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Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.
ANDREW BANNECKER
Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation
Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.
See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers
Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”
When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”
Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.
Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.
“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”
See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation
Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”
Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.
Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.
To Journey or Not to Journey?
In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”
In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”
Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”
Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.
See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm
“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”
A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”
* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
What’s a mystical experience?
Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:
• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)
• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence
• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)
• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)
• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)
• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)
Learn how your brain is affected by drugs and meditation.
ANDREW BANNECKER
Your Brain on Drugs—and Meditation
Flora Baker, 30, a travel blogger from London, took Ayahuasca while visiting Brazil and the psychoactive cactus San Pedro while in Bolivia. “Part of the reason I was traveling in South America was an attempt to heal after the death of my mother. The ceremonies involved a lot of introspective thought about who I was without her, and what kind of woman I was becoming,” she says. “On Ayahuasca, my thoughts about my mom weren’t of her physical form, but her energy—as a spirit or life force that carried me and carries me onward, always, ever present within me and around. I’ve thought of these ideas in the past, but it was the first time I truly believed and understood them.” The experiences ended with a sense of peace and acceptance, and Baker says she’s sometimes able to access these same feelings in her daily meditation practice.
See also 10 Best Yoga and Meditation Books, According to 10 Top Yoga and Meditation Teachers
Baker’s and Griffin’s comparisons of certain insights or feelings they had on psychedelics to those one might get through meditation may have an explanation in modern neuroscience. To start, in a study of what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, researchers at Imperial College London gave participants psilocybin and scanned their brains. They found decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These are key brain regions involved in the “default mode network,” or the brain circuits that help you maintain a sense of self and daydream. The researchers also found that reduced activity in default mode networks correlated with participants’ reports of “ego dissolution.”
When Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, then a researcher at Yale University, read the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, he noticed that the brain scans looked strikingly similar to those of meditators in a study he’d published two months earlier in the same journal. In Brewer’s study, he’d put experienced meditators with more than a decade of practice into an fMRI machine, asked them to meditate, and found that the regions of the volunteers’ brains that tended to quiet down were also the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortexes. (In the Yale study, meditators who were new to the practice did not show the same reductions.) Brewer, who is now director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, describes the default mode network as the “me network.” Activity spikes when you are thinking about something you need to do in the future, or when you’re ruminating over past regrets. “Deactivations in these brain regions line up with a selfless sense that people get. They let go of fears and protections and taking things personally. When that expands way, way out there, you lose a sense of where you end and where the rest of the world begins.”
Intrigued by the similarities in brain scans between people taking psychedelics and meditators, other researchers have started investigating whether the two practices might be complementary in clinical settings. In a study published last year in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers took 75 people with little or no history of meditation and broke them into three groups. Those in the first group received a very low dose of psilocybin (1 mg) and were asked to commit to regular spiritual practices such as meditation, spiritual awareness practice, and journaling with just five hours of support. The second group got high-dose psilocybin (20–30 mg) and five hours of support, and the third group got high-dose psilocybin and 35 hours of support. After six months, both high-dose groups reported more-frequent spiritual practices and more gratitude than those in the low-dose group. In addition, those in the high-dose and high-support group reported higher ratings in finding meaning and sacredness in daily life.
Johns Hopkins is also researching the effects of psilocybin sessions on long-term meditators. Those with a lifetime average of about 5,800 hours of meditation, or roughly the equivalent of meditating an hour a day for 16 years, were, after careful preparations, given psilocybin, put in an fMRI machine, and asked to meditate. Psychologist Brach and her husband, Jonathan Foust, cofounder of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute in Washington, DC, and former president of the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health, helped recruit volunteers for the study, and Foust participated in a preliminary stage. While on psilocybin, he did regular short periods of concentration practice, compassion practice, and open-awareness practice. He also spontaneously experienced an intense childhood memory.
“My brother is four years older than me. In the competition for our parents’ affection, attention, and love, he hated my guts. This is normal and natural, but I saw how I subconsciously took that message in and it informed my life. On psilocybin I simultaneously experienced the raw wounded feeling and an empathy and insight into where he was coming from,” Foust says. “During the height of the experience, they asked me how much negative emotion I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 10. Then, they asked about positive emotion and well-being and I said 10. It was kind of a soul-expanding insight that it’s possible to have consciousness so wide that it can hold the suffering and the bliss of the world.”
