If you take LSD, different parts of the brain, because the control center gets less energy, have the ability to communicate, and this is what actually gives human beings the edge.
If it is demonstrated that the brain is shooting new connections off after you've taken psychedelics, that should worry us because generally the brain does that when it's been injured.
Why did the Neanderthals die out and we sapiens continued? And it actually, the research points in that very direction, that it seems to be inherent for us to expand our mind. And the frontal cortex, which the brain of the Neanderthal was actually bigger than the sapiens brain, but the sapiens brain was structured differently. It had more neuronal connections in the frontal cortex, and that frontal cortex, at least that's what the archaeological research shows, was stimulated by a very, very early mushroom usage of the sapiens, which the Neanderthals never did. And if you look at tens of thousands of years in Europe when both these human species were on this continent, the culture of the Neanderthals was quite stable, but it didn't evolve. They didn't improve their tools and techniques, and also the cave paintings that they did were stagnant. They just did handprints mostly, while the humans, you can see that they evolve, that the frontal cortex is changing and that therefore concepts are evolving and concepts are changing.
Psychoactive compounds, as you said, make a change in the brain. What actually happens in the brain is that the control center, the default mode network, during a psychedelic experience receives a little bit less energy than usual. If you take a lot of psychedelics, it receives a lot less energy, which leads to the so-called dissolution of the ego. But if you just take a little, also the control center that tells us right now we're sitting here up here and you're down there and everything is normal, that's what your brain tells you right now, so you don't freak out. But if you take LSD, different parts of the brain, because the control center gets less energy, have the ability to communicate. And so there's a different chemical status happening, a different dynamic happening in the brain, which is this evolving of the mind. And this is what actually gives human beings the edge over all the animals and even over our previous cousin, the Neanderthals, who never did this, who were basically too sober for the future.
Well, I just wanted to challenge this idea that psychedelics help grow brain connections, help grow the brain and develop the brain. First of all, that hasn't been consistently demonstrated. But secondly, if it is demonstrated that the brain is shooting new connections off after you've taken psychedelics, that should worry us because generally the brain does that when it's been injured. We know the brain grows new connections after a stroke or after a brain injury. So it's not necessarily a good thing. That doesn't mean that people can't gain insight and get positive things out of taking drugs over and above just pure enjoyment. I think people can learn things from drug-induced experiences on occasions. But I don't think that's because they're growing brain connections or anything like that. I think that's just a normal learning process. They've had an experience and they've reflected on that.
But I would agree with you. You might hear the wrong things or you might go crazy, obviously. So how did humans deal with that? Because they always had psychedelics around them. How did they deal with that? They had structures. They had so-called rituals. If you go to a museum, you always see like, this object was used for ritual purposes. No one knows, historians have no clue what that actually means. I actually met one historian in Tampa, Florida, who decided to have a cup from ancient Egypt examined in a lab, because normally you just look at the cup and it looks kind of interesting and old, but he had the residues examined and found out that they had used, 200 years before Christ in Egypt, a very complex psychedelic brew that was drunk from this cup. But these uses were always embedded in knowledge. There were people that were giving that brew to someone else. There was some kind of a ritualistic usage which we have obviously lost. That's why, for example, in the 60s, when Timothy Leary just said, we just all need to take LSD and we'll become better human beings, there will be peace on earth, that thought is too easy. If we decide as a society to approach psychedelics in a more responsible fashion, then we shouldn't say they're illegal and they don't exist and they don't have any medicinal value. We should, as a society, then think of how can we use them. Should we develop new rituals, or should there be places where people can take them, or should there be therapists who are legalized to take them with their patients, which is happening all over the world, slowly happening right now. This is how we should approach it in order to avoid things like everyone takes psychedelics and new neurons grow and then maybe people go crazy.
As we've demonized recreational drug use, we've expanded the market for medical drug use and we've substituted one for the other. So everyone was sort of numbing themselves with opium in the 19th century and now they're being prescribed antidepressants or benzodiazepines or stimulants or something like that. And because we've medicalized it as a society, we now feel more comfortable with the idea and we've also disguised what we're doing. We're pretending we're treating medical problems, whereas actually we're giving people psychoactive substances to make them feel a bit different. So psychedelics are coming in. It concerns me because it seems that in some ways they're now being promoted to just replace antidepressants as the sort of new therapeutic tool, and that means they will end up being used on a regular long-term basis, and we really don't know about the implications of that on the brain and cognitive functions and things. But this idea first started off with the idea of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. So someone would have one or two doses of a psychedelic and then talk to a psychotherapist and process what they had experienced. And this has been tried out for all sorts of things, for PTSD, for alcoholism, for various things. And I can see that that might be useful for some people. I think there are probably other ways of processing trauma that might be safer. And the thought of taking a psychedelic and then have people with white coats around me, I find quite horrifying. Any better circumstance to produce a bad trip is difficult to think of. But nevertheless, I can sort of see the theoretical basis of that. The worry is that the psychotherapy part of that is expensive, so it will be dropped, and having people come along for one or two sessions is not profitable, so it will be extended. And that's exactly what's happened with ketamine in the US. Ketamine started off exactly in this way, and now what's happened is the psychotherapy has been dropped and people come in for their regular ketamine fixes, and we know that long-term ketamine use is extremely problematic.
First of all, I want to disagree. I'm sorry that you said you're afraid that psychedelics will replace antidepressants, then people will become addicted to psychedelics. That's completely false because psychedelics are non-addictive, except ketamine. Ketamine docks at the opioid receptors in the brain. But LSD and psilocybin are not addictive. They're actually counter-addictive because they increase neuroplasticity. So addictive behavior gets reduced. The problem obviously is that pharmacological companies are not interested in that, which I would agree with you on. They're not interested in us instead of taking a pill every day and becoming addicted to that pill. Like in America, I think 25% of the population takes antidepressants or something like that. That's of course a huge business. With psychedelics, maybe you only need to take it once in your life or maybe once a year. And also you don't take it with people in white coats. That's also a total cliché that kind of scares people off the situation. That's kind of a mind-control 50s kind of scenario in the United States. Obviously, in an advanced society like, for example, the Swiss society where it's already being practiced, you go to your therapist who doesn't wear a white coat but is actually dressed quite nicely in a nice room, and you do therapy with that person for a while. And then once in a while you take a psychoactive compound like psilocybin because during those sessions you just realize a lot more than you would otherwise. Freud thought we just need to talk for years, because he was a cocaine guy. He developed psychoanalysis, and cocaine is like the talking drug. He didn't have access to psychedelics because they had been repressed before. Psychedelics were very big in America before the Spanish came, but then they were not. Freud had no access to that. But right now, looking at psychotherapy combined with psychedelics, and also you said there's different ways which might be better. There's no way which is better than psychedelic-supported therapy right now, at least in my opinion and what I know from research. So I think you, well, I disagree strongly.
I do want to actually clarify. I think there's like two misunderstandings here. On one hand, I think it's not about psychedelics being addictive. They don't have addictive potential.
