The Science of MDMA with Ben Rein

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Startalk today. Coming up on Startalk's special edition, we're tackling the subject of the neuroscience of empathy and how MDMA plays its role in that study. We've got neuroscientist Ben Rain here, a researcher at Stanford University. You don't want to miss that one. Welcome to Startalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Startalk begins right now.

This is Startalk Special edition. Neil degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my usual co host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how you doing, man? I'm good, Neil.

Gary O'Reilly
Nice to be back in. Yeah, yeah. Former soccer pro and sports commentator. And I'm delighted that the sports universe has shared you with us. And I got Chuck.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Nice. Chuck nice. What's up? Professional stand up comedian and act. Yes.

So today we're gonna study a fascinating subject that I think everybody cares about, or at least should care about. And it's the neuroscience of empathy. Ooh, empathy. Yeah, like, some people have it. Oh, well, sorry, I'm out.

Chuck Nice
There you go. It's over for me already. Some people have it. Some people don't, you know? And why don't they?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And should they? Or could they? And we got to get to the bottom of this. So, Gary, you put together this. You.

You and your producers put together this show. Why don't you take us in? We've been thinking about this idea for a long time. So, kind of like how this begins is, as with a lot of things, the Beatles, one of their most iconic songs, is all you need is love. Wa pa pa pa thank you.

Gary O'Reilly
Thank you, Lennon McCartney. But this signpost isn't always recognized by some people. So, how do you go from hate to love? It is said you get empathy. But what is empathy?

What are we as humans with empathy? And what are we with humans without it? Can you chemically infiltrate the brain's neural processes and influence it? Like, hijack your brain to do the right thing? Okay, kind of, yeah.

And if you can, what do you need? The answer may well be something called empathogens. Or if you like to put it another way, it's time to do some. Molly, I was gonna say. Or if you wanna put it another way, other good drugs.

All right. So, Neil, please introduce our guests. I'd be delighted to. We have Ben Rain. Ben.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Am I pronouncing your last name properly? Typically, I go with Ryan, but if you do rain, then it turns into brain. If you use my first initial. Oh, B r e. Rain.

Chuck Nice
Brain. I'm going with brain. Yep. Perfect. I'm totally going with a Ryan.

If we go Ryan, then you with. Your first name is just Brian, right? Yeah. So, you're a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Stanford University, and you're studying the neuro bias of empathy and how drugs like MDMA can act on the brain and influence that. You've also been in the world of science communication.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
We need more folks like that, especially in your field, because however vast and complex the universe is, the human mind is greater than that. And you're also active on social media. We love to see that. Let's just start from scratch. So, we've all heard of MDMA, I think, or mollies.

How does it operate on the brain's neurochemistry? MDMA does. It acts on three major neurotransmitters, or neuromodulators. It basically takes serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Those three, wherever they already exist, in the brain and just causes them to be dumped out, essentially flooded.

Chuck Nice
Flood your brain? That's right. Just like Chuck said, just floods it. So. And that creates a whole bunch of effects, which we will definitely talk about, but many of them are well known, this sort of euphoric experience.

Ben Rain
A lot of people get this really intense sort of stimulant experience. So they're grinding their teeth, they're running around, they're sweating, their heart's racing. And those have more have recently been kind of parsed out as far as which systems are doing which of those things. That's why it's such a great club drug, because you have people who experience two things simultaneously. One is the stimulative effects.

Chuck Nice
So you're the dancing, you know, and then the other is the euphoria, because the music becomes more intense, more meaningful, because you're experiencing this euphoric state. So basically, you're, like, dancing and having the best time of your life ever.

By the way. By the way, I am not advocating for the use of molecules. Chuck has never done it. This is. He had friends who've done it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. Okay. Yeah, exactly. From what I heard. From what I heard.

Exactly. So what you're saying is we have these. We naturally produce these three chemicals, but MDMA enhances that production. It doesn't actually put it in you separately from the outside. It just boosts what your body would be doing otherwise.

Ben Rain
Yeah. So there are some drugs that will act like dopamine, for example, where they will come into the brain and they will bind to dopamine receptors and act as if there's. The brain will basically think that there's more dopamine suddenly. But MDMA acts on the existing serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine and the sort of places where it will be released naturally and just causes it to be released. Yeah.

