begin to work immediately.
David:They have seemingly reduction of symptoms for the majority of participants, and those reductions could be quite long lasting.
David:But for a small few, they have complete remission of their symptoms for, you know, six months longer, possibly indefinitely.
David:People find that they may be able to resolve particular psychological problems.
David:It's not a magic bullet, though.
David:It doesn't happen for everybody.
David:and the majority of people find that their symptoms begin to return after three to six months.
Carlos:I'm curious, connect a little bit connected to this tangentially as they're connected to this.
Carlos:So I, I have this understanding of perception that I've been reading about where there's a, a, a pattern matching thing going on.
Carlos:We have, our brains, because they don't perceive the world directly.
Carlos:It's through these signals.
Carlos:Eyes touch it.
Carlos:It's basically something in the dark room, receiving signals and trying to interpret what's going on.
Carlos:And so to a certain extent, our brains through experience, assume what's going on, and then they match it with what they perceive from the senses and the electrical al signals from the census, and then they course correct based on that.
Carlos:And so this, and what I'm connecting that to is this, we have beliefs and biases about the world that then skews how we perceive it potentially.
Carlos:And I'm wondering how that Connects to this idea of psychedelics and how that affects that, that relationship about how we see the world, particularly when we're talking about career changes, life changes.
Carlos:Belief systems, I assume is that, is there a connection there?
David:Yeah, I think so.
David:So some of the things we think we know is that yes, they increase connectivity across the brain.
David:They also increase plasticity.
David:So that is, uh, you know, putting down new brain connections and dendrite growth and neuron growth and all the rest of it.
David:So the brain is more plastic after a psychedelic experience, which means we are more open to suggestion.
David:So we have a kind of a period in which we are perhaps better able to install more positive behaviors and habits, break, uh, habitual patterns, uh, maladaptive beliefs, et cetera, et cetera.
David:You know, the flip side of that, and the danger is that we also might become susceptible to negative beliefs or ones that aren't useful to us as well.
David:Uh, or we just, you know, the first person we see, uh, we turn into a guru or, you know, the, so, you know, spiritual bypassing and.
Carlos:Take note, Laurence.
David:Yeah.
David:Are there potential pitfalls of having this kind of hyper suggestibility and plasticity, but in the right context, that can be very beneficial, particularly given that a lot of, you know, psychological problems like anxiety and depression and OCD are to do with kind of negative rumination, like just kind of getting stuck in these kind of thought loops.
David:Uh, the plasticity and the kind of divergence can lead to a breakdown of those habitual thought patterns, and the potential for new, more positive beliefs and attitudes and thoughts to emerge.
David:Uh, so they're habituation, interrupters in a way.
David:You know, they can break kind of patterns.
Carlos:Think next time we do the LinkedIn habit workshop, Laurence, we should be bringing along a bit of LSD to just, uh, reinforce the pattern, uh, change?
Carlos:Um, Simon is touching on the next path I was hoping to go down.
Carlos:And he was asking, why are we unable to easily feel like we are part of it without extra chemical input?
Carlos:And so I'm curious to hear from you, and I'm connecting to your interest in altered states of consciousness.
Carlos:Is this possible?
Carlos:How, how is this possible without chemical input?
David:Sure.
David:Well, I think that without chemical input I would go for, but I mean there's probably likely some chemical change, you know, like in all states of consciousness there's gonna be some neurochemical activity going on.
David:So like breathing, even breathing can profoundly affect your state of consciousness.
David:So things like holotropic breath work or pny armor, kundalini yoga, breath of fire, these things can profoundly affect your state of consciousness, you know, and I've seen people who've gone away and done loads and loads of ayahuasca, do a one hour session of holotropic breathing and be absolutely astonished
David:how psychedelic that experience can be, how much of a breakthrough they can have with that just experience of breathing in a different way for an hour.
David:So, like, you know, breath alone can profoundly alter our state of consciousness.
David:But also encourage people to Take non, psychedelic, to, states.
David:Just following our dreams, you know, keeping a dream journal.
David:You know, dreams for me are extremely psychedelic.
David:they can be very insightful.
David:You can learn a lot about yourself.
David:You can have wild adventures, go flying, have cosmic battles with all kinds of extraordinary entities, and then wake up in the morning, feel refreshed and go and do a day's work.
David:You know, no drugs involved apart from your own neurochemical supply.
David:So dreams, hypnosis, meditation, dark room chambers, dancing, chanting, all of these things can affect our state of consciousness.
