The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Can Spiritual Experiences and Psychedelics Make us Happy? (LIVE from DC)

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

More than a third of us admit to having had a spiritual experience. We might have been profoundly moved by a sunset or a painting; or felt that we've connected with our god or with the entire world around us. Such events can be transformative - bringing positive change to our lives and increasing our happiness - but some experiences aren't so great.  In front of a live audience in Washington DC, David Yaden of Johns Hopkins University tells Dr Laurie Santos about his work examining what effect spiritual experiences have on us and how things like meditation and psychedelic drugs can bring about these powerful transformational episodes.   David Yaden is the author of: The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.

Pushkin. Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. I don't want to spoil the illusion, but the life of podcast hosts often is pretty far from glamorous. Normally, I record this show in my closet, surrounded by pillows and mattresses to keep out all the noise of the trains that run by my Boston apartment. But not today. The Happiness Lab has hit the road.

And what a venue we've come to. The 6th and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C. Not only do we have a beautiful venue and a great crowd, but bringing the Happiness Lab live show to D.C. also allowed me to book a guest that I have been wanting to interview for a long time. Our guest today is Dr. David Yadin. David is an assistant professor

in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. David did his doctoral training in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored which mental states and interventions led to lasting positive impacts on our happiness and well-being. Since starting his own lab, he's begun studying the psychology of states of consciousness that most people think of as among the most meaningful moments in their lives. Specifically, he's a world expert on what we often refer to as spiritual, transformative, or self-transcendent experiences, including those that come from the use of psychedelic substances. And he's recently co-authored a book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, 21st Century Research and Perspectives. You all are in for such a big treat listening to David today because I think of him as the 21st century embodiment of a scholar that I love, William James,

who you're going to hear more about today. And so for all these reasons, I'm so, so glad that David accepted my invitation to be part of our first ever DC Happiness Lab live event. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to David. So David, as I mentioned in my introduction, you study these experiences that people report to be some of the most important moments of their lives, but we kind of have very little scientific information about these transcendent experiences. And so I wanted to just start off with some definitions. What do we mean by spiritual experiences here? Yeah, these experiences go under many labels. So you've mentioned a few self-transcendent, transformative, mystical,

and spiritual experience. We chose spiritual experience for the book because we ran a survey and we asked people, what do you call these experiences in spiritual one? So we stuck it in the book. But we do offer a definition. It's a two-parter. The spiritual experience is a substantially altered state of consciousness that involves a seeming perception of an unseen order of some kind. So let me break that down. First, substantially altered state of consciousness. So this is an overall shift in cognition, affect, and perception. So we feel qualitatively different than normal. We know something has changed from our ordinary waking consciousness. But that's very broad. That happens in all kinds of different ways. Fevers, falling asleep, etc. So you need the second part of the definition, which involves a seeming

perception of an unseen order of some kind. That sounds really convoluted, but basically it's as if you're seeing something that you don't normally see, but that's really important. And so for many people, that's God. For some people, that's an underlying unity of all things. For some people, it's entropy even and scientific sorts of concepts, but it seems as though you're seeing something that you don't normally see that's important. Yeah, and so give our audience a sense

of what some of these experiences might be like, like have them kind of walk through what it might feel like. Yeah, so I think when a lot of people hear the term spiritual experience, it will bring something to mind in their own life. So I'm wondering if we could try to bring up one of those experiences. So I think one way to do this is put your feet flat on the floor, put your hands on your thighs, take a nice deep breath in. Close your eyes. And as you breathe out, just try to call to mind a memory

of what you think a spiritual experience might mean for you. And don't think too hard about it. Just let something come up. It could be a very profound and obvious experience that maybe changed your life in some way. For others, it might be more subtle and just a deeply meaningful experience of mindfulness or awe or gratitude.

And any of those are just fine. So as you let just one memory come up, see if you can feel into that experience, try to remember how your body felt, what you were feeling, what you were thinking, what you were seeing, even smelling. And then try to remember how it impacted your life. and then try to remember how it impacted your life.

