Good Life Project - Adam Gazzaley | Neuroscience, Psychedelics & Attention

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

How does the neuroscience of attention affect nearly every aspect of our capacity to live good lives? How can we harness tech as a tool to help our brains be more, rather than less present and aware? What do psychedelics and neuroscience have to do with each other, and how might both work together to profoundly improve our experience of life?These are a few of the questions today’s guest, Adam Gazzaley, has spent researching for decades, and continues to immerse himself in today. Adam is a neuroscientist, inventor, author, photographer, entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder and executive director of Neuroscape, and the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is also the co-Founder and Chief Science Advisor of Akili Interactive, JAZZ Venture Partners, and Sensync, and has authored over 150 scientific articles and delivered over 675 talks. And, he is also a stunningly accomplished nature photographer and artist.We dive into all of this, with a special focus on his latest initiative, The Neuroscape Psychedelic Division, dedicated to advancing the field of psychedelic science and medicine through multi-level research covering basic to translational to clinical science. The level of scientific rigor Adam and his team are bringing to this area is kind of mindblowing, and we explore where it’s all headed.You can find Adam at:Website : https://gazzaley.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/adamgazz/If you LOVED this episode:You’ll also love the conversations we had with fellow neuroscientist, Ryan D'Arcy, about advances in technology that are allowing us to rewire the brain in ways we never imagined : https://tinyurl.com/GLPryandarcy-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So how does the neuroscience of attention affect nearly every aspect of our capability to live a good life? And how can we harness tech as a tool to help our brains be more rather than less present and aware? What does psychedelics and neuroscience have to do with each other? And how might both work together to profoundly improve our experience of life? Well, these are a few of the questions today's guest, Adam Ghazali, has spent researching for decades and continues to immerse himself in today.

Adam is a neuroscientist, inventor, author, photographer, entrepreneur, and investor. He's the founder and executive director of Neuroscape and the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco. He's also the co-founder and chief science advisor of Achille Interactive, Jazz Venture Partners, and Sensing, and has authored over 150 scientific articles and delivered over 675 talks. He's also a stunningly accomplished nature photographer and artist. So we dive into all of this with a special focus on his latest initiative, the Neuroscape Psychedelic Division, which is dedicated to really advancing the field of psychedelic science and

medicine through multi-level research covering basic to translational to clinical science. The level of scientific rigor that Adam and his team are bringing to the way that the brain functions and in this recent initiative, the way that the brain interacts with these psychedelic substances or molecules is kind of mind-blowing and may well change the face of medicine, especially around mental health as we know it in the decades to come. We explore all of this and where it's all headed in today's conversation. So quick note before we dive in. Adam was incredibly gracious in making the conversation happen while in the middle

of a month's long cross-country RV trip with his family. And we recorded this conversation literally minutes after he pulled into a campground. His wife and baby went out for a walk and he hooked up to their Wi-Fi before we actually lost the signal and he switched over to his own internet connection, which by the way, I didn't know that RVs could even have. And that was great and gave us a much better signal. So it's kind of a funny commentary on the state of things these days and how we're all really just kind of rolling with whatever comes our way and making the best of it. So the first 10 minutes or so are not the usual audio experience that we work to bring you, But the audio is great after that. And the

conversation is so good. And Adam's insights are so deep. I'm really excited to share the whole conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you're in New York City spending the better part of eight years on an MD-PhD,

focusing in on neuroscience. I'm curious also, as you're deepening into your academic studies and your professional practice, it sounds like you're wrapping up your PhD. And a year or so before that, you stumble almost by chance into the world of photography. That's true. That was a little bit of a stumble. It was not an intention. I never had the idea of doing anything in the artistic world. I was a science nerd from age seven. And then my uncle introduced me to photography. He had a book on a shelf by a photographer, Galen Rowell. And he was more of a camera collector than a photographer, though he did a lot of great photography too. And he introduced me to photography and nature photography has been a major part of my life ever since. Yeah. Stumbled into that. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you really immersed yourself in it. I mean, was there ever a moment where you thought to yourself, all right, I'm a year from graduating from this MD PhD program. I'm falling in love with this other pursuit. Was there ever even

an inkling of maybe I'll make this left turn into photography instead of this right turn that you've been preparing for for over the last decade? Yeah, it didn't happen until a little later than that. So after I finished my MD, PhD in 98, I went to Penn for my internship in medicine and then neurology. And it was there that my love of nature photography into a business, selling fine art photography, including to hospitals. That was like my main sort of business plan. I mean, now you see it more commonly. It was nothing, not even like the crappy hotel. It was just nothing on the walls. But what I was really intrigued by was art in

surgical suites and ICUs and places that just don't have anything. And so it was sometime during my residency, because I was detached from research for a while, and I started making money selling photography. I was like, actually, it was like a business. It was my first business. And for a while, there was one moment where I got invited to join this group of artists in Italy for like a year of like, it was like a gathering of all different artists. There was like a sculptor and a poet and I was like the photographer and I was like, that sounds amazing. And I was like that brief moment when I was like, maybe science and medicine isn't my real calling. I didn't think it.

