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

[0] Hello everyone watching and listening on YouTube and associated platforms.

[1] I'm continuing my investigation today into the domain of cognitive neuroscience with a bit of a side foray into psychotherapeutics and the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy with some attention paid to associated implications for analysis of brain function.

[2] I'm pleased today to be talking with an outstanding researcher in those joint fields.

[3] Dr. Robin Carhart Harris is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry and Director of Neuroscape's Psychedelics Division at the University of California, San Francisco.

[4] He moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol.

[5] In 2009, under the mentorship of Professor David Nutt, he relocated to the Imperial College to continue fMRI research with the psychedelic drug psilocybin, derived from what have been known culturally as magic mushrooms.

[6] In conjunction with Dr. Nutt, he built up a process of psychedelic research that includes functional magnetic resonance imaging and meg imaging with psilocybin, fMRI imaging with MDMA and plans for a MRC -sponsored clinical trial of psilocybin as a treatment for major depression.

[7] He was awarded an MA in psychoanalysis at Brunel University, London, and a PhD in psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol.

[8] He has designed human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT, and several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy.

[9] 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's 100 Next, a list of 100 rising stars shaping the research future.

[10] I wanted to start this conversation by asking Robin about his thoughts about the relationship between categorization and implicit learning and Hebbian learning, all of those things together.

[11] So 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.

[12] So our perceptions themselves are categories, and they're implicit.

[13] And 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.

[14] But this also pertains to the question of what constitutes the unconscious.

[15] A lot of what the unconscious seems to be is the implicit category structure that we use to perceive the world through.

[16] So that's a proposition.

[17] Maybe I could get you to comment on that as a proposition.

[18] Yeah, I think that's a reasonable proposition.

[19] So much of what we learn is learnt implicitly, really the majority.

[20] And the assumptions that we come to, the recognition of differences between things, which is the essence of categorisation, occurs implicitly and then is encoded with varying degrees, of what you might call confidence or precision.

[21] And that precision develops.

[22] It can strengthen with repetition.

[23] And then the encoding is stronger and the assumptions are more influential.

[24] And those processes are very much processes that play out unconsciously.

[25] And yet they dominate our thinking, the content of our thought, and our behavior.

[26] Right.

[27] 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.

[28] 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.

[29] but as they play it repeatedly, they build specialized neural machinery to govern the motor output that constitutes the ability to play the piece.

[30] And so they're automating what is initially voluntary.

[31] Then imagine that they automate a mistake, like you can play a missed note or you can automate a phrase that's mistimed.

[32] And then you'll have learned something that is now automatic, but is also in error.

[33] And 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.

[34] And I guess your theory with regards to psychedelic usage is something, as far as I can tell, is that psychedelic usage enables the re what would you say it re -navelizes the environment or re -novelizes experience so that the effect of that over -learning 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 when would previous learning be pathological because that's a hard thing to figure out.

[35] It is.

[36] It is.

[37] And, you know, analogies will help us here, and one that is perhaps relevant is rebirth.

[38] You know, we come into this world, sure, with some inherited models.

[39] And certainly they can, you know, come into play as we live a life, and they're activated and engaged as we encounter aspects of human experience.

[40] 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.

[41] And they dominate our way of thinking our way of seeing the world and our way of behaving.

[42] And so the analogy I want to come to is one of rebirth, is, you know, in a sense, resetting the system, recalibrating the system.

[43] And yes, then we will be experiencing the world with a refreshed level of novelty.

[44] Okay, so, okay, so imagine this, I'll go in two directions from that.

[45] So the first is that imagine that you grow up in a family where the interactions between the father and the mother and the children are pathological.

[46] So maybe the father is narcissistic and psychopathic, at least to some degree.

[47] 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.

[48] And so their perceptions are tuned in that regard.

[49] 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 very perceptions have been tuned and that's where the unconscious is right it's in 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 perception, her domain of perceptual familiarity, and anything that's vaguely reminiscent of the pattern that she's already learned will elicit the whole pattern.

[50] 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.

[51] And that's a good way of sort of zeroing in on what actually might constitute a form of psychopathological learning.

[52] So you might come from a dependency -inducing familial background too, where you're really, really taken care of to an extreme.

[53] 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.

[54] Then when you're thrown out into the broader world and that level of intensive care isn't forthcoming, your perceptions aren't adapted to that macro environment, to that broader macro environment.

[55] So that's one thing.

[56] Now, you talked about rebirth.

[57] So I spent a lot of time studying Mircea Eliad, in particular, historian of religious ideas.

[58] He was very interested in the symbolic structure of the idea of rebirth.

[59] And so the way that this is laid out in the broad mythological literature is that the rebirth, and that would be a baptism too, is a return to the beginning of time where chaos and possibility rule unstructured.

[60] And that return to the beginning of time to see that unstructured chaotic possibility is a time for rejuvenation and renovation.

[61] And the idea of baptism is actually a ritualistic attempt to produce the kind of rebirth that is in principle redemptive.

[62] Now, you have a theory about how psychedelics works that makes pharmacological sense of this notion of the reconstitution of a generative chaos.

[63] If I've got the theory correct, right, is that the psychedelics blow off the over -learning that constrains perception, or maybe even the learning, and the danger of that is everything, 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.

[64] Does that seem approximately appropriate?

[65] Yes, it does.

[66] And, you know, the analogy or the theme, the archetype perhaps of baptism is useful.

[67] Baptism often involves a shock, whether it's, you know, being thrown in water or water thrown on you or a baptism of fire.

[68] You know, so there's an appeal to a period, a state of chaos.

[69] And, yeah, and this opportunity for a second go, in a sense.

[70] And, you know, for the child, the scenario that you were describing, suffering, you know, complex.

[71] interrelationships, familial interrelationships.

[72] The product of that is that the child knows no different.

[73] They've just learned really adaptively, in a sense, even though the product is maladaptive, it couldn't have been any other way.

[74] The product, in a sense, they can't have helped, which is probably why we don't necessarily incarcerate children.

[75] 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 you know there are moral judgments on on behavior and so on and then there is an assumption that you could know 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 of victim to your experiences.

[76] 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.

[77] and perhaps there's a clue there again to some of the historical use of psychedelic plant medicines for that purpose.

[78] 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.

[79] Now, that's what should happen, right?

[80] Because if you're stressed, hyper -stressed, that means something has gone radically wrong.

[81] And when something's gone radically wrong, that's a good time to learn something new.

[82] 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.

[83] But what inducing that?

[84] pharmacologically.

[85] That's right.

[86] So this is a model I introduced maybe a couple of years ago now called pivotal mental states.

[87] And really it's a way to conceptualize and contextualize what psychedelics are and what they do.

[88] And I propose that they are drugs that hijack a stress response system.

[89] But that stress response system has evolved and exists anyway, of course.

[90] It has to.

[91] 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, you know, somewhat alien chemical coming in that you put into your body.

[92] So it was, in a sense, a way of sort of having a more foundational understanding of the psychedelic experience, you know, what is it outside of the context of psychedelic drugs?

[93] 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.

[94] And then in that pivotal mental state, this moment right now really matters as to where, you know, your life's going to go from here on.

[95] Yeah, well, that strikes me as analogous to the phenomenon that's often noted among people who recover from alcoholism.

