What if one experience could make you lose your sense of self, forget time, and feel deeply connected to everything around you?
Experts Jamie Wheal, Matthew Johnson, PhD, and James Fadiman, PhD, give us a deeper look at psychedelic medicine, exploring how substances like psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca change the way we see ourselves and the world. Used carefully, they can bring insight and unity. However, without support, they can be overwhelming and reveal just how fragile our sense of reality can be. These researchers explain the difference.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
JAMES FADIMAN: It is the natural evolution of consciousness to expand.
MATTHEW JOHNSON: What psychedelic means from its linguistic roots is “mind manifesting.” You could have a euphoric experience, you could have a hellish experience.
JAMIE WHEAL: People in the past historically have assigned this to the gods, to the muses, to fate, to possession. This is just too much. This is too cool. It's too inspired, it's too informed to possibly be me.
JAMES FADIMAN: One of the fundamentals that we all have is a sense of identity — kind of, who lives in this box. With psychedelics, what you realize is that, in some sense, you also are outside this box, and to transcend those limits shifts forever the way in which you see the world.
MATTHEW JOHNSON: “Psychedelic” can be used to refer to what are called the classic psychedelic compounds: psilocybin, which is in magic mushrooms; LSD; DMT, which is in ayahuasca; mescaline, which is in peyote.
They affect a particular type of serotonin receptor called the serotonin 2A receptor, and that's their primary mechanism of action.
But then you have other drugs. So for example, MDMA will work by releasing serotonin — that's a different mechanism. And ketamine and PCP, they affect the glutamate system in the brain primarily rather than the serotonin system.
So what does “psychedelic” mean then if it refers to multiple pharmacological classes of drugs that work in different ways? The answer for me is that these are all drugs that can have a profound effect on one's sense of reality, including one's sense of self.
JAMIE WHEAL: Because of the neurobiology, there are four qualities that tend to arise pretty consistently in those non-ordinary or altered states.
Selflessness tends to happen because the areas of our brain — specifically the prefrontal cortex, but including additional networks that connect — often turn off or completely light up. Either way, they knock out our everyday waking sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness.
Timelessness happens for a similar reason: as different parts of our brain light up and turn off, our ability to calculate time gets knocked out, and we get absolutely sucked into the immediate present moment, so a feeling of timelessness comes with it.
The effortlessness — and it's literally in the almost biblical sense, “not my will, but thy will.” When I knock out my self-consciousness, when I'm not in the past or the future, I'm just in the present moment, when I am effortlessly being propelled — the next thing that consistently seems to happen is the richness.
We have access to far more information than we do in our regular waking state. It can be: I feel myself swept along, and it feels awesome. Or it's terrifying, but I don't have a choice.
JAMES FADIMAN: Psychedelics not used carefully are dangerous. Most things not used carefully can be dangerous. The problem for psychedelics is because the expansion is so strong, if you have no support or no background or no understanding, it's terrifying.
Transpersonal psychology is a framework which allows you to get a larger view. It includes all of awareness, all of consciousness, all human experience, and it looks around for what are the tools.
Meditation is a tool. Psychedelics are a different kind of tool for opening up the closed box of awareness.
After a psychedelic experience, you are not only more open, but you are questioning very fundamental beliefs that you have had without any particular knowledge.
Integration is a method of dealing with the overflow of information that happens during and after a psychedelic experience. That time is a very fluid time where the brain is still communicating more than usual, and it's a good time where someone can help you move from confusion to clarity.
Central experience that we all strive for is to be unified and connected to a larger reality than ourselves — to feel that you are part of, for instance, humanity, or you're part of the living fabric of the Earth.
MATTHEW JOHNSON: It's not just about hitting a certain type of serotonin receptor in the brain. There's something about the psychology of the experience that unfolds during that session that tends to be important.
JAMIE WHEAL: You've assigned it supernatural origins, but in reality it's just us in an optimated state.
JAMES FADIMAN: That's perhaps the goal of transpersonal psychology, and it is the experience of psychedelics that things will never be the same afterwards, because my universe has actually opened wider.
