oh I did put that in it was dr. Jill
Jill Bolte Taylor this is what she said
about her stroke I remember that first
day of the stroke with terrific
bittersweetness in the absence of the
normal functioning of my left
orientation association area my
perception of my physical boundaries was
no longer limited to where my skin met
air I felt like a genie liberated from
its bottle it's a good metaphor the
energy of my spirit seemed to flow like
a great whale gliding through a sea of
silent euphoria the absence of physical
boundary was one of glorious bliss
recently it's dr. Roland Griffith I met
him once at a conference in San
Francisco surprise surprise a conference
on aw and this was just when he was
embarking on his experiments with
psilocybin which were the first
experiments on hallucinogens that were
permitted by the National Institute of
Mental Health in some three four decades
he had to be very careful to lay out the
scientific protocols so that the ethics
committees would approve the experiments
and so that the federal funding agencies
would also allow the experiments to go
through he started to experiment with
with psilocybin and he's found a number
of and published a number of very
interesting results one was that a
single psilocybin trip and I specified
trip because sometimes when people take
psilocybin out the doses that Griffith
uses they don't have a psychedelic
experience most people who take the dose
do but not everyone those who take the
dose and don't have the mystical
experience don't experience the
consequences of taking the drug and the
consequences can be quite profound so
one consequence is that if you have the
mystical experience that's associated
with psilocybin ingestion
you're liable to represent that to
others and yourself as one of the two or
three most experienced important
experiences of urine
our life so that would be at the same
level as the birth of your child or your
marriage let's say assuming that those
were transcendent experiences but but
that's but that's how people describe
them so that's that's very interesting
in and of itself then the next thing
that Griffith another thing that
Griffith reported was that one year
after a psilocybin dose a single
psilocybin dose profound enough to
induce a mystical experience the trait
openness of the participants had
increased one standard deviation which
is a tremendous amount and so it looked
like one dose produced a permanent
neurological and psychological
transformation now you know I'm not
saying that that's a good thing I'm not
saying that because I don't think that
openness is a troubled blessing but it's
certainly a testament to the
unbelievable potency of the of the drugs
there's about a 10% chance by the way
with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to
hell and so that's certainly something
very much worth considering when you're
thinking about the potential effects of
this kind of experience so the the
mystical experience produced by
psilocybin is rated by people as the
most profound among the most profound
experience of their life as
life-changing it produces permanent
personality transformations eighty-five
percent success in smoking cessation
with a single dose right that's another
thing that Griffiths demonstrated now
that is mind boggling because there are
chemical treatments for smoking
cessation boo Pro prion is one it
reduces craving to some degree but its
success rate is nowhere near 85 percent
certainly not with a single dose and so
we don't understand how it can be that
that occurs but it's nicely documented
by Griffiths team in this experiment he
gave psilocybin to people who are dying
of cancer
cancer patients often develop chronic
clinically significant symptoms of
depression and anxiety
previous studies suggest that psilocybin
may decrease depression and anxiety and
cancer patients Aldous Huxley took LSD
on his deathbed by the way so the idea
that there was something about
psychedelic substances that could buffer
people against the catastrophes of
mortality is an idea that's as old as
experimentation with the drug itself the
effects of psilocybin were studied in 51
cancer patients with life threatening
diagnosis and symptoms of depression
and/or anxiety unsurprisingly
I don't really know if it's reasonable
to describe the emotional state of
people diagnosed with cancer of
uncertain prognosis or mortal
significance as depression precisely you
know you know what I mean is that if you
go to the doctor and he tells you that
you have intractable fatal cancer the
normative response is to be rather upset
and anxious about that and so it one of
the things that bothers me about
clinical psychiatry and clinical
psychology is the automatic
presupposition that even overwhelming
states of negative emotion are properly
categorized as depression because I
don't think you're depressed when you
get a cancer diagnosis I don't think
that's the right way to think about it I
think that you have a big problem and
it's not surprising that you're
overwhelmed by negative emotion and to
think about that as a psychiatric
malfunction is a major error but anyways
it's it's a side issue with regards to
this study the effects of psilocybin
were studied in 51 cancer patients with
life threatening diagnosis and symptoms
of depression and/or anxiety I cannot
imagine how they got this through an
ethics committee it's just we're gonna
take people who have uncertain diagnosis
of cancer that are potentially
life-threatening and we're going to give
them psychedelics it's like but they did
it they did it and I think it's a
testament to Griffiths stature as a
researcher that that that was allowable
this is a randomized double-blind
crossover trial very carefully designed
medical investigation people were
assigned to the treatment group or the
to the drug group or the non drug group
randomly blindly and investigated the
effects of the drug also with different
doses which is another hallmark of a
well-designed
pharmacological study very low placebo
like dose 1 or 3 milligrams per 70
kilograms of body weight versus a high
dose 22 or 30 milligrams per 70
kilograms of psilocybin chemical
psilocybin administered in
counterbalance sequence with 5 weeks
between sessions and a six-month
follow-up instructions to participants
and staff minimized the effects of
expectancy participant staff and
community observers rated participant
moods attitudes and behaviors throughout
the study that's also the hallmark of a
well-designed study because they didn't
rely on a single source of information
