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SPEAKER_2: Anybody who's seen a picture of themselves for real understands that instruments that measure reality objectively can really mess you up.
SPEAKER_2: I see a picture of me and I'm like, I do not look I'm not this ugly.
SPEAKER_3: I am not this ugly.
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SPEAKER_4: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_4: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_4: This is StarTalk.
SPEAKER_4: Neil deGrasse Tyson here.
SPEAKER_4: You're a personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_4: Got Chuck with me.
SPEAKER_4: Chuck Nice, how are you doing, man?
SPEAKER_2: Hey, doing well, Neil.
SPEAKER_2: Thank you for asking.
SPEAKER_4: We got a hot topic today.
SPEAKER_4: Psychedelics and consciousness.
SPEAKER_2: Well, guess what?
SPEAKER_2: One of them I'm really interested in.
SPEAKER_2: I'm interested in one of those things.
SPEAKER_4: One of them, okay.
SPEAKER_4: We have our expert about town on this very subject.
SPEAKER_4: He's been on StarTalk before.
SPEAKER_4: George Mashour.
SPEAKER_4: Did I pronounce your name correctly, George?
SPEAKER_5: Yes, you did.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you.
SPEAKER_4: Excellent.
SPEAKER_4: A chair of anesthesiology and professor of neurosurgery, University of Michigan.
SPEAKER_4: You've taken a multidisciplinary approach to consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: I have a zillion questions about that.
SPEAKER_4: And the network mechanisms that empower consciousness and possibly disrupt unconsciousness.
SPEAKER_4: And just all kinds of metrics of consciousness.
SPEAKER_2: Is that what made you want to be an anesthesiologist?
SPEAKER_2: Or was it the other way around?
SPEAKER_2: Was being an anesthesiologist just sparking all kinds of curiosity about consciousness?
SPEAKER_2: Or was it that you always had these wonderings about consciousness and that led you to being an anesthesiologist?
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, great question.
SPEAKER_5: I got interested in consciousness studying philosophy as an undergraduate and decided to pursue medicine and neuroscience.
SPEAKER_5: I actually started off in psychiatry with an interest in psychoanalysis, and then I switched over into anesthesiology because I thought that would be the best field to study consciousness because of the rich set of tools that we have to modulate conscious experience.
SPEAKER_2: Not to mention the myriad of either willing or unwilling subjects.
SPEAKER_4: George, I like your phrase, to modulate their conscious experience.
SPEAKER_4: You mean knock them out.
SPEAKER_4: Just say it.
SPEAKER_5: But actually it depends because there are certain procedures in which you try to engineer the state, if you will, to be somewhere in between consciousness and unconsciousness.
SPEAKER_4: And also this affects very real afflictions, nerve injury that people have, stroke.
SPEAKER_4: And so, yeah, let's get right into this.
SPEAKER_4: So, you founded the Michigan Psychedelic Center beyond everything we just said.
SPEAKER_4: Because regular consciousness was not good enough for you.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_5: I started off studying consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: I founded the Center for Consciousness Science here at the University of Michigan Medical School in 2014.
SPEAKER_5: And we used anesthetics as a tool to modulate the level of consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: That's one key dimension of consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: And the level of consciousness refers to the global state of arousal.
SPEAKER_5: So, I'm awake, somnolent, sleeping, anesthetized, comatose, brain dead.
SPEAKER_5: And it's a very powerful set of tools that we have, but it's also limited because it isn't really addressing another key dimension of consciousness that is sometimes referred to as the content of consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: That's what we're actually experiencing, the qualitative aspects, the redness of the rose, the blueness of the sky.
SPEAKER_5: And this is where psychedelics can come into play because they don't have a major impact on the level of consciousness, but they certainly alter the way that we experience things and the content of consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: That's a whole other place to go.
SPEAKER_4: Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_4: On the research frontier.
SPEAKER_4: So consciousness then, if I thought about it mathematically, another dimension of consciousness is the intensity with which you experience reality.
SPEAKER_4: Is that a fair way to say that?
SPEAKER_5: Yes, I think that would fall under that content of consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: And there are a lot of different levels that we could be talking about.
