Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show where we talk about all things drugs. But any views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any type of throat. Hello, Psychoactive listeners, Today you're in for a real treat. My guest is one of the outstanding psychedelic pioneers. Her name is Lady Amanda Fielding. If you've already heard of her, it's probably because she founded and directs the Beck Foundation, which has been Britain's leading research and advocacy institute focused on psychedelics since the late nineteen nineties. But that was not the start of Amanda's work in this area. Indeed, her experimentation and advocacy date back to the sixties, when she first started speaking about the benefits of psychedelics. She's played a key role in legitimizing this issue in Britain and even globally. And not long ago, Amanda teamed up with her son Cosmo to create a for profits psychedelics company called Beckley psy Tech. She has led a truly fascinating life, which is mostly what I want to talk about with her today, and she's still going full steam ahead. So Amanda, thank you ever so much for joining me on Psychoactives. It's a great pleasure. So listen, I have to tell you. When I prepare for this, I'm remembering back it's I had started the Lindi Smith Center, wasn't even called Drug Policy Alliance at this point, and you know, I get a call from you. I don't even know if I knew who you were back then, and you're in New York and we land up having dinner and you're talking about all this stuff you want to do on psychedelics and da da da da da, And I'm thinking, who is this lady? I mean, who is this crazy British aristocratic lady who thinks she's going to change the world. But the truth is you've been doing it, and you've done it. So I want to start off by saying congratulations for whatever initial skepticism I had about you, you know that's my bad, and you've been having a tremendous impact. So I want to ask you, first of all, what is it you're most proud about that you've accomplished over these last few decades. I suppose it in from a sort of way, my dream has come true because my passion was always mysticism, the study of mysticism from a very small child, because I had a very kind of isolated up bringing, nothing much else to do except kind of dream and have mystical experiences. And then I studied all the states of consciousness from a young age. When I was sixteen, I was introduced to cannabis, and then when I was twenty one, I think it was I was introduced to LSD. And then most importantly, when I was twenty three, I met a Dutch scientist doctor who was, in my opinion, the only genius I've met who had two hypothesis about what is the underlying mechanisms which alter consciousness in taking psychedelics but also natural ways of exercise, fasting, meditation, all of those sort of things. So I suddenly got a grip on how you could use psychedelics which are tools to alter consciousness and actually control how you perform with them, you know. So it was a satin getting into control of the tools when used. And for me that was a magical change because before that I thought, well, psychedelics absolutely wonderful, but you can't live on right. And then with this knowledge, I've realized my goodness. Men, So I as you mentioned this Dutch lover who has such a great influence on you, Bar, but there were two other men or males I should say, who I understand had a major impact on you. One of them I think was your father. Can you just say a little something about him. Yeah, he was a very kind of eccentric and charming man. I mean we lived on the edge of a fen in an old Anglo Saxon fortress which was rebuilt in two times with three modes, and we had no heating or petrol or anything like that, so new one came near us the whole winter. It was a very isolated in the sense of Alice in Wonderland. Life, quite tough farming. And my father was a big influence because he was very intelligent and he was very anti authority. I remember he said to me, whatever the government tells you always do the opposite, and I always thought that was a very wise bit of advice. And he came back from the board that diabetic and I was free. And I became his kind of his pet dog, his Cara, who stopped him falling into ditches and passing out. And you were like the youngest four kids. And as I understand that your family was kind of the impoverished aristocracy. They had the land but no money. And your dad was an alternative, contrarian thinker, And so I guess that sort of opens you up. He was not somebody to rebel against, but maybe somebody who opens you up into the ways of thinking and more absolutely ways He used to drive over the center of roundabouts instance, he couldn't be bothered to go around and say that said. I mean, you know he was. He was crazy. But he never did psychede Alex himself as far as you know, or did he No, he would have loved it. He loved people on psychedelics. He felt completely at home with them. But because if his bad diabetes, I always felt nervous of providing them for him in case it had a bad effect. Might know what to do. I mean, he was on on the edge of hyperglycemia all the time because he kept his sugar very locally. Didn't want to go blind, as he was an artist, and so he went in and out of kind of control of consciousness. So it was rather like being with