Andrew Gallimore details how DMT and Salvia disrupt cortical prediction models, potentially granting access to hyper-dimensional realities inhabited by post-biological intelligences. He explains that while classic psychedelics stimulate the cortex, Salvia shuts down the claustrum, severing normal reality constraints. Gallimore proposes using target-controlled intravenous infusion to stabilize these states for extended communication, citing Imperial College pilots and AI decoding of high-dimensional geometries. Ultimately, he argues that anomalous experiences reflect a lost hyperdimensional heritage rather than mere hallucinations, suggesting modern technology can rediscover this ancient cognitive capability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Young Interest in Psychedelics00:06:17
So, thank you to Hamilton Morris for giving me the title of this podcast episode.
Andrew Gallimore is building a DMT machine to connect us to the alien worlds.
Kind of.
That's kind of true.
Yeah.
I'm not building it, but that's beautifully stated.
Yeah.
So, thanks for coming, first of all.
Thanks for bringing your books, beautifully designed books.
Thank you very much.
What do you do?
And how did you get into this world of.
Psychedelics and doing what you do now and studying these extended stay DMT trips.
Oh, it's a long story, Denny.
I'm ready.
I got at least six hours.
Well, I mean, how far do you want to go back?
I mean, when I was really young, like primary school age, I don't know what grade that is, but like seven, eight years old, really young, I was interested in ghosts and vampires, werewolves.
The unholy trinity, I used to call it.
Weird things, weird experiences, much to my parents' concern at the time, because I was kind of too young to be interested in sort of dark, occult kind of things.
But as I grew and got into my teenage years and started thinking about my future, that morphed into an interest in psychedelics.
And I remember a friend, because I'd been talking about psychedelics for a while.
This was before I'd ever had any actual experience.
Something about the stories that I'd heard about psychedelics kind of appealed to me.
And I remember a friend bought me this magazine to school, and it had this Terrence McKenna interview on the back page, and he was describing his favorite drug.
Something called DMT.
And this just fascinated me.
I thought, oh my God, this sounds incredible.
You know, these incredible, you know, his characteristically kind of baroque oratory on DMT is inimitable, really.
And I thought, okay, this is a fascinating.
I didn't know what DMT meant.
I didn't know what it was.
I didn't know what DMT stood for.
I had to go to the library and look up what DMT meant and got.
Completely the wrong answer from this book of acronyms or something.
But I knew from this point that I wanted to study psychedelics in some way.
I was maybe 16 years old.
So I thought, okay, I need to study pharmacology and chemistry.
So I did.
I went to university and studied chemistry and pharmacology and kind of developed a reputation amongst my friends at that point as being this kind of drug guy, this guy that liked drugs.
And.
It all kind of developed from there.
And it wasn't until maybe 15 years ago that I started really thinking seriously about DMT.
And as my scientific understanding of drugs and their pharmacology and the way they interface with the human brain kind of matured, I started to realize that DMT was truly something remarkable, that it wasn't.
Just any old psychedelic.
It was something much more profound, if you like.
But even then, it wasn't until I actually experienced DMT for myself.
And by this time, I had the best part of a decade of Terence McKenna lectures and his books under my belt.
I'd heard all the stories.
Wow, so you were deep into this before you ever experienced it personally.
Exactly.
And I thought because of that, I'm prepared.
You know, I thought, okay, I know what I'm going to see.
I know what it's going to feel like.
I know what kind of experience this is going to be.
But I was completely unprepared.
It shocked me to my very bones when I first experienced ENT.
And it wasn't even a breakthrough experience, mind.
This was sub breakthrough.
And yet I was confronted.
With this undeniable, immense intelligence, this inordinate complexity, this hyperdimensionality, this thing was far, far more than I could possibly have imagined.
And I remember lying on my bed, coming back from this experience, kind of reconstructing my human self.
And just all I could say was, oh my God, oh my God.
I was shaking, I was shattered.
All of my fundamental ontological assumptions about what is and isn't possible had been uprooted, had been obliterated.
And so that was the moment when I really thought, okay, I'm going to devote my life to this technology as I prefer to think of it now.
Rather than just a drug molecule, I think of it as a technology.
And since then, I've been evangelizing and writing and speaking and thinking about DMT.
How did we first discover DMT?
So, well, I mean, DMT has a history of use in humans that goes back thousands of years in traditional preparation.
Ancient Snuffs and World Models00:15:58
So, ayahuasca, these snuffs, kohoba snuffs, and yopo.
This goes back thousands of years.
But actually, The first time that the Western world realized the psychedelic properties of DMT, the molecule, were first discovered, that was back in 1956, I think.
So, this Hungarian physician, Stephen Zara, he was, you know, at the time, this was not long after.
Hoffman had discovered LSD, of course.
So, psychiatry at the time was becoming increasingly interested in psychedelics and their potential for studying consciousness, for studying the human mind, for studying disorders of consciousness, things like schizophrenia.
And so, Stephen Zara became interested in psychedelics and he tried initially to get hold of some LSD.
He failed.
He was behind the Iron Curtain at the time.
So, he got some mescaline instead, which he And he had a beautiful experience on Christmas Day.
But then he turned his attention to these cohoba snuffs, these used by indigenous tribes in Amazonia.
And there had been some previous research on these snuffs, which.
What is a snuff?
What is a snuff?
So it's like a.
So the cohoba snuff specifically is a ground up seeds, roasted seeds of this plant that contain a mixture of different tryptamines, but in particular bufotinine.
And 5 methoxy DMT and also DMT.
And the studies at the time had come to the conclusion, erroneously, in my opinion, and in the opinion of Stephen Zara, that bufotonin was the major hallucinogenic or psychedelic component of these snuffs.
So, yeah, the snuff, to kind of go back to your question, the snuff is ground to a fine powder and then forcefully.
So, you have this fine powder, very, very fine, a bit light.
You know, rappe.
I'm not familiar with rappe.
Okay, so that's a powdered tobacco snuff.
The seed is finely ground up and then placed into a long tube that's maybe a yard long.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, and there can be up to a teaspoon, I've read in certain reports of this.
It's laid out in this tube.
One person on one end, the mouth, the other person puts the tube up the nostril, and then, you know, forcefully blows, you know.
Forcefully blows this into your skull.
I mean, it sounds like an appalling experience.
I'm sure it was extremely painful.
The eyes start running and mucus starts flowing from the nostrils.
It's blood, you know, it's not nice.
There's certainly more efficient ways to consume psychedelics than that.
I don't recommend it to anyone by any stretch of the imagination.
But these had been used for hundreds, at least hundreds of years.
Yeah, so the studies of the snuff.
That had been done, the kind of chemical analysis, isolated bufotonin.
And what they actually did is they took this bufotonin, they injected it into a group of inmates at the Ohio State Penitentiary, I believe it was, and tested the effects.
And they went purple and they felt nauseous, and their blood pressure shot through the roof.
And it wasn't, you know, there was some kind of imagery that they saw, geometric visions, that kind of thing.
But it wasn't convincing to Stephen Zara that this was the.
The conduit to the gods.
This was how they communicated with the gods.
It just didn't seem that psychedelic.
So he turned his attention to the other component that had been isolated dimethyltryptamine.
Bufotonine is 5-hydroxy dimethyltryptamine.
It's a different molecule.
Is that the one where people talk about being inside the sun when they're in there, that everything goes white?
That's 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine.
It has an extra carbon.
But they're closely related.
So Stephen Zahra, he He synthesized, he's also an organic chemist as well as a physician.
He synthesized the DMT and he started swallowing it in increasing doses.
Now, we know now that DMT is not orally active on its own, so nothing was happening.
He went up, he started very low dose, a few milligrams, increased, increased.
And in the end, he was swallowing like a gram of this stuff and just nothing was happening.
So he thought, okay, maybe I'm just way off here.
This is on the wrong track.
Maybe I was wrong.
But then a colleague said to him, Have you thought about injecting it?
So he injected it into a cat, first of all.
I mean, I don't know what happened or what the cat said, what kind of trip report you got from the cat, but probably not much.
So he decided then to inject it on himself, intramuscular injection, and that was it.
He, you know, instantaneously, within just a couple of minutes of the injection, he started seeing these beautiful, complex, rapidly altering scenes in front of him.
So he was having the world's first pure.
DMT trip.
It's sometime in April of 1956.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so he got straight to work.
You know, he got some volunteers from the hospital, nurses and doctors and stuff from the hospital where he worked, and began the world's first kind of DMT human study.
And yeah, the rest is history.
When did we first discover that our brain produces DMT?
And can you explain how our current perceptual model of the world works and what DMT has to do with that?
Yeah, so I mean, I've never been that convinced by the idea that, I mean, Rick Strasman particularly proposed that low levels of endogenous DMT were responsible somehow for the way that we experience reality in normal waking life.
I've never been particularly convinced by that.
So, DMT levels, so DMT is very closely related to serotonin, which is, of course, an endogenous neuromodulator.
And it's not that difficult.
To kind of divert the metabolism from.
So serotonin starts from tryptophan, which is then converted to tryptamine.
Then you hydroxylate and you get 5-hydroxytryptamine, which is serotonin.
You could also go in a slightly different direction and go from tryptamine to dimethyltryptamine.
So it's very easy, in other words, to make DMT.
And so, way back in, you know, beginning in the 1950s, scientists, psychiatrists were already thinking maybe.
There is some aberrant metabolism in certain people where they produce more DMT than normal, and this is responsible for schizophrenia.
So, this was referred to as the transmethylation hypothesis of schizophrenia.
So, straight away, they were looking for DMT in schizophrenics.
So, measuring DMT in their urine, in their blood, trying to find a consistent, significant difference between DMT levels in schizophrenics versus normal people.
How hard is that to do?
To measure the DMT in somebody's blood?
It's not difficult to do, but it turned out to be difficult to find any significant relationship.
And this hypothesis has kind of fallen out of favor now.
There aren't really any psychiatrists who take seriously the idea that schizophrenia is caused by an excess of DMT.
And it doesn't make sense, to me at least, in terms of the phenomenology.
The DMT trip is not the same.
As the schizophrenic experience.
So it just doesn't make any sense to me that DMT is responsible for schizophrenia.
And that would explain why they didn't get the results they were looking for.
Yeah, so in terms of what DMT does, we kind of need to get back to, as you said, your model of reality that your brain constructs.
So the world that you experience in normal waking life, the world that you experience.
When you're dreaming, and even the world that you experience under the influence of DMT is always constructed by the brain.
This is kind of, this is absolutely fundamental.
And it's something that I repeat and I repeat and I repeat because it's the problem we have with DMT, I think, is the questions about it are poorly constructed.
So people will say, oh, is it real or is it all in your head?
You know, we've all heard that phrase, oh, it was all in your head.
Right.
But all experiences are, in a sense, all in your head.
They're always being constructed by your brain.
Your brain constructs your world model.
Your brain, I like to say, is a world building machine.
Right?
It constructs your world model from patterns of neural activity, patterns of a unified pattern of information, basically.
Now, that applies under all circumstances.
It applies in dreaming, as I said, it applies in the DMT trip.
So when you.
Take DMT, your brain is constructing a different world model.
It's constructing a different model of reality.
Now, in the normal waking state, this world model is constrained, it's modulated by a constant trickle of sensory information from that thing outside that we call the environment, that we never have direct access to.
It's a noumenal space, it's not something we can directly access.
So, the world that you're experiencing.
Now is this model.
It looks like you're experiencing the outside world, but actually, it's all internally constructed within this light sealed, you know, this black, dark space within your skull where your brain is.
Right.
The place people go when they do these things, like whether it be DMT or psilocybin or anything, is that.
Is it things that are.
Already there, like invisible, that are just becoming apparent?
Or is it just the mind like turning inside out on itself?
Okay, so this is the central question that I've been wrestling with for the last 20 or so years, right?
We don't know the answer to that question, but there are a number of explanations for the DMT experience.
First of all, when you smoke DMT, when you take any psychedelic, It's the world model that changes.
What psychedelics are doing is they are interacting with certain receptors in deep layers of the cortex.
The cortex is the outer layer of the brain that constructs your world model.
And the classic psychedelics, so that's DMT, LSD, psilocin from psilocybin, they interact with these receptors and they perturb the world building machinery.
They allow your brain to construct a different model.
So the model changes, the structure and the dynamics of the model changes.
Now, with a low dose of something like psilocybin mushrooms, the effect can be relatively subtle.
You get kind of an altered model of the normal waking world.
It's more fluid, it's more dynamic, it's more sensitive to incoming sensory information in that state.
But with DMT, Something quite different happens.
Terence McKenna used to call it a 100% reality channel switch.
Your brain doesn't, it's not just an altered version of the normal waking world, but it's a completely different model of reality.
It's like switching the reality channel.
And the question is, and it's a really difficult question to answer, but it's the kind of the orthodox explanation for this is oh, it's your brain is just making it up.
It's a wild cortical fabrication.
But that's never made much sense to me because.
We know that the brain wasn't dropped to earth ready to kind of construct worlds.
The brain evolved to construct the normal waking world as a model of the environment.
This is the world your brain knows, has learned, has evolved to construct.
It knows how to construct one world model, right?
So then you ask the question well, how is it then possible that when you perturb the brain with this simple Plant alkaloid, it suddenly becomes capable of constructing entirely coherent, inordinately complex, hyperdimensional worlds filled with seemingly hyper intelligent beings.
Where did it learn or evolve to construct these realities?
It's confounding to me, even from a neuroscientific perspective.
It's like imagine a young American child who only speaks English.
A five year old or something suddenly wakes up and starts speaking fluent Siberian Yupik or some South African click language, it would be shocking.
Like, where did he learn to speak this?
And it's similarly confounding to me that the brain knows how to construct these bizarre alternate realities that have no relationship, no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world.
Was taken from our world and brought into.
It's a completely disjoint reality.
And that is, to me, remains a great mystery, unless somehow the brain is receiving information from somewhere else that's kind of constraining and modulating and informing its construction of this alternate world model.
That is why it's such a problem, in my opinion, to explain DMT.
Where could that somewhere else be?
Yeah, we don't have a clue where this other space could be.
The Data Input Mystery00:05:32
And this is kind of what I've sometimes referred to as the data input problem.
So, the normal waking world, as I said before, it's always receiving information from the environment.
We understand how that works, we understand the stimulation of visual information.
Stimulation of the retina.
We understand how sound information works.
We understand how information gets into the brain to help the brain construct the normal waking world model.
So, this data input problem is well, if this DMT world is being modulated by information from elsewhere, where is this elsewhere?
That we don't understand.
Might not be within the constraints of space time.
Well, exactly.
Exactly.
And this is where, well, probably getting to later, we start to think about.
Where these other domains might be, and the kind of relationship between our reality and these other domains, and particularly the intelligences that we see within these other domains, which are often way beyond anything we can imagine in this universe.
Now, everybody, when they do DMT, they always experience the same thing.
They always experience these extreme geometrical patterns, and they all experience these so called elves.
That are dancing around telling them things like giving them positive messages that are transformative in some aspect or another.
Is this pretty much consistent through everyone?
And is there, how much deviation or variation is there from all the people that you've actually studied or talked to that experience DMT?
So, there, so.
Everyone's experience is in some sense different.
Everyone has to construct their own model of the DMT space, right?
We all construct our own model of the world.
Everyone's model of the world is in some way different, yet there's a certain consensus about what's what.
I can never get access into your brain and look at your model and see if it maps to mine.
I think about that all the time.
I think about, like, I'm looking at you right now and I see this room.
And if I walk outside, I know like what the trees look like and what the cars in the parking lot look like.
But I always wonder, like, through some, like, how would you know looking through somebody else's eyes if they're seeing the same thing?
We use the same language to describe these things.
Yes.
The language is the same, but we have no fucking clue if it's how similar or dissimilar it really is.
Yeah.
I mean, this is why we've heard it as a consensus reality because there is some consensus there.
But I don't know if when you look at the color green, what that, Looks like to you is the same to me.
It doesn't because I have a mild, I actually have a very mild form of color deficiency, mild form of red green color blindness.
So my reds look different to your reds, but we agree that they're reds.
And you can apply this, of course.
I mean, we don't even know if I was to be able to look through your eyes whether even that world that I saw would make any sense to me.
And that's kind of wild, right?
It might be completely confusing and bizarre, but you make sense of it.
Your brain has learned to construct that model of reality, right?
Some people go through most of their lives not being able to see three dimensional and they don't even know it.
Right.
I mean, there's, it's, you can get some, I mean, one way we know that your brain is constructing and how your brain constructs your model of reality is when things go wrong.
So there's, you know, a certain part of the visual cortex, for example, that's responsible for your experience of motion, that gives motion to objects in the world.
If you get a, if you have this rare condition called akinotopsia, Where there's damage to a very specific area of that cortex that's responsible for motion information, they see the world as a series of still images.
Now, I can't imagine what that's like.
Can you?
But I really can't.
Good lord.
You know, but that's how they see the world.