SPEAKER_5: Just basic, introspective consciousness, consciousness of the world, consciousness of myself or self-awareness.
SPEAKER_4: So and tell me, in the extreme limit of these examples here, you mentioned comatose.
SPEAKER_4: What do people mean when they say it was a medically induced coma?
SPEAKER_4: Can you measure that as like the extreme limit of no consciousness without being dead?
SPEAKER_5: Sure.
SPEAKER_5: So, I mean, one form of the medically induced coma or a common form would involve some sort of anesthetic agent, like a barbiturate or propofol, for example, these intravenous anesthetics.
SPEAKER_5: You can, in fact, measure the state or at least the drug impact using the electroencephalogram, EEG, focused on brain waves.
SPEAKER_5: And there are certain characteristic morphologies, such as something called burst suppression, which is electrical quiescence punctuated by this high-frequency, high-amplitude activity that would suggest that somebody does not have the capacity for consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: So, I think that would be one example of what is referred to as a medically induced coma.
SPEAKER_2: Speaking of measuring, what exactly are you measuring electrically?
SPEAKER_2: Is it the firing of neurons in a certain part of the brain?
SPEAKER_2: Like, what exactly is the metric?
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, that's a great question.
SPEAKER_5: First of all, I want to be clear that even though we're measuring things, not everything is reducible to a single metric or measurement.
SPEAKER_5: And Chuck, to your question, it really depends on the scale.
SPEAKER_5: It depends on the experimental settings.
SPEAKER_5: So, in the laboratory, we might be able to measure neuronal activity at a single unit level, for example, in the non-human primate brain, which we've done in our research group with our collaborators.
SPEAKER_5: In humans, we're going to be using typically scalp EEG to measure electrical activity.
SPEAKER_5: There's also magnetoencephalography that's measuring magnetic waves.
SPEAKER_5: There's functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is a neuroimaging form.
SPEAKER_5: So there are a variety of different scales and neuroimaging techniques that people evaluate when they're trying to assess an impact of a drug, for example, on consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: And then a whole suite of analytic techniques thereafter to try to parse through that data.
SPEAKER_4: So now let's back up.
SPEAKER_4: Let me be the thousandth person to ask you, what is consciousness?
SPEAKER_4: How should we think about it?
SPEAKER_5: Great question.
SPEAKER_5: I don't know if I can really give you an answer, but on the other hand, it's something that we all know from the first person perspective.
SPEAKER_5: It's a sense of experience, subjectivity, interiority, a point of view.
SPEAKER_5: Some people have defined it operationally.
SPEAKER_5: One philosopher is what we lose at night when we go into a dreamless sleep and what we regain the next morning when we wake up.
SPEAKER_5: Oftentimes in the clinical setting, we have to operationalize this through behavioral assessment.
SPEAKER_5: Neil, Chuck, I don't have access to your first person phenomenology, but I can make some inferences about your state of consciousness based on your interactivity.
SPEAKER_5: And we do this all day.
SPEAKER_5: We basically are making inferences about the state of someone else's subjectivity based on their objective behavior.
SPEAKER_5: That usually works, but there are certain situations, certainly in medicine, where there can be a divergence between responsiveness and consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: So the fact that the bookshelves are filled with people writing with titles, Consciousness Explained, for example, doesn't that mean we don't really understand consciousness as long as people continue to write books on it?
SPEAKER_4: Because I can tell you that in physics, there's like three books on gravity on the shelf.
SPEAKER_4: We're not still writing books on Newton's Laws of Gravity.
SPEAKER_4: So we're done there, and we're on to other things.
SPEAKER_4: So isn't the activity in the field a measure of how much we don't know more than a measure of how much we do?
SPEAKER_5: I think that's fair to say.
SPEAKER_5: And certainly if you compare it to physics and the long history of physics or other disciplines, the modern science of consciousness as we know it and we talk about it, really started to coalesce in the 1990s.
SPEAKER_5: Now, of course, people have been asking the question, why are we aware of ourselves and the world since people have been able to ask questions?
SPEAKER_5: But in terms of the modern science, it really started to emerge in the 1990s.
SPEAKER_5: For most of the 20th century, consciousness was really marginalized, even delegitimized as a topic of scientific inquiry, largely through the influence of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
SPEAKER_5: But then in the 1980s, there were some...
