This is a YouTube video titled "5 Ways to Find Meaning and Trust in a Skeptical World with Jamie Wheal (Part 3)" featuring a discussion led by Jamie Wheal. The content, recorded in early 2022, explores traditional and modern approaches to healing, altered states of consciousness, and cultural rituals that promote mental and social well-being. The conversation delves into neuroanthropology, cultural practices like trance dances and voodoo ceremonies, and their relevance to contemporary biohacking and mental health. There is no indication that Alicia Mackey Huber is a participant in this dialogue.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.
In traditional societies. They didn't have therapists, but they had elders and they had the local medicine person who would as likely deal with some altered state trauma thing as some sort of plant medicine, sometimes doing both at the same time. And then, you know, drumming rituals, rituals that have meaning that actually cause healing, rites of passage and things like that. Do you see those coming back?
Well, I think that's the entire fun project we have. Like when we think about, you know, this book is 5050 Neuroanthropology. Like let's look to the past, see what customs and habits we've done being these wacky tribal primates that we are. But also bring a level of neuroscience to understanding why those things have worked. And then forward facing is the culture architecture part. Like, now we know that stuff, now we know what the Lego blocks look like. How do we lay them in interesting, creative, joyful, productive combinations going forwards. And so to your point, right, Roger Walsh, who's at UC Davis, he's an MD, PhD, sort of both physician and anthropologist, has done some fascinating work on monophasic and polyphasic cultures. And monophasic is one channel that's effectively the western world political, post the enlightenment. So what I can see, touch, taste or think or feel five senses, that's it. Empiricism versus polyphasic cultures. Meaning I have, we, we welcome and regularly experience trans possession, you know, like visitations, vision quest, you name it, a whole mud dreams, a whole much wider spectrum of consciousness that we consider valid information streams, basically. Right. And the question now is, how do we get back to a post modern polyphasic culture, right, where we crank open the channels, we open that, you know, the sort of the rusted radio knobs and start being able to pick up a wider range of both body brain inputs, kind of our neurophysiology as well as the information that comes in those. So for instance, right, Our monophasic culture of the Western world is typically tired, wired and stressed. That's how we often feel. And it's high hyperactive beta wave activity, super focused executive function and default mode network rumination, poor air exchange, often a lot of persistent fight, flight stress, neurochemistry, norepinephrine, cortisol, all the things that kind of are great for fleeing the tiger and rot your bones and eat you alive if you're staying awake at 3am rehashing a conversation with your boss or a Twitter war you're in the middle of. Right? So all of those kind of things and Much of the biohacking movement, right, everything from intermittent fasting to hot and cold contrast therapies to all of these things, is attempting, right, to pry open that window and saying, we want to feel more. We don't want just to live in 72 degrees permaclimate with infinite calories. You know, we want to go hungry, we want to binge, we want to be freezing, we want to be sweating our balls off. We want, right, we want. We want to do all these things because there's just an intuition that in fact, that is healthier. So if we can build in culture, architecture, if we can build in the rituals that used to carry us forward so that we can change the radio dial on a regular basis, then we end up with more range and resiliency in our bodies and brains, but also in our minds and hearts. And there was a study of Haitian voodoo practitioners, and interestingly, once a year they would have these periodic voodoon ceremonies with possession entrance, and you could literally just go hog, hog wild and lose your minds. And in those communities, this was Wade Davis's research. I think that in those communities there was zero clinical cases of psychosis. So it was like, here's a cultural container, like, get your yayas out, go nuts, literally. And then you've scratched that itch, you're good to go. And Robin Dunbar at Oxford University has done something with the San Bushmen in the Kalahari and has found that they engage trance dances. But they do the trance dance more and more often when there's higher social friction and conflict. So you're like, oh, so this is cultural medicine, you know, like, this actually works. We can literally sweat our prayers. You know, you've got a sort of groove and reconciliation committee baked into your social structures. Sa.
