TrueLife - Alexander Lebedev - Tech Resilience: The Art and Science of Mental Wellness

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

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/Alexander Lebedev, MD PhD Entrepreneur | Full-Stack Data Scientist​At the intersection of technology and human resilience, I envision a future where tech is a powerful ally in enhancing our well-being. With an MD/PhD and over 15 years of experience in psychiatry and applied data science, I bridge the gap between the human mind and technological innovation.My life's mission? Crafting sustainable mental health frameworks that seamlessly integrate with the digital age. While I'm deeply committed to leading my own projects and academic research, I also find balance and discipline as a lifelong martial artist – sometimes even skipping lunches for jiu-jitsu rolls.For those looking to harness the power of technology, I offer tailored tech consulting services. Whether you're a budding startup or running an established organisation, with my proven expertise in machine learning and NLP, I'm here to elevate your business in today's digital era. Ready to explore the transformative impact of your projects? Let's talk.https://www.allebedev.com/Contact e-mail:[e-mail]​ 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, Fearist 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. I have this thing up. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody is about to be on the edge of the seat right now, because I know that I am. I have an incredible guest for you today this evening, depending on where you are on the world.

If you're in Europe, you could be at 9 in the morning. If you're in Hawaii, it could be 9 p.m. at night. But no matter where you are, prepare to get stoked. It's a true privilege to welcome Dr. Alexander Levadov, an acclaimed psychiatrist, data scientist, and entrepreneur who was illuminating the frontiers of psychedelic therapy. With Indy and Ph.D. credentials coupled with over 15 years of psychiatry experience. Dr. Lebedov offers a unique clinical perspective, but he is also a full-stacked data scientist, leveraging AI and NLP to unlock health care insights.

The fusion of humanity and technology defines his work. A serial innovator. Dr. Lebedov has launched startups applying data science and mental health. He is passionate about developing sustainable, resilience-oriented models of care. His mission is to harness technology to foster human flourishing on purpose. and flourishing on personal and societal levels. An award-winning scholar, Dr. Lebedov has earned accolades, including the prestigious CagleMLMLS-L-SP Schizophrencuitification Prize and highly competitive NIH neural imaging training.

He publishes groundbreaking research on psychedelics, ability to instill meaningfulness. Beyond scholarship, he provides bespoke tech consulting for organizations and startups seeking to operate more efficiently through AI solutions. His expertise aids business across sectors for his nuanced work advancing psychedelics healing. His retreat was named among the best psilocybin retreats in Europe by healing maps. He charts a prudent, scientifically grounded path forward

for this promising but complex field. Please join me in warmly welcoming this accomplished polymath. Dr. Alexander Lebeda, thank you so much for being here today. Well, thank you so much, George. I have to admit I almost blushed when you were spelling out these things. Thank you. That's probably one of the one of the Chinese introductions I've ever had. And thank you for this.

It's impressive, the way you put it. Yeah, pleasure to be here. And as we already started talking, I really appreciate you finding time to meet me. It's a 12-time difference between our time zones. I'm based in Sweden and Stockholm. That's where I'm currently residing and doing my research.

Fantastic. Maybe you give people a little bit of background on how you got to be in this field and just start off wherever you want to. Sure. Also, as I mentioned, I have two versions of my story short and long. So feel free to stop me if I go too detailed. So I was born and grew up in Russia. So I'm Russian by origin.

I was born in Murmans. That's the northern provincial town. in Russia and from the very early days I was into medicine so my parents told that it was from approximately five I cannot verify it but I I take the word for that so I entered the medical school to prepare to become a medical doctor so I was coming from a somewhat poor family it was also difficult time in Russia, collapse of the Soviet Union, the sentiment of change was all over. So I once gave a lecture at UCL on psychedelics and I called it my reconciliation with the term

change. So because I was from a humble background, so I had to find smart ways of getting my medical degree so I entered the highly competitive military medical academy in St. Petersburg so I managed to get a governmental tuition fee for my education and got into psychiatry very early I think it was the first year in the in the medical school I was blessed with the people I met on my path and very early I got exposed to science again at the end of the first year so I was my first project in psychiatry and neuroscience was quite intense so we were working with highly resistant psychiatric patients with obsessive compulsive disorder with resistant depression that were undergoing deep brain stimulation

that's a type of neurosurgery for the patients in which well traditional ways of of addressing their problems do not work. And that was the beginning of brain imaging in my country of origin, so I had to learn a lot and I had fascination with math very early since I was a kid. I was growing up, I was born in a family of engineers. I'm the first medical doctor in my family.

But I learned to cold quite early. And I had to work with the code also as a part of the research. So I was behind, I think, Russia's first FMRI study back in the days. It's also a fascinating story in itself because we were limited with equipment. But point of the matter, that was probably the first time when I encountered research with psychedelics. Back then, the information was very limited. There was a lot of misinformation about that. There still is, but it was way worse back then.

and my teachers in psychiatry have been very open-minded. I discussed that with them and they said, well, unfortunately, the way it works now, we can put electrodes in resistant patients' brain, but there is no way we can restart these sorts of studies. No one knows why they got shut down. There were allegations that these substances may lead to chromosomal damage and so on, and so on, you know, like the story that was all over in the newspapers in the late 60s and 70s.

So that was kind of put on hold. But I, you know, I would say this interest was with me for the entire duration of my education. Also two of my friends in Mormons died due to drug addiction. Two of my friends died from heroin overdose, one committed suicide. And that's something that also, I would say, stimulated my interest in psychedelics. But then, Iboga was legal in Russia, so I had my own experience with Iboga. I just to understand how it works. That was just the beginning of some anecdotal reports about its efficacy for treating addiction.

and interestingly once I think that was yes that was the fifth year in the military medical school I was really deep into scientific research I was attending national and international conferences presenting our work and at some point it became clear that I will have to part with the military if I want to if I am to continue my scientific studies It was totally supported by, of course, by my teachers because they understood that there is no other way for me to continue this work. So I left, I dropped off from the military and transitioned to the State University. And in some almost magical way, managed to preserve my government tuition fee. and I eventually graduated from the State University.

And at the end of the last year in my medical school at the university, I presented the results of our work at the European Psychiatric Congress in Munich, where I got noticed by my future employers in Norway. So they invited me to do PhD in Norway, which was focused on application of computational near imaging for understanding neurodegenerative disorders, the links between depression and near degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's or Louie Body dementia and leveraging machine learning algorithms to enhance image-based diagnosis of age-related neurodegenerative conditions.

So that's how I, some may say, escape. That's not my word. That's how one of my good colleagues put it. And yeah, so since then I've been working well in the field. So it's been over 15 years since I started. Also, as you mentioned in the beginning, I competed in some machine learning competitions, including the schizophrenia classification challenge, where I took price. Co-authored one technical paper on one of the novel machine learning algorithms in collaboration

with the Royal Holloway, London. that's the machine learning center in London. That's where a godfather, in my opinion, of statistical learning theory, Vladimir Vapnik is from. He is the author of Support Vector Machines, one of the most wildly applicable and one of the most well-known machine learning algorithms. So I collaborated with them and we published one technical paper.

So point of the matter is I kept the interest in psychedelics and once I saw Imperial College London publishing the studies, I immediately got in touch with them. I had a very specific hypothesis I wanted to test on brain correlates of the so-called ego dissolution phenomena, which they liked. And we started a collaboration, which resulted in two paper published together, one on salocybin and egot dissolution phenomena and another one on LSD. So we were looking into acute changes in brain dynamics occasioned by LSD administration and managed to discover that acute changes and the magnitude of disintegration of the brain dynamics happening acutely during an LSD session was predictive of lasting personality changes

in the personality trait openness observed two weeks later. And so that was the time of my transition. so I defended my PhD in 2014 and I moved to Sweden. I was invited for a postdoc at aging research center to work with neurobiological and cognitive plasticity. We were studying different means to enhance learning and neurobiological plasticity mostly in older populations. I coordinated and coordinated several research trials. non-pharmacological pharmacological trials while keeping this collaboration with the with Imperial College London and that was also the time when a non-profit organization in Sweden started called Swedish Network for Psychedelic Science and I I remember how it grew up from the very early days it started like a small series of meetings in a place held by burners

And ultimately it grew up in a full-on non-profit organization, thanks to which we managed to get an approval to run Sweden's first clinical trial with salicybin for major depression. But back in the days, it was very controversial. I was invited to give different lectures. I was very upfront about my interest and what motivated that interest. but it was not the easiest time back then it was unthinkable to get any governmental funding for that now it's definitely doable but back then it was more controversial and well and i used to tell very regularly that psychedelics wasn't my main research field and every year as i was saying it was becoming more and more difficult because i was invited to give lectures at local, international universities. And ultimately, I got a chance to run my own studies in Sweden.

So my first postdoc, after my first postdoc, I started my second postdoc, which very kind of organically and naturally converted into assistant professorship position. Now I hold a permanent senior research specialist position. And that was also the time when I was studying my own studies, looking into recreational use of psychedelics and different kinds of substances with respect to potential risks on psychosis-like traits, schizetype, which is sort of very roughly speaking, right? It's probably not a very psychiatric way of putting it, but like mild schizophrenia-type symptoms.

Well, schizotipal traits are. currently classified rather as personality disorders but it's there is a continuity between schizotopy and schizophrenia so that's what we were studying as well uh also inviting a subpopulation of psychedelic users to our lab to test them to see how whether there are any aberrations in the way they learn so we modeled their learning abilities computationally leveraging methods of reinforcement learning and spoiler alert there are no aberrations so if anything psychedelic users performed better compared to their non-psychedelic user counterpart and a number of tasks, which was interesting. And so yeah, that's what I was continuing to study.

It was, again, a very peculiar position because back then, and it still, I would say, remains so that right now the sentiment around psychedelics, I think it's almost a backlash from from a scientific community that was the research of which was suppressed for for several decades and now the sentiment around psychedelics is very much positive and i mean for the record of course i think that psychedelics have a tremendous potential to transform psychiatry and mental health maybe we can talk about it later uh in more details uh but for me it was very important to understand where are the so-called danger zones where we should be careful because i genuinely believe there is in machine learning there is a very influential paper called no free lunch stating that there is no ideal algorithm that would always perform best compared to you know it's

alternatives so there are there are different data sets for which algorithms work better or worse and i mean my own life experience my scientific experience suggests that the so-called free lunch no free lunch principle generalizes for different aspects of research and life. So that's that was my take on psychedelics, which put me also in a peculiar position. I was still controversial enough for the mainstream science back then, right? That psychedelics were still somewhat controversial, but also some of the colleagues who were very pro-psychedelics, they were not sure what to make out of my interest. You know, is Alex trying to say that, you know, psychedelics are dangerous? And of course, that wasn't my intention. So I really value these substances in the context of treatment as really important tools that may help us address a lot of challenging problems related to mental health and perhaps to some other societal problems.

So that's where I stand right now. So after I got a permanent position at my university and the possibility to run studies with psychedelics, I also got a chance to coordinate brain imaging art. of Sweden's first clinical trial with salisabin, as I mentioned. It was a study that we pulled through the pandemic. I'm really proud of making that happen together with the team. But still, you know, I understand that now it's even harder. After all of what I said, it's harder to say that psychedelics is not among the main focus of what I do. So what I would say my baby in science, so to speak, right?

