This Is Your Brain on Psychedelics

About This Episode

What if you could reopen your childhood brain and what do octopuses on MDMA have to do with it? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with neuroscientist and psychedelics expert Gül Dölen, to explore the cutting edge of psychedelic science, critical periods, and what a high octopus can teach us about the human mind.

Learn about the history of psychedelics and how LSD got its start with inventor Albert Hofmann’s first accidental trip on a bicycle. Why did Gul give MDMA to octopuses? Because studying a creature maximally different from humans, but capable of surprisingly similar social behaviors under the drug, strips away the accidents of evolution and reveals something fundamental about brain chemistry itself.

What is a critical period? Learn how this powerful discovery is leading to new methods of approaching mental conditions. Gul explains how every form of learning and memory is regulated by windows of sensitivity that open and then close and how the reason we are so terrible at treating brain diseases is that by the time we intervene, those windows have already shut. How can psychedelic reopening of critical periods help create therapeutic treatments? We discuss the therapeutic uses of MDMA, LSD, and ibogaine.

Is opening a critical period always a good thing, or is it opening Pandora’s box? Could psychedelics help stroke patients relearn motor skills, or help people fall in love again? What is the noetic property of psychedelics? We discuss why people get a sense that they know the “real truth” after taking drugs. Finally we ask: what does the fact that a single molecule can radically alter consciousness tell us about the nature of reality itself?

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