“One of the things which excites me most about psychedelics is yes, there is a treatment here–but they’re also rather intriguing probes to comprehend the brain,” he said.
The default mode network is a group of structures within the brain which link the cortex into the regions involved with memory, emotion, and other inwardly-focused believing, such as self-reflection. The default mode system is least active when you are focused on a job, and many active when you’re at rest without any external stimulation –that is when you start to daydream, recall things about the past, envision things about the near future, and mimic or replay your interactions with different people.
There may be modes of communication happening in the brain that we do not know about yet; Pollan mentioned a 2018 research in which a hippocampus–that the brain area associated with memory–was sliced in half, and neurons on each side may still interact with no direct contact.
The positive and lasting effect of psychedelics, he explained, is that the adventure of ego dissolution. It’s our egos–our sense of ourselves–that write and enforce narratives. “The ego builds walls. It isolates us from different people, it frees us from nature, it’s defensive,” Pollan said. “And when you bring down those walls in the mind, there’s less of a distinction between you and that other, whether or not other people in your life or the natural universe or the world.
As our prosperity climbs, our psychological health is on the decline–and quick. Rates of other ailments, suicide, anxiety, addiction, and depression have skyrocketed in recent years, and no one knows what to do about it.
Moving Forward
But mental health has essentially been in a standstill because the debut of the antidepressants called SSRIs from the 1980s.
“It’s really important to be humble in anything we say about the mind,” Pollan said.
Pollan believes psilocybin and MDMA may be approved within five years; the FDA has given breakthrough treatment status to the two, which means they assist researchers design trials that will move the drugs to acceptance. MDMA is already in Phase 3 trials.
“[Psychiatrist] Stanislav Grof wrote that psychedelics would be for the study of the brain precisely what the telescope was for astronomy or the microscope for math. Now that is an adventurous claim–but I no longer think it is mad.”
Maintaining Them Changed
“It is not a just psychopharmacological effect they’re having, it actually is the encounter,” Pollan said. “It is kind of like a reverse trauma. A lot of men and women who undergo this treatment say it is among the two or three largest experiences of their own lives.”
Pollan shared heard about their effects. “They have been paralyzed with fear of death, and they had these transformative encounters that in many cases completely removed their anxiety. This was the most astounding thing,” he explained.
Though the experience might last just a couple of hours, people frequently feel that the penetration or epiphany they have isn’t just a subjective opinion or idea, but a deeper revealed truth; the mind can be flashed in a means that would take years of sessions with traditional therapists or psychiatrists. Just as a single injury can put your head on a path that is new , perhaps permanently, a single mystical experience may be in a position to do the same.
“When they image the brains of individuals on psychedelics they expected to see a lot of action, but they were surprised to see that the default mode system was suppressed, with significantly less blood circulation and not as much energy moving for this,” Pollan said. “If the ego has an address in the mind it is somewhere in this network. And this is the region that gets silent”
“LSD encourages people to question all kinds of frameworks in their own lives, and may have contributed to this,” Pollan said. “It was a very threatening drug.” Nixon believed so, and because of this he began his war. Psychedelics research ground to a stop, and the drugs stopped as having any medical possibility, being taken seriously.
The anti-establishment subculture and psychedelics adopted. But in 1965–the year that the US deployed troops the media and the government started demonizing the drugs. They were labeled as immoral, and tales abounded about people having bad trips, end up in psych wards, or staring at the sun until they moved blind (the first two didn’t occur, but the final has been made up).
“I believe we will figure it out, but it is a whole new arrangement, a completely new paradigm, and that will take a little while,” Pollan said. After all of his research, however , he for one is exceptionally optimistic.
If it seems surprising that distinct disorders could be treated by one type of drug, consider their common link: they involve repetitive loops and harmful narratives. The section of the mind where this happens –known as the default style network–is the component of the brain psychedelics influence, in the sense that the medication quiet the system, thereby providing users an opportunity to escape destructive patterns of thought.
For most of history, he clarified, young men sent to war to defend their country just went–they did not ask questions. But unexpectedly, young American men were asking questions–large ones, such as”Is this a just war?” And”Is this something I want to fight for?”
Notice: A video of the entire session, well worth watching, is available here.
The medications have shown promise for alleviating a host of other ailments, including depression, anxiety, and addiction. Psilocybin is being used (“with striking success,” as Pollan place it) in an analysis of smokers at Johns Hopkins and a study of alcoholics in NYU, and has potential to deal with eating disorders too.
“The mind has certain moments where right angle turns occur, and perhaps it can happen in a positive manner in addition to a negative manner,” Pollan said.
The largest bottleneck is funding. The studies are expensive and controversial, and the National Institute of Mental Health has a minuscule budget compared to the National Institute of Health. Thus far, psychedelics research has been privately funded.
“It isn’t a right-left issue, particularly in regards to treating soldiers with PTSD,” Pollan said. However, there is the issue of how to integrate the medication into health as it is currently practiced by us. The industry is not interested in a drug people should take once. Therapists would need extensive training before being in a position to administer psychedelics, if this shifted.
In a fascinating talk with The 4-Hour Workweek writer Tim Ferris at South By Southwest earlier this month, Pollan shared insights from his research and his personal adventures.
Some History
It was their association with counterculture, Pollan clarified , that finally caused psychedelics’ decline as a tool. From the time the public heard in the 60s about the drugs, researchers in Europe and the US had been analyzing them and using them to deal with ailments like depression and addiction, with positive results. “The standards for scientific medication research then were different,” Pollan said. “The double-blind placebo controlled trial didn’t exist until 1962.”
Until today, that is.
Input psychedelics: LSD, magic mushrooms, mescaline drugs you would expect to find on your psychologist’s office, maybe not at a music festival or a rave. But that might be about to change, as research in psychedelics shows their possibility of treating conditions that are psychological.
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The word’psychedelics’ was coined in 1957 by psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. It combines the words to mind (mind ) and manifest (delic, from the Greek dēlos). “It’s vague in a way, but it’s indicating that these medications bring the brain into form of an observable space,” Pollan said. “I tried in my novel to rescue the term from all the encrustation of 60s Day-Glo acid stone and see if we could recover it, since it means the ideal thing.”
If what occurs during usage is a temporary rewiring of the mind –the compounds are out of the brain within four to eight hours–why is it that using the medication has an enduring effect on so many people?
Formerly called a food and nutrition expert thanks to publications like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, author Michael Pollan switched tracks a little due to his latest project. His latest publication, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, alcoholism, depression, and Transcendence, published last year, was an integral part of de-stigmatizing the psychedelics conversation.
Although we don’t know this much, we don’t know a lot more, about either how the brain works or how psychedelics operate. “Our understanding of the mind is actually crude,” Pollan said. “We all know psychedelic drugs bind dopamine into a receptor, and then there’s a cascade of effects resulting in synesthesia.” What occurs during that cascade? No idea.
To go in their present classification as Schedule 1 drugs–high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use–to becoming approved as a medicine, psychedelics will need to go through the standard three-phase FDA approval process: first a open-label, no-placebo pilot research, followed with a placebo-controlled trial, then a larger placebo-controlled trial.