[96] So it's very common, and I knew this, I learned this almost 30 years ago when I was studying alcoholism and its treatments.

[97] Even then, it was known that one of the most reliable treatments, and this has stayed constant, in the research literature was religious transformation.

[98] And so you think, well, and these are hardcore non -religious scientists who are putting this forward as a proposition.

[99] It's just a fact drawn from decades of observation about what works and what doesn't work in the treatment of alcoholism.

[100] Most things don't work, including treatment centers.

[101] But one of the phenomenon that's constantly reported by people who have recovered from alcoholism is that at some point, they hit rock bottom, right?

[102] And they have a devastatingly stressful experience as a consequence of the fact that their addiction has gone out of control.

[103] And that hits them with devastating force.

[104] 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 -navelized in some sense, that's associated with an experience of awe.

[105] And there's a religious element to that because the transformation is taking place at a very deep level.

[106] And so they hit something that's hyper -stressful, and then they're prepared for radically new learning, for personality retooling in some sense.

[107] So, okay, so then I was thinking, too, so 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.

[108] So imagine this.

[109] Imagine there's a hierarchy of implicit presumptions.

[110] Some are key and core, and those would be the assumptions that if disrupted cause traumatic stress.

[111] And then there are less crucial assumptions, which are more.

[112] like peripheral perceptions and they're ones that still have a lot of play they're not hyper learned yet and they're not a lot of 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 to constrain and 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 what i would want to add in there is that perhaps it's it's perhaps unlearning is even more important than learning in that process.

[113] So, you know, the patient is being brought back to traumatic memories, traumatic themes and feelings.

[114] But the pathology that they present with is one of arguably excessive learning, you know, a defensive learning that needs to be unlearned.

[115] And so in order to bring someone, on 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.

[116] 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.

[117] 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 when I after I talked to Carl Fristin 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.

[118] And so then the question is, like, so you get stress, and you talk in your paper, the one you sent me about the fact that stress also produces neural death, especially in hippocampal systems, for example, that are key to the movement of information from short -term attention to long -term storage.

[119] 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 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.

[120] Possibly, yes.

[121] I mean, a theme I'd want to bring in would be disconnect.

[122] 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 sort of forced retreat from objects that one would invest in, often implicitly love objects, you know.

[123] But that's meant very, 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.

[124] And Freud's model of depression was that that investment that we do when we, you know, have get up and go, who write papers and fall in love and, you know, 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?

[125] And that was Freud's model of depression that it's sort of dammed up and it gets deflected back onto the self in this very self -critical way.

[126] 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 a depression that involves some kind of inability to invest in...

[127] So I've been trying to conceptualize that neurologically.

[128] So imagine that there's a hierarchy of conception, right?

[129] And so we have some fundamental conceptions upon which many other conceptions are predicated and some that are less fundamental.

[130] Now, before you question a category, the category should fail.

[131] Now then that raises two questions is how severe is the failure?

[132] So let me give you an example.

[133] 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.

[134] 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.

[135] 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?

[136] I've always been hopeless.

[137] My whole past is hopeless.

[138] There's nothing good about the present and everything's just going to get worse in the future.

[139] I might as well be dead.

[140] And so imagine this.

[141] Imagine that there's a hierarchy of conceptions and there's a barrier for error propagation.

[142] 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.

[143] And so then imagine the more neurotic you are, the fewer failures it takes at any level to move up another level, to move up a level higher in the hierarchy and question something more fundamental.

[144] And maybe that's serotonin mediated.

[145] 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.

[146] And when you're depressed, there's no resistance.

[147] It's every error propagates all the way up to the most fundamental level.

[148] Yes, 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.

[149] But what one might think of depression and a lot of psychopathology is too much top down.

[150] You know, in a sense, reality, and 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.

[151] Right, right.

[152] And you can mention, this and yeah you can see that 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 yeah and the reality wasn't that bad you know so that's depression so I would argue that that's our that's too much model and the model is skewed and we sort of touched on this earlier you know tilted in a particular way, biased in a particular way.

[153] So there is this fascinating question of, why are you biased?

[154] Where did that skew come from?

[155] Why are you having to see the world through this bias, through this skew?

[156] What does it do for you?

[157] 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 an excess of of error -induced chaos and the way you just put it forward was that it was a pathology of constrained forecasting.

[158] But there's a point of agreement where both agreed that something fundamental has gone wrong.

[159] And we know this, right?

[160] Because, yeah, 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.

[161] 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.

[162] Something, and so what's really interesting about that, and this is why something, some fundamental set of propositions must have gone astray, because, and you're thinking about it as something that's canalyzed 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.

[163] It's, it's, it has to be fundamental.

[164] It has to be a primal set of conceptions because it colors absolutely everything, right?

[165] Nothing escapes from the depressive abyss.

[166] And so it has to be disruption in a system that's so fundamental that all other cognitions and perceptions depend on it.

[167] So this is part of the reason I was trying to make sense of it in relationship to social status, right?

[168] Because we know that if someone's social status falls, there are tonic levels of serotonin constraint decrease.

[169] And the 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.

[170] Because you have friends and you have people you can rely on and you're getting a lot of of attention from other people.

[171] And so it makes sense that you don't have to be hypersensitive to error because you're buffered.

[172] So imagine you get depressed and the mechanism that is adjudicating your social status is pathologized.

[173] And it rates you as a 1 out of 10 instead of a 10 out of 10.

[174] 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.

[175] which it is if you're actually socially isolated and extremely unpopular, right?

[176] You are in that sort of danger.

[177] Yes, but there is this interesting other possibility.

[178] I mean, it is a very delicate question of whether a pathology is adaptive or maladaptive or functional or dysfunctional.

[179] And it has been argued, you know, a depressive episode is functional, you know, in a situation of extreme social dilemma.

[180] Maybe it makes sense, in a sense, to retreat, to withdraw from the world, in a sense, to hibernate for a while, to stay out of trouble for a while.

[181] Another possibility, and this, again, you know, I do have a fair bit of time for certain Freudian ideas.

[182] And another one in relation to depression was that it's often repressed anger.

[183] So rather than, you know, some social dilemma plays out and you get aggressive and you do something dramatic, you know, you kill someone, then this could be a this could be fatal for you very easily in a, you know, a social network way back when or now.

[184] And so, you know, this is the argument for civilization and its discontents that actually, you know, 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, is, could be functional.

[185] I know that makes depression.

[186] Well, no, no, no, I think that it points to.

[187] 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.

[188] Well, you have three.

[189] One is you can just ignore it.

[190] And sometimes that's the right thing to do, because if you tried again, it would work.

[191] And so that's the utility of persistence.

[192] And you never know, in some fundamental sense, whether you're being persistent or blind.

[193] That's a tough thing to figure out.

[194] most entrepreneurs who become successful have failed in a dozen enterprises before.

[195] And so are they persistent or have they failed to learn from experience?

[196] Like, well, there's a toss -up.

[197] Then imagine you don't ignore it.

[198] Okay, now you're going to fix the problem.

[199] Well, then you have two choices.

[200] You could fix the world or you could fix yourself.

[201] 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.

[202] Not very often, but sometimes, you know.

[203] So if you're going to fix yourself, you've failed multiple times.

[204] The first thing that has to happen is that the part of you that's error -ridden has to die.

