TrueLife - Abigail Calder- Psychedelics & Neuroplasticity

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01389-zhttp://linkedin.com/in/abigail-calder-bb68831aaI’m so excited to finally get to speak with Doctoral Researcher at University of Fribourg, Abigail Calder. We will be discussing her recently published paper linked above.- Do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity? - Do psychedelics increase neurogenesis? - Where do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity?- At what dose do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity? - For how long do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity? One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. And gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with an amazing young woman all the way from Switzerland. She goes to the University of Freibor. She's a doctoral researcher. She's a big fan of neuroscience, pharmacology, and she is a woman who is fond of something

similar than everyone in my audience, and that is the world of psychedelics. And she's published a paper, and she's got an amazing insight on things. We're going to talk to her today. Ms. Abigail called her. How are you? I'm wonderful. I'm slowly working on my coffee, getting better every second. And, yeah, thank you so much for the invitation.

This will be fun of it. It's going to be fun. I figured I have learned in my life the best place to start is usually at the beginning. And so I thought we'd start there for this podcast here. What got you into, maybe you could first off explain a little bit more about yourself and then maybe tell us the journey that got you. What was it that made you fall in love with psychedelics? Yeah, okay. Well, that might be a bit of a long story.

I'll try to keep it not too long. So yeah, I'm a doctoral researcher in Freiburg in Switzerland, and I study LSD. I'm actually from the United States. I grew up in Illinois, but I've lived in the German-speaking world, Germany, and now Switzerland for the past, oh, eight years, I think. That's also its own story, but I try to stay focused. Yeah, so my interest in psychedelics, I'm not really, really sure where to start it because it goes really far back, I think, if I just look at my own

history. The reason I studied psychology originally was because I was interested in altered states of consciousness. And through that interest, I eventually discovered psychedelics in the course of my studies. So basically, when I started studying psychology, I was interested in, this is hilarious to me now, but I was interested in maybe using other types of altered states of consciousness in therapy because I had noticed that I would spontaneously have lucid dreams as a kid and also a teenager. And I would feel really good all day after having one of those dreams. It was just awesome and like an epic story of a dream and I could control it. And I came into my psychology studies originally with the very naive idea of trying to use lucid dreaming in

therapy. But I quickly learned that that was not going to happen because it's very difficult to teach someone to lucid dream. Some people can kind of do it. Some people, you know, it's really difficult. So I abandoned that idea relatively quickly, but it's still pretty funny to me that I came into psychology with that idea. It was like so close, so close to what I ended up doing. Yeah, but then I got really into hard science. I don't know that I was that scientific of a person when I came into my studies originally, but I was just really attracted to the pursuit of truth, objectively. And I noticed, well, as objectively as you can. And I found it very interesting to dissect my own biases and dissect the way I'm making mistakes in my thinking or lying to myself

or whatever. And that was very interesting. And I was also very inspired by other scientists who were just really into their topic. You know, like if you've ever heard Carl Sagan talk about astronomy, me, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's certainly an abundance in the field of psychedelics. But anyway, I studied psychology. I studied neuroscience. And then at some point in the middle of my neuroscience studies in Germany, I discovered this research at Johns Hopkins, where they were inducing an altered state of consciousness with a drug. And I think psychedelics had kind of been on my radar before because of meditation. I've been meditating for, I don't even know how many years now, off and on. I'm a bad meditator, but it's been a long-term interest of mine. And I would

keep hearing in meditation circles that people took psychedelics and that it deepened their practice. And I think I was kind of skeptical at first, like, uh-huh, yeah, sure, do you really have to take psychedelics in order to be better at meditation? I don't know about that. But it was on my radar. So I was a bit open to the idea of psychedelics. And then I came across this research at Johns Hopkins and I thought, whoa, you can actually do that. Like, you can actually research that. And then so I just went down the rabbit hole with the modern research. I, of course, read how to change your mind, which came out at almost exactly that same time.

And I was just hooked. I can't explain it. I was just, I didn't really know what I wanted to study going forward after my master's studies. I wasn't even sure I wanted to do a PhD. But then I found my topic. So that's the short version. That's a great story. And it's interesting.

I love hearing how people get to the spot there at. First off, it's an inspiring story. And when I hear that, I kind of hear the marriage of the dreamer and the hard sciences, you know. And it's so cool how you found that come together. Exactly. That's how I would describe it, you know. Yeah, I didn't have to fully leave behind those earlier interests. You know, they were there for a reason.

I think that that is something that makes people successful because too many people, they, I don't want to say they give up, but they're willing to sacrifice what they're passionate about for money. Or they're willing to sacrifice what really gets them going for something that's all right. You know, and so when you, you know what I mean by that? And like, sound psychedelic. So that's, can I ask you what, like, you don't have to share this, but I'm curious. what were the lucid dreams you have? Do you remember like the landscape or what you were doing in them? Oh yeah. You know, I kept a dream journal so I still have everything. Yeah.

That's so awesome. Yeah. I think it was, you know, high school was rough for a lot of us, right? I think for me they were a way to escape. And I actually taught myself to have really long lucid dreams. Yeah. I was that weird. I would even bring my dream journal to class. It was super, super weird for everybody. everybody else. But yeah, so often it was landscapes. Often I was flying or swimming. Like there was a lot of water. It was just, they were often really long. Sometimes there were battles. Like I think I was, I was also into video games at the time. And so if I was playing a zombie game, there would be zombies and we would fight in the lucid dream. And it was all fun shooting zombies. Yeah, just lots of different stuff, lots of different stuff. When you said you would train yourself to do it, like how did you do that? Like let's say there's a young Abigail out there somewhere or young George

Monty and they're like, these people are kind of cool and they hear you say you train yourself. Like what advice would you give them? Maybe you could ask about how you do it. That's actually how I got into meditation, funnily enough. The problem with lucid dreaming is, okay, let's get into this. When you realize you're lucid dreaming, you often get excited. And that excitement wakes you up. So it doesn't last very long. So the first thing I had to learn to do was to stay calm and just present and aware once I realize that I'm dreaming and to not over-control the dream or get too excited about it. So I started to briefly meditate during the day. And apparently, if you read a lot, think a lot, write a lot about dreams, it makes it more likely, first of all,

that you'll remember them, which is the first step to lucid dreaming. And secondly, that you'll actually be able to control them. I don't really know why that is. The explanation I heard at the time was your brain realizes it's important and starts to pay more attention. But that's what I did. I just got really into the topic. I would also do so-called reality checks throughout the day, which also made me super weird at school. So I would look at my hand, for example, and count the fingers because in your dream, you often have the wrong number of fingers or they're way too long or something like that. And one thing that was actually quite helpful, which was part of the reason I stopped, was it really works to break up your sleep. So if you sleep for five or six hours, wake up briefly for half an hour,

do something quiet, read a book, whatever, and then go back to sleep, then it's much more likely to happen that you have a lucid dream. But of course, that messes up your sleep schedule. So I don't know if it's all that healthy in the long term. And that's why I stopped when I went to college because I had an 8 a.m. class and it just wasn't feasible anymore. Yeah, I always think of the way I heard it an alternative to counting your fingers it's like to knock on something is this real is this real is this real because then when you're in your dream you're like oh there's a there's a there's a totem there's something i can i can i can see or you try to remember how you got there because in a dream you can't remember how you got here i didn't know that yeah yeah i heard an interesting tidbit today that

said when you learn when you really understand another language you can dream in that language do you ever dream in german yeah yeah that's so awesome it's it's It's often mixed. I think I also switch throughout the day because my boyfriend is German. We live together and we're just switching all day. And then sometimes at work I just switch because why not? Everyone speaks English anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. But then often my dreams are like mixed. Yeah. That's awesome. So if we shift gears, so you come over there and you decide, you read some. Was there maybe another book or was it that book? particular book that kind of drew you to psychedelics or maybe there was some of the literature in there? You know, it really was how to change your mind because I remember finishing that book and being so

hungry for more and there wasn't more yet. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to go make the more. That's so awesome. I don't think there was another book that I discovered super early. Oh, maybe, you know, maybe Sam Harris wrote this book called Waking Up and he talks about his MDMA experiences in that book. So I think I'd read that a couple years before, but that probably really opened my mind to the idea because he really talks about MDMA and psychedelic experiences as part of a spiritual path or part of a meditative path. He also talks about a horrible trip he had, so, you know, it's balanced. But yeah, that was probably an influence on me as well. Right. Have you read like one of my favorite go-toes is like Terrence McKenna?

Like the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss and Food of the Gods. I did. I tried to read Food of the Gods. I have to be honest. I tried to read it. I made it maybe a third of the way through. Right. What did you talk about it?

Yeah. Well, you know, what I was going to study, actually, was evolutionary genetics. So, like, what I really wanted to study, which I'm pretty sure is not very easy. at all was the genetics of human ancestors. I was really interested in evolution and ancient, ancient history. And so I had a bit of an interest in evolutionary biology. And when I read that book, having taken some classes in genetics and evolution, I was just like, I can't do it. Sorry, I can't take this. I just didn't think it was all that plausible, although I really liked the anthropological parts of that book, because I feel like that that was where he really shines.

that was his field of expertise. But as far as the Stone Dave theory and stuff, I just, I actually couldn't read it. I'm sorry. I hear you. There's a lot of dichotomies in there. And it's for me, I can't help. I'm so drawn into the ideas of what can be versus the ideas of what today are. And you know, I guess who else I turn to is maybe what about Aldous Huxley?

Have you read like the island or Brave New York? World or some of these times where they introduced these things in there? What did you think about that? Yeah, I read, I read Doors of Perception after I developed this interest in psychedelics. I had read Brave New World long before that, and so I didn't really make the connection there. My friends have been pushing me to read The Island. Or Island is whatever it's called. It's on my list. But yeah, Doors of Perception was really interesting to hear this firsthand account from a really, really prolific and skilled writer about psychedelics. Yeah.

Yeah. And he wrote another book. I forget what it was called. It wasn't about psychedelics. But there was a quote from it that seemed like it could be about psychedelics, and it hit me so hard that I actually framed it in my house. I have it in the other room. What is it say?

See if I can remember it. Put me on the spot here. Of course. Yeah. So it says... I don't remember the context at all. In fact, I had the feeling that I didn't understand this book at all. I need to go back and read it.

