Healing Trauma, Depression, and Your Brain with Psychedelics

Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the. Doctor'S pharmacy, neuroplasticity is real, the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience, for better or for worse. From 25 on until the end of life, the brain is still very plastic, but the requirements for changing the brain shift radically.

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Now, for quite some time, we thought the brain was just what it was. But now we know that the brain can change thanks to neuroplasticity. Now, neuroplasticity is the brain's ability to rewire itself in ways that lead to long lasting shifts in our emotional, cognitive, and behavioral patterns. Now, while there are many things that can assist with rewiring our brain, psychedelics have been shown to work at cellular and neural circuit level to trigger significant changes to the brain. In today's episode, we feature three clips from the doctor's pharmacy about supporting neuroplasticity to improve our mental and overall health.

Doctor Andrew Huberman defines neuroplasticity and names all the things that we can do to change the brain, while Sarah Gottfried talks about how ketamine reprograms the brain to help heal from trauma and autoimmune disease, and with Paul stamets about treating depression with psilocybin and opening our worldview. So let's jump right in. What I learned in medical school was that you were born with a certain number of brain cells, and that's all you get. And if you used up too many in college by staying up all night or doing drugs or farting too hard, well, tough, you know, that's all you got. But it turns out that's just not true.

That's not true that we have tremendous ability to restore brain function, to bring back all sorts of things at any age that we just didn't think possible. I mean, I just had a patient who was 70 ish year old guy who had a stroke and was paralyzed on one side. And traditional care is like, just do rehab and take your blood thinners and cross your fingers and hope for the best. And I'm like, hell no. We know a lot about how to optimize brain function.

So I put him on a ketogenic diet, which helps the brain repair and heal. I had him do hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I had him do iv nutritional therapies like NAD, which helps the tissues and cells in the brain repair. It helps the energy cycle. I had him take a number of supplements that help with inflammation, mitochondria.

And I had him do exercise, the whole cocktail of things. Cause it's not any one thing that's gonna make a difference even had him do sort of derivatives of stem cells and things like exosomes. And it's unbelievable to see how much he's been able to recover and repair from what we would have thought in medical school. When I was going to medical school was a permanent disability. And now he's not disabled, he's walking, he's using his body, he's doing things, he's come back.

He's not 100% yet, but it just compared to what we imagined was possible, we're seeing things we never thought possible, like whether it's reversing Alzheimer's or autism, strokes, trauma, brain trauma, even. Even things like depression, anxiety, you know, PTSD, we're seeing all sorts of doorways into repairing that. The psychedelic therapies that are being used now, or MDMA therapies for trauma and for PTSD are changing the way we think about accessing the brain. It's like, how does that even make sense that you take, you know, one therapy of psilocybin and all of a sudden lifelong symptoms are gone of depression. It's wild, right?

It's pretty wild. Wild. Cause we don't. We just like, oh, you need 30 years of therapy and psychoanalysis five times a week and. Nope, just, you know, go on this seven hour journey with a therapist and a guided experience and something shifts in your brain.

Yeah. The data coming out of Hopkins is. Are really impressive. I think. I think we're going to look back the work of Matthew Johnson and some of the other groups in the UK and the maps groups, and I know less about the maps groups and I think we're going to realize that, yeah, they are true pioneers and it's a topic for another discussion, perhaps, but what they've had to go through in order to bring credibility to this area has been really, really incredible.

Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so neuroplasticity is real. The brain's ability to change itself in response to experience, for better or for worse. I think that most of the discussion about plasticity is going to be what I call adapt. We don't have to get too much lingo, but adaptive plasticity is the stuff we want, and plasticity after a head injury or from chronic illness is the kind of plasticity we don't want. But if we say plasticity, it's almost always neuroplasticity of the type we want.

I think the way to think about neuroplasticity is that early in life, our brain is extremely plastic. Our brain is basically designed to wire itself up from about birth until age 25, which is not to say we don't need guidance from parents and peers, et cetera, but that the brain is trying to create a map of its experience so that it can move forward from that point. There are areas of the brain that are not very plastic, and we should all be grateful for that. Areas like the areas of the brain that control your heartbeat, your respiration, to make sure your gut continues to churn food along, like, all the kind of basic stuff, the housekeeping stuff. But the rest of it, we're discovering, is extremely plastic.

And from age zero until age 25, just mere passive experience. Exposure to things your brain will change creates a map, for better or for worse. Now, if people have traumas in that time, conditioning, you know, conditioning, you know, there are ways to undo that. And that all starts usually around age 25. People, uh, you know, maybe earlier, but, you know, the skills you learn how to walk, et cetera, all that's laid down early in life.

But from 25 on, you know, I want to draw a distinction, because from 25 on, uh, or so, 25 or so, until, uh, the end of life, the brain is still very plastic. But the requirements for changing the brain shift radically. Yeah. They just. Yeah.

So the. The way to think about this is that the brain, the adult brain, has no reason to change unless it has a shift internally that says what you're about to experience or what you just experienced is meaningful enough that you got to do something. You got to change. Okay? Now, the negative stuff is always provides the most salient examples of, like, a car crash.

You'll never forget that. Where I was when 911, when I first learned about 911, when the shuttle exploded. You know, one trial, learning immediate brain change is always going to happen for negative events more readily than it is for positive events. I'm sorry, that's just the way we're wired. There's an asymmetry there.

It's designed to keep us safe, keep us out of danger, and we should be grateful for that. So. But adding new skills, changing our emotionality, even changing personality, it seems to some degree, can be accomplished if certain chemicals are liberated into the brain and or body, and the chemicals that cue the nervous system. Aha, I need to change something. Basically fall into two categories, and they are adrenaline, epinephrine, and acetylcholine.

So acetylcholine, we could start with that. Acetylcholine is released from multiple sites within the brain. It's actually the neurotransmitter that allows us to. It's responsible for nerve, muscle, communication, memory, memory. There are two main sites in the brain that release acetylcholine.

One is in the back of the brain, in the brain stem, and it triggers alertness, and it also acts as sort of a spotlight on certain areas of the brain, saying, ah, whatever's active right now, I'm gonna mark that for change later. I'm gonna make those connections stronger. It's just the nature of the, sort of like a sprinkler system. It's more general, but it's kind of in the vicinity of, you know, I want to learn. You mentioned that you learn Chinese, so let's say I don't speak any second language, really.

So let's say I wanted to learn Mandarin. So if I were to go in and try and learn Mandarin, it would be very, very challenging for me. So I need to focus. We know that early in life, you can assimilate new knowledge without having to focus too much. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
Which is amazing. Which is amazing. But that's because the whole brain is basically bathing in acetylcholine. It's, you know, youth is lost on. Three or four year old kids speaking three languages.

I'm like, what the heck? Doctor Justin? Exactly. So younger people always ask me, what should I do if I'm not 25 or older? Here's what you should do.

Andrew Huberman
Don't even check with your parents. Learn a second or third language. You'll thank me later. Learn a musical instrument, you'll thank me later. For many reasons, I didn't do either of these two things, by the way, and develop good habits around health and nutrition and learning.