[205] And so there is that element.

[206] That's exactly, I would say, in some sense, the payoff of neuroticism is, well, why have negative emotion?

[207] It's, well, you get anxious so that you stop doing things that might cause you.

[208] your own destruction.

[209] 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 your you?

[210] 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.

[211] 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.

[212] And of course that's the case.

[213] Now, the problem with depression is that you get these macro retreats where everything falls apart.

[214] And you might hope that you're not in a situation where the right reaction is for everything to fall apart very often.

[215] 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.

[216] 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.

[217] 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.

[218] 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.

[219] 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.

[220] And it's that, and there's a canalization in that, right, that narrowing where that's actually beneficial.

[221] And so the model you sent me, the paper you sent me, I think, if I've got it right, concentrated mostly on this overlearning as the fundamental source of psychopathology.

[222] Yes.

[223] And that was very intentional.

[224] I mean, I do believe it.

[225] 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.

[226] people can be differentially vulnerable or sensitive, but the pathology does have a history.

[227] There was a process there.

[228] And I think that can help caregivers and patients because it says, you know, you can, there is some understanding to be done here.

[229] I mean, if that wasn't true, psychotherapy wouldn't exist, and people wouldn't share their problems and try and understand it.

[230] And often, you know, the process was very complex and, you know, not all the information is necessarily so easy to decipher and clear.

[231] But that doesn't mean that it hasn't developed and hasn't been acquired.

[232] And actually there is some logic to the presentation that comes about.

[233] Now, that doesn't mean that you then accept the pathology.

[234] So I just wanted to emphasize that.

[235] Right.

[236] It just says that we could understand this.

[237] But it doesn't say, oh, it's functional that you're depressed.

[238] So we just, we'll leave it alone.

[239] Better you're depressed than be, you know, a murderer or what have you.

[240] Right.

[241] 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, and 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, you know, 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?

[242] 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.

[243] That's very common, in fact.

[244] And so you have to take people off alcohol somewhat slowly, so that doesn't happen.

[245] But if you put people in a treatment center, you can get them over the physiological dependence in a matter of weeks.

[246] 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.

[247] And this speaks to what you just said, is that the thing is, and 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.

[248] It's like, well, that's one reason you're alcoholic, and it's a cardinal reason, but here's some other reasons.

[249] All the things you do socially are focused on alcohol.

[250] All of your use of leisure time is alcohol use learned.

[251] All of your friends are likely to be alcoholic, right?

[252] 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.

[253] And 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.

[254] This is partly why when Alcoholics Anonymous works, it works, is because it provides people with a new peer group.

[255] And so there is this problem.

[256] You could have the death of a pathological system.

[257] But then, okay, 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.

[258] and so this points back to this conundrum that we've encountered in our discussion so far are you talking this paper that you sent me about this general factor of psychopathology and as I said when I see that reminds me of factor analytic studies of emotion showing the powerful factor of negative emotion neuroticism 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.

[259] But that's different than the claim that it's pathologically canalyzed learning processes that are core to the essence of psychopathology, right?

[260] Because you're really talking about a pathological excess of order in some sense, whereas neurotism is a pathological susceptibility to chaos.

[261] 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 I think there's work to be done to measure what I mean by canalization pathological overlearning and then to see whether it is true that across the board transdiagnostically so in whatever you know category of psychiatric disorder you'll find this phenomenon and it will be there and it will be strong you know 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.

[262] They don't claim to explain everything, but they do propose to be able to explain something important.

[263] And so, you know, the idea with this new model is that there is a principal component, you know, a dominating factor to psychopathology.

[264] And I'm putting forward this idea that it's excessive, excessive associative learning done for psychologically defensive reasons.

[265] Right.

[266] Well, okay.

[267] So in the same paper, when you're talking about the use of psychedelic therapy, you put forward some cautions.

[268] And so some of the cautions are, well, maybe psychedelic therapy would be less warranted in situations where you already see an excess proclivity towards associative thinking.

[269] like pre -psychotic states.

[270] And so imagine that we could hypothesize, perhaps, to begin with, that there are pathologies of order and there are pathologies of chaos.

[271] Those might be more associated with neuroticism.

[272] There might be pathologies of creativity that would manifest themselves, let's say, in something like manic depressive disorder on the manic end.

[273] 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.

[274] So that would be, do you know, has anybody tried treating obsessive -compulsive disorder with psychedelics, for example?

[275] Because that's certainly...

[276] So what happened?

[277] Yes, they have.

[278] Okay.

[279] Well, yeah, pretty promising findings, and it's being repeated now.

[280] I think Yale, Imperial College London, are doing trials, the trial has been done, I think, in San Diego.

[281] So, you know, it's an indication that makes sense.

[282] Again, I do think it fits the model of, you know, over -potentiated ways of thinking and or behaving, the compulsive action, the need to wash one's hands or, you know, have these intrusive thoughts that repeat.

[283] And this very narrow category, categorical viewpoint, right?

[284] So much of the world becomes disgusting.

[285] And we know that the psychedelics are good at treating addictions like cigarette smoking.

[286] And that's also, that's a good model for canalization because the nicotine produces that hyper -learning.

[287] So I would say to your question, is this in a sense, I don't know if you use the word just, just a subset.

[288] I would say it's the majority subset.

[289] That's the idea.

[290] It's the principal component.

[291] And that's not to say there aren't other components, say, a component.

[292] component of hyper -associative thinking and behavior, erratic, like a delirium, and one can argue whether a manic psychosis is like that.

[293] It may be in a sense, but sometimes it's quite quick for that state to become canalized as well.

[294] Right, right, right.

[295] And also to say that that component, that component of hyper -associative thinking isn't, arguably isn't fundamentally pathological as well because that's an infant, you know, that's an infant that is someone in a, you know, state of, gosh, like a creative, like fugue state, you know.

[296] Yeah, yeah.

[297] So it's harder to see that, actually, in my mind, is obviously pathological.

[298] Yes, it can be highly unusual to see that in a grown person, an adult, but it happens.

[299] And actually, you know, going back to those pivotal mental states, those conversion -type experiences, they often feature that.

[300] And they can be life -saving those experiences, you know?

[301] Right, right.

[302] And actually this, now we're coming to the, really, the flavor of the psychedelic experience.

[303] experience as well.

[304] Right.

[305] Okay, so let's talk about the psychedelic experience for a minute.

[306] 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 is 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.

[307] And so some of this canalyzed learning that you describe is actually the use of perceptual categories to reduce that information flow.

[308] And so what seems to happen in the psychedelic experience is that that a prior restriction on perception and its associated emotions is lifted temporarily.

[309] And so the Bergsonian or, Huxleyan model of psychedelic experience, that it increases the breadth of that information funnel, that seems to be correct.

[310] And that's also been associated, if I remember correctly, with increased thalamic throughput.

[311] 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.

[312] I think that's Volan Writers' work.

[313] I think he's concentrated on that.

[314] That's right.

[315] Mark Gaya, yeah.

[316] It's true.

[317] I would say that the thalamus is one of other, in a sense, hierarchically subordidordinate structures and systems where the information can flow up to high -level cortex more freely under a psychedelic.

[318] The reducing valve analogy and that it goes back to Bergson is curious because canalization as a theme was sort of brought to prominence by Conrad Waddington, evolutionary biologist, who used it to try and explain phenotypes that get stamped in, that get entrenched, you know, encoded into the genome.