someone on edesty. Actually, And your mother was was also a free thinker, not so free, but she was. She was the daughter of a First World War hero, so she had certain noble attitude to life, and she kept the show of the road, which I can't pretend to my father, I think. And there was another figure I was going to say, but really, another male figure in your life who I think you say you learned something about the Lepazy from and who was was your other love of your life in your early years. I'm thinking about Birdie. Oh Birdie, Oh Birdie. Sorry I produced wrong, but yes, tell us about Birdie. Birdie was a great love of my life. I found him when his mother died on the window sill of flat in London, overlooking the river, and I brought him in and he was a day old. He had no feathers, and I fed him on a paintbrush with warm wheat a box and anyway he totally fed in love with me and I with him, and he literally became a kind of holy spirit, a superior spirit. He was always the boss. And when he grew up, my partner said, come on, we're going to be landed with his pigeon for the rest of our lives. Let's put him out and let him fly. And I put him out, and then I thought, no, I'm not going to put him out. He won't survive. So I took him in and he was with us for the next fifteen years. Sir never in a cage. He was always free, and in the flat in London, we had the windows open so he could go out and fly and find himself a mate. But I was his mate. So all the other pigeons came in because he was a little rich boy of the neighborhood and lived in our apartment, but he was by mate. And what did you learn from this relationship? A lot? I really learned a lot. He was my teacher. He was a very kind of dominant figure. Um there was no doubt he was a kind of leader, and he was an amazing personality. And I had very very strong telepathy with him. I always knew when he was in danger and sadly, I always had the feeling that he was going to rather be sacrificed like Jesus Christ, that someone was going to kill him, And so I was always anxious for him because it was a kind of artificial life in the sense that he was a wild bird but living with me. So he lived in London and flew out of the window over the river and flew around London. And then on one occasion we took him camping with us and lost him. He was terribly jealous and lost him for ten days. So then I put adverts in the Times. I then went on the BBC News appealing to the nature to find him and returned him. And the television was blocked with thousands of people seeing him and saying he was held there. And we went all over long England trying to find him. And then the only telephone out of thousands of the telephone cause which got through was the one with Birdie. Because the man didn't have a telephone, he had sent his son to the police station, and because it was the police station ringing up, the call was transferred to me. Did you ever dose Burly with any with any elicty or anything? He used to dose himself. He loved cannabis, and actually we had might source cannabis and they were They played with the flower arrangement and at the cannabis and then kind of jumped up the flowers and jumped off and it was very sweet. And I also had two toads who lived with us for many many years free in the house, and a hedgehog. It was a very nice household, and I had a very long suffering partner to put up with these rivals. You know, most people when they talk people, especially in this field, oftentimes they describe their first psychedelics experience as um, you know, oftentimes a glorious one. But I think in your case, it was a horrific one. It was a very very damaging experience. But it was impressive because many people would be traumatized by an experience like that, and you know, if this hurts you for months and just say enough with that. I've seen this horrible thing. I don't want to go back there. But you came back, sort of like the person who falls off a horse and says get right back on or something exactly, or the person who is allergic to the sea and ends up falling in love with someone who wants to go across that plantic on the raft. So that was me when it happened. I retired to back clear the house I grew up in into a hut here in the woods lovely, and after about three months someone came and say, come on, you must come a lovely party in London with Ravishanka playing. It will be fun. So I went and there I met this Dutch scientist, bart Uguez, who had arrived that evening at the invitation of someone called Joe Mellen and it would just love at first sight. So he actually had made the LSD. He was the scientist. He was the top favorite pupil in Amsterdam, and all the professors wanted him. And then he had suddenly realized the wonder of psychedelics. And he was absolutely a dream come true to me because he had this fantastic knowledge of natural science to a level that I hadn't known. You know, my my family was artistic and culture and blah blah blah, all of that. But he was a um an encyclopedia of knowledge of the natural scientists. He came from family of natural past doctors, so he'd grown up in a household with two bars and you had a hot bath and a teasing code bar every day. So he'd grown in that sort of world, and his mother had died. He said, to be a genius, you need your mother to die eighteen months or whenever his mother's side, and he