Very basic overview how the brain works as a whole and I’ll be sharing with you in theory that that’s been developed over almost a century. Now of that, in its moderate Incarnation, it’s called the predictive processing model of foreign. But the idea that the brain makes guesses about environment is not new so about a hundred years old.

So, to begin. I should mention this disclaimer, so I’m sharing these things as a private citizen, and they do not reflect the views of my employer, which is the National Institute City Festival. Okay, I want to make that very clear. So, to begin, what are psychedelics? Well, psychedelics are drugs.

Which are substances that we consume that affect the body. Some psychedelics come from plunging like LSD and psilocybin. And others come from plants, like mescaline and Ayahuasca. Still, others are made from chemicals like methylbean dioxin methamphetamine, or ndmh also known as modeling. Psychedelics can also be described as rolling.

Ripids described in 2006. The psychological effects of psilocybin which are similar to other classical hallucinogens include significant alterations in perceptual, cognitive affecting volitional and sometimes somatosensory function including visual and auditory sensory changes difficulty, thinking mood fluctuations and dissociative phenomena, Griffiths was a pioneering researcher who led the Psychedelics laboratory in Johns Hopkins University for many years.

This cold definition relies, the extraordinary contribution that he made to the field of psychedelic research, including the research, some of the research that I’ll share with you. Another way to describe psychedelics is as tools. So psychedelics can also be described as tools, that hold promise for our mental health and well-being, quite sure like emerging research suggests they can’t hear you come back, one sec.

I have to put a speed or not. How’s this? Still. Okay, we’ll just have to work with it. Not really. Okay? So tools are psychedelics. Can also be described as tourism. Who promise for our mental health and well-being, in short emerging research, suggests that psychedelics can be powerful antidepressants.

And a useful tool to drink addiction. And post-traumatic stress disorder. To convey why many health professionals are so excited about psychedelics? I’m going to share with some research findings with me. But first, I want to provide another description of psychedelics. With this gravel. So, this graph is easy enough to understand.

The x-axis represents the fraction of volunteers who after having had a psychedelic experience with psilocybin endorse one of the following phrases? That’s on the y-axis. That’s much better. The question was, how personally meaningful was the Psychedelic experience? You can see that the black bars represent subjects, who received the active included, magic mushrooms, also called suicidal, and the hash bars.

Represent those subjects that received a control substance methylphenidate. The subjects again, were asked to endorse one of these statements And you can see that those who receive suicidal describes it, as being one of the most, the top five, most personally, meaningful experiences in their entire life. And when they’re asked to identify other personally, meaningful experiences, those participants say, things like the birth of their child or the death of the parent.

These data suggest that suicidal and other psychedelics in general, can do something that no other psychoactive drug can do, which is to help users create new ideas and insights to help them make new. Meaning all while eerily laying on a sofa wearing eye mask and this vintage gentle music So I would at this point ask you to think about something that’s been very personal and meaningful for you and reflect on that as being analogous in some way equivalent to what these participants experience.

The next way, another way to describe psychedelics is with a scientific tool that’s been developed to study. The experience is called the mystical experience checklist and I’ve provided just a few examples of items from this checklist. Researchers use this checklist to determine whether somebody had a psychedelic experience. They’re asked to answer yes or no to the following to the following questions.

Do you have a sense of reference was there an awareness of the light and living presence in all things? Was there a feeling that you experienced something? Profoundly sacred and holy. Experience of Oneness or Unity with objects or persons. Was there a feeling that you’ve experienced eternity or Infinity?

And so on, this is just a small sample of the entire checklist. And when participants basically researchers, add up, the number of times that they say yes to one of these things and a higher number gives the greater confidence that the participant have a psychedelic experience. So hopefully these items convey some degree of what it is like to personally have or to to take to take a psychedelic drop.

So, in addition to the revelatory and transformational effects that psychedelic drugs can have They are also being studied to look at a variety of mental health conditions, as I said before, including depression, substance, use disorder, anxiety and PTSD. So the purpose of my talk today is to share some of those findings with you.

And awkward theory as to how they work to alter Consciousness. I’ll begin with studies that have examined. The effects of psilocybin, which again, is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as well as of MDMA, which we know and also, as Mali ecstasy So this study examined the effect of psilocybin on patients with severe clinically severe depression.

Uh, the patient’s depression was measured with a well-established scale. And there are those patients would then randomly assigned to receive either suicide in or placebo. The placebo in this piece was niacin which is a well-known vitamin. The y-axis shows, the depression score at Baseline before anybody took a drone.

Everyone’s score was normalized to zero. And then the effect of the substance on depression was then graphed, okay, so the effect on depression is shown in the y-axis and time is shown in days, notice that the x-axis goes out to 43 days. So you can see that psilocybin. Dramatic effect on people’s depression.

This is just a single dose given here that lasted for 43 days, notice? The placebo effect, of course, as well, but the effect of psilocybin was significantly greater than that. With this. What is that? I don’t remember what the dose was, but it was, I’m sure a psychologically effective noticeable, psychedelic experience and I I appreciate you asking your question.

I invite anyone else who like clarification of what I’m saying to raise their hand and ask a question, we’re just cleared about white vehicles. That’s okay so sorry for the study, I’m sorry. Just uh They establish statistical significance with their sample. You’ll see also the journal, I’m afraid, it’s come up with it but I’ve provided the journal uh for all these days.