SPEAKER_5: Freud, say it, say it, Freud.
SPEAKER_2: That's fine, you said it, that's fine.
SPEAKER_2: Tell me how you really feel about your mom and cocaine.
SPEAKER_4: And cigars, and cigars.
SPEAKER_5: I'm not going to address that, but many implications.
SPEAKER_5: But actually, yeah, so Freud said that consciousness is merely the tip of the iceberg, and probably was correct in terms of how much cognitive activity is going on outside of our conscious realm.
SPEAKER_5: But in the 1980s, there were some really prominent scientists and intellectuals that started to publicly turn their attention to consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: Nobel laureate Francis Crick, Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
SPEAKER_4: Not for that.
SPEAKER_5: I know, I know, and I know I don't need to tell you this.
SPEAKER_5: I believe for his work on black holes.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_5: But they started to turn their attention to this in a public way, and that helped to confer legitimacy.
SPEAKER_5: So it's fairly young, and despite the fact that we're learning a lot, and neuroscience has really advanced in terms of neuroimaging, the ability to manipulate neural circuits, to image them at the animal level, we're still asking fundamental questions like, are the neural correlates of consciousness in the front of the brain or in the back of the brain?
SPEAKER_5: Literally.
SPEAKER_2: Where is consciousness located?
SPEAKER_5: That course in terms of large swaths of cortex.
SPEAKER_5: And most recently, there's been a big kerfuffle in the field with respect to one very well developed theory of consciousness that has been called out or accused by 124 individuals of being pseudoscience.
SPEAKER_5: And this is a theory that's been around for almost two decades.
SPEAKER_5: So it just gives you a sense of the state of the field.
SPEAKER_5: It is relatively speaking in its nascent phases, certainly compared to disciplines such as physics.
SPEAKER_4: So then you'd expect there to be the Wild West, and that's not a bad thing.
SPEAKER_4: It's just the reality of a newly born field.
SPEAKER_2: In a way, it's kind of a cool thing.
SPEAKER_4: It's kind of cool.
SPEAKER_4: Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_4: So why are there all these people who want to deny consciousness to other animals?
SPEAKER_4: Like anyone who's owned a cat or a dog will never deny them a full consciousness of what's going on.
SPEAKER_4: But how about...
SPEAKER_2: Especially a cat.
SPEAKER_2: We know that cats...
SPEAKER_2: Now dogs...
SPEAKER_2: Okay, listen...
SPEAKER_4: The cat's plotting your death.
SPEAKER_2: When you see that cat actually calling your lawyer to see if it is a beneficiary on your insurance, you know that that cat is conscious.
SPEAKER_4: Basically what they're doing.
SPEAKER_4: So where does that come from?
SPEAKER_4: Is it the size of our frontal lobe and relative to that of other animals?
SPEAKER_4: We all know cats don't have a forehead, right?
SPEAKER_4: So that's an old joke about it.
SPEAKER_5: That is such a great question.
SPEAKER_5: And that taps into this bigger question.
SPEAKER_5: And I've alluded to it earlier, which is how do we know someone or something is conscious or not?
SPEAKER_5: So on the one hand, you have some who would assert that only human beings are capable of consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: And again, this is where definition is important because some people might actually be referring to self-awareness.
SPEAKER_5: There are others, and not just in the philosophical realm, but in the neuroscientific realm, who are bordering more on what is called panpsychism, which suggests that everything in the universe, to some degree, has some level of consciousness.
SPEAKER_2: That's like a molecular consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: Yes, so how do we figure this out?
SPEAKER_5: And you brought up animals as kind of an example in between.
SPEAKER_5: Well, this is where it's really important for us as a field to try to identify, and some are trying to do this, what are the fundamental characteristics of a conscious system that we can measure independently of behavior?
SPEAKER_5: Because again, we're making inferences based on behavior.
SPEAKER_5: Even if you're describing your interaction with a dog or a cat, you're making inference based on their behavior.
SPEAKER_5: But how can we figure out a behavior-independent way to assess the system's capacity for consciousness?
