Research
PT490 – Plasticity, the Role of Set and Setting, and the Influence of Psychedelics
February 27, 2024
Featuring: Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris: founder and head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, founding director of the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and founder of the Carhart-Harris Lab.
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris: founder and head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, founding director of the Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and founder of the Carhart-Harris Lab.
A legendary researcher, he talks about his psychedelic origins: studying Freud, Jung, and eventually Stan Grof and depth psychology to try and better understand the unconscious. He discusses the growth of psychedelics and the cultural shifts he’s noticed (especially in the U.S.), as well as what he’s working on today: researching the influence of psychedelics on set and setting by studying experiences in both enriched and unenriched environments.
He also talks about:
- Plasticity: how he defines it, how it relates to critical reopening periods, and how it’s a fundamental thing that transcends the metrics we use to measure it
- Early LSD studies, the nervousness surrounding he and David Nutt dosing Ben Sessa, and the youthful energy that kept them going
- How plasticity could be exploited to help relieve chronic pain
- The potential of psychedelics to help with fibromyalgia and anorexia
- How psychedelic-assisted therapy brought care back to health care
and more!
UCSF is seeking survey volunteers, so if you’ve had more than three experiences with ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin (must have experiences with all three) and want to contribute, do so here.
Notable Quotes
“In my school of thought, that’s not the problem, that’s the opportunity. When something makes sense but it’s abstract, I’m more led by the fact that it makes sense. The abstraction is an opportunity. It’s a richness, a fertility, and we can really dig into that.”
“You notice when people really put mindfulness to the aesthetic, and they lower the lights and with the music: it doesn’t take long and that much effort, really, before it starts to feel like really caring – like actively caring. And it is an intriguing thing to think that that’s absent in the default, you know? That’s a thing that a colleague said to me once; that she loved the fact that psychedelic therapy brought back care. As someone who went into the mental health care profession, she felt like she could care again, for the first time in a long time. And that was not just ok, that was really promoted and made easier in a sense by the paradigm.”
“There’s different hierarchical levels to these assumptions, but the assumptions are often the problem. They guide our experience of the world, but they can entrench us in certain ways, and that entrenchment can be really at the heart of a lot of psychopathology, a lot of mental illness.”
“I guess one thing I’ve discovered, which is fantastic, is just seeing how broad the community is here around psychedelics, and generationally as well. In London, it was really just a young generation, but here, it really transcends generations, and I really appreciate that. There’s something very normalized about psychedelics here that I started noticing very early on; that it was a topic of polite conversation. …That felt like a glimpse of how it will be, not just here, but elsewhere in the future.”
Links
Fill out UCSF’s survey (must have 3+ experiences with ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin)
PT245 – Robin Carhart-Harris – Psychedelics, Entropy, and Plasticity
The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness, by J. Allan Hobson
Pnas.org: Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin
PT389 – The Art of Ecstasy: The 90’s British Club Scene and MDMA, featuring Rupert Alexander Scriven