So it's amazing though. I mean, what's fascinating is that, like you said, science was your jam from the time you were a young kid, but at the same time, there's something else in you that is attuned to beauty and the role of beauty. It seems like it has been this through line that's weaved through really your entire life in addition to the scientific exploration of burning questions. Yeah, for sure. And photography and brain imaging and microscopy really had that in common because there was this scientific or at least nature element to all of them. But then there was also symmetry and balance and texture, light, and you have that in all

of those fields. They're very, very different tools to image the world. Finding beauty in nature is equally appealing to me. Yeah, it's also interesting to me that the type of photography you're drawn to was the natural world, because it's so related in a weird way to medical imagery.

Like you're really talking about layers and layers and layers of complex topography and fractal type of ways. I mean, you can just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And the same thing with imaging. For sure. My first time I ever used a 35 millimeter camera to a microscope and I was shooting neurons and hippocampus and there's two beautiful types of neurons. One is a granule cell and the other is a pyramidal cell. Pyramidal cells in particular, they're just exquisite. And glutamate receptors light up like trees.

I mean, it looks like a forest with trees and buds called spines, dendrites. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I wonder if you ever had the curiosity or the inkling to take overlays of the natural photography that you were days besides like some of the final products for papers and it was largely because it was like it was like a pre-digital era there were no digital cameras out there i had like this really expensive digital back on a microscope and it just it was just not the time but in i have had that thought i was like wow this reminds me of some of those microscopic images i should look through my collection. I'm like, where is that collection? It just wasn't the time where you stored all those images.

You wound up erasing them so you'd have more disk space, essentially. Right, like three images and next hard drive, please. Exactly. So you go from there down to Philly. You're doing postdoc work there and eventually head out to

San Francisco and end up, I guess, in 05 at UCSF, deepening into research, running a lab, teaching. And pretty soon after that, it sounds like a lot of your focus really starts to be on the brain and attention. Yeah. When I was doing my graduate school work, it was microscopic receptors, mRNA, very popular right now. And I was doing all that imaging and there was no cognition involved. There was no memory or attention being studied because these were just slices under a microscope. But the systems I was studying at the time was involved in cognition. It was the hippocampus, the memory system in the brain. It was during residency that I started getting activated emotionally and intellectually by cognitive disorders and

the conditions that are sort of, in some ways, closest to what makes us human, like Alzheimer's. That was what was most interesting to me during residency. It's also, in many ways, the most tragic. So it's a tough field, neurology, because it's fascinating intellectually. It's the brain. It's our consciousness. It's everything that defines us. But when it's damaged, it's very hard to see people suffer in those ways. And then when I actually, right before I went to UCSF for my faculty position in 2005, you're correct, and I changed my research methodology from microscopy to functional brain imaging, from animal models to human. And that switch, I started thinking about studying cognition in addition to the brain,

which is a field called cognitive neuroscience, which didn't really exist even 30 years ago. Most of psychology wasn't in the brain. And when it was psychology, it was at a different sort of level in animal models. But once you can do essentially psychological experiments on human beings and record brain activity, this field of cognitive neuroscience emerged. And as I started finding my footings in this new research field, I would say a lot of the things that pulled me towards attention was what I was experiencing as a nature photographer, even though some of my early writings in photography was perception and attention in nature, that it's all of this information. And when I started teaching

photography to people, it was really a practice of attention and not just attention externally to the world, but attention internally. What was stirring your emotions? What was captivating you? You have to be aware of that when you take a photograph, because if you don't, you'll take photos that no one will care about. If you don't care about it, no one will care about it. And so my interest in attention and perception really was happening in parallel as I started doing fundraising and I was continuing my nature photography and I saw this connection between them. And then on and on, it kept going deeper down the rack, all of the tension. But that was sort of my initial

excitement about it. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how these two worlds keep coinciding, right? The world of art and the world of science. It's kind of fascinating to me that the typical art student, if you actually go and pursue an education in that first year of school, probably the first semester, you're going to take a class where the vast majority of the time is a professor teaching you how to see, not how to draw lines, not how to use paint or whatever medium you're drawn to, or how to design with a computer or platforms or apps. They're literally going to spend a semester teaching you how to see, you know, not the representation that you've memorized of reality, but to actually look and see and observe what's really in front of you. I think it's so interesting that the vast majority

