trippy hippie asks what if lsd connects
your brain to other dimensions and
planes around you yeah what if maybe it
does maybe it did with your brain hi i'm
michael pollan author of this is your
mind on plants today i'm here to answer
your questions on twitter this is
psychedelic support
[Music]
at alfred romero asks how does lsd work
it's a great question and we know part
of the answer but not the whole thing
lsd is a molecule that is shaped a lot
like serotonin serotonin is a very
important neurotransmitter involved with
mood and a whole lot of other things
there are receptors in your brain that
are configured to receive serotonin and
as it happens the lsd molecule fits into
those receptors even more tightly or
perfectly than serotonin itself that's
one of the reasons that lsd lasts so
long because it just fits so snugly into
that receptor it is an agonist in other
words it makes that receptor do
something rather than inhibit from doing
something but beyond that we don't
really know there's a cascade of effects
from the time we've activated those
receptors to the changes in perception
and consciousness that people experience
you would be amazed how little we
understand about how the brain works at
carbon buns i'm never going to try lsd
what if it triggers some freak reaction
and erases my memories or completely
rewrites my brain i don't know of any
cases where that has actually happened
there are certainly people who have had
psychotic breaks on a psychedelic many
experiences can can lead can trigger
schizophrenia but psychedelics are one
of them so the fear of going crazy is
definitely out there and it's why many
people avoid psychedelics it doesn't
happen very often but if it happens
once that's a big problem
at angel core 3 asks how do i avoid
having a bad trip in the research trials
that have been going on for the last
couple years they will give you some
really helpful advice they call them the
flight instructions this is what they
tell you before your trip begins if you
feel like you're going crazy dying
melting dissolving
don't fight it go with it surrender
relax your mind and float downstream as
john lennon famously said even with that
good advice
there are scary things that may happen
you may confront
dark things about yourself you may
confront trauma and i think people have
to understand going in that that's part
of the deal and that's why a guided
experience is so important that there's
somebody with you to hold your hand
through those hard times and even more
important that there's someone to talk
it through afterwards help you process
it interpret it at i ain't no whiz kid
asks what is ego death and why do you
all want so bad
so eco death is the experience that some
people have on a high dose of
psychedelics where they feel their sense
of self
absolutely crumble i had an experience
once myself where i saw myself and i
know this sounds weird because who's
doing the seeing explode in a cloud of
post-it notes that then came fell to the
ground and spread out in this coat of
blue paint and i looked at it and i said
that's me the reason this is appealing
is if you accept it if you surrender to
it the feeling can be quite ecstatic
because after the walls of the ego come
down you have this sense of merging with
the cosmos or with nature or with other
people after i did describe this in
my book how to change your mind i heard
from underground guides that everybody
was asking for ego death
it doesn't always happen but when it
does it's it's one of the more
interesting life experiences you can
have at madame alexa10 asks serious
question how does microdosing work how
often do you do it and around how much
so micro dosing is the practice of using
tiny doses of psychedelics like lsd or
psilocybin essentially one tenth of what
would be a normal dose you're not
supposed to feel it it's just kind of
sub-perceptual and many people believe
that it improves their well-being their
productivity their creativity but it's
important to state that we really have
no idea if this is true the placebo
effect is very powerful with all drugs
and it's particularly powerful in the
case of psychedelics which we impute so
much magic and power to at shepsworth
bentley asks why does dmt cause
geometric hallucinations as opposed to
acid or shrooms which are a bit more
subtle and flowy timothy leary spoke a
lot about set and setting set is your
expectations going into a psychedelic
experience setting is the physical
setting you're in so on ayahuasca which
we associate with the amazon and the
jungle people are constantly seeing
cobras and panthers and and things like
that i tend to think
it's not the medicine or the drug so
much as the expectation that our
experience is really shaped by what we
expect to see and if you have an organic
drug like magic mushrooms then the
imagery is probably going to be much
more
natural than if you have a synthetic
drug where people tend to see more
geometry and human created shapes but i
have to say it's probably all in your
head
kelly rec asks how does hashtag lsd
affect those with hashtag schizophrenia
well in general it's not advisable if
you have schizophrenia to take a
psychedelic and in the current research
people at any risk for schizophrenia are
excluded the thinking being that it
would make your condition worse but
nobody really knows for sure in general
though psychedelics introduce a certain
amount of entropy or chaos into mental
functioning that is very valuable if
you're locked in with an addiction or
obsessive thinking or depression all of
which are the products of very rigid
fixed thought on the other side of the
spectrum though you have people with
schizophrenia whose brains are already
heavily disordered and they probably
don't need any more disorder that at
least is one theory but there's a lot
more research to be done in this area
at jackedu3124851
asks how do psychedelics help anxiety
they make you forget wtf so one of the
most promising and moving uses of
psychedelics beginning in the 50s and
60s and continuing recently has been in
giving them psilocybins specifically to
cancer patients and i've interviewed
many of these people and they have the
most moving stories to tell about how a
single experience on psilocybin allowed
them to confront their mortality
confront their cancer in many cases and
it actually lifted their
completely removed the anxiety they felt
about the prospect of death allowing
them to die with with peace and
equanimity and what a gift this is we
have so little to offer people in that
situation you know normally we give them
morphine to deal with pain or dull their
experience of things here is something
that sharpens their experience helps
them explore their predicament and for
reasons we don't totally understand
reconciles many of them to death
at hd south africa asks can hashtag
ayahuasca treat substance hashtag
addiction i'm researching firsthand
there's been some research done in
