TrueLife - Dr. Abraham Zangen - Magnetic Coils, Therapy, & Pure THC

Episode Date: April 22, 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/http://linkedin.com/in/abraham-zangen-7919299https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_ZangenDr. Abraham Zangen is an incredible individual. Dr.,Zangen has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters.Dr. Zangen has won prizes for his scientific achievements, among them the Medical Futures Innovation Award in the field of Mental Health and Neuroscience, UK, in 2007, the Sieratzki Prize for Advances in Neuroscience in 2010 ,the Juludan Research Prize in 2015 and the annual Innovation Award of Ben Gurion University in 2019.Some may be familiar with his work on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS.) TMS has shown diagnostic and therapeutic potential in the central nervous system with a wide variety of disease states in neurology and mental health, with research still evolving 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. Here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We've got a quick intro video for you today. We're live all the way from Ben-Gurin University with an incredible individual, Professor Abraham Zangan, who is, if you have read a little bit about neuroplasticity,

if you have read a little bit about using magnets to change the way people interact with different disorders, then you've probably read about him. Doctor, I wanted this to give you a quick intro to introduce people to who you are and what your work is. But before I do that, how are you today? I'm great, and it's good to see you. I like the difference in the time zones, like we're talking in the two sides of the planet. So it's exciting.

Yeah, you know, I was thinking when we got started, we're on these two different sides of the planet, almost like two different hemispheres of the brain, but we're connecting and kind of moving our language through there. And, you know, as we're getting started here, you have been the inventor of some fascinating technologies. You've had a very fascinating career. You've won some awards. But I was wondering if you could maybe, in this introductory video, maybe give people a little bit of background about how you got started. Yeah. Well, I actually always was very interested in the brain.

So I learned some physics. I learned some biology, some medical studies. And physics was really my main love. And when I started understanding, standing in my post in my PhD studies already the mode of action of antidepressant medications this was my main you know interest was how how really the brain works and specifically how do psychiatric disorder and mess our brains and how medications can fix it so this was my main curiosity when I when I was much younger like 25 years ago and then

I realized that we should use the physics of electromagnetic fields to change the brain. So this was something that really happened only later on after I completed my PhD studies. In Israel, I moved to a post-doctoral fellowship at NIH in the United States, and there I learned about electrical stimulation. And I was fascinated, actually, fascinated by the fact that I can implant electrodes to rats in the reward system, like the lateral hypothalamus or other parts of the brain that were the fibers of the reward passed through. And then rats would learn to press a lever in order to inject currents to their brain. And they will get crazy about it. They will not leave the lever.

And I did have experience before with the rats, you know, with animal behavior. You know, we can get rats to self-administer cocaine or other drugs. And it takes time to really teach them to do that. And they do become addicted. And then we can learn about the changes, the plasticity in their brain and what goes wrong during the addiction process. But for electrical stimulation, it was so easy. I mean, they turned it so fast.

It was so strongly, so rewarding. And this was fascinating. So this was actually where I started thinking about we should use this electrical stimulation or electromagnetic stimulation using external coils in humans. We also tried it in rats to manipulate the electrical activity of the brain and make changes to brain circuitries. So this was a long answer to. your short question, but yeah, I think, I think really it started from pharmacology of

antidepressant drugs and into the physics of electromagnetic fields to manipulate brain plasticity. You know, I've often seen a pattern with people who find themselves fascinated with neuroplasticity and behavior and drugs that elicit behavior to help addiction or depression or anxiety and that's been a pattern of people being affected in their lives by that or having someone close to them affected that was that the case for you myself not some others in my family yes psychiatric disorders and i was actually as i i always was afraid as uh during my adulthood i mean during my when i was a teenager i mean uh of becoming schizophrenic i always thought that i'm on the on the border of pink, I was afraid I was anxious actually about it,

that I might lose sanity, right, if I pronounce it right. So, but nothing happened to me. So I never experienced psychedelic drugs except for my research when I tried to study the mode of action of THC. And this was actually during my post-of-torship at the NIH. So I had a very pure, you know, compound there to inject the rats and learn about, get rats to self-administer THT directly to their brain. So they press the lever to get THC directly to the brain and find the trigger zone in the brain

for the effects of tetohygo cannabinole, you know? So cannabis, right? So I thought that if I'm studying that, I should experience it myself. So this was the first time I experienced it. So I took this pure THC that I had from the lab and put it on a cigarette, you know, and I smoked it and I felt nothing. I said, well, I went according to the literature, to the average dose of TAC in a joint. And I felt like it had no effect on me.