See also YJ Tried It: 30 Days of Guided Sleep Meditation
Foust started meditating at the age of 15 and he’s maintained a daily practice since then, including a couple of decades spent living in an ashram participating in intensive monthlong meditation retreats. “My meditation practice gave me some steadiness through all the waves of sensation and mood I was experiencing on psilocybin,” he says. “There were some artificial elements to it, but I came away with a much deeper trust in the essential liberation teachings in the Buddhist tradition. It verified my faith in all these practices that I’ve been doing my whole life.” Since the psilocybin study, he describes his meditation practice as “not as serious or grim,” and reflecting on this shift, he says, “I think my practice on some subtle level was informed by a desire to feel better, or to help me solve a problem, and I actually feel there is now more a sense of ease. I’m savoring my practice more and enjoying it more.”
Frederick Barrett, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins, presented preliminary findings with the long-term meditators and said that participants reported decreased mental effort and increased vividness when meditating. The meditators who reported having a mystical experience during the psilocybin-meditation had an accompanying acute drop in their default mode network.
Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, has an “entropy hypothesis” for what happens in your brain on psychedelics. His theory is that as activity in your default mode network goes down, other regions of your brain, such as those responsible for feelings and memories, are able to communicate with one another much more openly and in a way that’s less predictable and more anarchical (entropy). What this all means is yet to be determined, but researchers speculate that when your default mode network comes back to full functionality, the new pathways forged during the psychedelic experience can help shift you into new patterns of thinking.
To Journey or Not to Journey?
In How to Change Your Mind, writer Michael Pollan explores the history of psychedelics and the research renaissance, and, immersion-journalism style, samples LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca (which he drank in a yoga studio), and 5-MeO-DMT (a form of DMT in toad venom). Reflecting on his experiences, he writes, “For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation... This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”
In a special series on psychedelics published by the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 2017, Ram Dass shared accounts of his experiences, including taking psilocybin for the first time at Leary’s house and sensing “pure consciousness and love,” and offering LSD to his guru Neem Karoli Baba, whom he calls Maharaj-ji, in India in 1967: “On two occasions my guru ingested very large doses of LSD that I gave him with no discernible effect. He said these substances were used by Himalayan yogis in the past, but the knowledge has been lost. He said LSD can take you into the room with Christ, but you can only stay for two hours. And while drugs can be useful, love is the best medicine.”
Reflecting on this guru’s comments about LSD and love, Ram Dass, co-author of Walking Each Other Home, says, “After that experience with Maharaj-ji, I meditated and didn’t take psychedelics for many years, but I’ve advised people starting out on the spiritual path that psychedelics are a legitimate entry point. It’s the beginning stages of consciousness expansion. I already did the beginning. Now I stay with my sadhana—love and service.”
Bossis says he’s struck by how many people talk about love during or after psilocybin sessions. “They speak about experiencing an incredible sense of love, often describing it as a foundation of consciousness,” he says. When participants ask him how to stay with these feelings of love and other aspects of the experience they had on psilocybin, he encourages them to consider exploring meditation and other contemplative practices.
See also Inside the ASMR Meditation People Are Calling a Brain Orgasm
“While altered states from psychedelics offer great potential for healing and spiritual awakening, they lack a key benefit of long-term meditation practice—integrating the experience in a way that creates a lasting shift from state to trait,” Brach says. “An altered state—such as an experience of pervading love—gives us a taste of who we are. It gives hope and meaning to our life. But regularly arriving in awake, open-hearted awareness though a natural process of meditation allows us to trust that this awareness is the very grounds of who we are.” She describes a meditation practice as a rewarding cycle: “The more meditation carries us home to what we love, the more we are motivated to pause and come into the stillness and silence of presence. This inner presence then expresses itself increasingly in our communications, thoughts, work, play, service, and creativity. The experiences of love, unity, and light are realized as present and available in all facets of life.”
A year after her experience with psychedelics, Griffin says she has no desire to do them again but is grateful for the experience. “I feel less afraid to die,” she says. “The journey weekend gave me a sense that we come from pure love and we are going to pure love.”
* NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
What’s a mystical experience?
Whether it happens naturally or is brought on by a psychedelic, researchers define a mystical experience as having six key qualities:
• Sense of unity or oneness (interconnectedness of all people and things, all is one, pure consciousness)
• Strong sense of sacredness or reverence
• Noetic quality (a sense of encountering ultimate reality, often described as “more real than real”)
• Deeply felt positive mood (universal love, joy, peace)
• Transcendence of time and space (past and present collapse into the present moment)
• Ineffability (the experience is very hard to put into words)