Yes. Was this actual like psilocybin? Mushroom or was it right? You know, this is precipitous okay. So it was synthesized form of suicide. Okay, the next study is graft in a similar way. Again, these are patients with severe depression. Everyone’s depression is measured with a well-established scale. And the scores would normalize to zero and the change from that store was then plot is what’s been applied here.

Projects were provided with one of three different doses of psilocybin. And you can see that here. There was a strong effect on depression. This is the change of depression score. Symptoms dependent effect as well with a 2. A 25 milligram dose in the graves. To the ends of providing the consistent.

Also, the x-axis goes out to three months. So, a single dose provided, a durable reduction, in depression, in these patients, Okay, next is a study that looked at the effect of two doses of psilocybin spaced fairly closely together on alcohol. Use disorder alcoholism. In this case, all of the subjects were received intensive segular America.

We’re then assigned to receive suicidal as well as physical therapy. The y-axis shows, the percent of heavy drinking days, help the participants, So you can see that therapy alone as well as psilocybin led to a pretty strong rejection in the number of heavy drinking waves but the effect of psilocybin was statistically significantly greater than that of therapy alone.

Okay, finally This is a study that was conducted in part Emory University. This looked at post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. And as you may know, PTSD is a profoundly disabled condition. It causes severe anxiety, depression hyper vigilance insomnia and nightmares. And it is a common occurrence in veterans who’ve seen combat, as well as First Responders, and many other people.

Finding it effective treatment for PTSD would relieve the suffering of a lot of people. So in this study veterans with PTSD were given either Psychotherapy or Psychotherapy as well as an ndma, and they were given three doses of MDMA, spaced three months, apart With the grass represent is the percentage of people who didn’t respond to the treatment and those who showed a reduction.

Notice that we’re no longer diagnosable, it’s having PTSD. And in the darkest bars, those who were to find as being in remission from PTSD. And you can see the graph on the left to notice that you see And those on the right, we notice that we see and DNA, as well as psychotherapy.

So these four studies illustrate, why people are so excited about the potential of psychedelics to improve people’s lives. There have been many others and while they’re not without their weaknesses and shortcomings, nothing in scientists, certain everything is provisioning. But nonetheless, I hope you’ll agree that these findings are quite promising.

So to begin to provide an answer to the question of, how do psychedelics affect the money. I’m going to tell you, as I just as I mentioned before a theory about perception. Which is our ability to consciously sense. Recognize and name things in the world. Things like people objects, animals plants, and so on.

Now y’all are continually perceiving the world around you. You can perceiving need of companions and other people through your senses. Now, despite the Press to begin this story, I want to point out something very important, which is that despite the perception of light in this room and your perception of sound, it’s actually dark inside your head.

There is no light in it, despite our perception of it. Wise too. It’s quite quiet in your skills despite the sound that you’re perceiving. So what this illustrates is, the idea that perception is generated by the brain, it is not a direct reflection of what’s out. There it is generated by the river.

So to explain this, I’ll be focusing on the visual system and how it gives rise to the images that we all have in our minds. So as I said before, to describe this Theory, I’ll give you a very superficial description of Neuroscience including how the sensory areas of the brain work.

So buckle your seat belts and rev up your imagination because I’m going to ask you to use your imagination to visualize some things that are both very, very small and very, very intricate. So to begin with have a look at this schematic of the human brain and the labels.

This shows the right hemisphere of the brain as if the owner were looking off in that direction. Now notice how the senses are found in different areas of the brain. For example, here, the back is the visual cortex. This is where we do our seed, all right. Here’s the auditory cortex.

And this is the primary somatosensory cortex which is responsible for a sense of touch. So here are three different senses that are located in three different parts of the brain, okay? Every sense that we have Vision hearing touch smell, proprioception interception, all are represented in different areas of the brain.

Also a Regal surface that you’re looking at. This is called the cerebral cortex. It’s only about two millimeters thick and it covers the surface of the cerebral. Hemisphere our perceptions of the external world depend upon the cerebral, cortex, and the function specific areas. Now here the primary visual cortex.

It’s responsible for the detection of very simple features of our environment things like luminance. Texture. Edges. Things like that. They’re very small bit of aperture of the word. But in the association cortex right next to it. The neurons, there are sensited into much more complex types of skin. For example, there are regions of the association cortex that are sensitive to classes of objects, like microphones and laser protons Likewise with people, the visual cortex has regions that are specialized for the recognition of people, as well as the presence of individuals, like your significant other, your neighbors, your friends.

Each one of those has a distinctive pattern of activity in your visual vertex. So there is a hierarchy of areas in the visual cortex that in the primary visual cortex initially. Small simple features are detective again like edges luminance and so forth. And in higher areas, though the association cortex we find areas that are sensitive to classes and individual types of objects.

Our organization is true. Every sensory area in our brain. It goes from simple to more complex. Now, next, I’d like to share with you another important feature of the visual system, which is that it has a map. The map is of the retina. Which is that two-dimensional or that sheet of cells at the back of our arm, So here, I’ve provided a schematic diagram of the eye, sort of something you all can would recognize.

Here’s the cornea, here’s the iris, the lens, this light entry eye, and Landing at the back at the spoken. It the phobia is a tiny little bit of the red but that’s where we do our most acute scene. Is a sheet of tissue that could be laid out on a table as a like a flat mapper.

