How Food Affects Your Mind with Michael Pollan

Humans have a symbiotic relationship with plants. Plants coevolved to suit our desires for nourishment, beauty, and altering consciousness. Journalist Michael Pollan has investigated the human connection to plants. This week on Science of Perception Box, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch ask Pollan about modern trends like ultra-processed foods, industrialized agriculture, and consciousness-altering drugs from plants including caffeine, cannabis, and psychedelics. For more than 30 years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. Pollan is the author of eight books, six of which have been New York Times bestsellers. In 2003, Pollan was appointed the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. In 2020, along with Dacher Keltner and others, he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found. Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show. Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Episode Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (02:26) - The Profound Impact of Food on Mood and Perception (04:17) - Exploring Ultra-Processed Foods and Their Effects (06:45) - The Psychological and Physiological Effects of Food (10:29) - The Connection Between Food, Culture, and Education (17:46) - Michael Pollan's Journey into Food and Agriculture (21:42) - The Symbiotic Relationship Between Humans and Plants (22:55) - The Human Desire to Alter Consciousness (25:15) - The Transparent Experience of Coffee (25:47) - Caffeine's Benefits and Drawbacks (26:38) - Exploring Consciousness-Altering Substances (27:18) - Psychedelics and Cultural Evolution (29:02) - Creativity and Psychedelics (32:52) - The Nature of Ego and Consciousness (41:11) - Public vs. Private Self (45:31) - Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the great ironies of the supermarket is that the quietest food is the healthiest food. Broccoli doesn't have a health claim on it. But if you go to the, it just sits there. But you go to the middle aisles and everything's screaming. Cookies are telling you that they're low fat, or high fiber, or whatever. They're making health claims. So one of my rules of eating is don't buy any food that makes a health claim.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. We all live inside our own personal, private perception box, built by our genes and the physical, social, and cultural environment in which we were born and raised. In this podcast, we explore how although the walls of this mental box are always present, they can expand in states like awe, wonder, and curiosity, or contract in response to anxiety, fear, and anger. I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts to incredible and distinguished minds. Dr. Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry

• 1:06Speaker 01

  and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and Dr. Christoph Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and the current meritorious investigator and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.

• 1:30Heather Berlin?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to Science of Perception Box. I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  And I'm Dr. Christoph Koch.

• 1:37Heather Berlin?

  Every week, we feature an aspect of the Science of Perception Box, highlighting the latest research together with our expert guests. I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Pollan to the show. Michael is an author and researcher who describes his interest as the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. He's the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including The Omnivore's Salemma, Food Rules, This Is Your Mind on Plants,

• 2:09Heather Berlin?

  And cooked. He's received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gastronomic Science. And in 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics. I'd like to welcome Michael Pollan to the show.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Thank you. Thank you, Heather.

• 2:25Heather Berlin?

  So you've written a lot about the cultural and biological connection to what we eat for decades. So can you talk a little bit about how food can change or affect our perception, folks, and our perception of the world?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, food has a profound effect on our mood and not very well studied. We don't know that much about it, but we know that it happens. And the most obvious case is sugar, especially in children. I mean, it is a drug. I mean, it acts if you have kids. Basically, child rearing is a matter of sugar management. You feel really different after you're full. You feel different when you're hungry. The absence of food does sharpen you.

• 3:06Heather Berlin?

  Well, it is interesting.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Up to a certain point.

• 3:08Heather Berlin?

  Because the same food can affect you, impact you psychologically in different ways, depending on where you're at. So, right, if your food's deprived, a good piece of chocolate is going to be like, oh, my God, this is the best thing I've ever eaten. Now you've eaten six chocolate bars and somebody says, here, you can have another. And that same chocolate bar is going to be disgusting.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And of course, that's true with drugs as well. I mean, right, the dose makes a huge difference in how you respond to it. But I think it's a frontier of research to understand the links between food and mood. I know there have been some studies on prison populations, which you can do in England. I guess they don't have IRBs. I don't know. But they do. They get away with this. Where they use a prison population, we have ultimate control over the diet. And the addition of omega-3s.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Bumping up the omega threes in the diet, whether through fish or greens, I don't know how they did it, led to reductions in violence and, you know, real changes in the behavior of people in prison. There's also been some very interesting studies around ultra-processed food, you know, a term you're beginning to hear a lot more because there's now a body of science around this category. We used to just call it junk food and that was a kind of amorphous category. Ultra-processed food is still a little amorphous, but it has some more precision to it and rigor.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  So can you give an example?

