https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4NtKdisg0GA
So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. Yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. At low doses, people are often quite silly when they can talk. And what plays out in their mind’s eye is playful, cartoon-like, and sort of silly and grotesque. And of course, it can go deeper and become, in a sense, can feel more serious and frightening. That occurs in play, though. Imagine that what you’re doing when you read a serious novel is something akin to play. But if you read a Dostoevsky novel, you’re playing at a very deep level. And so what that would mean is that instead of playing with superficial categories, you can play deeply. And you know, when children are playing deeply, they’re really involved in it. They can play pretend games with children, can become incredibly serious. They can act out very complicated and even frightening scenarios in their play. They will do that. And I would say the seriousness of play is not a consequence of the admixture of negative emotion, per se. It’s an indication of the depth at which the cognitive categories are being transformed. So the deeper they fall into the play, the more radical the transformation is that’s occurring. Hello, everyone watching and listening on YouTube and Associated Platforms. I’m continuing my investigation today into the domain of cognitive neuroscience with a bit of a side foray into psychotherapeutics and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy, with some attention paid to associated implications for analysis of brain function. I’m pleased today to be talking with an outstanding researcher in those joint fields. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is the Ralf Metzner Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry and Director of Neuroscape’s Psychedelics Division at the University of California, San Francisco. He moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. In 2009, under the mentorship of Professor David Nutt, he relocated to the Imperial College to continue fMRI research with the psychedelic drug psilocybin, derived from what have been known culturally as magic mushrooms. In conjunction with Dr. Nutt, he built up a process of psychedelic research that includes functional magnetic resonance imaging and MEG imaging with psilocybin, fMRI imaging with MDMA and plans for a MRC-sponsored clinical trial of psilocybin as a treatment for major depression. He was awarded an MA in Psychoanalysis at Brunel University London and a PhD in Psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol. He has designed human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and DMT and several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy. He founded the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019, was ranked among the top 31 medical scientists in 2020 and in 21 was named in Time magazine’s 100 Next, a list of 100 rising stars shaping the research future. I wanted to start this conversation by asking Robin about his thoughts about the relationship between categorization and implicit learning and Hebbian learning, all of those things together. So the way I’ve been thinking about it, tell me what you think about this, is that we have to impose a structure of perception on the world in order to even perceive it. So our perceptions themselves are categories and they’re implicit and those categories can be functional and provide us with what we need or they can be dysfunctional and cause us all sorts of misery and distress. But this also pertains to the question of what constitutes the unconscious. A lot of what the unconscious seems to be is the implicit category structure that we use to perceive the world through. So that’s a proposition. Maybe I could get you to comment on that as a proposition. Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable proposition. So much of what we learn is learnt implicitly, really the majority, and the assumptions that we come to, the recognition of differences between things, which is the essence of categorization, occurs implicitly and then is encoded with varying degrees of what you might call confidence or precision and that precision develops. It can strengthen with repetition and then the encoding is stronger and the assumptions are more influential and those processes are very much processes that play out unconsciously and yet they dominate our thinking, the content of our thought and our behavior. Right, so imagine, for example, for those of you watching and listening, that you imagine a pianist who’s playing a complex piece and they play it repeatedly and when they first start to learn it, they have to pay a tremendous amount of conscious attention to everything they’re doing, to every finger movement, but as they play it repeatedly, they build specialized neural machinery to govern the motor output that constitutes the ability to play the piece. And so they’re automating what is initially voluntary. Then imagine that they automate a mistake, like you can play a missed note or you can automate a phrase that’s mistimed and then you’ll have learned something that is now automatic but is also in error and part of your theory of psychopathology is analogous to that in some sense, is that we’ll practice modes of apprehending the world, modes of categorizing the world and make them automatic but they’re also dysfunctional enough to cause us misery. And I guess your theory with regards to psychedelic usage is something, as far as I can tell, is that psychedelic usage enables the re-, what would you say, it re-novelizes the environment or re-novelizes experience so that the effect of that over-learning is ameliorated, at least temporarily and that gives the cognitive system, that gives the person having the experience the opportunity to lay down new conceptions that are less constrained by that previous learning. Then the question is, well, when would previous learning be pathological? Because that’s a hard thing to figure out. So it is. It is and analogies will help us here and one that is perhaps relevant is rebirth. We come into this world, sure, with some inherited models and certainly they can come into play as we live a life and they’re activated and engaged as we encounter aspects of human experience but as we develop and we learn and we create associations, these implicit associations that become ingrained and entrenched in our psyche, then yes, it can happen that sometimes we learn things too strongly and they dominate our way of thinking, our way of seeing the world and our way of behaving. And so the analogy I want to come to is one of rebirth, is in a sense resetting the system, recalibrating the system and yes, then we will be experiencing the world with a refreshed level of novelty. Okay, so imagine this, I’ll go in two directions from that. So the first is that imagine that you grow up in a family where the interactions between the father and the mother and the children are pathological. So maybe the father is narcissistic and psychopathic at least to some degree and so the children grow up in that environment and they learn to respond to anything masculine as if it has these psychopathic and narcissistic characteristics and so their perceptions are tuned in that regard and then they move out into the world and there are all sorts of potential male-female interactions that obtain in the actual world and their perceptions aren’t calibrated properly for the more generic environment because their specific environment was tilted in a pathological way but now their very perceptions have been tuned and that’s where the unconscious is, structures that actually govern perceptual categories and so what will happen for say a girl in that situation is she won’t be able to see anything positive that a man might do because that’s so anomalous and outside her domain of perceptual familiarity and anything that’s vaguely reminiscent of the pattern that she’s already learned will elicit the whole pattern. So part of what happens in the psychopathological environment is that you specialize your perceptions for a micro environment that’s not generalizable to the broader macro environment and that’s a good way of sort of zeroing in on what actually might constitute a form of psychopathological learning. So you might come from a dependency inducing familial background too where you’re really really taken care of to an extreme and then you’re going to learn how to adapt to that and to see the world as if that’s how it’s structured then when you’re thrown out into the broader world and that level of intensive care isn’t forthcoming your perceptions aren’t adapted to that macro environment to that broader macro environment. So that’s one thing now you talked about rebirth so I spent a lot of time studying Mircea Eliade in particular historian of religious ideas. He was very interested in the symbolic structure of the idea of rebirth and so the way that this is laid out in the broad mythological literature is that the rebirth and that would be a baptism too is a return to the beginning of time where chaos and possibility rule unstructured and that return to the beginning of time to see that unstructured chaotic possibility is a time for rejuvenation and renovation and the idea of baptism is actually a ritualistic attempt to produce the kind of rebirth that is in principle redemptive. Now you have a theory about how psychedelics works that makes pharmacological sense of this notion of the reconstitution of a generative chaos if I’ve got the theory correct right is that the psychedelics blow off the over learning that constrains perception or maybe even the learning and the danger of that is everything there’s too much possibility and too much chaos but the upside is a whole new set of propositions that are more germane to current life let’s say aren’t outdated could conceivably be generated does that seem approximately appropriate? Yes it does and you know the analogy or the theme the archetype perhaps of baptism is useful baptism often involves a shock whether it’s you know being thrown in water or water thrown on you or a baptism of fire you know so there’s an appeal to a period a state of chaos and yeah and this opportunity for a second go in a sense and you know for the child the scenario that you were describing suffering you know complex interrelationships familial interrelationships the product of that is that the child knows no difference they’ve just learned really adaptively in a sense even though it’s the product is maladaptive they couldn’t it couldn’t have been any other way they the product in a sense they can’t have helped which is probably why we we don’t you know necessarily incarcerate children you know there’s an innocence there they’re subjected to things and they develop in a particular way and they can be victims but there is that curious transition into adulthood where of course you know there are moral judgments on behavior and so on and then there is an assumption that you could know you could have known differently you could have been another way you know after a certain level of development there’s sufficient metacognition or consciousness or self-awareness to not be in a sense of victim to your experiences yeah and you know these these rebirths if you look at mythology they may happen you know as a kind of rite passage around a certain age coming of age and perhaps there’s a clue there again to to some of the historical use of psychedelic plant medicines for that purpose right well I don’t remember if it was in one of your papers or one of the associated papers that I’ve been reading lately but the proposition too was that you talked about baptism by fire is that if an organism is sufficiently stressed that