 Hello everybody. My name is Bella Lopez and I'm a fourth year student here at Cal, double majoring in history and media studies. I have loved my Cal experience. I am in the rally committee, as you can tell by my shirt, and I've had such a great time finding a community here and being able to put on events like the homecoming rally tonight. It's at though, you should stop by at the seven. And then just walking down Sprout this morning, it's so clear that everyone here is so passionate about something, whether it's their, you know, academic studies, their community, or any other activities they do. And so I'd like to thank our donors for their generous support. Cal all benefits from the support of generations of donors. And so thank you all so much. And of course, I would like to introduce our speaker today, Michael Silver, a professor of optometry and vision science and neuroscience. Michael Silver is the faculty director of Berkeley Center for Science and Psychedelics or the BCSB. His lab works to better understand how the brain actively constructs representations of the visual environment. Although Michael's team has been conducting pharmacological studies in humans for 18 years, his BCSP research is his first foray into psychedelic work. Following decades of suppression of research on psychedelics in human subjects, Michael is thrilled to have the opportunity to employ psychedelics and studies that will shine new light on mysteries of the mind and brain. Go Bears and please welcome Professor Silver. Thank you so much Bella for the introduction. And thanks to all of you for coming today. It's really lovely to see you. It's an honor to be to be part of Cal's upcoming activities. I'm going to begin with land acknowledgement. Before we begin this event, we take a moment to recognize that UC Berkeley sits in the territory of Huchin, the ancestral and unceded land of the churchenio speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone tribe and other family descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community, inclusion and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. As members of the Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also we recognize that the Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today. The subject of the lecture today is an overview of a relatively new center on our campus, the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. We just celebrated our third birthday and I'm the faculty director of the center, but there are many, many people who are involved in various aspects of this work and you'll hear a lot from, you'll hear about a lot of them today. So from its origins, the BCSP has had three major areas of focus. This includes research, that's researched with both human subjects and experimental animal models, training, which means programs for preparing people to be facilitators of other psychedelic experiences and public education, which includes journalism as well as other educational activities. And a founding principle of our center is that it's extremely interdisciplinary. It spans many different departments and schools on our campus and many different fields. Every center on our campus has an administrative home where it lives and the overall UC Berkeley landscape, ours is the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, but the members of our center come from all of these different departments and schools listed here, psychology, molecular cell biology, education, journalism, optometry, public health and neuroscience and really this is just the beginning for us. We would like to expand further into the humanities and social sciences as the center continues to grow. So why do we need a center like this? What's interesting about psychedelics research, how does it impact society or health or human well-being? So many of you I'm sure have seen reports in the media of clinical trials of psychedelic assisted therapy for a variety of mental health disorders. Here's one result from a study of MDMA which is a chemical name for ecstasy or molly, so pairing MDMA with psychotherapy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and this graph shows a scale that quantifies the severity of PTSD symptoms and the x-axis here are different sessions so where the the severity of the PTSD was assessed after different time points in this MDMA assisted psychotherapy and so a reduction in these values means an improvement in the severity of PTSD and blue is a placebo condition, the red is the pairing of the drug with psychotherapy and you can see there's a reduction in severity in both cases over time but that this reduction is much more pronounced when MDMA assisted psychotherapy is administered and the number of mental health disorders for which psychedelic assisted therapy seems to have promise is very broad it includes PTSD but also anxiety, depression, substance use disorder and many others. So this is fascinating and significant mental health challenges in the U.S. and around the world and very limited treatment options for many people and so the idea that there is a new treatment that has the potential to help improve the mental health of people is very exciting but it needs to be said that we really have almost no idea about how this is effective at the level of the brain. How is it actually working is something that much more research needs to be done and so our center is interested in understanding the actions of psychedelics in the brain in part to be able to understand how these therapies work and then ultimately to develop more effective therapies over time. Psychedelics are also a very reliable way of enhancing neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity simply means the capacity of the brain to change and so neuroplasticity includes learning when we learn new skills or knowledge or experiences that's the type of neuroplasticity recovery from brain injury is the type of plasticity there's also plasticity that is can be maladaptive as well and so having a chemical specifically enhance neuroplasticity is also something that's very interesting from a research perspective with potentially many applications once we have a better understanding of the mechanisms. There's also some really fascinating findings from studies of psychedelics not in clinical populations but in so-called neurotypical participants who don't have a mental health diagnosis and in this case this paper surveyed people after a psychedelic experience that they had in the context of a research study and they asked them about the significance of that experience in the context of other significant experiences in their life and for many people the psychedelic experience was profound and significant at a level that was similar to the most significant experiences they've ever had so it was the birth of a child or the death of a parent and so that's pretty fascinating too how can a chemical administered in the appropriate context reliably elicit these transcendent experiences that are so powerful for people and what does that tell us about the nature of human experience and its associated brain mechanisms and then finally for basic neuroscientists and psychologists who are interested in characterizing