Is the "Trip" Crucial for Mushrooms? - with Jack and Albert Dahan
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with father and son duo to talk about how crucial the subjective "trip" effects of a mushroom journey are for therapeutic benefits. Based on their research - it depends.
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:00 Alex, Unknown Speaker 0:11 welcome, welcome. You are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. I'm your host, Alex Dor, and we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi, we bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these fungal friends of ours. So today, we have a couple guests joining us from the Netherlands to talk about is the trip important in both psilocybin and ketamine experiences? So father and son duo, Alper and Jack, is it Dahan? Dahan, yes, yes. Nice. How you guys doing? Great. Thank you. Nice. So who are you guys? What are you up to? Shall I start Jack? All right, wonderful. So my name is Albert Dahan. I'm an anesthesiologist from the Netherlands. We live in Amsterdam, a great city, wonderful city. And my background, like I said, is anesthesiology. And I come from research into ketamine. I'm very interested in ketamine, both in its analgesic antidepressant as well as in its its psychoactive effects. We call them, always schizotypical effect effects both somatic and non somatic effects that cause the, well, the trip that you get from ketamine. And I've done some research in which I tried to link the subjectives, the the effects that that individuals perceived in relation to wanted effects, therapeutic effects such as pain relief, because they're really important. More and more people use ketamine daily, both for pain relief as well as for depression. So it's a very interesting drug, and virtually every time that people use ketamine, they get these schizotypical trip like effects. So that's where I come from, and my son will tell you where he comes from, yes. So I'm Jack the hung Unknown Speaker 2:22 and I am a medical and philosophy student now, doing my clinical rotations in Amsterdam. And as a philosophy student, Unknown Speaker 2:30 I did a lot of work on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognition, Unknown Speaker 2:36 discussing questions like, What is consciousness? Unknown Speaker 2:40 What does it mean when we say we perceive our environment Unknown Speaker 2:45 and that together with my medical interests and my father performing studies on ketamine and psychedelics, we found this common interest and decided, you know, we were talking about these questions. We're discussing it together. Let's do an article on it try to answer the questions that we have. And this was the main question that we were thinking about, I think, one year ago, Unknown Speaker 3:09 discussing, well, how crucial is this trip? And there are people saying the psychedelics only have a pharmacological effect that is important. Others saying, No, the psychological effect is much more important. So we thought, you know, let's try to set up a study to answer the question, yeah, so, so this is more a philosophical question that we had. I already had done some experimental work on ketamine, but now we came together on the trip, like you call it, and the the therapeutic effect, which we believe is really, really important, because, Unknown Speaker 3:46 as the data states, there's a large portion of the trip that is important for the therapeutic effect, for the change of of the disease that patients might have. And we're not only talking about depression or pain relief, we're also talking about substance use disorder, people with an opioid abuse disorder, an alcohol abuse disorder, nicotine, but also post traumatic stress disorder. So this is a highly relevant topic in which the trip might be of interest. So can you kind of give a brief synopsis on the paper, how it when maybe some key findings that you guys came across? Great. Shall I do that? All right, so we first did a large search of the literature. We really looked for all scientific papers that reported trip like phenomena. And this relates both to somatic effects, as well as mystical experiences, etc, etc, and treatment effects. So we, in fact, we only had two endpoints that we were aiming at, and that is, did a trip occur? How much of a trip did occur? Was it quantified? And second, Unknown Speaker 4:59 did. Unknown Speaker 5:00 A therapeutic effect occur. And initially we were very interested in all psychedelic drugs, so LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine. But eventually we discovered that most of the studies were on ketamine and psilocybin, so we decided to focus on that. But there are more studies than those two. There are studies on LSD, mescaline, etc, etc, and then we did lots of analysis on the data. We both read all papers. We both did data analysis. Then we came to a conclusion that took us some time, like Jack already said, we started with the idea over a year ago, and it took us a very long time to find all data. We were very cautious not to miss data. And in the end, we send it to a nature journal mental health research, and it got published. So it is a meta analysis. It is a systematic review of all the data, on the relationship between like you, call it the trip and therapeutic efficacy, Unknown Speaker 6:06 and what defines subjective effects in your paper? Chat? Unknown Speaker 6:12 Well, subjective effects, in a broad sense, is how a patient perceives the world around him can be, Unknown Speaker 6:22 of course, when we when we talk to each other, the effects are subjective. It's, it's how I perceive the environment, Unknown Speaker 6:31 but how we are we classified as subjective effects where Unknown Speaker 6:37 we I think