can re that can produce a state where rapid new learning is possible now that’s what should happen right because if you’re stressed hyper stressed that means something has gone radically wrong and when something’s gone radically wrong that’s a good time to learn something new but the proposition too was that what the psychedelics were doing in some real sense was pharmacologically mimicking the neuropharmacological conditions that might obtain after severe stress and so but right inducing that pharmacologically that’s right so this is a model I introduced maybe a couple of years ago now called pivotal mental states and really it’s a way to conceptualize and contextualize what psychedelics are and what they do and I propose that they are drugs that that hijack a stress response system but that stress response system has evolved and exists anyway of course it has to the drug has to come in and in a sense hijack and work on something that already exists for a function outside of the context of a you know somewhat alien chemical coming in that you put into your body so it was this in a sense a way of sort of having a more foundational understanding of the psychedelic experience you know what is it outside of the context of psychedelic drugs and so there I looked at things like ascetic practice extreme experiences that can drive intense states of stress where one comes to a crisis point a pivotal mental state and then in that pivotal mental state this moment right now really matters right to where you know your life’s gonna go from here on we’ll be right back with dr. Carhartt Harris in just a moment but first tis the season of giving but you’ve already given enough to your internet service provider because when you go online without Express VPN your provider can track all of your activity they’re legally allowed to sell that data to third-party advertisers for massive profits stop giving away free information start using Express VPN today Express VPN encrypts and reroutes 100% of your network data through their secure servers so your provider can’t see a thing just fire up the Express VPN app and tap one button to connect you’ve given enough to your ISP this year take back your internet privacy today with the number one rated VPN by tech radar and mashable visit expressvpn.com Jordan to get three extra months of Express VPN for free that’s ex pr ESS VPN com slash Jordan to get an extra three months free Express VPN com slash Jordan Yeah well that strikes me as analogous to the phenomenon that’s often noted among people who recover from alcoholism so it’s very common and I knew this I learned this almost 30 years ago when I was studying alcoholism and its treatments even then it was known that one of the most reliable treatments and this has stayed constant in the research literature was religious transformation and so you think well and these are hardcore non-religious scientists who are putting this forward as a proposition it’s just a fact drawn from decades of observation about what works and what doesn’t work in the treatment of alcoholism most things don’t work including treatment centers but but one of the phenomenon that are that’s constantly reported by people who have recovered from alcoholism is that at some point they hit rock bottom right and they have a devastatingly stressful experience as a consequence of the fact that their addiction has gone out of control and that hits them with devastating force You can imagine if that’s a hyper stress response and it opens up the doorway to new learning because it’s so stressful that everything in the environment gets re novelized in some sense that’s associated with an experience of awe and there’s a religious element to that because the transformation is taking place at a very deep level and so they hit something that’s hyper stressful and then they’re prepared for radically new learning for personality retooling in some sense so and then so okay so then I was thinking too so you know in psychotherapy there’s a rule of thumb and it’s a good one that if you can help people confront what they’re afraid of and avoiding in manageable bite sized pieces then they get stronger and braver so so imagine this imagine there’s a hierarchy of implicit presumptions some are key and core and those would be the assumptions that if disrupted cause traumatic stress and then there are less crucial assumptions which are more like peripheral perceptions and they’re ones that still have a lot of play they’re not hyper learned yet and they’re not a lot of not a lot of other conceptions are dependent on them so they’re more peripheral so then when you do exposure therapy with people you have them confront the micro categories that they’re using to to constrain and and formulate their behavior and they can modulate those and so they stress themselves a little bit and that’s enough to produce a little bit of learning but if you do that continually the system can introduce and incrementally grow and change without having to undergo dramatic stress induced revolutions Yeah what I would want to add in there is that perhaps it’s it’s perhaps unlearning is even more important than learning in that process so you know the patient is being brought back to traumatic memories traumatic themes and feelings but the pathology that they present with is one of arguably excessive learning you know a defensive learning that needs to be unlearned and so in order to bring someone back to some semblance of health there is arguably a need for a confrontation to go back there I mean this is the principle of exposure therapy to go to go back there and actually weaken associations that have formed too strongly to produce the psychopathology So one of the things you wrote about in your new paper is the emergent literature pointing to something like a general factor of psychopathology right and then when I read that I always think well that’s neuroticism it’s the same factor analysis it’s pointing to a susceptibility to negative emotion And when I after I talked to Carl Friston I was trying to sort out in my head the difference between neuroticism and openness the difference between neuroticism and creativity now creativity allows you to shift categories neuroticism seems to be the susceptibility of categories to stress induced disruption And so then the question is like so you get stress and you talk in your paper the one you sent me about the fact that stress also produces neural death especially in this hippocampal systems for example that are key to the movement of information from short term attention to long term storage so imagine that when you encounter something stressful The first thing that happens is that there is category death and perhaps neural death that’s proportionate to the degree of stress and that might be a necessary precondition for learning but it’s not learning right it’s just the falling apart of old pathological systems And that’s a problem because well now you don’t have the old pathological system but you also don’t have anywhere to go right so it’s only the death without the rebirth and then people experience that with extreme pain too because and I wonder sometimes too if that psychogenic pain like depression for example isn’t actually the psychological consequences of the neural degeneration and the category death that well that we’re referring to as a consequence of stress Possibly yes I mean a theme I’d want to bring in would be disconnect and I suspect if we take a classic aspect of neuroticism like depression then There is I think depression and of course this has been written about extensively and famously by the likes of Freud There is a sort of forced retreat from objects that one would invest in often implicitly love objects you know but that’s meant very broadly and generally so that might be one’s vocation you know that is an object of intense investment or in Freudian language Cathesis the investment of libidinal energy and Freud’s model of depression was that that investment that we do when we you know have get up and go write papers and fall in love and you know love our family and children and so on If that’s cut off if there’s a forced retreat then where does that energy go and it you know and that was you know Freud’s model of depression that it’s sort of dammed up and it gets deflected back on onto the self in this very self-critical way So I think it’s a bit tangential there but but I wanted to bring in the theme of disconnect because I imagine that there’s something important in in neuroticism when it develops into a depression That involves yes some kind of inability to invest in so so I’ve been trying to conceptualize that neurologically so imagine that Imagine that there’s a hierarchy of conception right and so we have some fundamental conceptions upon which many other conceptions are predicated and some that are less fundamental now Before you question a category the category should fail Now then that raises two questions is how severe is the failure so let me give you an example if you have an argument with your wife about the dishes That could mean that you should negotiate who’s going to do the dishes or it should mean that you’re you should get divorced Now the thing about someone who’s depressed is that they’ll take a micro fight and it’ll cascade all the way up the conceptual system to the most fundamental level they might go even beyond Well not only should get I’d get a divorce because my marriage is hopeless because then they’ll go who could stand to be married as to anyone as hopeless as me I’ve always been hopeless my whole past is hopeless There’s nothing good about the present and everything’s just going to get worse in the future I might as well be dead and so what imagine this imagine that there’s a hierarchy of conceptions And there’s a barrier for error propagation And the barrier is something like the number of errors you have to experience at each level before you’ll move up a level to question that presumption And so then imagine the more neurotic you are the fewer failures it takes at any level To move up another level to move up a level higher in the hierarchy and question something more fundamental And and maybe that’s serotonin mediated. So as you become more socially Confident and your environment is actually more benevolent because you’re more well placed your resistance to error cascade Increases and when you’re depressed, there’s no resistance. It’s every error propagates all the way up to the most fundamental level Will the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more reckless spending by a more emboldened administration higher taxes deeper inflation? 