The Psychedelic REVOLUTION Happening in Oregon – Professor David Nutt

[00:00:00]There's already quite a revolution happening in Oregon.

[00:00:03]Yes, about in the previous election Oregon voted to allow the access to magic mushrooms, psilocybin, for well-being. So, across the state people can have now got licensed well-being centers in which you can have a mushroom experience legally.

[00:00:23]And I suspect that it's going to show that those experiences make people happier, make people more resilient.

[00:00:29]They're probably going to be quite useful in terms of helping people stay together as as as couples because uh again, as you get a you get bonding. This communication with other people works with with you know, with couples as well as with you know, other society. So, I suspect we may find that mushrooms are going to be a useful way of giving of actually making humans you know, basically have a better quality of life, you know.

[00:00:52]I sort of asked this already, but I really want to nail it um with regards to when when someone is having what seems to be a hallucination or they seem to be in touch with something from the cosmos. Um is this a real event or is it a hallucination?

[00:01:09]Well, it's kind of both.

[00:01:12]I mean, am I real to you?

[00:01:14]Yes. But I am actually hallucinating.

[00:01:16]You know, you know that, don't you?

[00:01:18]What? I I mean, what you're seeing now of me, you're your brain is you know, your brain is creating in your mind what you think I am.

[00:01:27]But you're still but you're still there as well. Um Is that why you say both?

[00:01:31]Well, that's right. Yes, exactly. Yes, yes. So, every all everything we perceive in the in the universe is created by our brain.

[00:01:40]Uh so, at one level everything is an illusion. And we often, you know, and mostly very very useful and predictable illusions cuz you're pretty certain I think you're if you came across here, I would still be here. Mhm.

[00:01:52]But uh but I might not be. But even say you can't ever touch anything. I've I've heard that said because anything there's a still a space between the atoms in your fingers and the other finger. But I'm pretty sure you can.

[00:02:02]>> Yeah, I think generally generally our brains are very good at creating constructs of the world which are very reliable. Mhm. Under psychedelics they become less reliable and in some ways more interesting because what what we know how Sorry, let me let me reframe that.

[00:02:20]Perhaps the most remarkable thing we discovered in all our research with psychedelics came from the very first experiment. We did the first ever fMRI study of a psychedelic in the brain.

[00:02:32]I mean, why why us? Why not 30 years before? Because they're illegal and eventually we got permission to do this.

[00:02:39]And we thought when we gave people a mushroom trip and they had lots of hallucinations, their brain would light up.

[00:02:45]It didn't.

[00:02:47]Their brain shut down. And the bits of the brain that shut down were the bits of the brain which control how you think.

[00:02:53]And the consequences of that were that other bits of the brain started talking to each other. And in fact, what what happens in the psychedelic state is your brain goes back to how it was when you were a baby.

[00:03:02]You know what babies are like?

[00:03:04]You know, they're sitting there and they're looking at the world bit like someone who's tripping. Everything is magical, everything is strange. Trying to make sense, trying to work out where things are.

[00:03:12]Over the 20 to 30 years during which time we educate people to be like us, we constrain and constrain and constrain the brain till it becomes very much like everyone else's brain. That That is what education's about.

[00:03:26]Really useful cuz it means that the language I'm speaking you understand vice versa.

[00:03:32]But the problem is if you learn things which are wrong, you know, if if as we see it obviously in our clinical practice, if we see someone who's abused as a child and who the children tend to believe that they are the cause of things. Babies think I cry, my mother comes to look after me.

[00:03:50]I've made her do that. If something hurts them, they they tend to think it's my fault. So, if you grow up thinking it was your your fault that you were abused, it can be very difficult to undo that thought. Psychedelics put the brain back to as it was when you were a child.