But the quote was, on the surface, I'm paraphrasing here, on the surface, there is the waves and the spray, the turbulence, but there is dark peace in the depths, which by some strange paradox is the source and substance of the storm at the surface. That's beautiful. talking about the mind. Yeah. And for me, that quote seemed to really relate to meditation and maybe psychedelics. And it was just, it was at the very end of the book. I had read this book. I didn't understand it at all. I was frustrated with myself. And then in the end, he hits me with that quote. And I was like, okay, this, this is enough of a reason to have read this book. So I would, I'm curious to what it is. I hope when we're over with this, I would love for you to send me the title of it so I could read it as well. Absolutely. It'll come to me. It'll come to me. Okay. Nice. I can look it up, honestly.

I can just look it up right now. Yeah, why not? All this has to be books. Yeah, meanwhile, you can ask. Okay, okay. So I'm wondering, have you ever had a meditative experience? Like, I remember reading, I can't think of where I read it, but it was in, it was some book. And they talked about a really deep meditation.

and a psychedelic experience and some of the similarities there. I forget the guy's name. However, he was saying that a deep psychedelic experience is similar to someone who has been meditating for a long period of time and is able to find themselves in these states. And I'm wondering if I think some of the brain scans, and I'm just kind of throwing this out here. I don't have any brain scans to map it up. I think I read it somewhere. So you can maybe shoot me in the right direction here.

But I think I remember reading somewhere that you see similar types of activity in the brain from deep meditation and psychedelic experience. Does that sound like it could be plausible to you? Yeah, it's plausible. So the Aldous Hooksley book, by the way, is called Ilus in Gaza. That sounds beautiful. Yeah. I recommend the last five pages. The rest I didn't understand.

I need to go back. Yeah, as far as meditation, the thing that comes to, mind is something called Janna meditation. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Basically, in normal meditation, right, you focus often on the breath or on any other relatively neutral constant experience. And in Janna meditation, which I'm not good at at all, you do that as well, but then once you've reached a certain state of focus, a certain state of concentration, you shift your attention to some sensation in the body that's pleasant. And you make that your object of meditation.

And what happens then is that this feeling of pleasure spreads throughout your entire body, almost like an explosion, honestly, almost like an orgasm. I'm not going to lie. And it's the same, you know, it spreads throughout your entire body. And then something changes in your mind as well. And you're definitely in this altered state of consciousness. What usually happens to me when that happens in meditation is I get really excited, which completely destroys this whole state.

because Jonna meditation is very difficult to learn without a retreat, I think, or at least an instructor. I tried to learn it from a book after it happened to me randomly once in meditation, which I think is how a lot of people get to it. It's very easy to accidentally do it once and then almost never be able to do it again. But if you can really maintain this concentration and calm focus, you can stay in that state for quite some time and use it as basically a meditative state. And I think there's some similarities probably between that and psychedelics because your body feels extremely good. You're in this extremely clear state of mind. There's some also dissociation from the world around you to some degree. There's no visual hallucinations or other such pyrotechnics.

But when it comes to meditation and psychedelics, what I really see as common between them is being in the moment. because psychedelics also kind of force people into the moment. They enhance sensory perception. They enhance the perception of what is here right now. And then they reduce abstract thought or thought about the future. Well, I mean, not completely, but sensory perception is very, very enhanced on psychedelics. So people often feel like they're very in the moment. And that's what meditation does as well.

And there's some similarity between them, obviously, not a complete overlap. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that that is, like there's so much, there's so much different language from so many people from different educational backgrounds when they explain the trip that they use. And sometimes I think that that can be lost in, you know, interpretation means translation, right? So when we're talking between cultures or people or educational backgrounds, concepts can get kind of muddled. And a lot of the ones I hear sometimes is this thing called ego death. And it sounds to me what you explained about being in the present. maybe something similar to that. How do you think those two things mesh together? That's a good question.

Thank you. The difficulty is psychedelics do more than one thing in the brain. Oh, dear. That makes it very hard to parse together. So, yeah, I think this can also happen in meditation, right? If you become completely in the moment, it's almost like there's no room for your sense of self anymore. But in my experience in meditation, it's a lot more subtle.

It doesn't feel like a death. It's just, or it doesn't feel like losing control. It's just simply not there. And there's no story there. It's just not there because you're focused in the present. And then as soon as you stand up, it comes back. It's not dramatic at all. Psychedelics make a big drama out of it.

And I think this is probably also influenced by our, you mentioned culture. Right. The effects of psychedelics are very obviously influenced by culture as well. and about what people understand about the substances. So if somebody knows the term ego death and maybe they would like to have one, I think it's more likely to happen. In ayahuasca ceremonies, for example, it happens a lot less often than it does like in a study where we talk about it beforehand.

Or in a therapeutic setting where they, especially when they talk about it beforehand, because that's just not how ayahuasca is really used. People feel like they're communicating with entities or with spirits or with plants but there's still something of them there to communicate. They're not dead. I mean, not like it can't happen, but it's less frequent. Yeah.

So, God, I got all these things that are running through my mind. And I go up on tangents sometimes. So forgive me if I start. Great. Let's go on a tangent. Okay. Okay, then let me just jerk the wheel over this way. I'm speaking of books because that's what I do sometimes. What about Rick Strassman?

Have you read some of what he's been writing? Yeah, I read DMT, the spirit molecule art. Oh, you know what? That might be another one I didn't finish. This is a problem. Part of my problem is I always read 10 books at once. I can't just keep one. I can't focus on one.

I like to have 10 that I'm currently reading. I love it. Yeah. So, Rick, that story is really interesting and a little bit creepy to me, frankly. Because he's, you know, Rick Strassman is this conventional. conventional doctor type and then he starts giving people DMT and then they all have these experiences of I don't remember what it was entities some kind of entities that feel absolutely real and it really you can tell that it shook him up a little bit you know um so that was fascinating

yeah yeah I thought that maybe his his harder science background where he's in a lab he's clinical he's everything's there you know he's marking it down and like I thought that one might resonate with you a little bit and I wanted to see what you thought about the being in there. You know, I was really fortunate because I got to talk to him a little bit. And in one of his newer books, he really got, he really went deep on the Hebrew Bible. And when I, when I question on that, I was like, what, what was it? Like, what are you studying in this Hebrew Bible? Like, what is this entity? And he says, you know what, George, I want people to be aware of that which they are talking to or that which they are interacting with. And I think that these entities described in this

literature are the closest possible things to what people are talking to. And if people can be aware of that which they're talking to, the conversation will be much better for them. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, I see a real, a kind of split when talking about entities. Right. Some people think that they are only real to the person experiencing them, and some people think they are real outside of the person experiencing them, like that they really exist somewhere. I'm not sure which camp for extrasman is in. I haven't. It's really cool that you got to talk to him.

So stout. Yeah. So for me, in order for me to believe that they would be real outside of the person experiencing them, the bar for evidence for that for me is extremely high. Sure. Right now, I would think that they're generated by that person's brain and that they are, yeah, basically only real to that person. Because we already know that the brain can generate personality. You know, if you want to write a novel, for example, you can think up a character for that novel. You can just make a person. You can imagine a person. My guess would be that this ability of the brain to

make up personalities or creatures is just somehow enhanced on DMT. And have you ever had the feeling you've been, that you're being watched, that there's some kind of presence in the room. Absolutely. Yeah. There must be a part of the brain that generates that. And my guess would be that DMT is maybe stimulating that. Right. So it has a little bit of a different effect than say LSD because entity experiences on LSD are not very frequent. So maybe DMT is doing something special that other psychedelics aren't doing as much.

But that would be my guess is it's stimulating the brain's ability to create personalities and this feeling of presence. And people also feel that it's very real, right? They feel it's more real than reality. but that's you know they say in cognitive behavioral therapy feelings aren't facts and for me you know that's that's that's that's a cool experience and but i'm not sure that just because it feels real that doesn't mean it really is there's a part of your brain generating that too maybe DMT is just poking it yeah definitely what okay Abigail let's say me and you

were like you know what we're going to get to the bottom of this we're going to design a clinical trial to measure this? What would that look like in your opinion? Well, you'd have to have some way to, like if you wanted to measure entity experiences. When we measure subjective experiences like that with psychedelics, we usually just ask people about them, either with an interview or with a questionnaire or, yeah, those two things. So you'd have to, first of all, you'd have to obtain ethical approval for the study, just getting practical here.

That might not be so easy. And, you know, Rick Strassman's experiments, he wrote in his book that he did them in a hospital in a very clinical setting. I wonder if that maybe was a bit of a negative influence on the study participants, which he couldn't have known at the time because it was very early in the research. In our study, for example, the LSD study, we basically, we do what they did at Johns Hopkins. We have a living room like set up with a comfy chair and a nice bed and some pictures on the walls. We have a carpet in there. Like it looks like some weird hybrid between a clinic room and a living room, but it's a little bit cozy, you know. So I would want to have a setting like that.

You'd have to get DMT and then give people DMT and measure. I would want to know, for example, how often these entity experiences really happen. You'd have to not mention them beforehand. I think that would be very important. Like don't tell people beforehand you might have an entity experience. No primary. Yeah, yeah. So make sure they understand that DMT is a very, very, very altered state of consciousness.

it's not just getting high. You might be in another world entirely. It might be very different from anything you've ever experienced. But beyond that, be very vague. So they know what to expect. They're not going to be blindsided by this altered state, but then you're not priming them to experience an entity. And then you would measure with your interview or your questionnaire

whether they experienced any kind of entity and if so, what it was like and how they felt it was real. If you wanted to know which parts of the brain were active during that time, that would get very difficult because you'd have to stick them in an MRI on DMT. And frankly, I don't really want to do that. That sounds horrible. It's possible that it's been done. So there have been a couple of studies that used intravenous DMT,

which lasts as long as you have the IVN, basically. So if someone was calm enough and had no claustrophobia whatsoever, maybe you could get away with it. You know, people do MRI studies with people on psychedelics. But DMT is pretty crazy. know, like, yeah. I think being careful attention. Any confined space.