And you are basically. You're pretty much home free. Okay. You know, so those are the things that you're good, and you have this gift of plasticity. It's just, uh, et cetera.

So as an adult, you need acetylcholine released also from this area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis. There's a connection collection, excuse me, of neurons in the basal forebrain that when those become activated, essentially anything that you experience in the time window around that can be rewired. And these are incredible experiments that were done by Mike Merzenich at UCSF and colleagues, where they would stimulate nucleus basalis and then provide some sensory experience, and the brain would just remap within seconds. Now, the problem is, getting basalis to release acetylcholine is challenging. How do we do that?

Yeah, it comes from powers of focus. You have to be able to contract your visual window or your auditory window, whatever your attentional window is. You have to be able to bring a lot of focus to that learning event or life event. And now if you think about negative life events, you can realize why we learn them so readily because they bring about our entire focus. I'll never forget seeing those planes hit the towers in New York.

So I wasn't focused on anything else. I can see it in my mind's eye now still, and I probably don't have all the, all the details right, but that's the level of focus you need to bring to something that you want to learn as an adult. Now, there are things that can facilitate, as we call it, cholinergic transmission. First of all, there needs to be a baseline level of alertness. And that level of alertness is going to come from epinephrine, from adrenaline.

So there is no learning without a sense of agitation and focus. I think most people think, oh, I'm just going to calmly go into this and I'm going to learn Mandarin or whatever. No, it actually requires us a little bit of that. Leaning forward in the chair. Now, your agitation and your, and your knee bumping mark makes sense because you were that guy and you're rich with knowledge, you know, so that's why it's medical schools.

That's epinephrine. That's epinephrine. That's epinephrine. And so you set the stage for that by getting good sleep and by being excited and motivated. You know, the phenomenon of meeting someone and then you forget their name a second later.

You were focused on something else. We all do it. I'm terrible about that, too. But when you meet somebody that you're very interested in, let's be honest, you don't forget their name. No, it just locks in.

And you never forget, you never forget the details. And so focus and agitation and alertness, they, they work together because when acetylcholine and epinephrine are liberated in the brain and body together, it basically signals to the nervous system. Okay, I need to rewire things so that I don't have to deploy all these resources in the future. So if we want to improve our brain function, improve our learning, our memory, our alertness, attention, that's what people care about. And we want to enhance the neuroplasticity.

Mark Hyman
What are the top things that we should be doing? Okay, so get the foundational stuff right. Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep. Get your nutrition right. And for there are many things in, you speak to this in much more detail and sophistication than I ever could.

Andrew Huberman
But I think the omega, the what? What do you say follow the pegan diet. I joke, not vegan. Not vegan. Yeah, not vegan.

Yeah. So follow, you know, get, get sleep right, get your nutrition right, get your relationship to stress, right. We can talk about that maybe at the end, but the, but basically you need cholinergic transmission. And the thing, you need sufficient choline available. And we know that choline is going to come from meat sources, liver, nut sources.

Now some eggs, certain fish, sardines. Sardines. So these you need choline available. Now you can't just ingest those things and expect to get smarter. People always say, tell me what to eat to get smarter.

Mark Hyman
Sardines are going to get a long way. You have to engage in those focused learning. Not many friends, we have bad breath, but otherwise.

Andrew Huberman
You have to engage in those focused learning bouts. You have to decide what it is that you want to learn, what you want to change, and do that. Now for some people they say, well, I don't want to learn another language, I just want to feel happier. But that's actually, as we know, a process as well. That's going to be a process of leaning into some gratitude practice or some, maybe if what makes you happy is a physical activity, it's going to be bringing the greatest amount of, of attention and alertness to that practice as you possibly can.

And there's a lot of literature now pointing the fact that what we sometimes call flow or flow states or getting lost in the beauty of some experience or often involves a bit of challenge. It involves a sense of focus and your focus will drift and continually bringing that back. Now from a supplementation side, the data on alpha GPC are pretty impressive. To my mind, that's glycerophosphocoline, which is a derivative of choline for people listening. Yeah, you know, people.

I mean, again, I'm not a physician, so I can't prescribe anything, but the data on anywhere from 300 to 900 milligrams of alpha GPC before a learning bout, it's clear that cognitive function goes up, it's clear that people remember more. It's clear that people retain more of that information. So there's the encoding part, which is the part in which you're packing in the new knowledge, and that requires high levels of alertness and focus, and that's going to be supported by this nutritional perhaps supplementation background. And then there's a second step. And the second step is the one that in recent years we've learned the most about, which is that just having this heightened level of focus and attention to what you're trying to learn or change is just the first step.

The second thing is to actually turn off focus and put the brain into a state where it can rewire more rapidly. And there's a beautiful study that was published in cell Reports. There's a fine journal last year showing that if people go into a kind of a pseudo nap or they intentionally move away from any kind of focus for 20 minutes or so, after an intense learning bout that the brain rewires more quickly and their heightened levels of retention, the brain just rewires in these states of relaxation. So it's just sort of like physical fitness. You don't actually get better during the effort.

You get better during the recovery. That must be why I did so good neuroscience, because I was reading that Kendall book, and I remember being in the library in medical school, and I would let reader and I would, like, go put my hand on the book. Exactly. And then wake up and keep reading. Oh, okay.

That book is a beast. No disrespect to Eric, because I think that's a beautiful book. But there's now a shorter one, a shorter one called principles of neurobiology by somebody else that is a little bit, but it's still pretty intense. I love that favorite book in medical school. Yeah, it's a beautiful book, too.

It can hold the door open. It's so big. So you need these bouts of relaxation afterwards. Those can come from naps. And now for people that want to kind of accelerate the process, they're like, wait, I don't want to do the stimulus and then the relaxation.

I want to accelerate. There is a way that you can learn more quickly, and that brings us back to hypnosis. Hypnosis is a very odd state of mind because it's a state of mind where you both have heightened states of focus and relaxation at the same time. It's what I call an atypical state. Normally, we're either very alert or very calm.

Right. A nap is very calm, focused learning is very alert. Stress is very alert. Obviously, sleep is very calm. But in hypnosis, the whole purpose is to bring the brain and body into a state of deep relaxation while maintaining awareness.

I think deep forms of meditation do this also. And if you can, you. You can leverage those states as a way to accelerate plasticity. So meditation. Meditation.

The reverie app for hypnosis is great. Some people, including myself, have trouble with meditation because the mind tends to drift. Sometimes hearing a script or something, that can keep you oriented towards something, a metronome or a hypnosis script can be useful. So, yeah, and this all might sound like a ton of hard work, but actually the best learning bouts are going to be anywhere from about 30 minutes to 90 minutes. You don't really want to hammer on something five, 6 hours a day.

Medical school. Medical. I teach medical students. Medical school is like the worst form of learning. Too late.

Paul Stamets
Too late. But it's interesting because I look at the way medical students who have phenomenal minds, obviously, I have so much respect for physicians. The way that you guys learned was essentially to come in there and say, what do I? I'm going to extract the critical knowledge. So it's like these spotlights that come on when something's really important.

Andrew Huberman
It's not 90 minutes of content blitz. It's like you guys learn how to really extract the right information.

