MPS Manesh Girn v1 (Psychedelic Neuroscience – Full transcript)

My name is Minesh Gurun. I am a neuroscientist. I got my PhD in neuroscience from McGill University, where I studied something called the default mode network, which is this network in the brain that’s involved in a lot of processes, cognitive processes that are essential to being human, and that are also very relevant for psychedelics, such as our ability to create a sense of self, have a story about ourself, and kind of think in abstractions and concepts, and to imagine the future and remember the past and a variety of other things.

 

And so I did my PhD in that with a component on psychedelics, and then later moved into a fully psychedelic lab, which I work at now, which is at the University of California, San Francisco. I work with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who is a pioneer in the space of psychedelic research, and I currently do psychedelic brain imaging research, trying to understand how psilocybin works in the brain and how it can affect people’s brains differently, and how that relates to their unique experiences with psychedelics and also the therapeutic benefits that they might get. I’ve been interested in psychedelics for a long time, and actually they came into my world by way of my interest in meditation.

 

So this is when I was around 16 years old. I was exposed to things like Zen Buddhism and yoga and these different spiritual traditions, and I got fascinated by the idea of, you know, mastering our mind and altering our consciousness and having these peak experiences of oneness, of insight, and just the concept of enlightenment. As a teenager, this all fascinated me a lot, and I think that made me a lot more open to things like psychedelics, which I was also reading about a little bit, talking about how they can induce these profound experiences, similar to those found with mystics or yogis or what have you.

 

And that led me to have an openness beyond the stigma at the time, and when I had the opportunity to try some mushrooms, I think I was around 17 years old, the summer after 10th grade or sometime around there, and I took this opportunity and tried it with some friends at the beach, and it really, long story short, it opened my mind to different ways we can perceive the world and perceive ourselves. And I realized at that young age how our usual way of approaching reality is kind of like this tunnel vision reality, where we feel like our view of the world and ourselves is the only one, and we live from that place. And in that experience, I saw the dial shift, and I moved out of that frame and had a very different relationship to this character named Manesh and my body and the people around me, and I was just fascinated by that and how our experience can be altered, and it feels like reality is being altered, because perception is reality, in a sense, so that’s all we have access to.

 

And so this inspired me an interest to try to study this and understand it more, and around that time, psychedelics were starting to come into the mainstream in terms of scientific research again, so I was like, this is a great trend to hop on, this is fascinating, it intersects with all sorts of things I’m interested in, and so I pursued that, and here I am. That first experience was really insightful for me, and it just showed me the possibility of more growth and expansion as a person, and of the importance of having more self-awareness into my patterns, into the things that I’ve been conditioned to think and do, and kind of allowed me greater insight into the conditioning of my childhood, of my family system, of the experiences I went through when I was younger, and really motivated me to pursue this path of healing and growth and insight, and it led me to go to all sorts of transformational retreats, I was a part of a men’s group community for most of my 20s, where we processed things in our lives in a very vulnerable way, and kind of shared and were held accountable by other people in the group, and so it really led me to seek out all these things, to just have more self-awareness, to create more equanimity, to kind of stop my limiting beliefs on what I thought was possible for myself, because a teenager, Manesh, would never have thought I’d be a neuroscientist, I’d be doing all these things, that’s so beyond what I could have possibly thought was possible, and so I think psychedelics and all the growth work that’s inspired in me has really led me to lead this life, which is kind of mind-boggling to me, and would never have been anticipated by anybody, really, when I was a teenager, and so it’s really opened things up for me. So there are a lot of interesting developments in the neuroscience of psychedelics over the last while, and I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of some of them, and what really excites me most is really diving into the detail of why psychedelics can be so transformative.

 

How can they help people really reconceptualize who they are, and approach life in a different way, in a lasting way, because there’s not many drugs that can do that usually, typical psychiatric drugs you have to take every day, they don’t really change you for the better, they just make you, they just reduce your symptoms, and make you feel a bit better without making you feel amazing, and psychedelics are different, and so it’s like, okay, why is that the case, and are there ways to do it without psychedelics, and some of the work I have done has looked at, among other things, but the default mode network, and how it changes its relationship to other networks, and we found that the default mode network, which we can say encodes our sense of self, our sense of who we are, it’s other things too, but that’s a part of it, our ego, our sense of self, that this network starts to become much more connected with almost every other network in the brain, more so than anything else, and basically, this information related to our sense of self is no longer neatly organized and distinct from everything else, it’s now a bit more, perhaps, amorphous, able to be changed, more receptive to new information, and kind of less in its usual mode of functioning, and the idea is this allows us to kind of have a more, have more malleability in our beliefs and how we see the world, and people often experience, under a psychedelic, they automatically, against their own will even, start to question who they are, question what reality is, question their assumptions, and the idea is this is likely related to that network being broken down and becoming more integrated with everything else, and this is something I’ve seen in my research, in a couple of papers that I’ve published, and something that I’ve been pushing forward is this idea that the brain, under psychedelics, really just moves into a different way of functioning, where it’s more dynamic, it’s more flexible, it’s more able to respond to input in a lot of different ways, it’s more adaptive, as opposed to being rigid and stuck in a particular way of responding to the world, and so this is the kind of, what evidence is pointing to, and it’s a model that I’ve been crafting with my supervisor, Robin, here at UCSF. Transformation is possible, and there are such high reaches of human potential within all of us, that we can reach with the right experiences, practices, and in certain cases, substances, which can unlock and open parts of ourselves we never knew were there, and allow us to step into lives we never knew were possible. So I think psychedelics are really expanding awareness of the possibility of radical transformation at any point in life, and it also suggests that our brain has that capacity, you don’t necessarily need psychedelics, they can be catalysts, but the brain is able to change throughout the life, and who we are is never really fixed.

 

It’s difficult to change, but it’s possible, and there are ways to do it better than others. I’m very passionate about sharing this fascinating research with psychedelics to the world, especially since a lot of media reporting is pretty bad, a lot of it is sensationalistic, it misconstrues the science, and just ventures into this fantasy land a little bit, which can be harmful in certain cases, because it puts unrealistic expectations, gives people unrealistic expectations about the therapy and how it works. And so seeing that over the last few years, I’ve really put a lot of effort into creating rigorous science-based content describing scientific findings around psychedelics in a way that’s accessible to people who are not scientists.

 

And so I have a YouTube channel and Instagram page called The Psychedelic Scientist, I also very frequently appear on podcasts, such as this one, and I lecture for different training programs in the psychedelic space and different organizations, and I also have a course, if you go to mineshgurn.com slash masterclass, I have a comprehensive course on all aspects of psychedelic medicine, distilled in very concise, bite-sized videos, for anybody in the world who’s interested in psychedelics, but also particularly for practitioners and therapists of all kinds.

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