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In this episode I speak with Manesh Girn, a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, daydreaming, and the default-mode network. He is currently conducting research on the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT, in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and others from the Imperial College London Center for Psychedelic Research. In his free time, he also runs the YouTube channel The Psychedelic Scientist, where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy to understand, but non-superficial, form.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCccafaIN6dwBwyl1cwNH90w

Hello, Manesh, and welcome to the podcast.

For those who don't know, this is Manesh Gurn.

He's a PhD student at McGill University studying the default mode network and how psychedelics affect the brain.

In his free time, he's also in charge of the Psychedelic Scientist, an amazing blog on YouTube that tries to give digestible information about the real nitty-gritty science behind how psychedelics work.

I'm so stoked to have you on the podcast.

Well, today I'm really excited to talk to you about a bunch of the things that you bring to this field as I think a younger voice and somebody who's trained in the actual scientific understanding of a lot of these different functions.

At the same time, I know that you have a infusion of Buddhism in your personal story.

So I'm curious to explore those elements as well.

I could start by describing what that means exactly.

So like for me, I got interested in psychedelics through an interest in Eastern mysticism and spirituality and meditation.

And my first entry point was into that was this guy who worked at the high school that was I guess he was a career counselor, a bit of an interesting character.

And 1 time he recommended to me a book on Zen Buddhism called the 3 Pillars of Zen by Philip Kaplow, which is kind of a classic in the Zen Buddhist kind of literature, you could say Western literature.

And I read this and I was totally enamored by the idea of, you know, meditating, purifying our emotions and our minds, stilling our mind and attaining enlightenment like the Buddha.

And I was like, you know, nobody's really talking about this.

Like this is this is something there's something to this.

And at the same time, I worked part time at a restaurant and 1 of the guys there was really into occultism and esoteric traditions and secret knowledge.

And he got me listening to some stuff on that.

And then in tandem, these things just got me really interested in spirituality in general, in just attaining different states of consciousness and of some kind of underlying reality like that's not visible that we don't normally acknowledge is there kind of thing.

So I was very fascinated in that by the way from the beginning and I would read more and more on Buddhism.

And it was, I've been a daily meditator since I was maybe 18.

So it's definitely been a big part of my journey.

I mean, the, I just love the fact that you started to get interested in science and this whole domain through your own version of spirituality.

In my own journey, I've had so many people level the criticism at me that there's not enough spiritualness in science.

And I think that for a lot of people or in a lot of instances, that's just not true.

The spirituality may look different from person to person.

But I think for a lot of us who are interested in the nuts and bolts, that it really comes from this place of appreciating that there's something more going on.

I'm curious if you could just define a little bit what Zen Buddhism is, specifically as somebody who's been practicing Buddhism for a number of years, and it's just not been in the same tradition as Zen.

And so I think I have like a working understanding, but it'd be helpful to hear from somebody who's, it seems, is a bit more familiar with that.

So, so my understanding is Zen is this, it's kind of a more, you could say bare bones approach to spiritual development.

It's kind of a more difficult approach in some sense.

In like the kind of traditional Zen setting, there's less explicit instruction.

It's like, there's so many stories of Zen masters telling people, like, you ask them how to meditate.

What's meditation go stare at a wall or something like this, you know?

And this is kind of a very, it required a lot of figuring it out and not being told what to do or being told why you're doing certain things.

And a lot of it is about transcending the rational mind, right.

Which is the function of, for example, a very, 1 of the things that distinguishes Zen is their koans or cones, however you want to pronounce that, and which are just little like riddles, which are meant to make no logical sense.

Like, you know, what did your face look like before your parents were born?

Or, you know, what is the sound of 1 hand clapping or something like this?

Right, and you'd be given that in these monasteries and like, go meditate on that for 5 days and come back to me with what you get, right?

So Zen is kind of like a very, it's for serious practitioners and who are just like going to climb this steep ascent directly without any kind of help and techniques and guidance.

So it's very pure in some sense and just like straight up meditation, transcend your rational mind and you know, aimed at attaining Satori or, you know, some kind of realization.

That's the word for, you could say equivalent perhaps more often uses Samadhi.

So it's like, you could say a state of unity, perhaps a state of deep concentration.