Gary O'Reilly
So, Ben, chemically, MDMA is very similar to meth. Meth, as we know, not good. But NDMA can have some really positive beneficial effects. So why is. If they're so close, why are they so close?

How are they so close? But why do they have such differing effects on the human body? Yeah. So they are. If you look up a picture of meth and MDMA, like the structures, they're very, very similar.

Ben Rain
In fact, MDMA stands. Wait, wait. Just to be clear, you're talking about the chemical structures. Yes. The chemical structures.

Yes. If I just look up the pill or whatever, you know. You mean, like, get into the chemical bond, organic chemistry, and how they're all linked up. Okay, take me from there. Right, right.

And I'm not going to talk too much about that because, frankly, not a great organic chemist. Uh, or an organic chemist at all. But, yeah, if you look at the structures, they very similar. And the full name of MDMA is actually methylene dioxymethamphetamine. Methamphetamine is right in the name.

Right. It's right there. And so methamphetamine acts primarily on dopamine, doing the same thing, taking the existing dopamine systems and causing them to dump dopamine. MDMA does that as well, but then it also stimulates serotonin and norepinephrine release. And so the sort of stimulant properties of both are likely driven by this dopamine release.

And a recent paper out of my lab, the Rob Malenko's lab, led by this researcher, doctor Boris Heifetz, who just recently started his lab, also at Stanford, found that the pro social effects and the reinforcing sort of addictive liability properties of MDMA could be separated between serotonin and dopamine, respectively. So, for example, they took these mice and deleted this gene, sert, that allows serotonin to be sent between cells, and then they gave them MDMA, and they found that MDMA no longer made these mice more social, but it still had the reinforcing, rewarding, like, dopaminergic properties. How well were the mice dancing? That's what we really want to know. Chuck wants to know exactly.

I wish so badly the mice danced when they got MDMA. The only thing that happens is that their hair starts to stand up. It's the only real perceptible difference between a mouse that has gotten MDMA or saline. Do the mouse like to, you know, just stroke each other gently like humans do when they're on MDMA? So.

Well, we've looked for things like that, actually. We've looked for sort of, like, sensory kind of stimulation behaviors or constellation behaviors where they would, like, lick each other and interact and console one another. And we actually have didn't see, I didn't see any constellation behavior in that in the MDMA studies. But, yeah, who knows? They might be.

They're probably experiencing a whole lot, I would think, through olfaction, through the sense of smell. They're very olfactory animals, and when they get MDMA, they're probably picking up on each other's odors a whole lot more. And there's probably a lot of things going on that we could never. If we look at empathy as a spectrum, do you need to be in a sweet spot on that spectrum to gain the most empathetic response, or does it work well throughout? It's a good question.

I mean, to answer that really gets deeply into the mechanisms of what MDMA is doing to drive empathy, which is a whole big question. It's really what has been the focus of my project. Yeah, but if I'm already empathetic and then, I take it, what happens to me? You are a lot more empathetic. Believe me, it's a good question.

Cause it's like, if you're already here and you take it, like, is there a ceiling? You get, can you only bump a little bit? Versus someone's much less empathetic. That's right. Is there a ceiling to this?

Yeah, I would say not. I would say as long as you have. Well, spoiler alert. In the study, we found that the serotonin release in a particular brain area, the nucleus accumbens, is really critical for MDMA's and pathogenic effects. So as long as you have a normal or reasonable amount of these serotonin terminals in this brain area that the MDMA can act on, then theoretically, you know, you should certainly experience it just like anyone else.

And everyone's ceiling is probably different. I would think so. Ben. After 911, I was eyewitness four blocks away from the collapse of the towers and the bodies dropping from windows. And I was very moved by that, that firsthand experience in ways that I had not ever experienced.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Maybe it's a form of PTSD, I don't know. But in the days that followed, no, the months that followed, I had an enhanced awareness of people's emotional states. So it wasn't just an awareness. I would have reactions to their emotional states. I remember distinctly, I was walking through the airport, and there was a woman seated against the wall, kind of slightly tearing, like something must have happened.

I don't know. But I deeply felt that it was. I have to go over and console her. I have to help. I have to find out, what can I do?

And it was normally, you know, I'm a New Yorker. People sit in the street all the time. People cry on the street here all the time. All the time. So it's just something you see in New York, people walking around, literally boo hooing.

