Consciousness, Chaos, and Order | Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris | EP 314

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don't get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality, and that you can treat people instrumentally, and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper; it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom. Even if that pulls you into the desert, we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That's such a Christian question. At low doses, people are often, you know, quite silly when they can talk. And what plays out in their Mind's Eye is playful, cartoon-like, and sort of silly and grotesque. And of course it can go deeper and feel more serious and frightening. That occurs in play though. Like, if you imagine that what you're doing when you read a serious novel is something akin to play; but if you read a Dostoevsky novel, you're playing at a very deep level.

What that would mean is that instead of playing with superficial categories, you can play deeply. And you know when children are playing deeply, they're really involved in it. Like they can play pretend games, with children becoming incredibly serious. They can act out very complicated and even frightening scenarios in their play. They will do that, and I would say the seriousness of play is not a consequence of the admixture of negative emotion per se; it's an indication of the depth at which the cognitive categories are being transformed. So the deeper they fall into the play, the more radical the transformation that is occurring.

Thank you. Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms. I'm continuing my investigation today into the domain of cognitive neuroscience with a bit of a side to psychotherapeutics and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy, with some attention paid to associated implications for analysis of brain function. I'm pleased today to be talking with an outstanding researcher in those joint fields, Dr. Robin Carhart Harris.

He is the Ralph Metzner distinguished professor in neurology and psychiatry and director of Neuroscape's psychedelics division at the University of California, San Francisco. He moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol in '09 under the mentorship of Professor David Nutt. He relocated to the Imperial College to continue fmri research with his psychedelic drug, psilocybin, derived from what have been known culturally as magic mushrooms.

In conjunction with Dr. Nutt, he built up a process of psychedelic research that includes functional magnetic resonance imaging and mag imaging with psilocybin, fmri imaging with MDMA, and plans for an MRC-sponsored clinical trial of psilocybin as a treatment for major depression. He was awarded an M.A. in psychoanalysis at Brunel University London and a PhD in psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol. He has designed human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT, and several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy.

He founded the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019, was ranked among the top 31 medical scientists in 2020, and in '21 was named in Time magazine's100 Next list of a hundred Rising Stars shaping the research future. I wanted to start this conversation by asking Robin about his thoughts about the relationship between categorization and implicit learning and habit-based learning, all of those things together.

So, well, the way I've been thinking about it—tell me what you think about this—is that we have to impose a structure of perception on the world in order to even perceive it. So our perceptions themselves are categories, and they're implicit. Those categories can be functional and provide us with what we need, or they can be dysfunctional and cause us all sorts of misery and distress. But that this also pertains to the question of what constitutes the unconscious. A lot of what the unconscious seems to be is the implicit category structure that we use to perceive the world through. So that's a proposition. Maybe I could get you to comment on that as a proposition.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable proposition. So much of what we learn is learned implicitly, really the majority. The assumptions that we come to, the recognition of differences between things, which is the essence of categorization, occurs implicitly and then is encoded with varying degrees of what you might call confidence or precision. And that Precision develops, it can strengthen with repetition, and then the encoding is stronger, and the assumptions are more influential. And those processes are very much processes that play out unconsciously, and yet they dominate our thinking, the content of our thought, and our behavior.

Right, so imagine, for example, for those of you watching and listening, that you imagine a pianist who's playing a complex piece, and they play it repeatedly. And when they first start to learn it, they have to pay a tremendous amount of conscious attention to everything they're doing, to every finger movement. But as they play it repeatedly, they build specialized neural machinery to govern the motor output that constitutes the ability to play the piece. And so they're automating what is initially voluntary.

Then imagine that they automate a mistake. Like, you can play a missed note, or you can automate a phrase that's mistimed, and then you'll have learned something that is now automatic but is also in error. Part of your theory of psychopathology is analogous to that in some sense, is that we'll practice modes of apprehending the world, modes of categorizing the world, and make them automatic, but they're also dysfunctional enough to cause us misery.

And I guess your theory with regards to psychedelic usage is, as far as I can tell, is that psychedelic usage enables the—what would you say? It re-novelizes the environment or re-novelizes experience so that the effect of that overlearning is ameliorated at least temporarily, and that gives the cognitive system, that gives the person having the experience the opportunity to lay down new conceptions that are less constrained by that previous learning.

Then the question is, well, when would previous learning be pathological? Because that's a hard thing to figure out. So it is, and you know, analogies will help us here. One that is perhaps relevant is rebirth. You know, we come into this world, sure, with some inherited models. Certainly they can come into play as we live a life, and they're activated and engaged as we encounter aspects of human experience.

But, you know, as we develop and we learn and we create associations, these implicit associations that become ingrained and entrenched in our psyche then yes, it can happen that sometimes we learn things too strongly, and they dominate our way of thinking, our way of seeing the world, and our way of behaving. And so the analogy I want to come to is one of rebirth, you know, in a sense resetting the system, recalibrating the system, and yes, then we will be experiencing the world with a refreshed level of novelty.

Okay, so imagine this—I’ll go in two directions from that. So the first is that imagine you grow up in a family where the interactions between the father and the mother and the children are pathological. So maybe the father is narcissistic and psychopathic at least to some degree, and so the children grow up in that environment and they learn to respond to anything masculine as if it has these psychopathic and narcissistic characteristics.

Their perceptions are tuned in that regard, and then they move out into the world, and there are all sorts of potential male-female interactions that obtain in the actual world, and their perceptions aren't calibrated properly for the more generic environment because their specific environment was tilted in a pathological way. But now their perceptions have been tuned, and that's where the unconscious is, right? It's in the structures that actually govern perceptual categories.

And so what will happen for, say, a girl in that situation is she won't be able to see anything positive that a man might do because that's so anomalous and outside her domain of perceptual familiarity, and anything that's vaguely reminiscent of the pattern that she's already learned will elicit the whole pattern. So part of what happens in the psychopathological environment is that you specialize your perceptions for a micro-environment that's not generalizable to the broader macro-environment, and that's a good way of sort of zeroing in on what actually might constitute a form of psychopathological learning.

Right, so you might come from a dependency-inducing familial background too, where you're really, really taken care of to an extreme, and then you're going to learn how to adapt to that and to see the world as if that's how it's structured. Then when you're thrown out into the broader world, that level of intensive care isn't forthcoming, and your perceptions aren't adapted to that macro environment, to that broader macro environment.

Now that's one thing. Now you talked about rebirth. So I spent a lot of time studying Mircea Eliade in particular, historian of religious ideas. He was very interested in the symbolic structure of the idea of rebirth. And so the way that this is laid out in the broad mythological literature is that rebirth, and that would be a baptism too, is a return to the beginning of time where chaos and possibility rule unstructured.

And so that return to the beginning of time to see that unstructured chaotic possibility is a time for rejuvenation and renovation. And the idea of baptism is actually a ritualistic attempt to produce the kind of rebirth that is in principle redemptive. Now you have a theory about how psychedelics work that makes pharmacological sense of this notion of the reconstitution of a generative chaos if I've got the theory correct, right? Is that the psychedelics blow off the overlearning that constrains perception, or maybe even the learning?