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Well, an ultra-processed food would be, it's usually snack foods or ready-to-prepare meals that you would buy frozen. The definition, the best definition is they're made with ingredients. They usually have a lot of ingredients. They're made with ingredients that you don't have at home. You know, emulsifiers, stabilizers, things that bind things together.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Many syllable words.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yes, and they're unrecognizable generally to the normal person. But you don't have these ingredients in your pantry and you also need a factory to make this food. Even if you wanted to make a Twinkie, you don't have what you need. And this kind of food, if you, if you offer people over the course of a month, two versions of food, one is ultra-processed and one is whole foods, matched for all the, for all the macronutrients, same amount of fat, same amount of sugar, same amount of fiber, all that stuff. Actually, I don't know if they match fiber. It'd be hard to do. Ultra-processed food usually has very little fiber. People will eat 500 more calories a day. And so it's, it's food that's been designed on the drug model

• 5:44Speaker 00

  in a way to make you crave it.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  You mean they eat, the people who eat the ultra-processed food will eat?

• 5:50Speaker 00

  Will eat 500 more calories a day and that'll put on the weight pretty quickly. And we don't know the mechanism, whether it's some of these additives that are responsible, or the combination, or the fact that it's been specifically engineered to get you to overeat. I mean, that's how they.

• 6:07Heather Berlin?

  So maybe it's reducing the satiety, you know, feeling satiated.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Because there is no fiber. That may be part of it. It's absorbed very quickly, too, so the insulin reaction is different.

• 6:18Heather Berlin?

  And it's kind of like a, they call it a supernormal stimuli, right? Like, it's created.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  I don't know what that is.

• 6:23Heather Berlin?

  So there's like the normal kinds of sugars we would find in nature, right? Like picking fruits and berries. But then you artificially create these things that are very high in sugar and fat that wouldn't be naturally things that you would find in the environment, but that we're super attracted to, right? Because of evolution.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. That misfit between what our body expects to get and what it gets from highly processed food is a big problem. There was a study also done at Yale where they gave people a series of drinks in an FMRI. Some were matched. In other words, the sweetness and the sugar level were matched, and then they were not matched. There were drinks that were sweeter or less sweet, you know, had artificial sweeteners. And on the artificial sweeteners, the body becomes confused. And the insulin response is to perceive level of sweetness. But if you're not getting the calories to absorb,

• 7:22Speaker 00

  the body will look for them. And that's one of the reasons people on no-calorie sodas don't lose weight. Their bodies will find those sugars eventually.

• 7:33Heather Berlin?

  And there's a psychological, there's some work that was done by Ali Crum at Stanford, who looked at these milkshakes, and they had the same number of calories. But in one case, they said this was a really, like, high-fat. Milkshake and the other said it was this diet.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  So that's in terms of belief.

• 7:49Heather Berlin?

  Belief can also affect. So there's the physiologic aspect to it, but there's actually this top down where when people believed it was this high fat, you know, nutritious, they would feel more satiated. They would, and they wouldn't want any other food. When they thought it was the diet one, they still were hungry and they wanted to keep eating. So there's the psychological aspect of it as well that affects us. And there's also like the cognitive framing, you know, if they say there's a really expensive bottle of wine and people say we really like it. And then you say it's really cheap. It's the same wine.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  And it's not as good.

• 8:24Heather Berlin?

  Yeah. And the pleasure centers don't light up in the brain. So we really are, you know, it's this combination between what's happening in our bodies, but also in our minds that it, but, but you know, in terms of our perception box, it's like how, what we believe, our beliefs and our expectations impact how our body physiologically is responding.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  So it's really three things, right? It's the molecules we ingest, then it's the state of our body. Are we hungry? Are we sedated? And then it's what we believe.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  What we believe we eat, is it good or bad? Is it expensive? Is it not expensive? And all those three things combine to affect our health.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  And I'm sure if you eat something you, you believe is indulgent and not good for you, it has an effect. Whereas if you eat something that you've been told or you think is very healthy.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  I believe that mousse au chocolat is a cognitive enhancer. I should show you the evidence.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  I believe chocolate is definitely chocolate.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  But it's the mousse au chocolat.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:20Heather Berlin?