So this repeated people that had a sense of joy. Someone was walking with helium balloons, and I felt joyous just watching that. And I said, oh, I wonder if they'll let me into their party. So I could, you know. And so this was something that was externally triggered, and it faded slowly, but I think I'm still in a new place for it.

And this was now 23 years ago. Are you back to being your regular New York self where you see someone crying and you go, shut up?

So I just wonder, you must know whether or not natural events around us, life experience can trigger these chemical reactions that the drugs would otherwise stimulate. As you're talking through that, I was thinking about it, and without getting too deep into mechanism, it sounds like what you experienced was this sort of increased salience of others emotions. And what's interesting to me about that is that many of the brain areas that are involved in empathy, which we can go there, we can take a separate route in through that. Those areas are also involved in sort of this. It's called the salience network, paying attention to the outer world.

Ben Rain
Which makes sense because of course, part of empathy is detection. It's understanding what someone else is going through and really sensing out their emotional and cognitive experience. Like an empathy IQ. Yeah, yeah. And so perhaps the experience on 911 that, you know, really force you to turn outward and imagine, you know, all these tragic experiences really stuck with you and kind of potentiated those systems for a while.

And it's interesting that you initially said a few days or weeks and then you said a few months. I'm curious if that has gradually depreciated that attention or if that's. I'm pretty attentive. Just in general, just as a scientist, I pay attention to a lot of stuff that most people don't care about. No, I would have noticed the crying woman.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's just a matter of whether I would have felt anything for it. So it has faded, but it has asymptoted to a level much higher than it was before 911. So I'm a different person because of it. And so that's a. I would say it's a permanent shift, but not as severe as that shift was in the days and weeks that followed.

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Chuck Nice
Hello, I'm Vinki Brooke Allen and I support startalk on Patreon. This is startalk with nailed grass. Tyson.

Gary O'Reilly
Ben, there was a case in 2021 when it was reported the leader of a white supremacist group went through an MDMA trial and after having experienced that, came out the other side thinking very differently. Really thinking very differently. Is it simple or too glib to say he was cured of his own racism? Or do we have to look at this scenario from a different point of view? It's probably too glib, but I would say as Neil just explained, empathy is certainly exists on a kind of a slider and can be modified by experience.

Ben Rain
No doubt that experience can be, for example, in Neil's case, a really intense emotional event, or in the case of this 2021 report, a pharmacological event where this intense emotional experience was evoked through a drug taken deliberately. In both cases, I do think it can obviously have a longstanding effect. But what's really interesting about this particular case is that it was about really the way he perceived those of different races. And when I heard about this, it made me immediately think of, you know, empathy, of course. And it made me think about this question, actually someone we were talking about earlier that how if you already here, can you go to here you know, where do you exist on this slider where you know your natural levels of empathy?

This was a person who, he was previously a white supremacist or leader of this white supremacy group, obviously had very little empathy for those who look unlike him. And after taking MDMA, suddenly said, you know, what am I doing? Why am I leading this group? Why don't I appreciate everyone equally? And it's so interesting to me because it makes me think that he may have just been that sort of empathy deficit when it comes to empathizing with those who are unlike him.

And MDMA suddenly rush in all these emotions that he had never previously experienced. Suddenly he. Are we familiar enough with the case to know whether or not there was information introduced to him while he was under the influence of MDMA? Or was this something that emerged after the trial just organically from within him? Cause there would be two different, two.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Different things, totally different forcings on what the results were. Absolutely. There's several episodes of the twilight Zone where they get some racist, bigot, evil, mean person who goes through some psychological or some sort or dream state where he becomes the oppressed group that he was offending or slaughtering. And you go with him through this experience so that he can have a new place to stand to then make that evaluation. And so to walk a mile in my shoes.

To Chuck's point. Exactly. Walk a mile in the shoes. So, to Chuck's point, would one need to do that? Or can you just pop up and say, oh, you look differently from me, so.

But I don't care, let's go have a beer. Yeah. Like, it's one thing if you introduce the subject to him, subject matter while he's under. It's another thing if he just takes MDMA and then comes out of it and goes, now, I gotta tell you, before I took that pill, I just didn't like these negras at all. I don't know what it is about them, but it made me sick.