we define it very broadly, right? We didn't beforehand define any characteristics the subjective effects should fall under. Unknown Speaker 6:52 But in fact, what we did was all perceptions outside of the normal so if I perceive the world differently from what I normally perceived it. That's what we consider the subjective effect, of course, yeah. It's also mystical experience, you know, understanding how the cosmos, all of a sudden, works Unknown Speaker 7:11 dissociative effects. Dissociation very important indeed, personalization indeed. But also the meaning of life became very important to us so but what we did perceive in the research was that ketamine subjective effects and psilocybin subjective effects were very different and also scored differently the different questionnaires that surprised us somewhat, because in our my own work, in which I give a lot of ketamine to healthy volunteers, patients, but also people that have used many other drugs. Unknown Speaker 7:46 They come to a an understanding of these subjective effects that are not very different from the ones that are derived from cytosipine So most of them perceive the world all of a sudden, very differently, the world has more meaning to them. It's a warm feeling often. Unknown Speaker 8:07 And so it was a very broad definition. We have to say that in our own research, and I recently did a psilocybin study for the treatment of pain, not always these subjective effects are positive, at least perceived by us, positive. I give you an example. I recently gave a volunteer a psilocybin oral cybin, so mushroom for the treatment of pain, and she became extremely emotional. She started to cry. She didn't know why. And this took hours and hours, and we spoke to her, we interacted with her rather difficult. She was totally within herself, but she had the perception that the world in the end, that she had increased her meaning. So it's a difficult concept, these subjective effects. It's emotion, it's Unknown Speaker 9:03 it's, yeah, it's very, very personal. It's different for everyone, correct? And I think it's important to to mention that that the the difference between ketamine and psilocybin Unknown Speaker 9:18 is very psychological. So in a psilocybin trip, Unknown Speaker 9:23 you might be able to step outside of your life and consider how life is much more in the Unknown Speaker 9:32 you're sort of in a sort of deliberation with yourself, what is, what is wrong with my life? What is while in when you're in a ketamine trip, this, this, you don't really have the ability to think about your life. It's much more. It much more overcomes you. Yes, you're more driven by your emotions. Ketamine, no, yeah, yeah. Well, with, with, you're standing above yourself, you're, you're, you're discussing with your self. Unknown Speaker 10:00 About your life, the meaning of your life, and that's why I believe that a drug like the magic mushroom, the psilocybin, part of that allows you to be treated for diseases like PTSD, because it gives you a new starting point. It's like a chemical reset, but you induce it yourself. That's so interesting. It's a little bit philosophical, but I believe that's what it is, Unknown Speaker 10:29 and I assume that's why Unknown Speaker 10:33 you know you have the hypothesis one. One key takeaway was that the subjective effects for psilocybin, we're about two to five times more than ketamine in terms of treating depression. Unknown Speaker 10:47 And so do you think that's the case? Because with psilocybin, people are more Unknown Speaker 10:55 routinely able to step out from their their consciousness, have a, have an out of body experience, review their life and say, like, Why? Why am I depressed? Like, what? What changes do I have to make in my life, therefore making them a little more effective in treating depression? Yeah, I think you're right. The Unknown Speaker 11:14 the ketamine trip, and that's, that's what you always say, is that the ketamine trip is much more somatic, so it's much more Unknown Speaker 11:22 pharmacological mechanism that also induces a trip while in psilocybin, the trip is much more central. It's very Unknown Speaker 11:31 psychological. It's really an overwhelming experience which takes hours, which Unknown Speaker 11:38 also after the trip has its effects days, maybe six weeks after the trip. So the the trip is much more more central, while ketamine, Unknown Speaker 11:50 one could perceive it more more as a side effect. I think you could say that's what I always state, that the ketamine psychedelic are Unknown Speaker 11:59 subjective effects are very somatically driven. There is a change in your brain. All kinds of things change. It's like induction of a psychosis with with ketamine, while with silo sibling, it's more of a Unknown Speaker 12:16 Yeah, mystical change perception. You become better than you are. And that's what I really believe, that the changes induced by psilocybin are beyond yourself. Well, with ketamine, they are within yourself. There is you're restricted, and we did observe a difference in the relationship between the subjective effects and therapeutic effects for Unknown Speaker 12:42 for ketamine and psilocybin, because the effect was very small. For ketamine, just five to 10% while it was over 25% in some studies, over 50% by the way, for for psilocybin, and that's really important. It indicates that the correct characteristics of the side effects of the subjective effects are very different. Like I said, I really believe that the mysticism, that the stepping outside of your body, the control over your thoughts and body, is very different between the two. Unknown Speaker 13:14 What I thought was really interesting is that it really depended on what you are using ketamine