  But there are also, I mean, there are also studies that show, you know, if you're sleep deprived, if you're stressed and, you know, they give people a choice, they tend to go for the, the junk food, the more higher fat foods. And so there is this aspect of impulse control as well. Because often it's more attractive to have the food that is not so good for you. And so when you are sleep deprived or stressed or, you know, you tend to go for those. So I think it's asked.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Probably the quicker.

• 9:48Heather Berlin?

  High in the sugar.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, or satiation. I mean, these are foods, in general, processed food is absorbed by the small intestine and very quickly. So you get your sugar rush. And so if you're in a depressed or low-energy mood, you're looking for that quick response. And so there's food that kind of unfolds more slowly through digestion and offers your microbiome something, too. That's the other, I'm sure that's the problem with a lot of ultra-processed food, that it doesn't feed the 10 trillion organisms that you have to think about when you're eating, besides yourself.

• 10:22Heather Berlin?

  I think it's like a hidden sort of epidemic of people not realizing that their psyche and their bodies, everything is being affected.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think it's a misfit. I think, you know, we have this incredible mechanism designed by evolution to tell us what to eat. And you look at animals, they know what to eat. Cattle will self-medicate. You know, when they're, when they're pregnant, they'll eat one kind of grass, and when they're putting on fat for the winter, they'll eat another kind of grass. I mean, there is a nutritional wisdom that the, that food science has learned how to manipulate and thwart. And so we under, you know, we know, you know, fruit, we're attracted to fruit because of the colors and the, and the smells and the tastes. And we have, we have some nutritional wisdom that is in danger of being lost, because it can be manipulated.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  You wrote this beautiful article that stayed with me back in, in 2007 called Unhappy Meals, I think. You start off with this very short statement, eat food, not too much, mostly plant. So by, what, is that, is this what you mean when, when you say nutritional wisdom?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  It sounds a little cryptic, but what I mean by that is real food. And there's, there's certain substances we dignify with that word that we shouldn't. I mean, I think a lot of ultra-processed foods are not really food. So it's really eat real food. And, and I define that as, you know, food your great-grandmother would recognize as food, or food that doesn't have ingredients your third grader can't pronounce. So, you know, that was an article that, that eventually became a book called In Defense of Food, where I was asked by my editors at the New York Times,

• 12:04Speaker 00

  Do a deep dive into nutrition science and figure out what do we know? What can we say with some certainty about how to eat? Because there's a huge amount of confusion and the science around nutrition changes. And there's also a lot of companies putting out bogus research to confuse people and their health claims on very unhealthy foods. I mean, one of the great ironies of the supermarket is that the quietest food is the healthiest food. I mean, broccoli doesn't have a health claim on it. But if you go to the, it just sits there. But you go to the middle aisles and everything's screaming. You know, cookies are telling you that they have, you know, that they're low fat or high fiber or whatever, they're making health claims.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  So one of my rules of eating is don't buy any food that makes a health claim.

• 12:51Heather Berlin?

  Oh, I love that.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  Most health claims are bogus.

• 12:53Heather Berlin?

  What do you think about all those like super green powders, you know, super food?

• 12:56Speaker 00

  It's not food.

• 12:57Heather Berlin?

  Right. And there's no evidence that suggests.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  And nutrients, you know, and so it's a very interesting case of science as a problem in terms of public education. In other words, scientists need to study nutrients to understand food. You need reductive science to a certain, to a certain point. But for the consumer to focus on nutrients is a tremendous mistake. We don't eat nutrients, we eat foods.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  But tell me, do you believe if you not, if you equate everything else, which is of course never the case 200 years ago, let's say, when people were eating still mostly foods? Do you think the mindset of the people was fundamentally different from today? When, let's see, every large faction of people eat large proportions of meat, let's say, every day? Do you think actually their, their sense of who they are and their sense of reality, the sense of the world was, was different?

• 13:55Speaker 00

  You know, it's a good question. I'm not sure. I think that with regard to meat, it was it was a special occasion food. Meat was expensive and you had, you know, chicken on Sundays and that was a very special thing. And you had meat a couple times a week. We have meat three times a day, many Americans. You know, we eat eight ounces of meat per person per day and you're not, you know, holding your own and I'm not holding my own. Neither am I. I'm a vegetarian since 14. So people are eating for us. So and the idea of having meat three times a day, which now a lot of Americans think is an entitlement, is destroying the planet, not to mention the damage it's doing to people's health. I think people had a stronger connection. You know, food is is not just a substance we take