Okay. This is a diagram of the revenue. The phobia is labeled. Okay. Again, it’s the smallest part of the retina and the author has created little labels. One, two, three, four. So you can appreciate the math that’s seen in this cerebral vertex. This is a picture of the grape.

And what this is showing is how the retina, this is the retina maps onto the cerebral cortex You’ll notice that. Areas one, two, three, four. Again, the fovea have a very large area proportionally. Speaking in the cerebral cortex. The next post. The next most, the outermost region labeled 5678 has a disproportionately smaller region of the cortex than pedicated to it.

And so on nonetheless this is a map in which there is a relationship, a spatial relationship between location on the on the retina and location in the visual Vortex. So this is a very important principle in Neuroscience. The sensory areas of map onto the brain, every sense is like this.

So just to take another example, consider the skin, the skin can be thought of as a sheet or tissue a two-dimensional sheet that also maps in a one-to-one bike. Ray onto the somatic sensory forces. Every one of our senses has this kind of work, okay? Now just as there are maps of surfaces that receive energy from the environment.

So too are there maps of the body itself. Our joints and our muscles. Each one of them has a map. For example, all of us are in a certain position right now as a certain posture that reflects the position of our joints is unique for each position. There is a map that represents the positions of all of those joints.

So too are muscles are all in a unique state of contraction. There is a map that represents that The activity of these Maps of the body, contribute to something that neuroscientists call a sense of embodiment. The idea that we have a body that persists through time, I’m going to talk for a mom about embodiment because it’s important to be subject of psychedelics.

Emotions also provide a sense of good body because emotions are accompanied with feelings, right? And you fall in love, when we’re angry. When we’re scared each of those emotions is accompanied by a feeling that zooms to arise from the body. These feelings, I would suggest contribute to that sense of embodiment as well.

So I’ve shown you that we have maps for all of our senses of the external blade and we have not to do a turtle world too. We think that a distributed Network in the middle of the brain, could be responsible for the integration of the maps, Max representing the outside as well as the incident.

Is called the default mode now, One piece of evidence for this, is that when subjects are asked to introspect about their feelings or introspect about themselves. Neuroscientists find that the default mode network is activated. So again, you think that this network integrates maps of an externability with massive initial Into the sense of having a body that senses the outside world.

Now, I would posit that Consciousness itself requires the sense of having a body. And this is what gives us our sense of self. Which you might describe as a persistent feeling of meanness that persists in time and space. The default mode, Network many believe contributes to this sense of self.

Connection to psychedelics is this? One of the most reliable, psychological effects of psychedelics. Is it something called ego loss or de-personalization? The writer Michael Pollan, describes it as if his self was, so diminished that it became almost two-dimensional. He said he felt as though, his self was sort of spread out over the surface of the room as like a thin layer of paint.

The connection is psychedelics, is this when Looked at in the fmri scanner subjects, who take psychedelics reliably show a reduction in the activity of the default movement. May reflect a correlation between a change in Consciousness at a loss of the sense of self and a change in your brain state, that seems to underlie them and that’s a real actual scientific advancement here.

So now, I’d like to return the original question about conscious perception and dive even more deeply into the brain itself into the neurons, and the connections between them. So, as I’ve emphasized, the cerebral cortex is the key site of conscious perception to begin to understand how the brain mediates, a visual perception.

Take a look at this illustration of the cellular constituents of the cerebral cortex, which is the neurons in their connections. If we were to cut a cross section of the brain and place it in front of us, it would look something like this. You can see the gray matter.

Here’s the two, the two millimeter thick cerebral cortex and the white matter beneath it. And if we were to look at this little bit of cerebral cortex microscopically. And we would see something like this illustration. This shows that neurons of the brain, the cell, the cellular, constituents of the grain, and the fact that they seem to be organized, and the fact that they are organized in the sixth labels, The cerebral protects is organized into six layers throughout its entire area.

Now, if we can zoom in, even further with the microscope to look more closely, we can see the shape of the neurons. This is an illustration of the few neurons in the brain and their connections. Are beautiful microscopic trees with long, elegant. Branches and these branches are called dendrites.

On the tendrites are specialized connections called synthesis. This illustration shows five modes. A green chance of yourself a pink primitive cell, large facet cell, and a double b337. Which is the process that extends from the neuron to make connections with other neurons. Neurons communicate with each other via axons and be a synapses.

A chemical language that’s called neurotransmitters. So if you’re a zoom, even further in to look at a Synonyms, Compares the, the presynaptic cell which is sending a message to the postsynaptic Center. This is the accent and here is the load up picture of this symbols. Produce, tiny electrical. Pulses that travel down the axon, And when they reached an axon terminal, they induced the release of neurotransmitter, which is a chemical message.

Simple messenger to uses across the Sims, where it binds to receptors on the post-synaptic cell. The binding of the receptor causes an electrical change in the postsynaptic neuron. And if that electrical change is great enough, that will cause the postsynaptic neuron to fire a signal of its own. The communication is electrically first then it’s chemical and then it’s electrical again in this way neurons communicate chemical to electrical and back again.

Now, one of the near the brain contains many neurotransmitters, but the one that’s Central to the story of psychedelics, is called serotonin serotonin functions. Just like this, it is released at the axon terminal and binds to Chapters on the other side, Okay. Now we’re going to zoom our mental microscope and zoom out a little bit.

And look, back again at the organization of the cerebral. Cortex, I’ve shown you this collection of neurons from axon. That’s making connections here. I want you to direct your attention to this. This is a picture of for an illustration of the cerebral cortex. And you can see the six layers Illustrated with Roman numerals, six through one.