Like I don't even want to be in the back of a car if I'm, if I'm in a deep experience like that. It's, it's, the confinement to me feels so much more confining, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't really like MRIs anyway. So I wouldn't really want to be in one on psilocybin or, but you know, I've talked to the researchers to do that and basically ask them,

how do you make sure people don't free, got in the MRI. Well, they say most of the time it actually goes pretty well. First of all, they screen anybody out who has any difficulty with an MRI or in closed spaces. And then they say, you know, most people think that the noise in there is a little bit calming. Like there's this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom noise the whole time. And one of my acquaintances who does research with MRI told me that sometimes when the participants come out of the MRI, they feel like they're being born. Wow. I guess the heartbeat in there, it kind of seems like a womb maybe. It could be like a womb. Yeah, it seems like, I guess it seems like a womb. And people have probably heard these

stories of people experiencing a birth-like experience on psychedelics. And so maybe they connect it with what they've heard. And then they have this, yeah, this experience of getting born from the MRI. Wow. Wow. That's crazy to think about. Yeah. So what, like what, was there something particular about LSD? Is that the one you want to work with? Do you like all of them? Are you just choosing this one for now? I would have happily worked with any psychedelic.

In fact, the way I got my PhD was extremely random. I just got really lucky. So I decided right before the coronavirus pandemic that I wanted to look for a PhD in the field of psychedelics. Like fall 2019, I started looking. And so obviously it took a very, very long time because everything was shut down during corona. Nobody was hiring and nobody knew what was going on.

And I just basically started writing a bunch of different potential PhD advisors, including people who weren't yet working with psychedelics, who I thought might be open to it. And that is how I found my current PhD advisor. I wrote him because he'd done some studies on ketamine. And so I was asking about ketamine because I thought, you know, close enough. Secondalic enough. Yeah.

And as it turns out, he wrote me back to say, yeah, I'm thinking of doing a study on LSD. And I was like, wow, yes. Please let me apply to be your PhD student. So that was just an incredible stroke of luck. And I would have also happily studied psilocybin or DMT or any other psychedelic drug. In fact, I really like drug research in general. In my master's degree, I research with cannabis and mice.

I just like almost the simplicity of adding a drug to a system and seeing what happens. Yeah, I like to see what happens. Yeah, it's sometimes, is it, is it because simple things are elegant or like, what is it, what is it, what is it there? Yeah, good question. I think I, I think I just like the simplicity of the experiment. I don't know if I'm somehow just a bit cognitively lazy, but it's a very, it's a very easy experimental design and the results are often quite complicated. But at the end of the day, you're just adding one little substance to the brain or to the liver or whatever it is and seeing what happens. And there's just, I can't explain why that fascinates me. It just does.

It's, it, I think it's fascinating to hear why you're fascinated by it. That makes any sense. Does it, sometimes I think when I read these studies, it amazes me, like the things we're learning about it. and when you get to see the scans light up or you get to see what looks like the, the sounds being processed in the visual cortex or sight being processed over here by Broca's area or something like that. But I'm wondering for you,

does it take away any of the magic or maybe it adds to the magic? When you have been studying what happens in the brain and then you have a psychedelic experience, does that enhance your experience or does it take away from your experience? The scientific study definitely doesn't take away from the mystery because we still barely understand psychedelics. That's another reason I think I was attracted to this field is because it's so new.

I had thought beforehand about maybe doing aging research before I came across the Johns Hopkins studies, but that field is so full of people. I didn't feel like I could really make a difference. But in this field, there's so much low-hanging fruit because there's so much we just don't know that we really don't know. And so I felt like maybe I could actually make a difference. And so that's why the mystery is not gone. I think I have job security forever as a scientist because there's so much we don't know.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not going to be done in my lifetime. Well, not only that, but you have an opportunity to be a pioneer in a field right here. You know what? And like as I'm thinking about this, the same way you married, the same way you married dreaming with psychedelics, I think you're going to marry psychedelics with aging because I think you're going to be able to find that some of these things, some of the research that you are doing, Mrs. Abigail, I think you're going to see a lot of profound work on Alzheimer's

and some of these age-related disease. I think we're going to see that there. And I think I'm going to see your name next to some of that research in the future. You know, my lab is actually quite interested in that. There's another PhD student in my lab who's going to head that project. But it's so cool. So in my LSD study, if I can talk about that. Yeah, please. We're studying whether LSD enhances neuroplasticity in healthy people. And I took a

relatively young cohort because I didn't know what would happen with the older people because neuroplasticity tends to decline with age after the age of about 55 or so. You see a slow decline. So I took everybody up to the age of 55. But we may be planning a study with an older cohort just to be able to compare because one of two things could happen, right? It could be be that the brain is less sensitive to LSD and therefore less likely to benefit from it. Or it could be that because there's a deficit in neuroplasticity, that LSD can partially correct that, which would be incredible. Like, we don't know that yet.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but it's a really exciting thing to research. Are you leaning one way or the other? Like, what, or can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, there's just no data on it. There's a study at Johns Hopkins where they took people who are, I think, older, and who have depression, but also have some mild cognitive decliner impairment. And so they're treating the depression with psilocybin, and then they're going to see if it also helps the mild cognitive impairment,

which is a great study design because then they can offer a relatively well-known benefit, this potential treatment for depression, but then also see if it fixes other things. So I'm waiting for the data on that. I don't really know. As far as Alzheimer's, to be honest, I don't think psychedelics are going to cure Alzheimer's disease because the problem with Alzheimer's disease is dead cells, and psychedelics don't resurrect dead cells. They help existing cells grow new connections. So I don't know if it could maybe improve the symptoms to some small degree,

but you would really need another treatment additionally in order to cure it. So that's where I'm at with Alzheimer's right now. But whatever deficit there is with neuroplasticity, it could be that a drug that stimulates neuroplasticity might slightly correct it. We'll see. Yeah. You know, it's here's what I think. And I am nowhere near a scientist, but I love thinking about what can be.

And so it seems to me that the same way, the same mechanism of action that allows someone who has PTSD to work through that PTSD, in one or two sessions, I think the same mechanism of action should be able to help solve the cognitive decline. But isn't that what neuroplasticity is doing? Aren't you kind of like bypassing certain parts that could be dead or you're reworking memories or you're reworking through trauma? Isn't that the same way we can solve like cognitive decline?

If we can teach the brain to or if we can allow the brain to process information in other parts or bypass the dead parts. Isn't that kind of the same mechanism? It's almost half right. Yeah. So if, for example, if someone has a stroke, what happens to them is that parts of their brain actually die off because they're choked of oxygen. They're basically choke and those cells die. But that person can sometimes recover because the parts of the brain that are still alive can learn to compensate for the parts that are missing. But as you probably know, that recovery process is limited. Some people don't completely recover.

And with psychedelics, you know, this is also a bit of a question that we've been thinking about in our lab recently, if psychedelics could be used in neuro-rehabilitation. To me, I'm agnostic on it so far. We'll see. But perhaps they could help the brain compensate for dead cells. but that process is limited without psychedelics, and I think it's probably also limited with psychedelics, even if you can raise the limit a little bit.

So as far as Alzheimer's disease, for example, the reason that cells are dying and continue to die is not addressed by psychedelics. So even if you could maybe prolong somebody's cognitive health span, for example, that's what I think is maybe the best case scenario. But at some point, the cell death is still going to catch up with them. So you'd have to stop the cell death. That's the cure for Alzheimer's,

because you have to stop cells from dying. And we're not sure how to do that yet. I got your picture has frozen up on me. I can still talk. Yeah, I do that too. Maybe if I turn off the video and turn it on again. I wasn't sure if it was also for you. Oh, God.

I'm still, and I have a stupid look on my face too. You don't you have a beautiful look on your face. Are you kidding? I look worried. You look questioning. Like, is that right, George? Yeah. I don't know.

I guess we just have to live with it, eh? Let me try it on my side. I'm going to remove it and then we'll see if it comes back. Oh, nope. We're still there. Okay. Oh, you're back. Yes.

Nice. Problems all. Okay. Yeah, that's how we do it. So let's, I want to get into this paper that you would. I think it's really awesome and I'm excited to talk about it. And I know that you have presented at least once and you've been to some other places, maybe introducing people.

But so one of the first parts that I kind of wrote down some of the questions that you addressed in your profile. And the first question was, do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity? And maybe for people that may not know, maybe we should try to define what neuroplasticity is before we talk about that. Oh, yes. So neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to rewire itself, basically, to form new connections, to adapt based on experience.

Every experience you have changes your brain, and that's possible because of neuroplasticity. So at the molecular level, if we want to get down under the microscope, that comprises a few different things. One of them is the birth of new cells, new neurons, which happens in certain areas of the brain. It looks like the hippocampus and the olfactory area, which is responsible for smell processing. The rest of the brain, in humans, at least, does not appear to grow new brain cells. You have the brain cells you have, and if you kill them, it sucks to be you. But what neuroplasticity also means is that the cells that exist can grow new connections with each other

and also delete old ones that aren't useful anymore. So neurons, if you've ever seen a picture of when they have these branches, it almost looks like a tree. And those branches are called dendrites, and they connect to other neurons at synapses, which is the name for those connections. And those synapses can change. So new ones can grow, new dentists. Androids can grow, new synapses can form. The synapses can also change in their strength, which basically means how many receptors are there at the synapse that are responding to chemical

neurotransmitters. Stop me if I'm getting too technical. And yeah, so those are a bunch of different aspects of neuroplasticity. It comprises a few different processes in the brain. And so according to your study in your paper, in your opinion, in your research, do psychedelics enhanced neuroplasticity? It appears so. It's a good theory, is what I would say as a scientist. There's quite a bit of evidence for it in animals. Not as much as you would like, but there are quite a few studies that seem to show that even in a petri dish, if you give LSD, for example, or DMT or ketamine, that the neurons grow new branches and new connections with each other. So it seems to be that that's the case. However, many of these studies have been done,

in rats and mice or pigs, I think once, or cells in a dish. So the applicability to humans is still a little bit in question for me. I would guess that it's also happening in humans. There's some indication in human studies that it maybe is. There's some support for the theory. But for me, the jury is still a little bit out on that, even though it really appears to be the case. For me, the more important question is not do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity, but if they do, what does it mean? Does it matter? So I think psychedelics probably do enhance neuroplasticity even in humans, but I'm not sure what that means.

