Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful ? And here I give the caveats that maybe you'll feel obligated to give as well .
But it had been , you know , 25 years since I had done that . And , and there was this resurgence in research on psychedelics and I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me . But again , these were distant memories .
Um I've been part of a clinical trial , three doses of MD Ma which certainly altered my , the the quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least for me valuable learning . So what are your , what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion that we've been having ? And um what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in other sorts of brain changes ?
Um and we can talk about the , the uh pharmacology if you wanted to . But um the uh I would just say that for many of us , I mean , certainly for me , psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that this was uh that , that , that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing . You know , because , you know , I was somebody who , you know , age 17 or 18 before I had any real experience with um with MD MA or LSD or Psilocybin .
And it , and the difference between the two is like , you know , the tipping point is just , it's not really is kind of a high wire act in some sense , you know , you could just fall to one side or the other . And um yeah , so what I think people want is um they certainly want to be able to extract from the psychedelic experience wisdom that is applicable to ordinary states of consciousness . It's like , what is the thing you can realize in a moment of having a conversation with your child that isn't distracting you from that relationship .