The point of this is to tell you that, there’s yet another kind of unit of organization in this cerebral vortex, which is called a colicle The cerebral cortex. Not only has six layers, it has columns that tile the cortex everywhere. Everywhere. They look, you see these columns columns are like little computers in a way because they seem to have a standard connectivity in the window and they seem to take in information transform, it algorithm and spit it out and send it to the next column.

So there are like little computers that perform the same basic operation regardless of where they’re located. Okay, so now I told you this would be quick, we have a basic description of how the cerebral cortex is put together. There are six layers of millions and they’re interconnected with synapses.

There is a basic unit of organization called the column And in which the neurons are interconnected with each other, in our kind of stereotyped way. These columns are seen in every area. Now we also learned that there are sensory sheets like the retina that project or map onto distinct regions of the cerebral protects.

And finally, we’ve learned that each sense has a distinct location in the brain and that sensory processing is hierological from simple. Features up to more complex uh objects or unplugs like classes like objects and so on Like to take all of this Neuroscience and abstract it to an analogy of perception that I hope will help us make the leap from the squishy Neuroscience to something more conceptual.

Everybody use the visual analogy of a staircase to talk about perception. Okay, so this is going to be a kind of analogy of how perception might work. All right. So here’s the I, here’s the optic nerve and what I’m going to describe, is that intuitive, but wrong idea about the way perception might work.

So this might be thought of as the primary official protest. Then these are the association areas. Idea. Is that perception is one way. That information enters the brain and ascends the staircase so that we go for simple features the object recognition Concepts metacognition and so forth. Maybe perceptionist outside in.

This intuitive idea is actually wrong and it’s illogical too because if this were true it would make the question of who, or what is doing it receiving. To play a kind of Cartesian theater, unless there’s a little homunculus in the reunion of the screen of all these things. Over the anatomy tells a different story.

When If This Were true you would expect all of the axonal connections from the visual cortex to go in One Direction to the higher Association errorism. But in fact there are as many if not more that come back from the association areas back to the primary visual purpose. Can be centered areas is bi-directional, not one way.

So if the anatomy is bi-directional, what about function. Well this new Theory about perception says that prediction is as important as a sensory Impressions, this is the predicted processing model at a fundamental level. It says that the brain is trying to predict the pattern of its own sensory empathy.

Time, trying to minimize the discrepancy between the prediction and the actual pattern. So that could be illustrated with this staircase. Again, here are sensory Impressions and here are predictions that are coming back down. This gives rise to the same hierarchy, but It is within this Dynamic interaction between sensory Impressions and predictions about them that the recognition of objects and the formation of Concepts actually does arise.

So I’ve illustrated this idea with a simple picture. And this reflects the, the idea that I introduced earlier, which is that it’s dark inside of our hands, Perception must be generated. Okay. So here is the external normal. And here is the brain forming a model of the external void by virtue of its Dynamic, interaction between the prediction and sensory signals.

So now having introduced this conceptual model, I’m going to make it a little bit more realistic. With a very complicated schemale. So I’m going to take you through this. So recall, the staircase, we have sensory Impressions, going up and predictions, going down. Recall also that the cerebral cortex is composed of Commerce.

Portable power. And here are the cells within it. This is actually more anatomically realistic with the synaptic connections within and outside of the power. Here are the sensory inputs coming from primary visual cortex to the secondary visual cortex, the tertiary portion area circuit. The sensory inputs are being passed from column to column while at the same time predictions about those sensory inputs are descended It’s not that perception occurs by virtue of this Dynamic interaction between prediction and sense impression.

For moreover. There will always be a discrepancy between the centering input and the prediction and we could visualize that discrepancy as a number that varies between 0 and 1. It’s continuously variable. Greatest, trying to reduce this term, which is called a prediction error. And he does that by refining its prediction constantly with finding this prediction and it is fitness.

Dynamic interaction. That perceptuous thought to occur to give to to the rise. In fact, in fact, this Theory says that the content of our Consciousness, what we’re actually aware of is neither of an insensory Impressions at all or the prediction. It is actually the prediction error.

There, any significance to the center of Woodstore on the top of the college?

So as the brain tries to minimize the prediction error, this numerical term. It can cause Um it can it can apply different predictions to the same sensory impression and when this happens that can lead to a kind of perceptual flipping, And I’m going to show you what that looks like.

If anybody’s ever here, ever taken psychology 101 that they’re familiar with this object, or this image, this is the duck rabbit. Dana is from the psychology textbooks. It is a duck war rather but it can never be both. Think that this is occurring because the prediction is trying to establish one or the other.

Dr. Arabble and yet we can never be simultaneously. So this reflects the application of the prediction. As well as the prediction, terrible. So this predicted model of the mind has been with us for almost I think more than a hundred years. But it’s widespread application to neuroscience, has only grown the last 15 or 20 years or so.

And the predicted model of the predictive processing model is successful in many ways. One of which is in the interpretation of Illusions like the kaniza triangle, Okay, this is called. This illusory white triangle because it’s our great best. Guess about what could be obscuring, these black circles. Oh you might say those aren’t circles at all, there’s a little pot.

Well the brain is making an inference about um what could be in the fortnight and what can be in the background? And that prediction about the foreground background is why we interpret this as a foreground object of spearing background objects and the same type of prediction or influence is occurring in each of these Illusions.