And similarly, achromatopsia is when the part of the brain that represents color information is damaged specifically, and the world becomes black and white to these people, right?
I heard that, um, like something around 95% of the neurons in our brain are dedicated to vision.
I don't know, or an absurd amount of the neurons in our brain are dedicated solely to vision.
Right.
We are a visual species.
We rely on visual information more than any other information.
I mean, imagine looking at the room now and trying to describe it in such detail using words, using sound, such that somebody could reproduce the room to photographic precision.
You know, imagine that, right?
So clearly, there's a lot of information.
There's so much information that we have in our visual world, and all of that information is represented.
By this unified pattern of neural information in the brain.
Wow.
Yeah.
Reptilians and Other Beings00:04:23
But getting back to the entities, right?
So, to answer your question about do people see the same things, everyone's experience is certainly different.
But there are certain universal DMT motifs, if you like, that many people describe.
The structure, the ambiance of the space, the geometry, and also, of course, the beings within the space, the so called DMT entities.
And this goes back, I mean, of course, it goes back to these indigenous tribes in Amazonia who are using DMT.
They used it to communicate with beings.
They call them spirits or gods, right?
We might have a different name for them now, but certainly it was clear that this is.
A characteristic feature of the DMT experience is the experience of other beings.
And Stephen Zara, so you mentioned these elves, right?
Yeah.
Terrence McKenna, the elves, the machine elves, as Terrence McKenna called them, they're by far the most famous denizens of these hyperdimensional realms.
There's no doubt about that.
And many people like to say, well, people see elves because McKenna saw elves and McKenna spoke about elves.
So that's why you're seeing elves.
And it's like, you know, it's hard to get past that.
So, what we did actually a few years back is to go back to the original trip reports.
Let's go back to the 1950s.
Look at the trip reports there.
Stephen Zara's very first study.
Now, unfortunately, back then, they weren't that interested in the kind of details of the trip report.
This is not like Rick Strasman's study in the 90s, where he carefully had them write down everything they experienced.
So, if they would say, I saw hallucinations.
But even within these old papers, you get these little snippets of trip reports that had back then the characteristic DMT flavors.
They were describing this rapidly changing, rapid procession of complex geometric imagery.
They were describing beings that they called gods, language of the time, or they would call them spirits.
That was the lexicon of the time, if you like.
You see some kind of non human intelligence and you refer to it as a spirit.
Nowadays, we might call it something else.
But one of Stephen Zara's first subjects described these little, little dwarf like beings that moved around very quickly.
That's all we got.
But to me, this is part of the characteristic of these DMT elves, these very sprightly, lively beings, often very cheerful, and they kind of welcome you into the space and they love to show you things all the time.
Look at this, look at this, look at this.
They were there in the first.
Trip reports.
And then, you know, through the 60s and on, with people like Timothy Leary describing elf like beings and insectoid like beings and reptilians.
And there are certain types of reptilians?
Reptilians, man.
And they can be ferocious.
In Rick Strasman's study, one of the subjects described being, how should we say, raped by reptilians.
What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's bad beings in there?
Yeah, fortunately, before anyone has become totally frightened by DS.
The vast majority of entity encounters are either positive or neutral.
Often they will.
The majority.
We're talking like 90%, yeah.
But what about that 10%?
What's going on with those guys?
Well, I mean, they vary as much in their character as they do their form.
We wouldn't predict this was all beings of love and light.
I mean, that's to be expected, right?
The same on Earth.
Not everyone's nice.
Most people are nice to some, you know, or kind of neutral.
Trickster Behavior and Danger00:02:24
And this is the same in the DMT space.
Okay.
They often seem to be aware of their.
The large gap between their intelligence and what.
I mean, this is their world, after all, that we're kind of entering, if you like.
So, and they like to kind of have fun, some of them.
So there's a lot of kind of mocking going on sometimes, teasing, right?
Kind of trickstery kind of behavior.
With these entities.
They like to scare you.
So you have to be kind of aware of that.
But there's no evidence that they can actually do you any harm other than giving you a bit of a scare.
Has anyone ever been harmed by DM?
I mean, other than like abuse?
Because I know personally people who during their young age, like through high school and through college, that abuse psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms that they're.
They've been off ever since, or like they never really cognitively recovered from that.
You don't, well, I mean, the problem with these longer acting psychedelics is that you've got a much better chance to get yourself into a bad headspace, right?
You know, when things start to go wrong, you start to freak out, you become anxious or panic, and that can last a long time.
And so I think there's a greater potential for.
You could get yourself in some really bad places with psychedelics, which is why.
Because they last like hours and hours.
Exactly.
With DMT, for most people, it's shocking, it's astonishing.
Terence McKenna used to say the only danger with DMT is death by astonishment.
Right.
You know, these are shockingly astonishing.
Choose your superlative.
I mean, these are so bizarre and profound and strange and impossible experiences that they can.
The real danger, I think, or the real risk is that everything you thought was true, everything you thought you knew about reality is about to be obliterated.
Death by Astonishment00:06:43
You're going to come back and realize that you knew fucking nothing, that everything you thought was real or not real or possible or impossible.
It's gone.
It's gone.
And there's no coming back from that.
So you will be fundamentally changed in one aspect.
So you have to be prepared for that.
But for me, that was a.
I was euphoric after I came back, having seen this and realized this.
But for some people, if you have a particular ideological position about humans and our relationship to the cosmos, then you're in for a bit of a surprise, my friend, to say the least.
But for most people, it's so rapid.
It's like being on a roller coaster.
You're screaming, you're scared, but it's wild.
But You don't get a chance to mull it over.
You don't get a chance to think about the implications of it at the time.
Only afterwards.
Yeah.
So by the time you've kind of oriented yourself, if that's even possible within the space, you're already kind of on your way out.
Then you can think about what just happened.
And for most people, they actually forget a lot of the details.
They come out ranting and raving and, oh my God, this happened, this happened.
And then it's like a dream.
It kind of just.
It fades away and you can't remember details.
So, you know, for most people, there's no lasting, certainly not psychological damage.
No, no.
Like, I've always been worried about, like, you know, I never tried hardcore psychedelics.
Like, I never went past weed or like edibles, but I've done edibles and had some pretty trippy experiences.
Like, whenever anyone describes mushrooms to me, when I do an edible, that's what I experience.
Like, it's wild.
And I'm a hyper responder when it comes to any drugs.
So, any drugs I do, whether it be medications or like drugs, it just takes a little bit for me.
And I have like a crazy reaction.
Like, it takes me, I just take one pull of a joint and I'm singing.
When it takes like, you know, my friends or anyone else, anyone else I know who's with me, they have to smoke the whole joint.
But for me, it's only one pull.
Yeah.
So, like, I've always been super scared of diving into that world.
And then on top of that, when I was little, I heard up, when I was young, I heard a story.
I don't remember where I heard it, but I heard a story about.
These two Marines that were roommates, and one of them took mushrooms.
The guy was tripping on mushrooms, killed his roommate, cut his heart out, and cooked his heart in the oven and ate it.
And after I heard that, I was like, I'm never trying mushrooms.
But there's a lot of those fake stories that came out like in the early 90s.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, those stories go back to the 1960s.
Yeah.
People jumping off buildings because they thought they could fly.
And there's no doubt.
I mean, these drugs aren't without risk.
Anyone who claims that.
Shouldn't be listened to.
These are very strange headspaces that you're getting yourself into.
And of course, there's the potential for problems.
These are not party drugs for most people.
I mean, some people do like to use them as such.
But certainly, for someone who's inexperienced, you need to be very careful about what you're doing.
Be in the right environment.
Be with the right people, someone who is not tripping and someone who's very experienced with it, so they can redirect your consciousness.
But all of that stuff, DMT seems to kind of transcend set and setting, I always say.
It has no relationship to normal human experience.
Right.
And it's so fast.
There's basically nothing you can do to prepare for it, in my opinion.
And there's no, so another thing I would be concerned about is coming out of it and having sort of like a lasting, slippery grip on reality afterwards.
Again, you know, DMT, what's something kind of remarkable about DMT is it's so.
Clean.
It's fast.
You're in there and you're fucking deep.
Like deeper into this alternate reality than you could possibly have imagined before you go in there.
It's just remarkable in every way that this could happen, that your brain can do this, the brain can actually switch its reality channel with such efficiency.
And then you come out just as quickly.
And then within 10, 15 minutes, you might still be, you have sort of an afterglow.
So normally you're a little bit euphoric after having seen this, having experienced something that you couldn't have conceived of prior to DMT.
But then you're.
You're back to normal within 15, 30 minutes.
And how old were you the first time you tried it?
Sometime in my early 20s.
So, relatively late, actually, for many people.
I mean, I don't recommend people taking DMT in their teens or any psychedelics.
There's this guy who has a really popular YouTube channel called All Gas, No Breaks.
I think they changed it since then.
But he does these really cool, kind of like run and gun documentaries on weird subcultures around America.
And he did an interview where he talks about.
How, when he was like in his early teens, he did a lot of LSD, and now he is like perma tripping.
He said he sees hallucinations in his visual field all the time.
Yeah.
So, this is called hallucinogenic perceptual disorder.
That's it.
Post hallucinogenic perceptual disorder.
It's quite rare, but it does happen.
We don't quite understand why it happens, there's not that much research into it.
I would imagine it's not good to do this shit when you're like young and your brain is still developing.
That's it.
I would suggest the same thing.
I want to advise people about what they do or don't do.
It's their decision.
But yeah, I think as your brain is developing, certainly, you know, if you're 15, 16 years old, you know, seriously give your brain a chance to mature and develop before you start assaulting it with any kind of psychoactive.
Right.
Not just, you know, LSD or DMT, but any kind of psychoactive.
Wait until you're in your 20s, I would say.
With anything, even if it's not psychoactive.
I see so many kids that are in their like mid teens.
Now that are injecting testosterone, trying to like get jacked at the gym.
And it's just like, what are you doing to your body before you?
I mean, you're fucking 16 years old.
Yeah.
Totally unnecessary.
Computational Neuroscience Roots00:02:40
So, how?
So, you said you were originally into chemistry, right?
Yeah.
How did you evolve into becoming a neuroscientist?
Well, the thing is, is that to really understand psychedelics, it's interdisciplinary, it's multidisciplinary.
And whilst, Understanding the chemistry is really important and the pharmacology, right?
How do these molecules interact with protein receptors in the brain?
What effect does that have on these information generating cells, these neurons in the brain?
That's the realm of chemistry and pharmacology.
But to really understand what's going on at the cortical level, the global brain level, how do these cause these effects on the structure and the dynamics of your experienced world?
On your consciousness, that requires an understanding of neuroscience.
So, you need to be pretty conversant at every level, from the chemical level all the way up to the global brain level.
And so, after I did my PhD, which was in biochemistry, I realized that the neuroscience part was kind of missing from my repertoire, if you like.
So, I thought, okay, I need to do a postdoc in something neuroscience.
And so, I shifted.
With great difficulty, I will add, into a completely different discipline, which is computational neuroscience.
Wow.
That's a nice sounded word.
Yeah, it sounds nice and impressive.
It sounds impressive.
Yeah, that's another benefit of studying that.
Because I'd spent years in the laboratory doing wet biochemistry, which is, some people like it.
For me, I found it really tedious.
You know, it's a slow process, growing cells, they die or they get infected.
Everything takes a long time.
So I was tired of the lab.
I wanted to get out of the lab, man.
And so I didn't want to work, you know, killing rats and.
God, can you imagine?
I didn't want to get into that.
So I thought, okay, computational neuroscience.
This is where it's at, actually, modeling brain function using computers.
That, to me, seemed like the way the discipline, the field was moving.
There's only so much you can learn from studying wet brains.
What specifically were you doing studying wet brains and studying rats?
I wasn't.
And I didn't want to.
Japan's DMT-Esque Complexity00:04:44
That's the thing.
So I thought, you know.
Computational, that's the route.
So, I did a couple of postdocs.
I did one in England, York University, and Oxford University, studying synaptic plasticity, computational models of how neurons communicate and how those connections change over time as we learn, etc.
And then, after that contract finished, an opportunity, shall we say, opened up in Okinawa, in Japan.
And I'd always wanted to live in Japan since I was a teenager for some reason.
Don't ask why because I don't know why, but I did.
And I tried to learn Japanese when I was a teenager as well, but failed at it.
Yeah.
Because my German teacher said I couldn't.
There's something fascinating about Japan.
Yeah.
I'm in the middle.
I'm on season three of Man in the High Castle right now.
Oh, really?
Have you seen that?
I haven't, no.
In the original language?
I never knew it was in Japanese.
Well, maybe it isn't then.
I don't know.
No, yeah.
No, it's basically a show about if the premise of it is if America lost World War II.
And it's the Nazis and the Japanese are occupying North America.
This is PK Dick.
It's a PK Dick story.
Oh, is it really?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And so they're basically in an alternate reality, right?
And there's this one Japanese guy, the trade minister, who is able to meditate and travel into our current dimension back in whatever it was, like the 50s or 60s in America.
And he's being able to go back and forth and visit his family in that dimension and then his life in this dimension.
And there's this crazy, like, It's insane.
It's really mind blowing.
But, you know, it's a lot of like the Japanese culture really comes out in that documentary.
It's fascinating.
Yeah.
Japanese is.
I love the culture.
I love the people.
There's something weirdly, I would say, to many people at least, quite psychedelic about Tokyo.
It's a very strange world.
It's very, it seems to me, almost DMT esque in.
Just the lights and the complexity of the city.
It's like a fractal city.
You walk along the roads, the streets in Tokyo, and you see all the storefronts and all lit up, and there's big, huge neon lights everywhere.
You go into a building and you'll go up the elevator, and you'll find yourself in a new little world.
There's more stores kind of tucked away within one floor of one building, little tiny bars and things.
You can never get to the bottom of Tokyo.
You can have three or four lifetimes going to a different shop or different store or different bar or restaurant every day, and you never get to the bottom of it.
So it's very cool.
It's very small.
All the streets are kind of narrow.
It's very different to Florida, believe me.
That's something.
Florida is another dimension in itself.
Yeah, it's amazing when I come to America and the roads are so fucking wide and it's so broad and it's huge, beautiful, but very broad and very different landscape.
In Tokyo, everything's.
Compressed.
Very dense, right?
There's a lot of people there too, huh?
A lot of people, a lot of people, but not as.
People imagine that wherever you go in Tokyo, it's always going to be, you know, like crushed with people.
And in certain pockets, like Shibuya or Shinjuku, you're going to see that a lot of the time, like serious crushes, you know, loads of people.
But then you can turn a corner and find yourself on an empty street.
There's nothing there.
You might hear a shutter close.
You might hear a cat.
You might see a couple of.
Kids playing or something, very peaceful actually.
So, I live in my area, it's relatively quiet.
I can go for a walk for an hour after lunch and hardly see, you see a handful of people.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
So, you live like on the outskirts or something?
In West Tokyo, a place called Kichijoji, which is kind of a hip area.
It's within Tokyo, but you know, 20 minutes from Shibuya on the train or Shinjuku, you know.
But some of the imagery I've seen online of like the countrysides of like, With these mountains and these big lakes and stuff, it just looks incredible.
Yeah, you've got everything.
You've got the cities, obviously, but then you can get a train out of Tokyo and within an hour you're in a place like Nagano, this beautiful kind of mountainous region with lakes and Alps, the Japanese Alps.
Sushi, Kanji, and Language00:04:44
So if you like, you can do everything relatively simple.
If you like, sometimes you want to be in the city and the kind of the hustle and bustle and the excitement there.
And then You want a weekend out in the mountains hiking and stuff, you can do it all.
So, yeah, that's kind of why I like.
Can you speak Japanese now?
Yeah, fortunately.
Really?
But now, don't get carried away, Danny.
It's fiendishly difficult to learn.
I mean, I've been there eight years now in Japan and I'm still learning.
I'm still studying every fucking day, learning words, learning the kanji, the sounds.
It's really.
The way they construct sentences is completely alien to the way that we construct sentences in English.
So you have to learn a completely new way of constructing your thoughts and expressing yourself.
And sometimes you think of, I want to say this, and it's like, oh, how the fuck do I translate that into Japanese?
It takes a long time to do that.
And they speak so quickly, and it has this certain characteristic sound.
A lot of the words sound the same.
Sometimes you can move pieces of the word around and get a new word.
So, unlike in English, so if I take the word television, right, there's no way I can't switch that around and say vision telly.
That's not a word, right?
You never get that confused.
But in Japanese, often the words are very, very similar.
And you can move pieces, you can rearrange the pieces of the word and you'll get a brand new word.
And so you have to remember which way round it is.
So, you don't get the feel.
I find of a word in the same way you do in English.
You know, if you take the word elephant or something, it kind of sits in your brain somehow as that word.
In Japanese, they're so similar and they can be rearranged, it's hard to develop that feeling, that sense of the word.
So I'm often thinking, is this ryoryu or ryoshu or ryoshu?
Anyway.