Chuck Nice
But now I gotta tell you, I gotta go make friends.

Ben Rain
You know, as far as I'm aware, Gary, I'm not sure if you have any more information on this. I don't think he was presented with anything. I think he was part of a trial for, who knows, maybe PTSD or something else, anxiety, and just came to it organically. That is what I've read in the reporting, and the report is on the BBC, so it's a really authenticated, proper source of information. You would hope.

Chuck Nice
That's extraordinary. Yeah. And he then reached back to the people who conducted the trials and said, thank you, da da da. I now know what it is I have to do. And those words, basically, or some similar words, sent a chill through these people that said, we've got to reach this guy just in case something wrong is going on.

Gary O'Reilly
So they reached out to me, said, no, no, no. I now have understood what the direction is I need to be going. So christians would call that he had a coming to Jesus moment. Come to Jesus moment, right? That's what that is.

Ben Rain
There you go. And so he had an open, a spot in his mind that was a little bit more open. And I think the NDMA, from kind of reading between the lines, expanded that spot of open mindedness. And so that's. Now they say, we don't think he's completely cured of his bigotry, but he's in a better place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ben, let's get to the bottom of how does your field define empathy? Because empathy feels so abstract, it feels almost too abstract for science to define in a traditional way. Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge, but the way that it's generally defined is the sharing or stepping into another person's experience, whether that's a cognitive experience or an emotional experience. And actually, I've just defined sort of two key players in this, is there's cognitive empathy and there's emotional empathy. So cognitive empathy is really being able to imagine.

Ben Rain
It's perspective taking. It's putting yourself in their shoes and thinking, okay, I can probably guess what they're thinking, what they're going through, what, you know, what type of emotions they might feel. Emotional empathy is then actually sharing those emotions. So this is the same. This comes out of that world, your eQ, your emotional quotient, right?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Where people with high EQ were more likely to rise up and become managers because they had a sense of what people who reporting to them were thinking. So he would know how to speak with them in ways that could maximize their productivity. And if you're just detached from that, you got no place to reach them. Right. With that in mind, is empathy something that we can learn?

Chuck Nice
Let's just say that you are naturally at an empathy deficit, and that's your natural state. Is it possible to raise the level of empathy that a person has resonant within them and make them more empathetic? Yeah, I believe so. I think that in general, yes, empathy can be learned. It could be taught, and it may not even be necessarily need to be taught.

Ben Rain
It can be probably kind of enforced individually where you can, I believe, use cognitive empathy, that is taking another person's perspective, trying to ask yourself, what is it that they're going through? You can use that skill which everyone should possess, even those who are psychopaths and can't experience emotional empathy or don't experience it. You can still experience cognitive empathy and put yourself in someone's shoes, and then using that understanding, will yourself into the emotions. You can say, okay, I understand what they're probably experiencing. What would I feel like in that situation?

And this is really just a sort of simple practice that can be exercised. And for some people, that empathy, that emotional empathy might be very automatic. As Neil described. You walk by someone crying on the street, and you start to tear up yourself. This really immediate, impactful, robust empathy for others, it may not happen automatically.

There's this kind of, you know, like I said, a slider for any trait, there's really a continuum of how strongly or weakly it will be expressed. And I think the empathy is no different. And I also think that your natural level of empathy is partially driven by your experience in your early life, you know, what sort of empathy modeling your parents led. But in the context of psychopathy, it may be a bit different, because what I've been talking about so far is, you know, kind of picture this continuum. And if you're sort of lower on this, this continuum, meaning you're less likely to naturally experience empathy, you could probably will yourself up a bit.

But if you're on the very bottom of that continuum and your brain is fundamentally different, I believe that in the context of some psychopathy, it's generally driven by some sort of genetic difference that affects the functioning of those empathy related brain systems. And so it may not be as simple as just saying, you know, what do I. What do I think they're feeling? How can I get there myself? Because it might just not be your brain's natural state.