the properties of the mind and brain having a tool that can reliably alter perception, cognition, emotion is a really appealing way of studying the basic mechanisms of all of these phenomena so if you have a complex of brain and you drug that and drug interaction with the interactive environment that changes some aspect of cognition or emotion or brain activity then that can be used to give you basic insights into the fundamental mechanisms and so we're really excited about psychedelics as a researcher in that context as well. So hopefully it's one of those points kind of convinced you that psychedelics are a pretty fascinating group of molecules and deserve much more study and as many of you know research on psychedelics especially in human subjects has been very minimal in decades and quite recently so you know initially we talked about the properties of various psychedelics plants fungi and even animals by indigenous peoples indigenous peoples have learned a great deal about the effects of some kinds of plants and fungi and that we now know how psychedelic molecules are part of them. They've also learned a great deal about how to use the molecules or these organisms in ceremonial contexts to promote different kinds of healing and so this kind of research is not always considered to be a research framework but certainly a great knowledge that has come about through the indigenous use of these various materials and this goes back to trees and even light pieces. In a western science framework the identification of particular psychedelic molecules was a real landmark so you can see in 1938 LSD was the first time this is not a molecule this natural product molecule but also extraction of psychedelic compounds from plants in this case mescaline from the San Pedro cactus or the peyote cactus. So the cybin from psychedelic mushrooms these all give the concise into the chemical bases of why these mushrooms these plants have psychedelic activities and then you will be able to appreciate that psychedelics especially in psychotherapy can have complications and could be used for treating mental health and so many hundreds of days actually from the 1960s conducted research and a lot of these were either psychiatrists or psychologists studying the possibility that psychedelics could be used for mental health treatment and many of these papers would not modern standards or rigor for clinical trials but still there were a lot of intriguing I would say preliminary thoughts about the possibility of mental health treatments and so initially these were very much some research chemicals that were being studied in the context of health care but then although in the 1960s they became much more available in the general public and people started using for all kinds of reasons to go to parties listen to music and go to the woods in the ceremonial context and they became extremely popular in the United States and as well and this elicited a background in that many were threatened by the possibility that psychedelics were going to have to make contracts in our society they stabilized society they're also concerned about safety people using them in uncontrolled ways without knowledge and propagation sometimes there were also there was also misinformation about some of the risks so there are also real risks and so a combination of all of these reactions to psychedelics so widely used led to incul substances being passed in the early 70s through Richard Nixon signing the act and so this is a schedule system that we've heard about incul substances are classified in different schedules and so the Central Substances Act created schedule one LSD and so I've been we're both placed in schedule one and some of the criteria for the one arm is here so they to be in schedule one is formally not happy not designed for any currently medical use but it's a high potential for abuse so that is the designation that drugs are still in today despite the research that's ongoing some of these compounds and so the drugs were made legal for certain purposes necessarily but the difficulty of doing research given all the restrictions upon control sentences essentially meant that very little research with human subjects for decades afterwards that started in the 90s initially with MT dimethylamine is an optimal substance that is also a transmitter that we all make in our bodies as well and Rich Drostner insisted on obtaining all the regulatory tools necessary to do research on human drugs with the psychedelic drug is MT and then that's looking the door and provides a roadmap for how other users could do this sort of work and so that's led to now with many many FDA clinical trials of drugs like in DMAs, Diven being used to create a variety of disorders and there's a lot of corporate interest now as well companies are sponsoring these trials very similar to the way that pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs for treating blood pressure for example or arthritis so the FDA is regulating all of these and have the same standard for testing the efficacy of the safety and safety of these drugs for in different medical contexts there's also a lot of in between psychedelic and spiritual experience so there's research that's going on there that's not necessarily in a mutual context exploring aspects of psychedelic experience and as I mentioned before psychedelic basic research tools to better understand the fundamental problems of the mind and brain which is the moment we have such little understanding of drugs as a field so that's the context of psychedelic research there's really been a resurgence in this research and that was part of the way that the BCSP the the science of psychedelics is repeating to be able to bring to research to Berkeley so our focus is not on testing these drugs and the treatment of all the disorders we're doing basic mechanistic research which we hope will not treat with development but our initial focus in the human subjects is really to understand the fundamental properties of the mind brain and body and you psychedelics isn't a way of a better of deepening on that so we have a set of experiments that are really characterizing this making people experience itself and this involves perception so we're using a dose that's enough that can realistically and practically participate in experiments and have measurements made in the brain and the perception and cognition during the psychedelic experience with psilocybin other studies of higher doses really the experience is very potent and intense we're not really studying people during the experience rather we're comparing them after the experience look at the enduring formative effects of psychedelic experience on emotion learning memory and stress regulation and then also experiments in animal model rodents to examine a regular emotion at an apoptic level exactly how do psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity in the brain so I'll tell you a little bit about this first set of experiments characterizing this making people experience itself and it's based on this framework called predictive code theory of perception which is that the brain is constantly generating an internal model of the environment and