Neuroscience of psychedelics and meditation is in its infancy: When asked, “Can you give us just a brief bit of the science, the common pathways that thus far is thought between how psychedelics work in the brain and how meditation works in the brain? Like how do they both have the effects they have of giving us that enlarged sense of being?” (45:05) Rolland responds, “One answer to that is our understanding of that is truly primitive,” and then he adds, “The neuroscience of understanding how these experiences unfold with both psychedelics and meditation is exciting, there's a lot of research going on, but again, it's at its infancy”. “One of the most intriguing things that bring meditation and psychedelics together is the observation that acute psychedelics produce a decrease in the functioning of something called the default mode network (DMN).” (46:27) This large-scale brain network is known to be active while one is engaged in self-referential thinking (past, future, social evaluation, moral reasoning, etc). DMN is also known to be less active during mindfulness practice involving attentional focus on body sensations and breath, etc. However, DMN is not an anatomically well-defined term and its function and its relationship with psychedelics and mindfulness is an active research area.
Psychedelics-based guided therapy could act as a crash
course in mindfulness: This is how Roland describes the instructions given
to subjects undergoing psilocybin-based guided therapy at his lab – “We tell
people, you're going to have this experience, it may or may not be pleasant. It
can take all kinds of shapes and forms. There may be visualizations, there may
not be. And all we want you to do is pay attention to that experience, be
present with it. We're here to support you should you start feeling uncomfortable
but we're going to continue to ask you to go back in. And then we forewarn
people about these experiences can be very, very difficult and we'll give a
metaphor. We'll say, so, for instance, with psilocybin you can get a lot of
visualization and so as a thought experiment let's suppose a demonic figure
appears within your consciousness and this is something more terrifying than
you can imagine, it's made by you, for you. And your natural impulse is going
be to run or to fight it and you want to do neither of those two. You want to
just recognize it as an object of consciousness.” (21:06) If people learn to stay with such an
intense experience without getting drawn in, they feel empowered in a way that
they didn’t believe is possible before. Roland feels these instructions “amount
to a crash course in mindfulness” (21:06) and he calls it “meditation on
steroids”. (24:43)
There is no stability in psychedelics-based investigation
and is riskier than mindfulness: Both psychedelics and mindfulness
enable investigation of the nature of mind. Both are risky. Roland says, “There
are a couple of significant risks that can come out of psychedelic exposure,
and first and foremost is that people under unsupervised conditions, unscreened
conditions can just engage in dangerous behaviour and they can get disoriented,
they can get panicked, they can be confused to the point that they do
themselves or others significant harm. And so, these have to occur under
conditions that discourage that. But apart from that, there are biological
predispositions that would seem to be very unfavourable.” (42:10) He adds, “My
view is that the only way to achieve stability in this investigation of nature
of mind is through practices such as meditation or other embodied practices and
psychedelics can be misleading and certainly don't, in my judgment, represent a
path in and of themselves because there is just no stability in it. And then
certainly some people can get caught in the grasping for the experience and
that could derail them. And then there are certainly more risks involved in the use
of psychedelics than there are in meditation.” (37:55)
While writing this article, I came across a recent New York
Times article “The
psychedelic evangelist” that mentions that a former colleague of Roland has
filed a complaint against Roland for running his research lab like a new-age
retreat centre with religious symbolism and steering volunteers towards the
outcome he wanted. It is also alleged that the drugs come with unpredictable
risks, such as psychotic episodes, increased suicidality, or extended emotional
difficulties, which are most likely underreported by his research lab.
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