What fascinates me and intrigues me the most is to extend to which many aspects of our lives, our beliefs, our standards are shaped by contexts. Take, for example, the numerous child-rearing approaches that have evolved over time and were relevant in different periods of our history, right? and or say varying beliefs in conspiracy theories. So that's what fascinates me. That's what I study and how different beliefs, different ideas can be treated differently, different historical periods, in different contexts.

So maybe we're going to also talk today about, yeah, already mentioned about the study that we published. well, some of the tools that we used, it's called conspiracy mentality questionnaire, right? So I'm going to read, if you don't might, I'm going to read some of the points from it. Yeah. And I will leave it to our listeners and perhaps to you to answer them for yourself without any attempts to introduce any biases. So the conspiracy mentality questionnaire. So point one, I think that many very important things happen in the world which the public is never informed about.

Point two, I think that politicians usually do not tell us the true motives of their decisions. Point three, I think that government agencies closely monitor all citizens. Point four, I think that events which superfluous, officially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities. Point five. I think that there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions and so on. There are different tools to assess it, but I want to invite you to reflect on this, right? So would would the responses to the questions that I just quoted be the same if asked, for example, before the Cambridge Analytic scandal were after. Would the answers

to these questions very significantly between responders in Russia, Sweden, Iran, so these are the things that fascinate me or let's consider another scenario, right? The efficacy of

treatments when assessing the efficacy of medical, psychiatric interventions, we often assume that the effects under the study that are under study are more or less stable. But is this a reasonable assumption? Say, if we launch a study investigating the efficacy of psychiatric medication during a period, say, of economic growth, or initiate a similar study during a crisis or in the midst of a pandemic, for that matter, is it reasonable to expect the same results?

So this is the area of my study. This is the main area of my study. I love it. There's so much in there, man. And it's fascinating to see how long you've been around and how many different areas you've, in camps and areas that you've investigated and been part of. And I've taken the, I would have to say, like, I'm a four out of those five questions of the yes. You know, and maybe it's my heavy psychedelic use. I don't know. But I think not only the conspiracy mentality questionnaire, but you also use the epistemic belief scale,

the alternative facts, the truth. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about some of the, like the epistemic belief scale and some of the tools you use before we talk about the study. Yes, yes. Yes, so you mentioned the term alternative facts. And for the record, we were aware of the pun. of the pun, right?

So it was kind of semi-intended. I know who coined the term. We were fully aware of that, so we wanted to kind of gently implement it into the paper. And but really, so the point that we were making in the study right now, we don't have good tools to differentiate between tinfoil type. Tinfoil hat type conspiracy mentality and the health is keeps, I mean, you mentioned about the responses that you gave to the answers, and by the way, they were on scale from zero to 100. And my personal stance on it, right?

So I firmly believe in the values of freedom of speech, open dialogue, despite all the contradictions. And I've been studying different kinds of personalities, also. conspiracy ideation for quite a long time. And I know even people with us, well, with very convinced conspiracy mentality, shutting down the conversations around the topic, usually does more harm than good. So my personal stance is that I am in favor of a platform

where different kinds of ideas, as long as they do not violate other people's lives, freedoms, there should be a platform and there should be a platform for people to be hurt. So back to your question about different tools with all these limitations in mind, right, that we don't have good ways to differentiate between sometimes healthy skepticism and unhealthy patterns. So, well, for that matter of conspiracy ideation, for the record, the population that we were studying mostly consisted of healthy people there were people with psychiatric conditions but the effects were stable regardless of whether or not we include

people with psychiatric conditions or not but it's important to keep in mind that the majority of people are healthy even if they score high on some of the of the clinical skills and the tools that we were using the first one the first tool the conspiracy mentality questioner has been validated in several countries with quite diverse cultural background. And the second tool that you mentioned is the so-called epistemic belief scale, which in general evaluates how people treat knowledge. Right. So what we take as an evidence when analyzing facts, for example, whether we have a tendency to rely more on intuition

rather than facts, but there are several facets of this scale. So one, as I mentioned, it's the faith and intuition over facts. So for example, you know, you can, a participant can get a question, I trust my gut to tell me what's true and what's not. When my initial impressions are almost always

right these sorts of statements that people have to agree or disagree with the other facet of it is the so-called need for evidence and one example of such a subskill would be an invitation to relate a statement evidence is more important than whether something feels true so you see or for example a hunch or a guess needs to be confirmed with data or with facts or a statement I trust the facts and not instincts when when evaluating whether something is true or not and finally the third facet of the epistemic belief do is the facet that is related to the political coloring of truth which is also an

interesting topic on itself in you know in light of the global events and this facet this particular facet contains statements such as facts are dictated by those in power what counts as truth is dictated by those in power. Scientific conclusions are often shaped by politics and that facts depend on political context. So this is, that was another tool that we used. We used many tools in the study that you mentioned,

evaluating psychedelic users and also, you know, relationships between personality, structure and these sorts of beliefs in relation to different substances. And so what we found is indeed people, among all the substances that we evaluated in different models, psychedelics had their consistent positive or psychedelic use, both the history of psychedelic use and also the recency of psychedelic use was associated with the with some of these beliefs. And importantly, some of the facets that one may perhaps link to a more arguably

pathological ways of treating information, right, that different things that seem not connected are intricately connected, secretly or, you know, intricately connected. So they're a hidden pattern. So this, this facet, for example, was not prominent among psychedelic users. So and we are open to different kinds of interpretations and to be fair, once the study was out there were there were citations of our study in the context that psychedelics, psychedelic use is linked to higher conspiracy ideation so we are open to this kind of discussion. I personally stand my personal opinion is that it rather reflects non-conformism so I don't see

evidence in the study for a pathological kind of conspiracy ideation but that's that's what science is all about it's about discussion and and confrontation argumentation and and and discussions on the findings that we have. Science has never settled, right? There should always be a robust argument of people. How else do we know what's really happening unless we get the best people presenting their best arguments

and then allowing us to form our own opinions about it? It's so necessary. So let me just start with this one here. In one of the studies you talk about the flexible thinking, psychedelic-induced flexible thinking. So philosophically speaking, how should we evaluate ideas or insights that emerge through psychedelic-induced flexible thinking? Do they reveal deeper truths or just reflect unconstrained cognition?

That's not an easy philosophical, epistemological question, right? Again, I'm going to give. as much unbiased opinion as possible based on the data that we have and also give my personal opinion you know based on my own beliefs thank you if we are to take a stance of reductionistic science right that assumes that our the phenomenology our phenomenological experience even though it is questioned but you know most of the research attempting to link neurophysiology and phenomenology, assumes that our phenomenology is a function of our brain activity,

and some may argue that since the patterns of brain activity becomes more random or unpredictable during a psychedelic state, some may argue that that's what is reflected in phenomenology, and perhaps in a way it can be, you know, if we're talking about peak experiences, a more unbiased perception of reality when the cognition is unconstrained. And so there is no ego, there is no dualistic perception of reality.

And some may argue that this is a more unbiased perception of the reality we are dealing with, at the same time, having seen several psychedelic experiences, the behavioral patterns that may evolve during a psychedelic experience clearly show that to every psychedelic experience that a person is undergoing, he or she brings their own,

way of looking at the reality. So a point that I'm making, even though the rational or constrained perception, dualistic perception of reality is dissolved, that also opens up the unconscious dynamics that also introduce a lot into the way people interact with the reality. So in that way, in my personal opinion, psychedelics definitely, well, I mean, there was a fear, right, in the, in the 60s that psychedelics dramatically change people's, well, my good colleague, thanks to whom I started psychedelic research, David Nott, you know, at one of the interviews at London's real said, yeah, I mean, isn't it? that substances that influenced the way people voted were prohibited for that reason, despite having tremendous potential for medicine and for transforming mental health and neuroscientific research. So in that sense, I think psychedelics have remarkable capacity to help people to understand themselves. And but when it comes whether acutely psychedelic experiences make the reality perception more objective, I'm not sure.

I think they definitely make people more sensitive to some of the dynamics that may be happening within the group they belong to. they I mean they are cold mind manifesting right so they make things that are not obvious that are hidden more obvious and noticeable so that's their power I think that's that's that's that's something that is behind their their treatment potential because of that something that someone does not want to face becomes more obvious and important to ignore. And again, so there are different ways of working with psychedelics. And it is important to remember that Western civilization currently doesn't have a very reliable tradition to work with psychedelics.

we used to have but most of these traditions got lost and the way we currently approach psychedelics and psychedelic research is very different compared to how they were historically approached and understood so there are still indigenous communities in south america for example in which psychedelics are deeply embedded into their into the very fabric of their culture that is a part of conflict resolution of alignment within the group. So in that way, yes, put in the context, in the cultural context, I do think that psychedelics may help to, if not, more objectively look at their reality, but in my opinion, they do have the capacity to aid in conflict resolution.

And that's also evident by work of, in my opinion, one of the most relevant work in the field of psychedelic research led by Leo Rosemann from Imperial College London. And he is specifically studying effects of psychedelics on conflict resolution. So they ran a study in the context of ayahuasca retreat where Palestinians and, Israeli participants were taking the medicine together. Fascinating study. One of the most important studies, I think, in the field. So a point that I'm making is that when put in the right context, I do think that there is a power in psychedelics to aid and shaping more resilient ways to perceive and treat reality.

And that also brings my point that I often discuss with my colleagues, because if psychedelics are to stay in psychiatry, for that matter to make a difference on mental health, they will have to inevitably transform the way we treat mental health and possibly psychiatry itself. for that matter because right now psychedelics do not fit the way we have been historically approaching mental health so usually when a psychiatrist prescribes a medication it's taking to control symptoms to to give people some extra strength to manage the symptoms to numb the pain for lack of a better

word and psychedelics do something different right so what we discussed in the beginning so they make things that may be ignored for a very long time more obvious and in a way they leave no other choice than just to confront a very you know very painful experiences and it doesn't really fit that well into the model of very risk-averse psychiatry and mental health that we currently have And there is a danger, in my opinion, that some of the, I don't want to call them mistakes. I think that was an important lesson in the 60s. But some of the perhaps missteps that happen in the 60s, there is a danger that we can repeat them these days. but in my personal opinion the problem lies in the lack of traditions of working with psychedelics

because I think this field these substances are bigger than just the medications and we should be aware of it I consider this point as positive rather than negative. So to me it's good. And for me, it's important to comprehend that because they are bigger than just, you know, regular medications that you can get, you know, in the pharmacy or, you know, by a prescription from your psychiatrist. We also need to be more responsible in the way we incorporate them into the fabric of alloculture. Yeah, it's fascinating that you.

bring up the way in which it has the potential to disrupt medicine across the board. And this, you know, I've, I've got family members that suffer from, I come from a long line of people that suffer from a mental illness. I don't say that to impress you, but just to impress upon you that I get it, you know, on some level. And it seems to me that, at least in the West, medicine at some point decided that the best way to solve the problem is to put a patch on it and not think about it or suppress it. And if we look back, we can be like, oh, we just, we just figured out a way to get through. But now you're right, psychedelics force you.