it's making kind of predictions about what's coming next and so this doesn't feel like we perceive the world right we perceive the world we it feels like the world is the way a camera just move our eyes around and we just record what's out there but perceptions is really a reactive disruptive process it's built by the need and obviously it's formed by information from the environment but it's also informed by all the previous experience we've had and the brain do a lot of saving of computation by taking advantage of knowledge patterns regularities in the world to be able to make educated guesses about what's going to happen next and so that's this process of predictive coding and the brain is constantly generating these predictions about what will happen next in the visual environment and then compare them to the information that it gets from the eyes and these predictions are informed by our experiences about the ways that objects and images behave and so these are called priors is prior that we bring to each moment of perception to be able to generate predictions so here's an example of how this influence perception see these two images the one on the left looks like bounds i'm sorry looks like craters on top of mounds the one on the right looks like mounds at the bottom of craters these are actually exactly the same image each one is just flipped compared to the other so the image itself is fundamentally ambiguous there there is no right answer so to speak about three-dimensional content of this image based on the image itself so it could be concave it could be convex at any given point and there's there's not enough information in the image to actually determine that but we don't experience it as ambiguous we experience it in one very particular interpretation and that's thought to be because our prior in this case is the light is probably coming from above the light that's illuminating these objects is coming from above as opposed to coming from below and as soon as you make that assumption then the pattern of shading in the image does disambiguate it and it is then either craters and mounds or mounds and craters so we're not aware of this assumption that our brain is making and the assumption that light comes from above instead of below is a very solid assumption for almost all the environments we encounter but we've all experienced visual illusions where we fail to see things as they actually are and this is usually an example of setting up the illusion illusory stimulus in a way that it sort of takes it it it's just the exception that proves the rule really it shows how predictive coding in particular situations the the assumptions that we make are incorrect and so we have these illusory experiences in this case the prediction that light is coming from above is helpful because it gives us more information than would otherwise be available about the visual environment and our brains are doing this all the time kind of under the hood we don't really we're not really aware of it but it's a fundamental part of how we experience the world around us so this notion of predictive coding has been applied to psychedelics and the treatment of mental health disorders by robin carhart harris and carl friston their theory is called relaxed beliefs under psychedelics beliefs here you can think of as priors it's the the previous information that people are bringing to their representations and the theory is that the psychedelics systematically reduce the brain's dependence or the influence of these priors in experience and in the context of mental health disorders priors are not things like where the light is coming from they're more for the self narratives or the stories that people tell about themselves so you can imagine someone with depression they their identity as a person becomes very connected to the depression and so much so that the way they see themselves as a depressed person makes them less likely less motivated to go out and accomplish whatever it is they want to do in the world and then that worsens the depression and so in this case the priors are maladaptive the priors are i'm a depressed person i'm never going to be able to to do what i want in the world and so the idea is that psychedelics relax those priors and in the context of the right therapeutic environment new priors can be built that are healthier and more adaptive so that's the basis of the theory it's currently really hard to test this theory in the brain because we know so little about how the brain represents things like self narratives and and the experience of their own identity and so what we plan to do with the bcsp is to take the conceptual heart of this theory and move it tested in a part of the brain that we understand relatively well which is visual perception and the visual system in the brain so we're taking this notion that psychedelics reduce the strength of predictions in experience and we're designing experiments in the visual system to see if we can test that theory and then also learn more about the brain mechanisms so basically we're looking at whether psychedelics how psychedelics affect the interactions between predictions and sensory information in how the brain creates and modifies its representations of the environment and we're using a set of phenomena from vision science called by stable perceptions these are stimuli that are ambiguous that can be experienced in one of two different ways so i'll show you an example of this so most of you are probably experiencing this as four red line segments moving up and down relatively independent of each other they're not interacting in any obvious way but those exact same red line segments if they're presented with these blue stripes produce a very different perception so now these four line segments they're still the same line segments are moving up and down in the same way but we are grouping them into a shape and we're perceiving that shape as moving back and forth behind some sort of occluder that's between us in the shape so this is an example of predictive processing we are using all of the experience we've had about you know animals moving through a forest and disappearing behind trees and then reappearing or a person running behind a picket fence there's it's very often that we are seeing only parts of an image that are occluded by something in the environment and our brains are really good at sort of taking the little bits of the image that make it to our eyes and then sewing them together perceptually so that we can accurately perceive what the object actually is and once you see the one on the right you know if you look at the one on the left you may actually be able to perceive that as the diamond moving horizontally as opposed to the four line segments moving up and down for those of you who don't experience it there are ways of adjusting the stimuli so that people can actually go back and forth between two perceptual interpretations even though the stimulus is not being altered they're either perceiving it as these four elements or as a grouped diamond group diamond reflects these this predictive processing and the four elements predict more sort of raw sensory information so the idea from the rebus