Now, interestingly people who take psychedelics, who are on psychedelics find these Illusions, much more difficult. Okay. And that’s an important clue because it suggests that. One way that psychedelics may influence, the mind is by altering the predictions that we make about the sensual world.

Oh well, now that you’re staring at me. Sure. So seem to me, looks like a mind that might be floating in the water, right? It looks like a scare. Right D. Looks like the Loch, Ness monster. And B looks like uh an Ingot that’s covered up by a snake or something.

Just also improve it. Any other questions at this point?

Okay, so I tried to emphasize the dynamic, oscillatory process of censoring input and the application of predictions. How do psychedelics affect this process? Well one idea that’s been recently, put forward by Carl fristen and Robin Carter. Harris, is that psychedelics, relax our predictions? Making them less numerically. Precise.

That effect could be represented in the following way. If psychedelics are relaxing predictions. Cause the influence of sensory Impressions to be proportionately, greater on our Consciousness. In addition, it will cause the prediction error to be much, much, much greater and thus, the content of our Consciousness will change as well.

So let’s dive back into biology again. What do we know about how psychedelic drugs actually affect the brain? Tryptonine and phenethylene-based cellulose like LSD, suicide and then DMT are known to Target. The 2A subtype of the serotonin receptor. The serotonin receptor is subtitle. 2N is just an ordinary prosaic receptor.

There’s nothing special about it. It’s found on the dendrites of many, many cells. This what looks like at the molecular level, right? The atomic level. Actually, this is Okay, Adeland of serotonin. I’m sorry. This is an analog of Serotonin. Logic LSD. And they post it in this into the same location of the serotonin receptor, like Kia to a lot.

The effect of psychedelics on the serotonic 2. Aerosene. Make the neurons that they possess more excitedly, more likely to fire. Those little pulses of electricity down our axle. So increased excitability makes neurons more likely to fire spikes. And more spikes, means more activity, overall, It’s equivalent to the neural network that is our brain having more entropy or chaos, or even having a higher temperature, not literally, but kind of figurative.

So, the next thing we want to know about is where in the brain are serotonin tool receptors Express. Well, if you could remember the schematic of the human brain, I showed you. They are typically found, they’re always found in human beings in the deepest layers of the cerebral cortex, and most importantly, in those Association areas, where we think the predictions are the most important.

So this uh, schematic summarizes this idea. With the action with the action, you have, the serotonin 2A receptor there will be greater activity overall than minerals up there. That will increase the degree of prediction error in the altar of perception. It’ll make the effect of sensory inputs comparatively greater than the effects of the prediction.

This is all occurring in this very same sensor, areas that I’ve already talked about. So, These predictions and sometimes they’re called prior beliefs. Have the effect of constraining that the mind can do, they’re essential for navigating through the World by limiting the brain’s Freedom With relaxed prior beliefs or predictions the space of states that the brain can occupy Gets much greater there’s more freedom for the brain to grow.

Now, we have predictions and Prior beliefs about the external world. We believe that walls are solid and foreground object objects, obscure background objects, and when those priors are weakened the visual hallucinations can occur. Was common on psychedelics and the sensation that walls and surfaces are dripping or pulsing or regularly that may reflect the relaxation of our priors about more what solid surfaces are supposed to be like, We also had prior beliefs about ourselves.

That we have a particular body that persists over time and has feelings. And when those priors are weakened, there can be ego ones in depersonalization. These prior beliefs. We also have prior beliefs about things that we fear and about our actions in the past. And when those are weakened, we can have a reassessment about ourselves.

And that’s where the real power of psychedelics are. So, I’m going to translate once again, this idea to another visual analogy. This is the mind is a landscape. The, the concept of the mind is a landscape, is this? Our brains exists in particular States, over time. One steak is sleeping.

One state is being awake. One state is being loved. Another is being in hatred. Another is speaking. Listening, another is visually perceiving and we can describe these states as a landscape. That the mind can be in The mind in this analogy is like a Marvel, a red model, if you go that rolls around and then be one state or another, This analogy of the landscape, some bases are very, very deep and some are more shallow.

We think about brain states that are hard to get out of or particularly persistent as deeper basins and brain states that are easier to get out is more shallow. If psychedelics relax, our predictions, relax, our prior beliefs, that would be equivalent to making the landscaping. More shallow, valleys. This would allow this mythical red marble to or land easily from brain steak to brain.

Stick to brainstor. Mathematically, this would mean that there’s no entropy or chaos in the middle of their life. That the neural network has more freedom. This idea of more freedom for the neural network has been explored by many people, helping my own idea, and this is another way of representing it.

So, this is a Mathematical description of the human brain at Baseline. And on Civil side, The different colored circles represent different distinct regions of the brain itself. And the size of those regions reflect. Um, I think the number of synaptic connections that they have and the line reflects the strength, the width of the light affects the strength of the connection among the different areas, right?

So, Here we have our grains at the moment at Baseline with healthy adaptive. Important synaptic connections among the different areas which mediate normal adaptive behavior when psilocybin. You can see that the neural network becomes hyperconnected Is a reflection of the brain having or the mind having more freedom and it’s directly analogous to the more flattened landscape that I talked about.

Okay, in the final section of my top, I want to offer some thoughts about how psychedelics can help with psychic hearing. As I said before, they’ve received the most study for their ability to relieve new disorders, like anxiety, depression and PTSD. And to convey this, I’m going to choose yet another metaphor And this is too positive.