And I thought, yes, also when I take alcohol, it doesn't really affect me. I need very high doses to get affected, so it's probably not affecting me. So I went into my car going home through the beltway of Baltimore. That was where I lived. And after maybe 20 minutes, I felt like which exit should I go out? And I was driving there for three years, you know, I was working it. And so then I started feeling the effect. But other than that, I had no real experience.

I had no real experience. then I got the way home eventually, but no experience with that. Myself, except for my family, there was some issues in my family. But, yeah, I think that my interest in the field did not come from that, from the family. It came from pure curiosity on how our brain works and how, where is the source of self? and the interaction between body and mind was always very interesting for me. When I read a book, I think I was like 16 years old when I read a book of an Israeli philosopher and Ayahu Leibovic really talking about the conflict, I mean, the dualistic question about the interaction between brain and mind.

and this actually started my interest in the field, not personal or family issues. Thank you for sharing that story. It's so comical to be like, yeah, this one didn't really affect me. You get in your car and start driving. I think a lot of people, I think anyone who has tried a really large dose of cannabis, especially the first time, has had a story that's like, yeah, this is not working, but then it does work and stuff like that.

It's interesting. If I move forward in the conversation, just for time's sake, when we think about neuroplasticity and whether it's transcranial magnetics or if it is, when you think about it, is it the brain bypassing parts of the other brain, like open heart surgery bypasses a blocked vein? Is that similar to how neuroplasticity works?

Or is it just new connections being made in different? part. Okay, so now we are really going fast forward to the technology that I was together with my colleagues using electromagnetic fields with transcraniar magnetic stimulation. And now to really explain this, first we should know that when you use a single pulse, okay, just a single part, put it, say, on your motor cortex. Like, it's a strip between you. So you put the coil over here, you come to my lab, I press the button, and your hand will jump even if you try to resist it, right? Because it stimulates the pathways that go from the decision to make the movement through your spinal cord all the way to the muscle and the hand moves. And you cannot resist it, right?

So this is a single pulse effect. But to your question, when we use TMS to change the brain or change circuitries in the brain to change to affect diseases and so on, it's not a single pulse that can just make you hand move. We place the coil over the relevant areas of the brain. In the case of depression or addictions that we are trying to treat, we put it over the prefrontal cortex, different parts of the prefrontal. frontal cortex and then we apply multiple pulses many repetitive pulses like 3,000 per day, you know, to change the connectivity in the circuitry, to make a stable change, not just to induce a single, you know, pulse that can make a functional change in your behavior, like make your hand or leg jump, but to really affect the connectivity and the circuitry.

And we have even more advanced technologies where we are now developing that instead of just stimulating a certain area in the brain, we stimulate several areas and coordinate the timing between the stimulations in order to really change really the circuitry in the brain that we believe is involved in the pathology of a certain disease. So the answer, again, it was a long answer to a short question. It's not that we are, it's not, it's not that we are affecting a certain area. It's that we are affecting the connections between different areas in the brain by multiple sessions of such stimulation.

And a single session, even these 3,000 pulses per day, cannot induce a lasting effect. If you want to really change the brain, the circuitry, we have to repeat that daily for several weeks. Although we can get an effect after like two weeks, like 10 sessions or so of stimulation, but to really maintain the effect and have the therapeutic effect like in depressive patients,

we need to maintain the treatment for several weeks. Yeah. It's so, it blows my mind to think that like that potential methodology can have such, even if you do it over a few weeks, people are on drugs for their whole life. Like a few weeks pales in comparison to being on something that can change who you are for your life. Is it changing the structure of the brain? Are we seeing long, elongated dendritic spines? Yeah.

So, yeah. Yes. There is some evidence. for that, some changes in the dendritic tree, some work in my lab where we tested this in animals and models and we could learn about, like, creation of new neurons in the dentagirous of the hippocampus or changes in the density of the dendritic tree.