theory is that people will be more likely to experience the elemental aspect of this instead of the group and so we can measure that in real time we can have people respond now I'm seeing the diamond now I'm seeing the four elements we can administer psilocybin and see if that alters their perception and then we this is all going on with in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner where we're recording brain activity in real time as people are either interpreting the stimulus one way or another so the value of this kind of experimental design is that the stimuli are constant they don't change but people's perceptual interpretation changes in a way that they can report in real time and then we contract the associated brain activity and see how psychedelics influence that another set of experiments involve brain mapping at a very high level this is in collaboration with jack gallant uh psychology and neuroscience professor here uc berkeley and so I know you can't read all of these but uh these are images uh derived from human brains uh humans participating in this experiment and the brain is covered by the cerebral cortex and these uh representations here are a flattened unfolded representation of the cerebral cortex and using the kinds of methods that have been pioneered in jack allen's lab you can record from thousands of locations in the brain simultaneously and determine what features of the environment they are representing and how that changes over time so all of these colors and all these axes up here are different elements of in this case they were listening to stories so auditory stimuli to the brain and then different semantic aspects of the stories are represented in different parts of the brain and so in the visual domain you can think about well features such as color or motion or shape or textures or patterns all of these are represented in different parts of the brain and so it enables us to have a very systematic sort of dictionary of visual feature representation in the brain and then ask how psychedelics influence that so that tells us about the actions of psychedelics and it also tells us about the basic organization of the brain when it comes to representing these visual features uh moving on to these studies that are more about the longer term effects of the psychedelic experience here we're focused on cognition emotion functions of the immune system and stress regulation as well as some perceptual measures this is in collaboration with decker kelter in psychology and bill jagas in public health and neuroscience uh so here we're making baseline measurements before psychedelic is administered so days before and then people have a powerful psychedelic experience and then we're measuring them using brain imaging and psychophysiology and these various behavioral cognitive measures at different time points afterwards and so we're asking how do people change for days to weeks after the psychedelic experience and bill jagas lab in particular has been studying uh older subjects in other kinds of studies for a long time and so it's really intriguing that some of the reported effects of the psychedelic experience are on cognition and emotion and various biological measures are actually in the exact opposite direction of the way those same measures change as people get older and this is just healthy aging it's not disease and so the idea is that psychedelics maybe could reverse some of these but also that they give us insights again into the basic mechanism of aging if aging changes cognition in a particular way and psychedelic experiences changes in the opposite way that gives us a lever to be able to understand basic mechanisms so we'll be enrolling older participants in this study as well and decker kelter's expertise is in emotion science and some of you may know his work on awe and how is this transformative experience at least to all sorts of improvements in health and well-being and so his he's really interested in what are the exact elements of the psychedelic experience what are what are the emotional experiences that people have that best predict positive long-term outcomes and one possibility is that one of the things psychedelics do is reliably elicit a state of awe in people and then awe is then has all these powerful beneficial effects later on and so he's got really sophisticated tools for measuring different kinds of emotions based on people's reports and also based on recordings and you will test the idea that awe is the sort of mediator of psychedelic experience to be able to elicit these long-term effects on health and well-being finally there's animal research that's happening in the bcsp who's directed by andre agomas and her team and she's quite interested in the cellular and synaptic and molecular bases for how psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity in particular she's got a focus on RNA splicing so RNA is the intermediary between the DNA the genes and the proteins that cells express and she's studying how psychedelics influence different configurations of RNA molecules and neurons she's also looking at structural changes and synapses as well as recording electrical signals directly from neurons and looking at how psychedelics influence that as well so that's the initial research we certainly there are a number of labs at Berkeley that are interested in incorporating psychedelics into their research programs and so we anticipate this part of the bcsp will grow substantially in the coming years another program flagship program for our center is called the training program it's this the bcsp certificate program in psychedelic facilitation so it's understood that the environment in which people psychedelic experiences take place is extremely powerful modulator of their experience and then also what the long lasting consequences that experience are so it's quite different to to have a psychedelic experience in the forest compared to a rave compared to a ceremonial context compared to a clinical trial for treating a mental health disorder and it's understood that there's great benefit and also it's much safer to have a psychedelic experience in the presence of an experienced facilitator who is helping to prepare you for the psychedelic experience is undergoing is there when you have the psychedelic experience and then involved in the integration afterwards and so almost all the clinical trials you've heard about involve trained therapists who are undergoing uh preparation and therapy during the session and integration afterwards and so if any of these psychedelics are approved as medicines is anticipated there'll be a great need for trained psychedelics therapists um our program is not really medically oriented it's not training people to administer mental health treatments rather it's focused more on religious and spiritual care professionals although there are health professionals as well we have psychiatrists and nurses and social workers and so forth also and so its focus is on immersive experiential learning it's a relatively small group and it's an intensive program of study for people who are relatively advanced in their fields the idea being that they will be sort of seeds who can take