And almost even though it forces you to confront the issue, it almost does it in a non-confrontational way. Because it puts you in this third person perspective where you can look at it from over here. Hey, it's not so bad if I look from over here. Maybe I'm not that bad of a guy. Maybe I don't need to have this constant negative self-talk in my head. that says that. I can let that go. You know, and it's fascinating to think about the way in which

language may play a part of it. And that gets me back to this idea of like confrontation, psychedelics, and like language. And maybe like, we spoke earlier about how

it allows you to see the world differently. Non-constrained thinking versus constraint thinking. Does that have something to do with like a default mode network and conditioning? Maybe it allows you to see through the conditioning, the political truths that we talked about. Like, what's the, what's the relationship there? Yes. You mentioned the default mode network, indeed one of the most reproducible and consistent finding that we see as an effect of psychedelics is the is the so-called dissolution of the default mode network,

which was linked to some of the core experiences in relation to psychedelics, including ego dissolution phenomena. And indeed, the default mode network is an interesting network, which was discovered almost by accident, because most of the studies, of the brain imaging studies,

before the discovery of the default mode network, were focused on solving some attentionally demanding tasks. And so researchers consistently saw that while certain regions were engaged during task resolution, so the other set of regions was consistently suppressed. And so some brilliant scientists decided to reverse the problem and worked with some tasks that demand that different kinds of or modes of cognition

like imagining the future, initiating self-referential thinking. And interestingly, that's what appeared to stimulate engagement or be associated with engagement of the default mode network. Interestingly enough, we see that this network is consistently overly engaged. especially some components of this network is overly engaged in people suffering from some psychiatric conditions, serious psychiatric conditions including major depression. And so the brain dynamics of such patients reflecting the phenomenology of self-defeating thoughts, depressive ruminations, brain dynamics kind of shows the same patterns when their brain activity patterns are stacked in this very narrow repair tour of brain patterns.

So we see some resemblance of the changes at the phenomenological level to what is happening at the level of brain dynamics. Okay, so it's a speculation. I don't have data to support it, but I think it's reasonable to think that we shape our society is shaped by our human-to-human interactions. So ultimately, what's happening in our brains is one way or another is reflected in what we built, in what kind of connections we form and what kind of societies we built. So for me, there is nothing mystical or magical in effect that psychedelics or psychedelic use may be linked to more free or flexible ways of thinking with the communities of people who welcome liberty, free speech, free thinking. So for me, it's not surprising. If psychedelics reveal truth outside the system that challenge conventions, do we have a responsibility to integrate these truths responsibly?

You know, there are certain things we can't prepare for, you know. and I think, you know, I can speak for myself, you know, so there are many things that I managed to prepare in my life, but there are many things that I couldn't have envisioned. And I think that applies to different aspects of our life. It's a very non-scientific response to your question. It's a great answer. But I mean, I don't mean to bring extra political tone to our conversation. Bring it.

My friends in Sweden asked me a day before the invasion whether I think it's going to happen. And I said, well, there is no way. So my honest answer is I don't know. I think my personal belief and my personal opinion that there is more danger in suppressing opinions, suppressing free conversation, especially in an ever-changing world we are currently living in. So I think there is more danger in being overly rigid and inflexible. That's where I personally stand. And I think if anything, nowadays we would benefit.

more from a plurality and dialogue of opinions. And most importantly, patience, forgiveness and respect. Yeah, that's really well said. I couldn't agree more. It's fascinating that study between the Palestinians and the Israeli. Like, it's so like, you know, I don't really believe in coincidences. And it's weird that just happened not too long ago. And then this happens now. It's like the world's talking to us in a way like, hey, dummies, look at this. You know, it's so crazy to me. Do psychedelics reveal objective truths or I'm sorry, I already asked you this one. How do we nurture individual autonomy of thought while avoiding fractures and shared understanding of reality that enable manipulation? That's a valid point, right? So if you think,

Okay, you give everyone the tools to express themselves freely, to tell whatever the hell they want on social media. And then those who control the data flows, definitely there is an asymmetry in things that different people can do with these freedoms. I wish I had a good answer to that. and I will try to think out loud. Okay, please. In my opinion, in many aspects of our lives, in science specifically, you know, since I belong to the scientific community, currently there is a certain amount of monopoly of thinking,

even though the rationale behind creation of universities was the exact that thing to promote free thinking and the dialogue of opinions. I am it saddens me to say that unfortunately this is not the case nowadays. There is no plurality of dialogues in science unfortunately currently. There are ways to address this, to, say, to facilitate open dialogues, to provide, you know, this umbrella of open science, to give people platforms to disseminate the research at other places other than some of the peer review journals. I don't think it solves the problem completely. Because, I mean, still, of course, when it comes to how your peers, the society will treat information that is published in one paper or another,

it's largely determined by a reputation of a particular journal. And, you know, having your paper accepted in a respected journal is largely determined by not only the quality of your research, but also whether what you found aligns with the current sentiment that is existing, whether, well, what kind of organization you belong to. And, well, unfortunately, this is the reality that we have to deal with. So how to address this? in my opinion, there must be more platforms facilitating free speech.

I'll give you an example. One of the coolest and in my opinion, well, most valuable paper for me personally was the paper that we published last year on Global Societal Dynamics and relation between economic and some of the global societal processes like unemployment rates, housing prices and well-being. And I pre-printed that paper. You know, I wanted to get some early comments on that, and it produced some. It wasn't a pleasant experience. Let's put it this way.

So I'm not trying to kind of say that, yes, you know, I suffered a lot from that. no, not for that matter. But it definitely made me think that, well, maybe next time I'm not going to preprint this paper because of the negativity that we got. Now this paper is published in a decent journal, but it wasn't a pleasant experience. But even with all the challenges, with all the unfairness and difficult conversations, different and really nasty comments. that we read sometimes on Twitter back then an idea of censoring this conversation never crossed my mind okay I learned my lesson and next time I will not preprint the paper before it is accepted you know yes it was painful you know there are different ways of learning right so yeah I like to give this example I used to give that

example of different kinds of learning, right? So there are different ways to learn that bees can stink, right? You know, can bite you. You know, your mother tells you, you know, Alex, don't touch a bee. It may, you know, may sting. And or there is another way you touch the bee, it stinks and you never do that again. We all know which usually works best, right? So it's an instructed learning versus learning by direct reinforcement.

So, you know, in that experience, I learned by direct reinforcement. But point that I'm trying to make, so I think, no matter how uncomfortable and painful, it is to hear the opinions of people who maybe dislike you, disagree with you, they should always be a platform for free speech, for communication. This free speech and communication cannot be censored. because then we are down the spiral of something way more horrible. Yeah. Yeah, there's something to be said about lived experience

and even some of the most traumatic experiences can be the ones we learn the most from. I mean, you could argue that suffering is the one thing we all have in common, right? Yes. And whether it's people that lost a child or people that lose a loved one or some sort of traumatic event, You see the most unlikely characters sometimes holding hands and crying because they've been to the same thing together.

They get biometrically opposed about everything, but it's the suffering that we share. Yes, it's a very controversial statement by Karu Young. And yeah, also worth mentioning that I grew up and developed as a hardcore neuroscientist, you know, working with brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience reinforcement learning. but I did my own analysis in the Jungian framework. So I end up my own psychoanalysis in the Jungian framing. For me, that was very important for, I would say, forming my own point of view on the way I perceive approach my life

and science in particular. There is a controversial statement by Karu Young. And it's very easy to say it, I think. But with the examples that you gave, you can see why, it can be considered as controversial by some. He once stated that the foundation of all psychiatric or mental illnesses, for that matter, is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering. It's a powerful and difficult statement.

I can't say on a personal level. that I see some truth in it. Yeah. Yeah. It is powerful to say. It's, you know, sometimes if you look at like the DSM, you know, you can see that on some level as a manifestation of the problems of society. Like whether it's an eating disorder or it's an anger, misplaced anger or something like that. These all seem like symptoms of a society that.

is sickened. You know, not so much the individual's problem, but it's just the symptom manifesting through them. As like, we're a giant superorganism or something. To support your argument, there have been some studies looking into quality of life of people suffering from major psychiatric disorders, from psychosis spectrum disorders. That's an important clarification. And in the societies that are not very industrialized, relative to other peers, people suffering from psychosis spectrum disorders do better of course at the global level the quality of life is of course worse in third world countries and you know less industrialized countries and of course in the indigenous communities right so some of this psychosis spectrum seems to which are considered you know like one of the most severe conditions psychiatric conditions they are more accepted they are more accepted and Also, there are communities where different kinds of psychopathology or psychopathology-like traits are more accepted,

you know, among artists, for example. And I had some collaborations on the links between psychopathology and creativity. There is a story to tell about that. But, yes, so in a way, there is no psychiatry. is a peculiar beast in medicine, right? It has always been context dependent. So the way, well, even what we call today schizophrenia is very different compared to what was considered

and classified as schizophrenia several decades ago. Crappelin's, who is the father, well, one of the godfathers of classical German psychiatrists, So he coined the term dementia precox to describe what later developed into Bloiler's schizophrenia. But point of the matter is that every psychiatric condition you take has undergone tremendous transformation over the course of our history and the history of psychiatry in particular. So there is no single psychiatric condition, well, maybe with an exception of some rather neurological conditions. like Alzheimer's that did not undergo, that hasn't undergone massive transformation in terms of classification. So every psychiatric condition, and I dare to say mental health in general is

very context dependent and what we consider as norm or pathology has also evolved over time. And in a way, the mental health crisis is a reflection of something bigger and is very dependent on the state of the society that we live in. You know, I have a question about mechanism of action. I spoke with Brian Roth a while back and he was sharing some of his findings that are brilliant.

But it seems to me, on some level, there's way too many variables that we have no idea about. So sometimes looking for mechanisms, of action is like trying to find the true name of God. I don't think you could do it. You know, and so what are we doing? Like, are we ever, I mean, there's too many variables, right? Like, you're not going to find out what's going on, are you?

I don't know. I'm just throwing that out there. What do you think? Yeah, well, I've been contemplating a lot on different ways of looking at mechanism of action of psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy, for that matter. And, well, there are some things that we see consistently happening on the neurobiological, neurophysiological system level, right? You know, like I mentioned, some of the changes in the high-level networks of the brain,

changes in the repair-to-ar brain dynamics, kind of shifting the modes of the brain activity to the states that are opposite. to what we sometimes see in people suffering from major psychiatric conditions. There are obvious effects on learning, social learning in particular in your biological plasticity that we know. But does it capture the entire repair tour of what psychedelics are capable to do? I don't think so. There are multiple interpretations of how psychedelics work at the individual or psychological level. And I think there is no psychological school, you know, to which psychedelics do not fit.

At the early days, people were kind of questioning whether psychedelics and CBT go well together. Today, we know it's one of the most commonly employed methodology in clinical trials. there is a new wave of community behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment. ACT is a particularly attractive and popular school in the context of psychedelic assisted therapy. What I personally think is underlooked in psychedelic research is the aspect of psychedelic's action that is very, very hard to measure. I'd like to give an example of a substance addict who I have known personally. It's been a while since we met but he after a single psychedelic experience he managed to stop a long-term heroin addiction. Wow. And so during the experience

he saw how he is injecting venom into his body, how the body is rotting, decomposing. That dramatically, I mean, on then, directly after he cried. And within a day, making a decision to transform his life, you know, started exercising, eating healthy. and we how many years we've what was the last what was the last time we met but you know several years he was still in a deep remission and I mean if you ask a heroin addict of course everyone understands that you know it's destroying their body you know it's it's bad for them for their community for their families but this meaning enhancing properties of secondary Yes. It's something that we don't have so far very good tools to evaluate.