or psilocybin for so for for substance abuse, Unknown Speaker 13:26 the subjective effects seem to have a much higher Unknown Speaker 13:31 effect on on the healing potential for substance abuse around you know, 54% for ketamine and 60% for psilocybin, which was also a lot closer, they seem to have similar Unknown Speaker 13:46 effects in terms of the the the correlation between subjective effects and the healing why? Why do you think that is, you know, it has a much higher effects from the subjective effects or substance abuse, and then also closer related, both ketamine and psilocybin, if that should make sense. So this is what we were also very surprised about when we did the analysis and we talked about it for a very long time. Also, yeah, Unknown Speaker 14:17 we were surprised, Unknown Speaker 14:21 but I don't think we really came to a conclusive answer. You could think maybe there's a more, more of a psychological component in the substance use disorder, but of course, the very existence of a depression, there's also a big psychological component. Unknown Speaker 14:36 So I don't really have a very answer for it could well be that these individuals are more open to the effects that could be of ketamine and psilocybin that that could be, but you're very correct. The differences are striking. Unknown Speaker 14:51 And if you look to the other the few papers that we did not include, we came to the same conclusion, and that always when there was substance use disorder. Unknown Speaker 15:00 Water, if it be alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, whatever, it worked extremely well. And even after months and months, particularly after psilocybin, we did see an improvement of therapy or of the disease. And that's really important, that apparently the disease itself opens you up to treatment. That's also quite remarkable, because people claim that ketamine is very effective in therapy resistant depression, and you know that there is now intranasal ketamine available in the US. It's a specific form of ketamine. Is the s enantiomer, as isomer. It's called esketamine, and the intranasal formulation is called spravato, and people use it twice weekly and together with another antidepressant. But what is very interesting is that indeed it works extremely fast, because you need to realize that the classical antidepressants, they work after four to six weeks. And this drug by itself, and by the way, psilocybin does it even better, in my opinion, has hasn't been tested that much, but are one of or two studies that indeed looked at that, and it works even better than ketamine, even faster and for a longer period of time. But these drugs apparently have something that's so different from the drugs that we've used before, and I'm very happy with the renewed interest in these psychedelics, because otherwise we would be missing out of an important treatment option for people that really need it, they suffer from depression, they suffer from PTSD, but they also suffer from substance use disorder, and not only they do, but their family, their surroundings, do. So yeah, we might be very happy with these newly found options or old options, but why the correlation was bigger for substance use disorder? It's only guessing, and we have to say that we therefore there are far less studies on substance use disorder, far fewer. Unknown Speaker 17:08 So Unknown Speaker 17:10 more studies are Yeah, we need to do more studies. Yeah, indeed, yeah. Do you? Do you think that potentially, for most people, the cause of depression is more of a Unknown Speaker 17:22 physiological cause, like, you know, problems in you know, this is not my expertise, so, you know, the serotonin system, or not enough dopamine, and it's more of a, you know, A physical cause, rather than psychological Unknown Speaker 17:40 and substance abuse, potentially, is more psychological of there's a deep trauma in my life, and I'm trying to kind of fill a gap, or trying to numb myself, or trying to, Unknown Speaker 17:54 yeah, put a band aid over this psychological cause and and so That's potentially why, you know, for substance abuse in particular, that the mystical or subjective effects are more effective because it kind of allows people to see why. Why are they numbing? What are they numbing? Whereas depression, it's, it's, for most people, maybe more of just like a literal physical brain chemistry fix, Unknown Speaker 18:26 is that, well, be very good. Unknown Speaker 18:29 I personally believe that depression is more related to stress. If you have lots of stress in your life, the chemistry in your brain changes and then you need some additional drugs, like serotonin, like drugs, because we're talking about two was, particularly the cytosipanism and serotonergic drug. And with substance use disorder, yeah, often you see that something very bad happens in your life, a big psychological trauma, and this is the response to it. Unknown Speaker 19:01 So it might be that you're correct, yeah, because there's not a really an imbalance in your brain. Maybe there's a dopamine imbalance in people that are addicted to certain stimuli, like because it's not only related, we're talking about Unknown Speaker 19:19 nicotine, energy, alcohol, coking. But also, for instance, gambling is an addiction that can be treated with these drugs. Unknown Speaker 19:28 So yeah, that it might be an imbalance that is related to some trauma. You're numbing yourself. You're seeking other stimuli to subdue, maybe some damage that was done in your in your life, some trauma that happened in your life, yeah, maybe that is really true, very, interesting, very thank you for this. Thank you. Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. And I think Unknown Speaker 19:57 for me personally, I think I. Unknown Speaker 20:00 Everyone. I'm a big proponent of of the subjective effects, and I think there's a lot of Unknown Speaker 20:06 wisdom that can come from that, even even, you know, I think everyone should have a mystical experience in their life, whether whether it comes from psilocybin or, you know, prayer or meditation or something. I think there is a huge proponent in anyone's life to have those experiences. And so I personally, and this is just my personal experience, I would not be a proponent of like making psilocybin or ketamine, and somehow, if we figured out how to turn off a segment of our brain to make it not psychoactive, I think it's important for everyone to experience those effects, but that's just me personally. You know, there might be, I agree, without the psychological psychoactive effects, it might not work. We need to realize that it's an inherent component of the mechanism of action, and it might be a little bit more, a little bit less. And you also need to realize that in our study, we we claim to have been able to Unknown Speaker 21:09 to extract these psychoactive effects, but we might not have, because, like I said, the tools that we've used to extract these psychoactive effects from our patients might be insufficient. They might experience many more aspects of psychedelic subjective effects than we tested. So I do agree with you, and I really believe, I really believe from these studies, although there is some variation in the magnitude of fact, but for instance, psilocybin, you really need the psychoactive effects, otherwise, it's a Yeah, what do you take that? I've read papers on people that claim that they designed psychedelic drugs without the psychedelic effects, but yeah, what? What did you construe? You designed a drug that's a serotonergic drug without any other effects. And even with the classical antidepressants, there might be some experiences that we never even have looked for that occur in the brain of these people, and that might also be important in inducing therapeutic effects. So yeah, yeah. I believe that these mystic, mystical experiences, and I agree with you, it might be from meditation, it might be from religion, but also from the mushroom, is important when you Unknown Speaker 22:36 want to improve yourself. And you know, I say that. And there might be some, some cases, you know, someone who's very suicidal, on the edge, not mentally stable. And there might be a case where it's kind of like, yeah, they they need something to kind of bring them back. And if there was, you know, a psilocybin without the trip, to kind of bring him back just a little bit. So then, you know, their next time they can, they can take, you know, normal mushrooms with the trip. Or, you know, there might be some cases where it would be beneficial, right to have something like this. But I, I always kind of look at the cannabis industry as Unknown Speaker 23:20 as kind of uh, Unknown Speaker 23:23 you know, inspiration for, for how, you know these entheogens can be administered. And one of the the cool and interesting things I see in a lot of dispensaries is all these different strains or cultivars of of weed, and they're like, oh yeah, we have double bubble, 3000 for anxiety, or, you know, this and that, that for anxiety, or, I mean, depression and yada yada, for, you know, appetite or whatever. And they have these specific strains or cultivars for specific things with different ranges of compounds. And there are some people starting to create different cultivars of psilocybin or philosophy mushrooms. I realize we can't really do that with ketamine, but for, for salosy mushrooms, Unknown Speaker 24:14 you know, do you see a future where, you know, say, for treating depression, where maybe the mystical or subjective effects are not as important as, say, substance abuse, that there could be a cultivar of mushrooms that has less of a mystical experience, but maybe more of an experience targeted for depression and then for substance abuse, maybe the there's a cultivar where the mystical experiences are just a lot more. Do you see that as a future where there's kind of Unknown Speaker 24:50 patient specific cultivars of mushrooms? Unknown Speaker 24:55 This is, this was also a very interesting question that we didn't really discuss when discussed. Unknown Speaker 25:00 The paper whether there are different kinds of strains that can produce different effects and can be used in different ways. But it is, of course, an interesting question. Of course, I think if you could construe Unknown Speaker 25:15 mushrooms that really Unknown Speaker 25:17 produce very mystical experiences, as we've discussed, it could be that it would, for instance, be more suitable for substance use disorder. But what I do have to say is, of course, this study was very exploratory, so everything we discuss here has to be taken with a grain of salt, salt, I guess. Unknown Speaker 25:40 And of course, in in the medical field, the psilocybin that is used is one compound, psilocybin, right? So, yes, we have to discover this. I would like to make one remark regarding ketamine. Ketamine is a very interesting compound. There are three forms of ketamine. That's the racemic ketamine, which is a mixture of two isomers. Then there's the s ketamine, which is part of that, and there's the R ketamine. And we now understand more that the R ketamine, which has more Unknown Speaker 26:14 psychedelic effects, is more efficacious in the treatment of depression. So also with ketamine, you might find some variation. So this brings us, but Jack says it is a little bit speculative, but it might well be that if we focus more on the different, Unknown Speaker 26:34 because, you know, there is