Can you write in Japanese too?
I can read, I can type in Japanese, but writing all of the kanji, and so I know about maybe 2000 kanji, what's called the joyo kanji, which is what you need for basic literacy.
Children, when they leave school, will know these basic kanji, and all official documents use these 2,000 kanji, which in itself is a lot of kanji.
But there are maybe 50,000 of these kanji.
So if you're reading, it's weird, right?
When you read a novel in Japanese, you will often have above the kanji, so above this Chinese character, another few characters that tell you how to pronounce that kanji.
Because each kanji can have up to Some kanji have like 10 or 15 different ways of saying that one kanji.
Can you imagine that?
So you look at it, you don't know how, you've no idea how it's said.
Like, that's even more complex than Chinese.
In Chinese, you get one mapping, one kanji, one Chinese character to one sound.
In Japanese, you can't do that.
So they have kind of Chinese readings and they have Japanese readings, the onyomi and kunyomi.
So it's such a difficult language, in my opinion.
I've never struggled.
Intellectually, with something as much as I have.
You know, I'm not dumb by any stretch of the imagination, but Japanese really.
And being able to translate, having to translate all of that and communicate with people in the field that you're in has got to be like a compounded level of difficulty.
Yeah.
I mean, I can't, you know, I couldn't lecture in Japanese, certainly not on neuroscience and psychedelics.
I can converse, I can have conversations with my friends, but sort of academic level, scientific level.
Speaking in Japanese, sushi is good too.
The sushi, of course.
Sushi is like, I don't eat sushi anywhere else.
You don't?
Oh, no, you're anywhere else.
Yeah, they had it in Palm Springs, just up in Palm Springs.
Oh, God, it's awful.
Anywhere in California, sushi is terrible.
I've eaten sushi in the middle of the fucking desert.
Come on, give me a break.
It could be dolphin.
You know, they eat dolphin, a lot of dolphin.
I heard they used to feed, they used to feed, like, pack the schools with dolphin meat and, like, feed dolphin meat in Japan.
Have you seen that movie, The Cove?
I've seen that.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think Japanese people would be as shocked to hear that.
Most Japanese people certainly would not consider eating dolphin at all.
Right.
Prediction Errors and Updates00:16:09
But I don't think they knew about it.
They were slaughtering all those dolphins and just trying to find those diamonds in the rough so they could sell them to SeaWorld.
And then they ended up with all this dolphin meat, which is super bad for human beings.
I forget what's in it.
Mercury.
It's mercury.
It accumulates.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's crazy.
That movie was scary.
So.
What were we talking about?
So, you moved to Okinawa originally?
Yeah.
When you were how old?
35.
Give my age away here.
How old are you now?
You look young.
Thank you.
How would you think I am?
I would say you're like 40.
That's pretty close.
We'll leave it there.
A little bit north?
A little bit north.
Skoshidake.
A little bit.
So, do you think, by the way, do you think you'll stay in Japan?
You want to live there forever?
I have no intention of moving back to the UK.
I mean, I've built my life there now, and I feel at home there, so I'm a permanent resident.
I have the right to remain, so to speak, permanently, as long as they don't deport me.
That's cool.
So, you transitioned from the wet lab stuff into the computational stuff, and you studied, like, you wanted to get a better understanding of the entire human brain and how it relates to different chemistry.
Yeah, exactly.
So, I wanted to know, I wanted to be able to understand why.
I mean, it's one thing to know that DMT or LSD binds to these particular subtypes of serotonin receptor, it's another thing to explain how that event going on at these.
Subcellular level is causing these dramatic changes in consciousness.
So, that making that connection, that being able to form that narrative to a satisfactory extent in my own head, how that worked has been something I've been working on for a number of years and is the basis of my latest book, Reality Switch Technologies, where I think I've kind of put together, if you like, everything that I've been thinking about and researching and studying over the last.
Decade or so to form a coherent narrative.
How do psychedelics work?
That's kind of the aim of what I wanted to achieve with this.
You wanted to find out exactly how psychedelics work.
Yeah.
And it's, there's, you described this, I believe, a little bit in Hamilton's podcast, but correct me if I'm messing this up.
But from what I understood, is there is a column.
A cortical column where neurons travel through, and basically there's error signals.
So, like if I'm walking down the street and I see the trees and the road and the cars going by, there's no error signals, so I don't have to process that.
But when you take psychedelics, something fundamentally changes and you start getting all these errors.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
That's a pretty good summary.
So, yeah, so going back to what I said before, your brain is constructing this model.
It's a pattern of neural information.
It is these cortical columns.
So the cortex is constructed as like a 3D mosaic of these columns, right?
They are cylindrical and they're all stacked side by side.
So if you imagine looking at your cortex from above, you would see like little circles or something like that, all packed together.
And each column is responsible for the fundamental computational units of the cortex.
It's responsible for representing a basic feature of the world.
And so, well, you could think of it like pixels in a way.
That might be a little bit misleading, but you can imagine an image is formed from lots of pixels.
So imagine your entire world is constructed as this mosaic of this, a pattern of cortical column activation, basically.
And this pattern of activation is changing all the time as your experience of moving through the world is this constant stream, this constant flow of this cortical column pattern of activation.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So, what's happening when you take a psychedelic?
Well, actually, let's go back to you mentioned error signals.
So, your brain has this model, right?
Your brain's model is kind of like its best guess, its best hypothesis about what's going on in the world.
So, it uses its model.
Your brain has this model, it's working.
The brain doesn't know if this model is true, if it's correct, it doesn't care.
Has no way of knowing the truth of the model.
All it knows is does this model work?
Does this model allow me to predict the flow of sensory information?
Right?
So the sensory information is always entering the brain.
The brain is trying to make predictions about what's going to happen next.
If this model is working, the brain should be able to predict the pattern of information that is coming next.
So, make this a bit clearer imagine you've got a pool ball rolling along a pool table at a constant speed.
Right?
So, your brain constructs this model of this ball on this pool table.
Right?
And so.
Because the ball is moving at a constant speed, the brain knows that it has a model of the movement, the trajectory of this pool ball.
Your brain knows that the ball is here in this position now.
If the model is correct, it should be able to predict the sensory information coming from the ball in the next moment.
So your brain has this model.
It's working.
It doesn't need to know, actually, anything really, it doesn't need to know anything new.
There's nothing surprising happening here.
The ball is just moving.
Yeah.
And so when the brain receives that information from the ball that's moving constantly, it says, okay, this model is working.
I don't need that sensory information.
And it extinguishes it, it filters it out.
It doesn't need it because the model is working.
So does that make sense?
Yeah.
You're frowning a little bit, but.
No, no, I'm just thinking.
Yeah.
It makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the brain doesn't process sensory information, it's expensive.
It has to be passed through these neurons, and neurons have to communicate.
And there's a lot of energy expenditure in processing information.
From the outside world.
It also disrupts cortical activity.
So your brain tries to filter out and not use sensory information as much as it can.
So, as long as the model is working, your brain is making these predictions all the time.
You don't know it, but your brain is making these predictions all the time.
If the prediction is correct, nothing happens.
You don't process that sensory information, it's filtered out.
But if something surprising happens, the brain didn't predict, it makes a prediction about sensory information, that prediction turns out to be wrong.
The pool ball suddenly.
Takes a right turn.
Takes a right turn, right?
That's startling.
And your brain then generates this prediction error because there's a disconnect between the prediction and the actual sensory information.
Okay.
Yeah?
Yep.
This creates an error.
So if the prediction matches the sensory information, there's no error.
If the prediction is different to the sensory information, there's an error.
It's like the gap, the difference between them.
Processed and sent up into the higher levels of the cortex, and it's used to update the model because the model must be wrong.
The model is not working anymore.
It must be wrong.
And so, then only these error signals need to be used to update this working model.
And this is much more efficient than trying to absorb all of this sensory information.
Most of it, you know, you know about anyway.
So, what is the error?
What does the error look like?
The error is just like anything else.
You know, in the cortex is a pattern of information in the form of action potentials.
You know, it's electrochemical signals being passed up through into the cortex.
So, is it like learning?
So, like learning would be an error?
Yes.
I mean, there's learning.
Well, there are many types of learning, but certainly all the time your brain is updating its model.
I prefer to think of it as a model update, which you could think of as learning.
So, if I'm like learning to play chess for the first time, would it just be a ton of errors?
Or if I'm learning to play any, like do any sport for that I've never done before and you're like, That's probably a better example.
Sport, right?
That's probably a better example, yeah.
And you're learning when your brain is faced with a novel situation you haven't seen before, it doesn't have a very good model of it, then you're going to get a lot more prediction errors.
But as the brain refines its model, those prediction errors start to go down, Yeah.
A good example when I was a few years ago, I was walking through my hometown, and in the window of one of the department stores, right in the window, weirdly, was a police officer stood there.
What's he doing there?
Like, literally, stood in the window next to the mannequins.
This police officer, yeah?
But as I walked around, so at that point, let's think what's going on.
My brain has seen this sensory information, received this sensory information, and it says, okay, there's a police officer there.
And there literally was a police officer in my world model.
That's the important point.
My brain constructed a model of this police officer based upon what it knows about the world.
Now, as I walked around, so the brain is then predicting as I walk around the police officer, I should see his face going to profile.
The brain is predicting what it's going to look like, sensory information it should receive.
But what was it?
It was a big photograph, flat photograph of a police officer that had been put in the window.
It wasn't actually a real police officer.
So, as I'm walking around, where I should see the face coming to profile, that didn't work.
There were error signals, the model was failing.
Then my brain said, Oh, this model is wrong.
And I suddenly realized it's just a photograph.
It's just there to kind of discourage you from stealing, I guess.
Right.
So that's kind of how your brain is doing that all the time.
It's building this model of everything in the world and trying to predict what's going on.
It's only when it fails to make the prediction that it generates these error signals that your brain then uses to update its model.
Have you seen the hollow face illusion?
No.
So the hollow face illusion, people can Google this.
It's very famous.
It's your cue, Michael.
There we go.
It's like a picture of a mask.
And just a normal mask, three dimensional.
You look at it and it looks like a normal face.
You know, the nose is coming out and everything.
Oh, yes.
I think I've seen this.
So what's happening here is your brain has seen this sensory information.
It goes, this is a face.
The brain knows how to build models of faces.
So it constructs a model of.
There we go.
That's it?
Yeah.
I've seen a different one.
I've seen like a statue or something.
Okay.
Right?
So if.
Oh, wow.
Right?
So what's happening here?
When your brain sees the mask from the back, it assumes it's a normal face.
The brain is not used to constructing kind of hollow.
Reverse images.
Right?
Concave faces like that.
So your brain constructs a normal three dimensional face and you see it exactly as you would a normal three dimensional face.
But as the mask rotates, the predictions of the model start to fail, right?
Yeah.
And so your brain then has to update its model.
That's when you realize, that moment you realize, oh, it's the concave side of a mask.
That's the moment your brain has updated its model.
It's changed its model from convex, regular, normal face, which is the default, to this alternate model, right?
Right.
So that's what your brain is doing all the time.
It's constantly testing.
It's a cycle of model testing.
That's the role of sensory information.
So you don't actually need, as long as your model is working well, you don't really need.
Much sensory information.
And what's interesting about psychedelics is what they do is when they bind to this subset of serotonin receptors, a receptor called the 5 HT2A receptor, they stimulate these neurons that are important in maintaining the integrity of this world model.
Right?
So I spoke about these cortical columns earlier.
You mentioned them first, right?
So there are certain types of neurons called pyramidal cells, and they are important in generating these predictions of the model.
Your model is constantly making predictions, as we said.
And in order to make good predictions, your model has to be coherent, it has to be strong, it has to be well formed.
And what psychedelics do is they stimulate these pyramidal cells in these cortical columns and they make them more likely to fire.
They increase their excitability, they're more likely to fire, they're more likely to share their information.
With other pyramidal cells within other cortical columns.
So, overall, this world model that your brain is constructing starts to break down.
It starts to lose its structural integrity.
It becomes more fluid, more dynamic.
And so, as a result, your world, of course, from your subjective perspective, it's your world that starts to change.
So, your world becomes more fluid and more dynamic.
Your brain is shifting from this stable and predictable.
World, this very unstable and fluid and dynamic.
Now, this has interesting consequences because if the model is starting to lose its integrity, the predictions themselves become degraded.
So your brain can't make good predictions anymore.
So, as a consequence, the error signals increase.
If your brain fails in its predictions, there's going to be a greater mismatch between the prediction and the actual sensory information.
So, error signals go up.
Now, we can say that in simpler terms well, the brain.
Becomes more sensitive to incoming sensory information because sensory information is only processed in the form of error signals.
Am I making sense?
Yes.
And so, from your subjective perspective, what happens is the world becomes, you know, colors become brighter, everything becomes richer.
You're literally receiving more information from the environment in the presence of a psychedelic molecule like LSD.
Now, that is kind of cool in itself, right?
But we can take this one step further.
So, So, the brain is receiving all of these extra error signals in the presence of this psychedelic.
Now, the error signals are used to update the model.
And so, the fact that the brain is receiving all these error signals means the model isn't working anymore, which it isn't.
We need to update the model.
But no matter how much the brain updates its model, it can't reduce these error signals because the model just has lost its kind of structural integrity.
And so, this means that as the brain constantly tries to update its model, from your perspective, The identity of objects changes before the eyes.
That's what's happening.
Repressed Memories Resurface00:15:35
So you look at something and its identity will change.
Yes, you will look at a microphone and it will become a cat or something.
Or you will look at the pebble driveway.
This is described by Alexander Shulgin in his book Pekal.
He looks at this pebble driveway and it becomes this glistening bed of gleaming jewels.
Then it turns into a snake, the back of this huge, beautiful snake.
So that's kind of that experience, which is quite common with psychedelics, can be explained just by looking at this simple interaction between this molecule and this receptor and working it through to the effect on the model, the effect on the brain's ability to make predictions based upon its model, loss of integrity of the model, failing predictions, increased prediction errors, greater model updates.
So that's kind of what I, you know, that's the level of understanding I've been trying to reach.
Over these years, is trying to make that connection, this multi leveled connection between effects on receptors and why people have these certain subjective effects.
Wow.
But that doesn't explain DMT, which is.
That does not explain DMT.
Not quite.
Not quite, right?
So, what you just described, it sounds like right now the brain structure, the way it works, the way these cortical columns interpret the world and basically funnel it.
To us, to what we experience, it seems like it's crystallized.
Got it.
Like, am I kind of like getting this right?
It seems like it's crystallized in a certain way.
And when you introduce the psychedelics, what it does is sort of like melts that and makes it more plastic.
You got it.
That's perfect, right?
That's a perfect way of describing it.
So it's sometimes referred to as a hot state of the cortex.
I think of it, imagine like a piece of glass that's very.
Very rigid, very hard.
You can't manipulate it.
Right.
Heap that glass up and it bends to your will.
Right.
It becomes hot, of course, and it becomes more fluid, more flexible, and you can bend it.
That's kind of the state that your brain is in under the influence of psychedelics.
And from that, we can explain why psychedelics are useful clinically.
Because let's imagine that somebody is deeply depressed.
What's going on there?
Well, they have certain.
Embedded neural activation patterns, right, in their brain.
The brain is rigid, but it's rigid.
It's producing certain patterns that are negative.
You know, you're ruminating about how fucking awful your life is, whether it's worth living.
And that becomes entrained in a certain sense.
It becomes rigidified and you can't shake it off.
People say, you know, can't you just snap out of it?
No, you can't because your brain is.
Always to some degree flexible, but you can certainly entrain these connections in the brain and it becomes, over time, it becomes rigidified and you can't get out of it.
So when you take a psychedelic, the whole brain becomes much more fluid.
Smash me with a hammer.
Well, that's a bit extreme.
Yeah, you are heating up, you're not literally heating up the brain, but you are creating this so called hot state in which the brain is much more fluid.
You can start to break down these rigidified connections.
Patterns of connections and explore novel states.
You can explore states outside of that.
You can generate much more positive states, more positive patterns of neural activity.
And then, as you come out of the psychedelic state, the idea is that your brain cools down in a way back into a more positive state.
So that's that.
Right.
But for things like depression, Right.
Like for psychedelic treatment of depression, you don't necessarily know that their experience is going to be positive.
Right.
Some of these therapies, are people sort of guiding their trip or like sort of like pushing them in the right direction to make sure it's positive, to make sure they break this depressive loop, or are they just taking it and hoping for the taking the psychedelics and hoping for the best?
Well, so normally you do have it.
Well, I mean, it's like if you heat up a piece of glass, you need a skilled glass blower to get the shape that you want.
If you're not skilled, then you end up with, well, Piece of shit.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's kind of important.
So, yeah, it's not just, I mean, people do find benefit sometimes, though I can't recommend it.
Just taking a bunch of mushrooms and going on a hilltop and just exploring themselves more deeply and being able to access, you know, normally latent memories or things like this.
And that often is very beneficial.