Yeah, that's a tough question, but I think it matters. Like, I think it more than matters. And I think that there are some sort of anecdotal ideas about it. Like there's been studies where, you know, I think it was Francis Crick that came up with a double helix, right? And there's tons of studies where people have taken LSD or taken a psychedelic and had this epiphany. Maybe they were studying it before, or I think the gentleman that discovered the shape of the benzene rings was just thinking about it, thinking about it, and then all of a

sudden on some psychedelics, boom, there's these seven girls dancing and boom, there you go, Benzzy. Wow, I hadn't heard that before, but that's ironic. Yeah, so there's no question that neuroplasticity itself matters. The question with psychedelics is, how much are they enhancing neuroplasticity, is it just a little bit so that we can measure that there's a significant difference, but it maybe doesn't make a difference in that person's life? Or is it really enough to make a difference? And another interesting thing about neuroplasticity is it's not so easy to determine what it feels like. Like if you have a more neuroplastic brain, if your brain is more capable of making new connections than usual, what does that feel like to you? Can you

tell? And there's been very little research on that. I tried to find some. The main thing that you might notice is that you would learn faster or learn better. But sometimes people will try to anecdotally relate neuroplasticity to changes in mood, like the afterglow effect after a psychedelic experience where people feel good for a week or two afterward. I know of no evidence that that's based on neuroplasticity. It could be something else because psychedelics do more than one thing in the brain. What about reading comprehension? Like, could we measure it that way? Could you, could you, I think it's cumulative. I think the more, this is, like again, I'm just pulling this right out of my ass. But, you know, I don't know, but I think it's cumulative. I think that the more you do,

the more connections you make, it just sounds to me that that's the way memories are made. Like the more, the more you study something, the stronger that connection. And if we, if we run with that and we say, okay, this person is doing, I don't know, eight grams every Saturday and then a microdose during the week, wouldn't it make sense that you are continuing to use these new connections more and more and they're getting stronger and stronger? Is that a valid hypothesis? Maybe. However, neuroplasticity is very, it's very tightly regulated in the brain. There is a maximum. You can probably have too much. What does that mean if you have too much? If you're not thinking of anything? Yeah, if your brain was too plastic, here's what I think would happen.

you would adapt and perhaps over-adapt to every new thing that happens to you. So new events would kind of overwrite old ones and not become as integrated into your previous learning history to put a rather technical term on it. So let's say I'm a relatively emotionally stable person with good social relationships. Let's just say that. I'm not saying it's weird, but let's just say that. And then if I were to take a lot of psychedelics and really hit the maximum of neuroplasticity and maybe have too much, which the brain doesn't allow. But let's say it happened.

And the next day, I have a really awful experience with another person. Well, I might learn maladaptively that interactions with other people are always going to be that awful. I'm over adapting to the new experience. And then as soon as I have a good experience with someone, I'll adapt to that and assume it's always that way. And so the way neuroplasticity normally works is, yes, you adapt a little bit to new experiences, but they're also integrated into your previous history. They're integrated into the network of connections that's already there. If you had too much neuroplasticity, you would be

over-adapting, overfitting your model of the world to new experiences. So that wouldn't necessarily be good. Maybe. Or Abigail, what about this one? Maybe. Maybe what would happen is that you could could shift where you want to to have that memory. Maybe you could shift your your ability to process. Maybe if you had enough neuroplasticity, then you could manage where you're processing that information. You'd say, okay, I've had these experiences with these people. And now I've had these experiences with these people. I can shift between them. Maybe you could consciously shift where you want to process that information. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I don't know if you can consciously control. I have to think about that one. But anyway, the grain stops you from having,

from hitting that limit of neuroplasticity and over adapting. It controls it very tightly. So there is, there is a limit, probably. And at some point, no matter how many psychedelics you take, you'll hit the limit. And it just doesn't go over that probably. Also, if you took psilocybin every day, you might have heart problems, just throwing that out there. Wow. Okay, I want to talk about that. Why is that? Because psilocybin and I think other other psychedelics as well, they, stimulate the 5HT 2B receptor serotonin 2B, which has been associated with, I forget exactly which heart problem. But, you know, there's no data on this, but in animal models, drugs that stimulate serotonin 2B tend to cause, I think, valvular heart disease or something like that.

And so that's a concern that some scientists have about microdosing right now, especially if you do it like really every day for a long time, that it could long term lead to some kind of heart issue. Have you ever heard of someone taking a large dose of psilocybin and then having a heart attack? No, I have not. Yeah, it seems to be more an issue with chronic administration, so not one big dose. But, I mean, if you take enough LSD, some of your organs are going to fail. At some point, there is a dose that does that. Maybe you've heard of this, but every once in a while, like maybe every 10 years, there's a case report in the medical literature in which almost the same thing happens.

There's some people at a party. they want to do some cocaine and they snort a white powder that they believe is cocaine and it turns out it's LSD. And so they get a massive overdose of LSD and then they end up in the hospital with various complications from that. But nobody's ever died. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe if you really massively overdosed yourself, I'm not sure what would fail first, but potentially. What's the LD50 on that, you know?

For humans, I'm not sure. these people in the case reports, they'll take like, yeah. It's so crazy to think of someone snorting like a big one of, a few grams. Like whatever the cocaine dose is that you take, I don't know what it is, I never know anything, but a few grams of LSD,

and they very clearly need medical attention. So nobody died, but they were all hospitalized. And for some of them, it seems like they would have died without medical intervention. So I don't know, a few grams. That might be too much neuroplasticity.

Yeah, that might be too much of everything. It's so crazy. I want to read, like, there's going to be tons of stuff I'm going to want you to send me out of this, but I'm going to put that on the back note. Like that, that is a, and it shouldn't be funny, but it is funny. It is kind of, yeah, you know, you can laugh or you can cry. Right, right. Let me write that. Okay, so when we, at the beginning, we were talking about psychedelics and the neuroplasticity, and you had mentioned the way it was done some times in petri dishes and other times in different sort of animal,

models. What mechanism, how did you in your paper study this process? Well, it's a review paper. So I basically tried to find every single study ever on psychedelics and neuroplasticity and summarize them. I had some questions that I wanted answered, which ended up just being the questions that are the headlines in the paper. And actually, I wasn't necessarily planning on writing this paper when I started my PhD, I knew I was going to be studying psychedelics and neuroplasticity. And I started out by reading the literature on that and reading other reviews on that. And this paper that I wrote was partially born of frustration, to be honest, because I noticed a couple of problematic patterns in other papers that I was reading.

one was that papers that found no results, null results on neuroplasticity, were often not mentioned at all. And I knew they existed because I happened to know the researchers who did them. So for example, sometimes, do you know the term BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor? Right. Okay. So it's this marker of neuroplasticity. It's a protein in the brain. It stimulates neuroplasticity, basically.

And it is also present in human blood. So in studies, sometimes people will. try to measure the impact of, say, LSD on neuroplasticity by measuring its impact on BDNF. So they want to see if there's more or less BDNF in the blood after giving LSD. And sometimes you find an increase and sometimes you find no change at all or even a slight decrease. So it's pretty unreliable BDNF, unfortunately. The researchers I know who work with, I'd also say that. But in review papers that are, you know, making the case that psychedelic stimulate neuroplasticity

in humans, they almost never mention the papers that have null results. And that's like half of them. So that was a bit frustrating for me, and I made sure to mention them in my review. And I felt like I didn't trust the literature anymore. You know, like if all of these null results are just not being mentioned, how do I know that I know anything about neuroplasticity? I need to go dive deep into the literature and research this. And the other thing that was a bit frustrating was I kept seeing in scientific articles, this claim that psilocybin enhances neurogenesis, which is the growth of new brain cells. And every time this was claimed, they would cite a particular paper showing that. It's from Katlowe and colleagues 2013. There's nothing wrong with this paper. I'm not going to shit on this

paper, but maybe slightly shit on the people who cite it. So in this paper, here's what they did. They took some mice, and they gave them psilocybin. They gave them a high, dose of psilocybin and a low dose of psilocybin. And after that, they measured the effects on neurogenesis. They found that the high dose of psilocybin actually reduced neurogenesis significantly, which means that this effect was probably not random, or there was a low probability that it was a random find, so it's probably real. And then they found that a small dose of psilocybin non-significantly increased neurogenesis, which means, non-significant just means it could have been random. You can't really say that it's a real effect. But the way,

way this paper is cited is as evidence that psilocybin enhances neurogenesis. And that for me was kind of upsetting because if you read this paper objectively, it shows that psilocybin is bad for neurogenesis. And people kept citing it to say the opposite. So I just got angry and that was kind of how I wrote the review paper was because I wanted to know what was really going on. And as far as neurogenesis, there's really zero evidence that psilocybin or LSD enhances neurogenesis. because it hasn't been very well studied, but so far there's zero evidence. For DMT and 5MEO DMT, there is one paper each that shows that it appears to enhance neurogenesis, which is exciting, but it's also still just one paper. You know, if you say DMT enhances

neurogenesis, you're basing that statement on like two dozen mice. And I don't like to base anything I say on two dozen mice. So it's really not clear that psychedelics enhance neurogenesis at all, and it needs to be better studied because there's just not very many papers on it. Right. I was going to ask about the dosing and being dose-dependent, but I think we kind of covered it right there. Now, in LSD and in DMT, is there a difference in doses there? Like, is there a different study that you reviewed to hear about those two particular substances and dose-dependent B or eugenesis? Yeah. So there were a couple of studies that just did ascending doses. It's really, really hard to compare doses. between mice and humans. So if a human dose of 100 micrograms LSD is a full trip,

it's kind of hard to know what dose that is for mice. Because you can't ask them. Right. Hey, how are you tripping right now? So there's a couple things you can do to try to get an indicator. Like a head twitch? It doesn't like they don't they look at head twitches. But it's not clear what the correlation between head twitch and hallucinations is.

I know, it's so crazy. And you know, humans kind of have that too. humans get muscle twitches. Yeah. In the LSD study, sometimes you see people shaking and stuff. And almost every animal that's been studied has something like that. Like cats, they used to give LSD to cats back in the 60s. Poor cats.

But they have this thing. They have also a physical effect. It's called abortive grooming where they'll attempt to clean themselves. They'll put their little paw up to their face and start to lick it. And then they just stop. What is that a measure of? What is that a measure? It's just a fun.

