- Psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms,
affects your senses.
I'm Rachel Yehuda, and I study psychedelics
in the context of mental health treatments like PTSD.
It's really important to emphasize
that this research is very new.
There's not a lot of information from controlled studies
about what actually happens to our senses
when we ingest psilocybin,
but we do know that psilocybin
definitely affects your perception.
Let's talk about visual perception.
Well, after you've ingested psilocybin,
you may notice that what you're seeing is a little different
than what you normally see.
A lot of people believe that they're going to hallucinate
if they take a drug like psilocybin,
but these are not classic hallucinations.
Some people do have fractals,
which means that regular images form geometric shapes,
or they may see colors in a very profound manner,
or they might sense things that they know aren't there.
Even if they're having visual perceptions,
they kind of know that.
That's why people will say things like,
hey man, I'm tripping, or I'm tripping balls.
But we know a lot about how the eye
is able to detect something in the environment
and transmit an image back into your brain.
So we do not think that psilocybin affects that process,
that camera, if you will.
Here you see the eye taking a picture of an apple,
kind of figuring out what it is.
Your brain is gonna interpret to you that this is an apple.
But when you're under the influence
of something like psilocybin,
you may really feel
that you're seeing the apple in a different way
and for the first time,
and you're really marveling a lot
at the intricacies that are involved in this apple.
Maybe the smoothness of the skin, the shading,
the fact that it's not just one color green here.
There's a light green and a dark green
and it's really very beautiful.
And you might also have some gratitude
for living in a world where apples just grow on trees
and are available to you.
And then you might even think to yourself,
how am I related to this apple?
Your visual perception is happening over here a little bit,
the optic nerve going back to your brain,
but your prefrontal cortex
is really interpreting what is going on
and it's giving you more of the feeling
of pondering the apple
after your visual system tells you
that indeed it is an apple.
So eye shades are often used in clinical trials
to encourage people to go inward,
to kind of find what's there,
to kind of see where your mind will take you
when your mind can go a little further
than it usually would go.
In that context, it's very hard to say
that you're seeing something
with your visual system with psychedelics
when you're putting on eye shades.
When we dream, for example, we think we see things.
The sense you have when you're dreaming
is more a combination of a story or an understanding,
perhaps an image,
but it's certainly mediated by different parts of the brain
than the visual system.
So psychedelics may engage those parts of the brain.
We don't know that for sure yet,
and it's a very exciting time for us
because we can study this now.
Well, let's talk about how psilocybin
affects your auditory perception.
So a lot of people report
that when they listen to music while taking psilocybin
that their experience is greatly enhanced.
The idea here is that you're hearing the music
in a way where it has deeper resonance, deeper tones.
You're appreciating more how the music is making you feel.
Music is a big part of the therapeutic use of psilocybin
for mental health conditions.
There have been playlists that have been curated
to assist a psychedelic experience with psilocybin.
And so it isn't that your hearing is affected per se,
but that again, your whole experience of hearing
becomes heightened and more profound.
Most studies do use music as part of the experience.
That's certainly true in clinical trials.
A lot of times the music is discussed in advance.
Generally the music is really evocative.
People refer to it sometimes as shamanic music.
It generally does not have words, maybe chants,
but it's really designed to encourage an internal process,
maybe breathing in a certain way or emptying your mind
or prolonging the kinds of images
that you might see in your mind's eye.
So if you take psychedelics like psilocybin out in nature,
you know, you're not necessarily hearing music,
but you might hear the music of the world.
You might sense the birds chirping.
You might become very aware of that
or how the trees rustle.
I mean, the world really does have a soundtrack to it.
You might focus more on those sounds
and really see something in them
or take that experience,
many people report as really feeling connected and one
with those kinds of sensory experiences.
Synesthesia is the experience
of having your senses cross over.
You would hear colors or you would see music.
What you're really seeing when you see music
is that you're sensing
that the sound has a visual component to it.
You might hear boom, and then you see some light.
[soft melody]
So in a way, it's very similar
to when you experience fireworks.
Did you go and see fireworks or did you go and hear 'em?
You did both because they were both part
of this multimodal sensory experiences.
And yeah, the lights would've been great,
the sounds would've been great,
but the lights and sound
are what makes this experience magical.
One of the most common effects of psilocybin,
particularly at high doses, is your sense of self.
Sense of self in relation to your ego.
A heroic dose is a dose
that really allows your ego to dissolve
and allows you to kind of get outside of your natural self,
understanding that you can't predict
what you're going to see,
and that from a physiologic perspective,
you will be safe particularly if you're with someone,
but that it can be dark.
I mean, the risk of taking a drug like psilocybin
is you might see something that you don't wanna see
or that you're not ready to see,
or you might have an experience
that's more difficult than you bargained for.
It's just an experience
that is really not easy to predict for any given person.
What is bound to happen though
is that you'll remember what you saw.
And then there's a process called integration
where you're encouraged to talk about what you've seen
with a facilitator, with a therapist, with someone else.
There's a phenomena called ego dissolution
that is associated with psychedelics, especially psilocybin.
That really means that you kind of let yourself
or aspects of yourself dissolve into the background
so that you can examine things that are not your ego.
You've taken the psilocybin,
and within maybe 20 minutes, half an hour,
you start to feel either that your soul is lifting up
or your body is dissolving
or you're having trouble remembering maybe your name
or maybe why you're here or that you're here.
So sometimes with psychedelics, especially psilocybin,
people have what is called a noetic experience.
And a noetic experience is the sense
that you have learned something powerful,
that you now know something as a truth,
something about yourself maybe or something about the world.
Maybe it is I deserve to be here or maybe there is God,
any number of things.
A lot of people think that a noetic experience
is a revelation and therefore must be true.
That's not necessarily the case.
The fact that you know something strongly
doesn't necessarily make it true.
We have to be really careful about that distinction.
But there's this profound sense
of a truth that belongs to you,
and when you encounter it,
you recognize it as something that belongs to you.
And this could be very, very powerful.
Examples would be the only important thing is love.
I think that when you try to spend too much time
thinking about what is happening
for those six to eight hours
of somebody actively taking the drug,
you miss the larger point
of why psychedelics are being looked at
in the context of mental health conditions,
like addictions and trauma and depression.
They're being used as an assist.
They're being used to facilitate an insight.
What's critical isn't only what's happening
while you are taking the medicine,
but what happens down the road.
So clearly the process of psychotherapy,
the process of integration,
the process of thinking about what you're thinking about
while you're on the psychedelic
also has a biology and also has a neurochemistry.
And that's what we're investigating in our center
in the context
of doing these clinical trials with psychedelics,
that maybe you won't have those symptoms anymore.
So we're at a moment
where the mental health crisis in this country
and all over the world has never been more obvious
and the need for new therapies has never been more acute.
So why not have another look at this?
So that's how psilocybin affects your perception.