was kind of obsessive really basically as a kind of substitute for losing his beloved mother. And as opposed to most people who take it LSD and think how interesting, He thought, now, how is it having its effect? And he came up with a very convincing and clever hypothesis that the underlying effect was more blood in the brain is so suddenly you had billions more brain cells combusting glucas and oxygen, and so you had much greater connectivity in the brain. And then you suffered from glucose lack because the brain cells use so much in high level cognition. So basically I fell in love with this hypothesis. That was because I found that I control my level of consciousness. I could take their LSD. In those days, we took big doses. Two and fifty micrograms was a normal trip in the sixties. So we took that every day more less and they would have a gap and take them off. But I found that with the knowledge I had got of how it worked, by increasing the capillary volume of brains, I found one could keep one's concentration and work at a higher level. Because we were kind of obsessively interested in the human animal would upright talking, we become how we are, why we did to complete Nightmare, as well as being so clever, what makes humans specifically human? And so that was a passion and it was just a very very exciting period. We'll be talking more after we hear this. Add One of the things I remember you telling me when earlier we met was that you were in that that you had a daily practice of micro dosing, and that you were micro dos you know, every day or most days of the week, for years at a time. And I've also you talked about taking higher doses and describing that sometimes when you take the higher doses repeatedly, you develop a tolerance such that taking the higher doses repeatedly almost becomes like micro dosing. That's exactly so I wonder if you could just say a little more about your own practice, both in the past and more recently, and the macro dozing versus the micro dosing and the similarities, etcetera. Well, well, I'll tell you about my old habits, because modern habits you're not allowed to talk about. In the old habits, Um, it was pre pre criminalization. Well, well, actually, a man, let me just say that. You know, I think you know some of that fears about talking about the present time are fading. So I want you to know that, in your honor, I took a little micro dose right before this session here, so so you know, I am in the moment under a very small dose, and I'm kind of curious to see if my producers noticed any difference. But tell me about your old patterns and then you can share about the contemporary ones if you like. Well, I too took a little microtion on on a meeting, and um, in the old Dave when pre criminalization, we used to take two fifty normal big doses, but we took it more or less every day. I think it still has effect, but you get familiar with it. It's like hungry cows in the clover field. When you let them into the clover field, they all eat the clover and get rather ill, But once they've been in there for a few days, they kind of settled down, and I think getting high it is rather like that. It's still changes you, but not nearly as much. So, I having suffered my trauma of being given this whatever four thousand trips when I didn't ask for it, I didn't really like sudden, big trips, and I found that the when you've got there and got more used to it and balanced and could feel that one was high and enhanced cognition, but at the same time, one wasn't in any sense out of control. And that was a state I liked very much, and we liked it so much we never really wanted to have many days without it, because one didn't get a hangover when months stopped, but one came slightly down. And if you're in a beautiful place like Egypt or whatever, you know, having a good conversation, why why come down? So were you? Were you actually dosing? Then at the micro rim level for most days over many years back then, No, that was early on it was at a big dost dost But for how long a period was that over months or years or well, no one would do it for whatever, a couple of weeks and then have a break. One of the things we were doing with psychoanalyzing ourselves, and if you do it on LSD, you can actually be patient and doctor. Alternatively, if you want to be the doctor, if you want to read the Freud or the Reich or whoever you're studying, you'd keep your sugar level normal, and if you wanted to dig deep into underground psychology, you'd let your sugar level drop, and then you go into a deep state of breaking through the levels of protection. And we did that for several years. It was very interesting with Birdie around us, and it was a very interesting period of breakthrough and learning about and what's been your practice in more recent decades there Around this, I'm much more delicate on myself that I should say, well, let me let me ask you this. I've said there's sometimes at the speeches of the Drum Parlicy Alliance in years pas that that that I regarded psychedelics in a way. I've thought about them as something that is some almost like wasted on the young, and it's something that one should make a commitment to doing as one grows older. That there's a way in which a strong psycholic experience can kind of stir up the emotional intellectual sediment in one's life