And yeah, you mentioned that you've had a daily meditation practice going for a number of years and it sounds like there was little, if any explicit instruction or guidance on what a useful or productive practice look like?

So like, I remember reading the book on Zen and not being satisfied with what they describe meditation as it's like, I need more details.

Like I'm sitting here, I don't know what I'm doing.

And I remember I signed up for something called Transcendental Meditation, which made it for it, which is basically mantra based meditation, you know, and I paid the hefty fee you get for being trained in that, which I still don't understand that I understand the rationale behind it, but I paid for it as a teenager, with my money I made being a dishwasher, good use of that money.

And that kind of get me more, you know, familiar with the state of what it's like to be, have your mind a bit more calm and be a bit more centered.

And then as I went on, I kind of got more familiar with the distinction between a focused concentration practice versus a mindfulness practice, just like a more of an open, inclusive awareness.

And then, so I used to try, practicing that.

So I would have sessions where it'd be, like 5, the first 5, 10 minutes, depending on how long it is, I would do breath, just follow each inhale and exhale.

And then the last 5, 10 minutes, I would just try to be as aware of as many things as I can, without focusing on a particular thing.

And I've also included so-called non-dual self-inquiry types of practice too, in more recent years, but, but yeah, so it definitely my practice has evolved, but it's always been some kind of practice of stealing and focusing the mind.

Yeah, it's astonishing to me how many variations or slight ways of modifying meditation there are.

And when, yeah, whenever I, someone talks about meditation, I'm always kind of like laughing to myself about how it's such a amorphous process.

I'm curious for you, what is the sort of like timeframe that you're looking at?

I'm not somebody who thinks that like, oh, if you hit the 40 minute mark or the 20 minute mark, that's when like the real stuff happens.

I'm just curious from my own interest, like if you're doing it so consistently, is it a thing that you do in the morning for half an hour or yeah, what does it look like?

I've had periods in my life where I was doing half an hour to an hour every morning.

But these days, I actually primarily do about 15 minutes of meditation.

Sometimes at night, sometimes during the day.

I like to make meditation as a part of my life, right?

Like if I want to break from research, I'll just sit down and just do some conscious breathing and be present for a bit to re-center, right?

was going to say, after a couple of years of doing meditation, I very much arrived at the same point.

It's been an amazing journey to find myself exhausted at 3 in the morning, very high on acid or some combination of psychedelics.

And then also working as a photographer for Shambhala and being like, okay, well, I am feeling a whole bunch of stress and I'm noticing that I'm trying to shunt it and shove it into the recesses of my mind, I think it would be really useful to actually like, I'll give this space.

And so going backstage behind the DJs where they're playing like world thumping bass and sitting in half Lotus for like, I don't even know how long, 5 minutes, 10 minutes.

And just having people like walking around me, who'd be like, who's this idiot backstage?

It's like, yo, this is going to be like really helpful.

It is posed up in Lotus Plaster somewhere and meditate, right?

Imagine walking on campus at universities and seeing people doing that instead of just like tearing their hair out and like screaming or crying.

But yeah, but what I was going to say is that nowadays my practice is more so I mix it with a visualization practices and, and yoga and movement type stuff.

So it's really I'm amorphous these days And I like to integrate different components.

get back to that in a little bit, because it seems like it's a thread that connects to another role of your life that I know you're super passionate about, which is just self-development in general and mentorship.

But before we get there, I have a question for you about your career path that you're on, that of being a psychedelic scientist, TM, and Just asking, yeah, sort of why is it that you've invested so deeply in this path?

What is it about this field that excites you so much?

Or like, what is the promise you see in it?

So like to go back into this little autobiographical thing, like when I was into meditation and Buddhism and all these things, I came across psychedelics and books I was reading.

And I read this book in the first year of undergrad, I think it was, it's, LSD doorway to the numinous by the LSD psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof.

And this book is just like, an amazing compendium of knowledge on, he conducted over 4,000 sessions with high dose LSD psychotherapy in Prague, mostly, I believe.

And him kind of detailing his own cartography of the different states you can go into and talking about all this stuff.

And I realized that psychedelics had this huge potential to elicit this huge range of states, of experiences, which 1, have huge overlap with these mystical states of enlightenment of oneness with the universe of transcendence.