So I was once privileged to be a reviewer of one of the papers on that exact topic by invitation from Rick Strassman. Yeah. And I do think that it's one of the most interesting and attractive aspects of secular section that we don't pay enough attention to. I think that's Because I mean right now I think with all the I mean I think we won't have enough fingers To count all the crises

Right Zay I think that's the right way to put it That we have right now But I think as much as there is an economic Trust crisis Mental health crisis there is a crisis of meaning Yeah And that's why I think this kind of research and that angle on psychedelics becomes particularly relevant.

And I don't think it's only about psychedelics, right? Psychedelics are some of the tools that we have. But in general, the ignorance of mental health and science related to mental health, for that matter, to the meaning is something that may underlie some of, of the challenges that you are facing in my opinion. And so, yes, I agree with you. There are so many ways of looking at psychedelics. My personal opinion, despite being a neuroscientist,

brain imaging researcher, data scientists, I think this is where we need to pay attention. This is what we need to pay attention to. I love it. You know, when you said that, it seems to me in the most difficult part of the trip, or the most, which are sometimes the most meaningful parts, when you see the actual event happening and you know it's wrong,

is that the manifestation of neuroplasticity in real time? Like that's your brain rewiring itself in real time when you have that difficult experience, it seems like, right? Or I don't know. Do you think so? To be fair, we don't have data to actually demonstrate that. That would be interesting to see. I think so, yeah.

I, yeah, that's interesting. what we consistently see in neurophysiology, in your phenomenology for that matter, is that often the phenomenonological, the phenomenonology of an experience often mirrors what's happening in the patterns of brain dynamics. And so that wouldn't surprise me.

And that's an interesting hypothesis to test. I think that would be an interesting thing to observe. And I'm curious. Can you cite me when you do it? Yes. Okay, but this is exactly why the experiment where they want to try to take the difficult part of the trip, taking the difficult part out of the trip is taking the neuroplasticity out of the trip. If that hypothesis is true, right?

Yeah, I mean, also, as you know, there is some research going on trying to take the psychedelic part out of the psychedelic action. and my personal opinion on that is humble curiosity. Love it. That's, well, I think that's a healthy attitude that I have. I mean, if that's the case, I think that's awesome. I mean, if you ask me, do I think that psychedelics are good tools for everyone? No, I don't think so. I think there are probably people, conditions, you know, where psychedelics,

especially in wrong contexts, can do more harm than good. You know, for instance, people experiencing acute trauma. So my personal stance is that that's where one has to be particularly careful introducing extra crisis-like state or extra plastic state when there is already some profound transformations, perhaps going on. and people are processing that. I mean, there are other tools, you know, like MDMA, for example, that has been shown to be good for processing trauma.

But, you know, that's perhaps a story for another conversation. But what I wanted to say is that there are aspects where we need to be wary of how we introduce psychedelics. Yes, and, yeah, I don't know if that answers the question. It does. It's beautiful. Yes. In your view, is the experience of meaning a byproduct of changes induced by psychedelics or the core driver of their therapeutic benefits?

To be fair, right? So this question, the way you post it, it assumes the duality, right? The experience and biology. And there are different ways, right, of looking at the... mind-brain relationship that I briefly touched upon in the beginning right so sort of from a from a conceptual level right so we you know there are there are points on on pan-psychistic you know there are pan-psychistic views right that consciousness is a universal yeah is a universe is a characteristic is a fundamental characteristic of the universe or the

matter and there is a emergentism that states that well there should be a certain state of a matter and which well some properties that were not present in its elements start to

manifest on one example is a liquidity of water right so there is no liquidity in water molecules it's the way they interact makes the bigger system to manifest novel properties and there are there are reasons to believe that that could be the case for some of the denomina like consciousness.

And I've been a part of several discussions on consciousness, on experience. In my opinion, very often these discussions stumble upon poor definitions. That a lot of discussions go nowhere because the participants talk about consciousness and different terms, right? And also when it comes to emergentism, there are different ways, you know, there are different emergent phenomena, right? So the so-called heart emergence or soft emergence.

So say if you ask a, I don't know, a panpsychist, well, do you really think that a table on which my laptop stands is conscious and, you know, here she was, well, of course not. I mean, yes, well, it probably has some characteristics of what we call the proto-consciousness, for example, but the system is not complex enough to be self-aware and to defend a dissertation in neuroscience, for that matter, right? And on the other hand, some of the emergentists would say, would talk about the proto-consciousness elements, say, you know, perhaps liquidity is present as a potential energy and, you know, in the water molecules, as a possibility for manifestation for that matter.

So the point that I'm trying to make, right? So it's a very long intro to the answer that I'm about to give is that this question assumes that, well, there is a dualistic and causal relationship between mind and matter and the changes that are happening. And the point that I wanted to make, that's also an assumption, right? So we don't really know what's causing what. We know that some of the things that are happening happening in parallel. Well, you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, right?

So you did not refer to that term specifically, but you correct me if I'm wrong, you were kind of getting there about the synchronicities, you know, linking the current global events and the studies with psychedelic. So a point that I'm making, I think it's, I think on the questions, when we don't have enough data to support a particular causal link, it's best to remain agnostic and welcome different ways of looking at it. I think, if you're asking my personal opinion, I think the changes in the meaning that are happening,

And what we observe at the biological level are different sides of the same coin. Yeah. It's fascinating to me. It's, thank you for the answer. It's a fascinating concept, and it's fun to talk about. And I love this idea of meaning and psychedelics and transformation and language and behavior. It's just a fascinating topic, all of them. Could virtual reality simulations of meaningful psychedelic experiences provide similar benefits without ingesting substances, in your opinion?

I do think that there are other ways to bring transformative changes to people's life, to people's psyche, without psychedelic, without ingesting any substances. for example I got exposed to breathwork very early when studying psychiatry and that was a very brief exposure and to be fair

I was fairly skeptical about it but later on when I really did it with an experience instructor I understand that it has a tremendous capacity for transformation and you know needless to say other kinds of practices uh

i mean my a part of my life journey has been martial arts uh that i've been that i've been a part of my life since i was five and definitely uh that's a very important part that helped me to see myself better to learn about myself through my opponents yeah um so for me that's also a something that brings a lot of transformation to my life. So in that sense, to answer your question, I think, yes, whether it's a virtual reality. I have a good colleague working on a startup in Sweden, specifically trying to emulate or just leverage virtual reality for mental health. I think it has a lot of premise.

There are obvious use cases that are already at place like exposure therapy for phobias. to what extent they can actually reproduce a psychedelic experience. I don't know, and I may not even sure if that's what needs to be done, you know, because yes, there are ways to influence brain dynamics with stimulation, and we are getting better and better in it. There is some controversy around the magnetic stimulation to what extent it can actually alter brain dynamics, but I mean, good reasons to believe that it is possible on some conditions. And I think definitely virtual reality,

even without stimulation, have the capacity to alter our mental states. I mean, silence can alter our mental state. Exposure to nature can alter mental states. So yes, to answer your question, I think it is also an interesting technology that has future for our well-being and mental health. like any technology, we just need to be mindful of how we leverage them. But I am rather positive as long as every technology we employ, we approach with respect and care. Yeah. It's interesting to think about how it seems that there's a pretty big medical container around psychedelics. but possibly in the future I could see an avenue for optimization, whether it's through athletes

or whether it's through studying or I think that there could be these new emergent fields where you can use them for more than just medical reasons because medical is kind of a way of optimizing in itself, right? I agree with you. I agree with you. I, as I mentioned, and I think in, you know, in the beginning of our conversation that the way psychedelics have been used historically is very different compared to how we treat them right now right now in most of the clinical trials we are talking about the setting consisting of one patient

two therapists even though at this stage it's probably or used to be justified for research matter it's a very unnatural way of approaching a psychedelic experience and virtually all the communities historical use we can discover whether that being historical references or what's happening what we have now in some of the indigenous communities so south america for example it has always been a group experience a communal experience embedded into the very fabric of culture community families and a couple of weeks ago i attended a men's circle retreat for the first time in my life. I've never done that. But I also have a community of, you know, jujitsu that I've been practicing for very long time. That's also a very strong community.

And I do think that at some point, that would be curious to see how psychedelics or any transformative experiences for that matter, not necessarily substance assisted or, well, anything that entails ingesting any mind-altering substance. In general, transformative experience, and that retreat was, you know, did not entail any intake. So that was a purely conversational, body practice type retreat. I think that definitely strengthens the bones that people form and that's something that has been a long overdue in the way we function as a society at large. Yeah, there's a sort of oneness people speak about

through psychedelics. And a lot of the times on psilocybin, it seems that you become aware that at least I've spoken to lots of people who have had the epiphany that you don't come into this world, you come out of it, usually on a high-dose psychedelic or psilocybin trip like this, I don't know, it's this weird understanding or connection to nature

and other people in some way. Is that something that you have noticed in working with them? Yes. So the study that I would love to run at some point is to see the relationship between quality of experiences and the connection to nature. You know, there are studies showing that very simple simulation, Hearing sounds of nature, looking at patterns of nature makes a difference on your mental states.

Well, needless to say, there are some studies happening at my university, showing that the place you're living defined in the greenness index that you can extract from Google Maps, right? So, you know, how much exposure to nature you have on daily basis is very delicate, and closely linked to your well-being and the number of other well-being-related aspects of your life. There are, of course, there are a number of confounders, right, your income, your origin. But, well, the more data we collect, the more clear it becomes that connection to nature is very good for all aspects of our life. And right now at the university that I belong to, we have like in-house gardens, you know, there are trees, inside so well we are figuring it out and it becomes crystal clear that it's very

unnatural for human beings to separate ourselves from nature you know in this stone jungle so the yeah and we need to find a balance how to bring our connection to nature back and in that regard it's very interesting to contemplate on on on psychedelics in this context right so What we know very well about psychedelics is that they are making people tremendously sensitive, you know, what we were discussing in the beginning about different aspects of our perception of our life. And, well, of course, in the indigenous communities, psychedelic experiences are also part of connecting to nature. So of course every culture and I would argue every culture, you know, it's just some cultures kept this link and other cultures forgot this link. There was that threat connecting the ordinary states of consciousness to nature, whether that being the spiritual realm of nature, whether that being the spiritual realm of nature, whether that being the general idea.

that nature is a natural healer. So that was the classical approach to medicine, you know, in ancient Greece, right? So doctors communicate with nature to provide, to open up a possibility for nature to heal. So this, I would say, this has been around and understood by scholars, by society, for many years and I do think it's a very important aspect of action of psychedelics and in general the lost connection to nature is something that in my personal opinion is dangerous to ignore. Great points and it brings up a fascinating question about language. You know when when you look back at some of the history textbooks and they they ask some of the indigenous tribes.

How did you figure out how to make ayahuasca? Oh, the plants told us. You know, when we start talking, Jeremy Narby has a great book called The Cosmic Serpent, right? Love this book. Phenomenal. They talk about understanding the antidote to this snake is by, oh, the plants tell us. And the anthropologist, like, well, what do you mean? And isn't it incredible that, you know, he started as a, you know, as a hardcore Western anthropologist?