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Right the and you can measure this and Yeah, you can see that people’s you know Forecasting of future life events is way off They think that only bad things are going to happen nothing good And then you can actually track that and see what happens and you see that, you know people were catastrophizing And the reality wasn’t that bad, you know, so that’s depression. So I would argue that that’s that’s too much model And the the model is skewed And we we sort of touched on this earlier, you know Tilted in a particular way biased in a particular way So there is this fascinating question of why are you biased? Where did where did that skew come from? Why are you having to see the world? Through this bias through this skew what what does it do for one of the mysteries there, too? This is why okay. So now we have a conflict in view of depression in some sense because the way I put it forward was that it was an excess of of error induced chaos and the way you just put it forward was that it was a pathology of constrained Forecasting and but there’s a there’s a point of agreement, right? We’re both agreed that something fundamental has gone wrong and we know this right because yeah the depressive realism stuff Mostly cognitive behavioral or social psychologists using cognitive behavioral derived scales used people who were just Barely threshold for depression to formulate the depressive realism idea if you have people who are really depressed. It’s like Everything is terrible. It’s always been terrible and it’s going to be terrible into the future Something and so what’s really interesting about that? And this is why something some fundamental set of propositions must have gone astray because And you’re thinking about it as something that’s canalized into a very narrow channel and i’m thinking about about it more as the disintegration of anything positive but you know, there may be a way to reconcile that it’s that It it’s it’s it has to be fundamental It has to be a primal Set of conceptions because it colors absolutely everything right? Nothing escapes from the depressive abyss And so it has to be disruption in a system that’s so fundamental that all other cognitions and perceptions depend on it So this is part of the reason I was trying to make sense of it in relationship to social status, right? Because we know that if someone’s social status falls their tonic levels of serotonin constraint decrease and the lodge the logic in that from an evolutionary perspective would be that The more you’re situated properly optimally within a social hierarchy The more benevolent the environment actually is because you have friends and you have people you can rely on and you’re getting a lot Of attention from other people and so it makes sense that you don’t have to be hypersensitive to error because you’re buffered but so imagine you you get depressed and you’re and the mechanism that is adjudicating your social status Is pathologized and it rates you as a one out of ten instead of a ten out of ten And then the consequence of that is your whole nervous system now is tuned to react as if the environment the whole thing Has now turned on you and is dangerous which which it is if you’re actually socially isolated and and extremely unpopular, right? You are in that sort of danger so yes that But there is this interesting other possibility. I mean it is a very delicate Question of whether a pathology is adaptive or maladaptive or functional or dysfunctional and and It has been argued, you know that a depressive episode is is functional, you know in a situation of extreme social dilemma Maybe it makes sense In a sense to to with to retreat to withdraw from the world in a sense to Hibernate for a while to stay out to trouble for a while another possibility and this again, you know I do have a bit of time for certain Freudian ideas and another one in relation to depression was that it It’s often repressed anger So rather than You know some social dilemma plays out and you get aggressive and you you do something dramatic You know you kill someone then this could be a This could be fatal for you very easily in you know a social network Way back when or now and so You know, this is the argument for civilization and its discontents that actually you know to Retreat to withdraw to go into oneself to hate oneself Instead of for example your boss that sacked you or your partner who was adulterous or what have you? You know is could could be functional. I know that well Well, no, no, I think I mean I think that it points to an underlying permanent existential dilemma Which is well if you try and you fail that could be in a micro endeavor or a macro endeavor If you try and you fail Well, you have two options while you have three one is you can just ignore it and sometimes that’s the right thing to do Because if you tried again, it would work and so that’s the utility of persistence But you’d and you never know in some fundamental sense whether you’re being persistent or blind That’s a tough thing to figure out most entrepreneurs who become successful have failed in a dozen enterprises before and so are they Persistent or do you have they failed to learn from experience? It’s like well, there’s a toss-up then Then for imagine you don’t ignore it. Okay. Now you’re gonna you’re gonna fix the problem Well, then you have two choices you could fix the world or You could fix yourself and let’s say well fixing yourself is often at least in principle easier than fixing the world Although sometimes the world is wrong and you’re right not very often, but sometimes you know So if you’re gonna fix yourself you failed multiple times the first thing that has to happen is that the part of you that’s error ridden has to die and So there is that element that’s exactly I would say in some sense the payoff of neuroticism is well Why have negative emotion? It’s well You get anxious so that you stop doing things that might cause your own destruction Like there’s there’s value in the signal But because it’s so difficult to determine like if you’re arguing with your wife, this is constant issue in marriages it’s like well should she change your you and Answer sometimes is she should and sometimes the answer is you should and sometimes the answer is you both should but it’s not like that’s Easy to figure out a priority Now, you know, I think your your argument you’re making in favor of depression in some sense is that well now and then you should retreat and learn from your failures and Of course, that’s the case now The problem with depression is that you get these macro retreats where everything falls apart and You might hope that You’re not in a situation where the right reaction is for everything to fall apart very often and it does look like people who are prone to depression are prone to Having everything fall apart when it would be much more meat and right and even in terms of learning for something Smaller to be modified one of the things I tried to do with my clients all the time was to I wouldn’t say minimize a problem But it would be to parameterize it You know like maybe I’d have a client who was so afraid of their economic uncertainty that they wouldn’t even tell me how much rent they were paid because I had clients like that and so I would continue to inquire till I got them to admit the terrible truth about their rent and then we could Narrow the problem we could keep narrowing the scope of the problem so they didn’t feel like the problem meant their entire financial future was going to fall apart and and it’s that and There’s a catalyzation in that right that narrowing where that’s actually beneficial And so the model you sent me the paper you sent me I think if I’ve got it right concentrated mostly on this over learning as the fundamental source of Pathology so yes and And that was that was very Intentional I mean I do believe it but I would like to think that one Useful aspect of the model is that it invites people to understand pathology To understand how it can be acquired Through experience people can be differentially vulnerable or sensitive But the pathology pathology does have a history there was a process there And I think that that can help caregivers and patients because it says you know you can There is some understanding to be done here I mean if that wasn’t true psychotherapy wouldn’t exist and people wouldn’t share their problems and try and understand it and often, you know the process was very complex and You know not all the information is necessarily So easy to decipher and clear But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t developed and hasn’t been acquired and actually there is some Logic to the presentation that comes about now that doesn’t mean that you then accept the pathology So I just wanted to emphasize that right it just says that we could understand this But it doesn’t say it’s functional that you’re depressed So we just will will leave it alone better. You’re depressed and be you know a murderer or what have you right? So then there’s this question of well if you understand the presentation You could also understand In a sense by understanding how it serves you take an addiction for example You know someone with an awful history of complex trauma repeated abuse develops a hard drug addiction and Do you rip that away from them and say be well now have a huge? You know psychedelic experience and go fresh go happy now, you know Or is there something a little bit more gentle and sophisticated? To how you would treat a Presentation like that even if you are to treat it with say psychedelic therapy well well on the addiction front I mean generally let’s say with alcohol addiction Which is a particularly pernicious form of addiction and one that’s often deadly in the immediate recovery because if you’re Suddenly deprived of alcohol and you’re an alcoholic you can die of a seizure That’s very common in fact and so you have take people off alcohol somewhat slowly so that doesn’t happen But if you put people in a treatment center you can Get them over the physiological dependence in a matter of weeks But generally the literature indicates that as soon as you put the person back in their environment the probability that they’ll relapse is Almost as high as it would have been if they never went to the treatment center at all and this speaks to what you just said The thing is and this is part of the adaptive structure of the pathology so you might think well the reason you’re an alcoholic is because You drink too much alcohol. It’s like well. That’s one reason you’re alcoholic, and it’s a cardinal reason, but Here’s some other reasons All the things you do socially are focused on alcohol All of your use of leisure time is alcohol use Learned all of your friends are likely to be alcoholic Right and so when you throw the person who’s now no longer alcoholic back into their original environment Without preparation as soon as they go see their old friends the probability that they’ll start drinking again is extremely high it’s because not only do you have to remove the The pathology of the dependence, but you have to substitute a whole new set of skills That provides all the positive interactions and ways forward That the entire addictive lifestyle provided before this is partly why when an alcoholics anonymous works it works is because it provides people with a new peer group and So so there is this problem you could have the death of a pathological system But then okay that the thing that was Destroying your life the the presuppositions that were destroying your life are now defunct But that doesn’t mean that you now have a life and so so this this points back to this Conundrum that we’ve encountered in our discussion so far you talk in this paper that you sent me about this general factor of psychopathology And as I said when I see that reminds me of factor analytic studies of emotion showing The powerful factor of negative emotion neuroticism and so it’s definitely the case that this general predisposition to intense suffering is part of that single factor of Psychopathology and that’s more like a propensity to experience stress in in response to chaos and error but that’s different than the claim that it’s Pathologically canalized learning processes that are core to the essence of psychopathology right because you’re you’re really talking about a Pathological excess of order in some sense whereas neuroticism is a pathological susceptibility to chaos so I’m still trying to work out the Do you do you think do you think that there’s evidence that the? over-learning hypothesis that you’re developing is The same hypothesis is that which emerges out of the factor studies of of general psychopathology Men is it time to stop mindless scrolling time to finally gain that higher quality of life You know you’re missing out on if this sounds familiar Then on January 9th