Psychedelics Increase Brain Plasticity, But at What Cost?

I find that people can get in trouble because often we don't really need more plasticity. We need shaping of it to someone who's really suffering and trying lots of things and jacking up plasticity. The brain can take that changeability and can move it the wrong direction. So you get somebody who's like really really ADHD and they have ketamine. The theta brain waves get released into high gear and now they have severe stuck anxiety for months. So there's knowing your brain can also be navigate around that. You can look at your brain and figure out what meds or interventions might work. But I work with a lot of like let's call them bros you know the mix of finance bros Silicon Valley bros you know a lot of hard charging biohacker types and a lot of them come in micro doing constantly and you know every day they're micro doing ketamine specifically or just other no usually it's psilocybin sometimes you know 20 years ago it was medafanyl uh through through dent of Dave's uh talking about medapanyl uh deficits but you know no mostly it's um it's mushrooms these days and you know I mostly say, well, look, if you need more plasticity, I'd almost rather you meditate and get more reliable plasticity, but the neuro feedback brings up plasticity each time you do it in a measurable way. So, you might want to be a little cautious. What I find a lot of the time if people keep doing micro doing while doing neuro feedback is the micro dose turns into a macro dose. the sensitivity. The same thing happens with cannabis or with sim stimulants aderall rolin is that as you do neuro feedback the brain gets way more sensitive to it. Interesting. And maybe 3 to 5 weeks in like within a couple of days suddenly all the plasticity is reset and cannabis hits you three times harder than you expected. Stimulants are twice as impactful. Uh psychedelics three, four, five times as impactful. And people are like, "Oh my gosh, did I take two Adderall? I feel crappy." or did I have way too much weed? I can't get off the couch and like literally increased impacts from the things you're putting in your brain when you start doing brain work. So, it's a little bit, you know, I'm a little bit cautious. I'm not somebody to reach for every research chemical or peptide or random intervention. I'm more likely, okay, look at your brain. Where's the foundational stuff? Sleep, stress, and attention. What are you doing with your sleep hacking? How can we optimize these things? And I would only reach for really aggressive or unusual things like psychedelics under very narrow uh use cases and only with a doctor on board. You know, I would have a I have a good friend here in uh LA. There's a lot of work with ketamine. And so I wouldn't ever recommend somebody I was working with be doing lots of that without having someone like an expert in that on board as well because the variables can change really quickly when you're working on your brain and and what you need can change quickly. So and that makes sense too if if essentially you know the common trope is about like set set and setting for psychedelics and so understanding the environment that you're putting yourself in because you're essentially putting yourself not just for the temporary experience in a powerful state right but you're creating this high sense of plasticity and so if you're creating a high sense of plasticity you want to be setting yourself up for success to be in a positive environment to you again kind of create the maybe behavioral changes of what you want um to I also think it's it's hard to get that harvest. It's hard to pull the psychological learning, the transformation out of, you know, more ecstatic states with uh psychedelics or more shamanic states. Those are ordeal environments. And yes, we come back a little transformed. But the big problem with like western shamanism is that we go forth and trip our balls off and then don't have any growth from it the next day. we're still to our wives and girlfriend, you know, like there's this problem with transformation and um I often for people that are interested in that thing will often get into a different category of neuro feedback called alphatheta which creates this hypnogogic access brings you to the place between awake and asleep holds you there for 20 minutes or so and that creates huge surges of healing nonlinear awareness. This is of course what Dave's program is built around. 40 years is built around alphatheta alpha synchrony. It's a very very interesting experience and that particular category alphatheta alpha synchrony training I find serves the the goals of a lot of people that are these psychonauts seeking the transformation the next step the esoteric knowledge. Alpha Theta tends to give you that that access where you can open the door inside yourself and step through into that place where things are sparkly and interesting and weird and unusual and then step back through having not tripped your balls off. So like you're, you know, you come out of an Alpha Theta session, you stand up and you're a little bit loopy for 5 minutes and then you're walking around the rest of the day chill, having experiences that are relatively grounded. And so you have this wonderful access into that state, but you aren't being forced into that state the way you might with a a heroic or macro dose of a psychedelic. So while I think there are use cases for those drugs, I