And also just like a whole variety of other crazy things that you wouldn't really think of otherwise, in terms of, you know, entering different, basically visionary experiences and dreamlike experiences.

And in that book, he's reporting people occupying the consciousness of other animals and lizards.

And, but then when you, I think when I think about how I was told what psychedelics were, it's like, they make you go crazy.

They're like grouped in in the same category as heroin or something, you know?

And I had no appreciation of the nuance and variety of experiences you can get into.

And, and especially not the positive states, which have this positive impact in align with spiritual states.

And so I was like, these things are fascinating.

And then around that time, I guess before that, I had my first experience, which also opened me up to having experience of life, but like watching it externally, almost, I was able to see Manesh as this individual who has these personality traits, these thoughts, these behaviors, and he's functioning according to his own laws.

So I had this experience and it's like, all things, things in tandem showing me how limited and myopic are useful conception of reality and who we are is and how it can be in so many other ways.

And that psychedelics are a way of allowing us to shake off our blinders and, you know, enter different States, which provide access to new perspective and insights and all the rest.

And so I was like, yeah, I want to study this.

There's so many fields that intersect with this, you know, there's psychology, neuroscience, pharmacology, like ethnobotany, psychiatry, religious studies, all this stuff is related to anthropology.

And I was like, I'm a person with a very broad interest to I liked, I was very resistant to specialized specialization at that time to us like, here's a way I can have 1 topic that unifies many things and lets me read and learn a variety of topics.

So then I moved forward with psychedelics for that reason mainly.

Yeah, I'm hearing from you that psychedelics offered a path to studying some of the most exciting elements of what it is to be human and on this planet.

And with a like degree of what would it be power or like excitement, like It can go so deep in so many of the different fields in a way that a lot of the traditional modes of engaging with reality just kind of can't keep up with.

Yeah, and I'm curious when you were, you said you had your own experience, what were some of the takeaways you had from that first or following periods of discovery?

Like what was it like to have the blinders removed and that the external self-observing?

That first experience was really interesting because 1 of the things that I take away, and again this is me interpreting it in retrospect.

I'm not sure if I would have explicitly viewed it that at that point.

But something I felt was basically the like phylogenetic continuity between humans and between humans and other species.

So basically I felt how, how do I not be too abstract?

If you think about the different variations and that our genes can express themselves.

My brother has kind of similar genes, but different genes.

And then somebody, you know, very distant from me is very different genes.

But if you, if you look at, and then of course, chimpanzee and then a parrot and then a platypus, they have very different genes.

And if you, so what I kind of experienced is how my genes and compared to the platypus or whatever, you could think of it as a continuous movement in variation that gets me there.

It's very far, but like it's connected in that we're different forms of life.

We're different expressions of life and the genes.

How I think of it is as a huge multidimensional space of possible variation.

And we all occupy different parts of it, if that's not too abstract.

Anyway, so I felt this connection to other animals and I realized we're just animals acting out our own genetic heritage, which is as primates, we have our own tendencies.

So when I had that first trip, it was at the beach and there were fireworks.

And people on the beach were hollering and like acting in all these kind of ways.

And I was like, we're just a bunch of apes on this beach screaming out lights in the sky.

And, And I felt more affinity towards other animals.

They're just different expressions of life, which we are as well.

And I think overall that experience led me to kind of, yeah, just feel more connected to nature and animals, I guess, and be less so caught up in thinking that we're special.

And I'm also seeing that a lot of what I do and behave and think is out of my control.

It's like just happening and I'm witnessing it.

And that's a big, you know, insight to have at like 17 or 18 years old to be connecting with that.

And that's kind of what's motivated my meditation practice since then.

That's the gist of that first experience, I guess.

I can see like already in that 1 sort of anecdote, how so much of the research is embodied just this, like, it seems like you were humbled in simple terms.

And just the thing that so many people talk about, which is realizing the connection between the I and the many organisms and beings around us.

And yeah, just something that's incredible to me in this research and this field and going back even before like Western medicine got a hold of it, is how enduring these effects are and how almost not everyone, but certainly a very large percentage of people who have structured healthy engagements with these technologies come away with it with their own variation of these lessons.