join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life It’s called Exodus 90 and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life and it actually works Independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days including stronger Satisfaction rates in their marriages more meaningful prayer lives and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones For the past seven years Exodus has helped more than 60,000 men build a roadmap for living with virtue in a culture that offers far Too many paths to self-destruction Is it time for your Exodus we start January 9th find resources to prepare for Exodus at Exodus 90.com Jordan that’s Exodus 90.com Jordan I I Think there’s there’s work to be done to measure What I mean by canal ization right pathological? overlearning and Then to see whether it is true that across the board transdiagnostically so in whatever You know category of psychiatric disorder You’ll find this phenomenon and it will be there and it will be strong, you know, that’s the hypothesis That’s the model that I’ve presented. I call it the the canal ization model of psychopathology and You know as I say this paper simple models as Simple models are too simple. They don’t claim to explain everything but they they do Proposed to be able to explain something important and and said, you know the the idea with this new model is that There is a principal component, you know a dominating factor to cycle and I’m putting forward this idea that it’s excessive associative learning done for Psychologically defensive reason right? Well, okay So in the same paper when you’re talking about the use of psychedelic therapy You put forward some cautions and so some of the cautions are well maybe psychedelic therapy would be less warranted in situations where you already see an excess proclivity towards associative thinking like pre-psychotic states and so Imagine that we could we could hypothesize perhaps to begin with that there are pathologies of order and There are pathologies of chaos those might be more associated with neuroticism There might be pathologies of creativity that would manifest themselves Let’s say in something like manic depressive disorder on the manic end. So I’m wondering if that single factor of Obsessive over learning that you’re describing would characterize a subset of pathologies That are specifically characterized by over learning So that would be like, do you know has anybody tried treating obsessive compulsive disorder with psychedelics? For example because that’s certainly yeah. Yeah. So what happened? Yes, they have okay. Well Yeah, pretty promising findings and it’s being repeated now. I Think Yale Imperial College London are doing trials and a trial has been done I think in San Diego So, you know, it’s an indication that makes sense again. I do think it it fits the model of You know over potentiated ways of thinking and or behaving the compulsive action the need to wash one’s hands or you know You know have these intrusive thoughts that that repeat And this very narrow category view categorical viewpoint, right? So much of the world becomes disgusting and we know that the psychedelics are good at treating Addictions like cigarette smoking and that’s also that’s a that’s a good model for catalyzation because the nicotine produces that hyper learning So so I would say to your question is this in a sense? I don’t know if you use the word just just a subset. I would say it’s the majority subset That’s the idea. It’s the principal component and that’s not to say there aren’t other components say a component of Hyper-associative thinking and behavior erratic like a delirium And one can argue whether a manic psychosis is like that It may be in a sense, but sometimes it’s quite quick for that state to become canalized as right, right, right And and and also to say that that component that component of hyper-associative thinking Isn’t arguably isn’t fundamentally pathological as well because that’s an infant, you know that’s an infant that is someone in a you know state of Gosh like a creative like fugue state, you know, yeah Yeah So it’s harder to see that actually in my mind is is obviously pathological Yes, it can be highly unusual to see that in a grown person an adult But it happens and actually, you know going back to those pivotal mental states those conversion type experiences they often feature that And they can be life-saving those experiences, you know And actually this now we’re coming to the really the flavor of of the psychedelic experience as well Right. Okay. So so let’s talk about the psychedelic experience for a minute So when Huxley wrote about the psychedelic experience in the doors of perception he referred to Bergson who made the claim that in some real sense consciousness was like a reducing valve is that Part of what our brains are doing and they are primarily inhibitory at a neurological level is taking an unbelievably differentiated or unbelievably undifferentiated massive experience that’s far too much for us to process at any one time and narrowing it incredibly to the few elements that constitute the Focus of our attention at any one moment maybe as little as three or four bits of information from a stream of it of information that would be incalculably dense in terms of available bits and so some of this Canalized learning that you describe is actually the use of perceptual categories to reduce that information flow and so what seems to happen in the psychedelic experience is that that Apriori restriction on Perception and its associated emotions is lifted temporarily right, and so the the Bergsonian or Huxley and model of psychedelic experience that it Increases the breadth of that information funnel that seems to be correct and that’s also being associated if I remember correctly with increased thalamic throughput So there’s actually more information coming up from the sensory and the motivational and emotional areas of the brain During a psychedelic experience than under normal conditions. I think that’s Volin Whiter’s work. I think he’s concentrated on that and So right and my guy. Yeah, it’s true. I would say that the thalamus is is is one of other In a sense hierarchically subordinate Ordinary structures and systems that where the information can flow up to high level cortex more freely under a psychedelic the reducing valve analogy and that it goes back to Bergson is curious because Canalization as a theme was was sort of brought to prominence by Conrad Waddington Evolutionary biologist who used it to try and explain Phenotypes that get stamped in they get entrenched, you know encoded into the genome But he took it from from Norman Whitehead who took it from on rebergs and oh there and on rebergs And yeah, he offered the analogy the image of a canal of a canal And so that was the original inspiration. So it’s curious that The books and inspired Huxley with the reducing valve, right? Right. That’s an interesting. So here’s something cool, too This is a bit of a segue, but you’ll catch the significance of this. There is a paper published in nature just two months ago looking at genetic mutation Okay, so the idea is that genetic mutation is essentially a random process and the reason for that is well Let’s talk about genetic mutations that are brought about by Radiation solar radiation and so forth and so they’re randomly knocking Atoms out of the genetic structure and producing random mutation, but it turns out that the error correction post DNA damage is not random so the older the genetic structure that’s being damaged by the Cosmic radiation the higher the probability that it will be repaired by intrinsic DNA repair mechanisms, so there’s a hierarchy of genetic presumption built into the code and so the cells will allow variation on the fringes to take place without correction But if the mutation affects something that would be fatal and because it’s so core to the actual biological Continuation of the organism then the probability that it’ll be error corrected reaches a hundred percent And so this is you can think about that as an analog. It’s analogous to the conceptual structure, right? Imagine there’s a hierarchy of conception the the deeper the conception the more fundamental it is to the whole cognitive process the the the more caution there should be in undertaking any sort of radical radical revolution Because it’s too de-stabilizing and the less likely that will occur. So Yeah, so that was that’s an amazing finding as far as I’m concerned, yeah So that’s me and that’s canal ization. Yeah, that’s that’s you know, the these are phenotypes that the matter there that are essential and You can’t rip them up right now you could have some variation at a superficial level some creativity there, but Maybe don’t mess with certain Fundamentals well, that’s what that’s well, that’s what happens in post-traumatic stress disorder, too it looks like at least to some degree is that fundamental conceptual structures like the Trustworthiness of other people or the trustworthiness of human beings per se is brought into question and that demolishes whole swaths of the Of the systems that interpersonal communication and interaction depend upon so yeah But you’ll see Jordan that’s that’s true of borderline personality disorder as well, you know, others can’t be trusted the catastrophizing the splitting and it’s true in depression, you know where I I You know wherever there’s there are these biases in depression, you know, I’m worthless life is pointless better off dead and so on They are They’re exaggerated in a sense they’re exaggerated Responses and yeah, and then they’re skewed and and they’re skewed beyond the data There are sort of exaggerated response so the data so so let’s think about that data so I’ve been thinking about How how psychopathology might be defined formally and so We talked earlier about the idea that a child might have grown up in a micro environment Where they learn patterns of communication that are not applicable to the broader macro environment So imagine in the macro environment imagine you have a hundred interactions in a day with different people Imagine there’s a pattern that you have to manifest For those interactions to go well and that it’s stable across all 100 interactions So like one rule would be don’t swear at someone the second you meet them That’s not going to iterate well across multiple Interactions so people of course people don’t do that But my point is is that there are ways of conducting yourself that are going to get yourself in trouble Regardless of situation, right? So you imagine I had a friend I used to go shopping with him He was extremely socially fluent like a real expert and when we would walk into shops and the shopkeeper The clerk would approach him He always took about 10 seconds to make personal contact with the person instead of immediately asking them Whatever instrumental question leap to mind he would ask them How they were doing and he actually meant it and then he would listen and he’d ask them You know where they worked in the store and he tried to find out something that they were proud of About working there and he was really good at this He’d make a solid connection with people right away and going to different stores with him was extremely enjoyable because he would open people up and then they would also be extremely helpful and So he had mastered this style of interpersonal communication that worked across multiple instantiations So you could imagine that the definition of a pathologically Canalized Interpersonal style is one that worked in a given micro environment that was extreme but doesn’t generalize well across multiple Social situations. It’s something so there’s a so yuck panxep. For example He he paired animals together rats