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Not intentionally, but I think I kind of biohacked my way through medical school because I lived 4 miles away from the campus and I didn't have a car and so I would run to school every morning was 4 miles and any weather. Where was this? In ottawa, which, by the way, I ran to my nutritional bio. No, my biochemistry exam my first year was 37 degrees below zero without the windshield vector. Wow.

I literally had canadians face racked up. I got there, my eyelids were crusted shut. So I was kind of alert when I got to school. Yeah. And then I would kind of stretch and do a little yoga in the back and then I would run home and I would really hyper focus all day in class and I made sure I was sitting in the front, I was fidgeting all the time, so I was probably stimulating my whatever.

I did not leave that classroom until I understood everything. And then I would run 4 miles back home, I do an hour yoga, make myself a healthy dinner, and then I would sit in the chair for 4 hours until eleven and just go to bed. And I would do that day after day. So you just described the perfect neuroplasticity regimen. Really?

I majored in buddhism and I graduated like the top of my class and I just, it was kind of a joke because I really wasn't into science at all when I was in college. Toggling back and forth between these highly alert states and these deeply relaxed states is the, the secret sauce, if you will, of neuroplasticity as an adult. But what you're talking about is, I would call it inner size. Right. Like we know how to exercise, but we don't know how to access these different techniques that help our brain function better.

Andrew Huberman
Yeah. And it's sort of a shame because most of us are not connecting what we eat, how we feel our sleep, how we feel, whether we're exercising on how we feel. And my daughter, you know, came to visit me. She was really going crazy just studying for medical school. She was in premed and you know, she sort of was older student and COVID was very isolating with, you know, social contact and she didn't, all she was sleeping and all she did was study and she got into medical school.

Mark Hyman
That's great. Oh, she's going to become a physician. Yeah. But she really neglected the self care and got super physiologically depressed. And what was sort of amazing was sort of identified what was going on with her and she didn't even make the connection.

And then within a few days of just changing her diet, exercising, she literally transformed her whole mood and well being and the depression just went away. Yeah, we reward performance and productivity and there will always be people that are willing to burn themselves, including their health, on the altar of whatever it is they're trying to do. And it shifts, it shifts the culture. I mean, it's, I don't follow tennis, but we saw this recent thing, a woman who is top tennis player, forgive me for not remembering her name. Yeah, she stepped away from the tournament citing that she needed to take care of herself.

Andrew Huberman
I think it's great. I think that self care, of course, can be taken too far in the other direction too. We have to appreciate and understand that any learning, any competition, anything like that, is going to involve some adrenaline release in our body. I think if we could all become better at surfing the seesaw, so to speak, then it becomes an issue of, okay, there's a 30 minutes break between classes. Are you talking about the exam with your friends, or are you relaxing under a tree and resetting your mind?

That's a, that's a, that's a key question. Um, are you the person who is, um, you know, at every talk, feeling like you need to be at every talk and you're going out for dinner and drinks and then expected to be in the front row the next morning and performing? You know, when you start looking at things from an optimal, when you start looking at your life, whatever that life happens to be from, what's going to optimize my performance, which includes relationships, of course, as well, then the whole game changes because it really becomes an issue of how good are any one of us, each of us, at regulating the seesaw. And if you are spending too much time at one end of the seesaw, you're headed for trouble. That's just the way, that's just the way it is.

Now sleep. Most of us probably don't get enough sleep, but I think that can be overdone too. I think that many people feel exhausted because the systems for engagement of the mind and engagement of the body are also a bit atrophied. Yeah. So how do people start to begin to learn those tools to enhance their neuroplasticity, to do the things.

Mark Hyman
We talked a few of the practical suggestions about sleep, but is there a way? Because, you know, one of the things that terrifies me is the effect of, of technology on the brain. Yeah. And I just came back from a week vacation in Mexico and we were off grid, like phone, cell phone, computer, nothing worked. And we were in nature, didn't even know what time was, didn't watch.

And my sense of well being, my happiness, my focus was so different. And you talk about this phenomena of a digital concussion from phones, computers, social media. And I felt that like you literally. Your brain hurts add, like we, the incidence of diagnosable ADD ADHD is going up in adults and in kids. I think, well, there's ideal and then there's, there's reasonable and practical.

Andrew Huberman
Right? I mean, I do think vacations and resets are great. I think just like going camping can reset your. Your circadian clocks and melatonin and core cortisol. I think from a very practical, low or no cost perspective, one of the things that one can do is ask, okay, if attention and focus are required for neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, what can I do to increase my levels of attention and focus?

And there's some interesting data on this. First of all, learn to read one chapter of a book without your phone in the room. Just a physical book, not an audiobook, necessarily. Learn to read one chapter of a book per day. Can it be a Kindle book or an.

It could be a Kindle book, sure. The ability, you know, written word and handwriting and reading are baked into our DNA. It's just, there's no question. I mean, sure, we were drawing on cave walls a long time ago, but we were drawing on cave walls. And when we evolved language, there are areas of the brain responsible for speech and language, and for digesting speech and language and producing speech and language, which, of course.

So this is something I struggle with and as much as anybody, but if you're not a reader, still do it. Learning to read one chapter of a book and your mind will drift. People will go, wait, this isn't engaging, or my mind drifted or something. And that's revealing to you your powers of attention, of deliberate attention. It's revealing your ability to engage nucleus basalis.

So if you want to take a test of how well or poorly you can pay attention, well, you know, read one chapter of a book per day. So that's a wonderful practice that will improve the circuits for attention. So, this is one of the cool things about neuroplasticity, is it's not just about learning the information, it's about learning and teaching the circuits for attention, to get better at attention, so you can get better at attention as an action step, and that will allow you to learn more things. So it's lift weights. You have to start a little bit and keep going.

Mark Hyman
So you want to read one chapter, then you can read a book. That's right. And pretty soon, what's really interesting about the relationship between acetylcholine and an epinephrine is pretty soon it starts to recruit the dopamine system. It starts feeling good. To move through that agitation, you start realizing, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing this.

Andrew Huberman
And then your mind will flip off and you'll go back to reading. And this sort of thing, it really. Works for me, is when I have a deadline, deadline. So deadlines are great. I can write a book in three weeks.

Right? And the reason deadlines are so effective is because they deploy epinephrine. When you. When there, it's baked into your psyche that there are some social pressures of being. You want to perform well, you want to know the material, you don't, you don't want to make mistakes, et cetera.

So adrenaline is released, and once adrenaline is released, then acetylcholine naturally will follow you, tighten your focus. So reading one chapter of a book, whatever that happens to be per day, is absolutely critical to maintaining one's ability to focus and therefore one's ability to engage neuroplasticity. You'll also read a chapter. Read a chapter. We talked about all the foundational stuff of sleep and microbiome and all that earlier, right?

Yeah. The other one is to really respect these 90 minutes learning cycles. Don't try and throw yourself into a deep immersion of 4 hours of learning, of something ratchet up to being able to do 90 minutes of focused work. So write. An ideal goal would be 290 minutes blocks of learning per day.

But that's a lot. So if you're somebody who wants to keep your brain sharp, read a chapter a day and then decide what it is that you want to learn. Curiosity. What's that old saying? I think it was Dorothy Parker.