Apparently cats on LSD are having some epiphany about how they don't have to be clean. I don't know. Is that five fingers on my paw? Is that three fingers? Oh, with rats, you get sometimes, you know, when a dog is wet, it'll shake itself off. Rats do that on LSD. They'll shake like they're a wet dog. Yeah.

So anyway, I'm going on a tangent now. No, it's awesome. Yeah. So a head twitch response shows that the drug is working, but it doesn't show that the animal is hallucinating. In order to get some kind of subjective effect, what you can do is you can teach the animal to discriminate between being under the influence of a drug versus being sober. So you teach it to respond a certain way when it feels the drug and respond a different way when it doesn't. And so then you can tell like the threshold, basically. What's the threshold LSD dose for a mouse?

Can it feel it, basically? Can it discriminate between being given the drug and not? But you got to break that down for me. It's like a Pavlovian. You're teaching them to respond? I don't understand that. Can you say it again? So let's imagine you've got a mouse and you've got two buttons in its cage. Let's just call it the red button and the green button. And normally when they press the red button, they get, let's say, food.

Okay. And when they press the green button, nothing happens. And then you give them LSD and you change it. So now when they press the red button after getting LSD, nothing happens. And when they press the green button, they get a treat. And so what should happen if they feel the drug is they learn as soon as I feel the drug, I have to press the green button. Otherwise, I press the red button in order to get my treat. And of course, there's some confounders there.

Like at some point, if you give a mouse enough LSD, it's not going to do much at all. But, you know, they're still, they can be quite active. If they're in a comfortable cage that they're familiar with where it's not triggering a fear response, they can be, you know, they're still active when they're on LSD. So you can use that to tell if the mouse. feels the drug or not because if it doesn't feel it, it's going to keep pushing the red button even though it's, yeah. Yeah, that makes a much better sense. In the test that you do after that, yeah.

So that's a measure. Sorry. No, it's all good. It's all good. I was just thinking like the rat in the cage seems a lot like the human in a clinical sort of room where he's all cooped up. You know what I mean? I wonder if there's some kind of response there.

Not that it matters or anything. I mean, it's not necessarily a natural environment. for a rat. Yeah, right? Yeah. And you know what? That affects neuroplasticity. If you keep a rat in a bare minimum cage with no friends and then move him to what they call

a, I think it's called an enriched environment where he's got a lot of toys, lots of other rats. Rats really like other rats. They're very social. That will actually stimulate neuroplasticity. And actually, it would probably be more accurate to say that keeping the rat alone in a boring cage reduces neuroplasticity because its natural state is to be with other rats. and to be able to move around and have lots of things to explore. So that's, for me, a bit of a concern with some of the animal studies

is because you might have animals that are starting out with a reduced amount of neuroplasticity because of the way they're kept. It's a theory that could be happening. And so maybe they're more sensitive to changes in neuroplasticity as a result of a drug. I don't know. So that's why it's really important to translate the findings to humans to try and figure out if it works in humans.

You know, I know that what I'm about to say is really unscientific. And there's probably some really obvious reasons that, like, you don't do this. And I can think of a few of them, but I want to say it anyway. Like, I really think that, first off, people that are providing psychedelic therapy for people. I'm a firm believer that that person should have a lot of psychedelic experience. They should have their own trips. They should be, if they're administering ketamine, they should have gone through hours of ketamine. You know, if they're doing LSD, they should have done hours of LSD.

And I think there's some research that can be done if you yourself as a scientist, take that substance and then write down your notes. I think it's a, it's way better to ask yourself than a rat. Better to ask yourself than a mouse. Like, why aren't we doing more of that? Yeah, well, the great thing about rats and mice, which actually, it's not a great thing, is that after we dose them, you are allowed to take their brain out of their head, kill the animal, and to research it.

And so if you want to look at, you know, if I sit around and think about the molecular mechanisms of psychedelics and don't do any experiments, I'm probably going to come up with some bullshit, to be honest. Like, because you really have to study the brain. And so if you want to study neurogenesis, for example, you have to, with animal studies, you have to take the brain out of the head. You have to take it out, slice it up into little pieces and look at it under a microscope. You have to do that to verify, right? Like, I mean, if you want, if you really want that hard dad, you want to know for sure, then that's what you're. have to do. Yeah, that's what you have to do. I don't know of a way to do that in humans. Maybe there's, yeah, it would be really, really difficult because we'd have to use some kind

of imaging that, so in animals, what you do is you give a fluorescent marker that marks the newly born cells. And then you count how many there are, basically, after you give the drug versus after you give no drug. But in order to look at the fluorescent cells, you have to take the brain out of the head and slice it up into lots of little thin slices and look at it under a microscope. In humans, as far as I know, there's no technique to do that whatsoever. Okay, what if we could do something like this? I'm wondering if you have an idea of how many theories match findings in this particular area with rats? I don't.

I mean, in general, in science, there's a lot of dead theories. Yeah, totally. And mine is a total dead theory, too. But it seems to me, I think maybe you could. you can almost visualize what's happening. Like, I think there's a, God, I'm such a just bullshitter, but like, I think it's, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what I think.

I'll get back to you on this day. I'll think about it a little bit longer. I'll get back to you. So this paper that you wrote, the summary of this paper, where does this fit in onto where you're at with your PhD? Is this like the first one? Or is there something specific that your PhD is about? How does this fit in to what the long-term goal of your PhD is going to be?

Yeah, this is the first one, exactly. So this is me reviewing the literature, trying to figure out what we know about neuroplasticity and what is still important to find out. And so some of these questions that were left a bit open in the review are things I'm trying to answer with my study. For example, there was this question about the timing. How long does enhance neuroplasticity last? And in animals, in mice, at least, it appears to last between three and four.

five days, although there's only really one study that looked at that very specific question. And so I use that to inform the design of my study. So we give people LSD. We measure neuroplasticity about eight hours after doing that. We have them come in the next day. We measure it again. And then we have them come in again about a week later, and we measure it again. And so we have one measurement of neuroplasticity that's after one day and one after one week. And so this supposed a three to five day window that you see in animal studies is in between there. And if that's correct, you would expect to see enhanced neuroplasticity one day after LSD, but not one week later. Or maybe it does last longer in humans. I don't know. That's what we're trying to find out.

Yeah. That's going to be the primary, like, if you were to envision yourself with at your party, you got your PhD, like, would that be your thesis statement? Or like, what would that, what would your thesis be? So first we're trying to figure out whether psychedelics stimulate neuroplasticity in humans, and we're measuring that in ways that nobody has used before, or at least not published before. So what most studies have used is this BDNF in the blood, but as we've talked about, BDNF is a little bit unreliable. So we're using two different basically brain stimulation techniques in order to measure it instead. One is with TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and one is based on EEG, electroencephalography, which is this electrode cap that measures your brain waves on your head.

And basically, I don't want to get too technical with the techniques, but have you ever heard this phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together? That's basically a summary of neuroplasticity. Okay, I like that. Neurons that fire together, wire together. All right. And that's always true. And so what we're doing in the study is before and after LSD, a big dose and a small dose so that we can compare.

We don't expect the small dose to really do anything. We are artificially making certain neurons fire together, and then we're measuring how well they wired together, using a couple different techniques. And that's an index of neuroplasticity. That's much closer to the brain than peripheral blood, because it's not really clear that peripheral BDNF reflects brain BDNF. There's some questions about that. That's fascinating, Abigail. I'm stoked for you. That's really cool.

You know, it's really cool. We're not the only one doing it right now. So I have the healthy participants in my study. I know there's a group in London that's doing it with people with participants who have eating disorders, patients. And there's a group in the United States doing it with depressed patients. And so you'll get all these studies are still running right now as far as I know. And so you'll get these three groups. And we can maybe compare because they're using really similar techniques.

So that would be able to have all of that data in a couple of years. Yeah, that sounds awesome. I wanted to ask you this too. Like when we talk about like, is there a positive or a negative charge to the molecule LSD? Or does it attach with a positive or a negative charge in the, to the synaptic gap? Or however it charges in it, is there a positive and negative charge in the brain that these things are connecting to? And is that relevant? Oh, you're asking questions.

I actually don't know if LSD is positively or negatively charged, to be honest. Yeah, I grow mushrooms, and I'm pretty sure if I take them like a powerful magnet, like a neodymium magnet, like I can feel like there's something there. Like, if you take a magnet and you pick a fresh mushroom, like you can feel like that there. You know, I should probably mark the North Pole and the South Pole and figure out what it is. But I think that's there. And I got to think that, like, you know, you have positive, like in your blood cells, right, there's positive and negatively charged particles going through your body.

So, and when you talked about the magnetic resonance and the way the TMS, like, I'm wondering what role like magnetism and the electricity of the particles play in there. I think that that could be something no one's talking about. Yeah, I mean, that's, well, that we use it to measure. things. In MRI, for example, MRI is based on the fact that there are positive and negative electrical charges in the brain. EEG as well. In fact, EEG, so cells, of course, have a positive and negative charge. There's positive and negative ions going in and out of your brain cells and all of your cells all the time. It's essential. Can't live without it. And in EEG, we measure

these charges, basically. So I don't know if LSD is positively or negatively charged. I want to go back to something. Did you just invent a new way to hunt for mushrooms? Like if they're super magnetic, you can just go out there with a magnet and you got to test it. Well, I didn't want to talk about this, but it's in my family for generations. We were mushroom hunters with magna. I'm just kidding. I went and picked a bunch one time because I grow home from time to time and I was sitting there and I had just bought this really cool neodymya magnet, like the super thick one. I just thick one. I'm like, this is bad of the bone, man. I had this idea that, like, if I was super high, or if I took mushrooms that I could see electromagnetic waves. And so I bought, like, the green

paper that you could see the magnetic waves through and stuff. And I did this experiment that was just all me, all alone, like, okay, I'm going to focus. I'm going to see. Because, you know, you see stuff moving, right? Like, you start breathing sometimes. And I'm like, I bet you, like, that's the electromagnetic waves moving through it. And if I can just get the paper. So anyways, long story longer. I was thinking, I was setting up this little exercise for myself, and I'd pick some fresh mushrooms, and I had my cool magnet there, and I was like, I wonder if these are there.