their their learnings from this program and then go back to their communities their professional communities that they've established um and then share the knowledge there and so our our cohorts include chaplains and ministers as well as uh as people with more of a health care background the we intend over time to be able to link the training program to our research program by enabling students in the program to participate in the research studies and have legal psychedelic experiences that way because one of the uh challenges now is you if you go to a program that is training you to be a psychedelic facilitator there actually is no way for you to have a psychedelic experience in a legal context and so that seems like a major limitation in the training and so we hope to be able to address that by having these legal research studies that are available to the participants of our training program and then professor Tina Trujillo is the director of this program she's also conducting research studies they include evaluation of the training program to over time find out which aspects are most effective and then to share this knowledge with the world to be able to inform other training programs to be able to disseminate the findings and then also ethnographic uh studies of the participants in the program as well as the staff another major major focus of the bcsp is public education and journalism and here michael pollin and david presti are two of the key figures so even though we live in the age of the internet and there's information everywhere it's it's still can be challenging for people especially people who uh are relatively new to the field of psychedelics to be able to get reliable information and there's been a lot of misinformation and disinformation over the years as well and so most of the sources you would go to in the internet to learn about psychedelics have some sort of strong agenda that has to do with how the use of psychedelics whether they should be legalized or not legalized and so forth and so we see as a public university feeling a real need here of objective public education on really all aspects of psychedelics so anyone who is curious about psychedelics or maybe investigating the for themselves or for someone else they can learn about current research they can learn about risks and ways to mitigate those risks they can learn about the legal and political aspects as well as cultural aspects and so our website is a major source information here psychedelics.berkeley.edu and then we also over time want to establish a forum for gathering convening people to have conversations which again we will always disseminate publicly to be able to guide the field and to have evidence-based discussions about the the very the many complex aspects of psychedelics so one way that we realize this public education ambition is through our newsletter the micro dose so this is free for everyone it's it's published twice a week it involves interviews with important people in the field and also involves a summary of news and research developments so I encourage you to subscribe to that if you're interested I can do that through our website psychedelics.berkeley.edu thank you thanks to Tim Ferriss we also have a journalism fellowship program so here journalists make a proposal for an investigative piece and if they're selected they receive support from this program to be able to carry this out and so some of our fellows have already signed book deals based on the the work that the BCSP supported there's been articles in Rolling Stone National Geographic and it's very difficult these days for journalists to have support to be able to actually do deep investigative journalism and so this is one way that's helpful there these are all professional journalists who have other kinds of projects but the support from this fellowship program enables them to do much more comprehensive coverage of the topic that they might otherwise not be able to and then they are able to publish it in whatever medium they select or that is accepting of their work we're also doing some public polling research and this is headed by Imran Khan who's the executive director of the BCSP so there's a lot of really important policy decisions that are being made at the city state and federal level and there's very little information actually about what people know about psychedelics what they believe about psychedelics most of the work that's out there are these internet surveys where there's this huge self-selection bias where only certain kinds of people decide they want to participate in a study like that and so we're collecting information from across the United States from all registered voters so the methodology is very similar to the polls that are used to give information about political elections for example and we're testing a variety of questions about people's awareness knowledge and beliefs about psychedelics and again we're not taking a position of advocacy here we're just providing objective information for society to be able to use to guide policy decisions and further research and so we just completed our first inaugural survey and the results are available to anybody part of what this is going to do is establish a baseline so we can actually study trends over time so we have a snapshot right now of what people's beliefs and awareness and knowledges in 2023 but obviously things are changing rapidly and there's a lot of kind of reconfiguration of how psychedelics are viewed by people in different contexts and so we're providing this public service of gathering this information analyzing it and then disseminating it we also have an online open education course called psychedelics in the mind the lead instructor is David Presti we've teamed up with Nicole Vanola who's an Emmy award winning producer this is also of course it's freely available to everyone there's a link at the bottom you can also find it through our center's website David is doing some kind of more didactic lectures but he's also interviewing a variety of different experts in different aspects of the field and this is very broad coverage and includes neuroscience chemistry medicine history culture and policy and really is not making very many assumptions about this or previous knowledge that people are bringing to this it's really for anybody who's curious about learning more about psychedelics can sign up for this course it is free if people want a certificate of completion there's also a paid verified track that people can do and then there's quizzes and feedback and additional information that results in them having a certificate having successfully completed the course so that's a kind of whirlwind tour of our various programs and activities I want to say a little bit also about some of the core values of our center so we believe very deeply in the open science and in general the the public availability of knowledge and discoveries that we make in the center and so we've signed the statement on open science and open practice with psychedelics and some of the elements of this statement are that we will place the common good above the private gain of the individuals or the center we will share the results of our