of other forms of education don't teach something similar to that because it's the starting point for our experience of life. Yeah, I totally appreciate that. I never took an art class. It makes sense that that's what you're doing in art class, given that I've done photography now for 20 years. And when I teach it, that's what I focus on. And I see that point. I think a lot about education for children. I have a young child now myself, too young for education, but I started thinking about it differently now. And the act of how attention, the art of seeing or hearing, listening, how it is integral for everything that we do. And the same point I made before, seeing goes in both directions, right? Like there's the externally focused to understand

people around you and nature, but also your own internal world and knowing it and understanding it and learning how to regulate it. And then of course, there's the bringing of the two together. Where do you as this entity fit into the larger world and play with it. But you're right. It's the core of life right there. Yeah. I mean, your ability to place and sustain your attention in a meaningful way, really, in my mind, in no small extent determines the quality of the experiences that make up your life, you know? For sure. I mean, it's everything. It's core. Matter of fact, you see now that I've been studying attention for over 20 years and think about it from so many different perspectives, you see the impact of attention in pretty much every neurological and psychiatric condition.

It's there. It's an element and it plays a role in the symptomatology, in the person's quality of life in some way. It's completely fundamental to how you act with both your outer and inner worlds. And when we lose control of it, we don't really refine it. You pay the price and the people around you pay the price. So it's been fascinating learning about attention and it's such a vast field. It's one of those things that seems like so obvious what it is. But when you study it for years, you realize it's depth and complexity. Yeah. It really touched down in my life in a big way a decade ago. I have tinnitus. And when it first landed, I struggled mightily. It was a very dark, dark year until I trained my brain in how to process it. And it was in those

early explorations and experiments I was running to try and figure things out where I start to realize, okay, when I'm training my attention in a way where I can actually for windows of time, no longer hear the sound, but it's not that the sound, you know, the stimulus that's creating it is no longer there. It's that I've learned how to move my attention away from it. And I've learned how to redirect my attention elsewhere. So functionally, the sound is not there anymore. So like right now, if I just, as I'm talking to you, if I pause for a beat and I'm like,

where's the sound? It's right there. But here's the thing. But for the fact that I'm drawing my attention to it, it doesn't exist in my current experience on a day-to-day basis anymore, even though the stimulus that would be creating it does. And that was this really fascinating point of inquiry and even awakening for me. Yeah, there's so much there. A lot of my early papers when I started studying attention, so this is like early 2000s, was showing that attention is, for this conversation, it's two processes of focus and one of ignoring. And what I was showing in my papers was they weren't two sides of the same coin. You could be focusing just fine and failing to ignore. Just focus leads to better ignoring. So a lot of my research was showing that they were dissociable. They had different networks in some populations, like older adults,

ignoring would fail and focus be preserved. And the challenges, the senior moments, the challenges with memory, they were ignoring problems, how to suppress inputs, independent of your focus on other things. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, funny enough, I was writing a book about how people handle uncertainty at the time. And I stumbled upon the research about pain and mindfulness practice, especially a mindfulness-based CBT approach or cognitive behavioral therapy to pain. And it didn't change the stimulus, but allowed people to let go of the focus on pain. And that diminished the lived experience of pain.

And I started wondering, could I adapt that to let go of the sound in my head? So my practice was really very much a practice of repeated dropping over and over and over. Notice, then let go. For months until eventually one day I realized I was literally letting go without intentionally trying to. And I was like, okay, so we're on the cusp of something here. Very, very cool to hear. Really interesting. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

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charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know, in your work, your focus on this ends up also leading you to the world of technology and developing a game, NeuroRacer, which is designed to work with older adults and see if through about a month of training, you could create significant improvements in cognitive function and working memory. And

this generated really powerful results. And when you start to see what was happening, I'm curious whether you were surprised by that or whether you kind of expected it. We had pretty strong hypotheses going in that this would have a benefit. And we needed to because this study was five years long. So building the game was a year and a half and then recruiting hundreds of older adults to be in it, people all across the lifespan. It was a massive undertaking. It was incredibly risky. This is 2008, 2009, 2010 when we were doing the study. And there weren't a lot of projects using video games in this way. So we had to really knock it out of the park. It's science. You do the study and you see what you get. You can't do anything about it. But we were really optimistic that we