together to let them play repeatedly Instead of just once now if you just let them play once the big animal can dominate the little animal But if you have them play repeatedly Which is what they do in a naturalistic rat environment the little rat who could be defeated The big rat has to let him win 30% of the time or the little rat will stop playing So what panx have showed was that across iterated social interactions? There was a pattern of social Ethic That had to be instantiated If the social interaction was going to maintain itself and so and obviously what you’re doing when you’re dealing with someone clinically is you’re trying to snap them out of the narrowness of their pathologically sheltered environment and enable them to adopt a pattern that generalizes across multiple social situations and so Whatever healthy would be would be that pattern that that iterates well now that doesn’t mean we can specify it precisely But it gives it a kind of conceptual framework Black rifle coffee company is helping you knock out your holiday shopping with a ton of awesome new products this year Shop the best brewing gear thermoses mugs and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee Black rifle sources the most exotic roast from around the globe all coffee is roasted here in the US by veteran-led teams of coffee Experts stuff your Christmas stockings with the latest roast from America’s coffee for 10% off with the code Jordan Better yet sign your secret Santa up for a coffee club subscription Imagine the joy of a pre-scheduled coffee delivery your favorite roast when you need them most It’s the gift that keeps on giving black rifle coffee company is veteran founded and operated They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love America Every purchase you make with black rifle help support veteran and first responder causes go to black rifle coffee Com and use promo code Jordan for 10% off coffee coffee gear apparel and when you sign up for a new coffee club subscription That’s black rifle coffee com with promo code Jordan for 10% off black rifle coffee supporting veterans and America’s coffee Yes, yes it does and you know, it makes me think of You know, it makes me think of Of archetypes and of perennialism, you know And the psychedelic experience when people have a realization that every type of being is in Me you know And I can know love and compassion Even if I haven’t experienced it, you know and then developed pathology because of the harsh Maybe unusual or at least skewed upbringing that I had but then So why do you think it reminded you of the idea that there’s a multitude within do you think that’s a reflection of The possibility of these diverse encounters. Is it something like that? Well, I mean it’s curious that it’s not play unless One side can win a little bit because then it’s just you know Dominating and it’s it’s not easy to win Because then it’s just you know Dominating and it’s it’s not a game. It’s right. It’s there’s no there’s no place So you have to have that natural variability. Maybe it was that thought of sort of natural variability it can’t all be hard and a lack of love and you know, there’s gonna be some There’s gonna be some range some diverse. Yeah Well, that’s another definition of play isn’t it for a system to have play means that it has This ability to vary without being too rigid is the opposite of catalyzation in some real sense Yeah, you know and I think I think that there is something fundamental to the idea of play in terms of defining what a psychopathological system isn’t so because one of the things Peugeot pointed out for example was that In order for play to take place both partners in play have to agree voluntarily Right. So it it sets up a joint perceptual framework and a conceptual framework that people buy into voluntarily and so one of the things we could say about optimized social interactions is that if they’re optimized Then both people are engaging voluntarily and both people want the interaction to continue and that’s a That that actually only happens under a relatively narrow Set of preconditions like like the preconditions for a good conversation, right? I mean and then you think that the conversation we’re having to the degree that we’ve put each other on the edge of Transformation and that we’re allowing play to take place within us within both of us and then hypothetically within those who are listening That’s we’re doing it because we want to do it but we’re also doing it because we’re allowing optimized change to take place and I think the Fact that we’re interested in the conversation is actually a marker for that transformation Yes. Yes. I mean it’s it it invites some realizations about play and you know what children Might say, you know if they’re if they were meant to be playing, you know, that’s what they signed up to Yeah, and then the game change changes somehow and one of the partners says I thought we were playing but I thought we were playing You know, right or imagine if we’re having this conversation now and instead of it being playful One of one of us was sort of preaching a particular view or You know dominating too much or trying to convince the other way the world is then it would stop being fun And it would be like, you know, I’d be like I thought we were playing That would also be an indication of too Rapid catalyzation right so or or the imposition of something already catalyzed So if I was insisting that my viewpoint was right Then I would be discounting whatever you had to say and insisting that my catalyzed viewpoint already dominate and So I might do that because I don’t want to let any of my ideas go that might be one possibility or I might do it in a cheap Ploy to obtain dominance as a marker of status, right? The alternative would be that we could both play Right and then whatever status accomplishment would go along with that So in this case, it would be our people going to listen to the podcast that would be a consequence not of Being dominant but of being able to play So So so there’s something about there’s something about play. I think that’s key to this issue of of psychopathology it’s sort of like the spirit of play is antithetical to the to the psychopathological enterprise Yes, I like that and and and then you know how play and creativity and art can go Can go together and you know art and expression can work as a kind of antithesis to Catalyzation and pathology, you know when in a thorough Yeah, it’s I mean That’s a curious one is you know, when do you see the the best art in relation to? Psychopathology and I’m trying to remember now I think I Mean the classic one is a manic episode is mania and great art, you know But I think depression and art it’s a little bit more Precarious that one. Yeah Well, it could well it could easily be to that to the degree that depression is linked to artistic production It’s that the artistic production is actually part of the process that’s lifting the person out of the depression rather. Yes Right. Yes, and and and in bipolar disorder, you know the quality check, you know, because it goes My all my ideas are incredible. Yeah, they’re ingenious to they’re all worthless Rubbish rubbish rubbish rubbish. Oh, oh this one. This one’s not bad You know, yeah, I saw a movie which you can find on YouTube of Picasso about 1955 if I remember correctly was black and white and they had him paint a think it was a rooster But I’m not exactly sure on a glass sheet And so he spent a number of hours painting and it was so interesting To see him play because he wasn’t trying to produce a painting as the end product He was playing with visual representation and he probably erased and repainted a hundred times while he was working on the painting He’d paint and race and paint and race paint and race just Constant play as he was experimenting with hitting the mark No, and so he wasn’t he wasn’t an artist who was producing paintings. He was exploring visual representation, so Yeah, so I think that we could start thinking about a healthy interpersonal dynamic as Characterized by something like the presence of the spirit of play but also we could think about play as a Like a microcosm of a pattern of social interaction that actually works across multiple Potential domains of social interaction, you know It’s why you want your child to be a good sport because you might say well It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game The kid doesn’t understand that because they want to win but your point as a parent is yeah You want to win but you want to win in a manner that makes other people want to keep playing games with you right and there’s something that’s really core to what constitutes health about that and I like that conjunction of the developmental literature on play and that philosophical literature on play and its association with creativity and the idea of that is something that’s Antithetical to psychopathology Psychopathological condition occurs when all the play has been taken out of the system. Yes. Yeah. Yes and Yeah, no, I like that too. You can think of people who practice being well, you know like like experienced meditators You can sometimes encounter these beings and they are their light they’re like a child they’re they’re an adult A bit like the Dalai Lama, you know, he’s a bit like a big kid Maybe I don’t know him very well. You know, you know that I what’s his name. I don’t remember the Reese Richardson Richie Richie Davidson, right? Yeah. Yeah, he did EEG analysis of the Dalai Lama and other proof like practice meditators and he showed that they showed a Preferential pattern of left prefrontal activation that was associated with a dominant state of extroverted positive emotion And that would go along with that That also goes along with that gospel injunction, you know, except as you become like a little child You’ll know wise enter the kingdom of heaven It’s the same idea is that to read and it’s also associated with the idea of neotony in Evolutionary biology right that we tend to evolve towards our childhood forms That’s so, you know a human skull looks exactly like an infant chimpanzee skull. Mm-hmm So that’s yeah, it’s very interesting Stephen Jay Gould pointed this out. He showed that Animated creatures like Mickey Mouse and so forth. He showed a whole variety of these Become increasingly neotanas as the animation Propagates across time they become more and more childlike in their features It’s a kind of a universal proclivity. And so the idea with regard to mental health would be something like the ability to reattain that capacity for play actually characterizes mental health in the positive manner in adulthood and then one question neuropharmacologically Would be do the psychedelics put more play in the system? Fact that they allow category shift to occur much more Prolifically, let’s say seems to indicate that the answer to that might be yes Yes, I’m leaning towards a yes. I mean at low doses people are often, you know quite silly when they can can talk and and what plays out in their mind’s eye is is playful cartoon like And sort of silly and grotesque and yeah of course it can it can go deeper and become In a sense can can feel more serious and frightening Well, well, I think play play does play that out though that occurs in play though Like if you imagine that what you’re doing when you read a serious novel is something akin to play But if you read a Dostoevsky novel you’re playing at a very deep level And so what that would mean is that instead of playing with superficial categories Which you might be doing if you just read a cheap romance and I’m not putting that down I’m just saying it’s it’s a more superficial form of play But you can play deeply and you know when children are playing deeply they’re really