• 14:39Speaker 00

  in our bodies. It's a relationship. It connects us to the the person who produces it, to the animal, if there was an animal involved, to the earth, to nature. And food is one of our key connections to nature. And we have lost track of that. A hundred years ago, 200 years ago, most people either were farmers or new farmers. So they had a real sense of where the food came from. And I think that changed the process of eating. I think, you know, there was no accident. People said grace, because they understood that this is a this is a marvelous thing. And it's a real gift of nature or God. And and I think we've lost that. Food comes from the supermarket. Kids have no idea how food is produced. You

• 15:20Speaker 00

  know, I remember standing in line at a McDonald's once, and with my son. And I guess I did take my son to McDonald's occasionally.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  That's how you start off the book, the only one.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. We're having a McDonald's meal, which I proceeded to follow back to the farms. And and there was a kid there who who they had a picture of a steer or something. And Was shocked to learn that that's what she was about to eat. So, you know, it's just stuff. It's protoplasm from the supermarket for many of us. So I think there's a communal and a sacred aspect to food.

• 16:00Heather Berlin?

  Do you think the education is key for children's? Like, I became a vegetarian, not because of any political reasons, but I had dissected my first frog. And I noticed the like ligaments and the tendons and the bones. And then I was like, I don't want to eat these animals. It looks like chicken. And there was this sort of disgust response. And then it just made me not want to eat animals, you know? But I think, you know, children are smart and early childhood education around this could be something that

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:29Heather Berlin?

  changes their perception.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  I think everybody who eats meat should go to a slaughterhouse once in their life. It should be a field trip. I mean, that's what got me off meeting and just watching how the animals were treated on the feedlots. Just to give you an idea how far away we are from that, there are 14 or 15 states in America where it's illegal to take pictures of a feedlot, even from public right of ways. In other words, you could be on the road in Finney County, Kansas, where I went to write about the meat industry. And if I took a picture of that feedlot, there is law I'm breaking in the state of Kansas. I have a friend who's a photographer who just did a beautiful book about the food system. And he traveled all over the world with his paraglider, taking pictures of food production. And it's a stunning book.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  And he was arrested in Kansas for taking pictures from the air of a feedlot. So they've got something to hide.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  And they know it. And so, anyway, so, yeah, my, I stopped eating industrial meat anyway, when I, you know, having done all this reporting and gone to all these chicken houses and feedlots and confinement pig operations, which to me was the most upsetting. Because pigs are just so intelligent.

• 17:45Heather Berlin?

  Why food for you? Like, why did you? Become hyper focused and specialized in that.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  So all my writing, both the food writings, the nutrition writing, the agriculture writing, psychedelic writing, it all grows out of my interest in gardening. I was a passionate gardener. I started as a little kid. I had a garden when I was eight years old. Wow. Outside my family's house. And anytime I could grow a couple strawberries, I would put them in a cup and sell them to my mother. And so I was very entrepreneurial. And then I fell away from it for many years. But in my late twenties, I started gardening again and we bought this piece of property in Connecticut. And it's got a weekend house. I was working as a magazine editor. And I just got very absorbed with what happens in the garden and that kind of engagement with

• 18:35Speaker 00

  the natural world and the problems, you know, dealing with pests, keeping your soil fertile, which I gradually realized are the same problems that farmers deal with. And so I kind of went from this focus on the garden and it gradually opened up on to an interest in agriculture and farming. And I was writing a column about my garden for the New York Times Magazine, like a monthly column and using the garden as a laboratory to think about our relationship to nature and the environment. And this became my first book. But then at a certain point, you know, when GMOs were introduced, genetically modified crops, I thought, oh, you know, that's a good column.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  I'm going to get some seeds from Monsanto, plant them in my garden, see what all this brouhaha is about. Although there wasn't actually a lot of controversy at that time in this country. It was a huge controversy in Europe. And in the course of writing that piece, Monsanto, I had wonderful access because I had approached them as a garden writer, you know, the most benign creature on earth. And they gave me some of their potatoes to grow and they took me out to witness some of their farms out in Idaho. Where I saw industrial farms of a scale I just didn't know existed. You know, 50,000 acre farms, completely remote controlled irrigation pivots,