a mushroom store not so far away from where we live, and they also already claim that they have different strains of mushrooms, you might also be able to chemically alter the psilocybin to, oh, differently at receptor sites. That's also interesting. But that, and it's very medical. But if you take the mushroom by itself, there might already be strains, of course, one for the other. That's true. We do not know that now, but we have to difficult to investigate, because it's not, yeah, it's not a drug. It's not easily, it's not easy to use, just mushrooms in scientific research. That's difficult, yeah, so we get our sinusib in from Canada. It's really pure. It's 510, 1520, milligrams, Unknown Speaker 27:19 and, you know, it's one molecule, and it might well be like with cannabis. In cannabis, you have THC, CBD, many more compounds in the terpenes, and it's a combination of all of it that gives you a certain effect. Realize that I've done a study with four strains, four varieties of cannabis, and they all got different outcomes of my study. So I believe the same for for these mushrooms, but we need a lot. It's still a long way before we're able to use these, these mushrooms, in research. But, you know, I personally believe that you shouldn't even consider them drugs, but more as food additives, Unknown Speaker 28:05 you know when you do this. So I I'm really curious to get both of your perspectives on this as an anesthesiologist and a philosophy major. But Unknown Speaker 28:16 you know, one feature potential study that you talked about in the paper was studying the effects of people under general anesthesia, anesthesia. And I'm curious, you know, you propose this as a way to kind of shut off the subjective effects, but I'm curious, you know, what your thoughts around subconscious effects in say, if they're dreaming Unknown Speaker 28:42 and and how do you, Unknown Speaker 28:45 how do you measure that, and what do you, Unknown Speaker 28:49 what do you think that those effects are? I find this an intriguing question, because I always ask my patients, when they woke up, did you dream? Yes or no. And a minority of individuals indeed dreamt, and the dreams are very intense. Yeah, absolutely. So I, you know, when I wrote the paper, I didn't think of that, but now that you post that question, I have to change my mind about this. I don't think that you can study this under anesthesia, because I really believe that the the drugs like ketamine change your your mindset, your your your it's brain networks. Yeah, so change. Maybe there's a psychological effect under anesthesia. Absolutely, that's interesting. Absolutely, I believe that now, and it's because of your question that I've changed my mind about this, because I really believe that these subconscious effects are more important even, yeah, maybe than than the effects. That's my my first thought was, well, it might be that you're dreaming, but it might not be so important because you don't remember it after, after you don't need to remember maybe you don't need to remember it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, there. Because this. Unknown Speaker 30:00 Study showed no difference between placebo. It might well be that these individuals were dreaming and they had an effect, the proper fall by itself, which is an anesthetic, also produces antidepressant effect. And also these people, they dream intensely, yeah. So yeah, Unknown Speaker 30:16 very good point might well be so our, at least my now answer would be, yeah, you were correct. It might well be that something changes in the brain while under anesthesia. Anesthesia, by the way, is not like shutting off the engine with the key, no. Far from it, your engine keeps going. There is still something going on in your brain, and that's, you know, people might be even awake during anesthesia, we call that awareness, and we hope that they're not awake, because often they have PTSD afterwards, no because they have might have pain, they cannot move. So I now really believe that the engine keeps going, maybe in another gear, maybe in another Unknown Speaker 31:01 mystical state, or whatever you want to call it another level, but ketamine and any other psyched LSD might still affect the brain, brain function under anesthesia. Very interesting. Yeah, yeah. I have a I have a couple side stories, and I'll try to keep it quick, but there was one study I read, I think, like 10 years ago now, about the effects of napping on rats. And so they had one group of rats try to complete a maze, and then another group they, you know, let the rats explore the maze for, I don't know how many hours, and then they had them take a nap, and they hooked up their brains to some scanning technology, and the same parts of their brains that turned on while they're sleeping were the same parts of their brains that were on when they were trying to complete the maze. And then they woke up and they completed the maze after the nap like super quick, way faster than the other group that didn't take a nap. And the outcome of or the results of the study was that, Unknown Speaker 32:10 you know, sleeping or napping helps us Unknown Speaker 32:13 kind of process information and kind of figure out things that we're we're struggling with in the active day. Unknown Speaker 32:23 And then another quick, quick story, the first time I ever, you know, experienced Ayahuasca. I went to Peru, and my intention, I was suffering with with a lot of social anxiety. And the first night, Unknown Speaker 32:40 I fell asleep. Like, within a minute it was kind of crazy, like I drank it, and then, literally, with within a minute, I just fell asleep, and I woke up and, you know, the ceremony was over, and the next morning, everyone was like, Oh yeah, I