Your brain might actually be somewhat incapable of performing that exercise. Are there kind of no hope cases in this scenario? I never like to say there are no hope cases, but I think that maybe in certain cases, it might be useful to employ some sort of pharmacological agent if they want to, to kind of bump them in the right direction, maybe sort of like what we saw with this 2021 report of this white supremacist. This has severe ramifications in the prospect of free will, because if someone actually is at the bottom of that spectrum, in that range, and they don't feel what the rest of us feel in order to make decisions for the betterment of civilization. And then they're capable of heinous acts.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
How accountable are they for their heinous acts? If you study their brain and find out that they're very low on the empathy spectrum neurochemically. Are you asking me? Cause that's a real dumb question, Neil. I'm asking Chuck.

Chuck, what's your. Chuck, please help. I think you're the owner with a PhD in neuroscience on this call right now. So it's an interesting question, really, because, you know, it reminds me, actually, of another case. I talked about this in a video on social media.

Ben Rain
This guy started basically demonstrating pedophilia. He was downloading all these images and terrible, illegal things, and then it was discovered that he had this huge tumor in his brain, and they removed the tumor, and it went away. And it went away. Yeah. And it's kind of the same question.

It's like, should he go to prison for that? It's like, oh, man. Was it matter of fact, he was arrested, as a matter of fact, that particular case, and he was not imprisoned because they were able to sufficiently prove that this tumor affected him. And once it was removed, he was not a pedophile, period. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So at what point? I mean, you will surely be brought forth in future cases as neuroscience matures, as a field continues to mature, somebody's going to want to know whether a court is going to want to know whether someone's behavior was beyond their control outside of their free will. And you're going to be in the center of that. So I just get ready for that.

Ben Rain
That preparation starts today. Thank you, Neil. Yeah. Okay. Today I want a full report in the morning on where you're going to be there.

Gary O'Reilly
So, Ben, you mentioned earlier on there were different types of empathy, talking about the emotional feeling and connection. But did you say cognitive empathy? That's right. Yeah, he did say that. Cognitive.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
What does that mean? Cognitive empathy? Yeah. Cognitive empathy is the perspective taking element. So let's do this.

Ben Rain
Let's pretend that we're walking through a jungle and we're with our best friend, and suddenly you hear them yelp, and we're barefoot again. It's a jungle. You hear them yelp, and you look over and you see them reaching for their foot, and they're grimacing, and they appear to be in pain. Cognitive empathy is this perspective taking. They're reaching for their foot.

So you're thinking cognitively, okay? They're probably in pain. It's probably coming from their foot. Something's happening to their foot. That's cognitive empathy.

It's assessing what someone else is going through. But then emotional empathy is then starting to feel that sense of discomfort that you experience when you see someone experiencing something painful. It's that, oof, like, get me away from this. I don't wanna see this. For guys, it might be seeing another guy get kicked in the nuts.

You get that response. That's just like, now, what if you. See your friend reach for their foot and you're in the jungle and you think to yourself, let me check for snakes before I rush over there to help, because if he just got bitten by a snake, I don't want any parts of that. That's a great question, because that's sort of the. One of the functions, the many functions of empathy is that by being able to, without having to communicate a single word, you can understand what your friend is experiencing.

You're kind of living vicariously through them, and you're able to apply and extrapolate their situation to your own circumstances, which could be protective. In that case, you know, maybe they were bit by a snake, maybe they were bit by a thorn. Whatever it is, in that moment, you know, to stop moving and to look on the ground because you don't want to hurt your foot. That's. That's one of the really valuable evolutionary benefits of empathy.

Gary O'Reilly
What about firefighters bent those that run to not away from the flames? What. What level of cognitive empathy do they have? That's a sort of a different perspective or sort of a different situation because it's a responsibility, right? In that situation, they're paid.

Ben Rain
Yeah. That's the thing about empathy that's so interesting. It can be really manipulated by a lot of different things, like, the context is really important. So in that case, surely they're experiencing empathy, but they're not going in because they're experiencing empathy and they want to help. They're going in because they're financially compensated, too.

Chuck Nice
And it could be the marrying of two separate neuro states. One could be that they have a higher level of empathy, which made them from their younger years, say, when I grow up, I want to help people, you know, by being a fireman. But they could also be somebody who is a bit of a thrill seeker, and so they want to be, when the fire happens, it's not necessarily the empathy that's kicking in that says, oh, let me go save these people from a fire. It's a combination of that. And, yeah, I'm about to run into a fire, you know.

