VOICE OVER What is consciousness? And how can we better understand
what our brains are actually doing when they are experiencing consciousness.
CHRISTOPHER TIMMERMANN It's one of those early stages of
scientific development in which we are still agreeing on the concepts.
VO Historically consciousness has been studied by comparison to unconscious states like
dreamless sleep - but some researchers are interested in another perspective.
CHRIS We try to understand how do we change the quality of conscious experience
in a radically different way
VO One way to alter consciousness is through the use of psychedelic drugs.
These are compounds that can change a person's experience of consciousness.
SHAMIL CHANDARIA Vast vistas, infinite expanses of detail and intensity.
VO And studying the effects these chemicals have on the brain might be key not just to
unlocking our understanding of how consciousness works,
but also to treating some of the problems that can affect our waking lives.
CHRIS What's intriguing is that
it appears that there's a wide plethora of possibilities of applications
and that's why we think that psychedelics may be acting at some form of core mechanism
CHRIS We think of Consciousness simply as experience. Right, so that
that remains when we are not in dreamless sleep or under anesthesia.
We think that consciousness in terms of human experience needs to contemplate also
the alteration of consciousness while we are still experiencing something
VO Chris Timmermann’s research uses psychedelic substances to disrupt some of the key aspects of
the human mind - like throwing a stone into a still pond to see what happens.
CHRIS perception makes up our day-to-day experience of reality.
In the psychedelic state the features of perception, our features of what constitute the
external world are modified so for example with this experiments that we do with DMT we see that
people have a perception of entering if you will alternate dimensions that feel very real.
All right so, so subjectively felt to people as very strong. Modern neuroscientific theories uh
posit that somehow we live in some form of constrained hallucination, we make up reality.
So intriguingly enough in the psychedelic state we may be able to access some of the
brain mechanisms that allow us to construct realities even our ordinary reality.
VO To perturb people’s perceptions - as well as other elements of consciousness in
the brain - Chris needed a suitable drug. His current focus is DMT or
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine - a naturally occurring compound found in small amounts in many plants.
DMT is one of the active ingredients in ayahuasca, the brew that has been prepared
by indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin for social and religious uses for over 1000 years.
When it comes to research, DMT has several advantages over other psychedelics.
CHRIS With DMT we have a very reliable way to induce a transformation of experience in which
external reality is radically transformed. What feels like a real new sense of reality comes
up, emerges, that feels very immersive and the duration, so this entry into this state lasts
only 10 minutes so here we have an opportunity to have someone in the scanner for example
administer DMT and capture their brain activity throughout the whole process.
VO The next challenge was finding participants
willing to undergo this intense experience under observation.
SHAMIL I've been a long-term meditator for 30 years and so
I'm very interested in the nature of consciousness and the nature of self
and I started to hear about some of the research that was being done in psychedelics and there
was this whole renaissance uh in the last 10 15 years I was sort of drawn to try it and
uh and even though I'm over 50 I thought well you know this is actually a good time to try it.
VO Shamil was so interested in the new research into psychedelic medicine that
he helped to set up the The Centre for Psychedelic Research at
Imperial College London - which is how he learned about Chris' work.
SHAMIL As I became involved with the centre I knew that Chris was
working on this DMT study and I thought it was very interesting.
VO Having been judged a suitable trial candidate
Shamil was eventually prepared to receive a dose of DMT while having his brain scanned.
SHAMIL And uh yeah I mean I was definitely nervous by that stage.
CHRIS We're scanning the person before the drug is injected,
we scan them during the injection, we scan them throughout the whole experience,
and also when they're back. Participants describe a range of different phenomena.
SHAMIL I get this incredible energy, vibrations going throughout the body, and in the visual field
I feel the entire visual field pixelate into fractals, into geometrical patterns.
The body kind of dissolves in this enormous Rush of energy you go up into realms.
You know, very difficult to describe, super high definition moving patterns and geometry.
CHRIS After that we perform interviews, questionnaires, we capture psychological
data or what we call phenomenological data that pertains the study of human experience
so that then we can interpret whatever change or modification we see in brain activity in
light of experience. The Intriguing thing is that this experience many
times for the individuals feel very authentic, very real, it's almost as if
an experience that they never thought their mind would be able to conjure up.
VO But what do these experiences tell us about how the brain actually processes consciousness?
CHRIS We know that different brain oscillations govern brain function,
right, and different brain waves are related to different states of consciousness.
VO The electrical activity of our brains can be measured to reveal neural oscillations - the
different patterns that emerge as networks of synapses communicate with each other.
These brain waves change depending on what our brain is doing. For
instance low frequency delta waves come to the fore when we sleep,
while gamma waves become more pronounced when we are concentrating.
Alpha waves normally emerge when we have our eyes closed,
and dampen down when we open them - but DMT changes this.
CHRIS: DMT comes in and this Alpha wave goes down but the eyes are still closed but nonetheless
they're having a very vivid experience at the sensory level and then the other one is that we
see that the lower frequencies, lower oscillations when it comes to brainwave activity such as delta
waves which are also very pronounced in states of sleeping. We see that also they become elevated.
And when you think a bit about what is really occurring in in dreams and in sleeping is very
similar we are detached from this external world but nonetheless we start playing these movies in
our in our in our brains in our minds making up convincing reality, convincing experiences,
very much as what happens in dreams.
VO And to further understand the effects of DMT, Chris is using fMRI - a technique better
at pinpointing what is happening in specific locations and specific networks within the brain.
CHRIS I think we can understand these findings in light of the notion
that consciousness is this form of constrained hallucination
and that this form of constraint hallucination is governed by the hierarchy of these brain systems,
how they are arranged, and more importantly also what is happening at the top of this hierarchy.
The systems that govern all the rest of the connectivity patterns all the way down when
it comes to human experience. All the way down even into our more basic perceptual levels. Right.
So the idea is that models govern our perception of what is real and what is not real.
Apparently with psychedelics when you disrupt these models at this very high level everything down also can be
altered in a very significant way the brain is able now to explore new models, new stories,
new possibilities that can have the level of immersion and reality that our everyday lives also have.
VO Understanding how these drugs act on the brain, and the effects they cause to
the systems that underpin our consciousness opens the door to some exciting practical applications.
CHRIS When you think about depression or anxiety one of the stable features is the symptom of
rumination, in which bad stories are replayed, and we cannot really break away from them, right .
There's a, there's kind of like a looping aspect to them. If psychedelics effectively enable the system
to more flexibly adapt into different models that may be more healthy then we could expect
um that these substances have strong uses when it comes to depression and anxiety for example
things that have rumination or other conditions in which the idea of maladaptic models are presents
VO DMT shows incredible potential, both as a clinical treatment and a
tool for research - and next Chris wants to better harness the drug,
customising and extending its effects to reap even greater rewards.
CHRIS When we think about personalized medicine and we think that every individual have their own
needs for example we can now think of tailoring that experience to that individual for a
a specific mental health purpose. And from the point of view of consciousness research it provides us
also a flexible way to explore the ways in which we induce the alterations of experience and
therefore try to address some of these fundamental questions that concern human experience.