And the danger of that is that there's too much possibility and too much chaos, but the upside is a whole new set of propositions that are more germane to current life, let's say, aren't outdated, could conceivably be generated—approximately appropriate. Yes, it does. And you know, the analogy or the theme—the archetype perhaps of baptism is useful. Baptism often involves a shock, whether it's, you know, being thrown in water or water thrown on you, or a baptism of fire.

There's an appeal to a period—a state of chaos and this opportunity for a second go in a sense. And you know, for the child, the scenario that you were describing, suffering, complex inter-relationships of familial interrelationships—the product of that is that the child knows no different, right? They've just learned really adaptively in a sense, even though the product is maladaptive. They couldn't—it couldn't have been any other way. They couldn't have helped.

Which is probably why we don't, you know, necessarily incarcerate children. You know, there's an innocence there. They're subjected to things, and they develop in a particular way, and they can be victims. But there is that curious transition into adulthood where, of course, there are moral judgments on behavior and so on. And then there is an assumption that you could have known differently; you could have been another way, you know.

After a certain level of development, there's sufficient metacognition or consciousness or self-awareness to not be, in a sense, a victim to your experiences. Yeah, and you know, these rebirths, if you look at mythology, they may happen, you know, as a kind of rite of passage around a certain age—coming of age. And perhaps there's a clue there, again, to some of the historical use of psychedelic plant medicines for that purpose. Right.

Well, I don't remember if it was in one of your papers or one of the associated papers that I've been reading lately, but the proposition too was that you talked about baptism by fire, is that if an organism is sufficiently stressed, that can produce a state where rapid new learning is possible. Now that's what should happen, right, because if you're stressed, hyper-stressed, that means something has gone radically wrong. And when something's gone radically wrong, that's a good time to learn something new.

But the proposition too was that what the psychedelics were doing, in some real sense, was pharmacologically mimicking the neuropharmacological conditions that might obtain after severe stress. And so by inducing that pharmacologically, that's right. So this is a model I introduced maybe a couple of years ago now, called pivotal mental states, and really it's a way to conceptualize and contextualize what psychedelics are and what they do.

And I propose that they are drugs that hijack a stress response system, but that stress response system has evolved and exists anyway. Of course, the drug has to come in and in a sense hijack and work on something that already exists for a function outside of the context of a somewhat alien chemical coming in that you put into your body. So it was a way to sort of have a more foundational understanding of the psychedelic experience.

What is it outside of the context of psychedelic drugs? And so there I looked at things like ascetic practice, extreme experiences that can drive intense states of stress, where one comes to a crisis point, a pivotal mental state. And then in that pivotal mental state, this moment right now really matters to where you know your life is going to go from here on.

We'll be right back with Dr. Carhart Harris in just a moment, but first, 'tis the season of giving, but you've already given enough to your internet service provider because when you go online without ExpressVPN, your provider can track all of your activity. They're legally allowed to sell that data to third-party advertisers for massive profits. Stop giving away free information. Start using ExpressVPN today.

ExpressVPN encrypts and reroutes 100% of your network data through their secure server, so your provider can't see a thing. Just fire up the ExpressVPN app and tap one button to connect. You've given enough to your ISP this year. Take back your internet privacy today with the number one rated VPN by TechRadar and Mashable. Visit expressvpn.com/jordan to get three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com/jordan to get an extra three months free. ExpressVPN.com/jordan.

Yeah, well, that strikes me as analogous to the phenomenon that's often noted among people who recover from alcoholism. So it's very common, and I knew this—that I learned this almost 30 years ago when I was studying alcoholism and its treatments—even then it was known that one of the most reliable treatments—and this has stayed constant in the research literature—was religious transformation.

And so you think, well, and these are hardcore non-religious scientists who are putting this forward as a proposition. It's just a fact drawn from decades of observation about what works and what doesn't work in the treatment of alcoholism. Most things don't work, including treatment centers. But one of the phenomena that's constantly reported by people who have recovered from alcoholism is that at some point they hit rock bottom, right?

And they have a devastatingly stressful experience as a consequence of the fact that their addiction has gone on out of control, and that hits them with devastating force. You can imagine if that's a hyper-stress response, and it opens up the doorway to new learning because it's so stressful that everything in the environment gets re-novelized in some sense that's associated with an experience of awe.

And there's a religious element to that because the transformation is taking place at a very deep level, and so they hit something that's hyper-stressful, and then they're prepared for radically new learning, for personality retooling in some sense. And then, so okay, then I was thinking too, you know, in psychotherapy there's a rule of thumb, and it's a good one, that if you can help people confront what they're afraid of and avoiding in manageable bite-sized pieces, then they get stronger and braver.

So imagine this: Imagine there's a hierarchy of implicit presumptions; some are key and core, and those would be those assumptions that if disrupted cause traumatic stress. And then there are less crucial assumptions which are more like peripheral perceptions, and they're ones that still have a lot of play. They're not hyper-learned yet, and not a lot of other conceptions are dependent on them, so they're more peripheral.

So then when you do exposure therapy with people, you have them confront the micro-categories that they're using to constrain and formulate their behavior, and they can modulate those. And so they stress themselves a little bit, and that's enough to produce a little bit of learning. But if you do that continually, the system can incrementally grow and change without having to undergo dramatic stress-induced revolutions.

Yeah, what I would want to add in there is that perhaps unlearning is even more important than learning in that process. So you know, the patience is being brought back to traumatic memories, traumatic themes, and feelings. But the pathology that they present with is one of arguably excessive learning—a defensive learning—that needs to be unlearned.

And so in order to bring someone back to some semblance of health, there is arguably a need for a confrontation to go back there. I mean, this is the principle of exposure therapy: to go back there and actually weaken associations that have formed too strongly to produce the psychopathology.

So one of the things you wrote about in your new paper is the emergent literature pointing to something like a general factor of psychopathology, right? And then when I read that, I always think, well, that's neuroticism. It's the same factor analysis; it's pointing to a susceptibility to negative emotion. And after I talked to Carl Friston and I was trying to sort out in my head the difference between neuroticism and openness, the difference between neuroticism and creativity.

Now, creativity allows you to shift categories; neuroticism seems to be the susceptibility of categories to stress-induced disruption. And so then the question is, like, so you get stressed—and you talk in your paper, the one you sent me about the fact that stress also produces neural death, especially in the hippocampal systems, for example, that are key to the movement of information from short-term attention to long-term storage—so imagine that when you encounter something stressful, the first thing that happens is that there is category death, and perhaps neural death that's proportionate to the degree of stress.

And that might be a necessary precondition for learning, but it's not learning, right? It's just the falling apart of old pathological systems. And that's a problem because, well, now you don't have the old pathological system but you also don't have anywhere to go, right? So it's only the death without the rebirth, and then people experience that with extreme pain too because—and I wonder sometimes too if that's psychogenic pain, like depression for example—isn't actually the psychological consequences of the neural degeneration and the category death that we're referring to as a consequence of stress.

Possibly, yes. I mean, a theme I'd want to bring in would be disconnect, and I suspect, if we take a classic aspect of neuroticism like depression, then there is, I think, depression, and of course this has been written about extensively and famously by the likes of Freud. There is a rhythm, a sort of forced retreat from objects that one would invest in, often implicitly love objects, you know, but that's meant very broadly and generally.