Ben Rain
Right. There must be some gratification in saving someone, helping someone.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Other than realizing the causes and effects of this drug, there are people with very real emotional, psychological problems out there. And what is the medical community, rather than just simply the neuroscience community, doing with these tools that you are exploring that can help people with serious mental problems, especially PTSD? Right? MDMA, specifically, is being explored. Even more than explored, it's now being approved in certain places for the treatment of PTSD.

Ben Rain
And it's very, very interesting because from what I've been told, I'm not a clinician, I don't work with patients. I don't haven't done any of this type of therapy. But MDMA, as Chuck described earlier, makes everything euphoric. And so when you have a deeply repressed, a deeply uncomfortable memory, this trauma, it's uncomfortable to explore it, because every time you bring that memory up or that concept up, it evokes these intensely negative emotions. And that can be a huge barrier for those going through psychotherapy for PTSD.

But MDMA allows for those with PTSD to explore those ideas and those, those memories with this kind of COVID this protective cover of this MDMA euphoria over top of it, where you can really uncover more depths of these memories without evoking that really intensely negative experience. And so it's a very valuable aid to psychotherapy. And importantly, psychotherapy is kind of the key word there, because there's no reason to believe that just giving someone with PTSD MDMA will suddenly affect their PTSD. It's really about a conscious process of exploring it. So when you're experiencing the memory, you're reliving the event, which brings up, brings about intense anxiety, because your brain thinks you're in danger through reliving the event, but you're not in danger, so you're suffering needlessly.

Chuck Nice
So then you take the MDMA, and what that does is completely mitigates the anxiety, because you're having these intense, emotional, euphoric experience along with experiencing the memory. And the removal of that intense anxiety now allows you to recognize that the memory itself is no longer harmful. Therefore, I don't have to suffer through it whenever I recall this experience. Well said. Yeah, I mean, and a big part of that, too, is that it's not only anxiogenic, it makes you anxious, but it's also that it's so intensely emotional that it's like a light switch.

Ben Rain
You just shut it off and, like, put it away, and it's like, I can't go near this. And with MDMA, it's not so unpleasant. You could still approach it. You could still toy with it and get to understand it and. Yeah, and sort of restructure your understanding of that memory in maybe a not so intensely negative way.

Chuck Nice
Wow. But if we look at external forces, you know, social media, how people are treated on social media, the forces operating that make people want to change themselves to. There's their, like, who they are on social media relative to who they actually are. Or how about violence, not only in video games, but films? Can this desensitize us?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
What's the evidence for or against that? Operating on our sense of empathy? So, there is very little research exploring this question directly, but I have a very strong theory on this. Being a person who exists sort of at this weird interface between empathy research at a neuroscience lab and social media, where I'm posting videos and engaging with audiences, I couldn't help but notice the absence of empathy that I witnessed on social media, and that's people behaving towards me in a very hostile way, people arguing with one another in the comments over things that were truly insignificant, like, what's the book on my bookshelf behind me? And then going at each other's throats and really becoming violent.

Ben Rain
And after spending a lot of time thinking about this, I've realized the human brain evolved for face to face contact. We have all of these incredible systems for evaluating the experiences of each other using things like our faces. Like, for example, our eyes are lined with white so that we can easily see where one another are looking, and our eyebrows allow us to emote, we can express emotions and all of these things. We imitate one another's facial expressions and through feedback that informs us about their experience, and we start to take on their emotions. And none of that's in a comment thread.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
None of that. None, none. Especially in a comment thread where it's purely text. For example, in the comment section on a news article, right, where it's anonymous, you don't even have a profile picture or a name. You've been completely dehumanized to a string of text, purely representing whatever idea you're trying to talk about.

Ben Rain
There is just no system in the human brain for empathizing with that. You know, in that, in that sense, we're no longer humans. We are just strings of texts that we can be, you know, unleashing attacks upon without having to feel any sense of discomfort or any empathy for the, for the resulting emotions. And so I really think that the sort of format of social media brings out the worst in people. It's not that we have mean, mean people who are jerks to everyone in real life, being jerks to everyone on social media.

We have people who are kind throughout their normal day, going on social media and arguing with others just because their brain is not meant to perform this type of social interaction. We caught hints of this at the dawn of email, where you would misread the emotions of someone's comment in an email. And in the early days, I remember people said, let's just get on the phone and talk. So at least there's tonal variation, or let's meet up for lunch or coffee. So people knew that something was missing relative to whatever we were doing before, but no one heeded those warnings with social media, which is now a cesspool, as far as I can tell, all of social media.