And I was like, holy shit, magnet, dude. Can you feel that? Of course, there's nobody here but me. And I'm like, dude, just totally works. I wish there was somebody here. So it gives me. Did you try it again later, like after the drug effects were off? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.

There's something there. There's something there. I'm telling you. Yeah. A rare earth neodymium magnet. With TMS, we use a giant magnet to stimulate the brain. We basically take advantage of the brain's electromagnetic property. So what we do is we put this giant magnet over their motor cortex.

Okay. And that stimulates a certain area in the motor cortex. We are looking for the area that controls this muscle right here. The abductor polaris brevis, I think is called, or polyculus, I'm forgetting. But if you stimulate that part of the motor cortex, what happens is this muscle moves. Whoa. So we are like basically not controlling their brain, but a little bit controlling. their brain. Totally controlling their brain. See, now we're, now we're crossing the dark arts

of the scientists where they're like getting in there. Like, let me put this magnet. I heard a story one time where they, there's a back here, I forgot it was the right or left hand side and they used a magnet. I forgot if it was negative, the South Pole of the North Pole, but they did a survey and they found that like 30 minutes stimulating the back part of the brain would allow people's morality to be questioned. And the questions they were asking is like, would you punch a nun or they ask these crazy questions and then like the more they stimulated that part of the brain, they were like, yeah, I think I probably would if I had to, you know? Oh, I don't know that study. You got to send me that. I will. I will. Let me write it down.

Punching the nuns, son. Punching the nun study. That's crazy. I hope they kept nuns far away from that study. I know. I know, right? Okay, so have you read, now in your work and on your study, sometimes you come across other fascinating people. And we've already, you've already spoken about some other studies that you're doing. But let's say that you had the freedom to pick another PhD right now and they were all open. Would you, is there something in your mind that if you could have anyone besides this one, which is your favorite one and working with someone awesome, but if, if there was another one, what would that be?

Oh, and it's funded and everything. Wow. Yeah, let's go wild. Let's just go way out there. Yeah, I mean, okay, what's coming to mind right now is MDMA for couples therapy, actually. I know a girl that does that. Yeah, I know there are people who do it underground and there have been a couple of like theoretical papers written on it. But it would be really interesting to see an actual study. I mean, there would be so many hurdles to jump through.

but it would be interesting to see an actual study. And especially, you know, for couples who really want to stay together, but just are having trouble working through their problems, I think it could potentially be really beneficial there. Yeah. Do you think that that's – so I have a question on that. And I have a question on MDMA couples and neurons. And you're the person to ask.

All right. So, you know, with the limited stuff that I have read, cognitive development in children is made better through mirror neurons. The biological parents have neurons and then the child's have these mirror neurons. I'm wondering if say you're together with this person you've loved for 20 years, do you yourself develop mirror neurons, you think? Well, I'm not up to date on the mirror neurons literature, but if you have them, you always have them.

And they're used for understanding other people's behavior in general. So I don't think you have specific mirror neurons for. specific people. But they're used for, for example, if I make a movement with my hand, you can imagine how that feels, right? Right. Mirror neurons. Supposedly. I'm not up to date on the literature. I remember there was some controversy over whether they actually exist. But basically, with or without them, we model other people's behavior and emotions. And that's one of the basis of empathy. Yeah, please. Yeah, go ahead. I was just rambling to ask a question. Do you think that that is, that seems to me one of the major issues in any sort of breakdown in couples, be it someone you love or a family member or a romantic relationship or a sibling relationship, there's breakdown of communication.

And it seems that's what MDMA does, right? It seems to help with that facilitation of communication. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes things less threatening. So neurobiologically, it really reduces activity in the amygdala. which is, it's sometimes called the brain's fear center, even though it does a lot more than that.

But it makes basically anything safe to talk about, whether it's a trauma or a fight or whatever. And it also stimulates the production of oxytocin. By the way, LSD does this as well. I didn't know that. Yeah. And so that can facilitate some social bonding. And so you feel more connected to the other person.

MDMA also appears to simulate neuroplasticity, at least in rap. I think. So you have all these effects together. You've greater social bonding, reduced fear reactions, and neuroplasticity, which really, I think, could give you an ability to reset your relationship with somebody and return to the basics of it. Why are you together in the first place? What's really important here? And maybe also it can help you restructure your model of that person. If you've started to see them as somebody who always always has bad intentions or who is out to get you or who is selfish, maybe you can rethink your model of that person

and see things from their perspective. Yeah. So let's talk about restructuring your perception and like the idea that psychedelics can do that. I talked to this guy today, fascinating guy from Australia. He's the president of the psychedelic association out there. And he told me this funny but amazing story

about one time when he was younger, when he was a lot younger, he did what everybody does. He goes and he went to this party and he bought LSD from a stranger because that's what you do, right? That's okay. When you're young and dumb, that's what all kinds of people do. And so the idea was that he said he started feeling it come on a little bit. And then all of a sudden, you know, like the slow creep, just slowly coming over you.

And he noticed this gentleman across the table and he saw this thing on his arm. And he just became so enamored by it. And he was, you know, three or four feet away. And he's like, that is amazing. And he went over and got himself a closer look. And then the way he explained it was so funny. He's like, you know, after a while it goes by, the whole party stops. Everyone's just looking at me, looking at this guy's arm.

And I asked the guy, I'm like, what is this thing on your arm? And the guy's like, that's a watch, you know? That's so funny, right? But the reason I brought it up is that, and the moral, I don't know there's a moral but the story was like it'll like psychedelics strip away the hypnosis or they strip away

the label that was given to you or the label or the idea that you have reconstructed a million times and don't even do it consciously anymore it's just boom it's right there for you and it's that same process I believe of stripping away whether you're staring at whether you're a weirdo staring at some guys

watch at a party or you're a couple reinventing the relationship you're with with somebody. It's weird to see that same process in a relationship versus in a relationship with a watch. But I guess it shouldn't be that different. You're in relationship to it, right? Yeah, well, MDMA often doesn't have these perceptual breakdowns to the same degree LSD does.

But yeah, LSD disrupts higher order sensory processing, which basically means you might see the parts of a watch and process the very basic structure, the lines, the circles, the colors, but you don't put it all together and know that it's a watch. And yeah, I'm not really sure if that applies to MDMA, but maybe, I see that I see kind of the conceptual connection there that you're maybe breaking down a relationship into its parts, taking it apart a little bit, looking behind the curtain, seeing how you tick in the moment when you're interacting with that person. What makes me react and why do I react? And what are

the mechanisms in my mind that lead to that process of maybe overreacting to somebody when they ask you to clean the dishes or whatever it is. It's never about the dishes. It's never about the dishes. It never is. Just do them though. That's what I do. You're right.

I did that. So now I got two points. Now I have two different branches on this tree that I want to take. And the first branch is this idea of, I think in the future, some interesting tests that may come up, some interesting clinical trials that may come up in the future is, is one psychedelic better for one particular problem? Like perhaps psilocybin is better for PTSD

and MDMA is better for couples therapy. Or maybe there's like, okay, we're going to give you two weeks of MDMA and then we're going to follow it up with the psilocybin. I think that maybe even different strains of different psilocybin, you know, or maybe we'll get to see these different types of, or strains or, you know, you, for ACODMT versus four, you know, I don't know, whatever the other ones are. But like maybe these different analogs will be enough to treat different particular maladies in the future.

Like that's a kind of an awesome thing to think about, right? Yeah. You know, what's really crystallizing now is that it seems that MDMA is particularly good for trauma-based. issues because as we talked about earlier it reduces activity in the amygdala it makes things safe to look at um LSD can do that but it's a little more of a wild card right um yeah so actually here um in Switzerland i don't know if you know this but we have a compassionate use program um they don't call it compassionate use but it's quite similar where um psychedelic therapy is legal in some small exceptional cases outside of clinical trials. And what doctors here will often do

is start people with MDMA because it's a bit easier to handle. And then if that goes well, maybe they continue on to LSD maybe like three months later. So they do a lot of therapy in between. But MDMA is kind of a sort of a safe bet, especially for people with trauma-related problems. And as far as LSD versus psilocybin and all that, I don't know, I don't know if the differences between them would be super significant, but it's definitely worth looking into. You know, they're quite similar. One question is whether LSD's longer duration of effect is advantageous or not. Maybe there's more time for somebody to work through something while in the psychedelic state. Maybe not. Yeah, yeah, but it's a really interesting area of

research. MDMA has a bit of a different pharmacology. So there's a clear reason why it's different and why it might be more suitable for some things than others. On the one hand, it makes things safe. On the other hand, you don't have the perceptual changes or really transcendental mystical experiences happen less often with MDMA. Ego death happens less often or potentially not really at all. So if you want those therapeutic benefits, you would have to go with LSD. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I was thinking this too. Are you, like sometimes I have had the experience and I think that maybe other people have

this too is this inability to talk when you're on psychedelic. Like what's going on there? Every time. Yeah, in the study, people have it every time. Yeah. And I warn them about it so they don't get nervous. Yeah. Yeah, they have the feeling, you know, it is so amazing how.

normal someone can seem while they're tripping out of their minds. But people will tell me they feel like they can't talk. And meanwhile, they're talking like the whole time. But what they're experiencing probably is that they're saying things, but it's not quite what they meant. So they have something that they cannot put into words because they don't have the words for it. I think that's what's going on. So partially they're just overwhelmed with all the sensory experiences. You would also probably find it hard to talk, for example. Let's say you're driving. and you've got a passenger in your car trying to talk to you, and you come to a really complicated intersection,

and someone's doing something stupid, and you have to watch out for them. It's also hard to talk then because you're overwhelmed with all of the sensory input and the task you have to do. So I think that's part of it. But it's also that people just don't have the words for what they're experiencing. Right. I really like to ask people afterward if the LSD experience was what they expected, because many people are not experienced with psychedelics in this study.

And they always say, no way. way I could have expected that. Because even though I explained to them beforehand approximately what they should expect, there's no way I can actually give them an idea of what it's like in words. The best I can do is explain what might happen so that they recognize it when it does happen and don't feel scared of it. But it's really hard to imagine what it's like, obviously, without ever having experienced it because we don't have the words for it.