So that might be one's vocation, you know, that is an object of intense investment or, in Freudian language, cathexis, the investment of libidinal energy. And Freud's model of depression was that that investment that we do, when we get up and go, we write papers and fall in love, and love our family and children, and so on, if that's cut off, if there's a forced retreat, then where does that energy go? It’s, you know, and that was Freud's model of depression, that it's sort of damned up and it gets deflected back onto the self in this very self-critical way.

So I think it's a bit tangential there, but I wanted to bring in the theme of disconnect because I imagine that there's something important in neuroticism when it develops into depression that involves some kind of inability to invest in. So, so I've been trying to conceptualize that neurologically. So imagine that there's a hierarchy of conception, right? And so we have some fundamental conceptions upon which many other conceptions are predicated, and some that are less fundamental.

Now before you question a category, the category should fail. Now then that raises two questions. How severe is the failure? So let me give you an example: If you have an argument with your wife about the dishes, that could mean that you should negotiate who's going to do the dishes, or it should mean that you should get divorced. Now the thing about someone who's depressed is that they'll take a micro fight, and it'll cascade all the way up the conceptual system to the most fundamental level.

They might go even beyond: well, not only should I get a divorce because my marriage is hopeless, because then they'll go: who could stand to be married to anyone as hopeless as me? I've always been hopeless; my whole past is hopeless; there's nothing good about the present and everything's just going to get worse in the future; I might as well be dead.

So what? Imagine this: imagine that there's a hierarchy of conceptions, and there's a barrier for error propagation, and the barrier is something like the number of errors you have to experience at each level before you'll move up a level to question that presumption. And so then imagine the more neurotic you are, the fewer failures it takes at any level to move up another level to question something more fundamental.

And maybe that's serotonin-mediated, so as you become more socially confident and your environment is actually more benevolent because you're more well-placed, your resistance to error cascade increases. And when you're depressed, there's no resistance; every error propagates all the way up to the most fundamental level.

Well, the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more reckless spending by a more emboldened administration, higher taxes, deeper inflation. If you're unsure how the next two years will unfold, talk to Birch Gold Group about protecting your savings with gold. Birch Gold makes it easy to convert your IRA or 401(k) into an IRA in precious metals so you can own gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.

Gold is the world's oldest, most proven form of currency. When inflation soars and all other assets go sideways, gold is still there. This month, you can get a free gold back with every $5,000 purchase when you convert an existing IRA or 401(k) into a precious metals IRA with Birch Gold by December 22nd. Just text Jordan to 989898. Birch Gold will help you own gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account. Text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free info kit on gold. Then talk to one of their precious metals specialists. With every purchase you make before December 22nd, you'll get a free gold back. This is a great stocking stuffer just in time for Christmas. Text Jordan to 989898 and protect yourself with gold today.

Yes, if it's, if it, if it's that, because another possibility is that the data, you know, in predictive coding, we often talk about error coming up the hierarchy and sort of prediction or model coming down the hierarchy. But what one might think of depression and a lot of psychopathology is too much top down, you know, in a sense.

You can see this in depression, you know, the notion of depressive realism is only partly true. Typically, a proper depression, you know, the real deal is in a sense delusional. The and you can measure this, and you can see the people's, you know, forecasting of future life events is way off. They think that only bad things are going to happen; nothing good. And then you can actually track that and see what happens, and you see that, you know, people were catastrophizing, and the reality wasn't that bad, you know, so that's depression.

So I would argue that that's too much model and the model is skewed, and we touched on this earlier, you know, tilted in a particular way, biased in a particular way. So there is this fascinating question of why are you biased? Where did that skew come from? Why are you having to see the world through this bias, through this skew? What does it do for...

Well, one of the mysteries there too—this is why, okay, so now we have a conflict in view of depression in some sense. Because the way I put it forward was that it was in excess of error-induced chaos, and the way you just put it forward was that it was a pathology of constrained forecasting. But there's a point of agreement, right? We're both agreed that something fundamental has gone wrong, and we know this, right?

Because, you know, the depressive realism stuff, mostly cognitive behavioral or social psychologists using cognitive behavioral derived scales, used people who were just barely threshold for depression to formulate the depressive realism idea. If you have people who are really depressed, it's like everything is terrible; it's always been terrible; and it's going to be terrible into the future—all must be disrupted.

So what’s really interesting about that, and this is why, is that some fundamental set of propositions must have gone astray. Because, and you're thinking about it as something that's canalized into a very narrow channel, and I'm thinking about it more as the disintegration of anything positive. But, you know, there may be a way to reconcile that; it's fundamental. It has to be a primal set of conceptions because it colors absolutely everything, right? Nothing escapes from the depressive abyss.

And so it has to be disruption in a system that's so fundamental that all other cognitions and perceptions depend on it. So this is part of the reason I was trying to make sense of it in relationship to social status, right? Because we know that if someone's social status falls, their tonic levels of serotonin constraint decrease, and the large logic in that from an evolutionary perspective would be that the more you’re situated properly, optimally within a social hierarchy, the more benevolent the environment actually is because you have friends and you have people you can rely on and you’re getting a lot of attention from other people.

So it makes sense that you don't have to be hypersensitive to error because you're buffered. But so imagine you get depressed and the mechanism that is adjudicating your social status is pathologized, and it rates you as a one out of ten instead of a ten out of ten. And then the consequence of that is your whole nervous system now is tuned to react as if the environment—the whole thing has now turned on you and is dangerous.

Which, which it is if you're actually socially isolated and extremely unpopular. Right, you are in that sort of danger. So yes, but there is this interesting other possibility. I mean, it is a very delicate question of whether a pathology is adaptive or maladaptive, or functional or dysfunctional. And it has been argued, you know, that a depressive episode is functional.

You know, in a situation of extreme social dilemma, maybe it makes sense, in a sense, to retreat, to withdraw, to go into oneself—to hate oneself instead of, for example, your boss that sacked you or your partner who was adulterous or what have you. You know, it could be functional. I know that works depression.

Well, no, no, I think—I mean, I think that it points to an underlying permanent existential dilemma, which is, well, if you try and you fail, that could be in a micro endeavor or a macro endeavor. If you try and you fail, well you have two options. Well, you have three. One is you can just ignore it, and sometimes that's the right thing to do because if you tried again, it would work and so that's the utility of persistence.

But you'd, and you never know in some fundamental sense whether you're being persistent or blind. Right, that's a tough thing to figure out. Most entrepreneurs who become successful have failed in a dozen enterprises before. And so are they persistent or have they failed to learn from experience? Like, well there's a toss-up.

Then for imagine you don't ignore it—okay, now you're going to fix the problem. Well, then you have two choices: you could fix the world or you could fix yourself. And let's say, well, fixing yourself is often at least in principle easier than fixing the world. Although sometimes the world is wrong and you're right, not very often, but sometimes.

You know, so if you're going to fix yourself, you've failed multiple times. The first thing that has to happen is that the part of you that's error-ridden has to die. And so there is that element—that's exactly, I would say in some sense, the payoff of neuroticism is, well, why have negative emotion? It's, well, you get anxious so that you stop doing things that might cause your own destruction.

