How do magic mushrooms feel like to the body and mind? An interview with Manesh Girn, PhD(c)
The world of psychedelics is experiencing a renaissance. Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind has just debuted on Netflix. Other mainstream trailblazers include the documentaries Fantastic Fungi, Have a Good Trip, Magic Medicine, and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Lab and are educating the general public about psychedelics.
We are explicitly interested in psilocybin, a substituted indole alkylamine that is converted to psilocin in the body. It is found in more than 200 species of fungi worldwide.
Psilocybin and other hallucinogens are not considered classic drugs of abuse because they do not have reinforcing properties and do not produce drug-seeking behaviours. Psilocybin is a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. While decriminalized in some States, magic mushrooms are not legal for recreational use, mostly anywhere in the world.
There is mounting evidence that psychedelics can be an effective treatment for a wide range of physical and mental conditions. Psilocybin and other psychedelics are very powerful tools, and we feel strongly about making knowledge by industry leaders accessible to a broader audience.
We are delighted to have been speaking to Manesh Girn, PhD(c), Chief Research Officer at Entheo Tech Bioscience, leading up to the conference about experiencing psilocybin.
What got you interested in the psychedelic industry in the first place?
I've been interested in psychedelics for a long time. I originally got interested in them through meditation and spirituality. And I remember in my late teens reading books about how psychedelics can induce these mystical-type experiences, usually only reached by advanced meditators. These compounds have been used historically for healing, personal growth, having a deeper connection to the universe, to themselves, and so on. I wanted to understand what was there, and it fascinates me to this day.
Can you remember your first experience yourself? And what was it?
I think I was 16 or 17. The short version of the experience is that it allowed me to observe myself and see myself from a third-person perspective for the first time. It was like: here is Manesh. And here are his thoughts and ways of behaving and his identity.
I was able to understand that I live within this box of perceiving the world in a particular way and identify with this identity. That this is also not really me but a version of me. I found it fascinating how your whole reality can be shifted by how you look at it.
What was the compound you took and the setting for your experience?
It was a low dose of dried psilocybin mushrooms at the beach on a busy day while there were fireworks in Vancouver. So perhaps not the best place to have your first trip, but it worked for me.
Is there a difference between taking mushrooms in a dry or fresh way?
Dry is usually preferred because it's easier to measure the amount of mushroom and content you might be getting. When it's wet, you're getting a bunch of waterways, and it's hard to know how much of the active compound you are ingesting. It's hard to be precise. Also, as it is natural, different mushrooms of the same species vary in potency. One mushroom can be three times as strong as another.
So what are psilocybin mushrooms?
When we say psilocybin mushrooms, we're referring to what's also called magic mushrooms or shrooms. Basically, there are a variety of strains and kinds of mushrooms that grow in much of the world. The most common version of them that's often consumed is Psilocybe Cubensis, and all strains vary in potency. The main active compounds of psychedelic mushrooms are psilocybin and psilocin.
Psilocybin is what you can call a psychedelic drug, meaning that it activates specific receptors in your brain, which gives you a very unique type of experience. And this experience is not easily categorizable like other standard drugs. You can't call it a stimulant necessarily. You can call it a depressant; you can call it a variety of other things.
The word psychedelic means "mind manifesting". It's a class of drugs that is a non-specific amplifier, which amplifies what is going on for you. It also allows you access to parts of your mind and memories that are usually nicely stored away.
Was there a particular reason why mushrooms were your first experience?
To me, it really depends on the individual person, their personality, their own brain chemistry and so on. I have always enjoyed mushrooms. Frankly, the reason why that was my first one was that I was able to get some.
I know other people who really like other psychedelic drugs and so on. It is essential to underline that those compounds are illegal. I'm not condoning the use of illegal drugs, but in certain places, it is decriminalized. Now, you could get it and consume it.
Can you tell us a bit about your research and how psychedelics affect the body and the brain?
My research so far has been on the default mode network and analyzing how psychedelics work in the brain.
I'm interested in understanding how the brain creates a sense of self, what that means and the different aspects of it.
As I described earlier, psychedelics enable shifts in perception and allow you to change your relationship with yourself and some of your beliefs about yourself. This is really good for mental health because, let's say, you're bullied when you're young, and you grew up believing you are not enough or not loveable; these beliefs really structure how we perceive the world. Psychedelics allow you to change behaviour patterns. But we know very little about how that process works at the brain's level.
With my research that I'm gonna be doing next year, probably at the University of California, San Francisco, with Robin Carhartt Harris, I want to look at how we can understand self-beliefs and how they change through psychedelic use. Especially in the therapeutic context, how it all works and how we perceive and interpret the external world.
Touching on micro dosing, what are your thoughts on that?
Microdosing is very controversial. I should say, a lot of research on micro-dosing is done in a lab where you have a placebo and the microdose. These research settings have found insufficient evidence that microdosing is effective for many things. It's about the same results as a placebo. In many cases, people who got the microdose versus those who think they got the microdose but got the sugar pill reported improvements in their mood and anxiety and so on.