The anecdote for boredom is curiosity. There's no anecdote for curiosity or something like that. The best way to engage the mind is to actually be curious about something. So simply saying, I want to keep my brain young, that's a terrific mindset. But then the question is, what is it that you really want to know?

So if it's about fitness or if it's about health or it's about language or learning something that engages, if it's murder mysteries, even something that engages your mind, I would hope that it wouldn't be something, you know, morbid or something like that, but something that engages your mind, that's going to be important to do for 90 minutes and ideally 290 minutes learning cycles per day. And you might say, well, I don't have time for that. That's actually, people are wasting far more time than that now in terms of the. So those are some do's. And then, of course, if you really want to move things into the optimization realm, it is true.

I don't want people just relying on pharmacology. But it is true that if you take 300 milligrams or 600 milligrams, which is a lot, actually, of the alpha GPC, you will be like a laser for those 90 minutes. You'll feel really focused. Now, a lot of people nowadays are taking Adderall, modafinil, things like that. I personally, I mean that you're the physician, but I personally find that relying on what are essentially amphetamines in order to tighten the focus of the mind is a very slippery slope, because what it does is it tightens up that hinge on that seesaw on the alertness side, and then there's a crash to the other side.

And, you know, there are clinical uses, obviously, but I don't think those are the best way to go in terms of nootropics, drugs that make us smarter. The only thing that really speaks to improved brain function for learning that I've seen besides the foundational stuff are alpha GPC and creatine. Creatine gives the brain a boost, it seems, because it increases the availability of lactate, which the brain can use as fuel. Um, some people, of course, like the ketone thing or ketogenic diet for focus. Um, the other thing is that fasting and ketosis will increase focus.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you're somebody who's falling asleep while trying to learn and you're sleeping enough at night, chances are you're not releasing enough acetylcholine and epinephrine into your system. And fasted states promote that, and ketogenic states promote that. Carbohydrates flip on the other switch, which is for serotonin and for sleepiness. So if you're falling asleep, but we were all taught that you have to eat a good breakfast and you need food for energy.

Andrew Huberman
You actually, I realized you don't really need food for energy. You need neurotransmitters for focus and energy, and so eating to supplement to support those. There are other things that if it's a physical skill that you're trying to learn as opposed to just a mental skill, then there's a whole kingdom of things that are fun. For instance, if it's a physical skill, you want to generate as many repetitions as you safely can per unit time. So if you say, I'm going to learn dance, you want the ball machine.

Mark Hyman
If you're playing tennis. Exactly. You literally want to generate repetitions and in particular, you want to generate failures every time you, you give a bad serve playing tennis. Oh, yeah. That activates the circuits for focus and alertness for the next.

Yeah, it's true. That's right. So when you're losing. That's right. So, so that, and a lot of people don't like failures, and so they back away from it.

Andrew Huberman
So remember, the nervous system will only change if you give it a to do that. And the other one that's kind of an interesting twist on this, is the way the nervous system is wired is it wants to pass off all of its work to circuits that are reflexive as much as it can. You don't think about walking anymore because you learned how to walk, but when you were learning, you were very focused on it. One of the things that can set the stage for more plasticity overall is when you disrupt the vestibular or the balance system. It does appear that whenever we are physically off balance, the brain is primed to pay attention, and the chemical milieu is such that it can actually rewire itself faster.

And whereas I think the nineties and two thousands brought out a lot of important work on saying, hey, exercise of aerobic type, or maybe even weight training can create neuroplasticity, that was great, but it wasn't directed enough. It didn't say, well, what kind of exercise? And what will get me even more plasticity. And so there are some basal things about heart rate and blood flow, et cetera, but anything that involves balance or coordination, it's incredible how fast the brain can learn. So things like dance, martial arts, a real sport, not just exercising.

And I'm not, no disrespect to the, I'm more of a just an exerciser than a sport guy, but if you're 40, 50, 60, 80, whatever, learning a new physical skill we know is tremendously powerful for opening up neuroplasticity broadly. So some people will even leverage this, where after they finish some physical skill learning or something, they might take a 20 minutes nap, and then they might read or they might try something. So when we see these people, I've. Been learning surfing, I'm like 60 years old, perfect. And I'm like, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Mark Hyman
I learned, started learning tennis when I was 45. And it's really a challenge because it's not automatic, and I have to really focus and be present. Well, these and these individual cases are not necessarily the place to hang our hat completely. But for instance, the great physicist Richard Feynman, he was well known for learning bongo drums in the six when he was in, well, it was in the sixties, but in his sixties, then he became a quite accomplished painter later in life. And, you know, his whole thing was approach all of these things from a standpoint of play with intense focus.

Andrew Huberman
And I think the play element is key because the play element keeps the agitation in check so that when you're stepping on your partner's feet, trying to learn how to dance or you're failing miserably, it can. Frustration is a real thing. And so I think that the element of playfulness, some people call it beginner's mind, but I think that should be the anchor point to return to. And people that maintain curiosity, or I should say that cultivate curiosity and that cultivate a sense of play and willingness to take on new vestibular experiences, of all things. They show very.

They show remarkable plasticity into their late life. And I think that it all comes back to this thing, that the brain won't change unless something changes in the weather of the brain. The overall milieu has to say, wait, everything that's about to happen is different. Yeah. Otherwise, why would it change?

Mark Hyman
So this whole conversation is so great because it really is pointing out the fact that we have the ability to change our brains at any time, at any age. Absolutely. And that there are pathways and doorways and techniques and tools that help us do that. And if we do that, we're going to be happier, healthier, enjoy life more, be able to be able to do whatever we want and actually be able to actually maybe even limb longer. Ketamine is interesting because, you know, it's.

It's. It's one of the things that's approved for treatment resistant depression. Yes. And it. You take one dose and it lasts for a long time, which is really fascinating because it's like, if you have high blood pressure, you need to take the drug every day.

Sara Gottfried
It's a completely different way of thinking. And it doesn't make sense to us. Right. It's like, how do you take a drug one time or two times and have profound, long lasting effects? What's going on with that?

Mark Hyman
And how does it work? And it's sort of interesting to me that these drugs aren't just working on your psychology, they're working on your biology. That's right. So can you talk about how. How we can think about using those to address trauma, how people start to think about it?

Where can they kind of learn more? And what are the kinds of things you're seeing? Maybe you can share a few stories from your practice about what. What has happened, both to you as a result, and then also what's happened to your patients as a result of exploring these therapies, which very soon will be legal. I promise you all that.

There's billions of dollars in the space of research there's many FDA applications for new drug applications for these things. There's lots of people working on this in a massive scale. So even though it sounds like, oh, my God, drugs and psychedelics and, oh, my God, you take lsd, you're going to jump off a building and run a train. Well, that's not true. Well, they're safer than alcohol.

Sara Gottfried
They're safer than horse riding. That's like a David Nutt quote. Yeah. Oh, damn. I love horse riding.

Mark Hyman
Yeah. I just came back from cow herding in Argentina, which is a lifelong dream on beautiful horses, cow herding cattle in the argentinian ranches. But, yeah, the safety is quite interesting. There's something called the LD 50 in medicine, which is, what is half of the lethal dose? Like, what's the dose?