There's value in the signal, but because it's so difficult to determine, like if you're arguing with your wife, this is a constant issue in marriages. It's like, well, should she change, or you? And the answer sometimes is she should, and sometimes the answer is you should, and sometimes the answer is you both should. But it's not like that's easy to figure out a priori.

Now, you know, I think your argument you’re making in favor of depression, in some sense, is that well, now and then you should retreat and learn from your failures and of course that's the case. Now, the problem with depression is that you get these macro retreats where everything falls apart, and you might hope that you're not in a situation where the right reaction is for everything to fall apart very often.

And it does look like people who are prone to depression are prone to having everything fall apart when it would be much more meat and right, and even in terms of learning for something smaller to be modified. One of the things I tried to do with my clients all the time was to—I wouldn't say minimize a problem, but it would be to parameterize it.

You know, like maybe I'd have a client who was so afraid of their economic uncertainty that they wouldn't even tell me how much rent they were paid because I had clients like that. And so I would continue to inquire until I got them to admit the terrible truth about their rent, and then we could narrow the problem. We could keep narrowing the scope of the problem so they didn't feel like the problem meant their entire financial future was going to fall apart.

And that's canalization in that, right? That narrowing where that’s actually beneficial. And so the model you sent me, that paper you sent me, I think if I've got it right, concentrated mostly on this overlearning as the fundamental source of psychopathology.

So yes, and that was very intentional. I mean, I do believe it, but I would like to think that one useful aspect of the model is that it invites people to understand pathology, to understand how it can be acquired through experience. People can be differentially vulnerable or sensitive, but the pathology does have a history; there was a process there.

And I think that that can help caregivers and patients because it says, you know, you can—there is some understanding to be done here. I mean, if that wasn't true, psychotherapy wouldn't exist, and people wouldn't share their problems and try to understand it. And often, you know, the process was very complex, and um, you know, not all the information is necessarily so easy to decipher and clear, but that doesn't mean that it hasn't developed and hasn't been acquired.

And actually, there is some logic to the presentation that comes about. Now, that doesn't mean that you then accept the pathology. So I just wanted to emphasize that, right? It just says that we could understand this, but it doesn't say, ah, it's functional that you're depressed, so we just—we'll leave it alone. Better you're depressed than be, you know, a murderer or what have you, right?

So then there's this question of well, if you understand the presentation, you could also understand, in a sense, by understanding how it serves you. Take an addiction, for example. You know, someone with an awful history of complex trauma, repeated abuse, develops a hard drug addiction. Do you rip that away from them and say, be well now, have a huge, you know, psychedelic experience and go fresh, go happy now? Or is there something a little bit more gentle and sophisticated to how you would treat a presentation like that, even if you are to treat it with, say, psychedelic therapy?

Well, well on the addiction front, I mean, generally, let's say with alcohol addiction, which is a particularly pernicious form of addiction, and one that's often deadly in the immediate recovery because if you're suddenly deprived of alcohol and you're an alcoholic, you can die of a seizure. That's very common, in fact. And so you have to take people off alcohol somewhat slowly so that doesn't happen.

But if you put people in a treatment center, you can get them over the physiological dependence in a matter of weeks; but generally, the literature indicates that as soon as you put the person back in their environment, the probability that they'll relapse is almost as high as it would have been if they never went to the treatment center at all. And this speaks to what you just said is that the thing is—and then this is part of the adaptive structure of the pathology—so you might think, well, the reason you're an alcoholic is because you drink too much alcohol; it's like, well, that's one reason you're alcoholic, and it's a cardinal reason.

But here's some other reasons: all the things you do socially are focused on alcohol; all of your use of leisure time is alcohol use, learned; all of your friends are likely to be alcoholic.

Right, and so when you throw the person who's now no longer alcoholic back into their original environment without preparation, as soon as they go see their old friends, the probability that they'll start drinking again is extremely high. It's because not only do you have to remove the pathology of the dependence, but you have to substitute a whole new set of skills that provides all the positive interactions and ways forward that the entire addictive lifestyle provided before.

This is partly why when Alcoholics Anonymous works, it works because it provides people with a new peer group. And so there is this problem; you could have the death of a pathological system. But then, okay, that the thing that was destroying your life, the presuppositions that were destroying your life, are now defunct, but that doesn't mean that you now have a life.

So this points back to this conundrum that we've encountered in our discussion so far. You talk in this paper that you sent me about this general factor of psychopathology. And as I said, when I see that, it reminds me of factor analytic studies of emotion, showing the powerful factor of negative emotion, eroticism.

And so it's definitely the case that this general predisposition to intense suffering is part of that single factor of psychopathology. And that's more like a propensity to experience stress in response to chaos and error. But that's different than the claim that it's pathologically canalized learning processes that are core to the essence of psychopathology, right? Because you're really talking about a pathological excess of order in some sense, whereas neuroticism is a pathological susceptibility to chaos.

So I'm still trying to work out the—do you think that there's evidence that the overlearning hypothesis that you're developing is the same hypothesis as that which emerges out of the factor studies of general psychopathology?

Men, is it time to stop mindless scrolling? Time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you're missing out on? If this sounds familiar, then on January 9th, join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life. It's called Exodus 90, and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be.

Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life, and it actually works. Independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days, including stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages, more meaningful prayer lives, and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones. For the past seven years, Exodus has helped more than 60,000 men build a roadmap for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction.

Is it time for your Exodus? We start January 9th. Find resources to prepare for Exodus at exodus90.com/jordan. That's exodus90.com/jordan. I think there's work to be done to measure what I mean by canalization, right? Right? Pathological overlearning. And then to see whether it is true that across the board, trans-diagnostically—so in whatever, you know, category of psychiatric disorder, you'll find this phenomenon, and it will be there and it will be strong.

That's the hypothesis, that's the model that I've presented. I call it the canalization model of psychopathology. And, you know, as I say, this paper—simple models are too simple; they don't claim to explain everything, but they do propose to be able to explain something important. And so, you know, the idea with this new model is that there is a principal component, you know, a dominating factor to psychopathology, and I'm putting forward this idea that it's excessive associative learning done for psychologically defensive reasons, right?

Well, okay, so in the same paper when you're talking about the use of psychedelic therapy, you put forward some cautions. And so some of the cautions are, well, maybe psychedelic therapy would be less warranted in situations where you already see an excess proclivity toward associative thinking, like pre-psychotic states.

And so imagine that we could hypothesize perhaps to begin with that there are pathologies of order, and there are pathologies of chaos. Those might be more associated with neuroticism; there might be pathologies of creativity that would manifest themselves, let's say, in something like manic-depressive disorder on the manic end.

So I'm wondering if that single factor of obsessive overlearning that you're describing would characterize a subset of pathologies that are specifically characterized by overlearning. So that would be—do you know, has anybody tried treating obsessive-compulsive disorder with psychedelics, for example?

Because that's certainly... Yes, they have. Okay, well, yeah, pretty promising findings, and it's being repeated now. I think Yale and Imperial College London are doing trials, and the trial has been done, I think, in San Diego.

So, you know, it's an indication that makes sense. Again, I do think it fits the model of over-potentiated ways of thinking or behaving. The compulsive action, the need to wash one's hands, or have these intrusive thoughts that repeat, and this very narrow categorical viewpoint, right? So much of the world becomes disgusting.