Yeah, it's, yeah, I love this book, too. Yes. So on some level, is it possible that maybe like some of the psychedelics, maybe some of the entheogens are like exogenous neurotransmitters that allow us to communicate with nature? Is that too far out there? I mean, classical psychedelics, right? So their molecular structure resembles the one of serotonin.

Right. in one of the conversations with one of my colleagues, you know, we kind of joke, yeah, I mean, we're all tripping on serotonin. And yes, there are, as I mentioned, there are different ways to alter our perception. But ultimately, yes, you know, the way we perceive reality is determined to a large extent, well, the way our chemistry functions. and I mean, there is nothing magical and mystical in the fact that what's happening in our brain dynamics is very delicately and close to link to the way we perceive reality. And yes, so we know that at the constraint cognition, we perceive a very narrow aspect of our reality. I don't know what to make out of, I mean, I have a lot of respect to different ways of looking at the reality, right? So I dedicate my life to study different ways of looking at the reality and interpret and study how we approach different beliefs and facts in different contexts.

So that's why when I say I respect different views on reality, I genuinely believe so. I'm a very non-religious person, but my best friend is an Orthodox priest. And I do think that there are different ways to perceive reality and to walk you on path, right? So there are multiple ways to enlightenment. There are multiple ways to happiness, to healthy and authentic life. and as long as the worldview, a particular worldview, does not entail any destructive activities or obviously harmful activities for others, I think it's healthy to be inclusive. And, you know, actually when I say about potential links to some dangerous activities,

again full disclosure this this point of view has been questioned by by any anthropologists right so the way we look at some of the indigenous or historical accounts of some indigenous cultures like Aztecs it's important that this history that we know is mostly written by people who obviously had a conflict of interest right And they picture a very bloody society of Aztecs, you know, the society ruled by really scary bloody rituals and which psychedelics played arguably a massive role, right? So the emperor of Aztecs allegedly interacted with guts by means of psychedelics. And so that was, according to some accounts, a society that was very harsh according to our standards. So the point that I'm trying to make is that there are different ways to perceive and form the picture of reality.

And some of the ways of perceiving reality may look very bizarre. and horrible in the in the eyes of a over 21st century Westerner whereas you know probably if you if you tell Aztecs or I don't know any indigenous communities who lived in in in in America I don't know several centuries ago about the way we are living now they would probably think that we're all gone mad yeah I'm reminded of Orwell's quote

where he says he who controls he who controls the future controls the past and he who controls the past controls the present right history history is is all bullshit it seems like you know it's I don't know it's it's crazy to think about maybe that's my conspiratorial thinking

and my nonconformist attitude of but on some level I think looking at history is a great way for people to begin to form their own opinions. And you need look no further than the calendar. Like, why is October the 10th month when OCT is the first part of it? Why is December the 12th month when deck?

You know what I mean? Like, all of a sudden you're like, something doesn't add up here. Yes, yes. I mean, yeah, there are many things I agree with you on. I mean, I do think that, well, there is a, right, a famous quote, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, but I do think that when it comes to approaching something, like even hardcore facts. Right. It is important to be open to different opinions. And, well, one of my teachers and psychiatry when presenting some of the findings put it beautifully, specifically pertaining to my specialty, right? So he said, to me, a qualification and professionalism of a psychiatrist,

to a very large extent is determined by the ability to calmly and respectfully listen an opinion that one disagrees with. And I think that that is applicable to any aspects of our life. That's, I'm going to, I'm going to remember that. That's beautiful. I think it speaks volumes. You mentioned in one of your studies, the psychedelics may help rewrite negative thought patterns. Could they also unintentionally overwrite positive patterns or moral foundation? I, well, I can only speculate, right? So I think there is that sentiment around psychedelics, right, that they only bring, you know, love and position.

I am not sure. I'm not sure. Among psychedelic users I've encountered, I encountered different people. I think there is a great risk of treating psychedelics like a spiritual bypass or an excuse of not doing your work, so to speak. And I mean, of course, psychedelics played an important role in my life, you know, not only as a research, but also as a personal experience.

But I wouldn't diminish the importance of the personal work that everyone needs to do. like Alan Watts saying you know you got the message hung up the phone but you know to answer your question directly I do think that they can change patterns of thinking they can change beliefs and I don't think it's necessarily always for the good that's why it's very important to do that in the right context right so for example because people are becoming very sensitive and you know sometimes during psychedelic experiences people may confront very challenging thoughts patterns you know some people may remember or think that they remember real facts from their life whereas they may not be the real facts yeah but they may be very

traumatizing or re-traumatizing for some people and that's why it is very important to know how to process this and for you because if some of this challenging experiences are left unprocessed i do think that they can inflict harm on people's lives and uh influence potentially potentially damaging patterns of people's behavior and uh and may even have bad consequences for mental health and well-being of people and those around them. It's interesting to think about patterns and behavior. There's a great book by Marshall McLuhan called The Gutenberg Galaxy, and he talks about how typography fundamentally changed the way we see model reality.

It gave us ideas like exact repeatability and things like this. And the premise of the books is that the printing press changed our sense ratios as human beings. And in a strange way, it seems that psychedelics may be doing the same thing. Like, if you just think about shifting your sense ratios a little bit, that fundamentally changed the way you can model reality.

I think it's a fascinating thing to think about. Do you think that's plausible? I do think that psychedelics may, dramatically transformed the way we perceive reality yes and and I mean I I I almost there to say they will do that you know because because the genie is out of the bottle now yep yep and I well because of the of the effects of this substances and this experience it's very hard to ignore and very hard to shut it down i mean we had a history of that happening yes there are different opinions on why it happened but i mean to answer your

question yes i think it's almost inevitable and uh to what extent it's actually again the effect of psychedelics or it's just psychedelics came at the right moment in history i don't have i don't have the answer uh i have a good colleague working in the drug addiction clinic in mexico uh with i boga and uh we've been discussing a lot of the problem of addiction you know and different experiences that uh that people undergoing different kinds of treatments for addiction we're having and an interesting observation that he made. So I also observed that and in some medical practice that I had. But, well, to be fair, that was him who kind of coined that, and I fully agree with that.

That quite often he said, it's not necessarily the quality of the experience during a session that determines the outcome. the best changes that he said we observed and most durable changes that we observed he said were mostly happening in people who had to undergo a lot of things before getting to the clinic you know coming from a different side of the world you know sometimes having challenging situations just to be able to visit the clinic yeah trying different kinds of treatments really fighting for that you know putting a lot of personal efforts into that having supportive family and for them a an ibegain experience was just a final tipping point that they needed um that was just a part of a large path that they that they walked that just came in the right moment and in the right place

and you know perhaps perhaps that's what's currently happening and maybe psychedelics is just uh a potential part of this story. I, you know, I personally think psychedelics are powerful tools, but I mean, I ended up building my own startup in Sweden, working with dreams, for example, primarily, right? So I do think there is a transformative power of non-ordinary states of consciousness that our society came to ignore for too long. that being a psychedelic experience that being a realm of dreams that being the realm of other kinds of non-ordinary states of consciousness and i think it's our okay it's my perhaps job now and in a way a responsibility to to figure out what we can make out of it and and humbly do my part on on on what we're what I can do on this matter. But to answer your question, I do think non-ordinary states of consciousness in general have a tremendous capacity for shifting the way we interact, the way we connect with each other, with nature, and the way we shape our reality together. I've noticed a trend.

I was speaking a while back with Dr. Erica Dick, and she was mentioning some of the ways in the late 50s and 60s, when they were working with with patients, they had a way of measuring subjectivity that seems to be absent today. And they would use questionnaires with, you know, it was mostly men they were working with, but they would go to the wife and be like, is your husband more or less of an asshole now?

You know, but they would find ways to incorporate the family and real, like, subjective, but like mattering subjective. I see it, and I kind of, I don't know if I'm willing this to happen or I'm seeing trends or, but is that, can we get more of that going forward? Do you think that designing that into studies would be beneficial? One thing I wanted to say, well, first, I do think it's very relevant to take into account the subjective aspect of people's perception. And I think there is a danger of taking the person who is in suffering out of the equation

when talking about mental health. It's bizarre, right? To be fair, there is a trend, there is an existing trend in mental health research to bring back the subjectivity. For example, some of the skills that we are using today, I mean, for a long time, one of the most popular scales to evaluate depression was Hamilton. Depression skill, which is usually evaluated primarily. The most emphasis is put on a psychiatrist doing the evaluation. now one of the most popular scale is quits

that is primarily a subjective scale and right now we are bringing back the importance of subjective reports about evaluating our own mental health, our take on that personally I am in my opinion

the subjectivity of evaluation and particularly questionnaire-based assessment is a double-age sort. So I think, I'm not, well, to be bluntly upfront, I'm not a fan of questionnaire-based assessments. Right, right. I think quite often your behavioral patterns can tell more about mental health than what you say in a morning following sleepless night or I don't know, an argument with your girlfriend or whatever after a sickness.

The point that I'm trying to make, for example, we know that the amount of time people spend outdoors, you know, just like very simple measure number of steps is very close to linked to, you know, to how well we are doing, what kind of food we consume, what kind of stuff we are buying, you know, how we interact with people, what kind of language. So you mentioned about language we used in our interactions, right? So there was a study that linked the usage of self-referential speech patterns. And the amount of time you spent talking with self-referencing is linked to poor outcomes of mental health.

And that's true again. So bringing back to the points that we discussed previously, right? So the rumination, the self-defeating thoughts, this self-centeredness, which is also reflected and the patterns from brain dynamics is also reflected in the way we communicate, the way we talk. So my personal opinion is that ultimately, of course, you know, it's important to have this broader aspect of mental health, you know, right? So it's a personal mental health, the state of the family. I mean, speaking about kids, right?

So quite often the symptoms that a child is manifesting is not only a symptom of a child. In the vast majority of cases, if it's not all the cases, that's the symptom of a family. I'm not trying to say, yes, that's the family. and the parents' responsibility only for the children's mental health. But the point that I'm making that mental health expands beyond personal well-being, personal brain dynamics, personal reflections. It's always a reflection and also very context-dependent. So my personal opinion is that there will be, or I think there must be a trend towards,

it's contextualizing mental health in different occasions, you know, thinking, for example, in what context a person with a certain characteristics. I mean, so say, I like to give an example, an ADHD, right? You have a person, you have two people with the same magnitude of symptoms, and you can kind of evaluate the presence of ADHD symptoms by some scales. on one person is an athlete, another person is an office worker. One would get a diagnosis and the other one would not. Because they live in very different contexts with very different demands, with very different focuses in their life.

And so I do think that in general, not only the context of partners, but in general, the broader context of the mental health that a person is living in is very important for determining, also for helping. people to live you know to take care of their well-being better but when it comes to the to the use of technology in the assessment I do think that there is already an existing trend of for leveraging natural language processing to get information from natural behavioral patterns from natural speech on how people are doing yes and also you know there was I don't know if you if you know

there is there was a recent study based on compass pathways data from a clinical trial that evaluated with leveraging natural language processing of interactions patient patient therapist interactions and they objectively with technological tools detected that you know what we've known for quite a well, right, that the report, the personal contact that a therapist has with the patient is tremendously important for outcomes. And so it's interesting that the study is actually coming from a company representing the pharmaceutical players in the psychedelic space, right? And but again, so it shows objectively leveraging modern technology that the therapy part or, okay, so for that

that matter the personal connection part. Okay, so I'm not, I'm not here to say that the only way of approaching psychedelics is through full-on therapy. But at least, you know, we know that the personal, the subjective, the subjective aspect of treatment of the way people establish the connection with the therapist with each other is very important for the treatment outcomes. So this brings back the idea of the indigenous serenic. and rites of passage.