But the main thing that we believe is happening is actually in the receptor, in the molecular, level. So you don't really change the structure of the brain is more that you change the strength of the connectivity between neurons in the brain. So I'll say we have, we know that like in the human brain we have 100 billion neurons, right? And when you apply stimulation, you can, with TMS, you can stimulate at once of several millions of neurons. And the connectivity and the circuitry between these ignorance can change and have a lasting neuroplasticity effect if you apply these

pulses repeatedly and for several sessions over several weeks or at least several days. Now, we do have some studies, recent studies, like we performed in alcoholic patients where we apply the stimulation for those who are seeking to, you know, the people. people that are really addicted to alcohol and are trying to to cure their addiction and we were successful in several parameters certain parameters that we applied we tried different

parameters until we found so the parameters that were effective in treating alcohol addiction also induced some changes in the white matter in the brain so question we do also see in this case in very specific areas in the brain where we could see changes structural changes indications for some mini structural changes changes following the three weeks of treatment with like with three thousand passes per day over three weeks like 15 sessions all together five days a week and we compare the MRI before and after we did also some changes in in white matter you know if the

patterns. You mentioned MRI. Is that the way in which, is that one of the ways in which you're measuring the performance and the overall, you know, the effectiveness and the efficacy of this whole thing? Is it some neural feedback imaging as well? Or how do you, how do you measure and manage this process? Yeah. So the main outcome measures are behavioral, right? We get the head. In the case of addiction, we also, we cannot just rely on the reports of the patients or the subjects. We also take some urine or blood samples in order to see how much they drink before and after the treatment. So we have some objective measures, but most of the outcome measures are questionnaires or cognitive tests or in front of a computer test, depending on the specific

study we are talking about. But the main outcome measures are behavioral and cognitive performances and questionnaires. We do have MRI in order to understand the mechanism. So we look at functional MRI measures resting state activity, connectivity between areas that are helping us to understand how we change the brain. And we don't have enough information. We still don't really understand all the mechanisms. But these are the ways which we use to understand what we did to the brain. But our main outcome measures eventually are the clinical ones and the behavioral ones.

Yeah. I'm wondering, do you extend those questionnaires to like the patient's loved ones? It seems like sometimes the family member is a very good barometer of what's actually happening to someone else because they're an observer. Did the question just go to the loved ones as well? It should. But it's not, it's usually not the case. I mean, one study we had, so we have to really detail about the different studies we

had, we had studies in depression, we had studies in different types of addiction. The only case where we did have some input from family members was a study we did in ADHD. And for children, and there we want to also hear. about the parents' input. But in most studies, we only get the input from the patient itself and from the MRI, FMRI of that patient or from EEG. We also use a lot of studies where we use electroencephalogram EEG to look at changes that we can measure over the treatment or predictors of response.

We found, for example, in a recent study in depression, we tried two different. coils affecting either the lateral or the medial prefrontal cortex. We compared the effectiveness of lateral versus medial prefrontal cortex stimulation to treat major depressive disorder in patients who did not respond to medications, patients that are resistant to medications. And we were looking for patterns of EEG that can predict which patients are going to respond to the lateral stimulation on the sides or to medial stimulation. So, and eventually this is a recent study we published, we did find some interesting patterns that indicate that some type of depression also behaviorally would respond better to the lateral stimulation, and other parts of depression would respond to the medial stimulation. And along with that, we also find some electroencephalogram EEG patterns that characterize the depressive type of pain. that will respond to stimulation on the sides versus prefrontal cortex sides, lateral, and other types of depressive patients that will respond better to medial stimulation.

