My guest today is Dr Chris Letheby, a philosopher working on issues related to psychedelic drugs, who is currently a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Western Australia and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide. Chris is also the author of the book Philosophy of Psychedelics, which was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press.
In this conversation we touch on the account given in Chris’ book of the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, and then go deep into Chris’ account of the phenomenology of psychedelics. This conversation was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
I also want to explicitly recommend Chris’ book. I think it does an excellent job of drawing together a whole range of different types of research to provide a clear and sophisticated framework for understanding how psychedelics have their therapeutic and transformational effects, and the consequent philosophical implications.
Show Notes
2:45 – The question that Philosophy of Psychedelics is organised around: “Is psychedelic therapy simply foisting a comforting delusion on the sick and dying”?
6:15 – Chris’ theory about what is happening in the psychedelic experience, the hierarchical self-binding account.
16:20 – How the hierarchical self-binding theory accounts for the phenomenology of the mystical experience.
33:10 – How the hierarchical self-binding theory accounts for other remarkable aspects of the psychedelic/mystical experience – the sense that everything is conscious and the sense that the experience is True.
43:50 – How the hierarchical self-binding theory accounts for other remarkable aspects of the psychedelic/mystical experience – the sense of sacredness and the fundamentalness of love.
50:20 – What’s coming up for Chris and what he hopes to see in the next decade of psychedelic research.
Today I speak with Dr. Vince Polito (@vincepsy), Research Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. Vince works on developing better measures of self representation and investigating how this capacity is altered in different contexts, clinical conditions and states of consciousness.
Vince and I discuss microdosing, which refers to regularly taking very small doses of psychedelic substances. Earlier this year, Vince published one of the most rigorous studies conducted on microdosing to date.
This is an interesting topic because of its link to the promising therapeutic psychedelic studies currently being undertaken, the positive reports of microdosing in the media, and the lack of empirical research into the practice. We discuss these preliminary investigations and the outlook for this field.
Show Notes
1:10 – On Vince’s research background
7:20 – How Vince came to be interested in microdosing
22:00 – On the plausibility and continuity of microdosing effects with higher dose psychedelics
25:30 – On how to square the reported benefits of microdosing with the fact that the therapeutic effect of psychedelics are related to the intensity of experience (eg. Griffiths et al., 2017).
31:50 – What do altered states of consciousness, more broadly, have to offer cognitive science?
36:50 – Advice to students interested in similar areas.
39:10 – On meditation as an altered state of consciousness.
43:00 – What’s coming up for Vince in terms of research.
1:10 – On Vince’s research background
Vince’s work has included studying cognitive processes involved in self-representation (how we make sense of the world and where our bodies are in the world) and sense of agency (the feeling of intending things to happen in the world). In studying how sense of agency can be disrupted, Vince has looked at hypnosis, flow states and passivity phenomena in schizophrenia.
7:20 – How Vince came to be interested in microdosing
Vince has also done studies on belief formation – both how delusional beliefs come to be held and how beliefs spread through groups of people. Microdosing was an interesting topic from a belief formation perspective due to a combination extremely positive media coverage, the costs involved and virtually no empirical research. And so, apart from the effects of microdosing itself, Vince’s study investigated the impact of prior beliefs on reported effects.
Given the barriers to studies involving actual microdose administration, Vince thought that the most rigorous way to proceed would be to find people who were already microdosing and track their experience systematically.
The first part of the study tracked the immediate effects of microdosing through daily ratings of connectedness, contemplation, creativity, focus, happiness, productiveness, and wellbeing. Results suggested a broad positive impact on dosing days, but no residual positive impact on the following days.
The second part of the study looked at the longer term effects. At baseline and again after 6 weeks of microdosing, participants completed a battery of questionnaires assessing effects that are often talked about in connection with microdosing as well as with high dose psychedelics, including mental health, attention, wellbeing, mindfulness, mystical experience, personality, absorption, creativity and agency. Depression, stress and mind-wandering decreased, while absorption and neuroticism increased.