SPEAKER_5: Because then we could apply that to someone who, for example, we think is in a vegetative state, but might not be, or somebody that we think is anesthetized in the operating room, but they're only paralyzed, or a species that can't communicate with us, or babies.
SPEAKER_2: I was going to say, because really where you need to go first is babies, because their consciousness is emerging.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know if it's emergent, because that would be all of us.
SPEAKER_4: It's a different word, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: It's a different word, but it is emerging, because when you have an infant, you couldn't necessarily say that that infant is conscious of the world around it, is conscious or aware of itself.
SPEAKER_2: But you know that as another human being, that it is definitely going to be that barring any kind of brain malady or cataclysmic event that would stop it from happening.
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, and you can take that question even earlier and think about the prenatal and utero phase where there is electrical activity, where there are dynamics of brain activity that might potentially sustain experience.
SPEAKER_5: And obviously this is a question with major ethical implications as well.
SPEAKER_5: The other place where this is going to come up, so the big problem used to be we think someone is unconscious because of their behavior, they're unresponsive, but they're actually conscious.
SPEAKER_5: And I gave you an example, someone we think is anesthetized or we think is in a vegetative state.
SPEAKER_5: But now there's another problem that's emerging or that will emerge, and that is now we have artificial systems that are highly responsive and will get more and more responsive.
SPEAKER_5: And now people are going to start asking the question, well, is this responsiveness driven in part by some kind of sentience?
SPEAKER_5: And again, that's where we need these tools to assess, does this system in a principled way have the capacity for consciousness?
SPEAKER_4: We're all going to die when AI takes over.
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SPEAKER_11: Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.
SPEAKER_11: Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_4: Tell me about the importance, because I've read papers on this, the importance to you as a neuroscientist and a consciousness expert of an animal recognizing itself in a mirror.
SPEAKER_5: Yes, so this is something that goes back to Darwin, who while he was thinking and theorizing and investigating biological evolution, was also thinking about cognitive and mental evolution.
SPEAKER_5: And that mirror recognition test has often been used, and I'm not an expert in that, so I want to be clear about this, to assess some sort of self-reference, self-recognition.
SPEAKER_5: And this is interesting in terms of applying it to not just primates, but also some avian species.
SPEAKER_5: And some would posit that there have been multiple lines of evolution, not exactly the same thing as the cortex as we know it, the avian pallium, but a kind of similar functional organization.
SPEAKER_5: So I think this comes up in terms of trying to identify where across the timeline of phylogeny did consciousness emerge.
SPEAKER_5: And the other question is, is it an all-or-none phenomenon?
SPEAKER_5: Is it graded?
SPEAKER_5: Is there a continuum?
SPEAKER_2: Because, I mean, think about it.
SPEAKER_2: If a bird may see itself in the mirror and go, oh, that's not another bird, that's just me.
SPEAKER_2: But that doesn't mean that it then ponders why it is here.
SPEAKER_4: Its own existence, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Its own existence, you know.
SPEAKER_2: So, you know, some of this is a matter of intelligence as opposed to consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: Yes, it could be.
SPEAKER_5: And actually, your comment, Chuck, also leads to a reflection on different categories of consciousness theories because some theories are referred to as perceptual, others are cognitive.
SPEAKER_5: And one question that comes up is...
SPEAKER_4: Interesting.
SPEAKER_5: Does consciousness itself require some of the cognitive functions that we have such as attention or working memory?
SPEAKER_5: Or is it just kind of a purely perceptive phenomenon?
SPEAKER_4: Well, I'll give you that in a minute.
SPEAKER_4: Just a quick second here.
SPEAKER_4: Hold on.
SPEAKER_4: I've been saving that for the end of this conversation.
SPEAKER_2: I'm just sitting here just like, when are we getting to it?
SPEAKER_4: I want to get the foundations established here.
SPEAKER_2: That's why you're a scientist.
SPEAKER_4: So if we don't really understand consciousness on a very detailed level, we're not in a position to establish that what's going on in computers is consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: Are your tools useful, even if we don't know what it is that's going on, to say that a computer has achieved consciousness?
SPEAKER_2: How would we know?
SPEAKER_5: Well, that's the question.
SPEAKER_5: When people will ask me, do you think computers are or can be conscious?