would see benefits based upon, you know, all of my research and all of my interactions with older adults and my readings. But until you see it, you never really know. So it was an incredibly exciting time when we started looking at the data and seeing the vast improvements, especially in their ability to sustain attention and keep steady focus after just a month of gameplay. It was really, really gratifying. So when you saw that, that becomes this, it sounds like a five-year study and you're running all sorts of work in the background. But then this was a one-time thing. Like these people were in there for a bed a month, you know, and then this was, you

know, then they kind of go away. But there's a postscript to this story, which is much more recent and probably, you know, like even more interesting. You mean all the way to what's going, what happened like last year and moving? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's a a it's a decade-long story there's been many pieces along the way but the the story in a nutshell is this game uh became the foundation

of uh a technology and a new type of i would say a new type of medicine that i sort of describe as experiential medicine and the game technology I filed as a patent, the methodology behind it, and started a company, my first company in this field called Akili Interactive. And UCSF owns that patent. I am the inventor and Akili has a license. And Akili over the last decade has hired some of the best video game developers and professionals in the world, as well as a medical device team. And we built a way better game than NeuroRacer. Same underlying methodology, same mechanics, but much higher level of art, music, story, just a better experience, a more engaging experience, which we think is part of the benefit, its ability to have these positive outcomes on cognition.

And then dozens of trials over the year to show that what we found in older adults in our paper that was published in Nature, that was the first study, that five-year study was published in Nature as the cover of the journal in 2013, super exciting for us. But what's even more exciting is that we kept finding the same effect over and over again in different populations. And probably your listeners are aware of this replication problem in science, all of science, not the climactic moment of several years ago when I actually was not on this study, but Scott Collins led a study out of Duke showing that we can improve sustained attention ability in children that were suffering from ADHD, that had the inattentive variety of ADHD. And that paper was then positioned to the FDA that went on to its approval as a medical

device, a class two medical device to treat children with ADHD. So from all the way back 2008, 2009, as an idea of a video game, as a way of improving attention in older adults, all the way through to just July of last year of 2019, showing that we can, 2020, showing that we can improve the ability of children to hold their attention steady after a month of gameplay. Yeah, which is pretty extraordinary because now when you go through the FDA approval process, and this becomes sort of like, it gets the imprint of this is legitimate, you know, you can in theory have a doctor write a script for a game. Yeah, that's what we're doing right now. We're in that process of rolling that out, which in itself is a very, very complicated process. So it's one of those things, and

I'm sure everyone appreciates this. You like climb this mountain, you get up there, wow, we just took a video game through the FDA and got it approved for a childhood condition. I mean, it's really a first and it feels great. And then you're like, we have so much work to do, right? Because how do you distribute a video game? How do you write a prescription for a video game? And that's the great, but also challenging work that we're doing right now is to have doctors think of this as medicine and soon to have insurance companies think of this as medicine and parents and, and the, uh, the children themselves that this is a different type of video game and all of that in turning this invent first an invention and then a research project and then a medical device into actual usable, uh, product

that actually, that has the ability to make a difference in people's lives, this is the next big frontier for us. Yeah. And you mentioned, you went through the process with a focus on ADHD in kids, but like you shared earlier, the fundamental thing that you're working with here is attention, is training attention. And that is a central feature of all sorts of other struggles. So this is, you pushed it through the FDA or it was pushed through

under the auspice of this one particular thing. But the truth is it's kind of proof of concept on a much broader scale. You're exactly right. And this wasn't necessarily our decision. This is how approval processes for drugs or devices work. You need to have a very defined indication. You can't approve something for attention. It has to be attention in this population. As a matter of fact, we're really approved for children with ADHD of the inattentive variety between 8 and 12 years old. And we're expanding that now with other studies, but that's how our system works. But the reality is we have data from populations as broad as depression and autism and multiple sclerosis and early dementia, older adults, as we talked about, showing improvements in attention. So there's nothing

specific about ADHD. It was just a really important target population in great need. So it made sense as a company to be targeting that for our first pass. But you're right, the opportunity to now expand across many indications is so exciting. You brought up this term experiential medicine, which, so this is one, you know, like this is one application. This is one, you know, like one device, one intervention, one mechanism, but it's much bigger than that. It is. It's something that like, even now as we're talking about it, I actually feel goosebumps and chills because it's so immense. And I didn't have it all worked out at the beginning. It was, you know, it's a stepwise process I didn't have it all worked out at the beginning. It's a stepwise