Yeah. I got some more questions, but I have someone's chiming in here and they would love to ask you a question. Abigail, let's see what they say. Sure. Nice. So this one's from Kika. He's a fellow Hawaiian over here. What's up? Kika. Thanks for chiming in over here, my friend. He wants to know, are there any studies on elevated ketogenic diet while on psychedelics? Does that improve neuroplasticity? The short answer is no. I don't know of any. I don't think. I don't think. think there are any studies on the combination of special diets and psychedelics unless you count studies of ayahuasca in which people fasted beforehand, which is common practice. Right. Sadly. Yeah, that's good. I'm super stoked. Ike.

Thanks for chiming in, man. It's always, we've got to get together, man. I miss you, brother. You know what? Sometimes I wonder if there's so many people going to like these retreats in South America and they seem to be like white people from these states over here. And sometimes I wonder. Like you can have a great experience in a different country.

But you had meant we talked earlier about culture and language and getting lost in translation and the way we think about things. And it seems to me that if you're having a even some sort of breakthrough experience on ayahuasca in the middle of Brazil, might might you be better off having a breakthrough experience in a church in Illinois? Like wouldn't you be able to integrate it better? You know, I think there is something to that, yeah. So one thing is that people, when you go to another country with another culture and another language, you leave your support system behind. And especially if you have a challenging experience, but also with a good one, many people need to talk about it afterward to process it. They need that support system.

And so I think that sometimes leads to problems. I know a couple of people and have read accounts of this where people go. have an ayahuasca ceremony. Maybe it goes well. Maybe it doesn't. But there's no one there to talk to about it necessarily. You have to get on a plane, go back home, deal with that flight. And then maybe you have someone at home you can talk about it with. But in the immediate aftermath of it, your support system that you would normally have is often not there. And then there's this problem of not, yeah, not understanding the ceremony, basically. I've heard this from also people who have an indigenous background, they'll say that the songs, for example, that they sing during the

ceremony, if you're not embedded in that culture, you may not understand what the songs are trying to do for you or what they mean. And so there's, you know, it's different from the way we use music in the West and in therapy and in also studies with healthy people. So yeah, maybe, I mean, I personally, I don't know if I would take psychedelics in a church. Some people have kind of a difficult background with religion, but a place that's that you understand and feel comfortable in. I think is essential. And it's not, I don't, especially if it's your first time, if you're not super experienced, I don't think it's a good idea to go away from your support system in order to have an

experience like that. Yeah. I think that's a great feedback for people and great advice for people. Speaking of religion and psychedelics, are you familiar with the Good Friday experiments about the people that are pretty interesting, right? Yeah. You know, I mean, the connection between psychedelics and religion is pretty obvious because psychedelics God spiritual experiences.

I wouldn't be surprised if they started a few religions. Yeah. When I talked to Dr. Strassman, I was asking him, I said, you know, it's seen, we know that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And it seems to move in this helical motion and stuff. I'm like, do you think that potentially what we're seeing right now could be shut down the same way it was in the 60s? And he just, without any blink, it's like, absolutely.

He's like, there's going to be, there's going to be another Jones town. It's going to be another man saying, you know, and it's not the drug's fault, but it can be blamed on the drug. And he went into like how that can be. And just us talking about people going to South America, for just a note for men or women that go to South America, you may not know if the songs are saying, but if you get some weird guy touching you, that's the same thing. That's like molesting you. So get out of there.

Don't be part of that. That's some crazy stuff there. Yeah, no matter where you are. Yeah. Yeah, right? you're in a vulnerable state and people can take advantage of you. And it's a horrible thing to think about. Yeah.

I mean, I think Strathman's absolutely right there just to throw in my two cents. Yeah. There's also, you know, maybe there's a different set and setting or historical context for psychedelics now. Maybe they wouldn't be shut down for the same reasons as they were shut down in the 60s. But there could be some other reason, you know,

and people, what do you do with a drug that can send people to heaven or hell? that puts them in a vulnerable state. It's not an easy thing to integrate into a society. Yeah, it's hard to define those things. Not only just the feelings about them, but in some ways you can kind of see why people shed it. I guess it's way too powerful.

People are going to get crazy. Yeah. It brings me back to this idea of language and losing the ability to communicate. And I want to just stick there for a minute because I want to try to tie that to deconstructing watches or relationships. When we get to a point on a psychedelic where you, where language fails,

I think there's some real magic there. I think that allows you to, like, let's say that the guy sees the watch and the way you broke it down, Abilgate was really elegant and beautiful. You're able to, the higher functioning stops, but you're able to see the pieces there. But when the higher functioning begins to return, might that be the opportunity where you can reconstruct it differently? And if you can do that, might that be the pathway, to original ideas.

Might that be the pathway to coming up to solutions to problems that people haven't found yet? That moment, that magic moment or the ability, whatever's happening in the brain, that time, I think, is a pivotal time to reconstruct things

and see the world differently. Maybe that's where some of the magic can come from. Yeah, I think so. When language fails, all you have left is your perception, your sensory perception or your emotions, whatever's going on right now, there's no room for you to interpret it or limit it with your words.

Right. That's a very well said. All you have left is this sensory perception. And also in meditation, to bring it back to that, if you simply focus on sensory perception, often there's nothing wrong with it. Or maybe it's even beautiful. And so whatever's going wrong in your life just isn't there if you just focus on the moment right now, unless you're, I don't know, in the middle of being in a car accident or something like that. But usually not the time to meditate, not the time to meditate. And then when you put it back together, it's a way for you to re-adap to the world as it is now, not as it was. And my instinct about psychedelic therapy is that it's going to be particularly useful for people whose disorder is rooted in the past, whether trauma or something else.

Maybe you had a really stressful time in your life and you started to notice you were getting burnt out and depressed. and then the stress was over at some point, but you didn't quite readap to the world being good again. And eventually people can develop depression from situations like that. Chronic stress is a really big risk factor for depression and also for other psychological problems. So maybe psychedelics can help you re-adap to the world as it is now once the problematic circumstances or the trauma is over.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to ask you a question. You can tell me you don't want to answer it. It seems to me like when you say that, the way you said it about depression and why that is. It sounds like you have people that you help out or your people that you have close to that have depression. Is that true? And if so, have you tried to give them psychedelics? As a matter of fact, it is true. I have not tried to give them psychedelics. I think that's something that, people have to decide on their own. Right.

You know, people, I have some family members, for example. And they know what I do. I talk about the research. But, you know, I'm not going to push anything on anybody. Yeah, I mean, of course, I know people who have used psychedelics in that way, and it was helpful. But you have to want it. It has to be your decision. It can't be somebody pushing it on you.

Yeah. And, you know, it's also, you know, a lot of people, most people even, probably don't want to do anything illegal. because of the risks associated with that. And it's, you know, it's unfortunate that there's no way for most people to really safely access these substances right now, at least not the people I know. Yeah. So that's really too bad. It's interesting.

Like I didn't think about it, but yeah, doing something illegal while depressed is like just sprinkling some anxiety on top of that, right? Like that's crazy. Yeah, yeah. And maybe you don't know what it is. You don't know where to get it. You don't have someone to sit with you who understand. what this is.

There's a lot of issues. Whereas if there was a therapy center, for example, that you could go to, consult with a therapist, get some real therapy first, and then have the psychedelic session. That's what they do in Switzerland for those exceptional cases. Then it's quite safe. And you're supported. Back to support systems.

You know, if you just go buy LSD from some guy and then try to use it to cure your depression, you may not have a support system. Who in your life is going to understand why the hell you did that? You might not even get LSD. Yeah, you might get something else. That's so crazy. Yeah, yeah. So I want to shift gears.

I'm sure I know you pay attention to like all these things that are happening in the U.S. And there's all these laws coming out right now. And I'm wondering what are your thoughts on? There's some hot buttoned issues over here. And I'm going to throw them out here and you tell me what you think about it. There's some people that are really worried about big pharma getting into the world of psychedelics and making, you know, licensing. and just pushing out everybody. They're pushing out the Marina Sabias for the Elon Musk.

What's your take on that? Yeah. Gosh. Hey, random question. I didn't look at the news again this morning, but I know there was a vote in Colorado. It passed. Yeah, 121, I think it was, or 122?

Nice. Yeah, that'll be a watch. That'll be something more. I'm always on a delay over here in Switzerland when there's elections. Your time traveling. Yeah, yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah, that's interesting.

Anyway, yeah, you know, I think I don't know. I'm not an expert on this stuff. I just have an opinion, it might be bullshit. But if your main concern is the patience, I think the best way forward would be to research these substances as they are, integrate them into the existing healthcare system, including getting insurance to cover them. I, if I take a patient-centered approach, I don't really see the need to replace what we already have with new substances. New substances may be worth researching for various reasons, but we already have psilocybin. And I know there are people who think we don't actually need that much capital in order to

research them and integrate them into existing medical systems. What's really nice that pharmaceutical companies can do is they can afford big studies. with of course their own slight variance on psilocybin or whatever it is, Comp 360. You know, I appreciate those studies. I'm happy to see them. I'm happy to see that they are researching larger groups of people and slightly more diverse groups of patients who maybe are not so highly screened to only have this particular type of depression because that's not really how it works in the real world.

But in the long term, what I would like to see is these substances being well researched as they are. And if that research shows positive results, also in larger trials, that they be integrated into the medical system that we already have. Spiritual use aside, just commenting on the medical use, maybe there should be more than one option for people in how they want to take these substances. But, yeah, for me, I see the value in having companies that have a lot of money, to run big trials, but I don't know that we need all of these new drugs because we already have. We have LSD, we have psilocybin. And if you're just tweaking it so that you can patent it, it's not really, I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's not necessarily a patient-centered approach.

Yeah, more the profit-driven approach. Yeah, right? And the problem is research is expensive, you know, this is not an easy problem. Like every researcher at a university or almost every researcher has problems getting funding. And so they solve that problem, but maybe they create another problem as they solve it. And I don't know that I'm a good judge of which problem is worse. It's well said. I like the way you spoke about that.