had this, you know, seeing past lives, and I saw angels and all this stuff. And they would go to me, and they're like, So how was your experience? I was like, Oh, nothing happened. I fell asleep. And I was talking to everyone. I was like, Yeah, nothing happened. Nothing happened. And then one of the, the one of the ceremony leaders, pulled me aside, and she was like, Hey, how was your night? And I was like, well, nothing happened. I just I fell asleep. And she was like, Well, what was your What was your intention? I was like, oh, social anxiety. And she's like, Are you sure nothing happened? And I was like, Yeah, I fell asleep. And she goes, Well, the first night you came, I didn't see you talk to anybody, and then this morning, you literally were talking to every single person at breakfast. You're super open, having these full conversations, and she's like, well, just because you fell asleep doesn't mean nothing happened. And that moment it was like, Oh, shoot. Like, yeah. Like, maybe consciously nothing happened, but subconsciously, maybe in dream world, some, some really, you know, effective things happen. Absolutely, I really believe that sleeping consolidates learning activity. It's really important from learning, changing your mind, Unknown Speaker 34:10 getting rid of toxins from your body, clearing yourself, yeah, I really believe that. So, yeah, I like your stories. I believe them, very interesting. Interesting. Yeah, one, one other quick story. I can't remember what it's called, but, Unknown Speaker 34:29 and I believe it's, it's Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci both practice this but, but I read an article about how it was theorized that a lot of their insights came from this like semi asleep state, Unknown Speaker 34:46 where their body was was so relaxed that they could have these insights. And they had this practice where they had a metal sheet beneath them, and they sat upright in a chair and they held like a metal ball or a metal some. Unknown Speaker 35:00 Thing in their hand. And so when they fell asleep, they would drop the ball and it would make a loud noise and it would wake them up. And the practice was like staying in this completely relaxed state just before they went to sleep, Unknown Speaker 35:14 kind of like yoga nidra. There's like, a bunch of different practices of this, Unknown Speaker 35:21 and they, you know, at least the article said that, you know, that's where a lot of their insights came from. Of this, like completely relaxed state, where you fully let go, but you're still conscious, right? You're still, I believe, you awake. It's like a hypnotic state. And in hypnosis, you can also, you know, open these, these doors in your brain that are normally shut, it's becoming more open to your subconscious. And doesn't really matter how you do it, whether you do it with drugs, or you do it with with hypnosis, with sleeping Unknown Speaker 35:56 or meditation. Yeah, I really believe that that there's so much more within ourselves, and we can cure ourselves from all of the limitations that we believe we have. Unknown Speaker 36:07 That's what I really believe. And so even people that are extreme, extremely depressed or have extreme barriers in their life, they can be helped by taking these drugs and overcoming these barriers Well, well, but their studies do, do, do point to the fact that they're the trip might not be 100% necessary. I have to say, yeah, it is, of course, necessary. But as you said before, it might be that one doesn't want to strive for an extreme, full blown, mystical trip. But might want to say, Oh, maybe I would be in more, like, a more hypnotic state. Or that's true. So that's why you need these different strengths. And you have to figure it out yourself, what you are, what you want, yeah, yeah. So maybe in the future, we could, well, we should. You know, one important thing that I've learned from this paper is that Unknown Speaker 37:00 physicians, people that are really focused on the medical aspects of life that go do not go beyond the somatic part. They do not believe all of the things that we discuss, the use of ketamine, use of psilocybin. And I believe that we've shown that it is really important to understand that there's much more than just a somatic although it might be a small part Jack, yeah, it might also be a large part. That might might help you. But we have to look for the different drugs with the different the different mushrooms, different cannabis varieties, different ketamine isomers that might help you specifically, yeah, so it is a journey, and we're on this journey, and we'll see where we end Unknown Speaker 37:46 one, Unknown Speaker 37:48 one funny kind of Unknown Speaker 37:51 phrase or word for, you know, these subjective effects that I heard people say is that they call These effects fireworks. And I've heard a lot of people say, like, don't get lost in the fireworks, or don't get distracted with the fireworks. And the fireworks are like, you know, fractal imagery, or, you know, these super psychedelic colors and things like that. Unknown Speaker 38:17 You know, I heard a lot of people say, and I resonate with this. A lot of, you know, don't get distracted by them. They're really pretty, they're, you know, all these things, but they're kind of distracting in a lot of ways. Unknown Speaker 38:29 And another quick story, I the maestro that I work with in Peru, his traditional brew for ayahuasca, is is a lot more of the vine and a lot less of the CHA Corona, or psychothera viridis and the psychotross, it carries the DMT right? And so a lot of that comes from or adding more of that is more fireworks, more psychedelic imagery, more, you know, fractals and colors and things like that. Unknown Speaker 39:02 