Another recent study, using fMRI machines to track the brain’s response to LSD in healthy volunteers, found that the drug creates a kind of hyper-connectivity in the brain, allowing unrelated and usually discrete regions to communicate with one another.*6 It also appears to affect the default mode network (DMN), a network of regions in the brain active during wakeful rest or daydreaming. The DMN is involved in a variety of things, including self-reflection and remembering the past and imagining the future. LSD, at least in a dose large enough to make you trip, causes your DMN to become disorganized, which leads to ego dissolution, the sense that you are one with the world.
Basically, stimulating serotonin receptors loosens you up cognitively, which makes you happier.
Flush with my newfound understanding of neuroplasticity and neurobiology, I posed a simple question to Dr. David Presti, a professor of neurobiology in the department of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley and the author of the textbook Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey. “Is the small amount of LSD I’m taking making my brain more neuroplastic, and is that why I’m less irritable?”
Presti, an expert in the neurochemistry of drugs, said, “Sure, we can say these chemicals bind to serotonin 2A receptors and they activate glutamate circuits and they induce nerve growth factors, but we really just don’t have a clue how all that connects with what is happening in the psyche.”
Deflated, I sighed. But he reached out an encouraging hand. The important thing, he told me, is not necessarily what is going on inside my brain, but that I feel better. Presti believes in a more “globally integrated” theory of the brain than some of the other neuroscientists I consulted. He’s far more interested in experience and anecdote, in what I’m feeling, than in attaching a specific receptor to my mood. He was very encouraging about my experiment, far more than my friend the psychopharmacologist who, while curious, was clearly made anxious by the prospect of someone consuming without supervision a substance that has not been professionally tested. Presti said, “I really think there’s something going on with microdosing. I think when people do get around to researching it, it’s going to be relatively easy to demonstrate positive effects that are better than conventional antidepressants, which are awful.” About antidepressants Presti said, “They have all kinds of side effects, and we have no idea, really, what they’re doing. They cost a lot of money and they’re marketed with all kinds of flimflam.”
Was he actually saying that microdosing was either as safe as or perhaps even safer than conventional antidepressants? I asked him, incredulous.
“Oh, absolutely.”
I am a rationalist who likes firm and clear explanations, and I was so excited to think I might have found one. Neuroplasticity! BDNF! Glutamate! Synapses and neurons and all sorts of things measurable by fMRI machines! But the brain does not give up its secrets so easily. For the time being, and perhaps forever, I’m going to have to accept not knowing exactly what is going on in my brain. As difficult as that is, I was comforted when Presti reiterated what I had learned, that psychedelics are not physically harmful to the body for most people, even at massive doses. He told me that he has absolute confidence in the safety of my project. It is, at least in the view of that one particular neurobiologist, perfectly safe. I tucked that thought away for the next time I felt like I was having a heart attack in the dead of night.
* * *
*1 ?Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al., “Psilocybin with Psychological Support for Treatment-resistant Depression: An Open-label Feasibility Study.”
*2 ?See American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, “Active Ingredient in Magic Mushrooms Reduces Anxiety, Depression in Cancer Patients.”
*3 ?See https://clusterbusters.org/.
*4 ?R. A. Sewell, J. H. Halpern, and H. G. Pope, Jr., “Response of Cluster Headache to Psilocybin and LSD”; Matthew W. Johnson et al., “Pilot Study of the 5-HT2AR Agonist Psilocybin in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction.”
*5 ?R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., “The Paradoxical Psychological Effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD).”
*6 ?Enzo Tagliazucchi et al., “Increased Global Functional Connectivity Correlates with LSD-Induced Ego Dissolution.”
Day 6
Normal Day
Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Excellent.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: Woke up in the middle of the night, but fell back to sleep eventually.
Work: The words took some time to flow.
Pain: More or less the same as before I started the protocol.
Feeling good will make a woman do strange things; today I called my father. The call with my mother a couple of days ago went so well I figured, hey, you’re already experimenting with illegal hallucinogens; why not do something really wild?
When I talk to my father, it is less of a conversation than a monologue, or a series of mini-lectures. Kind of like attending a one-man TED conference at the Hebrew Home for the Aged. Today’s topics were, as ever, “Soviet History: The Stalin Era,” “Zionism and Trotskyist Theory,” and “Lincoln vs. McClellan: Whose Fault?” Or something like that. I admit I might have zoned out a few times during the call. What made today so unusual was that, instead of quickly losing patience and inventing an excuse to get off the phone, I hung in there. I stayed on the line. I heard the animation and even delight in my father’s voice as he gave me a detailed digest of his most recent haul from the Fort Lee Public Library. This is how he makes himself happy, I realized. Anyway, what did you expect? You call a telephone psychic, you get artful guesses and vague insights. Call Daddy and you get the Second Battle of Bull Run.
My father and I have always had a difficult relationship, but now, when I look back, I realize that it is my own expectations—my ideas about the father I need, the father I wish I had—that have been the source of the longing, disappointment, frustration, and ultimately anger that have characterized my feelings about my father for so long.
The futility of my expectations was made comically clear to me a couple of years ago, after my father somewhat mysteriously handed me a stack of microcassettes. They were recordings of his psychotherapy sessions, made during the early eighties with a New York City psychologist named Albert Ellis. I didn’t know what to make of this odd gift, what message they might contain, what he was trying to tell me by giving them to me. For a long time I didn’t listen to the tapes; I was too annoyed. You want to tell me something? I would imagine saying to him. Try talking! But sometimes I could not help wondering about what might be recorded on those microcassettes. All the feelings he had never expressed. His feelings about himself, his marriage. His feelings about managing his bipolar disorder. Most of all, his feelings about me. Maybe on those tapes I might hear the voice of a man who thought and wondered and cared about his daughter. The voice of the father I had always wished for, had always hoped, against hope, might be hiding in there, under there, somewhere.
Finally, at the urging of a friend, I sat down and listened to the tapes—six hours, representing two months of sessions with one of the most prominent psychologists of the day. So what did they talk about, my dad and the great Dr. Ellis? His feelings, worries, and cares? The people he loved? The personal and professional ramifications of his mood disorder?