Okay, here's the next one for you. This one takes me building a little bit of a foundation. All right. let let's what i have this theory actually i got to give credit to david heldriff who he gave me the maria sabina versus elan musk line which is a great line by thanks david and so this is one i ran by him and um ls or lsd or psychedelics as a trojan horse and i use specifically psilocybin in this one because it seems to give at least for me this feeling of what the fuck am i doing and so what do you think about psilocybin as a Trojan horse for big pharma.

Like all of a sudden they start making these analogs and then they come to this conclusion of like, you know what, we as the administrators of this should probably take it. So they take it. They start giving it to their people. And then they realize how corrupt some of the practices are. They put a stop to it. Cilocybin is a Trojan horse in the pharmaceutical industry. Abigail, what do you think?

I think psychedelics can't reliably change people's beliefs. Damn it. Yeah, I know, damn it. But, you know, it's a good thing because if you had a drug that reliably changed people's beliefs in a particular direction, somebody could really misuse it, even if you could also theoretically imagine a good use for it. So, yeah, I mean, if you take somebody who's based their entire career and livelihood on, let's say, drug development and they take psilocybin, you know, psychedelics are powerful, but I don't know that they're powerful enough to make someone drop their entire life most of the time. So here's the bubble. pop. How dare you, Abby?

I just don't think it's going to work that way. It would be nice, but I don't expect it to work that way. Okay, let's shift gears to the, you know, there were some interesting people throughout time that took, that were administered LSD, and one of my favorites for interesting reasons is our good friend Ted Kaczynski. Do you remember that guy?

Like, that guy took a bunch of LSD, A mathematician out of Harvard. The name sounds familiar, but you might have to remind me. Ted Kaczynski. He goes by the name of the Unabomber sometimes. Oh, okay. It's so fascinating to me that when you talked about it can be used for nefarious reasons. That person comes up to me, number one.

A second study was like, did you see the trials of like the CIA where they would, back in the 60s where they would take the Johns in there and get them all dosed up on stuff like that? I think there's been research that we're not privy to that talks about using LSD or psychedelics as some form of mind control. Are you familiar with any of that kind of studies? There's a great book on that. It's called Acid Dreams. It was written by a journalist who went through all of the documentation from those CIA studies and other studies after they got declassified. Acid dreams, I forget the author, but it's good. Lots of stuff in there.

Apparently at the CIA, they used to give people surprise LSD doses in their coffee. Surprise! Until somebody died and then they stopped. Now, is that something that you might focus on on your research? I'm just kidding. Surprise LSD? Just threaten everybody in the lab. You better be nice to me or watch your coffee.

Just point to the coffee. I'm here today. It's so funny to think about. All right. Yeah, so I wasn't aware of that research. I don't remember the rest of the question, though. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I sometimes I wonder if if this idea of psychedelics is it's not the right word,

but I'll try to, I'll try to flesh it out here. So I know you can't see more when you take psychedelics, but it seems to me that if you have a heightened sense of awareness, maybe you are becoming more aware of a situation that allows you to, to see more. Sometimes like I think that maybe, and this is just me pulling shit out of my ass again,

just so everybody knows. Like maybe the, the, it's connected, like the language and the, the place where you go where language fails. Maybe this is, could this be some sort of new sense where we're developing or a new sort of frontier that we're exploring? Like, what do you think? Well, you do see more, literally. Is that because your pupils are so dilated?

Well, not really. It's because, so there's a part of the brain called the Thalphalian. It's sometimes called the door to consciousness because it acts as a sort of filter. So right now, where you are sitting, a lot of your sensory perception is being filtered out because it's not important. Your brain has determined it's not important. Like for example, unless I really focus on it, I don't usually consciously perceive myself sitting in my chair because it's not important. I don't need to constantly be aware of that. And a big note in that filter process in the brain is the thalamus.

So whenever sensory perception goes, for example, through your eyes or through your fingers or wherever through your nose, it passes through the thalamus, gets filtered, and then it goes up to the cortex, which is sort of where conscious experience happens. On psychedelics, the thalamus's ability to filter is reduced. So you actually are seeing more and feeling more and hearing more than you usually. are. That's one of the things psychedelics do in the brain. They reduce the filter. Wow. So there's less that's filtered out, which means you get a lot of irrelevant information too, by the way. You know, there's a reason you have a filter. That's true. Yeah. But so you do see more and you feel more as

well. And some people also feel that they think more. They feel like their thoughts are just racing by it. They can't keep up. So in general, there's just more going on. Yeah. That's great. fascinating to know because is there any, I wonder, are you aware of any studies on the long-term use of psychedelics, psychedelics, psychedelics and the reduction of the filter in the hyper, and the hypothalamus? Like, it seems to me that prolonged use may have some effect on the hypothalamus. Do we know anything about that? Prolonged use as in long-term effects of one dose, because there is at least one study on that. As far as multiple doses, I don't know of anything because you'd have to get people.

people in the wild, so to speak, could do that and then measure them. And there's so many other influences on those people. And a big problem, unfortunately, in trying to get that population is it's very hard to find somebody who consumes psychedelics long term, but doesn't take other drugs. And so you'd also get the influence of the other drugs. So that I would actually love to do a study like that. Also with neuroplasticity, I would be really interested if people who use a lot of psychedelics have any kind of long-term effect on neuroplasticity, but it's hard to dissociate the effects of psychedelics from the effects of other drugs because it's difficult to find a population of people who only does psychedelics. They're out there, but it's not so easy to find

them. Yeah. What other drugs would disqualify them? Well, I mean, party drugs, lots of alcohol, cocaine, whatever, whatever people take it when they also take psychedelics. So a lot of it is, I used to live in Berlin, so I saw the party scene. And people will take MDMA and LSD, but then also speed. And so I don't know if speed-enhanceding, neuroplasticity. I have no idea. But there could be the effects of those as well, also potentially detrimental effects, depending on how often you take it.

So all the drugs would be kind of together. Yeah. Is speed like methamphetamines? It is amphetamine. Ah. Yeah. You think it is Adderol as an amphetamine too, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, it's very, very close related to methamphetering. I think it's just missing one, I'm going to say bullshit, one methyl group or something like that. It's very, very close. Nice. Yeah, I think I'm hopeful that we're seeing, you know, I reading the paper someday, like, there's a shortage of Adderall, like people are all cringing and stuff. I'm going to lose it. But I think it's nice to see it being replaced with, like, psychedelics. I think it just makes for a better community.

That's quite interesting, whether microdosing in particular, first of all, is safe because this heart issue. We need to know that. But second of all, whether it could help people who have ADHD, because it has a bit of a stimulating effect that's different from caffeine or other stimulants, Adderall. I wonder if that could help some people there. I think there's at least one study on that going on in the Netherlands, if I remember correctly. That's a great study. That should yield a lot of results right there. Yeah, I'm very interesting. Because that's, you know, that's one of the first effects people get with microdosing, and that's one of the, there's been all this microdosing research that comes up with null results a lot of the time. Like they don't find

anything. But one thing they do find relatively consistently is that there's a little energy boost. People feel less tired and less. They feel that, yeah, just a bit stimulated. And who knows if it works differently in people who have ADHD because that's the deal with Adderall is that in, you know, in a normal person, it's a stimulant, but in someone with real ADHD, it calms them down. Helps them focus a bit more. Yeah, I don't know if it'll be like that with microdosing. That'll really interesting to see. I heard it once described as a weird cup of coffee that lasts all day. That's a great description of it, right? Yeah. Yeah. I know we're getting close to our end here, but I have just a few more questions, and then I'll let you go. I'm wondering if, you know,

sometimes if you take mushrooms, then you'll, you'll see the lights come on. And what I mean by that is that the color's a little brighter, the bird's songs, a little sweeter. Do you think that that is the effect of the hypothalamus filter kind of being pushed down thalamus the hypodemus is something else yes I think so because well you're you're there's more sensory perception right pulled into the moment and the reason there's more sensory perception is because your thalamus is not filtering as much yeah so that's one thing that's psychedelic sorry for interrupting with that's one thing psychedelics do relatively consistently is they bias the brain's processing in favor of sensory information and against associative information temporarily.

Hmm. I'm so excited. I think that you're going to see my young niece is getting ready to go to college. She's going to do this. She wants to go to college for sports medicine. I think that there's a lot of evidence that you could see psychedelics playing a role in sports medicine for people that, like, they already go and meditate and stuff. Like, I could see them being on a retreat.

or even a micro dosing where they shoot as a team or they practice as a team. I got to think that's going to help group cohesion. So I'm just really excited for the future of psychedelics. I'm excited there's people like you, Abigail, out there who's going to be possibly pioneering new research. And it's really exciting for me. So I'm really thankful for your time. This has been an incredible pleasure for me.

And I hope you enjoyed it. And I know our listeners enjoyed it. And so thank you to that. Now, before I let you go, What do you have coming up? What is on the books for you? And what are you excited about? Where can people find you?

Oh, well, thanks so much. This was my first podcast, as we established before we started recording. So thank you so much for the invitation. It's been a blast. What's next for me? So I'm still running this LSD study to figure out if LSD enhances neuroplasticity. And if so, what that means. So we're also measuring learning ability after people take the psychedelic drug.

to see if there's a relationship between, well, first of all, to see if LSD enhances learning ability in this very specific domain we're measuring it in, and if that's at all related to neuroplasticity. So I'm really excited to see the results of that. It'll take a while, but yeah, I really want to see. And I'm also really excited for this potential upcoming study in the older cohort, in the older adults, because for me, I'm right now completely agnostic about whether psychedelics are going to be able to improve cognitive decline in any way. And so I'm really interested to see that data. We're also interested in characterizing the side effects of psychedelics more exactly. That's a project that's starting to run right now. Side effects very broadly, of course.

But there's almost no good data on that. And it's a very concrete thing to research. And so we're going to try and contribute some research on side effects, also within the LSD study, but in other studies as And yeah, so what's next for me is basically that. And I'll, I have a few other little side projects. And at some point I'll get my PhD. And then we'll see. Yeah. Well, I think you're going to help a lot of people.

And I'm really lucky and thankful to be doing what I'm doing and get to spend time and talk to you and learn about it. So I hope in the future we can talk more and we can figure out some more problems. And I got some panels coming up. Maybe you can be part of those if you're willing to do that. Sure. That sounds fun. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to end it right here, but I want to talk to you for one more second. Okay.

So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. Aloha. Have a fantastic day. We'll see you next.