and that that's a good thing. And I wanted to ask you your thoughts about what's the relationship between psycholic use and healthy aging. I actually think psychedelics and I actually have a particular love of LSD because of its purity. I think in a way, it's the most cognitively um stimulating and it's the least toxic. So you know, even when you take it regularly for a while, when you come off it, you don't have a hangover, you don't have any craving. There's no aspect of addiction about it. And actually one needs more discipline to take it than not to take it. In a funny sort of way, it needs discipline to take it and work with it. And we used to, I mean we were kind of rather passionate workers, and as recreation, we used to play the game the Chinese game go you know go, which is very much a game of skill. There's no luck, and go you is pattern recognition, So it's intuitive thinking. It's using your intuitive brain to see patterns. And Chinese masters generals used to instead of fighting walls play it's surrounding to opponent and capturing them. And and it's an absolute compulsive game is like life. Every movement in life, it is on the go board and we were very addicted to it. And I found that if I was on LSD and I kept my sugar level normal so I wasn't hyper lycemic, I would win more games if my opponent wasn't on LSD. And it was my first real experiment on cognition using myself as the subject, and it actually convinced me that it can not that it always dots at all, but it can increase cognition. I won more games if I was high. And when this comes to the issue of healthy aging, it suggests you think it can keep the brain more youthful and vibrant as we get older. From sixty six onwards, my life was doing experiments first on myself and then I set up the bed To Foundation to do it out in clinical trials and UM I was always interested in its effect on kignition and quite recently doing research on micro docing. We did a research on rats and you give them a choice of old new toys. Rats, they prefer the toys they know and familiar, but if you give them an enhanced environment, then they love the new toys. Old rats and if you give them L S D for three days, don't play with the new toys they go. So I think that that means that it definitely inspis neuroplacity, a delight in new things exploring. Do you think in human beings that micro dosing is going to be approved to be more effective if people have previously had the experience with a larger dose or are they really disconnected? Can people have never done high dose get the same benefit from the micro dose? I think they're disconnected. I'm a great believer in the potential of micro doses to enhance certain you know, physiological happenings and psychological I think micro doss are wonderful in the sense that they are doing what the food those stuff, but as as we know, at a very much smaller and more easily manageable rate. And I'm at the moment doing work on dementia more broadly, but Alzheimer's particularly and indeed on Parkinson's with micro docing psychedelics and actually having some very interesting results. Yeah, I should just tell our listeners. I mean, you know, literally, Amanda and I are talking in mid April, and just the day before our conversation here there's this news item that's in the press, I mean, in New York Times, all the media around the world about some new philocybin study that was done in Imperial College and UCSF University, California, San Francisco, with you know, Robin Carhart Harris, one of your colleagues, and maybe in some respects proteges and basically finding that you know, they had done. It's a small study, they said, it raises more questions than it answers, but showing the ways in which the brain is different under the influence of a psychedelic in terms of addressing depression as opposed to using the standard antidepressants. That the scan shall flourish it of neural activity, right, and a sort of liberating effect on the brain. So I guess people are excited about this study because it's confirming some of the hypotheses about how this may actually be working. But that study we actually did the first one when I used to set up um with Dave not I persuaded him to join me in studying psychedelics, and I can't remember when it was two thousand five or something, and what we first had to do a lot of work on cannabis to begin with, which was interesting. But I wanted to do LSD, of course, because I love LST the best um. But there's too much to boo. No one wants to touch LLST. So we did psilocybin because no one knows how to spell it what it is, and it has very little to move value. So we worked on psilocybin, and I wanted to do brain imaging too, to look into my old hypothesis of the increase in compilary volume. So we found, funny enough, not an increasing complority, which surprised me. I think the technology was limited in those days. But we found a decrease in the blood supply to the default mode network. And that's the kind of modern expression for the eager, as Freud used to talk, called the ego mechanism. And it had been observed that people with psychological disall is like depression, addiction, post traumatic stress as orders had a hyperactive default mode network. So we thought, well, maybe with psilocybin it will help treat depression. So that was the first depression study we did at