[319] But he took it from Norman Whitehead, who took it from Henri Bergson.

[320] Oh, they're really...

[321] And Henri Bergson, yeah, he offered the analogy, the image of a canal, of a canal.

[322] And so that was the original inspiration.

[323] So it's curious that, that Bergson inspired Huxley with the reducing valve.

[324] Right, right, that's an interesting.

[325] So here's something cool, too.

[326] This is a bit of a segue, but you'll catch the significance of this.

[327] There is a paper published in nature just two months ago looking at genetic mutation.

[328] Okay, so the idea is that genetic mutation is essentially a random process.

[329] And the reason for that is, well, let's talk about genetic mutations that are brought about by radiation, solar radiation and so forth.

[330] And so they're randomly knocking atoms out of the genetic structure and producing random mutation.

[331] But it turns out that the error correction post -DNA damage is not random.

[332] 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, because it's so core to the actual biological continuation of the organism, then the probability that it'll be error -corrected reaches 100%.

[333] And so this is, you can think about that as an analog, it's analogous to the conceptual structure, right?

[334] Imagine there's a hierarchy of conception.

[335] 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.

[336] So, yeah, so that's an amazing finding as far as I'm concerned.

[337] Yeah, that's neat.

[338] And that's canalization.

[339] Yeah, that's, you know, these are phenotypes that matter, that are essential and you can't rip them up.

[340] You know, you could have some variation at a superficial level, some creativity there, but maybe don't mess with certain fundamentals.

[341] Well, that's what happens in post -traumatic stress disorder, too.

[342] 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 swathes of the systems that interpersonal communication and interaction depend upon.

[343] Yeah, but you'll see, Jordan, that's true of borderline personality disorder as well.

[344] Others can't be trusted, the catastrophizing, the splitting.

[345] and it's true in depression, you know, wherever there are these biases in depression, you know, I'm worthless, life is pointless, I'm better off dead and so on, they are exaggerated, in a sense, they're exaggerated responses, and yeah, and then they're skewed and they're skewed beyond the data.

[346] There are sort of exaggerated response to the data.

[347] So let's think about that data.

[348] So I've been thinking about how psychopathology might be defined formally.

[349] And so we talked earlier about the idea that a child might have grown up in a micro -environment where they learn patterns of communication that are not applicable to the broader macro -environment.

[350] So imagine in the macro environment, imagine you have a high -endarmament.

[351] 100 interactions in a day with different people.

[352] Imagine there's a pattern that you have to manifest for those interactions to go well and that it's stable across all 100 interactions.

[353] So like one rule would be, don't swear at someone the second you meet them.

[354] That's not going to iterate well across multiple interactions.

[355] So people, of course, people don't do that.

[356] But my point is that there are ways of conducting yourself they're going to get yourself in trouble, regardless of situation, right?

[357] So you imagine, I had a friend, I used to go shopping with him, he was extremely socially fluent, like a real expert.

[358] And when we would walk into shops, and the shopkeeper, the clerk would approach him, he always took about 10 seconds to make personal contact with the person.

[359] Instead of immediately asking them whatever instrumental question leaped to mind, he would ask them how they were doing and he actually meant it and then he would listen and he'd ask them 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.

[360] So you could imagine that the definition of a pathologically canalyzed interpersonal style is one that worked in a given micro -environment that was extreme, but doesn't generalize well across multiple social situations.

[361] It's something, so there's a, so Yak Panksep, for example, he paired animals together, rats together, to let them play repeatedly instead of just once.

[362] Now, if you just let them play once, the big animal can dominate the little animal.

[363] But if you have them play repeatedly, which is what they do in a naturalistic rat environment, the little rat who could be defeated, the big rat has to let him win 30 % of the time, or the little rat will stop playing.

[364] So what Panksev 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.

[365] 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.

[366] And so whatever healthy would be would be that pattern that iterates well.

[367] Now, that doesn't mean we can specify it precisely, but it gives it a kind of conceptual framework.

[368] Yes, yes, it does.

[369] 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, of being is in me, you know, 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...

[370] So why do you think it reminded you of the idea that there's a multitude within?

[371] Do you think that's a reflection of the possibility of these diverse encounters?

[372] Is it something like that?

[373] 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.

[374] It's not a game.

[375] Right.

[376] There's no play.

[377] So you have to have that natural variability.

[378] Maybe it was that thought of sort of natural variability.

[379] It can't all be hard and a lack of love.

[380] And, you know, there's going to be some range, some diversity in that.

[381] Well, that's another definition of play, isn't it?

[382] For a system to have play means that it has this.

[383] ability to vary without being too rigid.

[384] This is the opposite of catalyzation in some real sense.

[385] And I think that there is something fundamental to the idea of play in terms of defining what a psychopathological system isn't.

[386] So because one of the things Paget pointed out, for example, was that in order for play to take place, both partners in play have to agree voluntarily, right?

[387] So it sets up a joint perceptual framework and a conceptual framework that people buy into voluntarily.

[388] 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.

[389] And that actually only happens under a relatively narrow set of preconditions, like the preconditions for a good conversation.

[390] I mean, 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.

[391] And I think the fact that we're interested in the conversation is actually a marker for.

[392] for that transformation.

[393] Yes, yes.

[394] I mean, it invites some realizations about play and, you know, what children might say, you know, if they were meant to be playing, you know, that's what they signed up to.

[395] 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.

[396] Right.

[397] 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.

[398] And it would be like, you know, I'd be like, I thought we were playing.

[399] I thought we were having fun in.

[400] That would also be an indication of too rapid canalization, right?

[401] So, or the imposition of something already canolized.

[402] So if I was insisting that my viewpoint was right, then I would be discounting whatever you had to say and insisting that my canalized viewpoint already dominate.

[403] And so I might do that because I don't want to let any of my ideas go.

[404] That might be one possibility.

[405] Or I might do it in a cheap ploy to obtain dominance as a marker of status.

[406] The alternative would be that we could both play, right?

[407] And then whatever status accomplishment would go along with that.

[408] So in this case, it would be, are people going to listen to the podcast?

[409] That would be a consequence, not of being dominant, but of being able to play.

[410] So there's something about play, I think, that's key to this issue of psychopathology.

[411] It's sort of like the spirit of play is antithetical to the, to the science.

[412] psychopathological enterprise.

[413] Yes, I like that.

[414] And then, you know, how play and creativity and art can go together.

[415] And, you know, art and expression can work as a kind of antithesis to canalization and pathology, you know, when in a thorough, yeah, I mean, that's a curious one is, you know, when do you see the best art in relation to.

[416] psychopathology and I'm trying to remember now I think I mean the classic one 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 well it could easily be to that to the degree that depression is linked to artistic production it's that that the artistic production is actually part of the process that's lifting the person out of the depression.

[417] Right?

[418] Yes.

[419] And in bipolar disorder, you know, the quality check, you know, because it goes, all my ideas, they're incredible, they're ingenious, too, they're all worthless, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.

[420] Oh, oh, this one.

[421] This one's not bad, you know.

[422] Yeah.

[423] 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.

[424] And so he spent the number of hours painting.

[425] And it was so interesting to see him play, because he wasn't trying to produce a painting as the end product.

