Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and Dr. Carl Hart discuss how psychedelics and meditation reshape the brain, specifically through the default mode network. Both practices can dissolve the ego and open new pathways for healing, with psychedelics showing promise in therapy when guided properly.
In very experienced meditators like Tibetan monks who've been in a cave for nine years, they are able to have the same effect on their brain on functional MRIs as those people who take psilocybin or LSD. Hi, I'm Louis Legge, one of the.
Producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Research on psychedelics is currently seeing a renewed interest from the medical community, from anxiety and depression to addiction and even overcoming the fear of death. Research is showing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy has a lot to offer. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman spoke with best-selling author and journalist Michael Pollan, and with clinical psychologist Dr. Anthony Bossis, about the area of the brain which gets suppressed with psychedelics, and how the ego is also housed in this same part of the brain.
Let's listen in, starting with Dr. Hyman's conversation with Michael Pollan.
I heard you speak at South by.
Southwest, and you were talking about this part of the brain called the default mode network. Default mode network. And you said something that sort of just caught my attention, which is that in very experienced meditators, like Tibetan monks who've been in the cave for nine years, they are able to have the same effect on their brain, on functional MRIs, as those people who take psilocybin or LSD. It suppresses this part of the brain It's sort of our ego. Yeah.
I mean, you talk about that? Yeah. Well, this is one of the most interesting findings in the kind of basic science around psychedelics. They began putting people into MRI machines and administering LSD and psilocybin, and they wanted to see what was going on in their brains, what was activated, what was deactivated. Their expectation was that there would be general activation because there's such fireworks, right, that people report in the experience. The big surprise was there was a deactivation of this default mode network, which is a group of tightly linked structures, connects the prefrontal cortex to the posterior singular cortex to deeper, older structures involved in memory and emotion. Pretty impressive for a journalist and all those brain parts.
I still struggle with brain anatomy, friends. It's like, neuroanatomy, that's not easy.
It's not easy at all.
And, it's just like a big mush of like this jello thing, but there's.
So much anatomy in it. It gets so specific. And our thinking now about the brain is it is very networked. It's not about individual parts to very specific things. They're all linked in very interesting ways and the linkages are just as important. So the default mode network is involved in self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states to others, time travel, the ability to think about the future and the past, which you really need to construct an identity. I mean, Oliver Sacks showed us if you don't have a memory, you don't have an identity. And the so-called autobiographical self, which is the function of kind of building the story of who we are out of what happens to us. And that appears to happen in the posterior cingulate cortex. So yeah, to the extent that the ego has an address, it would be in the default mode network. And this is basically, it's not completely turned off, but it's down regulated. And when they also did similar fMRIs of meditators, long-term meditators with 10,000 hours of experience, they found the same pattern, the deactivation of the default mode network, which makes sense in that both involve ego dissolution, right? I mean, you're transcending your ego in meditation if you're very experienced and quieting the part of the self-chatter. I mean, 'cause the default mode network is where you go to mind wander, worry, all that.
Well, that's it. I mean, it's exactly I think you are hitting on something that is so key, which is that suffering comes from identifying with your ego, and that the liberation of suffering, according to the Buddhist tradition, is realizing that that is just an illusion, and that you are not really separate, and that the meditation is a technique to help you actually realize that.
-And break that attachment to your worries or everything, really. And that attachment is the basis of suffering. Yeah, I mean, the Buddhists figured this out a really long time ago. -It is amazing. and now, you know, neuroscience is moving in a very similar direction.
We as humans think that everything we see, feel, smell, touch, hear is all that there is. But we know that there are many other sensory experiences that we don't have the bandwidth for, our spectrum of light, our spectrum of hearing, our spectrum of smell, our spectrum of temperature sensation. I mean, snakes can actually have this massive ability to detect temperature changes so they can see if there's something warm around them to go bite or eat. You know, and yet we think what we see is all there is, right? It's a very interesting thing. And so, maybe these drugs actually help us expand our sensory ability to kind of process information or see different things or relate to what we're doing differently.
It seems to do that, Mark. It's easy to talk about the biology a lot because we can see that as well in terms of fMRIs and PET scans. What I find remarkable is that it seems to, again, trigger something that's naturally occurring in humans. There's a recent Pew study that shows that's 49%.