the Battery Imperial Research Program, and Robin was actually I'd sent him to study with Dave Nut and he'd become our principal investigator. The three of us work together for whatever fifteen years doing research. Well, for our listeners, we should I should just explain that David Knut, who will be a guest on Psychoactive at sometime in the near future, is really one of Britain's leading scientists and a former advisor to the government who got booted for speaking too honestly about the reality of drugs and drug research. But you know, I mean, I'm also curious in your past, right, you had this period the sixties and seventies of the psycholics, your initial experiences, your relationship with the Dutch great love of your life as you've called them, bart Um, and then you start Beckley Foundation, which really is played a major role in sponsoring and instigating and psychedelic research but also carrying out funder is not just instigator, it's also carrying out and hands on and all of that. But there's this period in your life. I mean, what happens with you in the in the eighties and early nineties. There's this kind of quiet period where you're not out there. You haven't created Beckley Foundation, but you're not It wasn't actually quite um. I was fully occupied trying to spread the word of the wonder of psychedelics and in the cannabis from sixty s onwards onwards. I was convinced of the value potential value of these compounds for human civilization and the possibility that they increase learning. I actually myself gave up nicotine addiction by deciding, actually because Barth thought it was a horrible habit, I decided to give it up with a trip of LSD and decided, no, it's a horrible habit. And I did that and never smoked another cigarette. So the years later I suggested to Roland really Um at Johns Hopkins when he suggested what should we do with the five thousand, five thousand dollars I had to donate at that point, And he said, what's study might you like? And I said, well, why not the study I did on myself back in the sixties of overcoming nicotine. And so that study is turned into a very successful Well sure, I mean you planted the seeds for the first significant grant from the National Student Drug Abuse for her to looking at psyche alex an addiction that Matt John's in his colleagues at Johns Hopkins. God, so you know, congratulations, congratulations, they're wonderful teams. And then that was exciting. And then I do think I was largely responsible or was getting Dave not involved in that, and that then through that Robin involved by setting up the Beckley Imperial Research Program, which went on for whatever twenty years. So when you and I met back in ninety in New York, I think that must have been just about the time you were creating the Beckley Foundation, or maybe you'd previously created under a different name or something. But I guess you gathered that it's one thing to be out there as an individual voice, you know, Lady Amanda, and a different thing to be out there as a foundation doing all the things that a foundation can do. Exactly. I found sadly that as a voice, I couldn't break the two boot. For thirty years I've been trying to throw out, you know, I've been as active as I could be in trying to bring about change, to get scientists to do research, to persuade people of the potential value of these compounds, and indeed to trying to stop the terrible mistake of prohibition and then teach against it. But I realized that it was a losing battle as a female with no letters after my name, a deaf school at sixteen, and no letters often my name, no money, children, etcetera, etcetera. I couldn't. I couldn't change global drug policy, and I couldn't open the doors to the research. And so suddenly I realized, well maybe it was. It was an artwork. Really to become a foundation, it costs nothing. It costs a thousand pounds or something to become a foundation. I didn't realize foundations should have money. I just I called myself a foundation. Well, first I was called the Foundation to Further Consciousness, and then I thought that sounded a bit maybe hippy. So I thought Batley, the name of my house, sounded more like Berkeley or Bletchington or well Man. I have to let me ask you a frank question, though. So on the one hand, right, you're dealing with the burden being a woman in this field when there are very few with any women, especially in the early years of psychedelics, and not having the degrees, the advanced degrees. But on the other hand, you are this kind of minor royalty. You are Lady Amanda, and I'm curious the one way to being part of this mill you sort of do you think in what ways did it help you to open up doors in England to get through in some respect? I mean, I mean, just just frankly, I mean, do you think if you hadn't, what would have been like without that? In what ways were there some advantages? Funny enough, I actually didn't. I mean I didn't have it. I married it. And it's just like having a badge because I didn't have letters after my name, and people, even nowadays, even women, I don't think that one is capable of being creative scientifically unless you're got a PhD. I mean, I luckily had the father I had, who said, you know, I had no respect for professors or blah blah head people, or he never had that respect. Rather like Birdie he in the