[426] He was playing with visual representation.

[427] And he probably erased and repainted a hundred times while he was working on the painting.

[428] He'd paint and erase and paint and erase, just constant play as he was experimenting with hitting the mark.

[429] And so he wasn't an artist who was producing paintings.

[430] He was exploring visual representation.

[431] 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.

[432] but also we could think about play as a like a microcosm of a pattern of social interaction that actually works across multiple potential domains of social interaction.

[433] 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.

[434] The kid doesn't understand that because they want to win.

[435] But your point as a parent is, yeah, you want to win, but you want to win in a manner that makes other people, people want to keep playing games with you, right?

[436] And there's something that's really core to what constitutes health about that.

[437] And I like that conjunction of the developmental literature on play and the philosophical literature on play and its association with creativity.

[438] And the idea of that is something that's antithetical to psychopathology.

[439] Psychopathological condition occurs when all the play has been taken out of the system.

[440] Yes.

[441] Yeah.

[442] Yes.

[443] And yeah, no, I like that too.

[444] You can think of people who practice being well, you know, like experienced meditators.

[445] You can sometimes encounter these beings and they are, they're light.

[446] They're like a child.

[447] They're an adult, you know.

[448] A bit like the Dalai Lama, you know.

[449] He's a bit like a big kid.

[450] Maybe I don't know him very well.

[451] Well, you know that what's his name?

[452] I don't remember the recent, Richardson.

[453] Richie Davidson.

[454] Yeah, yeah.

[455] He did EEG analysis of the Dalai Lama and other practice 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.

[456] And that would go along with that.

[457] It also goes along with that gospel injunction, you know, except as he become like a little child, you'll have known why he's entered the kingdom of heaven.

[458] It's the same idea, is that to re, and it's also associated with the idea of neotony in evolutionary biology, right, that we tend to evolve towards our childhood forms.

[459] So, you know, a human skull looks exactly like an infant chimpanzee skull.

[460] So that's, yeah, it's very interesting.

[461] Stephen Jay Gould pointed this out.

[462] He showed that animated creatures like Mickey Mouse and so forth, he showed a whole variety of these, become increasingly neotenous as the, the animation propagates across time.

[463] They become more and more childlike in their features.

[464] It's a kind of a universal proclivity.

[465] 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.

[466] And then one question, neuropharmacologically, would be, do the psychedelics put more play in the system?

[467] And the fact that they allow category shift to occur much more prolifically, let's say, seems to indicate that the answer to that might be yes.

[468] Yes, I'm leaning towards a yes.

[469] I mean, at low doses, people are often, you know, quite silly when they can talk.

[470] And what plays out in their mind's eye is playful, cartoon -like.

[471] and sort of silly and grotesque and yeah of course it can it can go deeper and become in a sense can feel more serious and frightening well well i think play does play that 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 dostieski novel but if you read a you're playing at a very deep level.

[472] 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.

[473] But you can play deeply.

[474] And you know, when children are playing deeply, they're really involved in it.

[475] Like they can play pretend games with children can become incredibly serious.

[476] They can act out very complicated and even frightening scenarios in their play.

[477] They will do that.

[478] And I would say the seriousness of play is not a consequence of the admixture of negative emotion, per se.

[479] It's an indication of the depth at which the cognitive categories are being transformed.

[480] So the deeper they fall into the play, the more radical the transformation is that's occurring.

[481] Yes.

[482] Yes.

[483] In fact, the notion of a play, like a drama, you know, if it's a good play, like, you know, a good theatre production, then it has, it has.

[484] has depth and it can be serious and it can be moving and so quite.

[485] I guess the antithesis would be a play that gets stuck and gets boring, that repeats, that loops.

[486] And, you know, the analogy.

[487] Or where it's too predictable, right?

[488] That would be canilized in some sense, because all it's doing then is it's running over a plot and characterizations that you already 100 % know.

[489] Yeah.

[490] Right?

[491] So there's, there's, and that would be propagandistic.

[492] I think that art degenerates into propaganda, when it becomes canalized.

[493] Right.

[494] So you have to say this.

[495] It's like, well, we already know that.

[496] Yeah.

[497] We already know that.

[498] That's already been insisted upon.

[499] Yeah.

[500] Yeah, we need some surprise.

[501] So could you talk to me a little bit about this idea of local minima?

[502] 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, and you can't get out of it in some sense.

[503] But I don't exactly understand that metaphor.

[504] So how would you technically characterize a local minima?

[505] Yeah, it's an analogy for depicting states where the minima are substates, and a local minima would be the closest sub -state to visit where it has some gravitational pull.

[506] By being a minima, it has a gradient where you would get pulled to a point.

[507] So is it something like that if you've practiced, it's sort of the idea that if you're an expert with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[508] It's that you have an a -priority category system, and so anything that even vaguely approximates that is likely to get processed by that system.

[509] Is that a consequence maybe of the brain's desire to use maximally efficient neurological processing?

[510] 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.

[511] That's very complicated.

[512] I think that works.

[513] I mean, again, if we go to, pathology and depression is such a prevalent disorder so it's a maybe a useful one to go to again but you know if one 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.

[514] So that would be an example of falling into a local minima.

[515] Right.

[516] So it's something like a hyperavailability of already laid down pathways.

[517] Yes.

[518] Uh -huh.

[519] Uh -huh.

[520] And there are pathological conditions where that's much more likely.

[521] Yeah, well, that happens when that happens when you have to make an immediate response, which of course makes sense, right?

[522] Because you're going to use automatized perceptual structures in an emergency because you don't have time to do anything else.

[523] If it's familiar, it's easy to go there, you know.

[524] And so in a depressive presentation, it's easy to fall back there.

[525] Yeah.

[526] Now, do you practice clinically?

[527] No, I don't.

[528] No, no. Just research.

[529] But you were trained psychoanalytically as as well as neuroscientifically?

[530] As an academic, I studied and got a master's qualification in psychoanalysis.

[531] I also had my own analysis, but I've never actually trained clinically as an analyst myself.

[532] I see.

[533] I see.

[534] Okay.

[535] Let's contrast psychedelics and antidepressants for a moment.

[536] And so let me tell you what I understood from your papers.

[537] and you tell me if I've got it right, perhaps.

[538] So both of those chemicals seem to affect the serotonergic system preferentially.

[539] And my understanding of the serotonin system is that one of the things it does is modulates cognitive flexibility.

[540] 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.

[541] Now, but the psychedelics also affect the serotonin system, but they seem to decrease cognitive specialization and canalization, right?

[542] And so they make the system more open not to catastrophic failure, but to play.

[543] And so do you know how they, how detailed is their knowledge about how that's actually occurring at a cellular level?

[544] What is the chemical itself doing at a cellular or even a higher -order biological level?

[545] So if we begin with the classic psychedelics compounds like LSD or psilocybin or DMT, then the chemicals are binding to serotonin 2A receptors.

[546] 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 post -synaptically, so on the receiving neuron of communication, and they modulate the excitability of the host cell that the receptors are.

[547] So when they're stimulating...

[548] Do they make it more excitable?

[549] It's more excitable.

[550] All right.

[551] So actually, it all begins there, because if you think of...

[552] excitability like temperature, you're kind of dialing up.

[553] You're dialing up temperature, you're dialing up the excitability of the cell.