And if you find yourself in a heightened state of awareness and there's an elder who's already been through it and maybe your younger brother who's looking up to you to see you go through it for the first time, like, that's a tremendous container of learning right there. We're real, you know, you have everything you need. You have the old version of you and the younger version of you. You know, and there you are right in the middle. Like, depending on which one you are. But man, it's such a just hearing the idea of speech patterns.

makes me think about life patterns, makes me think about evolution. Like, I really, I think it would be fascinating to do some studies on the way in which psychedelic ceremonies and consumption of psychedelics have different outcomes in those settings, right? It's mind-blowing, man. I agree. For me, another aspect that has been largely ignored or under-investigated, let's put it this way, is interpersonal dynamics during such interventions or shared experience and how it is related to the outcomes of work with psychedelics. Because I do think it's my hypothesis, let's put it this way, that the bonds and the interpersonal connection that is formed during such interventions is very important.

And I think there are good reasons why psychedelics are used in the communal setting. To me specifically, I mean, we were running a company organizing this, you know, harm reduction services in the Netherlands. And that was a ceremonial setting. You know, we, so that was the company was started by four medical doctors. And we were working with the traditional spaceholders who started work with, you know, with, with this medicinal substances for many years. and the indigenous communities just to be able to facilitate your own ceremonies. You have to help out at the ceremonies for about 10 years. You need to study that.

So it has always been done in a communal context. And I think that's something that has a tremendous healing potential, this interpersonal connection that has been lost in current mental health that is quite often largely indifferent to what happens to a psychiatric patient, what he or she gets discharged. There are exceptions, of course. But, you know, when I was doing my residence in psychiatry in Russia, I said, I mean, you can, I'm quite sure you can teach a monkey to prescribe antidepressants, you know.

But what is really important is to communicate to a patient, you know, know what happens next, you know, where they can get help, how they can get support, how they can navigate, especially if they're suffering from a major psychiatric condition, how they can get help, how they can build their life, you know, in the light of challenges that they're that they're facing and in the light of their personal characteristics that they have, how they can find the right context and in which they can live a healthy life. So that's what is challenging. And that's what we so far haven't been very successful. Yeah, my grandpa used to say, if you want a new idea, read a really old book.

You know, and sometimes it's just like looking back to the people that have been doing this before us. Like, oh, we lost our way right here. Okay, let's go back, you know, or maybe this is what we're missing. I agree. I agree. My favorite book on psychiatry, and I read a lot of books on nearest psychiatry. But my favorite and most transformative book for me as a professional in mental health was general psychopathology by Karu Yasper's. Karayasper's was a classical German psychiatrist.

He was an interesting character. So he kind of is a recognized classic in psychiatry, but also a recognized classic in existential philosophy. So the book that he wrote, it's a massive book. It's one of the probably biggest books in psychiatry. It's mostly on phenomenology of a wide variety of psychopathological experiences, but it also has a massive section on methodology of what we study, the psyche, mental health, what are the traps that we can. can get into when trying to over-explain

phenomenology by means of neuroscience, by means of biology and physiology. So that has been a very influential book for me and I still believe that was probably the most important book in psychiatry for me. And it was written in the beginning of 20th century, just in there in the foundation of, during the, when the modern psychiatry was just trying to find its own place in the medicine.

It's fascinating to think of. You know, as we spoke about speech patterns earlier, and sometimes in the heightened states of awareness, you'll see these radical geometric shapes sometimes, you know, and whether it's a three-dimensional pyramid or some sort of geometrical anomaly. Like, wow, what is that? Is that possible?

Do you think that that has something to do with language? Is that like on some level? Because there's also the same aspect of the ineffable. Like you can't bring back in language what happened to you at times. But you can almost bring back the idea of that image. Do you think that those images that you see in language are somewhat connected? Well, there are studies, right, that would investigate effects on psychedelic on perception of symmetry. As you mentioned, there was some systematic research done on specifically perception of this pattern, of edges, geometric shapes.

And, well, because of what we discussed, right, so the psychedelic state is a mode of very unconstrained cognition. And in terms of perception, well, what we know is that there is some resemblance of this patterns to the way our visual cortex is structured. So when, let's put it this way, the lower level brain system become more engaged into the activity during the states. So there is more place of the basic aspects of our perception and the way we deal with the reality. And we know for you know for for for many years, you know, there was a belief that We are just passive receivers of Of reality right you know that we just have the observers Which is clearly not the truth so the amount of

Fit Forward projections to higher perceptual Network so far of the brain is for you know for many regions is larger than the then the receiving end of it, right? So we constantly, our brain and our cognition for that matter, but let's speak in terms of the cognitive neuroscience, our brain, as actually once stated by Carl Fristin, is the inference machine, constantly making predictions about reality, right? You know, you step on a non-moving escalator

and your body immediately tries to readjust, even though you see with your own eyes that it's not moving. So our brain constantly makes predictions about what's coming next. You know, that's related to some of the biases that we form. That's related to different aspects of life. And it's important component because there are so many things happening in our perception, and it's one way or another we form the model of our world. And some of the signaling from low-level systems,

from our fear circuits, from our basic aspects of perception of reality, and of our regular waking consciousness, this activity patterns get suppressed and filtered out from the perception. And in an unconstrained state of condition, so we see these aspects of brain activity, they are being brought back or they are being introduced to the mental space. And that's what we seem to observe. That's what we observe in the phenomenology.

And that's what people describe. So it's also interesting that there are some psychedelics that are more linked to these sorts of visual phenomena like DMT, for example. It's known for being associated with these patterns. And remarkable, isn't it, that we see some of this. DMT like patterns in some ancient cultures and some of the paintings of different religious places. So and I do think that, well, first, in a way, this patterns reflect in general the basic foundations of the way our visual system is involved in building the reality or the visual aspect of reality and yeah so it's i think it's another fascinating and interesting aspect of all the unconstrained cognition

you think most people have heard about like terence mackina's stoned ape theory about how what is your thoughts on that um i mean my opinion i don't i don't see okay so i respect terence mackina a lot, right? So he said a lot of interesting and he was definitely a prominent and interesting figure in the space. My personal opinion, I don't see enough evidence for that. I mean, as someone who is open to different ideas, I find it fascinating that mushrooms in a broad sense have amazing properties that on some within some frameworks can be recognized as having collective intelligence. Yes. That's something that fascinates me.

Whether in some bizarre way it was a, well, this communion of our mammal biology biology and and the mushroom biology somehow manifested in a new form of cognition. I don't know. I think that's a beautiful idea to contemplate on. If we find ways to actually somehow verify it, I mean, I am open to accepting this as a possibility. If I were to speak like a scientist, no, I don't think we have enough evidence to claim this,

But I do think it's, in general, I think there are many things that we still do not understand about species that we live so closely with, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating to think about. If meaningfulness is key, should psychedelic therapy focus on guiding patients to directly cultivate it rather than just treating symptoms? Oh, well, I think when it comes to working with psychedelics, it's very hard to only focus on symptoms that a person is manifesting, right? We can measure, and that's what we do at clinical trials, right? So a person comes with certain symptoms of depression. We evaluate it before and after.

Well, I mean, everyone who worked with psychedelics understands that, you know, even if you want to only focus on symptoms, well, good luck. You know, it's impossible. You know, it's like a Pandora box. you start working with psychedelics and there are more underlying things you know a person comes with addiction problem for example and uh well very quickly we may realize that that's just a tip of an iceberg uh i personally think that reframing approaches to mental health to um for lack of a better word i know it's a very abused term for for more holistic way of looking at our well-being and mental health by which I mean right focusing on our biology psychology and also

spirituality is something that we need to do and when it comes to meaning I personally stand by that so I think that meaning enhancing properties are very important and in my opinion to a very large extent to build a resilience or sustainable well-being is a lot about finding meaning in the ever-changing and chaotic unpredictability of the world. Do you have any thoughts on using AI and next-generation drug discovery? Yes. Well, yeah, there have been some attempts, right?

You know, there is a massive field of computer-aided drug discovery. Right. For example, I worked with computer-aided diagnostics, image-based diagnostics. And, you know, one of the papers that we published was written with a good colleague of mine from the Netherlands working with computer-aided drug discovery. So there are different ways of looking, of doing that. Sorry, I'm just going to align the phone. I'm taking up a lot of your time, man. Are you okay?

It's fine. It's fine. I'm enjoying the conversation. Me too, man. Me too. Thank you. Yeah, so what was I? So I was talking about the computerated drug discovery and the role of AI in drug discovery. Yes, for sure. You know, we already see this thriving. We already have the first fruits of this research. And yeah, I mean, this is, well, to that question, I can easily give a definite yes answer. So we already see it happen. Is there any speculation or is there any ideas on or potential thoughts on what a next generation psychedelic drug would be? I think we have really good psychedelics already that are largely under-investigated. Okay, so I'm going to give my own opinion, right? So I'm all pro, you know, discovering new substances. there is tremendous amount of work that Sasha Shulgin has done.

I think there is a massive amount of work we need to do just revisiting some of his fascinating work. And, well, I talked with a colleague of mine that actually Rediscar managed to rediscover some of this discovery is leveraging AI. and so with simulation leveraging genetic algorithms. But what I want to say is that there is a massive amount of stuff we still need to understand about the psychedelics that are available. And I think, right, so what we tend to see that many synthetic, well, for example, right, one of the most potent serotonergic psychedelics is Bromogragonfly, which is toxic or another psychedelic

and bone, for example, right, that was used as a tracer does have some toxicity. Whereas most of the naturally occurring psychedelics, they are ones of the least toxic substances known by humans. And, well, someone, well, you know, like one way to evaluate toxicity of a substance is to divide the dose that can potentially kill you versus the dose that induces the effects that you're after, right? For caffeine, this ratio is about 60, 70,

if you take 70 shots of espresso, you may die. For alcohol, it's about 10 or 12. So, you know, if a person, you know, who is not a drinker, drinks, you know, one and a half liters of strong alcohol, he or she may die. And for most of the classical psychedelics, this ratio is a matter of thousands or hundreds. And someone did an estimate of how much,

how many dried mushrooms one needs to consume to actually inflict any physical damage and ended up. I can't remember how to convert it in pounds. but about 11 kilograms of dried mushrooms. I don't know, it's not feasible to consume. So the point that I'm making, well, for a very long time, and again, so I'm coming from a country

that has a history of having this mentality of building a human that is the master of nature, right? that would domesticate nature that would yeah there were several projects in Soviet Union to turn the rivers right for the benefits of you know of human civilization

it was a massive experiment you know and I'm saying this not in a condescending way right I'm saying this as I would talk about a massive experiment that I was conducted at a scale of an entire population of an entire country that we have tremendous

amount of results to learn from and it hasn't been effective let's put it this way and over the course of you know of our lives as a humanity we've learned that it's a dangerous game trying to outsmart nature yep and my personal stance is that we just need to study and comprehend that we are, that we are an inseparable part of it. We are not the masters, the owners of nature. We are there, we are her children. Yeah, I love it.

