The Science of Psychological Transformation
The science of psychological transformation
Psychedelics have the ability to transform people. From curing mental illness to producing changes in people's political views, psychedelics have the potential to dramatically alter the brain and mind. Such experiences can also happen without psychedelics and have been sought after through religious practices for millenia. What happens in the brain when we undergo a transformation of this kind and might we actually be wired for such transformative experiences?
What makes us who we are?
When we are born, our brains are highly plastic. Raise a newborn in any country in the world and it will typically learn the local language with little effort at all. The same goes for recognising faces, learning to walk, and a huge number of other complex tasks. Our individual personality and sense of self also develop in a similar way. We discover that certain ways of being help us to get by in the world, maybe it’s being funny, maybe it’s caring about your looks, maybe it’s being shy. Our personality develops as a kind of coping mechanism that allows us to navigate the stresses of the world. As we grow older we get more and more set in our ways, making it harder and harder to change aspects of ourselves that may no longer be serving us.
The brain-basis of learning
When we learn something new our brain physically changes. The brain is a vast network of neurons, individual brain cells that connect together and send electrical signals to each other. When you hear someone ask a question and you respond, electrical activity produced in your auditory nerve ricochets through specific pathways that have been created in this complex networks, resulting in your mouth moving and you producing an appropriate answer. When you learn a new language, for example, the connections between these neurons physically reconfigure to allow you to respond appropriately to the sounds of the new language. At birth there are few of these pathways and the brain’s connections are primed to create new ones. Once you have set down these neural pathways the brain locks them in, making it harder to change them as we age. In some cases, however, radical transformation is possible, particularly when psychedelics are involved.
Psychedelic transformation
In people suffering with terminal cancer, a single experience with psilocybin has been shown to be capable of resolving the anxiety and depression they feel in the face of their own death [1]. People can suffer with anxiety, depression and fear of their own mortality for decades, but without the help of psychedelics such profound transformations are rare. Similar transformations are seen with MDMA therapy. Following three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, many people who suffered with seemingly incurable PTSD found that they no longer met the criteria for a diagnosis [2]. This is a profound transformation when you consider the fact that many who suffer with PTSD are driven to suicide due to the severity of their distress. Such effects are typically seen over a relatively short period, on the order of weeks or months. Single transformative experiences are more rare, but they do happen. In a recent interview, head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblin, told of one such case.
“He was a veteran and had PTSD...he had this sense that he had been disabled with PTSD for years because of friends of his that had been killed and all the violence he’d witness in iraq and under the influence of MDMA he had the realisation that there was something good about the PTSD, he was getting a benefit from it, which was, it was that way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died, that he was connected to their memory and that he was suffering and it was a way of being bonded still with them, but then he was able to kind of see himself through the eyes of his friend who had died and was able to realise that they wouldn’t want him to squander his life...they would want him to live as fully as possible…He realised there’s another way to honour his friends and that’s to live...and in that moment he cured himself of PTSD.”
Quantum change experiences
Such insights have the power to produce lasting transformation. These experiences are sometimes referred to as “quantum change experiences”, instances of radical change that occur over a short period of time. Such change is typically precipitated by an experience, a subjective state that feels profoundly important. This might be an insight or epiphany that can be put into words or an ineffable mystical experience. Such states typically have a “noetic” quality, a feeling of certainty regarding the truth of what has just been realised. The godfather of western psychology, William James, took an interest in such experiences in his classic work from 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He reported two types of psychological change, gradual change over time and sudden instances of transformation. The latter can be seen reflected in religious conversion experiences and other spiritual experiences. Since James this topic received little attention from mainstream psychology until the development of the field of transpersonal psychology in the 60s. With the creation of this new field of research, different types of quantum change experience began being studied by researchers.
Near-Death Experiences
When coming close to dying, many people have extraordinary subjective experiences that often change them for life. In these Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), people typically feel as if they have come into contact with another plane of existence that brings into doubt their previous conception of reality. From a biological perspective, it makes sense that an animal that behaves in such a way as to almost die might have some important learning to do. Both these grand metaphysical insights and the simple survival imperative of the organism can be used to account for the dramatic change seen after such experiences. Following an NDE, many people report changes in their character, typically becoming more open and loving.
Mystical experience
The mystical experience plays a central role in individual transformation in many of the world’s religions. During such an experience, the individual feels as if they have seen a profound and simple truth that exists behind our everyday experience of the world; that everything is one. Such experiences are typically characterized by feelings of liberation from suffering, as the self that suffers is surrendered in identification with the whole of existence. An experience of this kind can reframe an individual's entire conception of life and its meaning, providing an “overview effect”. This term refers to the mystical experience reported by astronauts who witness the entire earth from space, and experience that can cause a poignant reframing of our everyday concerns. The astronaut Michael Collins who flew the Apollo 11 mission to the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin saw the earth differently after such an experience.
“The thing that really surprised me was that it projected an air of fragility. And why, I don’t know. I don’t know to this day. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.”
Psychedelic mystical experience
Psychedelics can also produce such experiences. In 2006, a landmark scientific paper was published titled “Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance”. Researchers have since found that a single high-dose of psilocybin can produce mystical experiences with transformative potential. What's more, the strength of the transformation appears to be due to the subjective experience, not simply to the physiological effect of the dose [3].
Psychedelics and the brain
What is it about these experiences that allow them to produce lasting change? Psychedelics act in the brain by imitating serotonin and have been found to increase plasticity in networks of neurons. This means that new connections can be formed more easily, allowing us to get out of our old habits and ways of seeing the world and to try on new behaviours and perspectives. A widely used analogy is of a skier wearing down a path in the snow. After a while, it’s hard to escape the ruts that have been carved out. Dump a fresh load of snow on the hillside,however, and the skier is free to find new paths that may be superior. Psychedelics seem to temporarily lift the oppressive pull of the old paths in our brain and allow us to physically make new neural connections, changing us in the process.
Hacking our capacity for transformation
Even without psychedelics, we clearly have the capacity for radical transformation. Whether produced by a sudden insight, a fresh perspective, a mystical experience or a brush with death, our brain has the ability to change in an incredibly short period of time. One idea is that the serotonin 2A system in the brain that psychedelics act on evolved to give us the capacity for radical change in moments when things aren't going our way and we need to adapt dramatically [4]. In this view, when stress builds high enough this system is activated, producing a highly malleable state in the brain where learning can occur rapidly. If this is the case, stressful religious practices like fasting and isolation in nature might be a way to hack this innate capacity for change. Psychedelics could then be seen as another shortcut for triggering this potential. If used wisely, these substances could be used to lift countless people out of psychological patterns that no longer serve them and currently cause untold suffering.
References
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881110378371
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5776504/
[4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881120959637