That's our very, like, hot study that was published recently, and I'm very proud of it, actually. In the field of addiction, actually, we didn't get to that level yet, but in depression, we already can predict the response based on some, clinical and electrophysiological patterns that are specific for that patient, like personalized medicine

using brain stimulation for depression. That is fascinating. It kind of changes the landscape for depression when we start trying to understand where it's located. I know that doesn't thoroughly make sense,

but when you figure out, okay, over on this side, is this kind of depression? And, you know, I was just thinking like, you know, from what I've read, you know, people that are right-handed seem to utilize the left-hand hemisphere. People that are left-handed use the right hemisphere. Do you have to take that into account for each sort of diagnosis and each sort of treatment, whether someone's left-handed or right-handed or is there a diet involved in it if they eat like green leafy foods? Does that change the way

their metabolism and stuff is running? Yeah, I, maybe, but we didn't take this into our account in studies where we use tm.s to study the motor cortex of motor responses we only take right-handed subjects but some other labs did look at this more so but i'm sure that anything you do in life will affect brain and this can affect the outcomes of stimulation but we can't really control all these parameters when we do the studies. It's fascinating to me. And I know that, and I hope the people listening to this are watching this, understand that what we're going through right now is just kind of a little teaser of your work

so that for our next session, we can do a deeper dive. And there's so much information in here. And we're moving through it because it's fascinating. And I think that the audience will really enjoy just kind of teasing people with a nice set of odours to, to get people's palate wet for what we got coming up in the future. But, you know, is this recent study that you did that you're excited about? If you were to put on or if you were to underscore three parts of this new study that you're really excited about, what would those three parts that you highlight be?

In this specific study or in all my career? Because I thought that you are more interested in two other studies that I did earlier. And so I'm not sure what you really mean, but I think that the studies that we did on smartphones and finding that, you know, how people change when they are getting to use smartphones. And this was also using TMS or my study on self-awareness where we tried with brain stimulation to affect self-awareness. Studies that I think are more interesting to the wide public. But this study that is more practical.

It's like optimizing our way to treat depressive patients that are really suffering and do not respond to medications. So this recent study where we characterize the specific patients and find out which type of stimulation or location of stimulation would be optimal. I'm very excited by this because it can really help people. But we have to really decide where to focus our conversation. I thought that you will be more, I mean, based on the introduction and what I read about your interest, Elbe, you will be more interested to hear about not just about clinical studies, helping depressive patients or addicted or alcoholic patients, but more about the studies we did in healthy subjects and looking for how.

stimulation can affect self-awareness or what changes in the human brain following smartphone use and then this actually study we also use TMS to try to probe changes in the brain that were induced following several months of using smartphones in those who originally used only stupid phones. And this it couldn't be done today by the way. This study could only be done many years ago before everyone had his own smartphones. So we were smart enough to identify the potential and had students in my university that didn't yet have smartphones, but only stupid phones,

and we gave them smartphones and followed the development of their brain. So we should next time maybe talk about this as well. Do you see maybe in the future your company Brainways making a smartphone that's also a coil that actually helps people? Yeah. Well, so far, it's a nice idea. But so far, we need big coils.

A small small small will not do the job because in order to induce an effective field from physical limitation, we need a large coils in order to which deeper into the brain is a brain's way company. is actually taking advantage of the shape of the coil and the size of the coil in order to really reach the relevant brain regions. To reach deep enough into the brain, we need big coils. So a smartphone will not do it.

A smartphone may control the software but cannot replace the helmet, the coil that we put on our head. We need a big coil. And particularly these new developments that we are having, where we have in the helmet, several coils in order to stimulate different brain regions to ordinate the timing of the stimulation in order to change in parts of the brain. Of course, this cannot be done by a miniature, you know, device. It's a big helmet with many coils inside.

It's absolutely fascinating. And I am fascinated by all of your studies. And so it's hard for me to move through them all because I know we're unlimited time, but I think we did a great job at getting people, people, a little sampler platter of what our conversation is going to be at. I think we gave people enough to chew on where they can go into the show notes and start looking for themselves about some of the technologies that you've invented, some of the studies that your lab is doing,

and some of the other great doctors that are at your lab and what they're doing. And maybe if there's, if there is a greater power at work, maybe we'll even inspire someone to begin moving in the next generation of thinking about this. And so I want to be mind. of your time. I know that we had a we had a little snafu in the beginning and I apologize for that, but I want people here to know we got more coming up. And before I let you go this time, though, where can people find you and what do you got coming up? Where can people find me in my lab? Usually, most of the day, at home. I'm a most of the year I'm in Israel. I travel a lot to conferences also abroad. mainly in the U.S., so when there are conferences on brain stimulation, I'm there. Sometimes I provide lectures in these type of international symposiums and conferences. But most of the year I'm in the lab, in my own lab, in the Ben-Gur University in Belcheva in Israel.