research with the public and we won't look to commercialize products and discoveries that are created through our work and so this has been a foundational principle from the the founding of the center and it's really very much at the heart of what we do we also have a strong commitment to diversity equity inclusion and reciprocity and we are committed to doing that in whatever way we can in our different activities this includes assembling a diverse team within our center it includes attempting to diversify the participants in our training program our psychedelic certificate facilitation program but also the participants in our research studies and this has been a big problem in the field that most of the participants in these research studies have not been very diverse so far in the training program curriculum we look to honor and integrate indigenous traditions and knowledge wherever possible and then also in our public education offices we center indigenous voices and so partly in support of this the bcsp so most of our support really all of our support comes from philanthropy some of those gifts are unrestricted meaning that the donor is is essentially trusting the center to make decisions about how best to spend that other gifts are for particular targeted for particular programs and so for of those unrestricted gifts we've committed to allocating 10 of those gifts to dei and reciprocity initiatives and one concrete outcome of this has been the establishment of the indigenous research student fellowship program so this supports Berkeley undergraduates and graduates either from historically and from historically marginalized communities and or whose work addresses reciprocity and equity in psychedelic spaces and this is our inaugural class of indigenous research student fellows in the bcsp so all of these students submitted a research proposal some are undergraduates some are graduate students they were evaluated by a group of bcsp members and these are the ones that were selected for being fellows and being supported through these dei funds going on to the topic of funding as i mentioned at the moment all of our work is coming from individual philanthropists or in some cases foundations the bcsp is its identity is really not separable from the identity of uc Berkeley as a public university we believe profoundly in the mission of a public university and public education and committing to working for the public good instead of private benefit and so partly what that means is that we've actually been approached by some corporations about partnerships and just couldn't couldn't get to a point where we thought there was sufficient alignment between the bcsp and some of these potential corporate partners so the moment we don't have any corporate funding we're not categorically opposed to it but really at the moment we rely completely on philanthropy from individuals and and and foundations we look forward to a time when the u.s federal government will support at least the biological research in this area so for example the national institutes of health they support a lot of research in mental health treatments for different at all levels in animal research molecular human research there's been very little support from the federal government of psychedelics research in large part probably because of the stigma the historical stigma of these drugs but it seems as though certain aspects of the the national institutes of health are becoming more open to considering support of this and so that's a potential source of support for our center going forward but at the moment there are very few studies nationwide that are being supported by the federal government so almost all the work is either being done by companies or by philanthropy so if any of you are inspired to make a donation or know someone who is to support our work you can go to our website and the url is here at the bottom psychedelics.berkeley.edu and we have great ambitions but of course our ambitions are you know limited by the resources that we have and so that's a major focus of our center is fundraising to be able to support the work we do and we we always welcome people who are can partner with us that way. Finally a little bit about plans for the future so we have a couple new projects that are we have the funding secured and we're in the planning and preparation stages this includes a podcast that will be produced by the bcsp as well as something that's similar to the journalism fellowship program i told you about but instead of print journalism it would be video projects video journalism fellowships both of these are supported by blake mykowski we are looking to expand our activities into the social sciences and humanities there's a lot of really terrific work that could be done in this area and i has also been neglected in part for the same reasons that i mentioned how the the research into human subjects has been suppressed because of political and social factors we want to continue to build on our existing strengths in these areas journalism neuroscience psychology molecular cell biology and we want to expand our ability to make to convene people individuals organizations to provide public discourse about a lot of these really important questions in the field about you know what should the certification be for someone to be a psychedelic facilitator for example or what are the consequences of different kinds of psychedelic mental health treatment we have a lecture coming up later this month on the economics of psychedelic assisted therapy for health care compared to some of the existing treatments for example and so we're really at the beginning of this but we look to be a place where using the the good name of uc berkeley there can be a lot of attention brought to convenings and conversations that we organize on our campus through the bcsp and with that i'd like to thank you for your attention and go bears and i'm happy to take questions there's a microphone that's available so you can just put your hand up if you have a question yeah i can go ahead i'll repeat your question related to autism and psychedelic thank you for the question the question is about psychedelics as a possible treatment for autism i would say we we know almost nothing about the possibilities there so it is very impressive and it has led to some skepticism how many different kinds of mental health disorders have been claimed to be treated by psychedelics the rebus theory is one way of making sense of that so you can think about various kinds of addictions and ptsd and depression anxiety is all involving these sort of loops of the kind i talked about in depression where you know self-narratives actually worsen the disease someone thinks about themselves as depressed and that worsens their depression other kinds of disorders the evidence is much less that psychedelics are helpful so psychosis for example personality disorders and maybe those don't involve these same sort of ruminative loops i'm not an expert in autism in any sense but i think you know all of these involve really expensive highly regulated clinical trials to first establish safety of is this drug going to cause unwanted side effects in a population