And we know that the psychedelics are good at treating addictions, like cigarette smoking, and that's also a good model for canalization because the nicotine produces that hyperlearning. So I would say, to your question, is this in a sense—I don't know if you use the word just a subset? I would say it's the majority subset. That's the idea; it's the principal component. And that's not to say there aren't other components, say, a component of hyper-associative thinking and behavior—erratic, like a delirium—and one can argue whether a manic psychosis is like that.

It may be, in a sense, but sometimes it's quite quick for that state to become canalized. Right, right. And also to say that that component, that component of hyper-associative thinking isn't fundamentally pathological as well because that's an infant, you know, that's an infant that is someone in a state of, gosh, like a creative, like fugue state. Yeah.

You know, it's harder to see that actually, in my mind, as obviously pathological. Yes, it can be highly unusual to see that in a grown person, an adult, but it happens. And actually, you know, going back to those pivotal mental states, those conversion-type experiences, they often feature that, and they can be life-saving those experiences.

Right. And actually, now we're coming to really the flavor of the psychedelic experience as well, right? Okay, so let's talk about the psychedelic experience for a minute. So when Huxley wrote about the psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception, he referred to Bergson, who made the claim that in some real sense, consciousness was like a reducing valve.

Is that part of what our brains are doing? And they are primarily inhibitory at a neurological level—taking an unbelievably differentiated or unbelievably undifferentiated mass of experience that's far too much for us to process at any one time and narrowing it incredibly to the few elements that constitute the focus of our attention at any one moment.

Maybe as little as three or four bits of information from a stream of information that would be incalculably dense in terms of available bits. And so some of this catalyzed learning that you describe is actually the use of perceptual categories to reduce that information flow.

And so what seems to happen in the psychedelic experience is that that a priori restriction on perception and its associated emotions is lifted temporarily. Right? And so the Bergsonian or Huxley model of psychedelic experience—that it increases the breadth of that information funnel—that seems to be correct. And that's also being associated, if I remember correctly, with increased thalamic throughput.

So there's actually more information coming up from the sensory and the motivational and emotional areas of the brain during a psychedelic experience than under normal conditions. I think that's Vollenweider's work. I think he’s concentrated on that. Yeah, it's true. I would say that the thalamus is one of other, in a sense, hierarchically subordinate structures and systems where the information can flow up to high-level cortex more freely under a psychedelic—the reducing valve analogy.

And that it goes back to Bergson—is curious because canalization is a theme. It was sort of brought to prominence by Conrad Waddington, an evolutionary biologist, who used it to try and explain phenotypes that get stamped in, that get entrenched, you know, encoded into the genome.

But he took it from Norman Whitehead who took it from Henri Bergson. He offered the analogy, the image of a canal, and so that was the original inspiration. So I was curious that the Bergson inspired Huxley with the reducing valve. Right, that's an interesting... So here's something cool too; this is a bit of a segue, but you'll catch the significance of this.

There is a paper published in Nature just two months ago looking at genetic mutation. Okay, so the idea is that genetic mutation is essentially a random process, and the reason for that is, well, let's talk about genetic mutations that are brought about by radiation, solar radiation, and so forth, and they're randomly knocking atoms out of the genetic structure and producing random mutation.

But it turns out that the error correction post-DNA damage is not random. So the older the genetic structure that's being damaged by the cosmic radiation, the higher the probability that it will be repaired by intrinsic DNA repair mechanisms. So there's a hierarchy of genetic presumption built into the code.

And so the cells will allow variation on the fringes to take place without correction, but if the mutation affects something that would be fatal and because it's so core to the actual biological continuation of the organism, then the probability that it'll be error-corrected reaches a hundred percent. And so this is—you can think about that as an analog.

It's analogous to the conceptual structure, right? Imagine there's a hierarchy of conception: the deeper the conception, the more fundamental it is to the whole cognitive process, the more caution there should be in undertaking any sort of radical revolution because it's too destabilizing, and the less likely that will occur.

So, yeah, so that was—that's an amazing finding, as far as I'm concerned, you know, so that's neat—and that's canalization. Yeah, right. You know, these are phenotypes that matter; they're essential, and you can't rip them up, right? You could have some variation at a superficial level, some creativity there, but maybe don't mess with certain fundamentals.

Well, that's what happens in post-traumatic stress disorder too, it looks like, at least to some degree, is that fundamental conceptual structures like the trustworthiness of other people or the trustworthiness of human beings per se is brought into question, and that demolishes whole swaths of the systems that interpersonal communication and interactions depend upon.

So, yeah, but you'll see, Jordan, that's true of borderline personality disorder as well. You know, others can't be trusted; they're catastrophizing the splitting, and it's true in depression. You know, so is it—wherever there's—there are these biases in depression, you know, I'm worthless, life is pointless, better off dead, and so on.

They are exaggerated in a sense; they're exaggerated responses, and yeah, they're skewed and they're skewed beyond the data— they’re sort of exaggerated response to the data. So, so let’s think about that data.

So I’ve been thinking about how psychopathology might be defined formally. And so we talked earlier about the idea that a child might have grown up in a microenvironment where they learn patterns of communication that are not applicable to the broader macroenvironment. So imagine in the macroenvironment, imagine you have a hundred interactions in a day with different people. Imagine there's a pattern that you have to manifest for those interactions to go well, and that it's stable across all hundred interactions.

So like one rule would be don’t swear at someone the second you meet them—that's not going to iterate well across multiple interactions. So people, of course, don’t do that, but my point is that there are ways of conducting yourself that are going to get you in trouble, regardless of situation, right? So you imagine I had a friend; I used to go shopping with him. He was extremely socially fluent, like a real expert, and when we would walk into shops and the shopkeeper, the clerk, would approach him, he always took about ten seconds to make personal contact with the person instead of immediately asking them whatever instrumental question leaped to mind.

He would ask them how they were doing. He actually meant it, and then he would listen and he'd ask them, you know, where they worked in the store, and he'd try to find out something that they were proud of about working there. And he was really good at this. He'd make a solid connection with people right away, and going to different stores with him was extremely enjoyable because he would open people up, and then they would also be extremely helpful.

And so he had mastered this style of interpersonal communication that worked across multiple instantiations. So you could imagine that the definition of a pathologically catalyzed interpersonal style is one that worked in a given microenvironment that was extreme but doesn't generalize well across multiple social situations.

It's something, so Jacques Bank—step, for example—he paired animals together, rats together, to let them play repeatedly instead of just once. Now, if you just let them play once, the big animal can dominate the little animal, but if you have them play repeatedly—which is what they do in a naturalistic red environment—the little rat who could be defeated by the big rat has to let him win thirty percent of the time or the little rat will stop playing.

So what Banks have showed was that across iterated social interactions there was a pattern of social ethic that had to be instantiated if the social interaction was going to maintain itself. And obviously, what you're doing when you're dealing with someone clinically is you're trying to snap them out of the narrowness of their pathologically sheltered environment and enable them to adopt a pattern that generalizes across multiple social situations.

