Episode 16: Well Being and Psychedelics: caution, potential and meditation
Episode 16 of M3CS’s Contemplative Science Podcast saw Adam Safron come on to the show to talk about the warranted caution and enthusiasm for psychedelics in medical treatment, meditation and more.
For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
Theories and discussion relating to the use of psychedelics to help wellbeing.
How psychedelics create a period of plasticity in the brain, and what this means.
Discussion relating to psychedelics and their potential for enhancing freewill.
Adam Safron is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at The Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine. A meditation practitioner himself, his work centres on characterising the nature of preferences and motivation.
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
The use of psychedelics for wellbeing is still a growing and evolving field of research.
”I think there's many reasons to think psychedelics are a game changer for practice, for people's ability to help themselves and others. But it's only recently that we could really start to do the kinds of studies we need to do, to have a reliable knowledge on this.”
Whilst higher doses can be very effective, they must be approached with caution.
“Higher doses might actually be more univalenced, in some ways. When it goes bad, it might really, really go bad. But there seems to be like this middle regime, where you might try to control things more. And that's where things might start to go south or sideways... with a lot of stuff coming up that you might not have been looking at. Some of it might be real stuff, some of it might be just a delusion, but you don't know.”
As with meditation, this area of research is both subjective and dependent on context.
”And so it seems that there probably isn't one story of psychedelics, just like there's not one story of meditation. What is the practice? What is the substance? What is the dose? What is the set? What is the setting? Could be very different regimes that are brought forth. And so, how many different psychedelic accounts do we need?”
The best place to find Adam Safron is here.
See you next week!