[554] But the catch, it seems, is what that translates to in terms of population level activity.

[555] 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.

[556] It's how the cells interact and interrelate.

[557] And really, it's once we get to the population level, so populations of neurons oscillating together.

[558] So is that within cortical columns or between them, or do we know?

[559] Or is that dose -dependent?

[560] 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 computations.

[561] information processing computational units in the brain, the cortical column, like a column for a particular orientation in space, recognizing that.

[562] Right, and they're specialized for certain kinds of perception.

[563] And they have sparse communication between them.

[564] That's right, yeah.

[565] But high communication within them, you know.

[566] Right, right, right.

[567] Yeah, so they're specific for specific categories.

[568] So the very rudimentary level of visual.

[569] processing, like things oriented in this vertical domain or horizontal.

[570] So, yeah, I suspect that there's communication, increased communication across cortical columns.

[571] 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.

[572] That's actually a very well -replicated finding.

[573] Okay, so let me throw something at you here and tell me what you think about it.

[574] So I've been conceptualizing neuroticism as the proclivity of a conceptual system to collapse in response to error.

[575] So the higher your levels of baseline negative emotion, the less error it takes per unit of collapse, something like that.

[576] So then you can make an analogy, you can make an analogous case for creativity.

[577] 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.

[578] So the less creative you are, the more synonymous the co -activated words will be.

[579] So then you can imagine that if your creativity is in part a consequence of how much co -activation of idea is likely to take place, but then it's also a function of how distant the co -activation.

[580] 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.

[581] It's strange because they also seem to inhibit semantic processing to some degree.

[582] People become less able to talk, able to verbalize what's happening to them.

[583] So it doesn't exactly look like it's semantic excitation that's occurring.

[584] It's more like it seems to be occurring more at the level of image in some sense than semantically.

[585] But there does seem to be this broadening of creativity and the analog might be there that excitability is that any given idea is more likely to activate a set of associated ideas.

[586] Yeah, there is some evidence in this direction of things like category mixing, binocular rivalry paradigms.

[587] You have mixed percepts occur more often under psychedelics.

[588] Also, when looking at spreading semantic activation, there's evidence that the semantic network is broader under the psychedelic.

[589] 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 which is the creativity trait, one year later.

[590] That's a walloping effect for a single dose.

[591] You know, it also makes, you know, I read that, and I thought, wow, that's amazing.

[592] 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.

[593] Now, you might think, well, it wouldn't hurt everybody to be moved one standard deviation up on the creativity scale.

[594] But you'd only say that if you assume that creativity was a benefit without a cost.

[595] And I've never seen a benefit without a cost.

[596] So, you know, one of the things...

[597] I'm wondering, for example, if you're higher in neuroticism to begin with, is an increment in openness, a plus or a negative?

[598] Because I've known really open, highly neurotic people.

[599] And one of the problems with that personality constellation is that they often saw the branches off that they're sitting on, right?

[600] Because their ideas are so...

[601] 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?

[602] Because they're always...

[603] They can't settle on any identity, for example.

[604] And so they destabilize themselves.

[605] Like, I don't know if...

[606] We've looked for pathologies associated with creativity for a long time and manic depressive disorder seems at least in principle to be associated.

[607] There's not a lot of evidence.

[608] evidence for the pathology of creativity.

[609] But like I said, you don't often get a benefit without a cost.

[610] Yes.

[611] Yes, I imagine openness sort of tops out into, on other personality scales, like I think it's the Isaac one.

[612] It would probably be called psychoticism.

[613] And, you know, and also trait schizzipe is maybe crossing over with, with, you know, with extreme, extreme openness.

[614] Yeah, well, you get a false positive problem, right?

[615] Because the thing about creative people is they're pretty good at identifying patterns in sparse data.

[616] But the problem with identifying patterns in sparse data is sometimes you see things that aren't there.

[617] Apophonia, yeah.

[618] 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.

[619] Well, I talked to Dennis McKenna, yeah.

[620] Yeah, yeah, and so they were the brothers who established the protocols for domestication of psilocybin mushrooms, right?

[621] And Dennis and his brother, Terence, who's the more famous McKenna, They went to Mexico.

[622] I did a podcast with him just a couple of weeks ago.

[623] They went to, I think it was Mexico decades ago, and ate a lot of psilocybin mushrooms in a couple of months.

[624] And it, the experience gripped Terence in a way that never really let him go from what Dennis relates.

[625] And Terrence developed these, some of his ideas are very interesting, but some of them were quite baroque and strange.

[626] And Dennis told me that, you know, those ideas are very interesting.

[627] is 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.

[628] And it wasn't obvious, it seemed that Dennis had concluded that some of these ideas had gripped Terrence for decades in a way that produced a different kind of canalization, right?

[629] 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.

[630] Yes.

[631] 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.

[632] 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, I didn't know, I didn't know that that, other world actually exists, and I've experienced it now, kind of solipsistic reasoning.

[633] And it is a bit like, you know, a kind of apathenia trap.

[634] You're like, oh, well, I've experienced it.

[635] I've seen it.

[636] Now I know it's real.

[637] Right.

[638] Well, and I've seen it with emotional punch, right?

[639] It's not merely the perception.

[640] It's the perception.

[641] See, this also happens to people.

[642] I've tried to understand the phenomenology of paranoid schizophrenia.

[643] So here's what happens to someone who's paranoid.

[644] So imagine they're watching the TV.

[645] Maybe the Pope's on.

[646] And all of a sudden, what the Pope is saying is hyper -meaningful.

[647] So it seems like one of those experiences, maybe it's because the person is stressed, that their a -priory perceptions are no longer filtering their current perception.

[648] And so now all of a sudden the Pope's message is hyper -meaningful.

[649] and it manifests itself emotionally.

[650] They can't look away.

[651] And they feel it's as if he's talking directly to me. It's the only way they can explain it.

[652] Now, more intelligent people are more likely to become paranoid if they become schizophrenic.

[653] 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.

[654] Maybe that has to happen three or four times with different news media.

[655] And maybe it's only when a certain topic is being discussed, right?

[656] 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, something like that.

[657] It's the only thing that makes sense out of the emotional experience.

[658] And then having established that as an axiom, they build a whole paranoid belief system on top of it.

[659] And the thing about talking to someone who's paranoid schizophrenic is that within the delusional axiomatic system, they're pretty rigorous.

[660] But the axioms are something like, oh, I'm absolutely sure the Pope spoke to me when he was on TV.

[661] And you can't shake that, right?

[662] That becomes the axis around which the whole world turns.

[663] And it seems to be instantiated in them because of the intensity of the emotional experience when that message was wrong.

[664] receive.

[665] Yeah.

[666] Yeah.

[667] Yeah.

[668] Shatish Kapoor is called it aberrant salience.

[669] Like the right, right.

[670] 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 imbueing certain experiences.

[671] And so in a sense, there, It's feeding a Hebbian learning, actually, you know, an associative learning.

[672] And no, the Pope is speaking.

[673] Well, if it is, if it is dopaminergic too, I mean, the dopamine system produces that sense of reward.

[674] So that would be real, like, engrossed engagement.

[675] But the dopamine system also produces reinforcement.

[676] So it sort of backtracks the neural patterns of activation that occur just before the and it strengthens them.

[677] 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.