And he described when, when more Westerners came, Unknown Speaker 39:07 they were like, hey, it's not working, you know, I'm not getting these crazy visions and all this stuff. And so he kind of added more psychotross, so the Westerners would have more, like, firework experience and be like, Wow, that was so powerful, and all these things. But then recently, he's like, No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go back to the original brew, and the last journey I had. It was completely different, like super grounding. There were still some some fireworks, so to speak, but it was just really somatically grounding and clear and peaceful and like would still get insights, but potentially less subjective effects, if, if you would classify them, but different somatic, yeah, yeah, different subjective effects, right? Completely different, less firework. Unknown Speaker 40:00 Like colors and fractals, but more like this intuitive insight that was peaceful and grounded. So, Unknown Speaker 40:09 yeah, I'd be curious in kind of classifying the subjective effects, because for me, they can be radically different in a trip, you know, yeah, we that's our next step, of course, to not only look or define the subjective effects better in a better way and be and measure it in a better way, measure it in a better way, but also link it more to coaching or psychotherapy like settings. Yeah, doing it on yourself also an important question, what's the effect of psychotherapy? What's the what's the effect of a different setting? Yeah, the setting is so important, but we didn't take it into consideration in in this analysis, because studies didn't report it or poorly reported it so but that's, yeah, that's a next question we would like to address, definitely. So we really want to go more into the type of psychedelic effects that is important. Like you said, the grounding ones, the somatic ones, subjective effects, or the more firework like effects. Unknown Speaker 41:14 We're not against these firework effects, but we wonder whether or not they are the ones that induce the therapeutic change or gives you insight. Unknown Speaker 41:25 It's more visual. It's a different part of your brain. You need to realize that it's more the occipital brain part. People have all kinds of auditory phenomena. So yeah, it's really important where the drug works, where you get your subjective effects from, and that's also for us, the next step. And then again, there's the step with the psychotherapy which we leave is even, even more important. The study I'm doing now Unknown Speaker 41:55 is an interaction between hypnotherapy, Unknown Speaker 41:59 psilocybin and pain relief. And we really believe that the three of them interact in a way that if you do a good psychotherapy, the trip is good, then pain relief will be optimal. We'll see the study is ongoing. Unknown Speaker 42:16 Yeah, you guys have your work cut out for Unknown Speaker 42:19 you. Yeah, we're just, I mean, it's exciting because, you know, humans have been using psychedelics for 1000s of years all around the world, and yet we still have no fucking clue what's going on. And I don't know if we'll ever know, but it's exciting to have these questions. Makes it exciting. Yeah, definitely. So I know you Yeah, go on. No go. I think we still don't know whether or not we know all of the psychedelic drugs that exist. People are still making drugs, designing drugs, so it's a long way ahead of us. Unknown Speaker 42:55 So I know you know, we've been talking about it for pretty much this whole episode of all this future research that that you would love to do. Unknown Speaker 43:03 But what research would you like to see done in the next 510, years? What do you think is the most important topics that you would like to see? Unknown Speaker 43:13 Well, for me, it's I'm very interested in ketamine. I remain interested in ketamine. I would like to understand much, much better how ketamine interacts with all of these psychedelic schizotypical phenomena. And I really would love to study the arc component of ketamine in this that's one thing. The other one is, I would like to Unknown Speaker 43:37 assess the effect of other drugs on the psychedelic effects that we have. So there are many more, like I said, there are many more drugs that are enable us to experience mysticism, etc, etc. You know the truth serum, like pentobarbital, very interesting. Also changes your the level of your consciousness. So it all relates to consciousness, it relates to experience, it relates to how we change our life. Unknown Speaker 44:08 And what I really want most is that we get into a phase of acceptance, that everyone, even a regular medical field, accepts that these drugs exist and that they help people. And the most intriguing research would be to phenotypically assign specific patients to specific strains of mushrooms, of cannabinoids, etc, etc. And also my cannabis work, there's a lot of cannabis work I'm still doing. Unknown Speaker 44:38 Wait, you said the truth serum is that an actual thing? Well, there is pentobarbital. If you give it in a relatively low dose, people start talking about everything, and you can ask them any question. They don't use it anymore, right? No, they don't. Well, no, I use I was trained with it. Oh, yeah. And if you give it very slowly, people become extremely talkative. You can ask them any question. Unknown Speaker 45:00 Shouldn't they give you an answer? Unknown Speaker 45:02 Yeah, so I'm guessing that was Unknown Speaker 45:04 produced with military reasons, and then there's maybe some medical reasons. Very interesting drug. It isn't used anymore because we have much better drugs that don't induce this. But yeah, it's the truth serum. You can find it