Kills half the animals getting drug. And they're like, basically is none. It's like they're just safe. Yes. Yeah.

Sara Gottfried
So my, you know, with ketamine, you mentioned these people who take ketamine maybe for depression or some other indication, and they've got these benefits. You know, there's a lot of people who do ketamine for six weeks, like a weekly treatment. But what's interesting about ketamine is that we think it increases neuroplasticity. So it's not just a psychological effect. It seems to take, you know, if you think of downhill skiing and the grooves that you create, and maybe you just keep going down the same grooves on the mountain, we're getting to fresh powder, and that's super exciting.

So to be able to go down the mountain of your life on fresh powder, do you like to ski? I like to snowboard and I love powder. I love powder. Yeah. So what have I found?

I found that. I'll tell you about one patient in particular. Wait, wait, wait. Start with you. Start with me.

Okay, bring me back here. What happened when you went through that in terms of your own, not just psychology and getting free of those old stories and patterns and well worn grooves, but what happened to your health and biology? So I am a total nerd, as you know, and I like to track things pretty carefully. And I can tell you that when I take ketamine, when I do ketamine assisted treatment, my physiology changes, my blood sugar is better, my heart rate variability is improved for the days afterwards, a week, weeks afterwards, there's a lightness of being that just feels lovely with psilocybin, similar results. So really stable blood sugar.

I noticed that there's this lift that lasts for a long time, and that's been shown in randomized trials with people who've got a fatal cancer diagnosis and are using psilocybin in trials that are done at NYU. We know it's also helpful for depression. There's a Jama paper that was published last year on this MDMA assisted therapy. What is so striking to me is the way that it changes how trauma drives my behavior. I'm just less reactive.

I'm much more in the present moment. And another thing that it did for me that was inspired by a conversation with a friend, is that it got me to realize I knew a lot about secure attachment, avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, and I felt in my body after MDMA's therapy, I want secure attachment. Yeah, it's enough already. Yeah. I don't want to just have the book learning and the cognitive understanding.

Mark Hyman
I want to help out physiologically. Yeah. I want the regulation of that. I want to be in a relationship where we've got that co regulation like a mother does with a baby. You can have that in a relationship.

Yeah, absolutely. So that was a huge paradigm shift for me to realize, okay, I want secure attachment. And so that changed everything, really. And, you know, my vulnerability is this cortisol insulin issue that I mentioned. I've got the positive anti nuclear antibodies, and what I've done is test myself, science myself, all through this process of using psychedelic assisted treatments, I now have negative anti nuclear antibodies.

Amazing. My blood sugar mean, glucose is less than 95. The variability is less. I don't spike like I used to. I feel more embodied.

Sara Gottfried
You know, I used to spend all my time upstairs and also a little functionally dissociated, which, frankly, we select for in medicine. Yeah, right. Like, it's really helpful to be functional. If you kind of ignore your body, it's actually an asset because you have to drive it into the ground to get through medical school. Right.

So I'm not dissociated anymore. I am in my body. I just. I feel everything, which, you know, at times can be difficult because I'm really sensitive. But, you know, the thing about sensitivity and being so present is that, you know, we're like orchids, people with this kind of sensitivity.

And when an orchid has the right environment, has the right light, is facing north, gets the right amount of water, gets kind of spritzed. They bloom and they bloom and they bloom and they bloom. Yeah. And that's what I feel in my body, and that's what I want for my patients or for people who are on this journey. Yeah.

Mark Hyman
You know, a lot of the doctors who are in this space have had these challenges, right? And they're like, well, gee, everything I learned in medical school isn't quite working, and I don't know what to do, but I'm going to find something else. And sometimes it's a kind of wandering in the dark in the desert for decades. But we get there, and you got there, and you were able to, I mean, reverse a lot of the things that were happening to you and do something that isn't, quote, possible in medicine, which is reverse autoimmune antibodies. And I've seen that over and over.

So tell us a patient story where you've seen this, whether it's just the combination, because it's not just like, oh, you can still have heavy metals and eat tons of gluten if you're sensitive, and your gut can be a mess. But if you just do psychedelics, you're gonna be fine. You can't, you can't just do that. You gotta. It's a holistic approach.

Sara Gottfried
Right? And you talk about that in the book. I wanna. I wanna talk about how you break the vicious cycle of autoimmune disease and reset your system and reset your immune system and restore your health. But I wanna.

Mark Hyman
I want you to sort of start with maybe a story of that. And, and by the way, everybody listening, you know, there's been many podcasts I've done with people in the psychedelic space, from Michael Pollan to Gabor, mate, talking about trauma, to Paul Stamets talking about mushrooms, to Tony bosses and Rick Doblin, who's talked about MDMA therapy. So there's a lot of content on the Doctor Stories podcast if you want to dive deeper into these topics. But we're doing this from a medical perspective, which is a little bit different. And I think it's an important conversation because it's not being had in the halls of academia.

It's not really being had in doctor's offices around the country. But it is one of the most crucial conversations we need to be having with our patients about how do we deal with this as part of their therapy. So talk about a patient's story and what you found and what kind of made you wake up and go, wow, this really is something. One of the patients who inspired me the most is a woman named Christina. She's in the book, and she's someone that I met at a yoga studio in northern California, where I live.

Sara Gottfried
She was in her early forties and ran this yoga studio, and she discovered that her husband was having an affair with her best friend. So she had this profound betrayal. Wow. Profound toxic stress and trauma as she went through this discovery and confrontation and processing. And so she left the marriage, and within about a year, she started to notice elbow pain and kind of this crackling and discomfort in her elbows.

She's a yoga teacher, so this is a big deal. It's really dysfunctional. Right? And so she went to her downward dog. When your elbows, you can't do much of anything in yoga, maybe.

Maybe. So she went to her nurse practitioner, who ran a few tests. She had a really elevated c reactive protein. She had rheumatoid factor that was really high. And so the nurse practitioner said, I'm going to send you to a rheumatologist, made the referral, and this woman has private insurance, good insurance, but it was a six month wait before she could see the rheumatologist.

Andrew Huberman
Oh, wow. And so in the meantime, she did a couple of things. She reached out to me to see if I could help her. And then she also made an ultrasound appointment to take a look at her joints. Wow.

Sara Gottfried
So this is before the six month appointment with the rheumatologist. So we started a number of different things. We ran, you know, the blood testing, the genetic testing, the stool testing, nutritional panels. We found that her cortisol was dysregulated, and she was in the early stages of perimenopause, and that was something that we addressed, but we changed the way that she was eating. She's a yoga teacher, so she had a pretty healthy diet, but we started to reduce some of those things that are more immunogenic, like certain proteins.

She was having a pea protein shake every day, and it was a little too much for her immune system. So we went through this process. It took about three months, in her case, of helping her get to a place where she was feeling much better, and she was able to teach yoga again. She had the ultrasound, and the ultrasound basically showed that she was relatively normal. A little bit of inflammation, but nothing like what she had when she first started to come see me.