process. It always seems clear in retrospect. And I actually called it, I used to call it digital medicine. I did this interview with Sanjay Gupta. I don't know if it was the first time someone used that term, but it was quite a while ago. And he's like, well, what is this? I was like, it's like digital medicine. And it's a good term and it's stuck. But I didn't really like it um it was it was catchy and it wasn't inaccurate it's a digital delivery system of medicine as opposed to a pill but what i what i realized not soon after that and the reason i didn't like it is is that the digital is is like the pill of the syringe the medicine's the experience itself it just happens to be delivered in a digital format, but the experience is what drives the brain's plasticity that leads to the outcome. So then I started more recently calling it

experiential medicine, which to me is really gratifying because I feel like that's it. That's really the core of this. That's the term that I was looking for at that time that didn't pop into my head because it really defines the foundational principles, both in the neuroscience and in the practice of what leads to the change. It's the experience itself. Yeah. I mean, the fundamental notion that it's something, it's not something you take, it's something that you do. It's really a paradigm shift when you think about how you're going to address everything from trying to resolve illness or dysfunction to optimizing potential and performance. Yeah, this is a real paradox because, yes, it is a paradigm shift in many ways because

our medical system is so molecularly focused, right? The pill, the chemical, the drug, whatever you call it, something that you pop into your mouth and you hope you get better. That's like the entire medical system is built on that framework. So now we're like, oh, here is a medicine that's going to have the same approval process, the same double blind randomized control trials, backing it up, the same publication in peer-reviewed journals, hopefully the same insurance reimbursement, prescription process. It is medicine just like the pill, but it's an experience. That's a shift for sure, and one that is welcome, I think, by many people. But in many other ways, it's the oldest medicine there is, right? We've been using

experiences to change our brains for thousands of years. It's, you know, meditation and mindfulness are the more formal practices of it, but it's been a part of therapy and even education process itself is a type of experiential treatment, you know, usually for children. So it's one of those things that at the same time, it's so common and so baked into our history as humans that it seems almost like obvious. And then at the other, you know, simultaneously, it's such a new approach to medicine. It's really sort of fascinating. Yeah, it's amazing. And on the one hand, I think, like you said, you're right.

There are a lot of people right now that they don't want to take the pill. They want to know, what can I do other than that? Because there are side effects. There are a lot of people right now that they don't want to take the pill. They want to know what can I do other than that because there are side effects. There's experimental. We don't know what the long-term effects of these things are. Or we do know what at least some of the side effects are and we really don't want to deal with them. So what else can we do? And yet I feel like there's also the flip side, which is that there are a lot of people where it's like, well, if you tell them, you know, like meditate five

days a week or move your body like five days a week or take a pill, they're going to choose the pill and they're going to keep asking you over and over. Isn't there something I can just take instead of something that I have to do? Yeah. It's, it's, it's a fascinating, um, conceptual discussion that you just raised is this, this desire. I call it like the magic brain pill. It's what we want. We want to get up in the morning, to brush our teeth, to take that pill, and that depression, PTSD, autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's is just gone. That's really what we want. But that desire to take a pill that treats our brains and our minds in the same simple way that we treat an infection, which is really, I think, where the pill really took off, to be able to cure, literally cure diseases, largely starting with infectious disease, has driven this multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that has just never stopped pursuing that vision that that pill

is out there. And people want it. It's easy to distribute. You could put it in a little bottle and send it all over the world. You could market up enormously. It's easy to do. You take it usually for the rest of your life. It has a great business model.

I mean, that whole system has been going on for 70 years and we've just failed. We don't have that magic brain pill for any condition. on behalf of everyone, from the companies that make current medicines, to the regulatory agencies, to insurance bodies, to the physicians and the patients, to say, when it comes to the brain and the mind, we have to think about medicine differently. It's not going to be so easy. It's likely not going to be that simple moment and you're better. It's going to take some work, and there's okay. There's actually benefits of working for your mental health. Yeah. And I mean, among those benefits, I wonder part of it also is there's a sense of, you know, it's like when you bring a car to a mechanic and you're like, you know, like, and they're like, well, what's wrong with it?