And as you do, you can take a nice deep breath in, and as you let it out, you can open your eyes back to the room. I'm kind of curious, as you all in the audience were doing that show of hands, how many folks had an experience that they could go to that they really remembered? that show of hands, how many folks had an experience that they could go to that they really remembered? It's about maybe half, a third to half at least. Is that common when you do exercises like this? Yeah. So there have been a number of big Gallup polls. Who here has heard of Gallup polls? So big, everybody. So that was a warmup.. They're nerds in this audience. That was a warm-up. So Gallup will ask, in slightly different terminology, they'll say, have you ever been close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself? So the wording is often different, but the rates of endorsement are surprisingly similar

across the U.S. and the U.K. and across decades and across like changes in terminology. So what percentage of the U.S. population do you think would answer yes to the question, have you had a profound spiritual experience? Scream out your answers and I'll translate them. 17, 45, 11, 25. That's what, 60, 60. 60, 80 I heard too. 80, yeah, okay. So 12 to 80 was the range. That's really good.

That means I have something useful to tell you about because that's a really, that's a lot of uncertainty. And unlike lots of things in psychology, there's a very precise answer to this question, which is 35 percent if anyone guessed 35 percent you'll get a free book so come up see me after so it looks like there was someone but this is really fascinating i think that 35 percent so you know one out of every three people will say yes i've had one of these experiences so if it wasn't you someone you know will have had one of these experiences

and we don't talk about them. And we'll probably get into the reasons for that. Yeah. And my understanding from seeing some of your other interviews is that this is actually one of the reasons you got interested in the psychological nature of these experiences that you had one of these moments yourself too. Do you want to share? Yeah. So we say research is me-search often. And in psychology, it's usually you have a lot of it or you have none of it. So I had one of these experiences. This was under no psychoactive substances of any kind. And I wasn't engaging in any kind of deliberate practice like meditation or anything. This was totally spontaneous, which is the most common category for these experiences, actually.

It was during a sort of difficult time in my life, though. I think I was looking for myself, trying to think about what I wanted to do with my future. It was during a kind of a transitional period, which is also a common trigger of these experiences. But I was lying in my dorm room bed. I began to feel heat in my chest, which initially I thought was indigestion, heartburn, really. Cafeteria food,

you know, I was an undergrad. But this feeling of heat began to spread and get pretty intense and eventually covered my entire body. And this is where it gets a bit strange. So at that point, a voice in my mind said, this is love. At which point I go out of my awareness of my body, maybe into my mind. And it's as if I can see 360 degree boundless horizon stretching out in every direction, and a kind of intricate fabric that I felt fully part of. So after what was probably just a few minutes, but felt like hours or days had passed,

this feeling of love reached the absolute boiling point. So it was as much love as I could possibly take. I open my eyes. My body is laughing and crying at the same time. Everything seems new. I feel much better about myself, my future. I am overwhelmed with love for friends and family. I do the classic, like, I'm calling to say I love you to many people. And it felt as if I had just experienced the most important moment of my life. But most of all, I was wondering what the fuck just happened to me. I had no reference point. And of course, the thought occurs, am I going, quote unquote, crazy? Is this a symptom of a mental disorder? Was that God? What? and so i was kind of confused and it

it set me on a reading binge essentially through comparative religion philosophy neuroscience psychology and now i guess psychopharmacology it's still going i'm still trying to figure it out basically and that's that's what i do that's what I focus on. And that's why. I mean, I love sharing this story in part just because it's such a profound experience to hear about. But it also kind of highlights some of the stuff that I know in your research you found tends to be pretty typical of these experiences. And so one of the things you mentioned is this idea of like this sort of feeling of

love, a sort of sense of connection. You're sort of hearing voices. Interestingly, these spiritual experiences tend to be pretty social. They have this kind of sense of connection. And so talk about maybe either why that is, but what are some of the psychological consequences of that? We know that one of the most important contributors to well-being, happiness is social connectedness. These experiences are almost a kind of introverted social connectedness because people feel a very profound sense of connection to other people, to their environment, even all of existence in some of the more intense kinds of experiences. And it's not just as if they

feel connected to their physical surroundings. There's a kind of social element to it. So there's this concept of mind perception. When you look at me, without having to think about it, you're reflexively perceiving mind in this flesh body that's flapping around, but not to my chair and not to the wall. But during these experiences, we're more likely to perceive mind in other human beings, but also in things like the chair and the wall. And everything seems alive in a sense. And so it's like a massive social connection moment. So it's a way to feel a huge amount of connectedness all at one time and in a very intense way.