Earlier I said that there's really no research on this on social media, but there's a whole field of what's called CMC, computer mediated communication. So in those early days, when emails were starting to become popular and people were interacting on the computer, researchers started looking at this. And even back then, this is in the eighties, they saw that people behaved differently in computer mediated chats. They were more hostile. They were more likely to swear.

They would call each other names and be uninhibited and just behave strangely. Ben, is it the lack of social reaction? Say, for instance, a child misbehaves in a family group, the family group give that immediate reaction to the child, that this is unexpected, acceptable, and you get all the emotive reactions words as well. In this scenario, with an email, prehistoric email, or with social media and just no social reaction when you press send. Is this now where we are?

Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it. I mean, it's unquestionably easier to send a difficult message in an email than speak it to the person's face. Or it's much easier to leave a. A note on someone's car that said, you parked like a jackass, then wait for them to return and then tell them to their face. Right.

It's so much easier to not be there because you don't have to feel bad for them. You don't have to be confronted with potential attack. But there's also all of these social cues that. That really impact us and not only inform us about what another person is feeling. So if you insult someone, you see the look on their face.

You know, you see the tears streaming down their face. If you're really meant, you not only understand that they're feeling bad, but you feel bad as a result. And that's the emotional empathy piece. And there are so many of these systems built into human exchange. For example, a paper came out last year, super, super interesting.

They had these women watch sad movies, and they collected their tears, and then they had men sniff the tears or sniff saline solution and then play this game where basically they were measuring aggression. And they found that the men who sniffed the tears from the women right before had no idea what they had sniffed were 43% less likely to behave in an aggressive manner. So there's some sort of chemosensory thing happening where the smell of women's tears is enough to inhibit our aggressive behavior. I'm going to wait until that study is duplicated before I jump onto that one. It's been shown in rodents.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Is it just one study? That's that? Yeah, that paper just came out last year. Okay, I'm gonna wait around. It's duplicated.

Yeah. Is there. Is there a study that can explain why drinking the tears of children makes me happy? Nothing on that yet.

So tell me again, can our empathetic system be shut down because we are desensitized by violence either, like I said, in entertainment or just in the evening news? Wars going around in the world today are. I mean, you know, some of that happens because initially, when war breaks out, there's an outcry. And then if the war drags on for months and months and months, it becomes less interesting to cover in the news because it's not fresh and it's not. And we're basically desensitized.

So what do we do about that? So it's a very good question. I mean, you know, there's certainly. This is not my field to be really speaking on, but there's definitely research on how, like you said, being exposed to extreme news stories all the time, you become desensitized to them. You know what, what, five years ago may have been extremely alarming and terrifying to see in the news.

Ben Rain
Today is an everyday headline. And, you know, our experiences, our perspectives change. The role of empathy in that is. Yeah, it certainly is desensitized because you could only carry the weight of that for so long without being able to act on it. If you hear a story about someone being mistreated or a group being mistreated across the world and you feel deep, deep empathy for these people, but then another week goes on and the same story keeps popping up.

It's hard to carry that weight. It wears you down. And eventually you kind of are forced to desensitize yourself to it in a sort of adaptive way, you know, because it's no longer benefiting you. It's actually starting to hurt you to carry that with you. Can we increase our capacity, I mean, we talk about sensory overload and this is kind of in that ballpark, but can we maybe through other psychedelics increase our capacity to still feel the right level of empathy, even though night after night after night we are seeing horrific images on the news channels?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Right. And what is the future of psychedelics in that way? We focus primarily on one here, but. Well, it's not psychedelic, but a brain altering, emotion altering drug. But there's no shortage of emotion altering drugs and especially entering the psychedelic realm.

So do you see a future for this? If I can tag that part of my question onto Gary's comment, yeah. Well, if there were any drugs that were used for this enhancing empathy, it would very likely be MDMA. It's the one with the greatest, you know, the most robustly demonstrated effects as an empathogen. Other drugs show kind of similar effects, like, for example, psilocybin, which is psychedelic mushrooms, shows this.