Well, it goes to and like, you know, like when I click this, it doesn't click. And that's the extent. And you kind of like, you show up and you're like, wow, I need to completely surrender and trust that this person and what they're doing is like legitimate and right and fair. And it's going to work because I have zero knowledge. Like I don't have any sense of control or agency or autonomy or competence when it comes to understanding how to fix this. And I feel like we've gotten to a similar point very often with our bodies. And what you're talking about, when you step into the paradigm of experiential medicine, that requires us to play a part, that requires us to participate, to step into a place of some level of knowledge and agency, I have to imagine that that alone, even if you might resist in the beginning,

also does something which is good for us beyond even whatever the intervention itself is. Yes, I believe that strongly. And I think it's just an open-ended research question too. It's a fascinating one. What does the role of agency in your medical treatment at this level mean? What does it do? How does it influence the outcomes? How does it influence the sustainability of the benefits over time, right? Because so many medical interventions have fleeting benefits, right? You take it, the minute you stop taking it, you're back to where you were. Well, we see something very different with these plasticity-inducing experiential medicines

and how much of that is not just the active ingredients, but the process of engaging in your medicine in such a deep, personal, sustained way. So yeah, I'm very excited to study that in the lab to understand that role as well. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at

onepeloton.ca. of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. And that really brings us to your more recent fascination and sort of like the entire new division of your center.

And that is the world of psychedelics. You know, we're talking about experiential medicine, you know, like here, here is sort of like the ultimate experience where, you know, we're talking about substances, but it's not just substances. And I think that maybe that's one of the big misapprehensions about when, you know, like, you know, psychedelics have become sort of like, so digital or, you know, like Silicon Valley is using it to increase performance

and to do all sorts of things. But in the world of therapeutic outcomes, it's been around for a really long time. In the world of actual human potential, it's been around for thousands of years in indigenous populations. It was outlawed and labeled a political pariah for decades in this country.

And now we're seeing this stunning resurgence and you're stepping into this. And my curiosity, I guess at the outset is why, like what was the inciting incident for you to say, okay, we're running this extraordinary laboratory. We're doing incredible research. We're developing these tools and technologies. And oh, look, psychedelics. We need to devote a lot of energy and effort to this. Yeah, it's a great question. It's confusing to a lot of people when people that know very well what we do are often,

including our donors and everyone, psychedelics, it just seems like it doesn't fit with our focus on technology, neuroscience experiences. And that's because of this preoccupation with the molecule. And that's really what it comes down to. As a matter of fact, I was sort of caught up in that as well. When I was thinking about other areas that are related to what we do at Neuroscape that we might expand into, psychedelics wasn't even on my list because I was like, we don't do molecules. That's for like 95% of the other labs out there. That's not what we do. We have this own cool thing of video games and virtual reality and motion capture and the, you know, the building the sensory immersive experiences. That's, that's what we do. And then I read Michael Pond's book. I, I, I, now I'm friends with him and I often, he, I think he thinks it's funny and somewhat, um, I don't know about disturbing, but there's always like this ownership when you realize that what you wrote has influenced someone's career so dramatically, but he must be getting used to it by now because that book is amazing and has changed a lot of people's minds, which is the name of the book, How to Change Your Mind. And it really changed

my mind. And only because even halfway through that book, I was like, oh, this is experiential medicine. I mean, it was so obvious to me that it was, but I didn't connect it with what we were doing with video games. And although it's very different than video games at its core, it's not very different. It's the idea that there is an inciting event. In this case, it is a pill that you take or a mushroom that you consume. And that changes your brain in such a way, acutely, the plasticity, the perceptual aspects, your view of yourself and of time, to lead to an experience that occurs during the treatment that has the potential to lead to dramatic outcomes that change you. And they could be bad or good or good or transformative, but it's not just the molecule that's doing that. It's the experience itself. And the realization that the experience was the medicine, once I saw it, I couldn't not see it again. I was like, this is what we already study. We just do it without the drugs, right? So how

could we help this field? How could we inform it? How could we guide it in a different direction so that it has more opportunity to reach what I think is its optimal potential to help people? How can we help that using the tools that we use at Neuroscape in terms of recording brain activity during experience, in terms of creating immersive sensory environments that help guide experience. And so that was really the sort of epiphany in some ways was that, again, the preoccupation with the molecule is misdirected. This is a perfect example of an experiential medicine. And embracing that is the direction that I feel we need to go to really unleash its ultimate benefits. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me,

it's sort of like the molecules that push off the cliff. Yes. And whether you fall and crash or whether you sprout wings and fly or somewhere yet everywhere in between is is from what i understand like much more a matter of context you know yeah um yeah and what's interesting is you know so what you were building before what you have been building for decades now really is technology that would be considered um like closed loop technology closed loop experiences right Where you kind of control the entirety of the experience and you can, you can measure a huge amount of what's happening, you know, in a person's brain in real time, feed it back into the experience to alter the experience to deliver the

optimal, like experience in the optimal outcome. Okay. So you can do that with technology, right? But when we get into the world of psychedelics you know that the variability of the experience i mean that is not by in its nature a closed loop experience but it sounds like what you're trying to do is figure out how to make it one correct that is the ultimate goal that we have is to turn psychedelic treatments into closed loop experiences and be able to both personalize and more precisely target the delivery of this treatment by the closed loop. So yes, it's a daunting challenge because it's taking away all of the mushiness of the field that currently exists, right?