And then she went to the rheumatologist. She had the appointment, and the rheumatologist said, yeah, your ultrasound doesn't look too bad, but you've got rheumatoid arthritis. Here are your options. In terms of drugs. Which one do you want to take?

And so she left his office. She never took the medication, and she was never officially diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, although she had certainly the constellation of symptoms and signs. And now she is relatively free of this elbow pain that she had. And throughout this process, she was doing a number of psychedelic assisted therapies. I wasn't delivering them to her, but she did a few different things, Buffo and a few others, that really helped her with processing.

Mark Hyman
Bufo is what they call the toad. It's from the sonoran desert toad, and it's basically called the God molecule five. Five Meo DMT, which is releasing your brain at birth and at death. And it's quite a remarkable experience. I don't know if you've tried it.

Sara Gottfried
Sarah, but I haven't tried it yet. I did, and it was the most profound experience. It lasts just 20 minutes, but, you know, I was wearing my aura ring and my heart ability went up five fold. Yes, five fold, exactly. This is the kind of change going on here.

This is how the. The pine system is changed by these medicines. It's such an important point. It's not just your psychology. It's also the way that you regulate, such as your heart rate variability, which.

Mark Hyman
Is a measure of your stress response and your resilience to stress. And it's an important biomarker for so many different outcomes in your health. And it's something you can measure with various devices, even your iPhone, you can use your finger on the camera. There's different apps, you can buy an oura ring, a lot of ways to do it, but it's a very important biomarker. It is.

Sara Gottfried
And I would say, as our listeners kind of start to build out a dashboard of the things they want to pay attention to related to their pine network, I would say HRV is critical. Yeah. So she used psychedelic medicine to resolve the way that trauma was still living on in her body, and she changed the course of this potential autoimmune disease. Yeah. That's incredible.

Mark Hyman
That's incredible. So it was a combination of functional medicine interventions and psychedelic assisted therapy and treatments that helped her heal the trauma and rewire some of the brain. And I've seen data around psychedelics increasing BDNF and other neurotrophic factors. It increases neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and really restructures your brain. So it changes the structure and the function of your brain.

Sara Gottfried
That's right. So it's not just that you have an insight and you kind of feel better. It literally changes the gray matter. Essentially, yes. And I'm sure it regulates immune cells and lots of things we haven't even been able to measure.

Mark Hyman
And I think we're just beginning to start to unpeel the onion here around what these compounds do biologically. And they've been used for thousands of years by humans across cultures and every place. And I think they've used to heal, they've been used to have, you know, spiritual awakenings are used as part of cultural rituals to decide on what to do and how to do it. And it's just a very integral part of many, many cultures. And I just visited shamans in Ecuador and deep in the headwaters of the Amazon, sort of vanishing tribes, the Ashworth tribe and the Sappor tribes.

There's just a few of them left and they're still practicing their traditional medicines in their traditional ways. And I mean, it was a profound experience to sort of witness how connected they are to the earth and how they listen and how they experience things differently and they see things differently and they relate to things differently. And I think they have their struggles for sure. But these medicines have been around for a long, long time. As you talk about the importance of fungi in human evolution, it's not lost on me that they, they've been used throughout human history.

And, you know, you and I recently came back from a trip from Egypt where we took a trip down the nile and we visited these ancient temples thousands of years, 5000 years old, who knows, maybe more. And on the hieroglyphics on the sides of these temples were clearly psilocybin mushrooms. And so the ancient Egyptians were taking these compounds as part of their cosmology, as part of their religious activities, as part of their ways of understanding the world. And this is not just that culture, but all across the world. This has been done for thousands of years.

And what sort of strikes me really is how do these molecules, particularly in psilocybin, because all the others obviously work on different pathways in our body. But psilocybin particularly has this profound effect on our neurobiology, on our neurochemistry and our neuroplasticity, on neurogenesis in ways that are stunning and that are sort of hard to explain for me as a doctor. Like, how does this sort of molecule in nature bind to these places in our brain that makes us grow new brain cells, that increases the connection between brain cells. It helps resolve deep seated trauma, that helps alleviate depression, that's resistant to every other treatment, that helps improve people's sense of their place in the world and the meaning of life. I mean, it's quite remarkable to me.

So what's your view on this? And how do these psilocybin molecules work at the cellular neural levels? To actually trigger the responses that we're seeing now in the research. And I'm talking about, like in the journal, the American Medical association, not like some crazy left wing hippie journal. I'm talking about mainstream medical literature that now is just in engaged in this massive renaissance and rethinking mental illness and using these ancient compounds in plants to help us reimagine our lives and reimagine our way of treating one of the most important public health crises today, which is mental illness.

Paul Stamets
Well, I would like to take a step back to some of the audience understands the progression of science is to remove all the clutter, all the noise, try to find a signal. And that single molecular approach, what got us penicillin, it got us antibiotics, it got us many of the drugs that we know today. But the practices of integrative medicine and integrative science is how much these systems interrelate and influence each other. So with psilocybin, the narrative has been docking with a five hc two a receptor. This is a neuroreceptor that's throughout our body and particularly in our brain.

And serotonin also docs with that same receptor. But psilocybin substitutes temporarily for serotonin in the signaling pathways. And this is why the floodgates of the senses are open. So the big narrative is a five ht two a receptor. This is how these little thymine works.

Well, two articles I'm going to bring to your attention, we can put them up later on the website, the one published in cell 2022. About 25 co authors published that the reason why the majority of antidepressants SSRI's work is they don't. They bind also to a different receptor. Besides five ht two a, they bind to what's called tract b. These are map kinases.

And tract B is so interesting because on the surface of the cells, when it binds, it stimulates neurogenesis, and especially newborn neurons in the hippocampus, which was thought that you couldn't grow new neurons after the age of seven or eight, or some people debate what age, but you basically got all the neurons that you're going to get in your life anymore. Very not true. So now we know that it. These psilocybin just came out in an article that it binds to the same receptors that the FDA approved antidepressants bind to track b a thousand times greater than the FDA approved antidepressants. So you have two articles.

The new mode of activity recognized by many scientists is antidepressants work by binding to these tract b receptors. Newest article, psilocybin, binds 1000 times more than those FDA approved antidepressants. Now, I mention this because I've been a lot of skepticism about microdosing, and I've been telling people for years, be a little bit more circumspect. Be careful about what you say about microdosing. But this recent discovery, if it's a thousand times greater than an antidepressant medicine approved by the FDA at a therapeutic dose of psilocybin, what happens when you take a microdose?

110 as much? Well, it may not be 100 times as much, but it's going to be more, I guarantee you, in all probability, than these antidepressant medicines. So there's been an incredible sea change in the past three months by many of these skeptics who said that microdosing wouldn't work, who are now going, hmm, wow, I'm going to have to rethink this now, because the tract B activation, what happens with track B is called BDNF, brain derived factors. And so it stimulates endogenous BDNF to better bind and to locate and have a greater affinity of binding to those receptors. That's like miracle growth for your brain, basically, brain derived neurotransmitter factors like miracle growth for your brain.

