Endless Thread - Bonus: Magic Mushrooms With Michael Pollan

Episode Date: October 29, 2018

Author Michael Pollan talks about all things magic mushrooms, including their potential for upending the brain's hierarchy and helping people cope with death.

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into the wild world of psychedelics. In our last story, zombie fungus, we spoke to best-selling author and environmentalist Michael Pollan about cordyceps, a parasite which zombifies its host and eats its brains. Check that out if you haven't yet, because zombies are cool, and so is that episode.

Yeah, zombies are cool. But we also talk to Michael about his recent book, How to Change Your Mind, what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. When I talked to him for our episode, pollen had a lot to say about mushrooms and psychedelics in general because of the deep research he did for his book. So we thought you might enjoy it too.

Take a listen. Michael, thank you very much for talking with us. Sure, Ben. Glad to be here. So how many magic mushroom enthusiasts have come out of the woodwork to high five you for writing this book? Oh, you would not believe how many there are. I've heard from everybody. It's an interesting, you know, normally I write about food, and I meet a different crowd. Sure. But there are a lot more psychedelic enthusiasts out there than I ever realized.

One of the ideas in the book that you present is the idea that people should consider perhaps taking psilocybin later in life. Yeah, I mean, I don't recommend anybody do anything, but I think there's something very interesting about the experience later in life. And one of the reasons is that as we get older, we kind of get stuck in various patterns of thought and behavior that aren't always constructive. We get set in our ways. And one of the things these medicines have the potential to do is blast open those ways and create new pathways and help people break out of habits of thought and behavior that may be destructive. The way that kids use psychedelics is fundamentally different. They tend to want to be outside or be at a concert or be in a social venue. and they're really focusing on the extraordinary sensory experiences that these drugs can sponsor.

Whereas the way that it's been used in kind of guided sessions, these are supervised sessions that I focus on in the book, you know, you're wearing an eye mask and you have headphones on. So you're going down deep internally and working on all this material you've accumulated over the decades. And so that too makes it a fundamentally different experience. I don't know if one is better than the other. Sure. But one's certainly more interesting and more useful, I think. Is there also like an actual rewiring that's happening when people have these experiences?

Well, the honest answer is we don't completely know yet. The brain we do know is rewired temporarily. We know during the psychedelic trip there is a kind of new path. of communication between different parts of the brain. So that, for example, the visual cortex, which generates the images that we see, is suddenly in communication with your sense of taste or sound. And so you have that rewiring that we call synesthesia, when you can, you know, smell a musical note or see it. And so we do know that this kind of rewiring is happening and probably is responsible for things like synesthesia and for hallucinations.

Does it last? That's the question. I mean, the brain does go back to baseline. However, a memory is a, is a pathway in the brain. And you have created, even if they're temporary, new pathways. And so the more you exercise those going forward, the more they may persist. And by exercise, I mean simply recalling them over and over again. And, you know, I have certain images that I acquired during some of my psychedelic experiences. And I think back on them, all the time. Like what? Oh, well, there was a, I had a very mysterious image when I was having an ayahuasca experience. I was wearing an eye mask because we were doing it while it was still light out. I was in a circle. And the eye mask was tight and had black straps. And these black straps in my mind, in my imagination, turned to steel bars.

And they travel down my head. And suddenly my head was encased in this steel cage. And then the bars kept going down my body until I was entirely in this tight steel case and feeling very claustrophobic. It was not a pleasant moment. And then I looked down and I saw a little sprig of a vine, of a plant. And this vine started growing and it grew up through the bars of the cage winding around it until it got to the top and then it reached out to the sun. And I kept hearing in my head, you can cage an animal, but you can't cage a plant. Now, I don't know what that means as an image, but that image is in my head, and I have thought about it many times, and in fact had the occasion to think about it while I had my head in a kind of neural feedback rig in a laboratory.

And lo and behold, merely by thinking about this, I achieved mental states that looked a lot like how I was when I was tripping. So rewiring, it's a complicated issue. but something's happening. Today I learned that Michael Pollan wants to be a plant-based being instead of an animal, apparently. You know, some readers have written and said, well, that's you, obviously. That's you. You know, maybe it is. I don't know.

And who's that other guy who's trapped in the cage? Why do you think it's taken so long for modern society to get serious about looking at psilocybin? Well, psychedelics are very threatened. to society or have been perceived that way for a long time. You know, we went through this episode in the 1960s where psychedelics were achieving, you know, a large level of popularity, particularly in the counterculture. They became associated with the counterculture and indeed did nourish the counterculture in important ways.