war, he chose to be a private and so I never kind of um, I felt a need to get a PhD and spent six years of my life doing that because I felt that through knowledge of it, one could feel one's way. So in many ways maybe it was a disadvantage, but one does the way, it goes the way one can. But the kind of misconception about me, funny enough, is people always like to say I fund research. I never had funding. I had to go out and beg on the street corners. It was like being a prostitute trying to it still is. It's a part of I most hate and it's and actually it's got more difficult now there's billions floating around in the psychedelic world. In fact, the study we started, the Depression study, the the company which took over our study and never added anything scientifically, is worth a billion you're talking about contest here, yeah, yeah, but that hasn't benefited the poor little Beckley Foundation who is struggling. I'm I've got wonderful sub studies at the moment, a whole rare wonderful studies I'm doing, and it's almost impossible to find funding. But anyway, let's take a break here and go to an ad. Now you've created so you and your son, Cosmo have created a company now though, so just is that just based out of the frustration of trying to raise money for a Beckley Foundation or is it to seize these opportunities? What can you tell us about that? That happened a few years ago when Cosmo, my younger son, I said should we work together? To do a for profit company, and so as it as really raising the money is amazing. How little money in my forty years doing what they've done I've had. I should think probably it's two or three million or something. I've never added it up, but I've had it up. It's very very little. And everyone always thinks I have vast sums of money because I have a title it whatever. So creating a company not just a foundation here, what's the reason for doing that? And how do you deal? I mean, look, now there's all this criticism of people creating companies, and you know, we probably share similar concerns about the abuse of the pattern process and the greediness that can corrupt things. I have to say, I am a founding director, but Cosmo runs with The first company we did was a cannabis company, and we did it with the biggest cannabis company in the world, m called Cannopy, and we had a joint venture, so there were two of us and two of them on the board. We had a fifty fifty relationship and it was a dream from beginning to end. It went very very well, and then they wanted to buy us, and we were delighted and they bought us, and then we started a psychedelic company, which is what I wanted to do all the time, more than a cannabis company. And because he's running that and with amazing skill and charm, I think he does it, and I'm hoping so far he's kept his ethics. I do the exploratory work. That's what I'm good at, and what I love is the seed the seed work. I don't want to have to have kind of beavy of bankers on my back and have to raise hundreds of millions. It's it's not something with treasure at all. I wouldn't be good at it, and I didn't want to do it. But I love the exploratory work. And so he's he's doing that and he's doing it very well. And um, we work. Yeah. I mean, let me ask you. I mean, I'm sure you know. I remember there was this time, I think it was back in two thousand six and I was up in Oxford giving a talk and I realized you lived very close and I called you and you said, oh, come on over, come on over, and I go over to your place. I've never been there before, and it turned out it was your birthday. Um, and and it was basically it was just you and your husband, Jamie, and your son's Cosmo and Rocky and their girl friends and me, the seven of us having a wonderful time. And you know, I substantly would cross past with Cosmo because then he got very involved with this documentary Breaking the Taboo, which had been launched by President Cardoso and a young filmmaker in Brazil or Fernando Grosstein Andrata, and then and then your son Cosmo teamed up with Richard Branson's son Sam to make this. So you know, I saw him getting pulled in this area. So you obviously had a very strong and positive influence on him. But I'm curious to the extent you feel comfortable talking about it. You know, how did you bring up your two boys? I mean, here they knew their mother was out there about cannabis and psychedelics and their kids, and so were they doing these things? I mean, how did you feel about they're using it? Find enough, they always view We never ever hid anything from them. And yet they were incredibly well balanced, and they both went to Oxford and studied classics, got to double first in classics, and you know, they're hardworking, charming, attractive, wonderful fathers, do you know what I mean? But they grew up knowing what their parents did. We never hid anything from and I think that's where I'm a great believer in in that basically, so I had a wonderful relationship, and now my other son have also gotten to the family business. One could call it. Well, you know, I actually know quite a number of people for whom their children were introduced by such a psycholics by the parents or and I have other friends who themselves, when they were young, were introduced by their parents. And in almost all those cases it may because of the people I know and