Mark Hyman
So it helps everything can better heal, repair. That's an interesting analogy, because I do cell culture, I grow hundreds and hundreds of species. Is it best to give miracle grow all in one massive dose for this entire lifetime, or is it better to titrate it as it grow? Microdosing is titration of a nutrient over time that as the cells divide and reproduce, you don't overwhelm those receptors with one massive dose. You titrate it during cell division, as your endogenous system is repairing and growing.

Paul Stamets
So I think what's happening now, I'm just on a call with some physicians, is what we call pulse therapy of a high dose of psilocybin. With therapy, we think that's regulatory for PTSD, for trauma. No doubt about it, it's helped me personally, we know this is helpful, but you can't take a macrodose every week. So macrodosing followed by microdosing, that's where we think that you can be refortifying the signal pathways with this new way of thinking. And that's what happens.

The problem with psilocybin, it's got a pr problem. It sounds too good to be true. We all trained magic mushrooms. It must be magic, right? Well, you know, as you know, the New England Journal of Medicine, Jama, the Journal of American Medical association, numerous other journals.

Very convincing evidence for treating depression, very convincing evidence for reducing alcohol use disorder, for tobacco sensation. Two experiences, John Hopkins 67% of the people quit smoking tobacco. That's amazing. I mean, so this is too good to be true, or is it just fundamentally changing our neurobiology and all these behaviors are attempts at self medicating to reduce inflammation and pain and trauma and that you talk about this a lot. Inflammation and pain and trauma and mental health are all interrelated.

This is a vicious marioground. How do we get off that mariogram? And so I think psilocybin gives us that exit. And once we find that we can get off that marioground of self abusive behavior and all the calamitous societal effects that it has, then we find that there is a way out. And psilocybin, I think gives people a way out of their need to self medicate.

Mark Hyman
Well, when you look at the data on the PTSD stuff, it's interesting because I think that's an extreme example of the kind of mental illness people get from various traumas. Whether it's sexual trauma, war trauma. This is a real phenomena, that's habit. And this works remarkably well, better than any other therapies. MDMA also is effective and that's pretty important to understand that it has that role when nothing else works.

Like in terms of our paradigm in western medicine, there's like really no treatment other than any antiperson, any anxiety medication. It's a long term thing. It never really resolves and it's really debilitating. And yet here's this compound that with one or two, maybe three treatments can resolve this in ways that nothing else can. And most of us don't have that level of severe trauma.

Maybe it's 1015 percent of us, although I think one in four have some type of sexual abuse in their life. But we all have micro trauma. We all were raised by parents who maybe didn't love us right, or neglected us, or maybe yelled at us too much, or maybe we had just the trauma of living in the modern world where the threat of climate change and nuclear war and incredible divisions in our society and the instability of our economy and social inequity. I mean, the list goes on. There's no lack of micro traumas.

And so it's hard to cope with these things. And we develop anxiety, we develop poor stress resilience, we develop mental health issues, we develop physical issues that are a consequence of stress, because our thoughts actually manifest in biological reactions. We know, for example, from the data on adverse childhood experiences, which are bad things that happen when you're a kid, that the more of those you have, the more likely you are to have actually physical problems like cancer or autoimmune disease or heart disease or obesity or diabetes. So here's a compound, psilocybin, that potentially can help us deal with the whole range of just the normal, run of the mill stress of living to more severe mental illness, which we're seeing escalating at incredible rates. It's kind of this moment in history where kind of reimagining our approach.

It's almost as big of a change as when Freud talked about, you know, the unconscious and psychoanalysis, I mean, it's a massive paradigm shift in mental health. So can you talk about the research in this field, what you're seeing, what you see coming down the road, what's working, what's not working, and what people should think about as they're listening to this and. And maybe how they can think about it in terms of their own lives. Okay, I opened up a wide world. I did.

Paul Stamets
My brain is going, my receptors are dancing and cross talking with each other. That is indeed what we're seeing now is that there's a lot of crosstalk of the receptors. When you look at the single molecule, similar receptor approach, you're stimulating one node, node and network of many crossings, and that actually stimulates cross talking, influences other receptors activation. So when we. The thing about psilocybin that's so exciting is that it's activating many receptors, most of which I would, I would say we haven't yet fully discovered, because this is a whole organism change in behavior biologically and psychologically.

So it would be not likely due to one pathway and probably not likely even to do one molecule. Psilocybin mushrooms contain psilocybin, psilocin, bayocystin, norbaeocystin, norsilacin, norwegianicin. These are other tryptamines. All of those are legal except for psilocybin and psilocin. They get you high.

The other ones don't technically get you high, but they dock within many of these receptors. Some of them are broken down by maos.

And if you take maoi inhibitors putatively, they may cross into their blood brain barrier and also activate the receptors. But we do have evidence that even some of those without maos Maois do cross into the bloodstream. I'm saying all this because mushrooms are like miniature pharmaceutical factories and psilocybin mushrooms are uniquely compendium of these molecules that I think influence us neurologically. But let's go back a little ways. First, we need to give Maria sabina and the mazatecs our deep bow and debt of gratitude for opening up the therapeutic use, ritualistically, of the masotext R.

Gordon and Tina Wasson, specimens of which were sent to Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who first synthesized psilocybin. So if it wasn't for the generosity and graciousness of Maria sabina, this movement would be decades behind, not entirely eliminated. Because psilocybin mushrooms have been used around the world. There's 141 species identified so far, and the species that most people are using, 90 95%, is psilocybin cabensis. Well, Maria sabina never used psilocybe commensis.

She used slosophy mexicana cerulescens azetochorum. These are species that grow in soil, in pastures or in wood. Sloxybe caresses, goes on dung. The common name in Mexico is San Ysidro. It's the saint of the fields.

It's associated with the conquistadors who are brought over cattle. So slosophy cabensis, being used by the majority of people around the world, has no connection to Maria Sabina. Maria Savina was using a different species that unfortunately is wild harvested only even today. Not cultivated it can be, but in the laboratory, but the production is extremely small. So I say this because there's an interesting bridge happening, and I believe in building bridges, not divides.

A friend of mine went down to Oaxaca and visited Maria Sabina's relatives and the Mazatecs down there. And because of the interest in celtic mushrooms by tourists and by people suffering from mental illness, by medical doctors who want their patients to experience this, there is a shortage of these wild psilocybin mushrooms. So what are they using? Psilocybin cubensis, which can be cultivated using western technology of in vitro propagation to sustain a Mazatec tradition that's been going on for thousands of years. I mentioned this because there is a concept here in Canada, and I'm struggling to remember the person's name.

Albert. He's an indigenous elder from eastern Canada. And he was challenged by one of his indigenous mother of a student that he had. Why should I send my indigenous children to a western school? And Albert Marshall is his name.

And Albert said, because we need to learn the western ways to survive in this world. We need two eyes seeing one eye rooted in indigenous, traditional knowledge, one eye rooted in western technology and western knowledge. The two are compatible. And so many indigenous people are mixed blood. Look at Mexico, right?

You have the entire latino community is entirely mixed blood, most of it. So I'm saying this because this is an advantage of western technology, helping indigenous people continue their traditions. It's also slosophist not being it came over with cattle, we believe, and the arrogant, which is a bird that picks bugs off of the backs of cattle, also spread the spores of Slavs. So that ecotype was not present in the Americas for, you know, until the Spanish came. So they brought with them fungi that then are being used by the Masottecs.