• 20:01Speaker 00

  using pesticides that the farmer was so careful of, he would not go into his fields for three or four or five days after he sprayed.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Not even to break up, not even to fix a broken irrigation pivot. That's how neurotoxic these pesticides were. It's a pesticide called Monitor, which is now off the market. And, and why was he using that? And he explained, well, potatoes get something called net necrosis. It's spread by aphids. And that net necrosis doesn't really damage the food, but it leaves those brown lines you sometimes see inside a potato. And I said, is there any other way to deal with net necrosis? And he says, yeah, don't grow russet Burbank potatoes. And I'm like, oh, it's a problem with this kind of potato? Yeah, I said, well, why don't you grow another kind of potato? And he said, well, McDonald's only buys russet Burbank potatoes.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Now, the people at McDonald's don't understand that because of their insistence on that kind of potato, which is purely aesthetic, by the way, they want the longest possible french fry to put in those little red boxes, that little bouquet of french fries, you know, that they're so good at.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  That they're such an easy fix. And nevertheless, the food chain is so, the point I'm coming back to is the food chain is so long and opaque that people at one end don't realize that their aesthetic choices are forcing farmers to do things that endanger them and potentially the consumer as well. So, so that's kind of how the interest in gardening morphed into an interest in agriculture. And, and I've always been really interested in plants and our symbiotic relationship to plants and botany of desire. I dealt with this most, you know, manifestly. And, and I was very interested in the fact that domestication's a two way street

• 21:59Speaker 00

  and that these are very clever creatures that have learned.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  And I use the word metaphorically, that by gratifying certain human desires, they will get more habitat.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a co-evolution.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  It's co-evolution, exactly. It's a special case of co-evolution. And so I looked at four cases and I, and I looked at the plants, but I also looked at the human desires that they evolved to gratify. And so I looked at beauty, I looked at sweetness and I, and I looked at intoxication. And this is what I mean when I say all the work begins that way. And there's a long chapter on cannabis, which is a plant that has succeeded, you know, far beyond anyone's dreams because of the fact that it does something to our consciousness that we really like. And, and I looked at the neuroscience around cannabis and THC and anandamide.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  And I got very curious then, when I was working on that book, as to why would we like to change consciousness? You know, on its face, that might not be such a good idea. Why would it be adaptive to change consciousness? Now, there's some obvious cases like pain, right? If you can change your consciousness of pain, that's a really positive thing. I mean, one of the most important plants in the pharmacopeia is, are the opiates, which I've grown and written about and gotten in trouble with.

• 23:25Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, isn't that illegal?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Well, actually.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  It's a complicated.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  It's complicated. It's, it's legal to grow it, but as soon as you turn it into a drug, you're breaking the law.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  I think when you start cutting them up.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And I did do that. So it's a curious human desire though, because you're, if, when you're in an altered state of consciousness, you are more likely to have accidents. In a, in a wild setting, you're more likely to be the prey of some other animal. Yet we like to change consciousness and many animals like to change consciousness. I suspect some of it has to do with sheer boredom, you know, that we want to vary our experience of the world. And, you know, we happen to live in a. A highly distracted, entertained culture. We don't have the same boredom problem that I can imagine people a couple hundred years ago. You know, life could get pretty tedious.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  So being able to change consciousness with alcohol, or with caffeine, or with any number of things would be attractive. But I think there are more positive benefits to changing consciousness. Caffeine is a great example. Caffeine has a lot of benefits. I mean, it improves focus, it helps you stay awake.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  It's a great drug in a capitalist society.

• 24:42Heather Berlin?

  But too much is not good either. I mean, you can get anxious and jittery.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  You know, caffeine is, on balance, has been a boon to humanity, at least within the context of capitalism.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  And now, I understand, the most widely consumed psychoactive substance.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  In the world, yeah. In the form of coffee, tea, and soda.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  I mean, just to riff a little bit more on these. So what are the changes involving when you take caffeine in terms of consciousness? Because for sure, you get more alert, so it modulates the level of arousal.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  But what about changes in experience, which are different from arousal?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Coffee's a funny case, because the experience is completely transparent. If you compare it to psychedelics, or cannabis, or lots of other consciousness-changing things, which have a kind of, you know, you see the windshield.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Oh, you know when you're on magic mushrooms.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  You do. And even cannabis, there's this physiological noise, there's all these sort of weird side effects. Coffee, caffeine is like perfectly transparent. It's wonderful that way. It improves people's stamina, it's very good for athletes, and it's legal for them to use it, and they do, in large quantities. It improves memory. If you study for a test, then take a dose of caffeine, it will lock those memories in, and you'll perform better on the test. The negatives are pretty minor. I mean, there is, as you mentioned, jitteriness. Some people can't really tolerate it. The big negative is sleep.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  It does interfere with sleep. Caffeine has a long half-life, so it's in your system for... If you if you drink a coffee at noon, at midnight, there'll still be 25% of the caffeine will still be circulating. So it's a good idea to knock it off in the morning.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  But it is legal, but now people.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Thank God.