hang out with whose turned out to be very positive relationships where the children have turned out all are these ones? And what what was your experience around that. I've an amazingly positive relationship with both my boys. We actually never had a quarrel, and they said, well, they really were wasn't anything to fight about, you know, they were they were free. The one thing I'm mind it was good manners, firm on manners, and the rest they just did by choice. You dabbled in politics in your younger years, right, didn't you try worrying for office in the past? But I never loved it. I hated it. I mean, it's not my natural place. I realized that I had to do it to change the policies say that we could do the research, because in in the seventies, sixties, seventies, scientists couldn't do didn't want to. It would have ruined their career. So one couldn't find a scientist who was willing to do research actually or a doctor. And so another of my pet loves was trepan nation. So that was another by taboo area. Just explain what the ideas I think many of our listeners won't know which reprenation is. Tremp Nation is making a hole in the skull to allow the vessels, the blood vessels in the brain to pulsate fully on the heartbeat. That's an ancient operation which has been done throughout history. Actually, I knew the person who is in charge of the show The Caves, which is kind of years old, and they found trepanned skull and absolutely amazingly, I'm actually doing a study at the moment at Yale with the latest brain imaging technology of optogenetics. They're the first people to look at the effect of sarahtonin LSD on the tone of the blood, vessels and beer, collaborating together to look into my old love hypothesis of the fact that underneath the changes we experience with psychedelics, but also all the natural things meditation, etcetera, etcetera, deep breathing is an increase of capillary volume. And say, we were talking about the research they do and how they create a window in the scalp of the mice in order to be observed. What's happening with their special cameras pick up these arrays. Is brand news only just being involved? And I said, when when you tropan the scal do you notice any change in cerebral circulation? And they said, of course we do. It's a terrible problem as a sudden burst of activity. So that happened last week, and it shows old hypothesis if you've had since nine six, that making a hole in the skull increases the pulsation. Well, I'm proposed saying, and I'm reading about your theories about about the importance of blood flow or capillary action, and then I'm saying, you know people who we both highly respect, and you know very well, David Nutt or Robin Carhart Harris, and they're going, I don't know so much about the blood flow hypothesis. I think they're saying it's more about neural networks, more about electric impulses. But when Robin said to me that when we did the research and it showed um a decrease of blood to the default mode network and not the increase, she said, Oh, man, don't aren't you world have disappointed your your hypothesis being proved wrong. And I said, I'm disappointed, but I don't think it's proved wrong. Wait and see. Let's just see if technology will proved me right. And I think that's about to happen. I'll tell you what I'm doing at the moment. I've got a series of six breaking edge research projects, all to do with this. Half of them are to do with the full those looking into the mystical experience, and with that, I'm doing a study at Kings with wonderful collaborators looking at precision as fMRI with the highest tesla, the highest power we've ever used, seven tesla, which has never been used in psychedelics before. So we're looking at individuals. You're looking at much more detail, much higher resolution, to see what is happening in the brain. And that together with looking at the microscopic level and then looking at the different forms like pet and all the different meg all the different brain imaging technologies. I think i'd approve myself how many studies involved giving micro docing and how many are the more macro docing, and how many involve any level of psychotherapy. Yeah, it's it's a two headed study, a dub splity eagle like the Trust of the Beckley Foundation. One half is looking at macro at full dose and that's the study I'm doing um at the moment, I was working on it today at Kinks. Is really exciting one. And then to balance it, I'm going to do a pet scan and all other sorts of stunds. Is that there's a lot at different places. I'm working in Argentinea, Brazil, America, all sorts of I set up collaborations where I find lovely. What can you bring in Mastrick that involved psychelics and pain. Yeah, that's an interesting one. That was micro docing and we showed that a micro dose of LSD. Always I try to work with LSD because I promised Elbert Hofton that I will bring it back into civilization and we showed that it improved mood, cognitive functioning, neuroplasticity, and pain management. So now we're doing more into the pain and since then, I'm discovering how microdocing and these compounds can potentially help with neurodegenerative illnesses like Alzheimer's, dementia, parkinson because my Joe, Mike's partner dot Parkinson's and the micro dose of actually I again works on the dopamine production. Well, listen, last last