That a healthy mind is sharp flexible and resilient like this young Warrior’s sword. People with emotional trauma, which includes many of us have unhealthy minds, their minds have been made brittle by trauma, and by genetics, And as we know, psychedelic drugs are being evaluated for their ability to improve psychic health, particularly veterans with PTSD.

Ptsd is a brain injury. I would argue that affects the psyche. It creates semi-permanent patterns of brain activity that include chronic anxiety, hyper vigilance and so forth. This is like that sword becoming more brittle in the face of adversity. Yeah, so people with PTSD may be helped by psychedelics Because they allow people to reevaluate themselves by weakening their priors about themselves.

Such they may make their brains more sharp, more flexible and more resilient. And we’re going to talk for a few minutes just about how that might work. So, Ptsd is a brain injury. It can include a moral injury, moral injury is the idea that someone commits an act that tears at their conscience?

It’s not something they can ordinarily do, except an important. And so PTSD affects self-identity in ways that other brain injuries cannot And as we know medicine really has not had a lot to offer, there are drugs that treat anxiety depression, which are quite effective, but they cannot get at the underlying Neurosis, which is a habit of thought and emotion that causes suffering for the veteran and for those around them.

Ptsd is associated with recurrent and unbidden images of the traumatic event accompanied by the same feelings of fear and foreboding that. Accompany the original incident. Importantly, these feelings and emotions are often triggered by innocuous stimuliant in in the environment. A car, battery is a classic example, right? What that tells you is that in this exact, that example is that the brain has a deranged prediction mechanism.

The Gulfur. The backfire is predicted to is predicted to be endangered, right? And so, Perhaps psychedelics can help rewire that prediction mechanism a little bit. So, this discussion naturally leads to my favorite part of the brain, which is called the amygdala, The amygdala is an almond-shaped region of the brain in the temporal ligament and it was the subject of my research for 20 years as a professor of Neuroscience.

The amidal is responsible for fear learning and has been implicated in PTSD. How does that get to the work? Well, here’s a schematic diagram, probably from a college textbook. And but in short, the amygdala, learns to predict what causes pain and what causes fear based on external cues and cues from the body,

So here are the schematic diagram is our brain. Here’s a fearful stimulus, for some of us. That’s visual stimulus, travels through the brain and reaches the indictment, which is responsible for the harnessing of emotional behavior. Emotional behavior, includes things like facial expressions. E, a mouse stress hormone release autonomic responses.

These emotional behaviors cause bodily feelings, right? We discussed that at the beginning and these bodily feelings in turn can result in new predictions in the human being.

So again, PTSD seems to result from a deranged prediction mechanism in which innocuous stimuly are predicted to mean danger. And so we need them to figure out a way to rewire the brain. So as to reduce this prediction, Moreover. One of the reasons I think PTSD is so debilitating is because the brain kind of makes detours around, painful thoughts and painful numbers, and the effort to avoid those painful thoughts and memories takes energy, and work and um, this tooth can lead to Neurosis and pain.

So I’ve come almost to the end of my talk and what I’m going to do is offer yet another analogy about how psychedelics may work. And this too comes from the idea of concepts of metallurgy in the science of how we’ve worked with metal. Concept is called annealing. Okay?

Unneeling Very familiar concept to a metallurgist if I had a hunk of raw iron here and I would have hit it really hard with a hammer it might shatter okay. Paradoxically the reason that piece of iron would shatter is because the atomic connections amongst the atoms of that. Iron are very very, very strong.

Very strong Atomic connections amongst the iron atoms. Can lead to actually sort of regions of movements. And I tried to draw a certain. A piece of rock iron has many, many strong connections, and many, many weak connections, okay, there’s unevenness in the strength of connections, by the application of heat in very slow cooling.

The strength of the atomic connections, amongst the iron atoms can be smoothed out and as a result that piece of metal becomes vastly strongly, It’s kind of paradoxical by making all the connections weaker, the uh, the metal becomes strong. So by analogy, perhaps psychedelics do the same thing to the synaptic connections of the brain.

Before, psychedelics the mind of a person with severe PTSD, may look something like this with powerful synaptic connections. That relate a loud. Banging sound to the summary of a fear response psychedelics. I mean, we can go snap to connections. Through skilled. With a skilled practitioner and careful reintegration. The the weakened synaptic connections, May consolidate that the as such the amygdala becomes less filled with very powerful synaptic connections.

Okay. So, to sum of this, Of psychedelics and Psychotherapy. This is a very, very new area. Um, but we think that perhaps relaxed predictions can lead to New Perspectives, and maybe even lower prediction error in the neural network. Is for sure. Is that memories become less fraught with emotion?

And finally that after the experience perhaps again with the a skilled integration or skill, facilitator. Those those priors that were revised to be Consolidated, thoughts and beliefs about oneself, and about their actions one’s actions. In Wartime, for example, may become less fraught with guilt and the shame. So um, to conclude, I’m going to leave you with some suggested readings.

Um, these are there’s a lot, of course, a lot of stuff on the internet now about psychedelics, but you might begin with the Memoir by Robert Robert Dr. Robert Albert Hoffman, who discovered the LSD molecule and you were a wonderful Memoir called LSD. Might come with China. Find them interesting because they’ve read Michael Pollock’s book, how to change your mind and of course, I have as well.