Ben Rain
It creates a sort of effect of like unity and oneness, which is a little bit different. It's kind of similar to empathy, but it's. It is different. But this question about what's the future is a very challenging one. And, you know, it's something I think about all the time because the paper that's about to come out that I've been working on for the last few years we end using mice.

So, we don't know if it's true in humans, but we figured out the mechanism of how MDMA enhances empathy in the brain, and that was an interesting question to answer. But now that we have the answer creates a bunch of more questions, many ethical questions. It's like, if we have the power to enhance empathy through a specific pharmacological or deep brain stimulation mechanism, do we? Should we? Who should?

Who gets it? Who doesn't get it? Who decides who gets it? And those are questions that I'm certainly not in a position to answer. I am.

Chuck Nice
Here's what we do. Before any war is ever fought, we take the soldiers and we have a big rave, and they all get Molly, and then they get to dance with one another and hang out with one another doing Molly. Then everybody retreats back to their neutral corners, and now we have the war. No one's gonna want the war. All right?

That's my point. There you go, Chuck. Nice for secretary of state. Yes. Well, similarly, I mean, this is kind of a joke, but I'm kind of serious.

Ben Rain
One amazing application would be, make it. This is so controversial, so I feel silly saying it. No, say it. Before presidential or political debates, let's induce this state of empathy where people can actually understand and deliberate about differing opinions, instead of just throwing hostile comments at one another, attacking each other's points, and just get to the bottom of who's actually right here. You know, which.

Which perspective makes more sense, you know? Imagine what that would do for politics. It would be transformative. Oh, my gosh, yes. I don't understand why I feel this way.

Chuck Nice
This is the best I've ever felt. I'm the most empathetic. No one's more. No one knows empathy like I do. Very empathetic.

Very, very empathetic. It would be a spectacle, wouldn't it? But then there are also other realistic applications, which would be really the clinical applications, like, for example, psychopathy, or maybe in certain cases of autism spectrum disorder, where there's a deficit in empathy, and this person wants to experience empathy to a greater degree, and then it just becomes very, very controversial, because who makes that decision? Of course, it should be the person making the decision for themselves. What about in the context of psychopathy?

Ben Rain
What if you have a person who's imprisoned for a heinous act that they did because they did not experience empathy for the victim? Another side of this is, is there a difference between handing someone a bit of chemistry to alter how they think, possibly changing what their free will is. And then there's an ethical conversation about that. Is that any different from sitting on a psychologists couch every day for six months and have those conversations change the mental chemistry of the person? Is that really any different?

Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up. Because, you know, if you think about comparing, let's say, for depression, SSRI's versus psilocybin, SSRI's, we don't really truly know how they work, how they help. But one of the ways that they may work is just by increasing plasticity and by increasing plasticity in the brain that is making the synapses more flexible and, you know, allowing for change, you might be able to reframe your perspective, you might be able to sort of distance yourself from negative or harmful perceptions, whatever. And it's a long, gradual process that takes weeks or months even. It takes weeks for it to even start, but months.

And it should be accompanied by psychotherapy so that you're creating this flexibility and then you're also sort of reshaping it with the property therapy. I like to think of it like taking a hat that doesn't fit and, you know, blowing a hairdryer on it to warm it up and then putting it on your hat and letting it kind of melt back into the right position that you want it to be in. But the thing about psilocybin is it does the exact same thing. It induces neuroplasticity. It does so through serotonin, but it happens in hours rather than weeks or months.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And if it's the same effect, then there's. Because no one speaks of the moral consequences of getting therapy for six months. Right? That's that never. No one ever mentions that.

Right? So, Ben rain, delighted to meet you and to speak with you. And as you know, we. I'm sorry, Neil. I'm so sorry.

What? I just have one very important question for Ben before we let him go. What's that? Do you have any Molly? And can you send some to my house?

Ben Rain
You know, Chuck, as soon as you started, I was like, I was thinking, this is not going to be a question I want to answer right now.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ben, thanks for giving us your time, sharing your time with us, as well as your million followers on social media. Keep up that work and we'll be monitoring this space for future development. Yes. All right, Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure.

All right, Gary, you too. Neil degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

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The Science of MDMA with Ben Rein

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1: Introduction to the Topic

2: The Science of MDMA

3: Therapeutic Potentials and Ethical Considerations

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