But did you mean that or maybe I used to? Well, I was wondering if you had your own website or if, like oh where they can find me virtually i'm sorry about that like they kind of came out weird on my part i apologize yeah no it's my english well they can find me i i don't i'm not too much in the way on like i'm not very active in social networks i'm too busy with my right but we have a website uh for the lab we don't update it very often but yes, there is a lab, a website for the Zangen Lab, for my lab. You can find it in the Ben-Gurion University, where my lab is.

And you can also find a lot of information in Brainsway. Brainsway is a company that was actually founded based on the patents that I've developed together with my colleagues at the NIH, and they just licensed the patents from the NIH. So Brainsway, and I'm serving as a scientific consultant for Brainsway, and I'm one of the founders of the company. So although I'm full-time professor in university, I interact a lot with Brandsway. And Bransway actually is doing a much better job on the web, because it's commercial. It's a public company.

It's treated in the NASDAQ and Israeli stock exchange. So this website of Bransway will also have a lot of information about, about brain stimulation using the deep, deep TMS. This is actually the technology that we've developed, the deep transcranial magnetic stimulation, these big cores that allow stimulation of deep brain regions in order to treat psychiatric and neurological disorders. So this website of brainsway actually has a lot of interesting information

and some testimonies for many patients who already benefited from the treatments. You know, these treatments already approved. by the FDA and there are more than 150,000 patients that were already treated with these, you know, devices and it's also covered by insurance. So of course, there are many testimonies and Brainsway's website is full with them. So anyone who really wants to learn about deep TMS and their its potential in psychiatry can see much also in the Brainsway website. If you're more interested in the scientific, you know, specific studies that we're doing now and the future of

the field, there is some in the branch site, but that you will find more in my own website, which is not very much updated, but still you can find much in the Zange Lab website as well. So, you find me virtually in these places and physically, either in my lab or at home, or when I come to, you know, conferences in Europe or in the U.S. In the field of brain simulation. And I would recommend that everybody check out the Brainswave site and also Google Scholar if you want to read some individual reports of what you got going on. And I'll put those links in the show notes so everybody can check them out.

And I'm really thankful to talk to you. I know your time is important. and I'm thankful for the things that you're doing. I think it's helping people around the world. And if we're being honest with ourselves, everybody knows somebody who's had problems in their life that can probably benefit from new technologies and better understanding of how the brain works.

And so I'm really thrilled to get the opportunity to help share some information and to get you looking in the eyes and I just want to say thank you. So I appreciate it. And I would like to thank you as well because I looked at your website, really, and you have very, very, very,

innovative, fascinating type of interview. I really like it. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to be part of your show. I'm really thankful for that. Really. It's a very unique, unique way of delivering, you know, information to people in very interesting area of, I think the area that you're interested in,

mental health and how the brain works is something that everyone is interested. You don't need to be a neuroscientist to really be interested in it, and you are providing this in a very, you know, accessible way. So I'm sorry for by limited vocabulary in English. I hope I was able to explain what I mean, right? I think that many people are interested in the interaction between mind and body. You don't need to be a professor in university to be interested in it. Everyone is interested in it.

And it looks like you are really into this question and your interviews, the audience that you are looking at and the people that you invite for your interviews are really trying to touch these interesting questions. Yeah, I really appreciate the kind words. and I, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. I'm hopeful that I can provide a view from different areas. And maybe, maybe one person's view helps out this person. But if you put all those views together, it's like you can begin to get a bigger image of it.

And I, I am, I'm fascinated by the way we think. I'm fascinated by mental wellness and mental illness. And I've had plenty of people in my family that were affected by it. And your English is a million times better than my Hebrew, because I don't speak at one bit at all. So I'm happy I was able to interview you also a little bit and let you think about your your initiative. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is, I got to let you go. Your wife is going to be upset with you if I don't let you go right now. And so thank you so much for your time. And ladies and gentlemen, this is just the first one. We're going to go much deeper. So thank you to everybody for your time. Doctor, I really appreciate your time. And I'll be reaching out to you here shortly to set up some more, some more conversations.

I really appreciate your time. and I'll be a phenomenal day. All right. Bye. Okay. Aloha.