But sure, in a clinical setting, you won't just have the tripper, the The patient, so to speak, but also somebody who is going to direct their thought process, direct their consciousness into more positive places.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, that seems like it's got to be something that only comes with experience to where you can do it and kind of like actually take some sort of, like, is that possible?
Can you do this?
Like, get into one of these states and actually control it and sort of like become part of it?
Because I know, at least in my experience, it's always something that like, I'm fucking white knuckling the chair and like hoping, like, God, get me out of this.
But, you know, for someone who's doing some sort of therapy to cure their depression or PTSD or something like that, they're brand new to it and it's going to be terrifying and they're going to want to take that's a natural instinct is to be like, I need, I've lost control.
How do I regain control?
Okay.
So this is so, so before I was talking about this, the brain becoming more sensitive to the flow of information from outside.
So one way of, Thinking about this, and this will relate to DMT when we get to that a little bit later, is that the brain is more susceptible to, or the cortex is more susceptible because it's in this hot fluid state, it's more susceptible to incoming information.
So the incoming information, if you like, is helping to reorganize.
This is what I call informational reorganization.
The brain is much more susceptible to being reorganized by sensory information, incoming sensory information.
Now, there's also another source of information coming.
Not from the outside, but coming from deeper brain structures.
So all the time, your world is being modulated and informed, not just by information from the environment, but also memories, for example, right?
The way you've seen the world before and how you remember the world before is important for how you're seeing the world now and useful.
It's useful to know what a cat looks like.
You don't have to kind of build the model of the cat separately.
It's useful to know if you've.
If you met somebody and the last time you had a, they were, you know, total dick to you, right?
And you had a really horrible argument.
When you see that person, your instant response is going to be back off.
I'm going to avoid this person, right?
It's almost a subconscious kind of thing, right?
Because your brain has this memory and it sees that person.
You don't have to think.
You don't see their face.
You just see their face and go, fuck that.
I'm out of here, right?
So that is the memory, the memory trace of this individual and the emotions associated with it.
Are also flowing up into your world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's happening all the time.
But again, that is kept under control.
You don't want your brain being flooded by memories when you're trying to navigate the world in the current moment.
You don't want to be, and that's quite difficult sometimes.
You don't want to be thinking about, you know, imagine if something, you know, when something really awful or annoying happens, or you said something to somebody that you regret, and maybe you're driving and you can't stop thinking about it, and it's, oh, I wish I hadn't said that.
And it intrudes.
You can't fucking concentrate because this memory of what you did is so emotionally charged.
It's kind of intruding into your world.
That can happen.
So, your brain, this brain's world model is not only trying to constrain the flow of information from outside, it's also trying to constrain the information coming from these lower subcortical brain structures and an area called the hippocampus, which is important in memory.
So, it's stopping the flow of information from memory as well, keeping that down to a trickle, just what your cortex needs to help, you know, to inform the current model of the world.
And what you see in psychedelics, and this has been Seen for, observed for many decades is that under the influence of high dose LSD, for example, people get flooded with past memories.
Really?
Yeah, they find themselves reliving experiences in the past.
So you can imagine, right, and why is that happening?
Well, it's happening because your world model is losing control of the flow of information from the senses, but also losing control of the flow of information from these lower subcortical structures, including the hippocampus that's responsible for.
Memories, right?
And so we kind of understand why that's happening.
And you can also imagine why that might be helpful.
If someone had a particularly traumatic experience in their past, which is still, they're not able to process and make sense of, they're kind of pushing it down deeper and deeper.
They're preventing it from making its way into the cortex, into the current experience of the world.
So they're unable to process it.
What psychedelics can do is allow that kind of release those, what I guess psychoanalysts would call repressed memories, repressed traumatic memories, releasing them up into the cortex so they can be dealt with.
But that in itself can be very traumatic.
So, this is why you need someone really experienced with you when you're doing this.
So, if you suffer from something like post traumatic stress disorder, you might be repressing memories of the traumatic experience.
Experience for very good reason because they can cause massive disruption when they enter the cortex.
And so, but they need to be dealt with.
You need to.
Do they really like what is the downside of them being just keeping them repressed?
Like, what is the actual effect of having these traumatic memories that you just don't even think about anymore?
Yeah.
I mean, just because they're kind of repressed doesn't mean they're not having an effect.
And certainly they're always connected to emotion.
And emotion is also central to how we view the world.
The way that we emotionally respond to things is absolutely central.
That's our value system.
We're constantly judging.
When we meet someone, we're constantly judging.
How we respond to them depends on how we feel.
Always that's happening.
And if you have these repressed memories, then they can still.
Have some kind of influence on the way you're interacting in the world in quite negative ways.
And so you have to kind of bring them up and process them properly and form more adaptive or more positive constructions of these kind of models of these and memories.
So it is useful, I think, to do, to kind of release these repressed memories.
But at the same time, it can be.
Can be dangerous opening these floodgates.
So it should always be done, of course, with someone who's kind of experienced.
Wow.
You know, when you were talking about having these triggers that unlock deep, buried memories, I remember that happened to me the other day.
I was walking down the street and one of the neighbors, one of my neighbors had their garage door open and they must have been doing the laundry.
And I got this pungent smell.
It was a good smell, but it was this smell that I haven't smelled in like 25 years or like 20 years.
And it brought me and it put me right back in the last situation I was in where I smelled that smell.
And it was like, it was like this girl's house during high school.
I was like, like hanging out in her bedroom.
And I remember specifically being there because that smell was always in her bedroom.
And it literally just shot me back into that part of my life.
And it was so weird.
And I kept wanting to like go back because like I would forget about it as soon as it went away or I would like have trouble recollecting it again.
So I'd walk back past it and it would like shoot me right back into that memory.
It's so strange.
Yeah.
Smell is, it's, It's so evocative.
I mean, I will smell a perfume of like an ex, like a long time ago.
Like, we're talking maybe 25 years ago when I was with this individual.
I haven't seen them in, you know, more than two decades.
And yet, when I smell that scent, it's like instantly associated with that one person and always will be.
Yes.
It's so weird, too, because like I had no idea that memory even still existed in my brain.
Right.
Like, it's.
Like, I think my hard drive's full because all this stuff I do, and like, I don't have room for any more memories.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like, that the fact that that memory came up from that smell was just mind blowing.
Like, I didn't even, I hadn't thought about that smell in over 20 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, smells do elicit very strong, can elicit very strong kind of emotional responses.
I mean, this is important, of course, in our.
But it's not with like sight or like noises so much.
Maybe a little bit.
No.
Well, smell directs to.
Very deep centers in the brain.
I mean, you can imagine if you smell like putrefying flesh, the response to that is pretty strong, right?
If you open the refrigerator and you've had some shrimp in there that you've left in there for a month, yeah, it's like instantaneous and it's recoil, it's a reflex response here.
This is appalling.
It's this sense of disgust.
And that's obviously so important for us to survive.
To be able to recognize rotten food, because if you make a mistake of eating rotten food, then you can die, right?
Smell and Deep Brain Connections00:05:36
And the same with positive scents, things that smell nice, smell nice for reasons as well.
Fruit smells nice, right?
These kind of scents.
So, this is why we have this scent is hardwired into deep areas of the brain and can elicit emotions.
And emotions, of course, are highly connected to memories.
So, you can imagine your.
You're setting off, you're triggering this emotional and memory circuitry with certain smells.
And that's why, when you smell something that was emotionally charged to you, right?
So, you're not getting, you don't get this effect if you went to, I don't know, something kind of mundane and that was not particularly important to you, you know, 20 years ago.
And it's had a characteristic smell.
When you smell that, probably nothing will happen.
You're not going to go, oh my God, that smelled like that studio that I went in for five minutes 20 years ago.
No, right?
But if you, as I said, with like a relationship, when there's a strong, whether it's positive or negative, strong emotional, yeah?
Because.
Emotions are important in forming memories, right?
If you get yourself in a bad situation where you're frightened, right?
Let's say you're getting robbed down a particular dark alley somewhere in, I don't know, wherever.
At that point, your brain knows, okay, this is something I need to remember.
If you're scared, you need to remember this.
It's clearly something that your brain has to.
Hard wire so that you, if you get yourself in the same situation again, that you will know how to respond.
And so often, if you will avoid that dark alley for the rest of your life, and every time you go down there, even if you go down accidentally, your brain is going, Oh, no, Yeah, and it recognizes the structure of this space and it activates this emotion.
So sometimes, when you have this gut feeling, I don't like the feel of this, your brain has made some deep processing that's unconscious to you.
You don't recognize it, it's not up here.
Your brain has made that connection.
This is bad.
And you get that gut feeling, that feeling in your gut, that emotional response.
I need to get out of here.
Right?
That's not an accident.
It's not psychic abilities.
It's the brain, some deep processing that's gone on here.
And if there was a particular smell associated with that as well, that's going to activate this pathway and these emotions that are associated with it.
So this is why smells are so evocative.
It's so fascinating, too, how rare that happens.
And when that does happen, it's so.
Profound too.
Like, whenever that happens to me, it's like I want to talk about it to everyone.
Like, have you ever had, have you ever experienced this?
And it's such a rare thing that we, that, you know, modern humans encounter.
Exactly.
Well, we don't rely so much on smell anymore.
I guess that's why other animals, it might be very different to them.
They would use that circuitry much more than we do.
But sometimes, when there's a smell that's connected to something quite emotional, that memory, that circuitry is laid down.
And will remain there for a long time.
It could be decades.
Also, this is kind of interesting.
When I was young, just a little kid, maybe eight years old, I had two twin brothers, not my twins, but they were twins, younger than me, and they got really sick.
I used to love jelly.
You would call it jello.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, seriously.
I used to, whenever I went to my grandma's, she would always have a big bowl of jelly that would be made.
My mum would always make jello because, Fucking cheap, right?
It's cheap, but I absolutely loved it.
And anyway, I came home one evening and my little brothers, they had the flu.
They were really sick.
And my mom said, Oh, I made this bowl of jelly for you.
I went into the kitchen, you know, quaffed down this big bowl of jelly.
The next morning, I had caught the flu and I became sick like, really sick.
I've never eaten jelly since then.
Really?
Yes.
Why is that?
Yeah.
Is it the smell?
It's simply because your brain associates.
The emotion.
Your brain associates.
So, not just emotion here, but when, if you eat a certain type of food and you become sick, your brain makes the connection.
This food made me sick.
Do not eat this food ever again.
Yeah.
Yep.
Again, this goes deep into our evolutionary history.
Very important.
If you make a mistake eating bad food, don't do it again.
Yep.
Yep.
I do the same thing with when I go to a restaurant and get food poisoning.
Right.
Same thing.
I will never go to that restaurant again.
There you go.
I haven't been to Burger King since I got food poisoning in like 2016.
There you go.
There you go, right?
And so sometimes that mistake, it's, That connection is erroneous.
Jell-O didn't make me ill, but the brain doesn't know the difference.
You know, it's better to have a false positive in this sense than a false negative.
So, after that, now I can eat it a little bit, but I don't have any desire to eat it.
But since then, certainly throughout my childhood, I went from absolutely fucking loving this delicious sweet jelly to being repulsed by it.
Wow.
Salvia Divinorum Effects00:13:18
Yeah.
So it's powerful.
The emotions and the way that the brain works, there are some really deep, old mechanisms that are designed to keep us alive.
And they still function, even though in this case, it destroyed my love, the love of my life at the time.
It's okay.
It probably made you healthier.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, isn't there some.
Like, I know the stories of like Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb and the MKUltra.
Stuff and the Charles Manson stuff, where they were studying basically how to make people become more suggestible when they were under the influence of psychedelics and they were able to manipulate them in different ways.
Yeah, use is this using this same process you're talking about where it kind of like softens the whole world structure of the human brain?
Got it, yeah, exactly.
So, so it's the same, presumably, anyway.
That's the same process going on.
You have this highly Manipulatable, if there's such a word, brain in many ways.
And it could be information driven reorganization, sensory information from the environment, but it could also be ideas.
Ideas.
Ideas that's going into the brain.
And they can reorganize, if you like, neural activity.
So the brain becomes globally or more broadly susceptible to inputs.
So that would explain that.
Yeah.
So there's that story that from what I think Jolly West was involved with it with the elephant.
Are you familiar with that one?
No.
Tell me.
Jolly, you'd have to look it up.
Find out, look up Jolly West.
He killed an elephant with LSD, I think.
He like gave an elephant an enormous amount of LSD and something happened.
And well, he did all these experiments, but this one was like, he was like proud of this one.
I read about it in Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos.
Where he basically, are you familiar with that book?
No.
Tom O'Neill, he was an investigative reporter who was just, he was tasked to write an article for, I think it was the 20th anniversary of the Manson murders.
And it ended up being like a 20 year story he did.
And he basically got sued by the publications that he was hired by.
And when he refused to stop reporting on it because he just kept finding all these holes in the case, these gaping holes.
And he eventually got connected to this clinic.
In Haight Ashbury, where it was a CIA funded clinic where they were giving people LSD and amphetamines.
And there were these research papers where these two guys were doing LSD, giving these hippies LSD and giving them amphetamines and like studying all the different stuff.
And Jolly West was connected to this clinic.
And Jolly West was the guy who did that experiment on the LSD related death of the elephant.
One of the more unusual incidents in West's career took place in August 1962.
He and two co workers attempted to investigate the phenomenon of what does that say?
Muscle and elephants.
I can't read it.
Museth and elephants by doing Tusco, a bull elephant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City with LSD.
They expected that the drug would trigger a state of similar.
What is that word, Michael?
Must.
M-U-S-T-H.
Instead, the animal began to have seizures for five minutes after the LSD was administered.
Beginning 20 minutes later, West and his colleagues.
Administered the antipsychotic promazine hydrochloride.
They injected a total of 2,800 milligrams over 11 minutes.
The large promazine dose was not effective and may have contributed to the animal's death.
It died an hour and 40 minutes after the LSD was given.
But yeah, so he's being interviewed by, um, Tom in his book about Charles Manson, and he's like bragging about how he killed that elephant with LSD.
And he was just fascinated by, like, he would go live in dormitories with students and, like, be like giving them, like, they would all be doing LSD and think they're a part of this crazy new movement.
And it was during the, like, in the 60s.
He was a wild, wild character, but I don't know where I was going with that, but, like.
Suggestability.
Yeah, yeah, the suggestibility part of it with, like, Manson and his followers and them, like, Like he was this just wild, charismatic guy who knew how to talk.
And, you know, when you give, and he was giving his followers LSD and he wasn't necessarily taking it himself.
And, you know, that's just, it's wild what can be done to the human mind in that kind of setting.
Sure.
I mean, with LSD, even if you take it on your own, you can have some kind of rather wild ideas and thought processes that often seem quite profound.
At the time, when you kind of come back to a more focused, rational state, you realize actually that was not as profound as I imagined it was.
You regain some insight, if you like.
But if you have someone reinforcing this when you're in a psychedelic state, whatever message they want to imprint in you, I imagine this can be quite effective as a tool of so called mind control.
And what about?
I'm curious too, because they were doing amphetamine studies.
Do you are you familiar with what amphetamines do to the brain?
Yeah, I mean, so this might have been the same study.
I mean, Ken Keezy, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, yes, he was also given, he was in a medical trial that was probably around the same time.
And he was given a mixture, he was given LSD and he was also given alpha methyl tryptamine, IT290 at the time.
It was described as a super amphetamine, but wasn't actually an amphetamine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it wasn't actually an amphetamine.
It's a different kind of molecule.
But Yeah, so I mean, amphetamines, they work completely differently to the psychedelics.
They release neuroadrenaline and dopamine, particularly into certain areas of the cortex.
So, when dopamine is released, it's kind of taken back up, it's kind of vacuumed back up into the neurons, released from the neuron, then vacuumed back up through these special transporters that kind of terminate its action, which basically allows the brain to kind of control the levels of dopamine that are active.
Amphetamine does is it switches these channels, these pumps, if you like, back into reverse.
So they start pumping dopamine out of the neurons.
So it floods the brain with dopamine.
And that makes you feel fucking good.
You know, the noradrenaline has this neuro stimulatory effect.
It's the same effect on neuroadrenaline as well.
It causes neuro stimulatory effect.
The dopamine causes euphoria.
So you can imagine, right, if you have this combination, Kind of semi speculating here, but if you've got a combination of amphetamines that are making you feel good, this LSD, which is loosening up and making your brain more suggestible, you're receiving these messages, you're feeling fucking great.
It's telling your brain this message is fantastic.
Like you've just found the most delicious food or something, right?
You know, this flood of dopamine, you're feeling great.
So you can imagine.
Where you would get this association perhaps between this message, which is becoming imprinted in the brain, and this sense of euphoria and elation and stimulation.
It's like, oh my God, this is it.
This is the message.
This is God speaking to me.
You know, you can imagine that kind of happening with.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
So that might explain it.
That's what Hamilton described on his podcast with you.
He basically described a situation where he was going to a shoot and he had to take an Adderall, basically because he was flying across the world.