And another piece of the intensity of these experiences is that in lots of cases, they can be just super profound. And definitely in rare cases, they can lead people not just to feel differently in that moment, but to kind of alter the course of how people feel in the long term, like sometimes even changing their lives. These experiences can be in some sense, like morally transformative. Yeah. So sometimes these experiences don't have much of an impact, but sometimes for some people, they seem to have very long lasting results for years, even decades or an entire lifetime. There's an example of a man named Bill who was neglectful of his family, describes himself as pretty abusive due to his very, very severe alcoholism. He undergoes a kind of psychedelic therapy using scopolamine several times with no real effect. But the third time, just beforehand, he interacts with a number

of people, part of this group, it's like a religious organization. And he has this full-blown spiritual experience that allows him to be sober for basically the rest of his life. And this is Bill Wilson. This is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, on which all 12-step programs are based. And spiritual experience are at the very, very heart of these 12-step programs. So for some people, these experiences, while they may not last very long, they have a hugely lengthy impact on their life. And another feature of these experiences is this kind of altered state of consciousness, which I think when you're a nerdy scientist like us, begs this naturalistic explanation that gets kind of complicated.

You know, as you mentioned in your own experiences, you're wondering, is this God? Is this the kind of thing that we don't, as scientists, tend to try to dig into? These things kind of seem outside the purview of normal scientific research. And so one question is like, how do we take a naturalistic approach to stuff that feels perhaps by definition so supernatural? Yeah, as scientists, we need to study what we can measure. And there are many aspects of these experiences that we can measure, but there are some kinds of interpretations of these experiences that are simply off the table scientifically. And we leave those to philosophers and theologians and individuals' own interpretations and their own conscience and faith, essentially.

So when we study these kinds of experiences, we take a methodologically agnostic approach. And so we say, let's look at what we can study. We can study what people say about them, what triggered the experience, how they felt during the experience, what happens in the brain and the body during the experience, how it seems to impact people's lives, how it changes their behavior. So all of that is on the table. The question of ultimately where these experiences come from, is it from a supernatural realm of a strange feature of these experiences that they're really varied. You know, that's why you called your book, The Varieties of Spiritual Experience. And so give me a sense of the like spectrum of these things. We talked about some

of the extreme ones where, you know, it's changing your life. It's sort of morally transformative. Like what does the other side of the spectrum look like? Yeah. So for some people, these experiences can be quite negative and are, in fact, related to mental illness and can lead to mental illness. I don't want to portray these experiences as always positive. They're very intense and they can go in different directions for different people. There's a long history in treating them as merely parts of mental illness. And a lot of my research is oriented towards correcting that because actually most people benefit from these experiences and some people benefit tremendously. So in terms of the impact that they have on people's lives, there are

varieties. In terms of intensity, like when we went through that imaginal exercise, some people probably had really transformative experiences in mind. Other people may have thought about looking at a really amazing painting, somewhat less intense. So they vary in terms of intensity. They also vary in terms of the content of the experience. We've talked about if you ask people, have you had a spiritual experience? About 35% of the population will say yes. And you can make further subdivisions within that. The main three subdivisions. So the first one is feeling as if you're connected to an all-pervasive, sort of all-powerful, non-physical mind of some kind, like a kind of god or divinity.

The second one is unity. So people feel deeply connected to everything and everyone around them. The third, and this is where things get a bit strange, is non-physical entities or ghosts. So we didn't go looking for ghost stories, but they came to us. So if you ask people, have you had a spiritual experience? Many people will say yes, and it was a ghost experience. Now I'm being a little glib, but these experiences can be very profound. There was a study in Sweden that found that over 50% of recently bereaved spouses will have an experience of a visage or a ghost of their recently deceased spouse. And that most people view these experiences as meaningful and beneficial and helpful in the mourning process. And so I think we're going to talk more about what these variations mean, but as we're talking about this, I'm realizing that as we start talking about varieties,

we should be sure to give credit to the scholar who kind of came up with this notion of varieties. You called your book The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, but that was kind of a kickback to the scholar who first started the empirical study of spiritual experiences in general. And so when we get back from the break, we're going to do a deep dive into that scholar's story. It was David's academic forefather who started studying transcendent moments first, the famed 19th century psychologist William James. We're going to hear a little bit about James's story and how he became interested in century psychologist William James. We're going to hear a little bit about James's story and how he became interested in all these phenomena. And we're going to learn how his work laid the foundation for some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs we're seeing in

spiritual experiences today, including in the domain of psychedelics and happiness. The Happiness Lab in Live in DC. We'll be right back. in DC. We'll be right back. Ugh, we're so done with New Year, New You. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes.