• 26:40Speaker 03

  Also want want more stronger changes more.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Yes, there are consciousness changing plants and fungi that improve your performance in various ways, give you a certain edge, and caffeine is a good example. There are others that render you useless to capitalism, and psychedelics would be one of them.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  And to warfare, it's a CIA.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. It wasn't. Well, we think that's what they discovered. They haven't really told us. But we're assuming that's that's what they discovered. I've thought a lot about this and what consciousness change at that level of intensity could offer us.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  And we're learning, of course, about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. But I also think they play a role in cultural evolution. I really think that radical consciousness change is one of the ways that new ideas, new metaphors, new insights enter into our culture.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And in the same way, borrowing Richard Dawkins, you know, scheme that you've got memes in culture, you've got genes in biology, and memes evolve in a similar kind of way, through a process of mutation and then spread. I think psychedelics and but cannabis too, and other and other.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  This is all very recent, this 20th century, at least in Western culture, if we just stick for the moment with Western culture.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Well, the opiates were being used for thousands of years.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Again, in Western culture was really the the opening on the British.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  The route to China.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  So that was, you know, Opium War, but that was sort of the 19th and 20th century. I mean, before, yeah, there was probably some usage back with.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Well, there was alcohol, alcohol being grown in the West. Yeah.

• 28:30Heather Berlin?

  But you're saying that it's, I mean, there it's a cultural evolution that, but it seems to be linked to sort of creativity, right?

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, novelty.

• 28:39Heather Berlin?

  And not all consciousness altering substances are induced creativity.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  No, and in most people, they don't. And I would say, you know, 99% or 90% of the insights or metaphors or creative thoughts people have on psychedelics are worthless.

• 28:58Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Just like most mutations don't serve the creature.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  But I use, so let's take one of the greatest bursts of creativity, at least in in Western tradition, the Renaissance.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  And like, right? What evidence do we have that drugs were involved?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Well, caffeine, caffeine shows up, I think, in the 1640s in, uh, in England and France. Many of the Enlightenment figures were big coffee drinkers. Voltaire, um, uh, Balzac. It's very hard to pin this down. Um, but I do think that if you, um, look at their role, there are people, I mean, there's a, there's a history of scientists who've had breakthroughs on psychedelics.

• 29:41Heather Berlin?

  At least from what I know, the microdosing doesn't increase creativity. There's no evidence for that. But, um, I think it would be interesting to look across time, like if, once we introduced psychedelics into mainstream culture, was there a burst of creativity?

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:57Heather Berlin?

  I think I've, certain psychedelics are a quick route to get there and in a very extreme way, but that's not the only, only way to go.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  I don't know. By no means is it the only way. It's just one of the tools. It's one of the mutagens we have that, that, um, changes things. So I think it's had, you know, on balance, I think you could point to some positive effects that, that consciousness change has for our species. I mean, you're talking about another kind of consciousness change as part of creativity, giving up, um, unconstraining the self and the mind. So there was a study done on creativity in the seventies at Stanford Research Institute, where they gave a group of creatives, um, 100, um, micrograms of LSD. They had architects, they had, uh, writers, they had engineers, they had people across

• 30:46Speaker 00

  the, and, and everybody supposedly had a block, was stuck on a project. And they gave them the LSD and they kind of, you know, rolled around on the floor for a while and then they told everybody, go to your desks. And they had their work tables and they went to their desk and the architect worked on these, designing some mall or something. And the writers worked on their problem and, um, and it was an interesting study and many people reported a breakthrough, but there was no control. There was, you know, it was like.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Surely, we could do a better job of that now. We have better measures of creativity. We have, you know, I think we could better control something like that. You know, Alison Gopnik has various creative tasks that she gives to kids. Some of those could be used. So I think it's a, I think it's a really rich area to, to explore. And maybe you can, you know, you don't need a massive dose to, to get these effects.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I mean, there are management classes that offer this now that offer you to take you outside the US to the Caribbean somewhere where you can sort of be more creative.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  And, and we don't know if it works or not.

• 31:51Heather Berlin?