brazil to test ayahuasca as a treatment
for depression but i don't know of work
specifically with addiction that said
most of the psychedelics appear to be
helpful in treating addiction and so
there's some reason to believe that it
might work let's see what you find out
hd south africa at drug bot
anyone have experience with dmt entities
so this is a very curious phenomenon of
the dmt experience specifically
many people report that they see these
little elf-like creatures sometimes
they're called machine elves or just
elves and they're very friendly and
they're little and they're very
welcoming and it's one of the more kind
of common bits of imagery on this
particular psychedelic terence mckenna
who was kind of a philosopher of
psychedelics a few decades ago
popularized the notion to test this idea
it would be important to find a
population of people who have never
heard this theory of machine elves give
them dmt and see if they see them and if
they do
well that'll be really weird
at 8a 8n 8g asks how are psychedelics
medically used for addiction therapy yet
they're a schedule 1 drug make it make
sense well it doesn't entirely make
sense a schedule one drug is the is a
category in the federal drug laws that
means that a drug has no accepted
medical use and this is where
psychedelics all lie at the same time
this recent renaissance of research into
using psychedelic compounds as a
medicine has discovered that psilocybin
in particular can help people break
addictions it's been tried with
alcoholics it's been tried with
cigarette addicts and it's been tried on
cocaine addicts and it seems quite
successful more than 50 percent of the
people who tried psilocybin therapy gave
up their cigarette habit as one
researcher put it to me psychedelics
shake the snow globe in your brain and
when the snow resettles it settles in a
very different pattern allowing you to
break your patterns at brody supreme
asks imagine the first person who did
lsd they were probably going insane well
brody supreme that first person was
albert hoffman a chemist in switzerland
and he was working with a fungus called
air got that grows on a grain so albert
hoffman's job was to look at all the
chemicals in air got and go through them
one by one tweaking them to see if he
could find a useful drug lsd 25 was the
25th and he accidentally got a little
bit on his fingers and felt very funny
and realized he had a psychoactive
substance and that's when he decided to
take a big dose and he did think he was
going nuts as the effects began to
subside he realized he wasn't going
crazy and stepped out into his garden
and felt the beauty of it but it began
with the
conviction he was insane
at herk's binge a boy do blind people
trip on lsd great question i have no
idea but somebody should ask them
at rebel poet 6 asks why is psilocybin
dmt lsd and mdma being so thoroughly
studied but not peyote could it be
because peyote isn't so easily monetized
why aren't we studying the efficacy of
ceremonial versus therapeutic use so
peyote is a cactus that grows in
southern texas in a very small band of
land it contains mescaline which is a
powerful psychedelic peyote is used by
native americans in their religious
observances in their healing ceremonies
it's so precious and in such short
supply the more peyote we used in
research the less there would be for
native americans and you know it seems
to me we've taken enough from native
americans and if we want to do this
research concentrate on mescaline the
synthetic version of the chemical
produced by peyote now mescaline has
challenges in a research context the big
one is
it lasts a really long time like 14
hours you will be done with mescaline
before mesclun is done with you so it's
a lot of therapeutic time a lot of
therapeutic support it just may not be
practical would it be valuable it could
be because mescaline unlike other
psychedelics doesn't take you to another
dimension it really anchors you here but
more deeply here and now than you've
ever felt it also is a drug that you can
talk on and engage with other people it
has some of the qualities of mdma or
ecstasy which is a very relational drug
so i could imagine it being used in
group therapy at jesustheram asks could
lsd be used as a wound antiseptic
doesn't seem like a good idea i mean if
that lsd gets in the bloodstream you're
gonna have you know you're going to have
a trip i would not advise using lsd as a
first aid at gator neal jr asks didn't
carry grant's doctor prescribe him lsd
for depression i remember reading he
once told a friend that it was the best
thing he ever did in his entire life
well it's true carrie grant received
psychedelic therapy in los angeles in
the late 50s he had many sessions and he
claimed that it was absolutely
liberating at aoc tweets it is
ridiculous that congress upholds war on
drugs error barriers on federal research
into substances like psilocybin ibogaine
and mdma when early results are
indicating major promise in treating
ptsd addiction and more
i'm trying again to lift them so we can
pursue the science the research itself
is not being stopped because of the drug
war the fda and the dea has approved
these university research trials
the barriers right now are to federal
money being used to support this
research so far
with one small exception nih money has
not been available for psychedelic
research it's just considered too
controversial so all the amazing
research that's been done to look at the
potential of psilocybin and mdma to
treat trauma to treat addiction to treat
depression has all been done using
private money private philanthropy but
really if the research is going to gain
legitimacy and scale up as it needs to
the nih is going to need to step in and
anything politicians can do to encourage
that is i think really really helpful
the one exception i alluded to is there
is an nimh grant that was given to
someone in a laboratory at yale who is
studying psilocybin as a treatment for
obsessive-compulsive disorders so this
may represent a crack in the wall and a
new opening toward federal support for
psychedelic research which is really
overdue at this point at katie weston
asks why are psychedelics so frowned
upon you know there was a lot of baggage
that got attached to psychedelics in the
60s they were regarded as really
disruptive to society and in many ways
they were but their identity is changing
right now and that's what's really
interesting to watch in that they may
help us to address the mental health
crisis we have tremendous mental health
crisis one in five americans have
struggled with their mental health and
so we may look at psychedelics within
five years or ten years as important
tools of healing rather than disrupters
of society
so those are all the questions for today
before i leave you i just want to remind
you that right now taking psychedelics
is illegal it's risky to your mental
health so proceed with caution and
thanks for watching psychedelics support