More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. And so, David, many of the most famous accounts of spiritual experiences are pretty old in our oldest texts and our oldest religious works.

But it was only in the 19th century that researchers really started studying these phenomena from more of a scientific perspective. It was really until the pioneering work of one of psychology's great scholars, William James. And I know, David, that you're kind of like a William James super fan, but he's kind of not as famous as a lot of older psychologists that we think of, you know, Freud or Jung or something like that. Why not? And why is that kind of an oversight? exciting thing. And I should say, we named the book as an homage to William James's original book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, because we want people to go back and read the original. It's not like a copyright violation or error or something, right? No, no. So I was in a cab going to Countway Library, which is a medical library, and it's the only place in the world that has a chapter from Carl Jung's autobiography that was cut by the editor. And you have to go there in person, put on these gloves, and actually handle the manuscript

in person. And this deleted chapter is all about Carl Jung's relationship with William James. And why that matters is because most people see Carl Jung as Freud's protege and really just carrying forward Freudian thought, and then they split, but really they're kind of talking about very similar things. What this chapter shows is that Carl Jung's later work owes a huge debt to William James's work, and he essentially became Jamesian. So I was in a cab, and I was telling this exact same story. And the cast of characters involved are Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and William James. And the cab driver said,

I definitely know Freud. I think I've heard of Jung. I've never heard of the other guy. And that I think is pretty common. And David started weeping and the cab was like, that is absurd. That is so absurd. I mean, it was true of me before I became a psychologist as well, of course, but it's not only absurd, it's bizarre. So at the time of his death, William James was called the most famous academic in the world by Bertrand Russell. He had been the president of the American Psychological Association and American Philosophical Association. He's a professor at Harvard. He made huge contributions in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, psychiat Association. He's a professor at Harvard. He made huge contributions in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, psychiatry. He started the first psychology lab in North America.

So he's this towering figure who is also a member of the most famous family in America. He grew up with Emerson and Thoreau sitting around the dinner table. His brother Henry James became basically the most influential novelist of the time. His brother, Henry James, became basically the most influential novelist of the time. His sister, Alice James, became a famous feminist diarist. So massively influential and somewhat forgotten. And I think that that's a big mistake because I think William James really laid the foundation for the study of these experiences and did so in a way that was much more evidence-based and nuanced than either Freud or Jung. So William James wanted there to be rigorous empirical research

on these experiences. Freud and Jung did something very different. So Freud looked at these experiences and he said, these sound weird. He's like, these don't fit with our picture of psychology. He said he's never had one of these experiences. And so therefore they must be related to mental illness. And he even offered an explanation, or he tried to, he said, these oceanic feelings of oneness are actually memories of being in your mother's womb that are repressed, that are coming to awareness. So any psychologist would think that's completely absurd. We know that the memory doesn't work like that. So Freud said, these are parts of mental illness and they don't really have value. They're delusional, basically. Jung thought that they were the key to mental health. So he almost went to the entire opposite

perspective and he thought these experiences are so important that he's going to put them at the center of his system of psychotherapy, called the numinous experiences, and probably didn't really emphasize the risks and the fact that these experiences often don't result in long-lasting change, at least not for everybody. And he thought that they were veridical in the sense that they were showing us a true picture of reality. So those are very different perspectives. And William James's view is, I think, the correct one. We should look to the evidence, learn about these experiences, and we should set aside philosophical and theological questions that we can't answer scientifically. And one of my favorite things about the story of how William James got interested in these experiences is that

his kind of big foray into talking about them happened at an event a lot like this, right? Yeah, so the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, essentially the TED Talk of the day. This lecture series becomes the book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. And at the end of it, they apparently sang for He's a Jolly Good Fellow, which is like the equivalent of a standing ovation at a TED Talk, I guess. It's kind of fun.

I was going to have you do it. So now fast forward, you know, 100 plus years, and the scholars today are still using some of the same traditions that James did, right? I mean, functionally, his naturalistic approach is kind of what you've done with your famous varieties corpus, you know, so talk about kind of the goal of that work to really catalog these experiences. Yeah, so one of William James's students, Edwin Starbuck, did a survey of people in New England at the time. Have you had feelings of oneness?