I think of the Alan Watts line that the earth grows people, like an apple tree grows apples. It's pretty beautiful to think about on that aspect. There's been some, some, some, some papers written. I don't, I can't cite them and I, I don't know exactly. I, I don't even know if I read it in a, in a medical journal, but they were using five MEOT to help people with Alzheimer's disease. And it could be anecdotal evidence. I'm not sure. Have you heard any things or read any published papers where they have found success using psychedelics with neurodegenerative diseases? Right now, there are no systematic clinical trials that would, you know, show these effects. There is one phase two clinical trial, I think, that was initiated this year.

Was it in Argentina? Yeah, yeah, with FIOMEODMT. I think that's the one you're talking about. And when it comes to the preclinical evidence, I think it's clear, it's there. So I studied, and I'm saying this is someone who spent a fair amount of years studying neurobiological plasticity. So clearly classical psychedelics are capable of promoting neurobiological plasticity, learning associated with it. there is a series of papers where psychedelics were called psychopathogens, right, for that incredible ability to stimulate neurobiological plasticity.

And we know that plasticity is largely harmed in neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's, Louis-Body dementia, that was the focus of my work for also, you know, for many years. And for me, this is a clear rationale. Now, moreover, back in the days when I was just starting working with that, and we had a conversation in the department when we were running our studies with cognitive training. And of course, for me, I thought that's what we need to investigate it, but we needed to study. But back then it was not feasible to launch a study with psychedelics in Sweden to tell you a little bit more about the background. you know when we when when when the swedish network for psychedelic science was started thanks to which to a very large extent we were able to run our first clinical trial i talked to my colleagues and i mean there were lots of people who were very positive about the potential psychedelics for basic science for mental health but they said i mean Alex yes we understand but let's be realistic that's something that is never going to happen in sweden in the near future and i think well maybe in In a couple of years after that, everything went quite smoothly once there was funding.

I mean, I had experience interacting with, you know, with agencies that are, you know, like the analogs of FD and it went smoothly. But, you know, the point is, you know, I'm just to narrow down my answer. So I do think it's a, it's a very promising area of research. and that was one of the things that I proposed back in the days. I remember Amanda Fielding when she was in Sweden, so she was the one also in favor of that kind of research. But yeah, I communicated it to, you know, exploring the possibility of running that. And it was very hard.

I mean, it was very hard to work with other pharmacological. substances, even like, you know, the ones that are very well studied, like L-Dopa, for example, it was very hard to get through. And that was not the right time for that kind of studies. And now I'm happy to see that this research is gradually being prioritized. And I do think it has a tremendous potential, not only for Alzheimer's, but also for Parkinson's, like, all age-related in your degenerative conditions. You know, it's so fascinating to think about, like, if we think of, you think of, about psychedelics and when they enter the zeitgeist or when they enter the society,

isn't it fascinating to think that this part of this generation, the baby boomers, who are now getting to the point where they may have neurodegenergigms, were one of the, were one wave where they experimented with them. Thus, they might be more open to using them later. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's this, it's this beautiful tapestry in a way to see it coming back around to help out these people, medicine's opening back up to it on some level. I guess it brings me to this idea of degeneral shift, degeneration shifts in attitudes merely reflect changing cultural tides

or the technologies and drugs play a role in reshaping mindsets. Interesting that you brought up the baby boomers. I watched some of the videos on your channel. I'm sorry, I cannot call the name. I can't remember. so without risk, that was well put. You know, why considering the 60s and the amount of psychedelics

taken by baby boomers, why are we not living in an enlightened society, right? Right. That's so beautifully put. And again, so that's, I think, a partial answer to your question. I don't think that psychedelics are the answer.

They are one of the tools that we have. And we still, all of us, need to do personal work and and be proactively involved in shaping in shaping the way we interact and trade each other. Yeah. And technology, yes, you know, right now we are living in a peculiar moment, right? That to some extent the technology, some may argue, maybe a little bit ahead of our ecological and spiritual development.

and you know at the ceremonies you know anyone who participated in psychedelic ceremonies understands that there are difficult moments that affect all actors in the circle and sometimes it may be tempting to point fingers well horrible it's all how how it's all happening that shouldn't be done this way but these are the exact moments when everyone needs to exercise patience and respect to each other and look inwards

and that's what I think we all need to do now at different levels. And yes, when the technology or any progress is happening too fast, when there is a roller coaster of experience,

whereas there is a roller coaster of changes that we are undergoing to, that's when that's when our ability to look in words and be patient and calm and respectful are becoming paramount. Yeah. You know, when I think about ceremony sometimes and respectful and psychedelics, one trend or one thing that I've been talking to people about, that comes up is the way in the West, at least in the United States, that we treat death.

You know, death is something, I just recently learned, like, the etymology of pallative care. Like, palative care means the shroud. So palliative care means to shroud death. And it's such a, it makes me want to cry. It kind of gives me goosebumps. Like, that's how we treat death here. It's like, don't look at it, be afraid of it. It's so scary.

Oh, we hate it. We hate it so much. We're going to keep people alive even when they're, their spirit may have left them already. Like my grandma was just a vegetable for like for so long. And they have these codes. They don't even have a code for deaths because they can't, you know what I mean? It's like on some level it's it's this relationship to death that we're deathly afraid of.

And it robs the dignity up. And somehow it robs all of us of life in some ways. Like, you know, I'm sad about that. I'm wondering if I can get your opinions with that. And maybe can psychedelics. on some level help us work with that strategy what do you think um i am going to speak from my you know on my own opinion right now as a as a scientist even though there is some signs done on the fear of death not only on psychedelics um to me societal um phobia of death

and everything related to dying is also a reflection of a crisis of meaning. Yep. Because, well, we are talking right now and just a few days ago, well, Roland Griffiths passed away, right? Yes. Who is, for me, was one of the most influential people in the modern psychedelic science and you can see how it's very touching you know it's very touching how how he passed away and you can see that this person lived very

profound and meaningful life and there was no well I'm I don't dare to say that there was no fear of death I think it's natural it's it's it's embedded in the very foundation of our biology of our existence but there was acceptance and and and peace and I think what brings peace in many challenging situation is the sense of meaning right I understand. I'm not saying it's an easy thing and that's, you know, there is like a five-minute solution to find meaning and to find something that you're not afraid to die for. But, you know, if someone manages to find that something that is worth dying for, then suddenly it does not become that scary I think and yes to me the right you know

there is a there is an extreme saying by Charles Bukovsky find what your life has let it kill you it's a very it's a very Bukovsky way of saying that but there is some truth to it I think and um because um on the grand scale a human life is a is a very short moment and um it's very easy to get lost in the in in all the lots of information that we are dealing all the demands that we are seeing in social media you have to be an ideal father an ideal worker and forget about what what fulfills our lives with meanings yeah it's um it's a it's a it's a reflection out loud but i just to give you a very short and packaged answer so to me uh i do think that uh to a large extent we lost this connection to

well the the lost connection to death to nature and to meaning are very intricately related to me yeah that's that's really well said it for me like i have found recently maybe it's my age i'm almost 50 and maybe it's my age, but I believe it's also my relationship with psychedelics that allowed me to confront that the life I had been living for quite some time was a lie. It was, in some ways, it allowed me to see the absurdity of chasing things that are really shiny and that it allowed me to chase the meaning that was already packed. up and there for me to take rather than provide meaning for myself. And it's scary. It's really scary to get to that point and see it and be like,

I can't do it anymore. Like, especially like, it's so interesting because I think on some level, that's when you start to live a little bit. Like when you, you know what I mean? There's that saying that says, if you die before you die, you never die. But like, it's really, it's really, damn hard to walk away from a living when you have a family, when you have all these bills, when you have a mortgage, when, hey, what's my wife going to say when I say I'm leaving this place? You know, and then you, but on some level, it's that very move that will allow you to have a conversation with your wife that you've never had in your life.

It'll allow you to have a conversation with your daughter about, I'm going to do this so that she can see that you're supposed to do this. you know what I mean? And like I get goosebumps when I think about it. Yes, me too. You know, and I think, I know for me, Psychedelics played a role in finding the courage to do it. And it's on this, maybe it speaks to the idea of your relationship with uncertainty. And maybe that speaks to death too, right, on some level.

Yes. Thank you for saying this. I just wanted to say that it resonates deeply with me. what you're saying and when it comes to work with psychedelics there were several attempts in my career when i tried to steer away from them to do different things you know that would not put my career that would bring more predictable things to life but that's ultimately I felt that I I couldn't do that because that was not giving me the fulfillment and now I learned that I as a scientist I cannot research I cannot dedicate my life to researching what I don't believe in

and of course you know even what I believe in I need to question and put to test and just remain genuine and that's that's a that's a hard part of a scientist right to question and your own beliefs and yeah but you know what I wanted to say the ability to be honest with your own aspirations with your own desires about your own life what matters and what doesn't very often it's one of the hardest things to do but that's the thing that is very close to linked to, okay, so I disappeared for a second. A cliffhanger. That's a cool moment.

That was beautiful. Oh, I'm back. I'm back. I don't know what happened. So that's the thing that is most delicately and close to link to our well-being and meaning in life. And at this point, I cannot see my life without this. and the ability to be honest with myself,

with what matters and what does not. It's so closely tied with scripture in some ways about being reborn again or death and a rebirth, you know, and I can't help. But it just maybe instead of scriptures, you could use Sufi poetry, you know, but I mean, it's probably better. We had that joke.

We had that, you know, I was joking when we were preparing an application to, to our Swedish analogue of FDA for our study on psilocybin. I mean, it's very hard to sell an idea to that organization that the best experience you may possibly have as an experience of your own death. But, I mean, at the same time, that's true, you know. there is a lot of symbolic and personal value in these sorts of experiences. And yeah, I agree with you that, well, that's a good way of putting it.

You know, dying once makes you not being afraid of dying next time. It's so fascinating to think about it. but I'm mesmerized by it. And I, uh, Dr. Alexander exceeded all my expectations. I truly thank you for a very candid conversation and laying out your opinion next to

what you think about scientific. That, that's almost unheard of. And I, I truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with me to, to talk about all your opinions, to talk about all the research you've been doing, to thank you for the papers you've been publishing.

But before I let you go, maybe you can tell us a couple things. One is where can people find you? What do you have coming up? And what are you most excited about? Yeah. I, well, right now, I mean, I'm stationed in Sweden right now. It's an interesting time for me at the moment. It hasn't been the best time to be a Russian.

But each day I humbly accept the challenges life throws my way. Cherishing what remains or what hasn't been taken from me. I'm grateful for the moments I share with my daughter, the liberty to pursue my research and the roof over my head. Sadly, many people don't have even this days. So people can find me in person in Sweden because the way I was welcomed in the research community back in the days of the first year in my medical school, whenever I get requests from students, I am doing my best.

I always do my best to at least meet over coffee, to listen to the people, to know how I can be of help. even if on the surface it doesn't seem like we there is a place at the lab for example so you know if people want to meet me in person so just they can email me you know they just google alexander levitt of carolinska there is my professional email I what I am up to right now so we launched a startup in Sweden leveraging dream analytics allowing people to explore their unconscious. For me, okay, I'm trying to think how I can unpack it in a fixed amount of time. Take your time, take your time, man.