Now this is, this is, this is to honor and to say that all traditions by indigenous people around the world are sacred, should be respected, etcetera, should not be exploited. But it's careful. People should understand. With 141 species, any indigenous population in Europe and Africa and Russia and Japan and China ultimately would encounter these fungi and slosh be cabensis is very obvious because it gets to be this big. It grows on cattle dung, and cattle go to ponds to drink water.

So the whole thing with our egyptian experience with the blue lotus, a water lily, is that the slospy commensis would grow where the water lily would be located. The cows go to the water lily, so you'd find psilocybin conventus. So what I'm saying is that any people resident in the ecosystem that's aware basically on survival and knowledge will come to under to discover these mushrooms eventually. It may take thousands of years, it could take tens of thousands of years. And this is heroin is a problem.

And this is why this movement has been so slow. Think of this in your viewscape with plants and animals, you have a familiarity factor that goes over months, years. You are constantly in contact. Mushrooms come up and disappear in five days. They may not come up the next year, they may take two or three years.

What's that? I mean, you have to. Your memory of that is very difficult to recall compared to something like you're encountering all the time like a plant. So this eclectic knowledge is ephemeral. And then you have war, you have cultural domination, you have disease, you have religion, you have suppression.

And psilocybin liberates people from the shackles of conventional wisdom, from the shackles of oppression, from the shackles of structured religion. These are liberating experiences that bring us all together. Where there's no gatekeeper to God, there's no tithing, no gatekeeper to God. That's good. It's really, and so I can see it might be threatening to the, to the industrial religious complex.

Right. Although it's interesting when you look at some of the history of the christian early Christianity and, and the ancient Greeks, I mean, a lot of the sort of insights and mythicism that they had can be traced back to the use of ergot containing plants or drinks that they used to use. And recently this was sort of discovered as written about in the immortality key, but it was really an ancient part of the beginning of the sort of mystical aspect of these religions. So it's not like a new thing? No, it's not a new thing.

And that's what's surprising. It's been suppressed. And indigenous peoples, especially in the Americas, I mean, they have, they were so abused, and that is a tragedy we should never forget and we should do everything we can to make sure this never happens again. Indigenous voices are important. I mean, that's interesting.

Mark Hyman
I wonder if there's a, is there anybody working on the native american trauma using psychedelics? I mean, I think they have, you know, peyote as some of their traditional plant medicines that they use. But I'm wondering if you're aware that because it seems like a novel but very important idea, let me tell you a story.

Paul Stamets
I was in, I was driving up to Washington state, but I went through Bakersfield, I went through mill valleys, Sausalito, East Bay, and I ended up stopping. I gotta get a cup of coffee. So I stopped at a coffee shop. I'm there, and this native american woman, she kept on looking at me, and then she came over and said, are you Paul Stamis? And I said, yes, I am.

The fact that I was talking to her and what are you doing? She says, well, I'm a Navajo and I'm just accepted UC Berkeley, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do for my graduate thesis. I go, oh my God, you know, she's smart. She's, you know, she's not just indigenous. She grew up in the Navajo tradition, and indigenous people are really emphatic about this.

You might genetically have some indigenous genes with you, but were you schooled in the tradition of ancient knowledge? And she was. And I said, you know, you're in a really unique position to explore, and it's called re indigenization, bringing back knowledge. So indigenous people, at their request, not pushing this on them. And this is what she got so inspired about.

So she is now, I just met her again at the conference in Denver maps, and she's completing her PhD from that encounter in the coffee shop, which she was looking for something to do. And I thought, oh, my gosh. And so she's explored this subject very deeply and there is a resurgence of interest by indigenous people to recapture. I don't use, like the word recapture, I don't like the word rediscover, but maybe reintegrate. Reintegrate, re implement these ancient traditions, because so much of those threads have been broken, but we have echoes through time, or we have some family trees that are still practicing this.

But bear in mind that Maria Sabina, when she would do her Masochitech ceremonies, she had the holy trinity from Catholicism as part of the ceremony. My immediate response was, well, that was a survival mechanism, to be able to practice magic mushrooms within the catholic domination. But anyone who's gone to Mexico, I mean, it's a very, very catholic centric culture. It's very. So Catholicism with indigenous people is really an overhaul writing paradigm.

We can. We could debate all day long. Well, I want to take a minute to kind of dive a little more with you into the research around mental health and psilocybin and then talk about, you know, where it's being applied, what the future looks like, because, you know, a lot of clinical trials are going on now. I see them being published regularly, every week. You know, what, what's promising, what are we seeing?

Mark Hyman
What is that data and literature show, you know, what's strong, what's, what's, what's coming up. The great. I would, first off, recommend that people go to clinicaltrials dot Gov. It's the clinical trial government, us government website. All clinical trials are supposed to be registered.

Paul Stamets
If you want to advance to an FDA approved medicine or therapy. There's 124 clinical trials using psilocybin. 124. So that's like a roadmap. So all the potential indications, alcohol use disorder, stroke victims, mental health issues, depression, PTSD, all those things.

The use of psilocybin for treating depression is extremely strong. But let's make sure we're careful about this. 70% of the people on average, have benefits from psilocybin. 30% of people do not. Okay, so in a most recent clinical study that was published with treatment resistant depression, and you're being a doctor, I think it's two or three medicines did not work, and then you're in the treatment resistant depression category, for which there are no medicines that are available.

That's a very tough patient group. So suicidality became an issue because people who did not get benefit. Oh, my gosh. I'm at the end of my rope. This is my last hope, and it didn't work for me.

So you naturally feel, like, defeated because you're hoping that this medicine would help you. So it's really important that we contextualize this. But the. I would say most of us, and most of us are on the spectrum of healthy normals. I know that's used a lot.

If you're on the spectrum. Well, most of us are in the spectrum of healthy normals, and then there are people out in the outer edges of that who are not healthy. I think psilocybin has enormous potential for the prevention of mental illness, for the prevention of PTSD. We're looking at treating after the trauma, after the event, as a consequence of many factors. And then how do we heal people?

Well, how do we prevent this trauma from occurring from the beginning? And this is where I think the signals that we're getting from meta studies are particularly interesting. A reduction of partner to partner violence, reduction of crime, reduction of larceny, theft. If we can prevent and reduce crime, criminal behavior and mental illness, the return on investment for society is massive. I mean, think about the literally billions, if not trillions of dollars that could be saved if we had only 10% of the PTSD, the mental illness that we have today, 50 years from now, we'd be a much wealthier society.

We'd have more ability to support social programs, to be able to help educate individuals, to get, you know, basically know, housing and food. We can elevate our entire society just from the savings of money. So everyone talks about treating diseases and illnesses. I'm really fascinated by the fundamentally psilocybin makes nicer people. I think psilocybin makes smarter people.

Mark Hyman
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Healing Trauma, Depression, and Your Brain with Psychedelics

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1: Introduction to Neuroplasticity

2: Psychedelics and Brain Health

3: Enhancing Neuroplasticity

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