Yeah, what if maybe it does, Maybe it did with your brain.

Hi, I'm Michael Pollan, author of this is your mind on plants.

Today, I'm here to answer your questions on twitter.

This is psychedelic support at Alfred Romero asks how does LSD work?

It's a great question and we know part of the answer, but not the whole thing.

LSD is a molecule that is shaped a lot like serotonin.

Serotonin is a very important neurotransmitter involved with mood and a whole lot of other things.

There are receptors in your brain that are configured to receive serotonin.

And as it happens, the LSD molecule fits into those receptors even more tightly or perfectly than serotonin itself.

That's one of the reasons that LSD lasts so long because it just fits so snugly into that receptor, It is an agonist.

In other words, it makes that receptor do something rather than inhibit from doing something.

But beyond that we don't really no, there's a cascade of effects from the time we've activated those receptors to the changes in perception and consciousness that people experience.

You would be amazed how little we understand about how the brain works at carbon buns.

I'm never going to try LSD.

What if it triggers some freak reaction and erases my memories are completely rewrites my brain.

I don't know of any cases where that has actually happened.

There are certainly people who have had psychotic breaks on a psychedelic, Many experiences can lead, can trigger schizophrenia, but psychedelics are one of them.

So the fear of going crazy is definitely out there and it's why many people avoid psychedelics.

It doesn't happen very often, but if it happens once, that's a big problem at Angel Core three asks how do I avoid having a bad trip in the research trials that have been going on for the last couple of years?

They will give you some really helpful advice.

They call them the flight instructions.

This is what they tell you before your trip begins.

If you feel like you're going crazy, dying, melting, dissolving, don't fight it, go with it, surrender, relax your mind and float downstream as john Lennon famously said even with that good advice, there are scary things that may happen.

You may confront dark things about yourself, you may confront trauma and I think people have to understand going in that that's part of the deal and that's why I guided experience is so important, that there's somebody with you to hold your hand through those hard times.

And even more important that there's someone to talk it through afterwards, help you process it, interpret it at I ain't no whiz kid asks, what is ego, death and why do you all want it so bad.

So echo death is the experience that some people have on a high dose of psychedelics where they feel their sense of self absolutely crumble.

I had an experience once myself where I saw myself and I know this sounds weird because who's doing the seeing explode in a cloud of post it notes that then can't fell to the ground and spread out in this coat of blue paint.

And I looked and I said that's me.

The reason this is appealing is if you accept it, if you surrender to it, the feeling can be quite ecstatic because after the walls of the ego come down you have this sense of merging with the cosmos or with nature or with other people.

After.

I did describe this in my book How to change your mind.

I heard from underground guides that everybody was asking for ego, death.

It doesn't always happen, but when it does it's it's one of the more interesting life experiences you can have at Madame Alexa 10 asks serious question.

How does micro dozing work?

How often do you do it?

And around how much so micro dosing is the practice of using tiny doses of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, essentially 1/10 of what would be a normal dose.

You're not supposed to feel it.

It's just kind of sub perceptual and many people believe that that it improves their well being, their productivity, their creativity.

But it's important to state that we really have no idea if this is true.

The placebo effect is very powerful with all drugs and it's particularly powerful in the case of psychedelics which we impute so much magic and power to at ships worth Bentley asks why does D.

M.

T.

Cause geometric hallucinations as opposed to acid or shrooms which were a bit more subtle and flowy, timothy leary spoke a lot about set and setting.

Set Is your expectations going into a psychedelic experience.

Setting is the physical setting you're in.

So on.

Ayahuasca which we associate with the amazon in the jungle.

People are constantly seeing cobra's and panthers and and things like that.

I tend to think it's not the medicine or the drug so much as the expectation that our experiences really shaped by what we expect to see.

And if you have an organic drug like magic mushrooms then the imagery is probably going to be much more natural than if you have a synthetic drug where people tend to see more geometry and human created shapes.

But I have to say it's probably all in your head at kelly rec asks how does hashtag LSD affect those with hashtag schizophrenia?

Well in general it's not advisable if you have schizophrenia to take a psychedelic.

And in the current research people at any risk for schizophrenia are excluded the thinking being that it would make your condition worse.

But nobody really knows for sure.

In general though, psychedelics introduce a certain amount of entropy or chaos into mental funk.

That is very valuable if you're locked in with an addiction or obsessive thinking or depression all of which are the products of very rigid fixed thought.

On the other side of the spectrum though, you have people with schizophrenia whose brains are already heavily disordered and they probably don't need any more disorder.

That at least is one theory.

But there's a lot more research to be done in this area at Jacked You 31248551 asks how do psychedelics help anxiety, they make you forget.

WTF.

So one of the most promising and and moving uses of psychedelics beginning in the fifties and sixties and continuing recently has been in giving them psilocybin specifically to cancer patients.

And I've interviewed many of these people and they have the most moving stories to tell about how a single experience on psilocybin allowed them to confront their mortality, confront their cancer in many cases, and it actually lifted their fear completely removed the anxiety they felt about the prospect of death allowing them to die with peace and equanimity and what a gift this is.

We have so little to offer people in that situation.

You know, normally we give them morphine to deal with pain or dull their experience of things here, something that sharpens their experience, helps them explore their predicament.

And for reasons we don't totally understand, reconciles many of them to death at HD South africa asks can hashtag ayahuasca treat substance, hashtag addiction, I'm researching firsthand, there's been some research done in brazil to test Ayahuasca as a treatment for depression.