And that was regarded as very threatening to the status quo and to the government. It's no accident that Richard Nixon, you know, launches the drug war and calls Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. That's quite an extraordinary claim for a washed-up psychology professor to receive. And it was hard to see how he was such a threat. But the psychedelic experience, in the same way, it undermines habits of thought.

It can undermine obedience to authority. And certainly it did that in the 60s. Whether that's something hardwired in the drug is an interesting question. You know, there's so much about psychedelics are the result of what Leary called our set and setting. So if people took them in the expectation that they would be more free-spirited and more questioning of authority, that's probably how it would come out.

Although I've talked to researchers who believe there may be something inherent in the way the drugs upset hierarchies in the brain that translate into upsetting hierarchies in society, which is a very provocative idea. Tell me more about that. Why do they think that is? What seems to be happening in the brain on psilocybin, and this is true on LSD as well, or DMT, is that there is a particular brain network involving several structures linking the cortex, which is the kind of evolutionarily most recent part of the brain associated with executive function and consciousness,

to older and deeper centers of memory and emotion. And the big surprise when they began imaging the brains of people on psychedelics is that this network is quieted. It goes offline. And everybody thought they'd see lots of extra activity, but the most notable thing was the depression and activity in this network. This network is also at the top of the mental hierarchy. In other words, it exerts a kind of top-down organizational control over the brain. It is the, you know, as one neuroscientist put it to me, it's the orchestra conductor, the capital city, the corporate executive. And so when you take the president, out of the picture, that's when all these other things start happening. And you have all these

other networks talking to each other for the first time. So you have an upsetting of the hierarchy of the brain. And so at least in the minds of some researchers, there's a reason that there's a, or there's an inherent anti-authoritarian tendency to these drugs by upsetting hierarchies. You write a little bit about how people grapple with ideas related to death? Yeah. One of the most interesting. interesting, and this is how I got interested in the subject, was learning that there were these drug trials going on, giving psychedelic psilocybin in particular, which is the ingredient in magic mushrooms, to people with cancer diagnoses, many of them terminal, and to see if it could help them

with what the doctors called their existential distress, that combination of fear, anxiety, and depression that afflicts somebody with a life-threatening diagnosis. And indeed it did in about two-thirds of the cases. Remarkable results. They lost their fear of death in many cases and that they were part of this larger hole that would survive them. And they took comfort in that, even though it, you know, it didn't mean they would survive in their, in their current form. As an example, this one woman imagined that she would, that she was passing underground and going through the earth and broken, and she was broken up into molecules. She no longer had a self as we understand it. And those molecules were being taken up by plants and becoming new forms of life.

Now, you could argue that's a crazy idea, or that's exactly what actually happens. But the fact is that she could feel good about it was the radical change. There's something unsettling about this idea, too, though, right? Like, there's something about that that is also an illusion. And I pressed the doctors on that and the researchers. And I said, are you concerned that perhaps you're nurturing an illusion in people? And their answers were interesting and not entirely satisfying, but understandable. One is, hey, we don't know what happens after you die. Another was, that's beyond my pay grade. I don't get into that. And the third was, who cares? If it actually helps people to die with equanimity, who cares? You know, we have something

else that deals with that called religion, and we don't make the same critiques of that. And so anyway, you know, I don't know where I am on that question, but it's a little easy to go to that place that they're basically selling allusions to people. Sure. You know, if you compare it to morphine, which is really the main drug we have for people who are dying, which essentially dulls them to the experience, here you have something that opens them to the experience. And these are people who could talk about their death in a way I've never heard people talk about openly with clarity. it was quite a remarkable thing. So it seemed to me like a great gift for people in that situation, people for whom we have very little else to give them.

There are people that I think you talk about that believe certain kinds of mushrooms are, in some ways, nature's way of communicating an idea to humanity or to animals, right, to enjoy nature. Yeah, that's definitely a takeaway that some people draw from psilocybin. And to me that sounds very misdemean. It's a nice idea, but it seems like a romantic conceit. But my mind is open.

Michael Pollan, thank you very much for talking with us today. My pleasure, Ben. Thank you. Michael Pollan is currently the Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and Professor of Practice of Nonfiction at Harvard University. We'll be back with a new episode on Friday. Later, nerds. Just kidding. We love you. Bye. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. neuroscience, chemistry.

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