And so whatever healthy would be, would be that pattern that iterates well. Now, that doesn’t mean we can specify it precisely, but it gives it a kind of conceptual framework. Black Rifle Coffee Company is helping you knock out your holiday shopping with a ton of awesome new products this year. Shop the best brewing gear, thermos mugs, and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee.

Black Rifle sources the most exotic roast from around the globe; all coffee is roasted here in the U.S. by veteran-led teams of coffee experts. Stuff your Christmas stockings with the latest roast from America’s coffee for 10% off with the code JORDAN. Better yet, sign your Secret Santa up for a coffee club subscription. Imagine the joy of a pre-scheduled coffee delivery of your favorite roast when you need it most; it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Black Rifle Coffee Company is a veteran-founded and operated company. They take pride in serving coffee and culture to people who love America. Every purchase you make with Black Rifle helps support veteran and first responder causes. Go to blackriflecoffee.com and use promo code JORDAN for 10% off coffee, coffee gear, and apparel. And when you sign up for a new coffee club subscription, that's blackriflecoffee.com with promo code JORDAN for 10% off. Black Rifle Coffee, supporting veterans and America’s coffee.

Yes, yes it does. And you know, it makes me think of—you know, it makes me think of archetypes and of perennialism. You know, and the psychedelic experience when people have a realization that every type of being is in me and I can know love and compassion even if I haven't experienced it, you know, and then developed pathology because of the harsh, maybe unusual, or at least skewed upbringing that I had.

But then, so why do you think it reminded you of the idea that there's a multitude within? Do you think that's a reflection of the possibility of these diverse encounters? Is it something like that? Well, I mean, it's curious that it's not play unless one side can win a little bit—because then it's just, you know, dominating and it's not a game, right?

There’s no place. So you have to have that natural variability—maybe it was that thought of sort of natural variability. It can't all be hard and a lack of love. There's going to be some range, some diversity.

Yeah, well that's another definition of play, isn't it? For a system to have play means that it has this ability to vary without being too rigid. This is the opposite of canalization in some real sense, you know. And I think that there is something fundamental to the idea of play in terms of defining what a psychopathological system isn't.

So because one of the things Piaget pointed out, for example, was that in order for play to take place, both partners in play have to agree voluntarily. Right? So it sets up a joint perceptual framework and a conceptual framework that people buy into voluntarily. And so one of the things we could say about optimized social interactions is that if they're optimized, then both people are engaging voluntarily, and both people want the interaction to continue.

And that's actually—only happens under a relatively narrow set of preconditions, like the preconditions for a good conversation, right? I mean, and then you think that the conversation we're having, to the degree that we've put each other on the edge of transformation and that we're allowing play to take place within us, within both of us, and then hypothetically within those who are listening—that's—we're doing it because we want to do it, but we're also doing it because we're allowing optimized change to take place. And I think the fact that we're interested in the conversation is actually a marker for that transformation.

Yes, yes, I mean, it invites some realizations about play and, you know, what children might say. You know if they're meant to be playing, and they’re like, "That's what they signed up to." Yeah. And then the game changes somehow, and one of the partners says: "I thought we were playing!" "But I thought we were playing!"

You know, right? Or imagine if we're having this conversation now and instead of it being playful, one of us was sort of preaching a particular view or, you know, dominating too much or trying to convince the other of the way the world is, then it would stop being fun, and it would be like, you know, I'd be like, "I thought we were playing!" "I thought we were..."

Well, that would also be an indication of too rapid canalization, right? So, or the imposition of something already catalyzed. So if I was insisting that my viewpoint was right, then I would be discounting whatever you had to say and insisting that my catalyzed viewpoint already dominate.

And so I might do that because I don't want to let any of my ideas go— that might be one possibility. Or I might do it in a cheap ploy to obtain dominance as a marker of status, right? The alternative would be that we could both play, right? And then whatever status accomplishment would go along with that, so in this case, it would be are people going to listen to the podcast? That would be a consequence not of being dominant, but of being able to play.

So there's something about—there's something about play I think that's key to this issue of psychopathology. It's sort of like the spirit of play is antithetical to the psychopathological enterprise. Yes, I like that. And then, you know, how play and creativity and art can go together and, you know, art and expression can work as a kind of antithesis to canalization and pathology, you know, when in a thorough.

Yeah, it's—I mean, that's a curious one is you know when do you see the best art in relation to psychopathology? And I'm trying to remember now, I think—I mean, the classic one is is a manic episode, is mania, and great art, you know?

But I think depression and art, it's a little bit more precarious, that one. Yeah, well it could easily be too that to the degree that depression is linked to artistic production, it's that the artistic production is actually part of the process that's lifting the person out of the depression rather than actually being something that they're diving into.

Yes, right. Yes. And, and in bipolar disorder, you know, the quality check, you know, because it goes: my all my ideas are incredible; they're ingenious too; they're all worthless; rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish; oh, this one, this one's not bad. No.

Yeah, I saw a movie, which you can find on YouTube, of Picasso about 1955 if I remember correctly; it was black and white, and they had him paint a—I think it was a rooster, but I'm not exactly sure on a glass sheet. And so he spent a number of hours painting, and it was so interesting to see him play because he wasn't trying to produce a painting as the end product; he was playing with visual representation.

And he probably erased and repainted a hundred times while he was working on the painting. He'd paint and erase and paint and erase, paint and erase—just constant play as he was experimenting with hitting the mark, you know? And so he wasn't an artist who was producing paintings; he was exploring visual representation.

So, yeah. So I think that we could start thinking about a healthy interpersonal dynamic as characterized by something like the presence of the spirit of play, but also we could think about play as a microcosm of a pattern of social interaction that actually works across multiple potential domains of social interaction.

You know, it's why you want your child to be a good sport, because you might say, well, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game. The kid doesn't understand that because they want to win, but your point as a parent is, yeah, you want to win, but you want to win in a manner that makes other people want to keep playing games with you, right?

And there's something that's really core to what constitutes health about that. And I like that conjunction of the developmental literature on play and the philosophical literature on play and its association with creativity and the idea that is something that's antithetical to psychopathology. The psychopathological condition occurs when all the play has been taken out of a system.

Yes. Yeah. Yes, and I know—I like that too. You can think of people who practice being well, you know, like experienced meditators. You can sometimes encounter these beings, and they are—they're light, they're like a child. They're an adult, right? A bit like the Dalai Lama, you know. It's a bit like a big kid, maybe.

I don’t know him very well. You know that—what’s his name? I don’t remember.

The reason Richardson?

Richie Davidson, right? Yeah. Yeah. He did EEG analysis of the Dalai Lama and other practiced meditators, and he showed that they showed a preferential pattern of left prefrontal activation that was associated with a dominant state of extroverted positive emotion. And that would go along with that, and it also goes along with that gospel injunction: you know, except as you become like a little child, you'll know wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

It's the same idea that—and it’s also associated with the idea of neoteny in evolutionary biology, right? That we tend to evolve towards our childhood forms. That’s— you know, a human skull looks exactly like an infant chimpanzee skull, so that— yeah, it's very interesting. Stephen J. Gould pointed this out; he showed that animated creatures like Mickey Mouse and so forth, he showed a whole variety of these become increasingly neotenous as the animation propagates across time; they become more and more childlike in their features.