Have you had feelings of divine aid? And tabulated how many people said yes. And so this was a rudimentary, what we call cross-sectional survey. We've now done these kinds of surveys, but we ask a whole lot of questions about what triggered these experiences, what kind of experience it was, what people felt during the experience, and then how it impacts their life. And so we ask a whole lot of questions and we put these questions to thousands of people, not just a few dozen like they did back in the

day. And so what are we learning from some of these surveys? I mean, one of the big questions is like, where do these kinds of experiences come from? You know, what are we learning about how they tend to emerge in these surveys? The ultimate origin, whether it comes from God or the brain or somewhere else. Again, we set that question aside when we study it. I should also mention people of every religious faith, people who are spiritual but not religious, agnostics and atheists all have these experiences. And in fact, some atheists will have a full-blown experience of God. They'll just choose afterwards to interpret it as a brain event rather than a God experience. So what causes these experiences? A lot of things. So things like

prayer, meditation, solitude in nature. Maybe those are more expected, less expected being near death, in nature. Maybe those are more expected, less expected being near death, grief, transitional periods in life, and then psychedelic experiences as well. What do all those things share in common? I'm not exactly sure. If you know the answer, let me know afterwards because I'm really trying to figure that out. And so, you know, in James's day, we kind of just had these statistical techniques where we could kind of ask people about these experiences and try to catalog them. But James would be so excited to the access that we have nowadays in terms of new techniques for looking at these things. And one of the things that we can use, and I know that you have used, is looking at activity in the brain to understand what's happening in the brain when people experience these altered states. And so talk about how

researchers are starting to use neuroscientific techniques to get at the mechanisms of these experiences and also some of the particular challenges of that work that you might not think of ahead of time. It's pretty difficult to have one of these experiences on command, let alone lying in a neuroimaging scanner, a noisy, you know, uncomfortable neuroimaging scanner, but researchers are doing this. So my co-author in the book, Andy Newberg, was a pioneer in putting Franciscan nuns and Tibetan meditators. These are veteran contemplatives. These are people who practice prayer or meditation for hours a day for many years, who say that they're able to put themselves into this deep feeling of unity, more or less on command if given some time. And so when these people were putting themselves into this state

and they were in the scanner at the same time, what was found is a particular region of the brain was inhibited or less activated, the temporal parietal junction. A region of the brain, doesn't matter. And this region is less active than normal. And you have to be careful about drawing conclusions in this way. But this region is often associated with mapping the boundaries between yourself and everything else. And so it makes good neurological sense that when people are feeling this sense of unity, that this boundary modeling

region is turned down. And I know this is all preliminary work. So as we talk about these findings, you know, it's hard to say what we know for sure because there's so few studies, but there are other neuroscientific studies looking at what's happening in the autonomic nervous system when we're having some of these experiences. And so bracketed autonomic nervous system is something we talk about a bunch on the podcast. This is two sets of systems that kind of go back and forth between our sort of fight or flight threat response, like a tiger jumps out, the sympathetic nervous system response, and the opposite sister response of kind of rest and digest, our sort of parasympathetic calming response. And usually the autonomic nervous system has these two poles,

like one is active at any one time. You're either in tiger's jumping out at you, fight or flight mode, or you're kind of chill in rest and digest mode. That's what's typical. But what are some of these early neuroscience studies starting to show about what happens in the autonomic nervous system when we're having some of these experiences? I can't resist telling this little historical anecdote. So the stress response, the sympathetic response, was discovered by one of William James' students, Walter Cannon. He's such a William James fan. It's so cute.