question here. You know, it's about you've talked about, you know, on the one hand, the importance of the mystical experience and obviously Rolling Griffiths and all his work at Hartkins, he Folk it makes a big point of that, you know, and and also at the same point ego dissolution and the role of psychological and ego dissolution, And how do you see that connection between the mystical experience and the ego dissolution aspect of this? Yeah, I see it really beautifully because science has killed off spirituality and hence mankind is even more loss than they were before. And now right at the very center of the new sounds is mysticism. Because funnily enough, we and other players have noticed that those who have a mystical experience in their therapy of overcoming and terrible problem are the most successful. They most successfully overcome there whatever it is depression or addiction, or or fear of dying. And that is, I think, because what we've seen, the underlying factors in what's happening is the whole brain. And this I think is because underneath there's much more blood supply. The whole brain is flooded with connectivity and the controlling, repressive part which humanity has has learned through conditioning to repress parts of the brain so it can squeeze for limited blood supply to where it's most needed to survive. That's what we animals be human upright talking it learned to do, and that was the kind of trick which enabled us to become the rulers of the universe in vert commerce, but also the neurotic psychotic species we are because it's a grip which takes control of us and we aren't control of it. And I think the experience of a psychedelic can in the right setting let loose the repressive grip of the eager and make the whole brain more neuroplastic. So the person can take over a new outlook. Like I decided a smoking nicotine is actually disgusting. I don't want to do it anymore. And it's so deep the change in one that one actually doesn't want to do it anymore. And I think, do you see what I mean? Well, listen, here's my real last question. Here's my real last question, which is, on the one hand, we see all this emphasis now on the importance of integrating psychedelics with psychotherapy and the ways in which psychotherapy can both improve the positive effect of the psychedelic and also minimize the chances they go go in the other direction. On the other hand, the vast majority of psychedelic use is happening outside that context. And I remember you and I you know, we crossed passive burning Man back about fifteen years ago, and here where this amazing burning Man environment, you know, where people are all using it without really therapy. And so how do you reconcile those two things that the broader use. Well, I grew up in my psychedelic experience, not with it therapy. I mean, we were very serious people and looking at why why are we the way we are? And how do we curious and how do we heal ourselves and all of that. But we never took it with a therapist. I mean, it wasn't just in what we did. We were looked after ourselves. But I think if you've got bad traumas to overcome, the psychedelic setting of therapy can be very, very healing and therefore very valuable. I'm not against it, but I didn't think it's essential for everyone, And I think it's terrible mistake to criminalize it if it isn't in a medical setting, because in my opinion, what you do with your own consciousness, if you don't do anything which damages other people, is totally your private affair. It really doesn't have anything to do with the state or anyone else. Well, thank you very much for bringing it back to the core principle that we're all fighting war. So Amanda, thank you so much for joining me. Then your work is amazing. Good luck with the rest of the foundation and your own research and uh and with a company and all of that, and best wishes to your family as well. I'll leave you, love you, Indivi you and hope to see you really too. Okay, if you're enjoying psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine six that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronotsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Brio s f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Deep. Next week, I'll be talking with Garth Mullet's the host of an award winning podcast called Crackdown that he co produces with his fellow drug users and drug user organizers and activists in Vancouver on Monday, though, We're going to first play you an episode of his Crackdown podcast, and then on Thursday, he'll be my guest on Psychoactive. Listen to this clip for a sense of what's ahead. I'm an old school dope fan, you know. That's the story of my life is I've been on some kind of opioid pretty much every day of my adult life. For most of them, and for a long time that was heroin, and for a while now it's been methadone and uh, everything in between. And I came to understand our struggle just through my own personal experience with police. People get it all twisted here. They say it's an opioid crisis, it's an addiction crisis. It's not for me. It's a death crisis. It's a toxic rug supply crisis. You know, whether it's someone being wired to a substance or someone dying. And these are completely different things that require different solutions. Subscribe to Cycleactive now, see it, don't miss it.