It's a kind of a universal proclivity. And so the idea with regard to mental health would be something like the ability to reattain that capacity for play actually characterizes mental health in the positive manner in adulthood. And then one question neuropharmacologically would be do the psychedelics put more play in the system?

And the fact that they allow category shifts to occur much more prolifically, let's say, seems to indicate that the answer to that might be yes. Yes, I'm leaning towards a yes. I mean, at low doses, people are often, you know, quite silly when they can talk, and what plays out in their Mind's Eye is playful, cartoon-like, and sort of silly and grotesque.

And of course, it can go deeper and become, in a sense, feel more serious and frightening. Well, I think play does play that out, though; that occurs in play, though. Like if you imagine that what you're doing when you read a serious novel is something akin to play, but if you read a Dostoevsky novel, you're playing at a very deep level.

And so what that would mean is that instead of playing with superficial categories—which you might be doing if you just read a cheap romance. And I'm not putting that down, I'm just saying it's a more superficial form of play—but you can play deeply, and you know when children are playing deeply they're really involved in it. Like they can play pretend games, with children can become incredibly serious; they can act out very complicated and even frightening scenarios in their play.

They will do that. And I would say the seriousness of play is not a consequence of the admixture of negative emotion per se; it's an indication of the depth at which the cognitive categories are being transformed. So the deeper they fall into the play, the more radical the transformation is that's occurring.

Yes, yes. In fact, the notion of a play like a drama, you know, if it's a good play, like a good theater production, then it has depth and it can be serious and it can be moving.

So quite—I guess the antithesis would be a play that gets stuck and gets boring—that repeats. That—yep, and you know the analogy, where it's too predictable, right? That would be canalized in some sense, yes, because all it's doing then is running over a plot and characterizations that you already 100% know.

Yeah, right, so there's—and that would be a propagandistic... I think that art degenerates into propaganda when it becomes catalyzed, right? That's right! You have to say this, it's like, well, we already know that; we already know that; that's already been insisted upon.

Yeah, we need some—need some surprise! So could you talk to me a little bit about this idea of local minima? You talk about canalization in the paper that you sent me, and your proposition is something like when you overlearn something, you end up in a valley, in a fitness valley; you can't get out of it in some sense.

But I don't exactly understand that metaphor, so what—how would you technically characterize a local minima? Yeah, it’s an analogy for depicting states where the minima are substates and the local minima would be the closest sub-state to visit where it has some gravitational pull by being a minima.

It has a gradient where you would get pulled to a point. And then... so is it something like that if you're an expert with a hammer, everything looks like a nail? It's that you have an a priori category system, and so anything that even vaguely approximates that is likely to get processed by that system? Is that a— and is that a consequence maybe of the brain's desire to use maximally efficient neurological processing?

Because if you have the hardware for a perception, you might as well utilize that rather than going through all the difficulty of having to generate a whole new perception, right? That's a—that's a very complicated—I think that works, I mean, again, if we go to pathology and depression—such a prevalent disorder. So it may be a useful one to go to again.

But you know, if one's mind naturally moves in an itinerant way here and there, and in health, it moves very freely, but in a depression, it's very easy to fall into that minima that is related to the depression that has a negative bias.

So that would be an example of falling into a local minima. Yeah, right. So it’s something like the hyper-availability of already laid down pathways and their pathological conditions where that's much more likely.

Yeah, well, that happens when—that happens when you have to make an immediate response, which of course makes sense, right? Because you're going to use automatized perceptual structures in an emergency, because you don't have time to do anything else.

We'll be right back to our conversation with Dr. Carhart Harris, but first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary, Logos and Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world.

Illiteracy was the norm; the pastor's home was the first school. And every morning, it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing; here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg.

Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that.

If it's familiar, it's easy to go there, you know? And so in a depressive presentation, it's easy; it's easy to fall back there. Now, do you practice clinically?

No, I don't. No, no, just research. But you were trained psychoanalytically as well as scientific, as well as neuroscientifically, as an academic? I studied and got a master’s qualification in psychoanalysis. I also had my own analysis, but I've never actually trained clinically as an analyst myself.

I see. I see. Okay, let's contrast psychedelics and antidepressants for a moment. And so let me tell you what I understood from your papers, and you tell me if I've got it right, perhaps. So both of those chemicals seem to affect the serotonergic system preferentially.

My understanding of the serotonin system is that one of the things it does is modulate cognitive flexibility. And so if you have high levels of serotonergic function, which would be associated with social status, let's say you're more resistant to error propagation now, but the psychedelics also affect the serotonin system, but they seem to decrease cognitive specialization and canalization, right?

And so they make the system more open—not to catastrophic failure, but to play. And so do you know how they—how do they—how detailed is their knowledge about how that's actually occurring at a cellular level? What is the chemical itself doing at a cellular or even a higher order biological level?

So if we begin with the classic psychedelics, compounds like LSD or psilocybin or DMT, then the chemicals are binding to serotonin 2A receptors. So a certain serotonin receptor—one of the at least 14 serotonin receptors. These receptors are heavily expressed in the cortex, and especially so in high-level cortex, and they're expressed postsynaptically, so on the receiving neuron of communication, and they modulate the excitability of the host cell that the receptors are.

So when they stimulate—do they make it more excitable? More excitable; it's more excitable, all right. And so actually, it all begins there, because if you think of excitability like temperature, you're kind of dialing up, you're dialing up temperature, you're dialing up the excitability of the cell. But the catch, it seems, is what that translates to in terms of population level activity.

Because all the computation and the map to, I guess, information processing and experience, it doesn’t seem to happen at the single cell level; it’s how the cells interact and interrelate. And really, it's once we get to the population level.

So populations of neurons oscillating together—so is that within cortical columns or between them, or do we know?

Well, there’s that dose-dependent—it would be a great thing too. No, and I imagine that there’s increased communication between cortical columns, where cortical columns are like basic computational information processing units in the brain.

The cortical column—like a column for a particular, you know, orientation in space recognizing that, right? And they’re specialized, yes, they specialize, they have—as far as communication between them—that's right, yeah.

But high communication within them, you know, and right, right, and that's—yes. So they’re specific for specific categories. So the very rudimentary level of visual processing, like things oriented in this vertical domain or horizontal.

So, yeah, I suspect that there’s communication— increased communication across cortical columns. And if we look at things like systems or networks in the brain, which we can map quite well with functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example, then we can see that there’s increased communication across networks under psychedelics.

That's actually a very well-replicated finding. Okay, so let me throw something out here. Tell me what you think about it. So I've been conceptualizing neuroticism as the proclivity of a conceptual system to collapse in response to error.

So the more—the higher your levels of baseline negative emotion, the less error it takes per unit of collapse, something like that. So, and then you can make an analogy—you can make an analogous case for creativity. So we know that creative people, if I ask creative people, if I give them a word and then I say “Tell me all the words you can that this word reminds you of,” in a minute you can map out their associations, and the creative people will produce a higher volume of associations.

So they're more verbally fluent, but their associations will be more distant in conceptual space. So the less creative you are, the more synonymous the co-activated words will be. So then you can imagine that if your creativity is in part a consequence of how much co-activation other ideas are likely to take place but then it's also a function of how distant the co-activation.