It's saying, let's get really granular about every single individual. What is the elements of their mental and physical and physiological makeup where they approach this treatment? And then what happens during and all the complexity that could, you know, present itself. And then how do we maximally process that and integrate it after? And when you think about it from that perspective, it's so much more complicated than here's 20 micrograms of this, you know, we're going to sit with you and protect you and hope that

you're coming out the other side okay. Now, in all fairness, there is in the treatments that are being done right now in the clinical world, there is multiple days of therapy before. There's two sitters with you. There's an integration afterwards. So there is an appreciation of this ability to guide someone to a better outcome with the experiential elements being nurtured. But the details, the ingredients to the recipe, how to deliver it in a personal way, unknown. Now, there are

individuals out there that have been doing treatments for 40 years underground, and they know. They have so much wisdom just through their own experience, but that's not really scalable. We can't really teach everyone how to do that. So although this is a really challenging research focus, it's one, my partner in this, Robin Carr at Harris and Jenny Mitchell, who both are joining Neuroscape to help push this research endeavor to the next level, feel confident that we can accomplish it. It's going to take a lot of effort, but the technology to be able to record the state of an individual while they go through a psychedelic trip and to be able to guide their environment exists. We just have a lot to learn about how to do it in the most effective way. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like you're simultaneously trying to code the internal

and external experience of the person going through it while coding the entirety of the environment around them and coding the person who is in there as their guide or therapist or reminder at the same time, because it's like, they're all variables, you know, and unless you can observe them and somehow code them and then start to identify patterns over time, it doesn't work. It's not scalable. You know, so you see these benefits, but maybe they're not replicable. And certainly like you can't in any way consistently leverage them on a mass scale. Yeah, you framed it so perfectly and super intimidating to hear it said back to me that way. But it's the truth.

And it is going to require not just sort of being brave in terms of writing research protocols to try to do what you just described, but it's going to require cleverness and innovativeness in experimental design itself and statistical approaches. And this is a great opportunity for machine learning and pattern classification, signal processing. This is going to bring in so many different experts to be able to accomplish what you described that it's uh you know it's totally intimidating and thrilling at the same time and we're finding all those people and they're like let's sign me up i'm ready to go so bringing in that multi-disciplinary group that are all going to bring those different skills to the table is absolutely required to accomplish what you described. And it still could take us decades to really do it well. But the win is just a completely

new way of addressing our mental health challenges and beyond people that are suffering mental health conditions is just elevating the human condition, right? That's the ultimate win is that everyone can up level a couple of notches, in my opinion, all of us. And so there's an objective here beyond medicine that we're excited about as well. Yeah, it's the full scale of the human experience, the full spectrum of it, right? And if you think back to the 60s, you know know like timothy leary wasn't like all i concerned with um treating ptsd you know it was all about expanding consciousness it was about you know like taking people and like even if you were good with the way things were opening your consciousness so you can access a whole nother universe of of capacity and expansiveness but but even the earliest

research now it's coming out like johns hopkins and some other places on these things like PTSD and depression and anxiety, without all the controls that you're talking about, without all the details, the earliest research right now, the outcomes are stunning. I mean, they're kind of breathtaking. Amazing. It's really profound. Hard to think of another word to describe it quite so clearly in how dramatically different the results of these studies are compared to a lot of the pharmaceutical trials that have occurred before on those very conditions, PTSD, depression being two excellent examples. So I get really excited when I think about what's the potential, like what out Neuroscape's psychedelic research division and bringing together Robin Carhart-Harris and this world-class team. Like you said, you're getting a lot of people with a lot of different expertise.

So on a practical basis, when you're building out a center of this scale that you know is going to take a research effort for very likely decades to approximate what you want to make happen, what you hope to make happen. This is from a business side, this is a massive complex endeavor that also requires a lot of funding. And I know you've raised a certain amount of money and I know there's more that you're looking for. But what occurs to me too is the nature of the interventions that you're talking about, or at least in the early days from what we're seeing, it's not the type of thing where you're committed to it for life.