And yeah, for anyone who's listening, who maybe hasn't experienced either psychedelics in a high dose or just, or has done them, but hasn't had these takeaways.

It's really something that for myself is almost ineffable.

Like really just difficult to put into words.

Like words fail when you're trying to describe the sensation of truth and of like profundity as you realize like, holy cow, like all my quibbling, all my worries are so inconsequential compared to this realization that like we are life and life is incredible and is painful and is but this is so much more important.

So I love that contrast of you being on a beach surrounded by monkeys throwing shit and looking at the sky because yeah I think that's that's what life is all the time.

I wonder for a lot of people who maybe are just learning about or just coming on to the wave of psychedelics as like a legal and safe area of exploration, what you would say to them as a sort of pitch or an invitation to consider like really exploring it and really looking at it with like serious rational eyes.

I think the first thing is trying to first get clear on, you know, what your preconceived ideas are about them and what they can do.

And, cause a lot of people, we're in, it's instilled in us from a young age that they're dangerous, that they're X, Y, and Z.

And so I think people looking, who have some level of curiosity towards it, is to look on the internet, or there's a lot of good educational sources, like the Third Wave, or Psychonaut Wiki is a good 1, or even Arrowhead.

And it's getting some descriptions of the effects, like the actual effects that people are having on these drugs and what they can do, right?

Now, this is not to mention like great books like Michael Pollan's, How to Change Your Mind, which is like, that's the first place you should go, actually, which is a great compendium of both sociocultural and scientific kind of knowledge on the topic.

And I think at the same time, I'm always reluctant to say anything too general because they're not for everybody.

People need to make sure, for example, there's not a history of mental illness in their family, that they're in a mentally stable place, that they're in a supportive context.

And there's so many things that are caveats to having to being able to have a good experience with these drugs, right?

A lot of things need to be taken into account.

But I think, you know, I think psychedelics are aroused fear in people and make people push them away because they're so radical, they're kind of unpredictable in the sense that if you've never had a psychedelic experience, you don't know what exactly you're going to go through as much as you read about it, essentially.

Because the phenomenological experience is going to be as much different than some conceptual knowledge you're getting from a book.

And so I think if I were to try to make people more open-minded to it, I would just share the facts about the research that's being done in the preliminary clinical trials, showing that it's effective for different addictions such as alcoholism, tobacco addiction, for depressed patients, for people who are, you know, have a terminal diagnosis, are going to die soon, can't come to terms with it, but psilocybin and LSD seem to be able to help them integrate their life, which is huge.

And this is not, just not to mention the positive effects in healthy people and allowing them to have these mystical experiences, which they rate as very, like significant and meaningful, and which, which result in positive changes in their well-being that lasts up to a year later, even after 1 experience.

And so there's a lot of, yeah, even longer, like,

there's research that goes as far as 5, that shows like, it actually gets increasingly more effective, Like people who within the first year showed little to no effect will actually 3 to 5 years later show strong effects of like it, yeah, it worked.

So, so yeah, So there's a lot of stuff out there showing that they're like at least worth a look, you know.

But at the same time, I'm more and more hesitant with like, I'm just advocating for them more openly because they're not for everybody.

A lot of people aren't ready for that earth shattering experience that their whole reality has been just 1 of many possible realities or whatever, right.

Or that they were there, their core beliefs were safe long too since they're a kid are suddenly ripped apart and like crumble in front of their eyes.

Like people are just not ready for that and that's okay.

So I think there's a lot of stuff to take into consideration for sure.

And I mean, just to clarify, I, the thought behind my question wasn't as a recommendation to try psychedelics per se.

It was more so, just for people who are interested perhaps in learning more about them and especially those who from just like a curiosity or like a scientific background want to figure out like what is going on here?

Like you said, they are really powerful amplifiers of what's going on for you.

And they have the potential to radically upset and destroy people's paradigms.

And so, yeah, definitely a huge amount of respect that comes with engaging with them or inviting them into one's life, even as a conceptual idea, like without even trying them.

I think if somebody is gonna like look at them and be like, wait a second, a lot of people who do this recognize profound things about who they are and what their goals are and their self-worth and stuff.