[678] Yes.

[679] Well, it's confidence, you know, when you're, I get it now, I get it now.

[680] Yeah, right.

[681] It comes with a feeling of, that's, you know, slanted in a positively valence way.

[682] It feels good to know.

[683] It feels good to be confident.

[684] And typically it's difficult to be the opposite of confident, to be swimming in uncertainty.

[685] Yeah, yeah.

[686] Well, right, right, exactly.

[687] Well, that also accounts for the attraction of certainty, right?

[688] Is that when you're certain of something, well, and this is relevant to your model, if you're certain of something, you dispense with what would be excess entropy.

[689] Like the entropy is all the doubts.

[690] What could be this, could be this, could be this, it could be this, could be this, could be this.

[691] I mean, there's play there, but it's, well, I think part of the distinction there too is that's involuntary play, right?

[692] When you're plagued by doubts, you're not playing.

[693] It's your subject to them.

[694] It's different than sitting there contemplating different possibilities, sort of at your own rate.

[695] It's a very different thing to be visited by, an intense barrage of doubt and that's, no one enjoys that and that might again be the difference between neuroticism and creativity, right?

[696] Because a neurotic person who's like obsessing about doubt is contemplating a whole set of ideas right, but so you think well what's the difference between that and creative play and a huge part of it does seem to be the distinction between voluntary and involuntary.

[697] You know, one of the things you do for people who are obsessive, is you say, well, you know, you're disgusted by this thing you're looking at, and then that thought comes and visits you involuntarily.

[698] Before you go to sleep at night, bring that thought to mind voluntarily and play with it.

[699] And if they do that religiously, let's say, that'll often decrease the intensity of the thoughts.

[700] So whether you have the thoughts in the spirit of challenge or whether they're being forced upon you also seems to be an indication of whether you're playing creatively or if you're subject to something like neurotic overload and stress.

[701] Yeah.

[702] When we think of certain so -called third -wave psychotherapies like mindfulness -based cognitive therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy, I guess there is a promotion of a ability to sit with difficult feelings, to almost play with them.

[703] You know, some of the acceptance and commitment therapy techniques involve play.

[704] Like, you know, you have a racnophobia and you'll wear a toy spider around your neck.

[705] I guess that's exposure therapy.

[706] But, you know, or you have a negative cognitive bias in depression thinking you're worthless and you'll wear a sign that says, I'm worthless.

[707] And the fact that it's there all the time becomes like comedic and it loses its punch because it's out there and it's silly rather than it's in here and getting chewed over.

[708] You're also reversing the predator prey relationship in some sense, right?

[709] If you're afraid of spiders, but you're wearing one, you're now bigger than your fear.

[710] And so you've, even though you still might be afraid, you're also allowing that part of you that can transcend the fear to become the part that you're identifying with.

[711] And you do that constantly in psychotherapy.

[712] And one of the constant findings with regard to exposure therapy is it's not so much that people get less afraid.

[713] It's that they get braver.

[714] And the distinction there is really important because it turns out that if you expose a person voluntarily to one thing they're afraid of, they become less afraid of classes of things.

[715] You know, the psychoanalysts, when they went after the behaviorists for exposure therapy, they said you'll get symptom substitution.

[716] You know, you train someone who's agoraphobic to get in an elevator.

[717] They'll still be afraid of death.

[718] But it turns out that if you train them to expose themselves to the elevator, they are simultaneously exposing themselves to the fear of death.

[719] And they actually become braver across context as a consequence of the single exposures.

[720] And there is something in that that's play.

[721] You know, with my clients, I always used to play with them.

[722] It's like, okay, there's the elevator.

[723] You don't want to look at it.

[724] Can you look at it from 30 feet away?

[725] No. Well, how about 40 feet?

[726] How about 200 feet?

[727] Like you'd find a place where they could play.

[728] It was right on the edge of their fear, right?

[729] And then, and so there was play right on the edge of fear.

[730] And then maybe you could get the person 40 feet away, say, well, will you look at the elevator for, like, just glance at it?

[731] Will you look at it for 10 seconds?

[732] No. Will you glance at it?

[733] Yes.

[734] Can you glance at it for two seconds?

[735] Yes.

[736] You just push that horizon of play.

[737] And you do that sequentially.

[738] across sessions and that seems to work well it's sort of like how people learn everything right because you learn on the edge and the edge is where the play edge is where the serious play takes place so yeah so what are you working on now you've got this paper you sent me that's coming out I presume at some point in the future it was a pre -print what's out the horizon of your investigations at the moment what are you contemplating well I do quite a lot of brain imaging work trying to better understand what is the psychedelic experience in the brain, how is it encoded in brain activity and bodily activity.

[739] It's easy to be too brain -centric, but it does seem to be a very important organ for experience.

[740] So there's that.

[741] So I'm planning an extensive, intensive brain imaging study of the psilocybin experience.

[742] people will have repeat sessions with the psychedelic four separate dosing sessions with psilocybin, including quite high dose sessions.

[743] And the majority of the session will actually be spent in a MRI scanner.

[744] And so this hasn't been done before.

[745] We've done, you know, 10 minutes at the most, really, of what we call a resting state run.

[746] You close your eyes.

[747] the scanner runs and we collect some data and then make some mappings to subjective ratings.

[748] But what I'm trying to do now is to be a bit more involved with the experience sampling.

[749] So the sampling of your experience with more regular subjective ratings.

[750] But in order to do that and not contaminate the data with asking people to do ratings, you need a lot of repeats.

[751] You need a lot of data.

[752] So this This is why we have to dose people.

[753] It's actually four times and have them go into the scanner for three, more or less, hour -long sessions under drug.

[754] Well, how do you keep the experience positive for them when you're doing that?

[755] Because it's pretty clinical environment generally to have people in an MRI.

[756] And, of course, set and setting is so important to the facilitation of a psychotherapeutic psychedelic experience.

[757] How do you manage that with the MRI?

[758] Yeah, well, it's surprisingly well tolerated because it's actually quite unsurprising as an environment.

[759] And we will have a pre -dose scan where people will acclimatize and so that initial habituation to being in an unusual environment that is very loud and when the first, you know, tone of the scanner begins, it can be quite jarring, but that's being repeated.

[760] all the time for a long period of time.

[761] So you very quickly habituate to that initial shock.

[762] And then it becomes actually very reliable.

[763] There's nothing new entering your visual field apart from what's playing out in your mind's eye with eyes closed.

[764] So it's quite a stable environment.

[765] And you can go very deep.

[766] And this isn't a clinical trial.

[767] We won't be recruiting people with, say, depression for this study.

[768] these will be people who you know meet criteria for being healthy right and and we'll also have had previous experience with psychedelics and that's a safety consideration here so we are trying to go deep it is a sort of psychonauts you know dream in a sense a study like this yeah so what are you what are you hypothesizing?

[769] What's known already about brain activation during psychedelic experiences?

[770] And how will you extend that?

[771] What are you expecting to learn?

[772] Yeah.

[773] Well, this entropic brain principle is something I introduced close to 10 years ago now, which is a very simple principle that says that the entropy or the unpredictability of spontaneous brain activity increases during the psychedelic experience.

[774] and the magnitude of that increase in brain entropy correlates with the increase in the richness of conscious experience, the richness of phenomenal consciousness.