It’s wonderful. But there’s a lot of stuff on the internet about psychedelics and about the predictive processing model and one of them is called to be energy efficient, grants predict their perceptions, it’s a wonderful story in Quantum magazine. Leaders have looked by one of the pioneers of the predictive processing model and those Seth who wrote a book called being you and I2 is just a wonderful resource.

So that is the end of my talk, to thank you for your attention. And I’m happy to take any questions.

So it’s hey that’s working out too. Awesome. Uh yes, thank you very much. Do we have any questions? All right, you wrote the man first So you mentioned it. So you mentioned at the end that Um, the psychedelics can reduce Emotion, like the emotional fraud of past memories, but Does it do so in a selective way to Produces diversion from like, Traumatic events.

Would it also reduce the emotion from like your wedding right? Good question. Well, which could be a traumatic

That’s a great question and I get I I get asked that a lot, right? So this could be there’s you know, double-edged sword, it could and the data is still out on that as far as I know. But what seems to be the case is that um traumatic memories seem to hold a particular grid, on the mind pleasant memories, perhaps not so much.

And while you know, the overall strength of synaptic connections, May weaken as a result of psychedelics, it doesn’t seem to affect the um, Positive diversity, or positive numbers. It seems to affect the strength of the negative emotions, which themselves might be, you know, proportionately much more stronger than those, you know.

Even even I, you know, memories of a wedding may not be quite as strong as the most horrible members were One question. Um, in many meditation research some of the same effects are presented as a suppression under the formal language? Yes, um, professional cells. So, end of the same effects.

Are there any problems with mechanisms or installing the Superfars? And yeah, I mean, you just identified a couple, right? So after meditators, do show, reliable, and durable reductions in the department network, presentations. And take, I believe also that meditation can create a mindset. That’s not unlike that, of being honest, psychedelic right there is eco loss and personalization and a kind of um, timeless quality to a very highly, a meditative state.

Okay? Just in time us,

Medicine terms, and putting out thinking,

So with, I’m particularly interested in PTSD, that’s more like complex in nature from like trauma on programs and one of the things that’s correlated with that trauma. Like if you look at something more basis, uh, tests uh, highly correlated over the world, you know, physical and really, which is probably rooted inflammation involved and going somewhere with this.

So have, are you aware of any studies in Utah, is what we talked about and look at how that might follow up the physiological. Um,

The paraphrases you might be asking have researchers noticed that people that recently don’t show less bodily inflammation. Right? And I I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a really interesting question. You’re worried about a lot harder, right? I’m not sure. So that’s a great question. I’m thinking. I was wondering, are there any theories as to why a single dose of In Psychedelic agents have such a long-term benefit as opposed to like SSRI medications and increase certain activity.

But when you stop the medication, the benefit is pretty much gone. And thank you for asking you’ve pointed to something that’s that. Many people are beginning to understand that, which is that Um, selective serotonin reuptake intentacles and other antidepressants that after the serotonin system, As well as psychedelics may have a common mechanism and that is to promote neuroplasticity, right?

That they they’ve antidepressants do increase the levels of serotonin at the synapse, that’s for sure. Effect may actually be to promote the world rewiring Now in some people, perhaps the effects of ssris, go away? Right away. But I think for many people, the effects wear off fairly quickly over time And so that may reflect the the ongoing maintenance of neuroplasticity by antidepressants that goes away, after the drugs, always drive, we think that psilocybin Who promotes neuronally wiring, there’s actually pretty good evidence now from animal laws that show, just that.

So, the antidepressant effects Of psilocybin. And perhaps also, ssris come from rewiring of the brain, not from the elevation or in addition to the elevation of 17 months. Does that make sense? Thank you.

I think we talked about this thing, okay? This this is. Does it fall into this categories? Whether it’s being used and tested for treatment of PTSD and such I was just curious if A separate class is serotonic, I’m sorry. Ketamine is a It’s sort of been sort of edge case about whether it is a psychedelic Will use it for acceptable effects.

It’s a recreational drug for some people, but its mechanism of action is different than what I’ve talked about. You, it acts at a different receptor called the nmda receptor and as well as others, right, it acts on being, um, what are the opioid receptors as well? But its main site of action is the nda recent, uh, It has such a memory suppressive effect.

There’s the k-hole. The idea of going into a Kennedy state is marked by powerful memories of Russians and the MMDA receptor is critical for memory, um, but it too may promote neuroplasticity. In fact, ketamine is considered a very, very valuable and important drug in the psychiatric toolbox for people with suicidal, ideation, and who are at great risk of harming themselves.

It’s very wider news, but a different mechanism.

What about a bad trip? How does that affect? All of this. What, how would you describe it back to a bad trick? What does that mean to you? I mean, I don’t I haven’t ever had one because I’ve never done these drugs but like I remembered of people having a bad trip that you want to be careful.

Not to have a bad trip for sure. And I I hope I didn’t come across as being too pollyannish about these substances, right. Psychedelic drugs are very very very powerful drugs, okay and I hesitate to call them medications. They’re not exactly medications, they’re very powerful drugs and they affect people in profound ways and frightening and disorienting ways, okay?

In the hands of a skilled therapist or facilitator. May potentially be avoided. But in my limited experience and it is actually quite limited bad tricks can reflect or or be Caused by. Thought loops in which you cannot stop thinking the same thing. Right. Uh, it can they can be marked by extreme paranoid.