anywhere. Interesting. Yeah, I've seen it in TV shows and movies. I thought it was just kind of like a, Unknown Speaker 45:23 yeah, like a Hollywood thing. But that's crazy. Exists, yeah, wow. It's, it's not the fable. I Yeah, I think they were Unknown Speaker 45:35 with MK Ultra. I think they were trying to see if LSD and psilocybin would be that true serum, but that's crazy that that actually exists, and that's saying, but Unknown Speaker 45:47 so this is might be a tough question, but if you had unlimited funds, time, team, equipment, you name it, Unknown Speaker 45:58 What would you do and why? Unknown Speaker 46:01 Well, I think what's really important for the future of Psychedelic Studies is that you have large RCTs comparing psychedelics the two Unknown Speaker 46:12 SSRIs, SNRIs, that are commonly used in psychiatrics. That's important to really ground the efficacy of psychedelics, because there are a lot of studies of psychedelics compared to placebo, but that might be interesting, but also compare different kinds of psychedelics, I think that that's really important for me. These are huge studies, yes, impossible to perform, but yeah, I agree with you. Would have the funds. You know, I originally come from opioid research. My main focus has been on opioids. Opioids are extreme. Opioids cause these hallucinatory effects as well. I've you know, I once gave volunteers opioids, and they were sitting in front of a window, and there were trees outside, and the tree leaves were going up and down, the branches were going up and down. And these people were were looking at the tennis game because they really thought that they they were hallucinating. So these opioids are extremely, extremely interesting drugs, and I really wonder about the mechanism of effective opioids, whether or not we can produce opioids that are actually safe because, you know, there's an opioid crisis going on in the US because of the unsafety of these drugs. They're drugs of abuse, drugs of addiction. They cause severe depression, of breathing, and people die from that. They get a cardiac arrest. And I'm really interested whether or not we can replace these drugs with drugs like ketamine and with drugs like cyrosamine. But this is really major research. It might take decades. Unknown Speaker 47:50 Yeah, I think it's incredibly important. I just, I would, just watched a series on Netflix. I think it's called painkiller or painkillers. Great series. Oh, my god, yeah, I had no idea. I did have a friend growing up, OD on on oxy. And, Unknown Speaker 48:07 yeah, it's, Unknown Speaker 48:09 yeah, there's a lot more. You know, it's a huge epidemic of so many people addicted and and the crazy thing I didn't even know until he passed that, that he was addicted to Oxy, because there's so many functional addicts that just, yeah, they're very high functioning and just they they're able to do it until the day they pass and they often die because of combining deoxy with alcohol, other drugs. Yeah, it's a disaster. It's really tragic. But there's so many people in pain, you know, and I think other alternatives that don't wreck people's lives, and are like these drugs were just discussed and right? I really believe that. But also, what you what you briefly discuss, is the Unknown Speaker 48:56 possible antidepressant effects of propofol, other anesthetics. There's a, there's a big, big line of research that possible has not really been no, it has covered, no, yeah, I agree. Unknown Speaker 49:09 So props to you guys. I think it's awesome when family members can work together. So that's, that's great that you're combining interests of both your fields of studies and interests. Really great. Yeah, that's awesome. I hope it continues. And for people listening, where can people follow your work, any future studies that you have at our names? They can follow us Research Gate, probably, or PubMed, or just on the internet, on Google, they can find us Unknown Speaker 49:38 Awesome. Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Unknown Speaker 49:42 Congrats on this work. I think you have the whole rest of your lives ahead of you to tackle all these amazing questions. And thank you everyone for tuning in and shrooming into another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. We couldn't do without you. We really appreciate it. Wherever you're tuning in from, from around the world. Unknown Speaker 50:00 So Unknown Speaker 50:01 if you want to support the show, we don't have any direct way that you can donate financially. We don't have a Patreon or anything like that. We do have a mother brand, mushroom revival, and we have a whole line of organic, functional mushroom products, from capsules to gummies, powders and tinctures. Unknown Speaker 50:19 And if you're interested. We do have a VIP coupon code just for listeners, and that's pod treat for a surprise discount code if you don't want to spend any money. We have a giveaway going on. Link is in the bio. We pick a winner once a month. We also have a whole line of free blog posts and ebooks that you can download on all the different topics, like micro dosing and ecology of fungi, and also my newest book, The Little Book of mushrooms, is on there as well. And if you learned something cool in this episode, please tell a friend, tell a random person in the grocery store, tell a family member, keep that mycelia web going and people just having conversations about topics like these to keep our collective conscious growing and figuring out ways that we can help our mental health and our health in general, with with better things that are a little healthier for us. So thank you, everyone, as always. Much love and may the spores Be With You. You. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