SPEAKER_5: My response is, how will we know?
SPEAKER_5: And again, that's where we need to figure out what is the system that's required.
SPEAKER_5: And does that system need to be neural?
SPEAKER_5: Does it need to be neurobiological?
SPEAKER_5: Or can you simply have a functional arrangement of information processors that could achieve the same outcome?
SPEAKER_5: So I would say we do not know that.
SPEAKER_2: So let me ask you this then, based on what Neil just asked and what you just said.
SPEAKER_2: If we were to have the computing power, like a quantum computer, and we were able to replicate down to the very neuron, a human brain, so you have this trillion connections all firing at once and you're able to program into it exactly everything that the person that you're mapping was thinking and so forth.
SPEAKER_2: Would that then be sentience or would that just be a replication of sentience?
SPEAKER_5: It's a great question and I don't have an answer.
SPEAKER_4: Chuck, you're not supposed to stump the guests, okay?
SPEAKER_4: That's not why you're on the show.
SPEAKER_5: Great to explore and there are a few things that go along with that.
SPEAKER_5: One is we think about it exclusively related to the brain, but what about the body?
SPEAKER_5: What about the interaction with the environment?
SPEAKER_5: So those environmental factors are critically important as well.
SPEAKER_5: But also to the point is we don't know yet what is generating the conscious experience.
SPEAKER_5: And we can look at lots of different network models, and we can look at different principles across different systems.
SPEAKER_5: But some of these systems are conscious and others aren't.
SPEAKER_5: So they're clear network phenomena that are going on in the conscious brain that get disrupted during unconsciousness.
SPEAKER_5: But there are similar network phenomena going on in non-biological systems that we don't think are conscious.
SPEAKER_5: So very important question.
SPEAKER_4: And Richard Hofstadter, was that his name or Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote Gödel Escher Bach, do you remember?
SPEAKER_5: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: His last name was Hofstadter.
SPEAKER_4: In that book, which I think went a Pulitzer Prize, very thick, very fascinating book, in the end he has a conversation with Einstein's brain.
SPEAKER_4: And he imagines, this is like decades before people thought of that we're in a simulation or anything.
SPEAKER_4: He imagined removing Einstein's brain, but preserving every single neurosynaptic capacity, all the neurosynaptic capacity of that brain.
SPEAKER_4: So it's in a jar.
SPEAKER_4: And so now you ask it a question.
SPEAKER_4: You say, Albert, what time does Grand Central Station arrive at the next train?
SPEAKER_4: That'd be like a fun relativity question.
SPEAKER_4: Everything's relative, right?
SPEAKER_4: So you pick a question, and then that question goes in through acoustic signals to the, up to the, to the, whatever the acoustic nerves that connect with the brain.
SPEAKER_4: And you watch it trip circuits throughout the brain.
SPEAKER_4: And if you had it perfectly modeled, you should be able to follow how that question lands and how it triggers a response where then Einstein's brain speaks back.
SPEAKER_4: Is that in principle something that could happen one day, do you think?
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but first of all, you know, this brain in a bat concept, really in many respects goes back to Descartes, when he was reflecting on whether he could just be completely deceived by everything that he was experiencing.
SPEAKER_5: But yes, there are ways of mapping the information processing from, as you said, the primary, in this case, auditory cortex to higher order cortices.
SPEAKER_5: These different volleys or reverberations of activity can, in course ways, be mapped.
SPEAKER_5: But then again, the question comes up, is that associated with experience?
SPEAKER_5: Because I can put the same questions into chat GPT right now, that's going to have its own processing capability, and it could give me the same answer as Einstein's brain in this thought experiment through a completely different mechanism that we presume is non-conscious.
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SPEAKER_4: All right, so now, let's get to the meat of this conversation.
SPEAKER_4: I'm sorry, there could be vegetarians out there.
SPEAKER_4: Let's get to the carrots of this conversation.
SPEAKER_4: I never thought before today, and the notes for this conversation, how psychedelics could be tools in your utility belt to probe the conscious mind.
SPEAKER_4: And that fascinates me greatly.
SPEAKER_4: So, you would measure certain quantities of psychedelics, get a willing subject to ingest them, and then measure the consequences of that and their awareness and reaction to the physical world around them.