David:And I think psychedelics are just a special case of an altered state's induction, right?
David:That they're a special case in that you ingest a chemical and they're fairly reliable.
David:Not totally, but they're fairly reliable and can give you very intense states.
David:But there are many ways of getting there, which don't require you to ingest any chemicals.
Carlos:One something that was really, well I was connecting to our work in terms of we, you know, we help a lot of people navigate a transition, career transition, life transition.
Carlos:They've thought in one way, they're needing to think in a different way, 'cause of the way they're thinking at the moment just doesn't seem to be helping anymore.
Carlos:And this idea of taking yourself out of these patterns in one way, a simple way, just leaving Laurence talks about going away from the screen we take into another country.
Carlos:And how I'm connected to this, I just, maybe not as extreme as an altered state of consciousness, but just breaking away from habitual behavior.
Carlos:And then how that is, uh, part of this way of, all right, how can I reassess, or how can I remo, reboot some of these filters?
Carlos:I think that's what I feel like psychedelics and these things, they're like a reboot.
Carlos:They melt some of these filters away temporarily.
Laurence:Mm-Hmm.
Carlos:And so you don't see the world.
Laurence:The other thing about that is having, allocating dedicated time and space to this experiment with you, or like in our case, taking people away or having a weekend away.
Laurence:Like when people just create space and stop just what happens, even if you don't do anything when we have rituals and different things that we do.
Laurence:But it feels like that alone is so rare in modern life to have that time to just let what's in our brain sort of emerge, really.
David:I totally agree.
David:I think you're absolutely right.
David:I mean, psychedelics can be a bit of a sledgehammer for a nut, there are other ways of doing it, but, in a way that's kind of suited to our insanely busy ever increasingly fast pace of life.
David:Sometimes we need a really kind of big wake up, and shift to our habitual patterns.
David:I think psychics serve a very important niche in that regard.
David:just stopping what we're doing, paying attention, putting down the phone, getting off screens, being in nature, breathing, yoga, exercise, meditation, being with family and friends.
David:Those alone.
David:just changing kind of rigid patterns, I think is really important.
David:And all the usual good stuff.
Carlos:I have a, an experience of doing some holotropic breath work, and it was only for half an hour.
Carlos:I can even remember, feel the experience again, but I ended up having this real clear image of myself in like 20 years time.
Carlos:I could just see who, who I was going to become.
Carlos:And it was just like, as if they were in front of me and it was just bizarre.
Carlos:It just came outta nowhere.
Carlos:And so it made me really curious about the nonchemical approaches to tapping in to these sort of different ways of perceiving or connections that can happen.
Carlos:And how that can help not only with self connection, but connection with others and making more conscious choices with our lives.
David:Absolutely.
David:Yeah.
David:No, I totally agree.
David:And I think one thing we see from these states, be it psychedelic or otherwise is this kind of generally an increase in connectivity and that's kind of across the whole range, you know.
David:From what's happening in the brain.
David:This increased connectivity between different parts of the brain, people feeling connected to themselves, people feeling more connected to other people feeling more connected to nature, more connected to the universe, cosmos at large, and even connected to something kind of divine or spiritual as well.
David:So yeah, effectively altered states can just enhance connectivity, I think like in a very broad brush way.
David:And they don't have to be hypercharged diving off into alternate dimensions on DMT, it can be as simple as just spending 10 minutes meditating or doing half an hour's breath work right?
David:I wonder how long ago was that experience?
David:Was it 20 years ago?
David:Have you arrived?
Laurence:Are you that person now?
Carlos:Thank you very much.
Laurence:Or are you on your way there?
Carlos:I'm on my way there.
Carlos:I've got an app actually that can show me anyway, so I don't really need to breathe through.
Laurence:Oh, I've seen that.
Laurence:Well, I wanna meet,
Carlos:There's a quick question here.
Laurence:Kim.
Carlos:Yeah, Kim.
Carlos:Exactly.
Carlos:She's asking can the use of mushrooms help neurodiverse teen girls with OCD self-harm and suicide ideation?
David:Well.
Laurence:Kim's business is rights for girls.
Laurence:She's been on this before.
Laurence:But yeah, she works with a lot of teenage girls through these challenges.
David:Brilliant.
David:I mean, I think this kind of comes with a caveat, right?
David:I mean, I think potentially, yes.
David:But no, not without risks, because, and I mean, first of all, they're not licensed as medicines in the UK yet.