What's going on here is the expectation of the patient to feel something. Having said that, there's also this extensive survey of studies of people doing microdosing in their daily life. Again, people reflect in journals noting comments such as "It transformed my life" and "It makes a huge difference for me". It might all be a placebo. So I think it's very unclear what effect that micro-dosing has. Also, people disagree on what dose actually constitutes.
I understand perceptions are very subjective?
Yes, that's the thing, like when you take a microdose, the whole point is that you don't really experience it. You're not really tripping or fueling it. But it's supposed to affect you in this kind of behind-the-scenes way. When you're not experiencing it, that's when you just think you're experiencing something when you're not, you know. It's a perfect thing for your expectations to run wild and create something for you.
The use of psychedelics to treat young adults is very much debated, arguing that any psychedelics have a higher chance of a negative impact due to the brain's increased flexibility. Do you believe it generally makes sense to not have psychedelic experiences before your 30s?
Yes, for sure. I do agree with that. Something that psychedelics can do is, shift you out of stability into chaos, and you have the chance to create a new order.
If you're young and you haven't formed a model of yourself and the world, taking psychedelics can be a bit destabilizing and maybe not helpful. So I believe, in terms of ages, a psychedelic experience might be more impactful for older people, people who are settled in their ways and think they know what's what and understand who they are; people that can really use a shift out of that, come back to that plasticity and the flexibility that they might have lost through just being in their routines etc. I think psychedelic-assisted therapy has tremendous potential for that age group of 30plus.
Having said that, unfortunately, there are a lot of teenagers and young adults who suffer from depression, for example. Doctors and psychiatrists prescribe them antidepressants, which are also almost definitely worse than psychedelics in terms of impacting their development negatively. But that's kind of culturally sanctioned, which I think is wrong. Whereas we doom psychedelics to be used on young adults, I think that's such a ridiculous double standard. And I think if you are 17 or 18 and depressed, you're already stuck in a negative frame. Compounds such as psilocybin can be helpful to shake you up and foster positive change. So it's really best to decide on a case-by-case basis.
“Something that psychedelics do is that they make your brain a bit more flexible. As said before, you are a bit unconstrained. You’re able to think out of your usual ways of viewing yourself in the world, see things from a new perspective, and explore new lines of thought. ”
How does the brain react to psilocybin? What is happening in the brain, but also what's happening with you in your body?
Something that psychedelics do is that they make your brain a bit more flexible. As said before, you are a bit unconstrained. You're able to think out of your usual ways of viewing yourself in the world, see things from a new perspective, and explore new lines of thought. It is a visual experience, and you can almost relive memories in a dreamlike way. With the proper guidance, you can then process and integrate memories during and after the trip, which can be very profound. This is also reflected in the brain and how it makes it more diverse in its activity.
In the body, usually, people will sometimes feel a bit of nausea, their hands might get clammy, their heart rate might go up, you might get a headache, and some people feel sensations in their body almost like twitching.
But usually, it's not necessarily a highly unpleasant physical experience. It's just that you feel very much in your body, are very aware of it and very present. Other times you take a higher dose and start to forget that you have a body, or the boundaries of your body fade. You don't have a clear understanding anymore of where your body starts and where it ends. You're kind of blending into the environment. And as much as this sounds scary, it can be beautiful and healing.
Is it true that you are yawning a lot at the onset?
Yeah, you have crazy giant yarns. It has to do with the serotonin system in your brain, which is interesting modulating.
How about the perceived sharpening of sight, as you are way more aware and have a more open and broader sense of what you're seeing rather than actually seeing better?
Yes, I think what our brain does in its quest to save energy and keep us functioning is filter the information coming in. Many information does not reach our awareness because unfiltered, day-to-day life would be unmanageable and overwhelming.
In theory, psychedelics open up that gate to allow more information to come in. So now we're able to receive more information coming into our eyes. So then we can see more details and things that seem like they're HD.
Does this mean that a creative person, who might have an increased or more profound nervous system sensitivity, perceives that mystical experience differently?
Many artistic people score high on the personality trait of openness to experience, and they also score high on another trait called absorption. Interestingly this function is one of the traits most correlated with having stronger mystical experiences and visual experiences. Someone with higher absorption is somebody who naturally just becomes immersed in whatever they're doing. Like if you're in a forest, you get pulled into its beauty and the sensations and perception. Or if you listen to music, you can get lost in that. Artistic people usually have a strong connection to an internal fantasy world. People who are naturally very sensitive like that have more intense experiences overall, and this also applies to psychedelics.
Manesh Girn, PhD(c) is Chief Research Officer at the psychedelic bioscience company EntheoTech Bioscience and is currently obtaining his PhD in Neuroscience at McGill University, focusing on the default-mode network. He is also researching the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT in collaboration with Dr Robin Carhart-Harris and other leaders in psychedelic science.
Manesh has been the lead and co-author of over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, daydreaming, and the default-mode network. He also runs the YouTube channel The Psychedelic Scientist, where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy-to-understand but non-superficial form.
He will be speaking on Tuesday, September 20th about the biology behind psilocybin.