I think even just for, I've certainly met people who, when they hear that and they're like, wait a minute, like, oh, I'm not sure if I want to do that.

Just like knowing that as the technology can be, yeah, an invitation to consider and reflect on where they're at in their own life.

And I've come across people who like hear about them.

They're like, yeah, it sounds fascinating.

It sounds like I've read about the positive experiences, but I'm just not ready for it yet.

Yeah, so I think totally that's a good point that you can recognize their potential, But realize you're not ready to step to that yet, or it just might not be for you.

I wonder, something I'm curious, and I hope over the next 10 years or so as psychedelics get legalized here in the West, I hope that there will be an evolving body of research that shows what percentage of the population willingly do engage with them when there's not like the threat of legal action, as well as like what percentage of the population gets significant benefit from them.

Cause right now it's really hard to tell.

And I think the point thing with these studies too, is like there is a lot of like therapy going on.

There's a lot of preparation with the, with the therapist rapport building you know, integration afterwards, structuring and making sure everything is okay.

And then if people are just using it in a more casual way, it's like, it's not guaranteed that, you know, it's going to have those same probability of having a good effect, right?

There's so many, you would say extra pharmacological factors like outside of the drug itself that go into the picture.

And I mean, something I'm interested in really is the psychedelic assisted therapy.

I heard Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, once say that there's a difference between doing MDMA at a rave versus MDMA in therapy.

And there's a reason why you don't have everyone who comes out of a rave being cured of their depression or their PTSD, because

Yeah, and this is kind of that idea where psychedelics don't do the work for you, right?

It's like psychedelics, they give you a window of opportunity to make these changes and to integrate your trauma and to, you know, experience your repressed emotions and to go to those dark places.

But they're not gonna like facilitate the changes in of itself, right?

It's gonna show you where you need to go, then you need to allow yourself to go there and you allow yourself to be present and feel it and then make a intention to integrate it afterwards.

There it's almost like they're the conditions that can help facilitate or like invite the change, but you ultimately have to be the 1 who makes the change possible.

And I'm curious, like this seems like a place where the blend of again, your, the spiritual elements of your life and the research you do at McGill come into play because it's my understanding is that this is really a lot of what you're standing in, or studying this notion of like the neurological implications of psychedelics.

I mean, so like right now, like my research involves data that's collected by the research team at the Imperial College in London, led by Robin Carhart-Harris and others.

So I have their brain data of people on LSD, psilocybin, and DMT, and I'm kind of analyzing in different ways to look at similarities and differences between the drugs and how they affect brain function.

And this whole like area is so interesting right now, although it is very much in its infancy.

I think a lot of people assume we know more than we do.

Not just psychedelics, literally about everything.

But with psychedelics, I'm very interested in...

I mean, at the current point in time, I'm just looking at how can we understand their effects on brain regions and how they interact in more nuanced ways.

And I think, and I think that's emerging the psych doc research literature right now is the fact that when you look at some of these, like at a more coarse level, if you look at the changes they do to the brain, it's very similar across LST, psilocybin, DMT, and even salvia actually, which is interesting because salvia does not work on the serotonin system, whereas the other drugs do.

So it's attacking a different receptor, but leading to these similar brain changes.

And so then so then the question that's arising more and more in research is like, are the way that we're characterizing brain function?

Is that a way that's kind of useful in differentiating drugs?

Or is it just some like very, it's too coarse to even get there, right?

So 1 of the things I'm interested in is trying to find out ways where we can actually say something, you know, uniquely specific to each drug.

Well, the ultimate goal of trying to, trying to, you know, link these unique brain effects to their unique subjective effects, because they're not all the same, you know, especially like DMT and salvia are very different.

Both those are very different than LSD and psilocybin, just in terms of the fact that LSD is like an experience that could be 10 hours, 10, 12, psilocybin, 4 to 6, DMT, maybe 15 minutes, salvia, same thing.

So it's like, how are these like affecting the brain in a similar way?

It's because they're not, but our measures are not sensitive to figure it out.

And so something I'm interested in is in trying to find out the distinct brain mechanisms that relate to different drugs.

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Doing a PhD in Psychedelics, w/ Manesh Girn, Aka The Psychedelic Scientist | Rupert Radio #03