David:Psilocybins just been licensed as a medical treatment for depression in Australia, but the rest of the world is yet to follow suit.
David:May happen soon.
David:So, you know, we can't say this in any kind of medical advice way.
David:Theoretically, I think yeah, that very much could help with OCD and also self-harm, suicidal ideation, you know, just with psychological issues in the right context, you know, for some people.
David:The additional risk factor is of course, that teenage brains and teenage minds are still developing.
David:Uh, we got a little bit of evidence from some studies that there is a somewhat elevated risk of challenging experiences and long term negative psychological consequences from psychedelic experiences in adolescence.
David:Perhaps not too unsurprisingly really.
David:You know, not only developing brain, but they're also kind of having to find their way in a very increasingly confusing cultural milieu, you know, growing up.
David:Uh, so they're, you know, generally more at risk.
David:They're more of a vulnerable population.
David:So not without caveats, but I think yeah, potentially there, there is a lot of potential use.
David:There's been a couple of studies now on the treatment of OCD with psilocybin, both of which have been quite positive.
David:Not full blown clinical trials, so just pilot studies, but had very encouraging results.
David:There's another one underway currently at Imperial as well.
David:I think I might have just concluded, but they haven't reported on this findings yet.
David:So.
David:I think there is scope for dealing with those kind of issues, particularly OCD or, you know, whatever the kind of underlying cause for the self-harm and suicidal ideation might be as well.
David:But at this point we can't really, professionally advise people to do that because there is no legal or medically sanctioned route of access to getting that treatment currently.
Carlos:It's fascinating how, from hearing when you talked the history of the substances, how they'd be, were taboo, the fear around them, the legislation around them.
Carlos:What's allowed, what's possible and what that means in terms of the research required to know, you know, how well they can be used where they can be applied and what benefits they can bring about.
Carlos:But having learned from you, I'm so curious about the possibilities.
Carlos:There is a guy I follow called Sam Harris and he's very much around this, well, what I've heard him talk about is psychedelics nearly like a fast track to spiritual enlightenment and how that can help with that kind of sense of connection.
Carlos:It's a bit worrying, but on the other side, I also thinking like, you know, if we were more connected in that way, if we were be able to experience other and not just self all the time, and maybe it's this empathy thing, what would that mean for us as a species and also this rock that we are sitting on?
Carlos:Thank you very much, David.
Carlos:Really it is super.
Carlos:Yeah.
Carlos:Again, we could have gone for ages, uh.
Carlos:Hope to collar you at Summercamp after when we see you in September.
David:Be great, yeah.
Carlos:That'd be awesome to sit down and have a chat and get one with the world.
Carlos:I have a question for you.
Carlos:I experienced you as someone who's very passionate about your work.
Carlos:And so I'm curious, what does it mean to lead a meaningful life for you?
David:I mean, I, I do find my work meaningful, but I think, you know, our kind of career choices and where we choose to put our energy is important and are, are always keeping that in mind and in check.
David:I try to be on balance more of use in the world than I am a hindrance, uh, or a problem.
David:Uh, but for me, yeah, meaning also comes from if I'm doing my work and feeling like it's, it's has some use and utility.
David:And I think most of that comes through, yes, the positive potential benefits for mental health, but also potential benefits of helping people feel more connected to nature.
David:And also just bringing in indigenous people and their voices from out of the cold, and valuing them, and saying, they're not just a bunch of crazy superstitious, old primitives.
David:They've been using these things for thousands of years and they might know a thing or two.
David:and also for the meaning of just, I live here in the middle of the Ashdown forest.
David:It's very beautiful in nature with my daughter.
David:and just being around friends and family, I think it's super important too.
David:So, really enjoyed the interview.
David:I'm very grateful.
Carlos:One of my favorites films is called Limitless.
Carlos:Uh, and this, this idea of being able to just connect things in my mind more clearly and not be held back by whatever noise there may be, there's something freeing about that experience.
Carlos:And yeah, to be able to claim that every day, that, for me would be success and very meaningful.
Carlos:Thank you.
Carlos:Thank you everyone.
Laurence:Yeah.
Carlos:For your lovely words and for your time and energy here.
Carlos:Thank you, David, for your wisdom.
Carlos:Your, uh, yeah, your knowledge and yeah, insights.
Carlos:That's got all of us sparking and take care everyone.
Laurence:Cheers, everyone.
Carlos:Bye-Bye.
Carlos:Until next time.
David:Thanks everyone.