There's no real good business model from the provider side. So that takes pharma, which often funds the research at the level needed to do the breakthroughs that you're doing, kind of out of the equation, which means it's like you're out there on your own. Yeah, it requires, I mean, talk about a paradigm shift. The idea of a single visit or just a couple visit treatment for something as complex as PTSD is so far beyond where we are right now. It changes every model system of reimbursement of how pharmaceutical companies make money. And the field is reverberating with the complexities of that potential change that it will induce. And we feel it now as we raise money. I mean, most of the field right now is being

supported by philanthropy. Individuals that believe in it, that have the resources, that they want to contribute to changing the world. And they might have their own personal struggles or maybe more oriented along the consciousness and enlightenment and elevation side of it. Everyone has their own window to look at this, but that is largely driving the research funding right now. It has to change. It's not sustainable. It's not enough. We do need, I believe, to have companies that figure out ways in authentic, transparent, and feel-good manner, make money, and also help that. I feel like that has to happen in order for this field to become everything it can. And the field is struggling to find that right now,

but those models hopefully will, you know, we'll continue to develop, but you're right. Yeah. So it's sort of like you're sitting at the precipice right now, not just of incredible discovery and invention in the context of medicine, but also in the business model that supports it and in really the paradigm of accessibility of solutions to a vastly larger community of people. Yeah, I find it really, really exciting. And what we're doing in psychedelics, again, it's sitting in parallel to our experiential medicine through the digitally delivered format with no drugs on at all. So that's like another vast field that we're looking at from virtual reality and augmented

reality solutions to a lot of these problems that don't involve any compound on board. Some people may not need that push off the cliff, or it's just so many questions in front of us. So I'm riding this wave right now, surfing it, trying to see how these different types of experiential medicines that rely on compounds like psychedelics or not, how they're going to come together as time, you know, rolls on over the next several years. Yeah. I can't even imagine the sense of possibility that runs through your veins right now. And if it were me, I would also be like fear would be added to that equation. Yeah. I try to embrace the fear. I love it. I really feel so fortunate that I could be at this place in history. I think as a kid growing up, all I wanted to be was this famous scientist that did something really important. But no matter who you

are, how smart you are, or how much you want that, there's many factors that lead you to do something really big. And a lot of it is just time and place and all those elements that had to come together. Like this might've, you know, we know it wasn't ready 50 years ago. And same thing with video games. Like it was even a struggle just a decade ago to get the NIH to think about a video game as a treatment. So I just, I feel really fortunate that I've been able to be at this sort of point in time where the field is also fed up. Like we have just done an atrocious job. Like everyone, everyone from the pharmaceutical companies to the regulatory agencies is ready for new medicine. So the timing is right. And I've met

an incredible support team of great people who are just brilliant and as motivated as I am to see this through. So I feel really excited about it. Yeah. When you zoom the lens out a little bit, so as we're having this conversation, you have a baby girl. We've been talking a lot about your work, but you're also in this role of a new parent. You've got this beautiful little child. When you think about the hope of your work, what do you hope your work will do for the world that you'll be inheriting? Yeah, I think about that a lot. I'm on a RV road trip right now with a four-month-old daughter, and we're just living in this little teeny house moving across the country. So we spend a lot of time together. We spend all of

our time together. And looking at the world through these little eyes as she goes from four to five months and start bringing on layers of awareness, I can't help but think about her future and her teenage years and all the struggles that she's undoubtedly going to face. I am so optimistic about the future, given all the challenges in the world. I'm not living with blinders on. I've been watching what's been going on over the last several years as well, in addition to the state that we find ourselves in. But I am optimistic.

I think that this path that I and others have started of thinking about medicine when it comes to the mind in a different way, where it doesn't have to be that alternative, fringy, new agey stuff that sits on the side. It could be mainstream medicine. This is the future of mainstream medicine and education. We didn't talk about education, but it's part of this, right? Because again, education, how a young developing mind changes is an experiential process also.

So to me, they're almost the same exact thing. The fact that the fields are advancing and there's an openness to it and a sophistication to the research and methodology that's being deployed to advance it makes me really hopeful for her future. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in this container of the Good Life Project,

if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to experience. To experience deeply and sustainably, to really hold the moment in your mind such that you can really evolve with it. You don't want your experiences to just be these fleeting moments. You want them to help you grow. And that's sort of, you know, both how I try to live my own life, to make all of those experiences. I mean, you can't make them all, but to make them meaningful and make you have some change, some growth from them. And that's exactly the same thing that we

do in the laboratory, that we think about it from the experiential medicine perspective. So to me, living a good life is living a life of rich experiences. Thank you. scientist Ryan Darcy about advances in technology that are allowing us to rewire our brains in ways we never imagined. You'll find a link to Ryan's episode in the show notes. And even if you don't listen now, be sure to click and download so it's ready to play when you're on the go. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project in your favorite listening app so you'll never miss an episode. And then share the Good Life Project love with friends because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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