[775] Okay, so let me ask you about that.

[776] So there's this emerging idea, I suppose it's a couple of decades old, but it's been elaborated more recently that consciousness exists on the border between order and chaos.

[777] And your proposition there is that if you add more, if you add a richer activity set entropically, that the field of consciousness or the breadth or the depth of consciousness actually increases.

[778] So what do you make of ideas that consciousness, whatever it exists, exists on the border between order and chaos?

[779] And what do you think it means ontologically for consciousness, consciousness itself to expand as brain entropy increases.

[780] Yeah, well, it's the psychedelic experience in terms of what it's like to be in that state.

[781] That model is there in the entropic brain model as well that says that consciousness exists at so -called criticality, you know, that critical point between, you know, the extreme poles of extreme, order like a frozen system or an extremely, you know, random system like a gas.

[782] You know, there's some kind of critical point at which you get certain properties of organization, things like hierarchical organization, long -range correlations or freer information flow throughout the system, and information transfer across scales.

[783] as well, to like fractal organization.

[784] So why does that, why does the hierarchical organization and the fractal organization emerge at criticality?

[785] How are those related?

[786] Yeah.

[787] Do we know?

[788] I imagine some people know, and it's probably to do with efficiency.

[789] I imagine it's to do with efficient information transfer.

[790] it doesn't happen so well in a frozen system because things don't go very far.

[791] There aren't sufficient dynamics.

[792] And then maybe in a gas, things are just too loose.

[793] There's no integration.

[794] So there's a sweet spot.

[795] So the claim is something like that at that border between chaos and order, hierarchical organization, well -structured hierarchical organization is likely to emerge.

[796] Yeah, and I guess it does say that hierarchy in nature serves some kind of, you know, efficient function, some adaptive function.

[797] It's useful.

[798] So, you know, in the Genesis chapter, that's essentially the model that's being pointed at.

[799] So what you have is the proposition that the divine word is the creative agent is something like the idea that the order that is good emerges out of the dynamic interplay between order and chaos.

[800] So the process of dynamically intermediating between order and chaos is something like the word.

[801] And the word in the Genesis chapter is specified as that which generates the habitable order that is good.

[802] That's the proposition.

[803] Then there's a meta -proposition that emerges out of that, which is that the spirit of man and woman is made in that image.

[804] that's the fundamental axiomatic proposition that the narrative is putting forward it's very interesting to me that that's true at the mythological and narrative level and that it's increasingly mapped out at the neurological level using language that's actually quite similar right the chaos so the Tohu Vabohu is what the spirit of God contends with at the beginning of time and Tohu Vabohu I'm probably not saying it right But it's also Taom, which is a derivation of the word Taimat, which is Mesopotamian.

[805] And it's just the dragon that Marduk carves up at the beginning of time to make the world.

[806] And so it's like this place where what's predatory is encountered and mastered.

[807] That's all hidden in the symbolic complexity of that initial story.

[808] But the fundamental idea is that there's an eternal process that operates at the border between chaos and order.

[809] And if it's operating optimally, it generates the order that's good.

[810] That's the days of creation.

[811] So it's very much analogous to this idea that the hierarchical structure emerges out of this interplay between chaos and order.

[812] There is this other curious angle here.

[813] If psychedelics can increase properties of criticality, signatures of criticality like fractal organization, long -range correlations, There's things like critical slowing, which means that the system doesn't recover very quickly.

[814] It recovers slowly from a perturbation.

[815] That perturbation sort of reverberates through the system more easily.

[816] It's a more sensitive system when the systems are criticality.

[817] Anyway, all of those properties, if psychedelics increase the strength of those signatures of criticality, then that implies that normal waking consciousness is poised at what I understand, I hope I get this right, would be a subcritical regime towards order, towards that frozen system.

[818] You know, it's close to criticality, but it's not quite there, and you can dial it up further and see stronger signatures of criticality.

[819] I wonder if it would be biased somewhat towards order for purposes of efficiency, do you suppose?

[820] Maybe for mastery.

[821] Maybe for mastery.

[822] You know, I wonder.

[823] Right, for ease of mastery, right?

[824] Because, well, if you can implement automatized routines, it's less energy demanding.

[825] Right?

[826] But the price you'd pay for that is that you would be learning as quickly.

[827] But the advantage would be that you're doing what you already know how to do in a manner that doesn't require a lot of energy output.

[828] Yeah.

[829] I think of it, again, a little bit like civilization and its discontents, you know, like we started to control the critical world, you know, that was organized, disorganized in its, you know, beautiful, rich and diverse and fractal way, but we started to, you know, manage our food source and structure our world in a particular way, and now it's, you know, it's got ridiculous how how we've done that.

[830] And I imagine, and actually there's a bit of curious neuroimaging data that suggests that certain properties of brain activity that are suggestive of subcriticality or too much order, like the alpha rhythm.

[831] It's a very dominant rhythm in the human brain, in that adult human brain, it's lower in infants.

[832] It increases as you go up to adulthood.

[833] And actually, It's also maximal in humans relative to other species.

[834] So it's like an adult human rhythm.

[835] And if you look at the sort of prominence of different rhythms in brain activity, it's the main one, you know, a big peak in the alpha range.

[836] But this curious study was done in India, looking at different people, either sort of living more, you know, at one with nature or people living in dense urban environments.

[837] and those who lived in the dense urban environments had stronger alphar rhythms.

[838] And for me, that was suggested of people who have become kind of divorced from the criticality of nature.

[839] Yeah, they're more canonized.

[840] Right, right, right.

[841] They're two -ordered, yeah.

[842] Well, the urban environment actually lends itself to that because a lot of the things that we build are structured so that we only have to glance at them to know what they are.

[843] Right?

[844] So, like a lot of our design technologies are aids to can't.

[845] Think about the shiny outside surface of a car.

[846] I mean, some of that's for aerodynamic efficiency, but a lot of it is so you can just categorize it at a glance.

[847] All the complexity is hidden.

[848] Yes, exactly.

[849] And so the whole urban, this is especially true in modernist urban environments.

[850] Everything is smooth and one pixel, right?

[851] And the advantage to that is, well, you don't have to pay any attention to it, but the disadvantage of it is, it's pretty, it's desert -like in terms of its richness, right?

[852] Much different.

[853] than the surface of a tree or a plant, say.

[854] Quite, yeah, it's mind -numbing, yeah.

[855] And that may be one of the reasons why urban environments are associated with worse mental health.

[856] Right, right, right.

[857] Yeah, well, there is some indication of that, and that actually it's the deprivation of the fractal structure of the surfaces that's associated with that.

[858] Yes, we need to come home to nature and see that practicality to see that richness to be reminded of our origin in a sense.

[859] Yeah, right.

[860] Yeah, well, that ties us back to the beginning of the conversation.

[861] All right, well, we should stop this part of the conversation and we'll proceed for those of you watching and listening.

[862] I always talk to my guests for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[863] That's an addition, not a subtraction, by the way, because I wasn't doing that before.

[864] And so those of you who are interested, I'm going to talk to Dr. Carhart Harris, to Robin, about the development of his interest in the psychological, the phenomenological, and the psychedelic.

[865] I'm very interested in how people's interests make themselves manifest and what beckons to them, let's say.

[866] Hello, everyone.

[867] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.