But I don't know of work specifically with addiction.

That said most of the psychedelics appear to be helpful in treating addiction.

And so there's some reason to believe that it might work.

Let's see what you find out.

HD South Africa at drug body asks anyone have experience with D.

M.

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Entities.

So this is a very curious phenomenon of the D.

M.

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Experience specifically, many people report that they see these little elf like creatures.

Sometimes they're called machine elves or just elves and they're very friendly and there little and they're very welcoming and it's one of the more kind of common bits of imagery on this particular psychedelic.

Terence McKenna, who was kind of a philosopher of psychedelics a few decades ago popularized the notion to test this idea.

It would be important to find a population of people who have never heard this theory of machine elves give them D.

M.

T.

And see if they see them and if they do well.

That'll be really weird.

At eight A.

Eight N.

Eight G.

Asks how are psychedelics medically used for addiction therapy?

Yet there a Schedule one drug make it make sense?

Well it doesn't entirely make sense.

A Schedule One drug is is a category in the federal drug laws that means that a drug has no accepted medical use.

And this is where psychedelics all lie at the same time.

This recent Renaissance of research into using psychedelic compounds as a medicine has discovered that psilocybin in particular can help people break addictions.

It's been tried with alcoholics.

It's been tried with cigarette addicts and it's been tried on cocaine addicts and it seems quite successful.

More than 50% of the people who tried psilocybin therapy gave up their cigarette habit.

As one researcher put it to me, psychedelic shake the snow globe in your brain and when the snow resettles it settles in a very different pattern, allowing you to break your patterns.

At brody supreme asks imagine the first person who did LSD they were probably going insane.

Well brody Supreme that first person was Albert Hoffman a chemist in Switzerland and he was working with a fungus called ergot that grows on a grain.

So Albert Hoffman's job was to look at all the chemicals and air got and go through them.

One by one, tweaking them to see if he could find a useful drug.

LSD 25 was the 25th and he accidentally got a little bit on his fingers and felt very funny and realized he had a psychoactive substance.

And that's when he decided to take a big dose and he did think he was going nuts.

As the effects began to subside.

He realized he wasn't going crazy and stepped out into his garden and felt the beauty of it.

But it began with the conviction he was insane at Herc Svenja boy do blind people trip on LSD great question.

I have no idea but somebody should ask them at Rebel Poet six ask why is psilocybin, D.

M.

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L.

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D.

And M.

D.

M.

A.

Being so thoroughly studied but not peyote.

Could it be because peyote isn't so easily monetized?

Why aren't we studying the efficacy of ceremonial versus therapeutic use?

So peyote is a cactus that grows in southern texas in a very small band of land.

It contains mescaline, which is a powerful psychedelic.

Peyote is used by native americans in their religious observances in their healing ceremonies.

It's so precious and in such short supply.

The more peyote we used in research, the less there would be for native americans.

And you know, it seems to me we've taken enough from native americans and if we want to do this research, concentrate on mescal in the synthetic version of the chemical produced by Peyote.

Now, Mescaline has challenges in a research context.

The big one is It lasts a really long time.

Like 14 hours.

You will be done with mescaline before mescaline is done with you.

So it's a lot of therapeutic time, a lot of therapeutic support.

It just may not be practical.

Would it be valuable.

It could be because mescal in unlike other psychedelics doesn't take you to another dimension.

It really anchors you here but more deeply here and now than you've ever felt.

It also is a drug that you can talk on and engage with other people.

It has some of the qualities of M.

D.

M.

A.

Or ecstasy which is very relational drugs.

So I could imagine it being used in group therapy at Jesus.

The RAM asks could LSD be used as a wound antiseptic doesn't seem like a good idea.

I mean if that LSD gets in the bloodstream you're going to have you know you're gonna have a trip.

I would not advise using LSD as a first date at gator Neil JR asks didn't Cary Grant's doctor prescribed him LSD for depression.

I remember reading he once told a friend that it was the best thing he ever did in his entire life.

Well it's true.

Cary Grant received psychedelic therapy in Los Angeles in the late fifties he had many sessions and he claimed that it was absolutely liberating at AOC tweets.

It is ridiculous that Congress upholds war on drugs are barriers on federal research into substances like psilocybin.

Ibogaine an M.

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When early results are indicating major promise in treating PTSD addiction and more.

I'm trying again to lift them so we can pursue the science.

The research itself is not being stopped because of the drug war.

The F.

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A.

And the D.

E.

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Has approved these university research trials.

The barriers right now are two federal money being used to support this research so far.

With one small exception NIH money has not been available for psychedelic research.

It's just considered too controversial.

So all the amazing research that's been done to look at the potential of psilocybin and M.

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M.

A.

To treat trauma, to treat addiction to to depression has all been done using private money, private philanthropy.

But really if the research is going to gain legitimacy and scale up as it needs to, the NIH is going to need to step in and anything politicians can do to encourage that is I think really, really helpful.

The one exception I alluded to is there is an N.

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M.

H.

Grant that was given to some In a laboratory at Yale who was studying psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder.

So this may represent a crack in the wall and a new opening toward federal support for psychedelic research, which is really overdue.

At this point at Katie Weston asked why are psychedelics so frowned upon?

You know, there was a lot of baggage that got attached to psychedelics in the 60s.

They were regarded as real disruptive to society and in many ways they were.

But their identity is changing right now.