involved in it Like they can play pretend games with children can become incredibly serious. They can act out Very complicated and even frightening scenarios in their play they will do that So and I would say the seriousness of play is not a consequence of the admixture of negative emotion per se It’s an indication of the depth at which the cognitive categories are being transformed So the deeper they fall into the play the more radical the transformation is that’s occurring. Yes Yes, in fact the the notion of a play like a drama, you know If it’s a good play like, you know a good theater production then it has it has depth and it can be serious and it can be moving and so quite I guess the antithesis would be a Play that that gets stuck and gets boring that repeats the maps and and you know the analogy Or that or where it’s too predictable, right? Yeah, that would be catalyzed in some sense Because all it’s doing then is it’s running over a plot and characterizations that you already 100% know. Yeah Right. So there’s there’s and that would be a propagandistic I think that that art degenerates into propaganda when it becomes catalyzed, right? So you have to say this It’s like well, we already know that yeah, you already know that that’s already been insisted upon. Yeah. Yeah, we need some need some surprise So could you talk to me a little bit about this idea of local minima you you talk about catalyzation in the paper that you sent me and and Your proposition is something like when you over learn something you end up in a valley in a fitness valley You can’t get out of it in some sense, but I don’t and I don’t exactly understand that metaphor So what how would you technically characterize a local minima? Mm-hmm Yeah, it’s a analogy for depicting states Where the minima are substates and the local minima would be the closest substate to visit Where It has some gravitational pull by being a minima it has A gradient where you would get pulled to a to a point And then so is it so is it something like that if you’ve practiced It’s sort of the idea that if if you’re an expert with a hammer everything looks like a nail So that you have an a priori category system and so anything that even vaguely Approximates that is likely to get processed by that system Is that is that and is that a is that a consequence? Maybe of the brain’s desire to use maximally efficient neurological processing because if you have a Hardware for a perception you might as well utilize that rather than going through all the difficulty of having to generate a whole new Perception right that’s a that’s very complicated. I think that works. I mean again if we go to pathology and depression such a Prevalent disorder, so it’s a maybe a useful one to go to again, but you know if one one’s mind naturally Moves in an itinerant way here and there and In health it it moves very freely, but in a depression It’s very easy to fall into that minima that is related to the depression that has a negative bias So that would be an example of falling into a local minima. Yeah Right, so it’s something like a hyper availability of already laid-down pathways Yes Uh-huh, uh-huh and their pathological conditions where that’s much more likely Yeah, well that that happens when that happens when you have to make an immediate response Which of course makes sense right because you’re going to use automatized Perceptual structures in an emergency because you don’t have time to do that Perceptual structures in an emergency because you don’t have time to do anything else We’ll be right back to our conversation with dr. Carhartt Harris first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary logos and literacy I was very much struck by how the Translation of the biblical writings jumpstarted the development of literacy across the entire world Illiteracy was the norm the pastors home was the first school and Every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung this is amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible Bible printed on the press of y’all good science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but Historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to Civilization itself it is the most influential book in all of history and hopefully people can walk away With at least a sense of that If it’s familiar, it’s easy to go there, you know, and so in a Depressive presentation, it’s easy. It’s easy to fall back there Yeah, now, do you practice clinically? No, I don’t know. No just research But you were you were trained psychoanalytically as well as scientific as well as neuroscientifically As well as neuroscientifically As an academic I studied and got a master’s qualification in psychoanalysis I also had my own analysis, but I’ve never actually trained clinically as an analyst myself. I see I see Okay, let’s contrast Psychedelics and antidepressants for a moment And so let me tell you what I understood from your papers and you tell me if I’ve got it, right perhaps so both of those chemicals seem to affect the serotoningic system preferentially and My understanding of the serotonin system is that it one of the things it does is modulates cognitive flexibility And so if you have high levels of serotonin energy function, which would be associated with social status Let’s say you’re more resistant to error propagation Now but the psychedelics also affect the serotonin system, but they seem to decrease Cognitive Specialization and canal ization right and so they make the system more open not to catastrophic failure but to play and So, do you know how they do? How do they how detailed is their knowledge about how that’s actually occurring at a cellular level? What is the chemical itself doing at a cellular or even or even a higher-order biological level? so if we begin with the classic psychedelics compounds like LSD or psilocybin or DMT then the chemicals are binding to serotonin 2a receptors So a certain serotonin receptor one of the at least 14 Serotonin receptors these receptors are heavily expressed in the cortex and especially so in high level Cortex and they’re expressed post synaptically. So on the receiving Neuron of communication And they modulate the excitability of the host cell that the receptors are So when they stimulate do they make it more excitable or excitable? It’s more excitable So actually it all begins there because if you think of excitability like temperature You’re kind of dialing up You’re dialing up temperature you’re dialing up the excitability of the cell But the catch it seems is what that translates to in terms of population level activity because all the computation and the map to I guess information processing and and experience it Doesn’t seem to Happen at the single cell level. It’s it’s how the cells interact and interrelate and and really it’s it’s once we get to the population level so populations of neurons Oscillating together whether is that within cortical columns or between them or do we know? Well, is that dose dependent it would be a great thing to know and I imagine that there’s increased communication between cortical columns where cortical columns are like basic computational information processing computational units In the brain the cortical column like a column for a particular, you know orientation in in space Recognizing that right there specialized for yes They have sparse communication between them. That’s right. Yeah, but but high Communication within them, you know and right right and that’s yes, so they’re specific for specific categories So the very rudimentary level of visual processing like or things oriented in this vertical domain or horizontal So yeah, I suspect that there’s communication increased communication across cortical columns and if we look at things like Systems or networks in the brain which we can map quite well with functional magnetic resonance imaging for example Then we can see that there’s increased communication across Networks under psychedelics. That’s actually a very well replicated finding Okay, so so let me throw something at you here and tell me what you think about it. So So I’ve been conceptual and I conceptualizing neuroticism as the proclivity of a conceptual system to collapse in response to error So the more the higher your levels of baseline negative emotion the less error it takes per unit of collapse Something like that. So then you can you can make an analogy you can you can make an analogous case for creativity so we know that creative people If I ask creative people if I give them a word and then I say Tell me all the words you can that this word reminds you of in a minute You can map out their associations and the creative people will produce a higher volume of associations So they’re more verbally fluent, but their associations will be more distant in conceptual space so the less creative you are the more synonymous the the co-activated words will be so then you could imagine that if your creativity is in part a consequence of how much co-activation of Idea is likely to take place, but then it’s also a function of how distant the co-activation and so if the psychedelics are increasing Excitability I wonder if they’re Doing something analogous to the co-activation of more disparate columns as well. That’s strange because they also seem to inhibit semantic Processing to some degree people become less able to talk able to verbalize what’s happening to them So it doesn’t exactly look like it’s semantic excitation that’s occurring It’s more like it seems to be occurring more at the level of the image in some sense than semantically but there does seem to be this red broadening of creativity that and The analog might be there that excitability is that any given idea is more likely to activate a set of associated ideas Yeah, there is some evidence in this direction of things like category mixing binocular rivalry paradigms you have mixed percepts occur more often under psychedelic psychedelics also when looking at spreading semantic activation There’s evidence that the semantic network is is broader under the psychedelic so While people might not be able to articulate themselves very well They the this the semantics in terms of meaning is is certainly very rich It is well you get this permanent effect to that Roland Griffiths detected right so in his psilocybin Experiencing participants the ones that reported a mystical experience showed a one standard deviation Increase in trait openness, which is the creativity trait one year later That’s a walloping effect for a single dose You know it also makes you know, I read that and I thought wow, that’s amazing but it also made me sort of leery because it does indicate a Permanent transformation. It looks like a permanent transformation in personality and in neurological function Now you might think well wouldn’t hurt everybody to be moved one standard deviation up on the creativity scale but you’d only say that if you assume that creativity was a Benefit without a cost and I’ve never seen a benefit without a cost So, you know one of the things I’m wondering for example, if you’re if you’re higher in neuroticism To begin with is an increment in openness a plus or a negative because I’ve known Really open Highly neurotic people and one of the problems with that personality Constellation is that they often saw the branches off that they’re sitting on right because their ideas are so They can’t get a grip on anything stable because they’re so mutable in their cognition And that seems to drive a certain degree of negative emotion, right? Because they’re always they can’t settle on any identity for example And so they destabilize themselves and like I don’t know if We’ve you know, we’ve looked for pathologies associated with creativity for a long time and manic depressive