And then he took, To help himself go to sleep, he took some sort of psychedelic.
I forget what it was.
Gaboxadol.
And he said he had the craziest trip of his life.
Yeah, so that's not a psychedelic.
It shouldn't have a psychedelic.
It's a completely different mechanism.
It works by completely different receptors.
But in high doses, apparently, and it was news to me at the time, it can have quite profound psychedelic effects.
So there are a number of ways, actually, you can reach these different types of psychedelic effects in the brain.
It doesn't have to be stimulation of these 5 HT2A receptors.
You have.
Molecules like salvanorin from Salvia divinorum.
They also can have effects that are reality tearing effects that can really take you to another fucking world.
But they work completely differently.
I mean, it's this kind of remarkable molecule, this salvanorin, that's isolated from this single plant, this what was a very rare plant in the wild that grows in these cloud forests in southern Mexico.
The only plant of its kind that produces these.
The only plant in the world that produces this particular molecule that looks nothing like the classic psychedelics.
It has a completely different mechanism that nobody predicted.
And yet, when its discoverer, Daniel Siebert, so this salvia divinorum has been used traditionally for a long time.
And normally it's.
There are a number of ways to consume it, but often you would take the leaves, you would roll them into a cigar and just chew them gradually over.
A number of, you know, quite a long time.
And this salvanorin molecule is absorbed into your bloodstream and it generates this psychedelic effect.
But we didn't know until I think it was the early 90s what the psychedelic component was of this molecule.
And Daniel Siebert, who's kind of a salvia aficionado, he's the man when it comes to psychedelics, he made this extract of salvia divinorum, a very pure extract, it turns out.
He didn't know this at the time, but it was like 80% pure salvanorin.
And he smoked just a small amount, again, a couple of milligrams, what seemed to be a small amount.
And he was instantaneously catapulted.
He was taken out of his body.
He found himself in these impossibly strange worlds.
His reality was torn apart, obliterated in a second.
It was a horrifying experience for him, but he discovered the psychedelic essence of salvia divinorum.
So, in many ways, he was elated.
What else did he say about that world?
Well, he describes it.
You can find it on the internet.
I forget the details, but he.
So, the thing about salvia is, or salvanorin, particularly the isolated molecule, is that it's very different from DMT.
It takes you to, like DMT in high doses, incredibly strange worlds with a very strange kind of geometry, populated world filled with.
Intelligent beings, often more malevolent.
There seems to be a greater propensity for negative experiences with salvin.
Most people don't like it.
Most people who do purified salvinorin never repeat their experience.
Some do, some proper kind of psychanaut head cases, they really kind of get into it.
But he found himself being propelled through many different types of worlds, you know.
Over about 15 minutes, you know, impossibly bizarre worlds until finally he kind of came back.
But what's kind of, I think, quite frightening about deep Salvanoran states is what I call existential absoluteness.
Existential Absoluteness in Space00:04:01
Once you're in that space, that space is all that's ever existed.
Any memory, any connection to your humanness in this world is gone.
It's completely gone.
You've no memory of it.
You've no memory of ever taking a drug.
Nothing has been brought with you.
You're in this space and you've always been in this space and you will always be in this space.
And to me, that thought is horrifying.
Not having a thread back to reality, back to, or should I say, well, not having a thread to the normal waking world and your existence prior and just finding yourself in this.
This existentially absolute space that is not necessarily a nice space.
It's not like going to heaven, right?
What would you say is happening in the brain there?
Okay, so there's a deep part of the cortex.
So the classic psychedelics work the cortex.
I spoke about these pyramidal cells, right?
So it's stimulating these pyramidal cells, which are in the cortex, the deeper layers of the cortex.
Now, underneath the cortex, you have this very important but relatively small part of the brain called the claustrum.
And the claustrum is.
It's like the milk that mothers produce.
Yes, but completely different.
Same word.
Same word, but completely different.
And the claustrum is, well, we don't fully understand the claustrum.
And there are still conferences devoted to understanding the claustrum.
That's that, yeah.
We've known about it for a long time, but we don't really understand it completely.
But it seems to be an orchestrator.
Cortical function.
It's a global inhibitor.
It keeps the construction of your world model.
It keeps neural activity constrained.
It's constantly sending out inhibitory signals, keeping the brain under control.
That's what it's doing all the time.
It's like the conductor of an orchestra, yes, who is telling, you know, a conductor of an orchestra, it's controlling which instruments are sounding, which ones should be quiet, which ones need to be, you know, louder.
It's Controlling the flow of the music from moment to moment.
Now imagine the claustrum doing that in your brain, but with your world model being constructed by your cortex.
It's telling which parts of the brain need to be quiet, which ones need to become activated, and then quietening them down so other parts can become active.
It's constantly maintaining this control over the flow of cortical states from moment to moment.
Yeah.
Now, What happens when you consume salvinorin?
Well, salvinorin binds to a type of receptor called the kappa opioid receptor.
It's the same family of receptors that morphine binds to, right?
But completely different.
Now, these kappa opioid receptors, they inhibit the neurons in which they're embedded.
When you activate a kappa opioid receptor, it basically shuts down that neuron.
And there are lots of these kappa opioid receptors in the clostrum.
So, when you take salvinorin, it binds strongly to these kappa opioid receptors and it shuts down.
The claustrum.
So it's like shooting the conductor of the orchestra in the head.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
And the orchestra just goes kind of wild, doesn't know what to do, right?
And so your brain is like a release mechanism.
Whereas the classic psychedelics are stimulating the brain directly, yeah, stimulating the cortex by binding to these 5 HT2A receptors.
Salvinorin is shutting down the conductor and it's employing this release mechanism.
It releases the cortex from claustral control, from control by the claustrum.
Creativity from Emergent Patterns00:05:07
And And this is why you get these wild patterns of emergent activity.
That's why there's no string back to our current reality.
There you go.
Well, that could be it.
I mean, we don't really understand why.
It has certain qualities, but that's kind of a broad explanation of why the salvia, from your subjective perspective, why your world model is completely disrupted and completely novel patterns of cortical activity begin to change.
Emerge and that is experienced by you as this, a complete shift in your world model.
Everything breaks apart and brand new patterns of neural activity start to emerge.
And this is experienced as this reality tearing, world shifting effect.
Very dramatic.
Wow.
Has anybody ever used psychedelics or any of these other drugs to, like, we talked a little bit ago about how you can reconstruct somebody's.
Like somebody's loop that they're stuck in, like with depression or reliving suppressed traumatic memories and sort of break them out of it.
But it seems like this is all very much connected to plasticity, like neuroplasticity.
Has anyone ever utilized any of this stuff to learn new things?
For example, learning Japanese for the first time?
Could you essentially loosen up those cortical columns and those neurons and introduce something new or a new way of looking at the world and then let kind of relearn or retrain your mind in some way?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, certainly the way that we view the world and.
Can sometimes impede the rigidity, the kind of these very strict and rigid models that we've constructed and ways of thinking about things, ways of approaching problems.
Yes, this can become quite embedded and quite rigid.
And in a sense, that's kind of a good thing.
You want to be able to approach a problem that's worked in the past, for example, in a specific way.
And 95% of the time, or whatever, that's going to work for you.
But what happens when you're faced with a problem that you can't solve?
And it's like, what do I do now?
And it's very difficult to get out of that rigid way of approaching something.
And so, if you take a psychedelic, it loosens that up.
It allows your brain to explore more possibilities and perhaps arrive at a novel solution to the problem.
And that's why I think psychedelics are so useful for creativity.
We get in our own way.
We get in our own way, I think, a lot of the time when we're trying to, particularly if you're a musician, for example, you find yourself, I'm not a musician, but I guess you find yourself going through the same chord progressions or you can't let yourself go.
And I was speaking actually coincidentally to a, on the way to the airport in Palm Springs, a musician who uses low doses of psilocybin, just like a gram, not a super psychedelic.
A gram's a pretty good amount.
Well, maybe.
For me.
Maybe for you.
But it's, he still has.
He's still kind of compass mentis, right?
He can still have conversations.
He can still think.
But everything's loosened up a little bit.
And it allows him to become much more free in the music that he's making.
You know, he can think of new ideas much easier.
He gets out of his own way because the brain is capable of exploring novel routes.
It gets out of these kind of embedded problems.
Rigid roots that your brain has kind of established over time and into novel areas.
So you can imagine it being useful for art or even like architecture.
There are stories of architects going into a room, taking 50 micrograms of LSD and spending time with a problem and coming out with interesting solutions.
Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, reported much later on that he was using LSD at the time and that he had a vision.
Of this double helical structure.
And that was, you know, probably the most, certainly one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last century.
Wow.
No doubt about it.
And so, you know, you might find that LSD and Carrie Mullis, who invented the PCR reaction, he also was a user of LSD.
And he said, actually, that if it wasn't for LSD, he wouldn't have invented the PCR reaction.
So psychedelics can certainly be useful in bringing creativity.
To what are otherwise quite rigid and strict disciplines, such as science or mathematics or things like this.
Non-Physical Civilizations00:14:39
Are you familiar with John Mack's studies?
Oh, yeah.
And his interviews with people and talking to people who had encounters with beings and UFOs.
So, Kerry Mullis described a lot of these weird encounters with paranormal encounters where he would have.
There was one specific where he walked out into the woods and encountered some dark, evil entity.
And the next thing he knew, he woke up in his bed and it was the next day.
Like he had a lot of these weird experiences.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, I mean, certainly with psychedelics, because you're, I mean, obviously, we're getting to really, really speculative territory now.
Yeah.
When we kind of start to think about the connections between the work that John Mack did with abductees and the experiences of people who take DMT, some people would say, well, there's no relationship here.
But even John Mack, towards the end of his life, which was tragically cut short, he was hit by a car in London, right?
Right.
Yeah, he looked in the wrong way.
That's what James Fox said, yeah.
So, John Mack, towards the end of his life, he started to think that these, first of all, he was a very eminent psychiatrist.
He was not a kook by any stretch of the imagination.
By all of his These individuals reporting being abducted were not insane.
They weren't crazy people.
They had these experiences.
Now, the question is what was going on?
Were they being physically lifted from their beds and carried into ships waiting in the front garden, or was something stranger going on?
And I think John Mack began to believe from reading his writings that there was something else going on, something.
Beyond the physical, there was some interaction between these beings, wherever they are, and the individual, the abductees' minds, and that perhaps they weren't being physically taken from their beds, but actually they were manipulating the neurochemistry in some way, perhaps.
So, like these beings, these gray aliens, could be similar to the elves people see on DMT?
It's possible, yeah.
We just don't know.
But I think there's a much closer relationship to the UFO experiences, but that's much broader now.
UFO experiences, alien experiences, alien abduction experiences, and DMT than many people have considered.
Interestingly, I was just up in Palm Springs just over the last couple of days, and I met.
So, do you know J. Allen Hynek?
Of course.
Of course, yes.
We came up with the Close Encounters classification system.
So I met his son, Paul Hynek, who's a really great guy, and we became friends kind of instantly.
And he'd heard about my work, and I was very pleasantly surprised that there were so many people, including Paul, who no longer consider the alien phenomenon to be.
Restricted to wet brained physical beings coming from other planets, but that there is some other, shall we say, other dimensional or trans dimensional or choose your word.
We don't really know where these beings might be coming from or the relationship between their reality and our reality, but it seems to be something non physical.
And he's become very, very interested in DMT because it does.
It reliably grants access to what is often described as a hyper technological domain filled with extremely intelligent beings, exactly the kind of beings we might imagine as being far more advanced.
Intelligences, you know, far more advanced alien intelligences.
What would that look like?
Now, okay, so this takes a little bit of getting to.
Now, we could just kind of accept that and say, oh, maybe people seeing aliens, maybe there is this relationship between alien intelligence that other people have been describing in the kind of UFO phenomenon community and the DMT experience.
But to me, that's not satisfactory.
I want to know why that relationship might exist, right?
Why should there be this connection here?
And so I go back to.
Thinking about the progression of advancement of civilizations, right?
So let's take our civilization.
We are humans with these, as I said, wet brained, physical carbon and water based creatures that exist on this earth, obviously.
And so far, for most people, when they think about aliens, they think about other wet brained beings.
Carbon or something based beings that exist like us on a different planet.
You know, it's pretty naive in a way to think like that, but that's how we have imagined it for a long time because that's all we know.
That's all we know what intelligence looks like.
It looks like us or it looks similar to us.
It's physical, it's based in this universe.
But actually, I think that is a grave error that we're making here for a number of reasons.
And this isn't.
Kind of a fringe or cranky, wooey position that I'm taking here.
Many physicists and astrobiologists and philosophers have thought about this.
If we're looking for life, other intelligence elsewhere, i.e., not on Earth, what's the best way to look for it?
What's the best way to kind of make contact with this intelligence?
And so far, we've been firing electromagnetic pulses into the sky in the hope that we'll get some binary missive.
In 25,000 years or something from some other distant star system.
But that's kind of a stupid idea.
Terence McKenna, what did he say?
To search expectantly for a radio signal from a distant civilization is as culture bound a presumption as the search of the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.
Right?
That's a great line, right?
That's right.
You know, we're so limited in our thinking, the idea that these aliens, these advanced intelligences, would be using radio signals.
But I think it's It's even worse than that because we think about the progression of intelligent civilization.
You have a number of phases.
To me, I break it up into three phases.
I have what I call the pre technological phase.
So, this is us, you know, more than a hundred or so years ago, where we weren't thinking of, in a really intelligent way at least, about communicating with other intelligences in the cosmos.
We weren't doing it, we didn't have the ability to do it.
We couldn't even send radio signals, right?
So, we can kind of forget about those civilizations, you know, other civilizations at that level of advancement.
There's no way we could communicate with them without physically going to their planet and finding them because they don't have the technology either, right?
Then we have us.
We are in this technological phase.
We can conceive of other intelligences elsewhere.
We can conceive of how we might communicate with them.
We can even think about how we might ultimately leave planet Earth, how we might even transcend our biology.
Even that is something that's strongly considered now to become a form of artificial intelligence.
You know, the idea of uploading us, our consciousness or something, into some computational structure, right?
That's already an idea.
And according to people like physicist Paul Davis, philosopher Susan Schneider, who have been writing about this, it's their contention that once a civilization reaches the level of advancement where they can conceive of transcending their biology, becoming post biological, they're probably only a few hundred years from doing so.
So we'd no longer be physical intelligences using.
Using a physical wet brain and body to kind of instantiate our civilization, we would become post biological.
And so that means, right, that if you think about all the intelligences elsewhere in the cosmos, the number of intelligences that are within our technological phase is a very narrow temporal window, right?
Just maybe a few hundred years.
Once an intelligence reaches their technological phase, they're probably only a few hundred years from transcending their biology entirely, yeah?
Becoming post biological.
We can talk about what I mean by post biological, but what that would mean is that they would be completely transparent to any mode of communication we have.
We couldn't even conceive of an intelligence that has become post biological at all.
And so, focusing our attention on technological beings that are sufficiently technologically advanced but still in physical, wet brain, carbon based forms is restricting.
The search to probably, I don't want to give a number, but a very small proportion of the intelligence in the cosmos.
The vast amount, the vast majority of intelligence in the cosmos is likely to be post biological and completely transparent to any mode of communication.
So, what does post biological mean?
So, there are a number of ways of thinking about the advancement of.
A civilization, an intelligent civilization like ours.
So, Kardashev, the Kardashev scale, have you heard of this?
No.
The Kardashev scale is a way of looking at the progression of advancement of a civilization based upon how they harvest energy.
So, you have like type 1, type 2, type 3 Kardashev civilizations.
I've heard of that, yeah.
Yeah, right.
So, you have a type 1 Kardashev civilization, which I think can control all of the energy of their Their home, the host planet, the home planet, right?
So we're kind of before them.
We're like a type zero.
We're type zero, right?
Yeah.
We're not even there yet.
Then you can think of an intelligence that can control the energy of the nearest star in their solar system, right?
That would be a type two.
We're certainly not there.
And you can expand that to intelligence that can control the energy of the entire galaxy.
And you can keep going further and further outwards to a larger and larger scale.
Yes.
Then you can imagine a civilization that can control and manipulate entire galaxies, entire universes.
You can imagine at higher and higher end, this Kardashev scale has been kind of extrapolated quite a bit.
But imagine a civilization that can control entire universes, perhaps even entire multiverses, able to actually create and destroy universes at will.
We have no idea what an intelligence like that would look like, right?
But this is how you progress in one direction, in one direction.
But actually, if you really think about how human civilization is progressing, we're not so much thinking about moving more and more outwards.
Yeah, okay, there's some talk about.
Populating Mars or whatever.
But actually, most of our effort is directed not at larger and larger scales, but at smaller and smaller scales.
Yeah?
So think of the large Hadron or Hadron Collider.
Yeah?
We're more and more interested in nano scale and even smaller than that, manipulating much lower scales of reality.
We're interested in chemistry.
What is that?
Manipulating molecules.
Then down to atoms, manipulating subatomic particles or the Interactions between subatomic particles.
That's something we also kind of do just to a certain extent.
But you can imagine going deeper and deeper and deeper.
That tends to be actually the progression of an intelligent civilization, it tends to be deeper and deeper to the ground of reality.
That's where we're trying to get.
That's what the Large Hadron Collider is about.
It's about understanding the fundamental structure of our reality.
And if you imagine this deeper and deeper and deeper, ultimately you will get to.
The ground of reality, whatever that is.
Once you develop an understanding of that, when we're far from there, I would say, when you think about then, well, what do we do with that?
How do we become a post biological civilization?
I don't think what you're going to do is kind of run, you know, people might imagine like stacks of servers stacked on the nearest moon kind of running this civilization computationally.
Again, this is a very human centric way of thinking about it, right?
It's not going to be like, That.
It's more likely to be that the civilization, intelligence, will instantiate themselves at the lowest level of reality, exploiting the fundamental computational structure of reality.
That's where they're going.
They're going deep down.
They're not expanding to larger and larger scales.
They're going deep down to the fundamental ground of reality.
That's where they've kind of left this scale of reality.
And they're deep, deep down.
Profound Reality Layers00:16:24
And they are.
Practically invisible.
And we've no idea, no fucking idea.
It's completely impossible for us to comprehend or to conceive what an intelligence like that would look like.
John Barrow, the cosmologist, invented a term for this.
He called it the micro dimensional mastery scale.
Okay, very mainstream, famous cosmologist and theoretical physicist.
So the micro dimensional mastery scale is that opposite to the Kardashev.
It's looking at the development of the civilization down, down, deeper and down.
Down, down, deeper and down.
Yeah.
Who is that?
Status quo.
Down, down, deeper and down.
Yeah, anyway.
So, yeah, down, down, deeper and down.
And you get to these.
So, it starts at type one minus.
So, it's opposite the Kardashev.
Type one minus, type two minus.
And he envisioned this civilization he called the type Omega minus.
Right?
So, they have got right down to the fundamental ground of reality and they are instantiating themselves right down there.
That's where they are.
We haven't.
There's no way we would know how to communicate with them.
We have no idea what they would look like.
We have no idea what kind of worlds they construct for themselves.
We know nothing about them.
But, but if that is our kind of destiny in a sense, and if that's the destiny of all successful intelligent civilizations is to achieve that, then the vast majority of intelligences within our universe are likely to be something like that.
The vast, imagine that, imagine that.
The vast majority of intelligences, and it might be like 99.9% or something, we just don't know, would be inconceivably strange.
We can't imagine.
And they would, in a sense, be everywhere.
But nowhere at the same time.
And then you think, wait a minute, wait a minute, if that's true, if that's true, what's happening when you smoke DMT?
Well, you're entering this hyperdimensional world filled with these super intelligent beings in this highly complex, constructed, inorganic space.
Is there a possibility that we are somehow interacting with this type Omega minus civilization?
Is that what's going on here?
That's the question for me because I think to myself, how would we communicate with something, an intelligence like this?
We can't send up radio signals.
It seems like we can't do anything.
But then I thought, well, the most obvious way for them to communicate with us, if they chose to, would be using our brains.
Because, why?
Because the brain can receive information directly and it can use that information to construct a world.
And so you can imagine us being able to, if information could.
If the flow of information could be gated from this other domain that sits at the ground of our reality that's everywhere right now, our brain could begin to construct a model of that reality.
It would allow us to literally enter their world, experience their world, allowed our brain to construct a model of their world.
So that's where I'm leaning towards.
If we take these intelligences seriously that people meet in the DMT space, it seems to me it would be something like that a world that has a very close.
For us, an incomprehensible and un understandable relationship to our reality, that is where I think you might be finding.
That's why I think DMT might grant access to this domain.
Quantum computers could perhaps help us to communicate with beings that are operating on atoms, right?
That's possible, but again, we're talking probably several layers lower than atoms.
Than atoms, right?
We don't really know.
I mean, we call them certain things, you know, particles, fundamental particles, but that's just.
As fundamental as we can kind of grok, as fundamental as we know.
But actually, it could be many levels below that.
We just don't understand the fundamental structure of reality.
And so there's the problem.
There's the problem.
We don't understand how these other realities or our relationship to these other post biological domains where these type omega minus civilizations might reside.
And so, when, okay, so going back to what I said before, right, the DMT.
Or other psychedelics, when they enter the brain, they create this hot state, yeah, this very fluid state where the brain is much more susceptible to incoming information, yeah, to be information driven reorganization.
So that would be precisely the state in which the brain would be susceptible to receiving information somehow.
And I think it would be at the lowest level of reality.
This information is coming in somehow into our brain.
I don't think it's coming.
Through the normal, it's not coming through the normal senses, certainly.
The brain is this information is entering the brain and reorganizing.
I always say, you don't break through into the DMT world, the DMT world breaks through into you.
It is taking control of your world building machinery and using your world building machinery to construct its world.
You're not going anywhere, you don't need to go anywhere.
All that needs to happen is information must flow into your brain from their domain, and your brain, which is a world building machine, as I said.
Will construct a model of their world.
Do you think people like Alan Hynek and Kerry Mollis could have the ability?
Do you think there are certain people like them who could have the ability to tap into this without psychedelics?
Possibly.
Yeah, I'm not saying necessarily.
I mean, DMT seems to be the most efficient.
It seems to cause, unlike the other psychedelics, which create this, as I said, this fluid, hot state of the brain, with DMT, it seems to go.
Past this, it transcends this state, and you get this sudden reorganization of the emergent patterns of activity in the cortex.
And this seems to be, for reasons we don't understand, makes the brain even more susceptible to information driven reorganization if that's what's actually happening.
Of course, this is speculative.
I'm not saying, yes, when you take DMT, you're communicating with advanced post biological civilizations instantiated in the ground of reality.
I'm not saying that's true.
I'm trying to find the connection there.
If we do take these entities seriously, and I think we need to, I don't think it's simple to explain their presence within the DMT state.
I don't think it's simple.
I don't think it's easy to simply explain them away as hallucinations or as archetypal structures from the collective unconscious.
There seems to be something much more profound going on here.
These beings, they have clear intent when you go into the space, they're waiting for you, they get to work.
Right, um, they get to work on you, they're expecting you, uh, they welcome you, uh, and they have an agenda, they have an agenda, um, and it seems to be far more than your brain just making it up.
Your brain doesn't really, in my opinion at least, um, seem to have this ability to model these hyper complex, hyper dimensional realities filled with these beings that bear no relationship to anything in our world.
So, I think that.
That we need to actually take seriously.
And I say this as somebody who is something of a sober neuroscientist.
I don't just, I'm not one of these people who says, oh, it's the spirit world or it's the astral plane.
I always avoid that because there's no explanation there for me.
If you say, are you going to the astral plane?
I mean, well, what's the connection there?
How does that work?
What's the mechanics?
So I'm looking for some kind of coherent explanation for what's going on.
And I haven't found it in.
The orthodox paradigm of modern neuroscience at all.
I've read the interpretations, I've read the explanations of the DMT state.
It's hallucination.
That doesn't make sense to me.
These are far too complex, they're far too coherent to just be made up by the brain.
But at the same time, I don't think that we can explain it in terms of archetypal structures as well.
I think there's something completely non human going on that has no relationship to either modern or ancestral.
Humans.
There's nothing in our evolutionary past, our historical past, that can explain why people are seeing these types of non human, extremely advanced intelligences.
So I think we have to start at least entertaining the idea that there's something far, far stranger going on.
It's fascinating also that Heineck and Mullis and Jack Parsons, like the father of rocket science, Jack Parsons is like one of the most, I think.
Warner von Braun attributed a lot of his discoveries to Jack Parsons.
Jack Parsons was hanging out with Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.
There you go.
And there's like this deep, and Alan Hynek was obsessed with what is the, I don't, I never know how to pronounce it, esoteric, esoteric.
Well, I would say, oh, how, what would I say?
What would you say, esoteric?
I've said esoteric before, but I think it's esoteric.
So esoteric or esoteric?
Esoteric or esoteric?
Depends, like tomato, tomato.
Right, okay.
I say tomato, you say tomato.
Right, okay.
I say potato, you say potato.
No, I don't say potato.
Everyone says potato.
But yeah.
But yeah, he was obsessed with the esoteric stuff.
And even Jacques Vallee, when Diana went into his apartment in San Francisco, she said he had a library full of these esoteric texts and these books on angels and demons.
And he had this book that he gave her all about the history of Satan.
And he said, You need to understand this book.
Yeah, Valet was very interesting.
And I was actually, Paul Hynek quoted from Valet or something, paraphrased from him.
And Valet said that if this phenomenon turns out to just be extraterrestrials from another planet, he would find that incredibly disappointing.
It seems to be something far, far more than that, that we just don't have the.
The cognitive toolkit, I think, to actually grasp what's going on here, what these civilizations are, what they look like, what is their relationship between our world.
We don't even know what our fucking reality is really built from.
So the idea that we have a kind of a full grasp on other worlds or whatever, I mean, the idea of other worlds or parallel universes or dimensions, that's pretty standard.
Cosmology or pretty standard theoretical physics.
No one would rule that out, that there are other realities or whatever that might even be populated.
Where you get into trouble, I think, with physics is making the claim that there is a possibility that there could be some interaction between those worlds and our worlds.
But I've always said, I don't agree with that because we don't understand the, we don't even understand our reality.
So the idea that we understand what is or isn't.
Possible in terms of interactions between our reality and some other reality, we haven't got that information.
So, if we do, you know, if you do meet beings that are apparently extremely intelligent and clearly quite aware of the fact that they're extremely intelligent, extremely advanced, you have to think, well, maybe they are who they say they are.
We don't understand how we are establishing communication with them, why, when you perturb the brain with this simple plant alkaloid, it allows us, it Grants access to their domain.
It gates the flow of information from their domain into our brain.
We don't understand that.
I will admit that.
But that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
It doesn't mean we can rule it out and say that's not a reasonable, feasible explanation because it could be.
Yet we just don't understand that deep connection, that deep relationship between our reality and their reality.
When it comes to John Mack and his book, his abduction books, and he's interviewing all of these experiencers, what do you make of that and what those people are experiencing?
Because they're all talking about experiencing the same things, very, very similar things.
Yeah, that's what kind of attracted me when I first read.
Abduction.
It was the first of John Mack's books that I read.
I was as struck by, and the fact that this is not just some kook, it's not just a collection of experiences.
These are experiences that have been reported to one of the world's most preeminent psychiatrists, a Harvard psychiatrist, who didn't really want to get involved in this abduction stuff.
And you can imagine why.
And he took a lot of academic stuff.
Dick for this.
I mean, people wanted him out of his job.
He was destroying the reputation of Harvard University by pursuing this.
But he was convinced.
He obviously went into this assuming that they were psychologically disturbed.
These were hallucinations.
Carl Sagan, I remember, Carl Sagan, John Mack said, Carl Sagan said to him that.
They're just hallucinating, John.
And John said, What the fuck do you know about hallucinations?
So that's what he had to deal with people who didn't have his training, explaining away these experiences that he himself could not explain away.
And if he was able to explain them away, he would have done.
This is not someone who was susceptible to being kind of taken in.
He knew about disorders of consciousness, disorders of one's neurology, you could say.
And he found that these people were perfectly sane.
What they reported happened to them, as far as they were concerned, happened to them.
And not only that, if you read the book, it's absolutely clear that there are so many different commonalities that all describe the same kind of process of being taken up into these highly technological environments, these beings that work on them.
These particular, what appears to be reproductive agenda that they have, where they're trying to produce hybrid babies apparently, and abductees meeting their hybrid children and feeling great love for them.
Extremely traumatic but coherent stories.
You get one abductee reporting this experience, and then there's more, and there's another, and another.
Eventually, I think you have to say, well, there's something going on here.
Collective Consciousness Stories00:02:44
We can't say what it is.
We can't say, okay, aliens are landing on the front lawn and going into the bedroom and removing them from their bed.
That's a jump too far.
But at the same time, what you can't do is say they're just hallucinating.
It's incredibly dismissive and I think disrespectful to John Mack's intellect to claim that he was being misled.
He knew what he was doing, he knew what he was talking about.
Incredibly well trained psychiatrist.
So, if he thought there's something strange going on that we can't explain, then I don't want to appeal to authority here.
But there are some people who are worth listening to and some people that aren't.
And John Mack was certainly worth listening to.
And so I've, you know, I tend to focus my attention often on people who are worth listening to.
And John Mack is certainly one of those.
Yeah.
And then, you know, like we were talking just a minute ago, there's this collective consciousness of human beings where, like, What's his name?
Chardin's philosophy.
I think the guy's name is Chardin.
He basically had this philosophy that there was like the biosphere, like living beings create the biosphere of Earth.
And then there's the nuosphere, which is like Chardin.
Chardin.
I can't pronounce French.
Taliad de Chardin.
That's him, yeah.
He was a monk, I think.
Yeah, yes.
And this nuosphere is like human thought.
Or human consciousness, how it's like this extra layer above the biology of us, and that it's like it permeates everywhere, right?
And it's like it's its own entity.
And, um, I think about that a lot when it comes to like technology with screens and people seeing things like when Betty and Barney Hill were abducted right around that time, there was this TV program that came out that showed the gray alien being.
I forget exactly what the name of the show was, but, um, And then they like described it, and then there's all these other people describing it.
And like the more and more people talk about it, there's this collective consciousness or collective understanding of what this thing is.
And that's what people use to argue against this and against what those people were experiencing.
Well, I think, well, if you think about this, what the Noah's fear, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not so far away from what I was saying earlier about these, what John Barrow would have called the type Omega.
Minus.
Simple Models Create Complexity00:10:56
Right.
Right.
These advanced civilizations that have transcended their biology and instantiated themselves deep in the structure of reality and are kind of everywhere and nowhere at the same time, that sounds kind of similar.
A similar idea.
So I don't think it's an excuse to dismiss these things at all because it suggests that there is indeed what you call it.
You might want to call it the collective unconscious, but I hate doing that because.
A lot of, particularly DMT users, are self described Jungians.
And they say, okay, anything we can't explain, any experience that is strange or unusual, we'll just put it into the collective unconscious.
That's where it came from.
It becomes really, really convenient to me, extremely convenient to just toss things into the collective unconscious, which is often very poorly described or poorly defined anyway.
So I need more.
I need more.
Of a mechanistic, clear explanation for what people mean.
What do you mean when you say they're coming from the collective unconscious?
What is that?
I have a very neurobiological interpretation of the collective unconscious.
You know, we, as I said before, we didn't, our brain wasn't dropped to the earth ready to start building our model of reality and interacting with the environment.
It's something that evolved.
And there are certain patterns that developed in our ancestral history.
Some really.
Basic fundamental ways that we interact with the world, the relationship to your mother, for example.
If you think about your mother, assuming you had a good relationship, you have a good relationship or had a good relationship with your mother, then it evokes certain feelings.
There's certain ways of interacting with this figure called your mother.
It generates a feeling of warmth, of protection, of someone you want to move towards and remain with, right?
These are basic fundamental human interactions that are wired into our neural architecture.
And they're deeply embedded.
And we're born with these.
And you could say the same about interacting with enemies in your environment.
How do you respond to them?
Again, deeply wired, emotionally laden neural structures that we're all born with.
In animals, we would call them instincts.
What are instincts?
They are essentially instantiated by patterns of neural structures that have been honed and developed throughout evolution.
You don't need to learn.
You don't need to learn.
But they're kind of very simple models.
They're basic models of how we interact with our environment and with other individuals in our environment.
They're very, they're quite rigid, they're very strong, and you don't need to.
Kind of, you don't need to learn these things, they're there, but they're quite simple models, really.
You need to elaborate them.
Um, so, for example, there's um, if you if you take a um, a mouse, yeah, newborn mouse or set of mice running around in a cage, and you drop and this, these mice have never had any exposure to any other animals in the environment.
You drop a uh, a bunch of cat hairs into that cage, those animals start, those mice start.
They're very kind of wary of this fur.
Yeah.
They look at it.
They don't want to approach it.
They stop their kind of playing behavior and they're very curious, but they're very hesitant to go near this fur.
It doesn't work with dog fur.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow, right?
So they haven't learned this is how you respond that the cat is the enemy here.
And yet it's embedded because that is an embedded neural structure.
Their relationship, the way that they interact with a cat is one of fear.
It's one of, Avoidance.
Yeah.
So these are basic models that we're all born with that.
So imagine that in humans now, slightly more complex, but still very simple models of the world and our interactions with agents in our environment that are absolutely critical for our survival.
Interaction with your mother, certainly in the early stages of your life, that is essential.
You will die if you don't know how to respond to your mother.
Right.
Yeah.
You will die if you don't know how to respond to snakes.
You will die if you don't know how to respond to.
Other enemy tribes or whatever, right?