think that the stuff people want to get out of those drugs can be gotten without them generally. That's one of the questions I wanted to ask about was, you know, are there other ways to access these these spaces? I had another guest on who talks about like even like you music festivals and stuff which I'm a big fan of and have gone on a ton like act as these sort of like liinal spaces where you know we go on this like sort of interpersonal and extrapal like adventure that leads to a sense of transformation and goes into it. So like can you share with whatever you know like what is going on in the brain in these kinds of experiences even without psychedelics and then like what are some of the other ways that we can access this without substances or even without neuro feedback. Yeah that's a that's a great question. I'm not sure I have an answer. I think it's a sociological uh answer to some extent, but I you know really what you're doing there is creating a container and engaging in ritual expression, right? And so ritual expression is essentially creating a sacredness and then acting within it. And I think that that is the set and setting you are creating. It can be a fish concert. It can be burning man. It can be a sun dance ceremony, a sweat lodge. And you know, each will serve different purposes. But when we go into a music festival, we're going with certain perspective around what we're going to get out of it and what we like like to do there. Some folks are never stopping moving and dancing. Some folks are taking drugs. Some folks like to relax and, you know, sit in a blanket. And that is the ritual for that person. So I I'm not sure I know what's happening in the brain, but I would argue that the reason that we tend to be drawn to those environments is because of the opportunity to practice the ecstatic experience where we loosen the the linear shape of the mind. We're allowed to kind of move away from the the pure linear thoughts into the more expressive, the receptive uh the insight driven space, the creative space, the spiritual space. And I think that's why those are so attractive at the very least even if I don't know why what's actually happening during them. Yeah. Why why is that ecstatic experience so important to us as a as humanity? Well, I mean it's sort of I don't know that it is uh for every individual. I think as a species it's really important um because it there's deep learning there and there's deep you know art and and emotion and healing and all the the deep stuff. I mean some of that to get back to some of the idea of brain laterality there's some early ideas in how laterality developed that posits the question that well maybe the reason we had spiritual experiences because the non-dominant hemisphere was sending language in and hearing God was our non-dominant hemisphere. the uh Julian James the origin of the bicamal mind is a good book on that uh the idea that the two hemispheres have this linguistic capacity that temporal lobe epilepsy creates auditory hallucinations and so we were hearing God because our non-dominant hemisphere was talking to us via an epilepsy phenomena essentially. So I think that we spent a lot of time in in a linear environment. We're solving problems. We're watching TV. We're being sold to. We're fighting. We're getting money. We're consuming. It's a very linear. It's a very transactional way to be. And kind of like, you know, think about all of us who sit at desks and we're in this cashew shape all curled up all the time, right? And then we find that kettle bells in yoga become super important because of the opposite because they pull the body out and they teach the the posterior chain to become really powerful so that you're not always curled up in a fetal position as a human. And I think that the ecstatic stuff becomes important for those of us for whom we are curled up in a linear position to butcher the metaphor where we're always in that like non-spiritual non-abstract non-nuance non-emotional non you know non-aware state some education some irrigation of those tissues of those abilities can give people a lot of more rich human experience but also as a place to go to do healing to release trauma to release uh crap. Um Mercedes Elata who described shamanism shamanism talked about the shaman goes to extraordinary reality and then comes back to ordinary reality. But again the problem is harvest coming back with insight especially because a lot of the things we use historically to get to those states are very altering. you know, if you're doing your combo or your IASa or your, you know, heroic dose of LSD or something, yeah, you're going to have an experience, but are you going to be present enough to come like to learn from it, or is it going to be like, wow, I had a cool experience two days ago. Well, I I know I learned something. And if you do something that's not completely distorting but get you some of the same access which can be dance meditation with absorption practices not awareness like simple med mindfulness but like concentration absorption practices neuro feedback intense exercise um I would argue if you're a musician playing music at a high level with other people becomes one of those things as well because it's a rich nonlinear communication. that you're just participating in instead of you know deciding how it goes. Um, and I think these are really important things that we may under emphasize in this modern western linear