disorder seems at least At least in principle to be associated. There’s not a lot of evidence for the pathology of creativity, but like I said You know, you don’t often get a benefit without a cost. Yes. Yes it I imagine Openness sort of tops out into Openness sort of tops out into On other personality scales like I think it’s the isink one it would probably be called psychoticism And you know And also trait schizotypy is maybe right right crossing over with uh with extreme extreme openness Yeah, well you get a false positive problem, right? Because the thing about creative people is they’re pretty good at identifying patterns in sparse data But the problem with identifying patterns in sparse data is sometimes you see things that aren’t there Apophenia, yeah Yes, and and I think that’s one of the limitations one of the things to watch out for one of the pitfalls of of psychedelic use and maybe psychedelic therapy is seeing things that aren’t there or Yeah In a sense look being too zealous in one’s learning from the data that’s allowed to come up Yeah, well I talked to dennis McKenna, yeah Yeah, yeah And and so they were the brothers who established the protocols for domestication of Soicide and mushrooms right and dennis and his brother terrence who’s the more famous mckenna? They went to mexico. I did a podcast with him just a couple of weeks ago They went to I think it was mexico decades ago and ate a lot of psilocybin mushrooms in a couple of months and it The experience gripped terrence in a way that never really let him go From what dennis relates and terrence developed these some of his ideas are very interesting, but some of them were quite Baroque and strange and Dennis told me that you know those ideas some of them had to do with Alien possession for example because it’s not that uncommon for people having a psychedelic experience to have experiences that are akin to alien abduction experiences the kind of thing john mack reported and It wasn’t obvious. It seemed that dennis had concluded that some of these ideas had gripped terrence for decades in a way that Produced a different kind of canal ization right they knocked him out of his normal perception, but they knocked him into a new state where he saw patterns that he then pursued literally for decades that Turned out likely to be both false and counterproductive. Yes, so Yes, well Whereas the practitioners of health would say things like hold it all lightly in a sense. Don’t believe anything, you know Uh like the buddha said Question everything and test test it all yourself. Don’t take anything on faith in a sense There is this other thing that can happen where you take something like an intense dmt experience where it feels like you’ve encountered another Dimension altogether that’s populated by seemingly sentient beings and you come back from that Compelling experience deeply immersive experience and you come back from it and think I didn’t know I didn’t know that that other world actually exists and i’ve experienced it now kind of solipsistic reasoning And it is a bit like, you know a kind of apophenia trap you’re like, oh well, i’ve experienced it I’ve seen it now. I know it’s real right well and i’ve seen it with emotional punch Right, it’s not merely the perception. It’s the perception See this is this also happens to people i’ve tried to understand the phenomenology of Paranoid schizophrenia. So here’s what happens to someone who’s paranoid. So imagine they’re watching the tv Maybe the pope’s on and all of a sudden what the pope is saying is hyper meaningful So it seems like one of those experiences maybe it’s because the person is stressed that Their a priori perceptions are no longer filtering their current perception And so now all of a sudden the pope’s message is hyper meaningful And it manifests itself emotionally. They can’t look away and they feel it’s as if he’s talking directly to me It’s the only way they can explain it now more intelligent people are more likely to become paranoid if they become schizophrenic So the first thing that happens is they have an aberrant experience and the experience might be Well, it was like the pope was talking to me and maybe that’s not even enough to get them going Maybe that has to happen three or four times with different news media and maybe it’s Only when a certain topic is being discussed Right, and so then they conclude the only way to account for this intensification of emotional experience Is that I am being specifically targeted that I have some cosmic destiny. Let’s say something like that It’s the only thing that makes sense out of the emotional experience and then having established that as an axiom They build a whole paranoid belief system on top of it and the thing about talking to someone who’s paranoid schizophrenic is that within the Delusional axiomatic system. They’re pretty rigorous But the axioms are something like oh i’m absolutely sure the pope spoke to me when he was on tv And you can’t shake that right that becomes That becomes the axis around the which the whole world turns and it seems to be instantiated in them because of the intensity of the emotional Experience when that Message was received. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Shatish Kapoor is called the aberrant salience like the right, right the salience which He and others would relate to dopaminergic functioning, you know, there’s a Hypersensitivity of the muscle limbic dopamine system and that’s encoding The excessive salience with which you’re imbuing certain experiences and so in a sense the It’s feeding a heavy in learning actually, you know an associative learning um And no, well pope is speaking if it is if it is if it is dopaminergic too I mean the dopamine system produces that sense of reward so that would be real like engrossed engagement but the dopamine system also produces reinforcement so it sort of backtracks the Neural patterns of activation that occur just before the reward and it strengthens them so not only would you get that sense of grip Because the message say is being delivered to you but along with that dopaminergic Hyperproduction would become an increased probability that those Neural systems are in fact reinforced in their development by the very experience. Yes. Well, it’s confidence, you know When you’re I get it now. I get it now. Yeah, you know it right it comes with a feeling of This this you know slanted in a positively valence way. It feels good to know it feels good to be confident And typically it’s difficult to be the opposite of confident to be swimming in uncertainty Yeah Yeah. Yeah. Well, right, right exactly. Well that that also accounts for the attraction of certainty, right? Is that When you’re certain of something well, this is relevant to your model If you’re certain of something you dispense with what would be excess entropy like the entropy is all the doubts What could be this could be this could be this it could be this could be this I mean that’s There’s play there, but it’s well I think part of the distinction there too is that’s the involuntary play right when you’re plagued by doubts You’re not playing it’s your subject to them It’s different than sitting there contemplating different possibilities sort of at your own rate It’s a very different thing to be visited by an intense barrage of doubt And that’s no one enjoys that and and that might again be the difference between neuroticism and creativity, right because a neurotic person who’s Like obsessing about doubt is contemplating a whole set of ideas right, but So you think well, what’s the difference between that and creative play and A huge part of it does seem to be the distinction between voluntary and involuntary You know one of the things you do for people who are obsessive is you say Well, you know You’re disgusted by this thing you’re looking at and then that thought comes and visits you Involuntarily before you go to sleep at night bring that thought to mind Voluntarily and play with it. And if they do that religiously, let’s say that’ll often decrease the intensity of the thoughts so whether you You have the thoughts in the spirit of challenge or whether they’re being forced upon you Also seems to be an indication of whether you’re playing creatively or if you’re subject to something like neurotic overload and stress Yeah when we think of You know certain so-called third wave psychotherapies like mindfulness based cognitive therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy I guess there is a promotion of a ability to sit with Difficult feelings to almost play with them, you know some of the acceptance and commitment therapy techniques involve play like, you know you have a arachnophobia and and you’ll You’ll wear a toy spider around your neck. I guess that’s exposure therapy, but you know or You have a negative cognitive bias in depression thinking you’re worthless and you’ll wear a sign that says I’m worthless And the fact that it’s there all the time becomes like comedic and it loses its punch because It’s out there and it’s silly rather than it’s in here and getting chewed over. You’re also you’re also Reversing the predator prey relationship in some sense, right if you’re afraid of spiders But you’re wearing one you’re now bigger than your fear No, and if and so and so you’ve you’ve you’ve even though you still might be afraid you you’re also Allowing that part of you that can transcend the fear to become the part that you’re identifying with And and you do that constantly in psychotherapy is to and you know One of the one of the constant findings with regard to exposure therapy is it’s not so much that people get less afraid It’s that they get braver and the distinction there is really important because it turns out that if you expose a person Voluntarily to one thing they’re afraid of They become less afraid of classes of things, you know the psych the psychoanalysts when they went after the behaviorists for Exposure therapy. They said you’ll get symptom substitution You know you train someone who’s agoraphobic to get in an elevator. They’ll still be afraid of death but it turns out that if you train them to Expose themselves to the elevator. They are simultaneously exposing themselves to the fear of death And they actually become braver across context as a consequence of the single exposures and there is something in that that’s That’s play, you know with my clients. I always I always used to play with them. It’s like, okay There’s the elevator. You don’t want to look at it. Can you look at it from 30 feet away? No, well, how about 40 feet? How about 200 feet like you’d find a place where they could play That was right on the edge of their fear, right? And then and so there was play right on the edge of fear And then maybe you could get the person 40 feet away say well Will you look at the elevator for like just glance at it? Will you look at it for 10 seconds? No Will you glance at it? Yes. Can you glance at it for two seconds? Yes, you just push that Horizon of play and you do that sequentially across sessions and that seems to work Well, it’s sort of like how people learn everything right because you learn on the edge And the edge is where the play edge is where the serious play takes place Yeah, so what are you working on now? You’ve got this paper you sent me that it’s coming out I presume at some point in the future. It was a pre-print. Yeah, what it what’s that? What’s out the horizon of your investigations at the moment? What are you what are you contemplating? Well, I do quite a lot of brain imaging work Trying to better understand What is the psychedelic experience in the brain? How’s it encoded in in brain activity? And bodily activity. It’s easy to be too brain centric, but it does seem to be a very important organ for experience So there’s that so i’m doing i’m planning an extensive intensive brain imaging study of the psilocybin experience uh People will have repeat sessions with the psychedelic Four separate dosing sessions with psilocybin Including quite high dose sessions and the majority of the session will actually be spent in a mri scanner And so this hasn’t been done before we’ve done, you know 10 minutes at the most really Of what we call a resting state run you close your eyes the scanner runs and we collect some data and then make some mappings to Subjective ratings, but what i’m trying to do now is to be a bit more involved with the Experience sampling so the the sampling of your experience with uh more regular subjective ratings But in order to do that and not contaminate the data with asking people to do ratings You need a lot of repeats. You need a lot of data So this is why we have to dose people. It’s actually four times and have them go into the scanner um for Three more or less hour-long sessions under drug Wow, how do you keep the experience positive for them when you’re doing that? Because that it’s pretty clinical environment generally to have people in an mri and of course set and setting is so important to to the facilitation of a Psychotherapeutic psychedelic experience. How do you how do you manage that with the mri? Yeah Well, it’s surprisingly well tolerated because it’s it’s it’s actually quite unsurprising as an environment And we will have a pre-dose scan Where people will acclimatize? um And so that initial habituation to being in an unusual environment that is very loud and And when the first you know tone of the scanner begins It can be quite jarring but that’s being repeated all the time for a long period of time. So you very quickly Habituate to that initial shock and then it becomes actually very reliable There’s not nothing, you know new entering your visual field apart from what’s playing out in your mind’s eye with eyes closed So it’s quite a stable environment and you know, you can you can go very deep And we this isn’t a clinical trial. We won’t be recruiting people with say depression for this study These will be people who you know meet criteria for being healthy um, right and uh, and we’ll also have had previous experience with psychedelics and that’s a safety consideration here So we are trying to go deep. It is a sort of Psychonauts, um You know dream in a sense Uh study like this. Yeah So what what are you what are you hypothesizing? What what what’s known already about brain activation during psychedelic experiences? And how will you extend that? What are you what are you expecting to learn? Yeah, well this entropic brain principle is something I introduced Close to 10 years ago now, which is a very simple principle that says that the the entropy or the unpredictability of spontaneous brain activity increases during the psychedelic experience and the magnitude of that increase in brain entropy correlates with the uh increase in the richness of conscious experience the richness of right, okay, uh, phenomenal consciousness Okay. So so so okay. So let’s let me ask you about that. So there’s this emerging idea I suppose it’s a couple of decades old, but it’s been elaborated more recently that Consciousness exists on the border between order and chaos right and that and and your proposition there is that if you add more If you add a richer activity set Entropically that the field of consciousness or the breadth or the depth of consciousness actually increases so What what do you what do you make of ideas that? Consciousness whatever it exists exists on the border between order and chaos and what do you think it means? Ontologically for consciousness itself to expand as brain entropy increases Yeah Well, it’s the psychedelic experience in terms of what it’s like to be in that state That that model is there in the entropic brain model as well that says that consciousness Exists at so-called criticality, you know that critical point Between uh, you know the extreme poles of extreme order like a frozen system or An extremely, you know random system like a gas, you know, there’s some kind of critical Point at which you get certain properties uh of organization things like hierarchical organization um long-range correlations or Freer information flow throughout the system And information transfer across scales as well to like fractal organization Um, so why does that why does the hierarchical organization and the fractal organization emerge at criticality? How are those related? Yeah Do we know? I imagine some people know and it’s probably to do with efficiency. Um It’ll I imagine it’s to do with an efficient information Transfer Um, it doesn’t happen so well in a frozen system because things don’t go very far. There aren’t sufficient dynamics And then maybe in a gas Things are just too loose. There’s no integration. So so there’s a sweet spot So you get so that’s it. So it’s so the claim is something like that at That border between chaos and order hierarchical organization Well structured hierarchical organization is likely to emerge Yeah, and I guess it does say that hierarchy and nature serves some kind of you know efficient Um function, um some adaptive functions. It’s useful. So You know in the in the genesis chapter That’s essentially that’s essentially the model that’s being pointed at so What you have is the the proposition that the divine word is the creative agent is something like the idea that The order that is good emerges out of the dynamic interplay between order and chaos so the process of dynamically Intermediating between order and chaos is something like the word And the word in the genesis chapter is specified as that which generates the habitable order that is good That’s the proposition then there’s a meta proposition that emerges out of that which is that The spirit of man and woman is made in that image That’s the fundamental axiomatic Proposition that the narrative is putting forward. It’s very interesting to me that that’s true at the mythological and narrative level and that it’s Increasingly mapped out at the neurological level using language. That’s actually quite similar, right the chaos so the Tohu vabohu is what the spirit of god contends with at the beginning of time and tohu vab Vabohu i’m probably not saying it right, but it’s also taalm Which is a derivation of the word tayamat which is mesopotamian and it’s the dragon that marduk carves up at the beginning of time to make the world and so it’s It’s like this place where what’s predatory is encountered and mastered That’s all hidden in the symbolic complexity of that initial story But the fundamental idea is that there’s an eternal process that operates at the border between chaos and order And if it’s operating optimally it generates the order that’s good. That’s the days of creation So it’s very much analogous to this idea that the hierarchical structure emerges out of this interplay between chaos and order There is this other curious angle here, you know if psychedelics can increase properties of criticality signatures of criticality like fractal organization long-range correlations There’s things like critical slowing which means that the system doesn’t recover very quickly it recovers slowly from a perturbation That perturbation sort of reverberates through the system more easily It’s a more sensitive system when the system’s at criticality anyway all of those properties if psychedelics increase those The strength of those signatures of criticality then that implies that normal waking consciousness is poised At what I understand. I hope I get this right would be a subcritical regime towards order Towards that frozen system, you know, it’s close to criticality But it’s not quite there and you can dial it up further and see stronger signatures of criticality I wonder why it would I wonder if it would be biased somewhat towards order for purposes of efficiency Do you suppose maybe for mastery? Maybe for mastery, you know, I I wonder right for ease of mastery, right? Because well if you can implement automatized routines, it’s it’s less energy demanding Right, but the price you’d pay for that is that you would be learning as quickly But the advantage would be that you’re doing what you already know how to do in a manner that doesn’t require a lot of energy output Yeah, I think of it again a little bit like civilization and its discontents, you know, like we Started to control The critical world, you know that that Was organized is organized in in its you know, beautiful rich and diverse and fractal way but we started to you know manage our our food source and And structure our world in a particular way and now it’s you know, it’s got ridiculous how how we’ve done that And I imagine and actually there’s a bit of curious Neuroimaging data that suggests that certain properties of brain activity that are Suggestive of subcriticality or too much order like the alpha rhythm It’s a very dominant rhythm in the human brain in the adult human brain. It’s lower in infants Increases as you go up to adulthood and actually it’s also maximal in humans relative to other species So it’s like an adult human rhythm and if you look at the sort of prominence of different rhythms in brain activity It’s the main one, you know, it’s a big peak in the alpha range But this curious study was done in in india looking at different people either sort of living more You know at one with nature or people living in dense urban environments and those who lived in the dense urban environments had stronger algorithms and for me that was suggested people who were kind of Have become kind of divorced from the criticality of nature. Yeah, they’re more catalyzed right right right two ordered Yeah, well the urban environment actually lends itself to that because a lot of the things that we Build are structured so that we only have to glance at them to know what they are Right, so they’re like a lot of our design technologies are aids to catalyzation think about the shiny outside surface of a car I mean some of that’s for aerodynamic efficiency, but a lot of it is so you can just categorize it at a glance All the complexity is hidden. Yes, exactly. And so the whole urban this is especially true in modernist urban environments Everything is smooth and one pixel Right and the advantage to that is well, you don’t have to pay any attention to it But the disadvantage of it is it’s pretty it’s desert like in terms of its richness Right much different than the surface of a tree or a plant say quite. Yeah, it’s mind numbing. Yeah, and Maybe one of the reasons why urban environments are associated with worse mental health Right, right. Right. Yeah. Well, there’s there is some indication of that and that actually it’s the deprivation Of the fractal structure of the surfaces that’s associated with that. Yes, we need to you know, we need to come home To nature and see that practicality to see that richness to be reminded of our of our Origin in a sense. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well that that ties us back to the beginning of the conversation All right. Well, we should stop this part of the conversation And we’ll proceed for those of you watching and listening I always talk to my guests for another half an hour on the dailywire plus platform That’s an addition not a subtraction by the way, because I wasn’t doing that before and so Those of you who are interested i’m going to talk to dr Carhartt harris to robin about the development of his interest in the In the psychological the phenomenological and the psychedelic i’m very interested in how people’s interests make themselves manifest and what? beckons to them, let’s say Hello everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com