and then scaling up the clinical trials to look for efficacy and if it's a useful treatment or not and it's really the same process that these huge pharmaceutical companies undergo to develop new drugs and so it takes a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of money and so psychedelics research in humans has been at such a low level for so long for many conditions including autism i think the field is just doesn't have information one way or the other to to guide at this point unfortunately yes hello okay with some of the research you show the results like for instance with with through MRI or imaging is that correct do they do further do they show further on like a few months later or years later that those changes were were maintained do you know what i mean yeah so i should say we are just at the very end of obtaining all the regulatory approvals to do this work ourselves and so we have not yet enrolled our first participant we're hoping to do that in the coming months so but some of the work that i've referred to by other groups around the world for the most part they've not done long-term follow-ups and the long-term follow-ups that haven't done are typically more looking at for example you know is the reduction in the PTSD severity something that's maintained over time and so there's only a couple examples i can think of where people have made these these detailed neurobiological measurements and then track those over time but that's something that we're quite interested in doing we and many other groups as well but again the field is just hasn't evolved far enough to really have much information to provide there thank you so much this is really interesting um so if the mechanisms of the psychedelics affecting the brain are to reset the priors i wonder what the kind of risks are of the experience psychedelic experience perhaps if it's not kind of guided as so there could be some reprogramming happening perhaps a loss of security in you know what the world is and i wonder whether this means that there will have to be repeated experience and with that you know what are the costs long-term costs in terms of the health of the individual and another question i have is so are the networks of auditory and visual perception the same as self-perception thank you um so the first question is if you do reduce your priors do they necessarily get rebuilt in a way that's healthy and adaptive maybe not and i should start by saying that the rebus theory is a theory it needs to be experimentally tested but to the extent that psychedelics in general uh enable you to uh experience significant changes in yourself uh those can go in in many different directions and so that's part of why people think it's so important to have a trusted and reliable guide or facilitator for these experiences and that you know maybe the rebuilding of the priors is actually not something that happens very much during the psychedelic experience but happens during the integration period for days weeks months afterwards and so that might be actually the most precarious time in a way in terms of what the long-term outcomes are but there's no guarantee that if if priors are reduced that the the subsequent priors are going to be beneficial uh and so i think it's something that needs to be attended to very carefully uh so that's and and but it's understood also that people are having all kinds of psychedelic experiences they don't necessarily have support of a trained guide or facilitator and so those are real risks that people need to know about is that these can elicit really substantial changes in one's sense of self since the universe relations and um and that uh one needs to be very mindful and respectful of that um sorry your second question was oh about the commonalities between sensory systems and and self-native systems you know there there are motifs in the brain in terms of patterns of connectivity and neural cell types and so forth uh but then there are also really important distinctions between the the nature of information processing in different parts of the brain and so it's somewhere in between there are some important similarities there are some critical differences and that's something that's going to come out of this research is really characterizing them much more completely uh i had a question about i guess sort of beginning to break the boundaries of the conversation because to get it to a government federal level of it it has to first i guess go through like social approval and i think at least a majority of society doesn't really approve of psychedelics like talking with my friends and our experiences with our parents the thought of even bringing up psychedelics to our parents is insane like they would think they raised us wrong or something but from personal experience of psychedelic use and all of my friends who have had tried psychedelics like it's something we would love to talk with our parents about we think they could really gain some insight from trying it but it's how do you even begin the conversation to someone who's already preset their mind that it's been so stigmatized for psychedelics is bad it's you know it's like cocaine or something they see it on that level yeah there's so many ways to answer that question i think first of all this is just one finding from our polling research surprisingly of the people who participate in the study more than half are supportive of regulated therapeutic use of psychedelics so there's different types of legalization right one would be it's treated more like a prescription medicine where it's not freely available for everyone but in the right context with a medical doctor prescribing it it could be available in that way and that may be happening fairly soon the data from MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD is compelling and probably in the coming months there will be an application to the FDA to have it approved as a medicine and so at that point you've got the FDA saying this is a viable medicine and it can be prescribed and you have the DEA saying it has no known medical use probably there will have to be some sort of reconciliation there and that could involve rescheduling the drug that wouldn't make it necessarily legal for anybody to use it would be still be regulated and in very particular contexts i think in terms of starting the conversation i feel like a huge part of how this field has shifted is actually michael pollin and his writings and his netflix series and a lot of people who had certain preconceptions and in some cases based on misinformation saw his what he had to share and his experiences and it definitely shifted the conversation in many ways i'll also say a lot of the interest in mental health treatments and psychedelics is coming from the community of veterans in the military where there's such awful mental health struggles that so many veterans have with very limited treatment options and so there are a lot of people who are really advocating for psychedelic assisted therapy for that population they don't necessarily have a you know fondness for the 60s and the counter culture and hippies and things like that it's just this is a new way of reducing suffering for