SPEAKER_4: So, that seems like an entirely...
SPEAKER_4: Is that an unexplored frontier for the neuroscientist, as opposed to just the person who wants drug experiences?
SPEAKER_5: Yes, great question.
SPEAKER_5: So, obviously, many of these naturally occurring psychedelics have been used for millennia in spiritual practices and rituals.
SPEAKER_5: But of course, there was already in Western civilization a first wave of intense interest in psychedelics as a tool to understand the mind, the brain, and for therapeutic purposes.
SPEAKER_5: And this is something that was happening in the 1950s and 60s.
SPEAKER_5: And of course, we know how that turned out.
SPEAKER_5: In terms of the late 60s, the enthusiasm started to extend far beyond the rigor and sense of responsibility.
SPEAKER_4: Woodstock, just say it, Woodstock.
SPEAKER_5: Things were made illegal around 1970, and then the field really just became dormant.
SPEAKER_4: It was under President Nixon, if I remember correctly.
SPEAKER_4: The drug rules got all readjusted.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_5: And now we are really experiencing what has been referred to as the psychedelic renaissance, because in the past 10 to 15 years, there's been a resurgence of neuroscientific investigation.
SPEAKER_5: There has been a resurgence of clinical investigation with rigorous clinical trials that are testing psychedelics for conditions like depression.
SPEAKER_5: These articles are getting published in the New England Journal, the Lancet, major medical journals in the field.
SPEAKER_5: And obviously social attitudes have been changing, policy has been changing with decriminalization and cannabis has probably led the way a bit on this.
SPEAKER_5: So we really are in the midst of a renaissance.
SPEAKER_5: Again, this is something that was already a matter of intense interest, but now we have a lot of tools such as neuroimaging, for example, lots of analytic tools, theoretical constructs to explore psychedelics and to help us understand this spectrum of conscious states.
SPEAKER_5: Now I'm an anesthesiologist and I actually, I want to state with humility that I wouldn't consider myself the foremost psychedelic neuroscientist.
SPEAKER_5: There are great people out there doing great work, but if you think about anesthetics and psychedelics, they're kind of mirror images of one another and they help us probe our model of the world, brain function.
SPEAKER_5: So anesthetics suppress consciousness, they contract the repertoire of accessible brain states or configurations, they reduce neurophysiologic complexity.
SPEAKER_5: Psychedelics, one could say they give us a higher consciousness, they expand the repertoire of accessible brain states and they enhance neurophysiologic.
SPEAKER_4: Wait, wait, but the brain barely works as a tool to measure objective reality.
SPEAKER_4: If it worked better, we wouldn't have optical illusions books, right?
SPEAKER_4: Where simple line drawings completely confound your capacity to know what is objectively true and what isn't.
SPEAKER_2: They certainly wouldn't have Penn and Teller.
SPEAKER_4: Illusionists, right?
SPEAKER_4: That wouldn't exist, right?
SPEAKER_4: So why would stirring chemicals into the brain give you a more accurate understanding of the brain rather than a less accurate one?
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, so that great question and there are a couple of dimensions there.
SPEAKER_5: First of all, what is consciousness doing in the first place?
SPEAKER_5: It's your point.
SPEAKER_5: Is it a mirror for reality or objective reality, as you said?
SPEAKER_5: I don't necessarily think that's the case.
SPEAKER_5: There are lots of different ways that you can think about it.
SPEAKER_5: You can think about the brain as a sensory processing organ, but others would suggest that the brain is really creating this conscious experience.
SPEAKER_5: It helps us get through the world, helps us achieve the biological goals, and the brain is essentially like a hypothesis and model making machine.
SPEAKER_5: It generates a mental model.
SPEAKER_5: It uses sensory information to give feedback to that model.
SPEAKER_5: So I think what the drugs are doing in one direction or another is not so much helping us understand the brain vis-à-vis objective reality, but just how the brain functions in terms of its own models and its own capacity for consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: An in-situ tool.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, because that makes sense, because anybody who's seen a picture of themselves for real understands that instruments that measure reality objectively can really mess you up.
SPEAKER_2: Because I see a picture of me and I'm like, I do not look, I'm not this ugly.