Right, so there were different ways to reintroduce the things we've talked about to the Western society, you know, connection to nature, the way to connect with each other, to our spiritual roots. And we learned that the new age way is probably not the way for the Western society. But I do think that

technology specifically some of the tools that we have right now allowing people to make sense of the experiences that are very hard to make sense just by you know reading them and you know trying to interpret them rationally I think that technology have a tremendous capacity to show us that we all intricately connected yeah me too and that's what the dreams here is all about it's a it's an immersive experience that we are building and we are building it with their community right now we are running our alpha testing phase receiving wonderful feedback dream series a story of our days it's a narrative that is being told not only by me not by the co-founders it's the narrative it's the narrative that is being told

that is being told by all of us and that's the that's the startup that that we initiated. So there are scientists, programmers, artists that are involved in creating it. Nechreste, resurrect, and explore the new ways we can evolve and connect with each other. That sounds fascinating. Maybe we could talk more about it.

Like, what, when you say it's a narrative, Is it like a documentary? Is it something that I put a headset on to? Is it something that it's interactive and immersive? Or do I see it in a dream? Like, maybe you tell me more about it, man. It sounds fascinating. Practically, the most simplistic way and the way to describe the technology,

it's a dream analytics app. Okay, so that's the most reductionistic way to describe it. Okay. You wake up in the morning. you activate voice to text or type your dream. You get the feedback on the occurring themes and sentiments that you have in your dream. And each individual dream has a unique set of coordinates in a shared space. There is a narrative that evolves based on the dreams that people see, that you'll see.

There is also a story to tell about the dream realm and that's something that Carl Jung was studying and described in the dreams of his patients and his own dreams and before the Second World War. And we know right now there is one of the most prevalent theory of dreams and dreaming is the continuity. hypothesis that dreams are reflective of what's happening in our own mental space and I with this technology we are trying to revisit test expand and explore some of the ideas some of the old ideas including ideas of Jung about our shared mental space and there is a narrative So there is a story that is being told. There is something like a visual novel that evolves. There is a lore that we shape together with the community.

So do you think, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of, I've heard people say that Young's Red Book was his adventure into psychedelics. Have you heard that? Yes, interestingly, Kar Jung himself was quite, skeptical let's put it this way about psychedelics he saw them as a as potentially dangerous when an unprepared mind enters this realm of course he has his own indigenous very powerful in an ordinary state of consciousness but among psychedelic therapists there are many people with Jungian background and it

does not surprise me and Yes, I do think that some of the concepts introduced by Karium, while they may look bizarre by some accounts, I think right now we are, we have tools to to regularly, rigorously investigate and verify or on the other hand reject them. so we'll see for me young was not the entrance to psychedelic research it was rather the other way around I first encountered Jung and Jungian ideas I think that was the first year in the med school too when I first came to the Department of Psychiatry and one of the first assignment that I was given by my first teacher before I joined the group doing brain imaging one of the first assignments was to write a report on where voices are coming from.

And I was fascinated by neuroscience. I created, I think, a decent report by student standards on neurobiology of voices happening in some schizophrenia spectrum disorder. There was enough imaging work, neurophysiological work on that. so my teacher read it and said it's beautifully written but where the voices are coming from why do we see different narratives why do we see transformation of different objects that are well if it is a persecutory ideas or persecutory uh voices why do we see this transformation of changes in different cultural contexts and i realized that i didn't have an

answer for that based on the information that I've collected and later I learned that he was Jungian I tried reading Jung when I was in the first year so it didn't land well so I I was very skeptical but that inability to answer a question was something that really stuck with me and that eventually stimulated my development as a researcher and in some way probably led me to study psychedelics to study socionomics the global societal dynamics and i think it's probably one of the most valuable valuable gifts that I have received during my education, this simple assignment and the question that challenged my views. So that's how I got into Jung and eventually ended up completing my own

analysis in Jungian framework. So where do the voices come from? I think that we have good reasons to believe that the way our society interacts brings emergent properties into our dynamics that may also continue to influence our behavior at large. Some of these ideas resonate with one of the godfathers of modern sociology Emil Dürgheim. He authored a massive work on suicide that was called suicide. And his concept was that, you know, one of the reasons of the mental, and he predicted the duration of mental health crisis and the suicide crisis in particular. That was one of the first work, like really massive work on sociology.

And his idea was that, you know, there is a paradox that despite being connected with each other, based on our skills and we know the society is becoming more interdependent we are becoming more disconnected from each other on the spiritual and personal level and that what brings a lot of challenges to our lives and our mental health in particular anyhow so he was one of the first to talk about this societal dynamics that some of the concepts may continue to exist and influence our behavior you know one example christmas right there they're not that many people who actually belief in the you know in the in the in the whole story right but you know it also it's also a celebration that has a massive history and also from an anthropological account but this is the

concept that keeps determining massively the way we behave starting from basic things like shopping pattern so that's a massive construct that continues to influence that and I think that that's true for many of the driving forces in our society. I don't know where my own ideas are coming from. Creativity itself is a very interesting thing, right? So I, I, well, I don't have a definite answer, right? So where the voices, where creative thoughts, where the ideas coming from I think there are good reasons to believe that we are not fully and I know

it's a dangerous way of putting it especially for a scientist fully responsible and fully authoring the ideas that we are bringing and communicating but yes we are responsible in the way we are communicating it probably in the way we shape them. But the origin of creative ideas, novelty, revelations, continues to be a mystery

that I dedicated. I'm trying to dedicate my life to understand. It's so true. I mean, you can scroll through biographies or YouTube videos. I've talking to plenty of people. where they've written a book and a large portion of people say the same thing. Like this was written through me.

You know, I felt like it just came right through me. I've, I've been on really high doses of like four ACODMT. And I'll never forget the first time I heard a voice in my head. It scared me to death. Like I remember, like curled up like a frightened cat in the bathtub. Like, what? And for a moment, I'm like, oh, my, you know, later after I was, after I got through the experience, like the next day I was like, I can't imagine having that experience. Like, imagine having that all the time.

You know, you don't know what it is. Like, wow. And that brings us back to the idea of, you know, maybe in, in the 60s or 50s, they did research where the professional would take the drug so they could understand psychosis. Like that's a brilliant move. Like you really get an insight from there from understanding from a perspective of what it's like or or even like really high doses where you think things that are could be considered way out in left field. And then later you kind of come back to this rational understanding, whatever that means, you know, and you're like, that was so real. I still believe it in some ways. You know, there's so much more going on than we've really have any idea.

Yes Man Have you Have you read Julian James book The breakdown of the bicameral mind? I haven't read it fully I'm familiar with the concept A good colleague of mine

We talked about it with a good colleague of mine Robin Carter Harris Yes Yeah but I mean I haven't read the entire book I'm familiar with the concepts Yes, I find them interesting. Fascinating to think about a corresponding part to Broca's area and Vernica's area

in the opposite side of the brain that may be responsible for voices. Yes, yes. Man. So here's another one. Now that I'm thinking about it a little bit, when we think about synesthesia, do we know, it sounds to me like that could be information being processed in the visual. cortex or information being processed or visual information being processed in like the sound part of our brains.

Do we know what's going on there when synesthesia happened? Yes. Actually, a good colleague of mine here in Sweden is studying or used to study synesthesia. Well, first, right, so when we are talking about, for lack of a better word, normal waking consciousness, so the networks. There are some networks that usually do not interact or interact very little, visual network, auditory network. So there is a certain amount of segregation between them. So what we see happening during psychedelic experiences and what we see in people with anesthesia is that there

is more cross-talk between these networks as compared to non-sinestasic is there such a word in people without synesthesia in normal waking consciousness if we look at the way learning is

and forgive me if I get this wrong but if we look at learning as a strengthening in connections between different parts of the brain is it possible that some of if someone experiences synesthesia often, that that can become a normal pathway, maybe leading to more creativity in some ways?

I think creativity or some aspects of creativity, right? It's very intricately related to the ability to see connections that are not obvious. right and in that sense I mean I don't have data to support it that it may actually be linked to better creativity I think there are studies showing that synesthesia is more prevalent than creative specialties but don't quote me on that creativity right so there are different ways to conceptualize creativity you know say artistic creativity creativity creativity an abstract usual artist as compared to creativity of an engineer or scientist. Well, the way we personalize creativity in the lab when we administering tests for creativity, like Torres, like Torrance test for creative thinking

or alternative use test, which is a very simple task. You know, you have a word break, you have five minutes to come up with as many potentially potential users for that word. So, well, there are two aspects of creativity, the way it is person analyzed in the lab. It should be novel, unusual, and useful. And in that sense, I think that in a way, may be more flexible patterns of brain dynamics linked to the exchange of information between the regions that usually interact little, may in change.

reduce an extra capacity to get new insights to look on a situation or a problem under a different angle. So there were actually some studies done in the pre-prohibition era among entrepreneurs, scientists trying to solve a problem for a long time. And then, you know, and they're going in a psychedelic session discovering novel solutions. In that sense, I do think that this aspect of creativity, the ability to look at the problem under a new angle. I think there is a story to tell about that it does not still exclude the ability to make sense of this novel look. And one of the, you know, that there is a link between psychosis and creativity. You know that people among siblings of people with creative professions,

there are more relatives suffering from psychosis spectrum. disorders, there are studies linking some traits like psychoticism to creativity. And there are studies showing that if it's, you know, polygenic risk scores studies, so people who score high on polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder while not having a psychiatric condition, meaning that their genome resembles more of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are more likely have creative professions and so it's there is a link and there are some groups that believe that schizophrenia and psychosis itself is a side effects of a tremendous expansion of our creative abilities as the homocypians to discover patterns to adopt and when perhaps the

this ability is not met with the capacity to contain and to incorporate this ability to perceive unusual patterns. It can go overboard and compromise a essay for lack of a better word, reality perception and connection to reality. So, you know, to me creativity is an interesting dance. Yeah. Between subjective and objective reality and all about the ability of an individual to befriend your subjective or internal and external reality. That's a beautiful answer. I was speaking with Dr. Jessica Rochester a while back and she had mentioned that, I don't know if she read it somewhere or who she was citing, but. there were some indigenous people that came to the United States and were mesmerized by seeing

some of the people that were in the hospitals and were, you know, it's that and that had psychosis. And they're like, what are you doing? These are the people that have see patterns that no one else does. You know, I have had an incredible time here, Dr. Alexander. I could probably talk to another two hours. And I am super thankful for everything that you put, that you put out there. that we've talked about today and for all the work you're doing and you've been very gracious with your time and is there anything else that you want to leave people with before we turn it

over no i think we we covered a lot uh singular to you i i'm sure if we had more time we would find lots of topics for the conversation it's been a really great pleasure talking to you George, it's been one of the, ah, these were, well, probably one of the greatest questions I've been asked on the interview. So thank you. Thank you very much. It's been, it's been a great pleasure to be present in this interview. Thank you for having me. And I'm wishing all of us, patience.

and compassion. I think hands down you're one of the most brilliant researchers out there and what you're adding to the field is phenomenal. And anybody who is listening right now, check out his discography. He's got tons of incredible work out there and it's wonderful. And thanks again. If you hang on real briefly afterwards,

I'll talk to you just real briefly afterwards. But to everyone listening right now, Aloha, Thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you have a beautiful day. And that's all I got. Aloha. Thank you.