this group of people and so we have some very conservative politicians who have been great proponents of research and treatment development for psychedelics that is really sort of separate it's a completely different sort of entry into psychedelics than the kind of narrative of the how things have happened in us popular culture so that's an intriguing and aspect of the sort of more this resurgence of interest in psychedelics thank you for your research my question is how has psychedelics eased anxiety related to end of life diagnosis um so that some of the earliest studies were exactly on that actually so initially people who actually had a terminal diagnosis and the psychedelic treatment was not addressing the terminal disease but rather the psychological emotional aspects of confronting one's mortality and the anxiety that often comes up for people there and so the data i think are quite compelling that that type of psychedelics intervention if you will is very helpful for people being able to manage their anxiety around the end of life diagnosis and so there there are multiple published studies on exactly that question so that's actually further along than even some of the the mental health disorders the sort of diagnosable mental health disorders we've got five minutes left so we'll take two or three questions and then i think professor silvers ready to engage individually with folks for a few minutes afterwards hi um so the 2021 uh the nature paper um about mdma and ptsd um from what i understood they were doing like a very specific kind of trauma informed therapy to deal with ptsd um but like ruminations and the the sort of theory you were talking about there's a whole school of trauma informed therapy that believes that you know most of those ruminations come from unresolved trauma mostly in youth and so what i'm wondering is if your certificate program like of training people um if you know because the risk of like not having a trauma informed facilitator um could be either like kind of a bad trip or like bypassing trauma in like a jerusalem syndrome kind of outcome so i'm wondering if your certificate program is like building on the trauma informed facilitation thank you so i'll start by saying i'm a neuroscientist and not a therapist and not an expert on various types of therapy um certainly the trauma and its consequences are a component of the program um and you're right that this study was on people who had a severe ptsd diagnosis and so trauma was kind of front and center there and i'm sure that for these patients the preparation and the integration was the the the unresolved trauma was a enormous part of that um our facilitation program is not designed specifically for training people to uh to treat mental health conditions certainly it could be useful there but because there are chaplains and ministers and and other religious and spiritual care professionals we anticipate that there will be various opportunities for people to have psychedelics services with support outside of a mental health context and we already see some states that are passing laws that enable people to access those services even though these drugs remain illegal at the federal level um and so there are other programs that are much more focused on training therapists for working with patients um and our program is distinct that way it's it's more general and it's more sort of fundamental principles and that puts a lot of emphasis on being culturally informed and uh ancestral knowledge from from various uh places around the world and so it's different than uh one that's kind of grounded first and foremost in a western medical perspective um i just this kind of an altered state's question but i wonder just referring to the question about the danger of our priors being maybe replaced in a bad way by these experiences is there any part of the research that is asking if um if what happens in these experiences are not just neurological constructs but maybe um actually letting us perceive the previously imperceptible elements of the real world uh and are you referring to elements of real world that are they have a physical identity but we normally are unable to perceive them uh i mean there are definitely people who uh i would say are open to that kind of explanation and there are others who are more materialist and physicalists and they're just you know everything is happening in the brain and it's all about changes and synapses and so forth so uh i would say for the people doing the neuroscience work in our center most of us are starting with the assumption that this has a neural basis and we're trying to find that neural basis um but i think any scientist in the field has to acknowledge that we know so little about the nature of consciousness and human experience that we want to be careful about closing doors off prematurely but we're we're we have the tools that we have that enable us to study the brain uh in a very sophisticated way and so that's the sort of construct of our experimental design that we're working with hi i'm curious how you assess and think about the significance of psychedelic experiences because it seems like uh the relationship between a spiritual importance of birth of a child and uh psychedelic experience with the chemical is somewhat akin to the experience of a intimate interpersonal relationship and masturbation sorry what was the last one you said masturbation okay um i this these are all surveys and they were designed by the researchers to try to convert this ineffable powerful subjective experience into numbers that can be analyzed on a spreadsheet and so they're basically asking people to literally to try to sort of rank various elements of the experience uh compared to other powerful life experiences they've had so i don't know if that answers your question but it's all just self-report survey data and i think you know somewhat surprising just that this for a lot of these people uh the psychedelic experience was that powerful and transcendent and spiritual meaningful that i'm not sure that addressed your question though um they may well uh whether they would rank that as the you know one of the top five powerful experiences of their lives um if i may it might have something to do with the idea of preparation someone being with you and someone helping you integrate afterwards being different from someone's experience with psychedelics at a rave or other contacts where there doesn't seem to be any um reported longer term transformational impact on people from using these compounds in that kind of way um that wraps up our formal presentation for today thank you everyone for uh joining us for this great presentation please join me in thanking michael for his presentation as as i mentioned uh he's volunteered to spend a few extra minutes if uh people have further questions uh in the meantime thank you so much for staying in touch with your alma mater or your children's alma mater um cal couldn't live and survive and be as marvelous for the next generation without your time and attention and caring and engagement so thank you very very much and again psychedelics.berkeley.edu if you'd like more information after today's session thank you thank you