So these are important, and you have these.
And so it's not surprising then that these can take the form of imageries.
There's no images in the unconscious.
This is an important point as well, which will surprise some people.
There are no images deep down.
These are very simple models.
Everything's about models.
Everything's about models.
The brain is constructing models from the lowest levels of the brain all the way up to the highest levels.
The most complex models are constructed in the cortex, as I said, the model of your world.
It's a very adaptive model.
It's a very flexible and fluid, constantly changing model.
Then you have simpler models that go deeper and deeper and deeper down.
The deepest levels of the brain, you have models that allow you to control your blood pressure, control your heart rate, control your breathing rate.
These are very rigid models, but they're very simple.
They work.
They have to work.
They fail, you're dead.
As you go up through the brain, these subcortical regions, you have also quite simple models, models of these basic interactions between other humans, for example, or certain animals.
That's why people are scared of spiders, why people are scared of snakes.
It's instinctive.
But they're simple models.
We all carry them.
They're collective.
This is the collective unconscious, in my opinion.
It's not this magical, mystical domain where these beings are inhabiting, it's those.
Universal inherited structures that give rise to certain images.
So, if I ask you to draw a mother, right, or something, or you would come up with something quite different to me.
It would be based upon your personal experience.
Or if you were to describe a mother, it would have certain basic fundamental characteristics, but it would also be colored by your own personal experience, right?
But the model itself is actually very, very, very, very simple.
These are the archetypal structures.
They're not images.
They're basic patterns of neural connections, neural architecture that you are born with, neurognostic structures they're often described as.
It's not a realm filled with creatures that are kind of living out their existence.
That's not the collective unconscious, in my opinion.
It's just the set of universally inherited structures that come from our evolutionary past.
So we can use the collective unconscious to explain why certain types.
Of images might emerge.
We cannot use these very simple, low level subcortical patterns of activity, these very simple models to explain why people see higher dimensional objects or why they see extremely advanced intelligent civilizations existing within this inordinately complex space.
That doesn't make sense.
You're trying to create great complexity from what are actually very simple models.
It doesn't It doesn't make any sense to me that you can explain away these types of experiences as archetypal structures.
Some people would disagree with me on that, but I'm trying to find an explanation that makes sense to me as a neuroscientist.
And appealing to the collective unconscious to explain anything that is otherwise inexplicable is a cop out to me.
It's a convenient place to drop things we can't explain.
And I just don't agree that that's what the collective unconscious.
What did you think about that video we watched about the basal ganglia?
And Gary Nolan's talking about some people have a very hyperactive basal ganglia.
What would that do?
What is your opinion?
I mean, obviously, you didn't know anything about that going in.
No, I did.
Maybe you did.
And I'd have to think about it a lot more to come up with a semi coherent response to that.
But yes, we can think about it, we can look deeper into the brain, but we can't.
We can't disconnect what we understand about the brain, which of course is limited.
We don't know everything about what the brain is doing.
We do at least know something about the way that the brain is constructed and the way that the brain evolved, at least, and the way that the brain is constructed from these very simple models deep down to more complex models going up.
The reason we have a cortex is to allow us to build very complex models.
You can't build complex models or really complex models, certainly not of the complexity of the models that are constructed at the cortical level deep down in these structures.
There's simply not the complexity there.
So, we have to be careful, I think, about appealing to these lower structures to explain away often anomalous experiences.
But there might be a relationship.
There could be a relationship when you disturb.
It's not all going on at the cortical level.
When you start to perturb the behavior of the subcortical structures as well, the brain is connected, everything's working together.
You stimulate or you inhibit or you somehow.
Disrupt certain areas of the brain, and you can have completely unpredictable effects that are going on at the higher level where you are experiencing the world.
So, we saw with LSD, for example, where you get this effect on the cortex, but it also causes the release, it disinhibits these lower subcortical structures, like the hippocampus, for example, which is sending constantly this memory information up into the cortex.
You're allowing a flood of information into the cortex.
So, you know, the brain is a unified, highly complex system.
And so, often disrupting one part of the brain can have completely unpredictable effects that you would never have predicted until you actually do it, until you actually look at it.
And then you think about what that means.
DMTX Research and Tolerance00:15:49
Okay.
So, let's go into your DMTX research.
Oh, yeah.
How did you get into this?
And how the hell did you get funding for this?
Like, this is beyond any sort of.
Like a clinical trial, I have ever heard of.
Yeah.
So, well, first of all, I didn't get any funding.
You funded it yourself?
I don't.
Well, I don't personally, and I always have to correct people on this.
People always talk about my DMTX study or something.
I don't do any DMTX studies in humans, right?
I live in Tokyo.
I don't work with, I don't give humans DMT or anything like that.
So, let me tell you the story.
It'll make sense.
Yeah.
So, as should be.
Kind of clear by now.
I do take seriously the idea that it's possible that we are indeed communicating with some kind of other intelligence, the location and identity and the origin, the nature of which we have no idea about.
So I take that seriously.
So then the question arises is, well, what do we do about that?
DMT reliably grants us access to these intelligences, but it is very short acting.
It's five minutes in the space.
You go up this roller coaster phase, you burst through this breakthrough phase into this strange, very strange domain with these intelligences.
And then suddenly, maybe just a few minutes later, it might just be three, four, five minutes later, you're being dragged back out again.
Just as the state is starting to stabilize and you're starting to perhaps establish communication with these entities, you're being dragged back out.
So it's not conducive.
To establishing stable two way communication with whatever beings are in there, for actually studying the space, studying these intelligences, developing some kind of relationship with these intelligences to really learn about who the fuck they are.
Again, if you take these intelligences seriously and you want to establish communication with them, you want to understand them, you want to know where they're from and what's the relationship between us and them, you have to stop treating DMT like a drug.
Treat it like a technology.
A technology that you develop.
I mean, that's it's a fun, kind of an important cognitive shift.
Once you start treating DMT like a technology, then you think about, okay, what's the best way to use and develop this technology?
That's a crazy way to put it.
Yeah.
But it's right.
Yeah.
Because then you free yourself from the idea that this is a drug.
And you think, okay, this is a technology for entering this alternate reality model, this alternate world filled with these beings.
How do we develop this technology?
How do we improve upon?
Methods of administration and utilization of this molecule.
That's the key cognitive switch.
And so that switch happened to me, and I thought, okay, let's think about how we can improve this technology.
So, DMT is a fascinating molecule for many reasons, not just in terms of its effects, but also it has these what I call pharmacological peculiarities.
Unlike the other classic psychedelics, it's, as we said, very short acting, which is for most people merciful.
Most people, five, ten minutes in that space, quite enough.
Thank you very much.
Quite enough.
But as I said, for extended journeying in that space, to give you more time to interact with these beings and study the space, to map the space, to look at the geometry and the topology and the dynamics.
Of this space, you need more time.
So, how do we extend the time?
Well, DMT, it's short acting.
It doesn't seem to have subjective tolerance.
It's completely non toxic, it seems.
What do you mean?
Can you expand on the subjective tolerance part of it?
Yeah.
So, Rick Strasman, of course, did the largest study of DMT in humans in the 90s.
I mean, he went through, he was jumping through a lot of fucking hoops to do this work.
I mean, no one was doing this work before him.
You know, with the end of The psychedelic dark ages, in a way, and certainly in terms of academic study in humans, no one was doing it.
So he had to go through a lot of bureaucracy and permits and licenses and convincing the relevant authorities that they should allow him to do this study with DMT.
And he made it as boring as possible.
His proposal I'm going to measure blood pressure, I'm going to measure skin conductance, I'm going to measure heart rate.
Well, didn't he do it?
For schizophrenia?
Didn't he get the funding from the war on drugs or something?
He got.
I can't tell you where he got the funding from, but it wouldn't surprise me, right?
That they might fund something as dull and uninteresting as that.
But of course, what came out of it was all these trip reports.
Wow.
It became part of his book, DMT The Spirit Molecules.
That was the real purpose of this study, but of course, he didn't tell them.
Genius.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Absolute genius.
But one of the.
As well as simply.
So he had like 60 volunteers.
He injected them with bolus DMT, which means the injection all in at once or within 30 seconds.
So a normal DMT trip, basically.
They go into the space, they're there for a few minutes, and they come back out again.
Standard stuff.
But one study that he did was to look at the subjective tolerance.
So if you take something like LSD, if you take LSD on day one and have your DM, sorry, your LSD trip, Say 100 micrograms.
If you take the same dose the next day, you will have a much more diminished experience.
So there's subjective tolerance there.
There's a number of mechanisms that's going on in the brain why that's the case, but that's what you see.
It's like a tolerance.
Yeah, exactly.
Tolerance, the reason we say subjective tolerance is tolerance to the effects.
When you measure the intensity of the effects in the individual, they are diminished over time.
Now, Rick Strasman wanted to test whether that was still the case with DMT.
So, if he injected someone with DMT and then he measured the intensity of the effects using his hallucinogen rating scale and then injected them again 30 minutes later, what is the intensity of the effects?
Does it go down?
And he found that it didn't.
It didn't go down.
The intensity of the effects remained the same no matter how many times he injected them with DMT, which is kind of fascinating.
But what that, in itself, is an interesting scientific result.
And it's another one of these interesting pharmacological peculiarities of DMT, it has this particular characteristic.
But to me, this suggested that DMT could be utilized.
Not by bolus injection, but you could actually infuse DMT into someone's bloodstream and actually maintain a stable brain DMT concentration.
And the intensity of the subjective effects would remain constant because there's no subjective tolerance.
Yes.
And also because it's so rapidly metabolized and removed from the brain, it doesn't build up either.
Yeah.
So this technology is called target controlled intravenous infusion TCIV and it's well established.
As a technology that's been used for decades in anesthesiology.
So, in anesthesiology, if you want to put somebody under general anesthetic, what they don't do is kind of inject you with the anesthetic and then kind of put you to sleep because the anesthetic will rise in the brain and then it will begin to fall.
So, they would go to sleep, they would become unconscious, and then they would start to come out.
That's no good if you want to hold someone unconscious for several hours.
So, what you do instead is you take a very short acting Anesthetic drug with no subjective tolerance, so that won't have diminished effects over time, and you infuse it.
You develop what's called a pharmacokinetic model, which is a mathematical model of the metabolism, the distribution, the absorption, the excretion of the drug over time, which allows you to program this infusion device such that you can maintain a stable brain anesthetic drug concentration, you can push them deeper.
You can bring them into a more shallow anesthetized state.
You can have really quite good control.
So, this is well established technology in anesthesiology.
And my thought was well, let's repurpose that.
Let's replace the anesthetic drug with DMT.
We can develop a mathematical model, the same pharmacokinetic model that's been used for anesthetics, but create it using the data from DMT.
And I knew Rick Strasman had that data.
He published the blood, he was measuring the blood.
Levels of DMT over time.
So he had a model, he had a model of the absorption and the rise of DMT in the bloodstream and then the subsequent drop off.
So I knew he had that data, and that's the data you need to build this pharmacokinetic model.
So I thought, okay, this is cool.
This would be a technology for extending the DMT state from five minutes to however long you want an hour, two hours, three hours, you know, an unlimited, really, amount of time within.
Certain practical considerations required.
So I sent an email to Rick and said, Hey, do you still have this data from back in the 90s?
This was in 2015.
Fortunately, he hadn't, unlike some scientists would have done, kind of discarded or lost the data.
So he had this old Excel file which he fired back to me after about 30 minutes, and I thought, yeah, here we go.
So we agreed at this point to kind of write this paper, to propose this technology.
I would do the modeling, build this pharmacokinetic model, and then we would get together, we would write the paper and explain why this technology could be useful for extending the DMT state.
Of course, we didn't.
Necessarily, I didn't.
My aim was that this would allow us to communicate with these intelligences and spend time in the space for that reason.
We didn't write that in the paper because it would probably be rejected.
But we wrote that it would be useful for clinical applications to have a much more controlled psychedelic state than is possible with psilocybin.
You say, sorry to interrupt, but you said it would be rejected.
Who are you aiming this paper at?
And who are you trying to get approval from?
Well, I mean, if you write an academic paper and you want it to be published in a peer reviewed academic journal, then it needs to be peer reviewed.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you have to, there are certain constraints about things that you can and can't say, right?
Right.
If you kind of say things like, you know, alien intelligence, they're just going to go, I'm sorry, this is a bit far out.
This is not ours.
We wanted a mainstream, sober, proper scientific journal.
There are a lot of kooky journals out there that would have accepted it, but we wanted this to be taken seriously.
So, yeah, we kept the paper kind of sober and not boring, but bearing in mind, What we were dealing with here.
We worked on the paper together and then we managed to get it published relatively easily.
The first journal we went to published the paper for us.
And this was just a proof of principle model.
It was basically to say, look, this technology should work.
Yeah?
It wasn't a technology, hear sirens.
That's okay.
It wasn't a technology.
Or a model that was ready to be deployed in humans straight away.
We just wanted to show that, hey, DMT has the right pharmacological properties that would make it amenable to this kind of technology.
And when the paper was published, it got quite a lot of attention.
People were writing articles about, oh, these scientists are building machines to communicate with aliens, a lot of kind of hyperbole.
It's a good clickbait headline.
Absolutely, yeah.
And so for that reason, many people still.
Think that I am injecting people with the MT.
No, that was never the aim that I would be kind of running these studies.
All I wanted to do was plant that seed in a scientific consciousness, so to speak, and get people to notice it and to pick it up.
And they did.
They did.
So the Imperial College team, certainly of the academic institutions, were the first to really run with this idea.
And they improved upon the model.
The model I produced wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a perfect model.
It wasn't ready to go into humans.
It was a back of the envelope kind of model, proof of principle model.
So the Imperial team spent time recruiting pharmacokineticists, pharmacologists to actually get a really good model ready that would allow them to do this in humans.
And they were successful.
And they recruited maybe two or three years ago, they recruited a small number of volunteers for a Pilot project.
I think there were 11 people in this pilot study and were successful.
They published this paper very recently in the last few months and demonstrated that it works.
They can stabilize this DMT state in this study for 30 minutes.
30 minutes.
And it was tolerable.
These people weren't freaking out, they weren't going mad.
Their anxiety levels peaked at the start of the experience and then settled back.
Down to kind of pre dose levels, right?
So these were very comfortable in the space.
Their heart rate, again, same deal, blood pressure, et cetera.
They were dealing with it very well.
They were experienced DMT users, by the way.
You didn't pull people from the street who'd never taken DMT before and say, hey, let me infuse you.
Nothing like that.
That would be absurd, of course.
But yeah, it was completely safe, completely tolerable.
There's a group in Basel now, in Switzerland, who have extended it to 90 minutes.
They just published their paper on.
On this, again, able to stabilize the experience for 90 minutes at several dose levels.
So you can have a light experience where you can push it right through to kind of break through levels, the same kind of level brain concentration as you would get by taking a couple of lungfuls of pure DMT vapor.
So real, proper DMT, serious DMT experiences, but extended and controllable in real time.
Stabilizing the Experience00:05:46
Now, what are they doing with these people?
Like, while they're infusing these people with DMT, what are they doing specifically to measure stuff?
Like, are they literally, is there someone sitting on a chair next to them?
Talking to them and asking them to talk about stuff?
Are the people that are getting infused writing down notes?
What are they doing?
Not at this stage.
So, this was really a safety and tolerability study.
Okay.
Just to test if it works.
So, no, they didn't have that.
They were getting measurements of things like intensity or entities.
This was actually done after.
I think this was done after they came back.
They got them to report at certain time periods because they were being told the time, you know, one minute.
Two minute, five minute, ten minute.
So they could have some connection to the outside world, so to speak.
And then after the experience, they were told to report on various characteristics of the phenomenology and the subject.
How intense were the effects?
Were there a lot of entities?
Scale of one to ten?
How many entities were there?
Things like this.
Very broad, kind of coarse grained data.
Just to establish that there wasn't something horrible was going to happen when you.
Induce someone into this kind of state, which is, you know, could have been possible, right?
But in my, you know, what are we going to do with this then is the next question.
If it works and it's safe, it's tolerable, what do you do with that?
And I think, yes, we need to have real time delivery of information from this DMT space, from these beings into back to the team waiting on the other side.
You can't remember everything.
Right.
You know, if I ask you to remember everything that happened in the last 30 minutes and give me a You know, detailed breakdown, you would struggle.
So imagine doing that in a DMT experience.
No, forget about it.
It's over.
So, what do you do?
Is you need some technique which will need to be developed to actually deliver information in real time to a team waiting on the other side.
What would that look like?
What sort of tools could we use to do a sort of a live?
A live sort of like relay of what these people are experiencing.
How coherent are you when this is happening?
Remarkably, actually, what I hoped would happen is that the DMT state, as I said, initially it's this roller coaster fade.
It's disorientating.
You don't know where the fuck you are.
You don't know what's happening.
Everything's moving and changing very rapidly.