for the outcome data right they got self
reports that's fine but they had
relatively objective observers also
gathered data at the same time high dose
psilocybin produced large decreases in
clinician and self related measures of
depressed mood and anxiety along with
increases in quality of life life
meaning and optimism and decreases in
death anxiety and that's an interesting
it's a subtle and scientifically sparse
statement but it's a very interesting
one it was the in there's a there's an
intimation of a causal relationship here
increases in quality of life life
meaning and decreases in death anxiety I
mean the intimation there is that one of
the ways of decreasing your anxiety
about death is to increase the felt
meaning in your life and the psilocybin
dosage just potentiate that but it's a
good thing to know in a general manner
if it happens to be a generalizable
truth right if you're terrified of
mortality terrified of vulnerability
there's always the possibility that the
life path that you're following isn't
rich enough to buffer you against the
negative element of existence it's a
reasonable hypothesis and an optimistic
one I think although a difficult one at
six month follow-up these changes were
sustained with about 80
set of participants continuing to show
clinically significant decreases in
depressed mood and anxiety Steven Ross
commenting about this he was a
co-investigator said it is simply
unprecedented in psychiatry that a
single dose of a medicine produces these
kinds of dramatic and enduring results
right which means we have no idea why
this happens participants attributed
improvements and attitudes about life /
self mood relationships and spirituality
to the high dose experience with more
than 80 percent endorsing moderately or
greater increased well-being in life
satisfaction community observers showed
corresponding changes mystical types
Silas psilocybin experience on session
day mediated the effect of psilocybin
dose on therapeutic outcomes what that
means is that well when researchers were
trying to look at a causal relationship
between drug ingestion and the positive
outcome the causal relationship was drug
ingestion mystical experience positive
outcome it wasn't drug ingestion
positive outcome there had to be the
experience produced by the
pharmaceutical agent in order for the
pharmaceutical agent to have had its
effect
now we don't again we don't know why
that is either I mean maybe some people
needed a higher dose who knows because
people vary tremendously in their
sensitivity to pharmaceutical substances
now why am I telling you all this well
I'm telling you for a variety of reasons
one is the first is make no mistake
about it human beings have the capacity
for forms of consciousness that are
radically unlike our normative forms of
consciousness and the evidence that
those alternative forms of consciousness
are purely pathological which is the
simplest explanation right you perturb a
system it produces pathology that's
negative that is the simplest
explanation the evidence for that is
weak at best leaving out the bad trip
issue which which is non-trivial the
empirical evidence as it accrues in fact
seems to suggest that the consequence of
mystical positive mystical experiences
associated with psychedelic intake is
over
well ming-lee positive even in extreme
situations and you really can't find a
more extreme situation than uncertain
cancer diagnosis with concomitant aim
and depression and anxiety like I mean
that's not as bad as it gets but it's
kind of in the ballpark and so the fact
that even under circumstances like that
there was the overwhelming probability
that the experience would be positive
because that's another thing you
wouldn't expect you know even from some
of the earlier earliest discussions
about psychedelic use that were put
forth by people including Timothy Leary
describing the importance of set right
this so that the early experimenters
noted that if you had a psychedelic
experience and you were in a bad state
or in a bad place that that was one of
the precursors to a bad trip that the
negative emotion that you entered the
experience with could be magnified
tremendously by the by the chemical
substances so that it was necessary to
be somewhere safe to be around people
that you trust to be in a familiar
environment to get all the variables
that you couldn't control under control
but here is the situation where that
isn't what's happening at all because
people have this cancer diagnosis of a
cancer diagnosis of unspecified outcome
and they still the vast majority them
had a positive experience and the
positive experience experience had long
lasting positive consequences so so the
case that the transcendent experience is
not real that's wrong it's real now we
don't know what that means because it
actually challenges to some degree our
concepts of what constitutes real but
it's certainly well within the realm of
normative human experience so it's part
of the human capacity and you know
there's been other neurological
experiments too there's there's a
researcher Canadian researcher for I
remember correctly who invented
something he called the god helmet and
it used electro magnetic stimulation
brain stimulation to induce mystical
experiences now I don't remember what
part of the brain he was shutting off or
activating with that particular gadget
but and you know there's there's there's
there's also there's all sorts of other
indications of this sort of thing that
have cropped up in uh in other domains
of the neurological literature for
example it's very common for people who
are epileptic to have religious
experiences as part of the prodrome ah
to the actual seizure that was the case
with Dostoyevsky for example who had
incredibly intense religious experiences
that would culminate in epileptic
seizure
and he said that they were of sufficient
quality that he would give up his whole
life to have had them and the funny
thing too is that in my reading of
Dostoyevsky at least is that I think
that epileptic seizures and the
associated mystical experiences were
part of what made him a transcendent Lee
brilliant author I don't think that he
would have broken through into the
domains of insight that he possessed
without those strange neurological
experiences and it was certainly not the
case that his epilepsy or the
experiences that were associated with it
produced what you might describe as an
impairment in his cognitive functions
quite the contrary
at least that's how it looks to me
you