SPEAKER_2: I am not this ugly.
SPEAKER_2: But that is because when I look in the mirror, my brain is creating a construct for what it says, this is what I look like.
SPEAKER_2: But the camera is just like, no, you're ugly, bro.
SPEAKER_4: So, Chuck, you should sign up for one of his.
SPEAKER_4: It sounds like you need help.
SPEAKER_4: So, presumably, the dosing matters greatly here.
SPEAKER_4: And if people's brains are roughly similar, you would expect similar reactions to similar drugs and perhaps similar dosing.
SPEAKER_4: But Mike, I bet that's not the case.
SPEAKER_4: Could you explain why?
SPEAKER_5: Sure.
SPEAKER_5: I think the dose does matter.
SPEAKER_5: And people are exploring what is necessary, for example, for a therapeutic effect.
SPEAKER_5: Can you do microdosing?
SPEAKER_5: That doesn't really have a major impact on consciousness.
SPEAKER_5: Some actually are exploring whether you need to have a psychoactive experience at all.
SPEAKER_5: Maybe there are aspects of these drugs that are having a therapeutic effect independently of the psychedelic experience.
SPEAKER_4: Which of course is the case with marijuana.
SPEAKER_4: You separate out the ingredients there, and they have very different utilities.
SPEAKER_5: And that's being explored as a novel drug class.
SPEAKER_5: I think the other thing about psychedelics, and this goes back to the Timothy Leary days, is the concept of set and setting.
SPEAKER_5: That unlike other drug classes, where maybe you give dose X and you get response Y, obviously it's going to vary across the population.
SPEAKER_5: But with psychedelics, the set or the mindset going into the experience and the setting or the environment can have a major influence on what the subjective experience is.
SPEAKER_4: Of course it would.
SPEAKER_5: So even at a similar dose in the same person, going into it in a certain mood or with a certain orientation, having this at a hospital versus a naturalistic setting could evoke very different kinds of experiences.
SPEAKER_2: Good trip, bad trip.
SPEAKER_4: Exactly, exactly.
SPEAKER_4: So if you're successful, if you're supremely successful in this exercise, you and your colleagues, and I've said this, but only because it felt like it would be true, not because I really knew.
SPEAKER_4: If you're successful in treating mental health, we won't need psychologists or psychologists in the future, because you just go into the brain and fix the brain, rather than, oh, lay on the couch and talk to me for three hours a week, and do that for three years, and maybe you'll be cured.
SPEAKER_4: You're coming at it from a whole other place.
SPEAKER_4: So I've said this, I've gotten only mild pushback, because I think deep down people know it could be true, if not will be true, that psychology is to neuroscience as alchemy is to chemistry.
SPEAKER_2: Ooh.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's not good for psychomics.
SPEAKER_4: You know what I'm saying is you have to begin somewhere.
SPEAKER_4: I'm not faulting alchemists.
SPEAKER_4: They bet on the wrong horse, but they kept good notes.
SPEAKER_2: They bet on the wrong, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: But they kept notes, and the foundations of the early periodic table were there.
SPEAKER_4: But we learned, no, there's a better way to do this, a more reliable way.
SPEAKER_4: So could you just react to what I just said?
SPEAKER_5: I should, I'm reacting right now and...
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, so it's a great question.
SPEAKER_5: And another way I want to just reframe this is, what is the mechanism of therapeutic action of the psychedelics?
SPEAKER_5: And there are a couple of different possibilities.
SPEAKER_5: Some would say it's just the drug in the brain.
SPEAKER_5: There's something that's going on at the molecular level.
SPEAKER_5: It's going to induce neuroplasticity, maybe dendritic spine arborization and neurons.
SPEAKER_5: And we can engineer a drug that doesn't even have to have any experience.
SPEAKER_5: Others would say, well, it's not just the drug in the brain, it's the experience that the drug evokes.
SPEAKER_5: And there is something that the person and the brain learns about itself through that experience, and that's essential.
SPEAKER_5: And others might say, no, it is actually the therapeutic intervention.
SPEAKER_5: It's the psychotherapy.
SPEAKER_5: The drug is just creating the conditions for growth, but it's the therapy that's actually doing the work, or it might be some combination.