And so if the psychedelics are increasing excitability, I wonder if they're doing something analogous to the co-activation of more disparate columns as well. That’s strange because they also seem to inhibit semantic processing to some degree.

People become less able to verbalize what's happening to them. So it doesn’t exactly look like it's semantic excitation that's occurring; it’s more like it seems to be occurring more at the level of image in some sense than semantically. But there does seem to be this broadening of creativity, and the analog might be there without excitability is that any given idea is more likely to activate a set of associated ideas.

Yeah, there is some evidence in this direction of things like category mixing, binocular rivalry paradigms; you have mixed percepts occur more often under psychedelics. Also, when looking at spreading semantic activation, there's evidence that the semantic network is broader under psychedelic.

So while people might not be able to articulate themselves very well, the semantics in terms of meaning is certainly very rich. It is. Well, you get this permanent effect too that Roland Griffiths detected, right? So in his psilocybin experiencing participants, the ones that reported a mystical experience showed a one standard deviation increase in trait openness one year later.

That’s a walloping effect for a single dose. Yeah. You know, it also makes—you know, I read that and I thought, wow, that's amazing, but it also made me sort of leery because it does indicate a permanent transformation. It looks like a permanent transformation in personality and in neurological function.

Now, you might think, well, it wouldn’t hurt everybody to be moved one standard deviation up on the creativity scale, but you'd only say that if you assumed that creativity was a benefit without a cost. And I’ve never seen a benefit without a cost.

So, you know, one of the things I’m wondering, for example, is if you’re if you’re higher in neuroticism to begin with, is an increment in openness a plus or a negative? Because I’ve known really open, highly neurotic people, and one of the problems with that personality constellation is that they often saw the branches off that they’re sitting on, right?

Because their ideas are so—they can't get a grip on anything stable because they're so mutable in their cognition. And that seems to drive a certain degree of negative emotion, right, because they're always—they can't settle on any identity, for example, and so they destabilize themselves.

And like, I don’t know if we’ve, you know, we’ve looked for pathologies associated with creativity for a long time, and manic-depressive disorder seems to, at least in principle, be associated. There’s not a lot of evidence for the pathology of creativity, but, like I said, you don’t often get a benefit without a cost.

Yes, yes, it—I imagine openness sort of tops out into another personality skills, like I think it's the Isync one—it would probably be called psychoticism. And, you know, so—and also trait schizotype is maybe... Right, right, crossing over with extreme openness.

Yeah, well you get a false positive problem, right? Because the thing about creative people is they're pretty good at identifying patterns in sparse data, but the problem with identifying patterns in sparse data is sometimes you see things that aren't there. Apophenia.

Yeah, yes. And I think that's one of the limitations, one of the things to watch out for, one of the pitfalls of psychedelic use, and maybe psychedelic therapy, is seeing things that aren't there or, in a sense, being too zealous in one's learning from the data that's allowed to come up.

Yeah, well I talked to Dennis McKenna, yeah, yeah, and so they were the brothers who established the protocols for domestication of psilocybin mushrooms, right? And Dennis and his brother Terence, who's the more famous McKenna, they went to Mexico—I did a podcast with him just a couple of weeks ago—they went to, I think it was Mexico decades ago, and ate a lot of psilocybin mushrooms in a couple of months.

And it—the experience gripped Terence in a way that never really let him go, from what Dennis relates. And Terence developed—some of his ideas are very interesting, but some of them were quite Baroque and strange. And Dennis told me that, you know, those ideas—some of them had to do with alien possession, for example, because it's not that uncommon for people having a psychedelic experience to have experiences that are akin to alien abduction experiences, the kind of thing John Mack reported.

And it wasn't obvious—it seemed that Dennis had concluded that some of these ideas had gripped Terence for decades in a way that produced a different kind of canalization, right? They knocked him out of his normal perception, but they knocked him into a new state where he saw patterns that he then pursued literally for decades that turned out likely to be both false and counterproductive.

Yes. So yes, well, whereas the practitioners of health would say things like hold it all lightly in a sense. Don’t believe anything, you know, like the Buddha said. Question everything and test it all yourself; don’t take anything on faith in a sense.

There is this other thing that can happen where you take something like an intense DMT experience, where it feels like you've encountered another dimension altogether that's populated by seemingly sentient beings, and you come back from that compelling experience—a deeply immersive experience—and you come back from it and think, ah, I didn't know! I didn’t know that that other world actually exists.

And I’ve experienced it now—kind of solipsistic reasoning, and it is a bit like, you know, a kind of athenia trap. You're like, ah, well, I've experienced it, I've seen it, now I know it's real. Right?

Well, and I’ve seen it with emotional punch. Yeah, right. It’s not merely the perception; it’s the perception—see, this is also happens to people. I've tried to understand the phenomenology of paranoid schizophrenia.

So here's what happens to someone who's paranoid. So imagine they're watching the TV—maybe the Pope's on—and all of a sudden what the Pope is saying is hyper-meaningful. So it seems like one of those experiences—maybe it's because the person is stressed that their a priori perceptions are no longer filtering their current perception.

And so now, all of a sudden, the Pope's message is hyper-meaningful, and it manifests itself emotionally; they can't look away, and they feel it’s as if he’s talking directly to me. It's the only way they can explain it. Now, more intelligent people are more likely to become paranoid if they become schizophrenic.

So the first thing that happens is they have an aberrant experience. And the experience might be: well, it was like the pope was talking to me, and maybe that's not even enough to get them going. Maybe that has to happen three or four times with different news media, and maybe it's only when a certain topic is being discussed, right?

And so then they conclude the only way to account for this intensification of emotional experience is that I am being specifically targeted, that I have some cosmic destiny, let's say. That’s the only thing that makes sense out of the emotional experience.

And then having established that as an axiom, they build a whole paranoid belief system on top of it. And the thing about talking to someone who’s paranoid schizophrenic is that within the delusional axiomatic system, they're pretty rigorous.

But the axioms are something like: oh, I’m absolutely sure the Pope spoke to me when he was on TV, and you can’t shake that, right? That becomes—that becomes the axis around which the whole world turns, and it seems to be instantiated in them because of the intensity of the emotional experience when that message was received.

Yeah, Kapur has called that aberrant salience, right? The salience which he and others would relate to dopaminergic functioning. You know, there’s a hypersensitivity of the mesolimbic dopamine system, and that's encoding the excessive salience with which you're imbuing certain experiences.

And so, in a sense, there it’s feeding a happy and learning, actually, you know, an associative learning. And no, if it is dopaminergic, too, I mean the dopamine system produces that sense of reward, so that would be real, like engrossed engagement.

But the dopamine system also produces reinforcement, so it sort of backtracks the neural patterns of activation that occurred just before the reward, and it strengthens them. So not only would you get that sense of grip because the message, say, is being delivered to you, but along with that dopaminergic hyperproduction would become an increased probability that those neural systems are in fact reinforced in their development by the very experience.

Yes, well, it's confidence, you know. When you're—I get it now; I get it now, you know? It comes with a feeling of this slant—in a positively valence way—it feels good to know. It feels good to be confident, and typically it's difficult to be—the opposite of confident, to be swimming in uncertainty.

Yeah, yeah, well, right—right, exactly. Well, that also accounts for the attraction of certainty, right?