Look at how his face lights up when he does that. You're going to cut this, I know. And then the other, the parasympathetic response, the relaxation response, was discovered in the same lab by Herbert Benson and his group. So kind of funny. William James, super important. Now you'll never forget his name, but yeah. So these different branches, stress response,

sympathetic, relaxation response, parasympathetic, it's generally the case that one is on and the other one is essentially off. But during certain experiences, and it seems like spiritual experiences might be such a case, there's what's called a paradoxical response, where they both seem to be activated at the same time. There are other contexts in which this occurs as well, like orgasm, for example. And some scientists think that these spiritual experiences, while otherwise quite different from an orgasm, may involve some of the same underlying physiology. It's just a theory. And so all this stuff is really new but exciting, right? Because now we have these techniques

and the promise of these techniques for looking at these experiences. But when we get back from the break, we're going to talk about another modern window that we have into the nature of self-transcendent experiences. We're going to start talking about psychedelic drugs. The Happiness Lab, live in D.C., will turn to the science of psychedelics in just a moment. show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating

with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. So David, we're going to start talking about psychedelic substances. And I think in some ways, it might feel weird to talk about psychedelics in the context of other spiritual experiences. On the one hand, we're talking about nuns who are having these religious experiences, and we're talking about them in the same breath as tripping on LSD at some festival, right? But the reason you think this is okay is that you've argued in your book is that a lot of the experiences that people self-describe on psychedelics seem pretty indistinguishable from the more spiritual

realm. So give me some examples of why that seems to be the case. I should first start out by saying psychedelic substances have been used in indigenous communities for spiritual religious purposes for centuries and potentially millennia. And so the associations that our culture has with psychedelics, 60s and tie-dye and things like that will be very, very different in other cultures where this association between spiritual type experiences and psychedelic experiences is totally normal. But yeah, in our culture, it does maybe seem strange, but it's been noticed for a long time that there's similarities in the reports of some psychedelic experiences and some of these spiritual experiences.

So there was a scholar named Houston Smith, and when he was lecturing at Princeton, he used to write on the board one experience that was triggered by psychedelics, and then another experience that was triggered spontaneously. And he would ask the students, guess which one was triggered by the psychedelic? And no one could. I mean, it was 50-50, just at chance. And when you read these accounts, there are many in the book, they just seem indistinguishable. You wouldn't be able to tell, was that triggered by meditation or psychedelic or spontaneously? That's important data that leads us to believe that there might be something about psychedelics that will allow us to discover more about the underlying psychopharmacology of spiritual experiences in general, or at the very least, use psychedelics

to model these kinds of experiences that we're so interested in studying, not just in a correlational survey way, but actually inducing them in the lab. I mean, you've described the benefit that scientists might get from psychedelics, but my guess is other people who are sitting out there might be thinking, hang on, I could wait to kind of spontaneously have one of these experiences that are so transformative and maybe will change my life forever, or I could take a substance that might get me there.

And I think this leads to this sort of natural question, which is like, are psychedelics just a super fast way to get these intense spiritual experiences, a kind of quick fix to enlightenment, maybe even happiness? But you've argued that before we can even answer that question, we need to become more careful historians of what happened the last time we started exploring these questions with psychedelics. And so give us a kind of quick glimpse into the history of psychedelic research, kind of from where we started to where we wound up today. Yeah, so there does seem to be some promise for psychedelic compounds and the experiences that they create. And this results in statements like psychedelics can cure mental illness or solve the climate crisis these these outrageous claims and that one was true that was literally in a news article yeah yeah what's frustrating about that is the experiment has been run i mean in the 1960s

there was widespread use of psychedelics and And here we are. It's not as if everything became a utopia. And so this idea of, oh, just distribute psychedelics and the world will be healed, I find just, well, I'll just say empirically implausible. And so I think we have an opportunity as a society to treat these compounds with more respect this time around and to be a little bit more careful or a lot more careful and to do better science. And so with that care in place so far, what do we know about how these things work and the potential promise they might have for some therapeutic benefits? Yeah. So at our lab at Johns Hopkins, we do quite a lot of research with psilocybin. So psilocybin is a serotonergic psychedelic. It's one of the psychedelics.

And by the way, I should say, when I talk about psychedelics, I'm not talking about MDMA or ketamine. So MDMA we call an empathogen and ketamine we call a dissociative anesthetic. So when I say psychedelic, I mean serotonergic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline. So we do a lot of work with these serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin. And the way we do it is we bring in participants who are interested in having one of these experiences. We screen them. So we screen out people who have

personal or family history of psychotic disorders or cardiac issues. We go through extensive prep sessions so people can learn about what the psychedelic experience might be like and to build some trust with two of their guides who follow them through the whole process. On the session day, we just had one today, and these two guides will be in the session room with the participant. There's music playing. The participant wears headphones and eye shades and lies on a couch. And the experience lasts about six hours. And two to three hours in, there'll be peak intensity. People report a lot of different kinds of experiences throughout that six-hour period, some of which look very much like the kinds of experiences that I'm interested in. Deep feelings of unity, other kinds of spiritual experiences