  And also, each drug-

• 31:52Speaker 03

  People believe that they're more creative. That may well make them more creative.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Well, it might improve their confidence, but if their product still sucks.

• 32:00Heather Berlin?

  But there is something in the letting go that where creativity thrives. And I think these drugs are an avenue for that. But they're, they're all different and they all, you know, I think we lumped together psychedelics, but like, you know, MDMA is a different, you know, has a different effect on consciousness than ketamine, than, you know, LSD, than ayahuasca.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And works on different reasons.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  And opiates and opiates.

• 32:21Heather Berlin?

  All of it. So, so do you have, do you have a favorite? Do you think like if there was a recommendation, you know, everyone-

• 32:28Speaker 00

  That's my favorite.

• 32:29Heather Berlin?

  Caffeine.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's the one, you know, I can use most often without disturbing my life too much.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  But you don't lose a sense of soul.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  No, you don't. In fact, it's intensified. I think it's an ego building drug and that's part of the reason it's so good for capitalism. And, and that is an interesting model for drugs. Are they, are they enhancing the ego or softening the ego?

• 32:52Heather Berlin?

  But also, everybody has different needs, right? Some people are too open and impulsive and they need something to constrain them.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:58Heather Berlin?

  In a way.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 32:59Heather Berlin?

  Others, some are too constrained.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  And they should take amphetamines.

• 33:01Heather Berlin?

  And they can take amphetamines to help them. Others are too constrained, they need to be able to let go. And, you know, it's interesting. So it's not one size fits all, but how this affects our perception. But, you know, there's this like, is it opening the doors of perception? Is it all about expanding our perception box or, you know?

• 33:16Speaker 00

  But some people need to do, to constrict it.

• 33:18Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Because they're too scattered.

• 33:20Heather Berlin?

  Too, too expansive, too much. And so it's, it's not, you know, I think it's- Personality dependent.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Totally, in certain setting. So what about the other extreme where those substances that completely make you lose a sense of self, yet you're, isn't it remarkable that you can totally lose your body, your memory, your identity, yet there's still some, something there that experiences, right?

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, one of, you know, the most powerful experience I've had on psychedelics has been, you know, one of complete ego dissolution. I had always assumed I was identical to my ego and discovered that my ego could dissolve. In my case, it was detonated into a cloud of blue Post-it notes.

• 34:01Heather Berlin?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  It was.

• 34:03Heather Berlin?

  We can analyze that from a.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 34:05Heather Berlin?

  Blue Post-it.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Somebody said, yeah, well, you're a writer, so you probably use a lot of Post-it notes. And I don't know what the blue was about, but it was definitely blue. But I wear a lot of blue.

• 34:15Heather Berlin?

  We need to unpack that.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Who saw that? Who experienced?

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Well, that's the question. I, I, I knew that was me and I was no more, but there was some perspective, but it was not a familiar perspective. It was highly disinterested. It wasn't troubled by what it was seeing at all.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  There was no personal memory. There wasn't.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  No. It wasn't me.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  It wasn't Michael.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  But I was perceiving it from some vantage. It was an unfamiliar vantage.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  So I think you, you need to be ten careful with the word I.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  Yes, I know, but it's like.

• 34:50Heather Berlin?

  Well, it's his brain in a way that's doing the perceiving.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Well, we have no idea of the brain. It could be the liver or the hush. Many people.

• 34:56Heather Berlin?

  Are you, is this you? You're a scientist?

• 35:00Speaker 03

  No, all I'm saying, you'd never experience your brain.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 35:03Heather Berlin?

  No, but we are assuming as scientists that, that, that these consciousness is coming from the brain, not the liver.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we haven't at all talked about the physiological subject. Here we're just talking about consciousness, phenomenology, feeling. And so my point is, when, when you say your self disappears and seeing I.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's sort of like.

• 35:21Heather Berlin?

  The construct of the self is disappearing, but the brain is still giving the experience that he's having.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  The tachycardia, this is what I would call a non-dual experience.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  It was non-dual, and I shouldn't use the word I, but I don't know what pronoun to use.

• 35:33Heather Berlin?

  Well, I would say. The the brain that's inhabited in this skull was experiencing that.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But the brain, as Christoph says, the brain's not part of our phenomenology at all. And and I'm trying to describe it. It was very hard to write about.

• 35:46Heather Berlin?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  But it was.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  But it's cool, isn't it?

• 35:49Speaker 00

  It was. It was extraordinary.