SPEAKER_2: So it's kind of like planting a field.
SPEAKER_2: You gotta prepare the ground, you gotta have the seeds, you have to have the water, all these things come together.
SPEAKER_2: It's not just one of those things.
SPEAKER_5: But I don't know the answer, but it's an empirical question.
SPEAKER_5: And if we find out that these so-called non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analogs or psychoplastogens can have an impact on depression without any therapy and without any associated psychedelic experience, that would help us answer it.
SPEAKER_2: We are seeing some evidence, not necessarily of that per se, but there is some evidence pointing towards that when you look at PTSD patients who go through these psychedelic experiences, many of them basically say, I don't have PTSD anymore.
SPEAKER_5: Yes.
SPEAKER_5: Well, there certainly is empirical evidence that some of the protocols used in these trials, which often include a psychedelic drug, support during the psychedelic experience, and then psychotherapy or integration afterwards, are effective in what's unique, I think, and what differentiates psychedelics from traditional antidepressant medications is that they can sometimes have an impact that's durable beyond the drug being in your body.
SPEAKER_4: I was going to ask that.
SPEAKER_5: After a single session, as opposed to a traditional antidepressant, it might take four to six weeks for a mood effect.
SPEAKER_5: Psilocybin or ketamine, it's almost immediate.
SPEAKER_5: And that's important if you think about somebody who's acutely suicidal or who might be in a palliative care situation with cancer.
SPEAKER_2: That's the other area where these cancer patients go through these psychedelic experiences, and they come out of it and invariably, they come out and say, I'm cool now.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not afraid to die anymore.
SPEAKER_2: I'm no longer overly anxious or no longer anguished about the fact that I know I have a terminal disease.
SPEAKER_2: That's incredible.
SPEAKER_5: Yes, and that is one area trying to treat or help existential distress in the dying process.
SPEAKER_5: Again, it was explored in the 1960s, is being actively explored again with psychedelics.
SPEAKER_4: So I'm delighted to just bear witness to the birth of a field and watching this unfold in real time right in front of our eyes.
SPEAKER_4: And I have friends who were microdosing and who had neurological emotional challenges, and they only speak highly of that experience.
SPEAKER_4: And so to the extent that science continues with phase one, two, three trials, whatever is necessary in the field, I look forward to where this is going.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: George.
SPEAKER_2: Now, Doc, I got to ask you, and this is the most important question.
SPEAKER_4: And we got to wrap.
SPEAKER_4: We got to run out.
SPEAKER_2: Well, then I'm glad I'm getting this question in because it's seriously important.
SPEAKER_2: Where do I get these drugs?
SPEAKER_4: What's this?
SPEAKER_4: He's got a van out back.
SPEAKER_5: A good time to wrap up.
SPEAKER_4: Offline, we will learn.
SPEAKER_5: I do need to say, and this is important, that we are really trying to adhere to the most rigorous, the most responsible standards in our work.
SPEAKER_5: I'm looking at the big picture in the long game.
SPEAKER_5: It's great to be enthusiastic, but we also have to be self-critical if we want this to become part of mainstream medicine.
SPEAKER_5: And so my tagline always is, we shouldn't stigmatize psychedelic research, neither should we romanticize it.
SPEAKER_5: We need to treat this with seriousness just like we would any other drug research.
SPEAKER_4: That is a sentence to end the show right there.
SPEAKER_2: If I ever heard one.
SPEAKER_4: Dr.
SPEAKER_4: George Mashour, thanks for being back on StarTalk.
SPEAKER_5: Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_4: It's been a delight to catch up on what you're doing in your field, you and your colleagues, and keep up the good work.
SPEAKER_4: Like I said, that's a whole, we're witnessing the birth of a branch of science that could just become commonplace and routine in the decades to come.
SPEAKER_4: Let's end this before Chuck loses it.
SPEAKER_4: Alright, well, this has been StarTalk.
SPEAKER_4: Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, all about psychedelics and consciousness.
SPEAKER_4: Again, Doc, thanks for being on the show.
SPEAKER_4: Chuck, always good to have you, man.
SPEAKER_2: Always a pleasure.
SPEAKER_4: Alright, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always.
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