happening in that context, which are often highly valued. So what we're seeing is that many people are reporting profoundly positive experiences. The majority of participants are saying this is among the most meaningful moments of their entire life. And we're seeing benefits to well-being that last many months. Boosted attitudes about self and life, overall well-being, pro-social attitudes, and these are self-reported and also confirmed by observers. This is quite promising. And as a well-being intervention, maybe among the most potent positive interventions ever discovered. There are, though, risks. So not everyone has a great time. There's always about 10 to 20 percent of the sample that has experiences dominated by anxiety and fear and who would prefer

never to have the experience again. We're generally not seeing adverse events that can't be resolved through psychotherapy in the laboratory setting. But as we do more studies, we're generally not seeing adverse events that can't be resolved through psychotherapy in the laboratory setting. But as we do more studies, we will certainly see that. And in observational studies, we see people do have adverse events. So psychedelics can result in behaviors that are unusual. And if they're taken in unsafe settings, can result in physical harm. We've heard stories of people running into traffic. So physical safety is important. People can also be taken advantage of. And so social

safety is extremely important as well. And abuses can and do occur. I'm guessing that at least some of the people listening right now have either tried psychedelics or maybe are thinking about trying it. Does your work provide any advice for some best practices with engaging in these substances? Do we have a sense from the research yet how best to kind of try them out, if you're interested? I am a researcher that works in a medical school. And so our research on psychedelics is generally trying to quantify their risk-benefit ratio to look at their potential as treatments, but I'm also beginning to look more and more at their potential for enhancing well-being. I think though the way I look at this

is very descriptive. I'm trying to understand the benefits and the risks. And so even though some of these findings sound quite positive, I'm not promoting psychedelic use. They're also illegal in most places. Some places they are legal. And I guess from a harm reduction perspective, if someone was going to use a psychedelic, I would really strongly advocate to learn a bit about what to expect, about the experience, and to do it in a safe setting physically and socially. experience and to do it in a safe setting physically and socially. And so as you look ahead, you know, five, ten years from now, you know, what do you see on the horizon? What do you think are going to be some of the most important steps in kind of understanding, you know, how these substances work and the potential that they have? So I think quantifying that risk-benefit ratio

is so important. This is a potent intervention, which from the perspective of learning to enhance well-being is very valuable potentially, because I think we need new ways forward if we want to try to learn how to enhance well-being. But there are real risks and we need to be able to provide information to people so that they can make an educated decision about whether to engage with the psychedelic. I would say one of the more exciting directions is this question that's emerging in the field, which is, does the trip matter at all? Can you take the trip or the acute subjective effects of psychedelics out and still benefit? And actually there's hundreds of millions of dollars being poured into this question right now. So there's a lot of people trying to take the acute subjective effects or the trip out of

psychedelics and use it as a treatment, which I am all for. That's interesting scientifically, could be valuable clinically. But I think what's important to me is that the psychedelic experience isn't demonized again, because for decades, we've had propaganda about how these are terrible experiences. And what we're seeing from the data are that these experiences are for most people quite positive and can be extremely profound. And so I'm concerned that we really stay grounded in the actual data and what people are saying about these experiences and not just try to take the subjective effects out. So David, I really just see you

as this modern day embodiment of William James. You're taking the next step and really trying to understand these spiritual experiences using kind of the best techniques we have scientifically. I hope we come back in a hundred plus years and we're having yet another event where someone is singing for your successor He's a jolly good fellow

That was great. Well done, well done. The Happiness Lab Live was co-written by Ryan Dilley and was produced by Ryan Dilley and Brittany Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the team at our great Happiness Live venue, the 6th and I Historic Synagogue in DC, to our amazing site engineer, Jason Granville,

and to Ronald Young Jr., who set us off on our path. Finally, thanks to this amazing live studio audience. I'd also like to thank Leytal Malah, Jasmine Perez, Carrie Brody, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliore, Morgan Ratner, Jaceb Whiteford, my agent Ben Davis, Doug Singer at WME, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab Live was brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Dr. Laurie We'll see you next time. with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know

what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.