The third part of the study involved comparing expected effects to reported effects. People did have very positive expectations, but it didn’t seem like the observed effects were driven by expectations. For example, creativity was the trait that people most expected to increase yet this was not found in the actual results.
22:00 – On the plausibility and continuity of microdosing effects with higher dose psychedelics
Yes, broadly the findings are consistent. However, the finding of higher neuroticism seems inconsistent with higher dose research and the finding of unchanged creativity seems inconsistent with other studies of microdosing.
25:30 – On how to square the reported benefits of microdosing with the fact that the therapeutic effect of psychedelics are related to the intensity of experience (eg. Griffiths et al., 2017).
Firstly, despite some instructions that microdosing should be imperceptible, microdosing is generally accompanied by noticeable changes in cognitive functioning. Still, these effects are orders of magnitude lower than those reported on high doses of psychedelics, which Vince likens to a positive version of trauma. Because of this, it is difficult to square the reported benefits of microdosing with how we conceive of the therapeutic mechanisms of high doses of psychedelics. Presumably the effects of microdosing result from a more direct pharmacological effect, perhaps relating primarily to effects on the default mode network.
31:50 – What do altered states of consciousness, more broadly, have to offer cognitive science?
We are so bound to our normal waking consciousness, that altered states of consciousness offer an important tool to separating out the dimensions that are part of normal waking consciousness. This is basically a neuropsychological approach. Meditation and virtual reality are other related technologies of consciousness.
36:50 – Advice to students interested in similar areas.
Some good advice might be not try to build a career around psychedelics of altered states of consciousness, but to find a topic that is important and respectable, then use altered states as a case study of how your topic might be effected. This is what Vince has done with sense of agency.
39:10 – On meditation as an altered state of consciousness.
I propose to Vince that the best way to consider meditation might be not necessarily as an altered state of consciousness, but as an attentional practice that can give rise to altered state of consciousness. Vince agrees and reaffirms the legitimacy of deep states of meditation as altered states of consciousness.
43:00 – What’s coming up for Vince in terms of research.
Vince will be working on better measures of self-representation – measures that capture sense of agency, embodiment and presence. He doesn’t have immediate plans for follow-up psychedelic research, but stay posted.
Today we speak with Dr. Stephen Bright, a clinically-trained psychologist, ethnopharmacologist and Senior Lecturer of Addiction at Edith Cowan University.
Stephen has over 15 years experience in Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) research, harm reduction and mental health. He is a member of the AOD Media Watch Reference Group, an organisation that highlights poor examples of journalism regarding AOD-related issues. He is also a founding member and vice-president of PRISM, a not-for-profit organisation supporting research into harm reduction, evidence-based drug policy and the medical application of psychoactive drugs including psychedelics.
And finally, please accept my apologies for the recording quality of this episode. My lack of experience is solely to blame. I hope it doesn’t take away from what was an interesting conversation.
Show Notes
1:30 – On animal drug use.
4:20 – On human drug use across time and space and the distinctly different view dominant today, which Stephen describes as ‘psychophobia’.
8:40 – On harnessing the therapeutic potential of psychedelics without the psychedelic experience.
12:20 – On how MDMA and psylocibin work.
21:30 – On the experience of being a clinician administering MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
28:00 – On the potential of and challenges facing psychedelics within psychology and psychiatry.
33:45 – On other important and contemporary areas of human-drug relations.
40:30 – On the transfer of current alcohol use culture to drug use.
Today we speak with Dr. Nigel Strauss, a psychiatrist with over 40 years experience and Adjunct Professor at Deakin University.
Nigel’s career has focused on medico-legal psychiatry, in particular Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He is Director of Occupational Psychiatry Pty. Ltd. which integrates psychiatry into the workplace.
Prompted by the extraordinary results of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD (which was recently granted breakthrough therapy designation by the US FDA), Nigel became interested in the therapeutic potential of MDMA and other psychedelics, a stigmatised but therapeutically promising class of drugs.
Nigel now advocates for psychedelic-research in Australia and has published a number of papers on the subject.