And I was hoping that once the brain settles into constructing this alternate reality model, which is what's going on here, that it would stabilize.
The brain would settle and that the experience would still, of course, be.
Progress and quite rapidly things would change, but it would be more stable, more navigable, more coherent over time.
And that seemed to happen over time.
So that's great.
That suggests that, yes, you can navigate, or at least should be able to learn to navigate the space and to establish communication with the beings within the space.
That should be possible.
Then, your question how do you get information out in real time?
And there are a number of ways you can think about this.
One is, of course, verbally.
You can ask them to describe what's going on.
Alternatively, you might have.
Now, Timothy Leary, interestingly, had a machine.
He was, of course, he was most well known for LSD.
But he had a deep interest in DMT as well.
And he developed this device called the experiential typewriter, which was two typewriters, really, one in each hand with a number of keys.
And each key was mapped to a certain feature of some kind of feature of the subjective experience.
And so you would go under, you would be in the DMT space, you know, administer DMT, breakthrough into the DMT space, and then you would, rather than having to speak, you would use this keyboard, which you would need to be trained upon, of course, to deliver information.
And they had this one of these old, like, paper rolls, you know, with like a pen, you know, that kind of thing.
So, Timothy Leary, in a way, was kind of way ahead of his time here.
He was already thinking about how do we get information back.
So you can imagine something like that.
It would be much more sophisticated, of course, than what Timothy Leary could have constructed at the time.
But it was something like that.
You would have some kind of device that you would have to be trained upon.
These voyagers would be trained to control this device in real time and deliver certain types of information.
Now, what would that information look like?
Here, you need.
Specialists, you need linguists, you need mathematicians, you need cartographers, you need artists, you need theologians, you need philosophers, you need physicians, you need a whole group of people with different specialisms to think about what kind of information we can bring back here, how can we make sense of the information in real time.
You also might use artificial intelligence.
So, this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently can we train?
AI Decoding Higher Dimensions00:14:28
It's like if I start speaking a foreign language, you can't understand.
If I start speaking Japanese now, I won't do it, but I'll embarrass myself.
But if I start speaking Japanese now, then you won't have a clue what I'm saying.
But someone who spoke Japanese, of course, would obviously, or an artificial intelligence would know that I'm speaking Japanese.
Now, if I start speaking the DMT language, in other words, if I start delivering information out of the DMT world as it's occurring to me, whether it's through a device, whether it's through verbally, or even perhaps measuring neural activity, nobody on the outside, the people, might be able to make sense of this, but an AI might.
In the same way, an AI might be able to decode.
Some kind of language that I'm speaking.
If I started speaking Latin or something, the AI would detect I'm speaking Latin and decode that, translate it into English.
You can think of an AI as being able to decode and try to make sense of this information coming out of the DMT space and make sense of it and to maybe reconstruct the geometry of the space, try to think about, well, he's talking about certain shapes, he's talking about certain patterns.
Is there a mathematical formalism?
That can be used here to think about what's the dimensionality of the space that he's experiencing.
If you go into a seven dimensional space, let's imagine, right?
People do describe this consistently, not seven dimensional, but necessarily, but going into high dimensional spaces.
How do you test whether someone really is?
They say to you, Look, I was in this world, it seemed to have more dimensions than normal.
These elves, these fucking little elves were coming and they had these seven, they were singing these impossible objects into existence.
These seven dimensional Faber JX, as Terence McKenna used to call them.
How do you prove that they really are experiencing a higher dimensional object?
It seems impossible without getting them.
You could get a mathematician to go into the space, but even a mathematician probably wouldn't know how to formalize mathematically what a seven dimensional object or seven dimensional space looks like.
You can do the maths quite easily, relatively easily, I guess.
But actually, being able to conceive what a seven dimensional object would look like is impossible.
We can't do it.
Our brains.
And again, this is why DMT is so confounding the brain can't construct seven dimensional spaces.
It's used to constructing a three dimensional space.
So, that, and again, I'm going off on a tangent here.
That's also why DMT is kind of very difficult to explain.
Why can the brain suddenly start constructing higher dimensional worlds?
So, if we can prove that these individuals really are experiencing a higher dimensional world, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine dimensions, that in itself gives.
Some weight to the idea that we're dealing with some other space, that this really is some other reality that we're interfacing with here.
So, how do we prove it?
You can think of tests that you might give the subjects.
But you might ask the subjects to describe what they're seeing, describing the way lines interact, describing the kind of shapes that they're seeing, the kind of structures.
If you get someone experienced, perhaps a topologist or an algebraic topologist or some other.
High dimensional mathematician in that space, they can describe I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this, I'm seeing this shape, I'm seeing this shape, seeing this form, this particular topology I'm seeing now.
You feed that to an AI, and the AI integrates all that information and says, Oh, it looks like this individual is within a six dimensional space or something.
You see what I mean?
So the AI can interpret data that to us just looks like fragmented pieces of information, bring it together and say, What kind of world?
Is this person experiencing?
So I think that could be really, really cool if you get an AI that's trained on higher dimensional data sets.
Right.
You know, it can reduce it down to the mathematical formalisms and say, okay, this is a six dimensional space that this person is experiencing.
That would be fucking wild if that could be achieved.
If we could achieve this and figure out exactly what this is, how many levels, how many dimensions there are, and sort of like map this other world that people are going to better, what would that mean for us?
And what sort of application, what could we use this for?
And what would be the implications of being able to have a get some sort of a real grip on what's going on there and where and what it is?
Well, I think there are a number of levels here.
So, first of all, the fact that we have access to a world, the fact that our brain can construct a world that bears no relationship to our reality, that is inordinately complex and rich and dynamic and filled with intelligent beings, that in itself is.
Remarkable.
That in itself is worthy of study.
There's no doubt about it.
So I think even if you don't accept that we're interfacing with some actual other autonomous intelligence, even so, it's a state of consciousness that should be studied.
So minimally, the technology should be developed to actually explore this space.
I think that goes without saying.
But I think if we find, if we are able to kind of definitively demonstrate that these are worlds that are higher dimensional, that are in many ways impossible, seem impossible for the brain to construct, then we are in a difficult situation.
Well, orthodox scientists are in a very difficult situation because they're faced with the The data, they're faced with incontrovertible evidence that DMT grants you access to worlds that the brain shouldn't be able to construct,
which suggests that indeed there is perhaps some interface, some interaction, some gating of the flow of information from some other domain, some other reality filled with actual intelligences who exist from their own side.
And that In my opinion, it would be the most profound and shattering discovery in the history of humankind.
No doubt about it.
Fuck the wheel, man.
This is light years ahead of that.
We cannot comprehend the kind of uprooting of our place in the cosmos, our place within reality, than the discovery not only that intelligences exist and not only inside our universe, but that intelligences exist.
Elsewhere in another domain that's not within our universe, but which has a close relationship in some hidden way to our universe, and that we can communicate with these intelligences with such facility as inhaling a couple of lung folds of this simple ubiquitous plant alkaloid.
That to me would be, well, I don't have words for the significance and the importance of that discovery.
So if there's a small chance that that's what we could be dealing with, we must pursue it.
And this is really interesting too when it goes to some of the stuff that Graham Hancock is talking about with ancient civilizations and some of this evidence of things like Gobekli Tepe, which is like 12,000 years ago, and even the pyramids in Egypt and some of these other things that we found around the world that we can't explain with things that we could not construct today if we wanted to.
And people, you know, you think it's like some high technology.
You know, what sort of crazy technology did they have?
Some enormous scale pulleys or saws that could cut some of the hardest stones that exist on earth that we can't even do today.
But, like, if you think about it the way you're talking about it, is this high technology inside of us?
Yeah.
I mean, in a way, it is.
We are constructing these realities.
So, a brain is the fact that the brain can construct these realities, as I've said several times, is.
In itself, confounding.
It's remarkable.
It suggests that there's some ability there that we weren't aware of.
We weren't aware of.
It suggests that I've often described this idea that we have this hyperdimensional heritage.
It's a world that's not so much alien, but a world from which we have become alienated.
DMT grants us this brief but astonishing glimpse at this remarkable hyperdimensional heritage.
Where does that heritage come from?
Why is DMT so at home?
In our brain.
The brain, why is the brain able to shift so effortlessly and so efficiently into constructing this alternate reality model?
Does it suggest that there is some distant relationship here?
Maybe some ancestral function.
Was DMT an ancestral neuromodulator in some way?
Was it present at much higher concentrations in our brain in prehistory?
We don't know.
But that might explain that perhaps there's been some kind of.
Degrading of the function of producing DMT in our brain over time.
We become much more cemented as such in this consensus model of reality and more alienated from, more disconnected from this other reality.
And perhaps there were earlier humans, many tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps, or perhaps even closer than that, who were more connected to this other reality.
Domain and were able to access it, whether through using exogenous DMT from plants or whatever, or perhaps more likely from altered neurochemistry.
So, at times, DMT levels in their brain were rising.
Their endogenous DMT was higher.
Their endogenous DMT was higher.
And I wrote a paper back in 2013 where I suggested that perhaps ancient dream function was related to DMT.
So, you can imagine DMT levels having a kind of diurnal cycle.
So, they drop down during the day when we're interacting with the normal waking world, the consensus world, the environment, when we need to be very, very aware of our environment.
When we're asleep and we're dreaming, this is when DMT levels rise and allows us to access in the dream state this alternate reality.
So, these would be ancient DMT dreams, if you like.
So, we would live kind of parallel lives, both in this world and at night.
We would be interacting with this alternate reality and perhaps receiving information that we could use then in.
Doing these kind of amazing structures and amazing kind of technologies they had in those days.
That's a possibility.
I'm not saying it's true, but it's an idea.
And since we've lost that function, we've become alienated from that world.
And this is also perhaps why, when people take DMT, there is this profound sense of deja vu and familiarity.
Deja vu, you really get this sense that this is the most fucking bizarre experience I couldn't possibly have imagined.
And yet, at the same time, it is intensely familiar.
I know this place.
I've been here.
Really?
I welcome you back.
You know, the lights start.
Flashing, the bells are ringing, there's your name literally in light.
He's returned, we haven't seen you for so long.
Terence McKenna used to say, right?
It was kind of like that.
There's so many people describe that of being welcomed home in a sense, like we've been away for so, so very long.
And that would make sense if there was some much deeper relationship with that reality in our ancestral past and that some of that neural architecture.
Those inherited neural structures I was talking about earlier have been degraded but still carried with us.
And we're kind of reactivating this ancestral function by consuming exogenous DMT rather than relying on endogenous DMT.
But you're going back to those same kind of worlds that these ancient humans would have been experiencing using perhaps endogenous DMT levels.
Right.
That's a cool idea, right?
It is a great idea.
I mean, it does make sense too, especially with the evidence of the younger Dryas Cladic.
Cataclysms that came and wiped out civilization, and there was a couple proto hominids that survived, possibly, and they were much more primal.
And we sort of evolved, like we had to sort of like reset.
Yeah.
And maybe we didn't go in the right direction.
Got it.
Yeah.
So we became more cemented in our consensus model of reality, and we completely lost contact with that.
We're rediscovering it now.
What's interesting is we're rediscovering at a time when we are perhaps we needed time away to develop.
Ourselves to develop our to become more cognitively and technologically sophisticated.
So now we know more perhaps about what to do.
We've rediscovered this space just when we are, I mean, 1956, right?
So this isn't that long ago, just as we were becoming a really clearly technological species, right?
Worlds Stranger Than Supposed00:05:23
We are at the stage in our advancement where we're beginning to think about other intelligences elsewhere, right?
That's the time.
DMT comes back, it's rediscovered, and we're starting to learn to use it and go back into reconnecting ourselves to this other domain, but with much better cognitive and technological tools at our disposal.
So I see DMT X as being part of that rediscovery and redevelopment of DMT as this technology for reacquainting and reconnecting.
With this domain, with the intelligences that are resonant within it.
So, what are you working on currently?
Like, what state are you at in DMTX and, like, what's next for it?
Well, as I said, I'm not directly.
I know, you're not directly.
Yeah, with the research.
Yeah, just the kind of the model.
But I think you can imagine a hundred different ways that this kind of research, and you can imagine many different research groups, by the way, picking up on this and developing their own protocols.
And, yeah, what are you going to do?
Can you perform experiments within the space?
Can you establish stable communication with the intelligence?
Can you decode their language?
Can you map the space to some extent?
Map the geometry and the topology of the space?
Is that possible?
You know, the possibilities.
We've discovered a new world.
This is a new world, far stranger.
I mean, imagine when Columbus landed on the shores of the United States.
It was Columbus, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know your American history.
Yeah, yeah, Columbus.
There we go.
You know, a new frontier, right?
A new world.
Immense possibilities lay before.
Yeah.
And here we are now.
After all that, you know, not that long, actually, it's a few hundred years, right?
Right, right.
Now, imagine.
We're at that same kind of phase, but we've discovered a world that is incomprehensibly stranger and more complex and vaster than anything that Columbus could have dreamt about.
So you open up this new world, the possibilities are quite literally endless endless worlds, endless landscapes, endless intelligences.
It's unfathomable what we might have discovered here and the potential for how we might use it, how we might explore.
Navigate, study, establishing relationships with the intelligence within the space, thinking about their nature, their origin, what they can tell us, what we can get from them, what we can give to them, maybe.
Yeah, a lot.
Dude, thank you so much for doing this.
We just did three and a half hours.
That was absolutely fascinating.
So, which one of these books is your most recent book?
The Reality Switch Technologies?
Reality Switch Technologies.
Can I do that?
Yes, absolutely.
Hold it right next to your face.
A little bit back.
There you go.
Perfect.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
So, Reality Switch Technologies is my lady's book.
And the other one, too.
The freaking cover is so cool.
Yeah.
You designed it yourself?
Everything.
And it's the inside as well.
It's full color and kind of this is kind of a digital early computer game kind of vibe I was going for there.
And this one's called Alien Information Theory.
Yeah.
Psychedelic Drug Technologies.
And the cosmic game.
Yeah, so that's a very speculative metaphysics kind of book about speculating about what is possibly the relationship between our reality and this alien intelligence and what is the relationship between those and DMT.
So it's very speculative, it's kind of one vision.
The idea is to get people thinking about what we really understand and what could actually be true.
And the actual truth of the matter is probably far stranger.
Reality is not just stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.
And so I want to get people thinking about what could really be going on, the origins of our reality and where we might be heading.
Reality Switch Technologies, my second book, is more about talking about.
Today I was talking about the idea the brain is a world building machine, it's also a world building tool.
So we can think about the brain can access these, it can construct.
These alternate realities, the DMT reality, for example, the DMT worlds.
You can also construct these strange, bizarre salvia worlds.
You can also reach other kinds of worlds using ketamine or using the tropane alkaloids, scopolamine.
You know, you've got all these different worlds, your brain.
So your brain can construct a number, a large number, perhaps a practically infinite number of worlds using psychedelics.
Whether you think these worlds are real spaces or whatever, we know the brain can construct them.
So you have this like, You think of the brain as this tool that you can tune, this world building machine that you can tune using these molecules and reach these spaces.
So, I wrote this book, and it's also really, in my opinion, the most detailed and comprehensive and thorough guide to how psychedelics work in the brain.
Infinite Psychedelic Possibilities00:02:34
That's what I wanted to write.
That book didn't exist.
A really good one that anyone who is not a neuroscientist or pharmacologist, anyone that's curious and interested and is willing to spend the time with the book, it's not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination.
But if you want to develop a really deep understanding for how psychedelics interface with the human brain from the molecular level all the way up to the cortical level, the world building level that we've been talking about today, this book will do it.
So, yeah.
Well, thank you for doing this stuff.
I mean, it's so often that people like you, with your level of education, are so worried about being labeled as a kooky psychedelic guy, or they're too worried about not being taken seriously.
And they present stuff in just this boring, bland, undigestible way.
But you've done it in a phenomenal, incredibly immersive, entertaining way, the way you created your books and the way you talk about this, too.
It's just so fascinating.
So, like, huge kudos to you for doing that and having the balls to dive into this world and not being worried about being attached to any sort of stigmas or not being taken seriously.
Well, that's really cool.
I mean, I piss off everybody.
I mean, on the kind of scientific side, the really kind of rigid orthodox scientific side, they say that I'm getting into realms that I have no right going into.
Whatever.
Then on the other side, you have the more mystical kind of.
Spiritual guys who say, Oh, you're too reductionist.
This is too brain centered.
So I sit in this little domain on my own, right in the middle of those.
So I'm used to being kind of attacked on both sides.
So I don't care, really.
I'm not attached to any university anymore.
I'm just a writer.
So I don't care who thinks that I'm a kook.
I just try to present ideas.
I think about these molecules and their potential and about reality.
And I present these ideas for.
Hopefully, to get people thinking about the nature of our reality and about how psychedelics can manipulate the nature of our reality.
And people can take away from that what they like.
Well, thank you for doing it.
And thank you for coming all the way to Florida from Tokyo.
I'll link the books below so people can find them.