Other things like that and that’s harmful that needs to be avoided, right? We want to reduce the harm from all drugs particularly psychedelics and they should be avoided. And you know what Timothy Leary said a long long time ago is that the key is set and setting Secondly drink if you’re calm, you’re relaxed, you’re well rested, you’re hydrated, you’re happy or at least not very sad and you’re in a calm relaxed peaceful setting.

Are the ingredients that help promote a good trip as it helps your bathroom?

I got one I should go back on you. Slide to the grain one. Sure all the way back. It looks pretty much stimulus. I’m sorry but stimulus of a spider that I’m not afraid of. Okay, so we’re talking about rural rerouting. And according to your research, it has to go through Thalamus and then it has to go through the cortex in them and but it certainly has to go from the fellows.

Yeah. We’re rerouting straight to yeah. Yeah. That’s not going to happen. You know. That won’t happen the the kind of plasticity that that psychedelics produce is far. Far, far, much less dramatic than that. About would be the loss information on that, a few more synapses in within the regions not between them.

Okay, so we would I might predict that synopsis in the amygdala. Yeah. Weakened as a result of psychedelics point that there might be more of that. Right. And that would be correlate it with a relaxation of your priors about yourself. It’s not being a bad person for about that horrible experience.

You have over it being enough. Yeah, but psychedelic drugs will never cause such a wholesale rewire in the way or else people wouldn’t be doing them. We all be, you know, the whole time. Huh? I promise. So, I have a few questions, but my biggest one is Right? Nancy Reagan was telling us, we shouldn’t do drugs because we’re going to get addicted if we’re old enough to remember, Nancy Reagan.

Um, and so, you know, I’m talking to a legislator and I’m trying to get them to be like we should allow more therapy with psychedelics like what are the conditions upon, which this is what we would call safe and not addictive. Yeah, thanks for asking your question. And I too talked to legislators here in Georgia.

And the thing that I emphasize is that they are not habit formal, okay? That’s pretty clear. Both of animal models as well as epidemiological studies. Yes. Solution, right? So you’re going to find some people who do indeed. Take. These substances way too much, way too often, and do terrible things, and Destroy themselves in other people, right?

That needs to be avoidable. But of course, drugs that are currently legal, do those kinds of harms and vastly more, right? But there’s very little evidence that the classical psychedelics are addictive. Also, they are physiologically safe. There is no known lethal dose. Psychedelics. They will cause a very bad trigger if you try to overdose, okay.

You will lose your mind, perhaps, if you try to overdose but you will not die. Okay. All right. This is the one. You’re one more. All right. Uh, one more question. The man in the plaid. I guess I I was just wondering. Do you talk a little bit more about the, the guidance, like the therapy, the sort of surrounds this and the connection between kind of the the focus of that, right?

So if you’ve got someone, who’s who’s PTSD, is there a strong correlation between what the therapist kind of guides them through thinking about during the people that the drug dose and that area being you know, you talk about kind of done yeah Landscape. Yeah the landscape as opposed to other parts of it is is the therapy really important or does the does the drug sort of have a a sort of broad topological uh kind of effect?

Like, thanks for asking it? I I get the question, I think it

Facilitating Psychotherapy is a very interesting area and I actually offer consultation if anyone who would like to know more online, the the way that facilitated therapy has worked at places like Johns Hopkins, University in Hawaii, and Yale University and elsewhere is non-directive uh, In a way, there is a growing belief among practitioners that.

The less you direct better and that the drug will work on its own. Pretty much as long as this the participant is in a safe comfortable. School bar. Almost, as we would say pharmacological. Right, this is why patients. Currently who currently use? Ketamine are placed in a sterile room that looks like your dentist office and yet, they achieve psychological healing and often have great insights into themselves.

All while sitting in a sparrow room with fluorescent lighting. They don’t interact at all with their, their credit union. But facilitated Psychotherapy, Tickets with the practitioner asking them. If this the participant. Why they want to have the therapy? And what their intentions are for. And the prep the practitioner asks a participant to formulate an intention that is Broad and super new super numerous over many different issues.

So, for example, Forgiveness. Could be the concept that you work with forgiveness, right or Grace. Um, I knew someone who printed the word out on a piece of paper, forgiveness, and looked at it. During your experience and that was enough to promote. A reevaluation of how relationships with your parents and with your husband and your children.

And it also helped to have pictures of those people that people modestly. What the the Q word was forgiveness and that. Is that the only direction was was that word? Long-Winded answers to a very succinct question. Thank you. I think that was the last question. So yeah. Awesome. Uh we’d like to thank our speaker one more time.

Thank you so much.

Like to thank all of you for coming out on a Friday night. Really appreciate it. Uh, also a huge, thank you to our friends at Wild Heaven for hosting us here tonight. Uh, we are a science from Georgia and we look forward to working with you again in the future.

Thank you. I’m gonna put the QR code up in five seconds. Like, I can only talk it. It’s the end of the week. I can’t do three things. It’s a lot. But, uh, Uh, we do not have an event in December because all y’all have way too many Christmas parties.

You gotta go to but we will have an event in January. We’re planning it right now. Um, It will either. It will either be on Women’s Health or it will be on how to have difficult conversations. How to have difficult conversations. Yeah, which we probably could use before the holidays but sorry guys.

And so, but if you’re on our newsletter or you follow us on BW, we’ll learn all about it. So thank you for the prompt and Patrick. Thank you, too. All right, thank you all for coming. Thank you.