• 35:51Heather Berlin?

  Were you ever afraid?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Frightening. No, I wasn't frightened at all. And earlier in the experience, I had had frightening moments. But at this point, it was complete equanimity. And what was interesting is that when the ego dissolves, the wall between us and them, or me and it, also goes away. And and that leads to this experience that William James described of this merging into something larger. And for me, it was a piece of music, which surprised me. I mean.

• 36:27Heather Berlin?

  What kind of, what drug was this?

• 36:29Speaker 00

  This was. Suicide. This was a pretty high dose of psilocybin. And I heard that music in a new way because, and again, the pronoun's wrong because I didn't hear it. I became it. There was no space between me and that piece of music. No distinction.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  That's what Arthur Schoppen, the German idealist, calls the aesthetic experience.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  I had one for the first time in my life.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  When.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no separation.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  And the.

• 36:56Heather Berlin?

  So you are the music.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  You are the art. You are the the painting, the music.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  And at moments, I could feel the horsehair of the bow, you know, going across my body. Again, that implies I had a body at that moment, but. And I felt like I was inside. I mean, as the thing evolved, I was inside the well of sound. It was it was extraordinary. It's a very sad piece of music, but I didn't feel sad at all. This this felt so right. And it taught me an important lesson that I think is relevant to the perception box idea, that I'm not identical to my ego, that I'll survive its disappearance and that.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  That the ego stands between us and amazing experiences. Not to mention love and connection to nature and all the other things, but that we build these walls and they may help us in certain ways.

• 37:49Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, they're, oh yeah, without an ego, I'd be screwed. You probably wouldn't have survived this long if you.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I wouldn't have gotten any books written.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Write a book.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:57Heather Berlin?

  But there's a difference between temporary ego death and death, death.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Well, what's interesting though is, I mean, I've interviewed a lot of the cancer patients who've had psilocybin therapy. And the ones that undergo an ego death, it does change their attitudes toward their physical death in ways that make it less frightening to them. It's a rehearsal and that rehearsal seems to help them. Even though they're, you know, they're not, they're not saying, I believe in an afterlife or anything, but they just sort of feel, okay, this is what it's like.

• 38:30Heather Berlin?

  The letting go, I can let go.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  And it is the letting go, I think. I mean, letting go is a very hard thing to do.

• 38:35Heather Berlin?

  But when you let go in that way, you're letting go into becoming one with the music and you're still having an experience.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:41Heather Berlin?

  Whereas there's a letting go into what we think is no experience.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  We don't know.

• 38:46Heather Berlin?

  I mean, it'd be lovely if there's something more.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  You, there's this, you know, there's this mental entity, it's like a river. And then in the river, there are all these billions of little eddies that form. And these eddies all feel, well, here I am, I'm forever, I'm a me. And, you know, and then.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  And it's how you define your me too. I remember interviewing this one woman who had cancer and she was, she had psilocybin therapy at NYU and she told the story about flying around the world and finally going into the earth and dissolving in the earth and her molecules were taken up by the plants. Now, that's a very naturalistic afterlife, but she could identify with the molecule so strongly that it didn't frighten her.

• 39:35Heather Berlin?

  But there's no, this is the thing, and not to harp on this, but it's not about me, the ego, but I like the experience of consciousness and the way that our molecules happen to got together gives us an experience of consciousness.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Did you just hear what you say? I.

• 39:49Heather Berlin?

  Okay.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  I like. No, no, I get it. It's your ego.

• 39:53Heather Berlin?

  But when all these molecules are disorganized and separated.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  The world will still go on.

• 39:59Heather Berlin?

  But there will be no experience of consciousness of those molecules.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  No ego, there will be no heaven.

• 40:04Heather Berlin?

  But you think they'll still be conscious?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  We don't know, but what we do know, there will not be ego. It's ultimately.

• 40:11Heather Berlin?

  I don't mean the ego, but I like the idea of consciousness.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Again, you say, I, I.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Well, the other thing, the other important takeaway for me was that consciousness survived the death of the ego and that there was still experience.

• 40:26Heather Berlin?

  No, I'm all about that.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:28Heather Berlin?

  I want consciousness to survive.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  And I thought the two were identical.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Very important insight, because many people claim self-consciousness is the defining feature of consciousness. Without self, there isn't consciousness, which I think is nonsense.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  No, I think that psychedelic experience proves that that's not the case.

• 40:44Heather Berlin?

  It's pure consciousness, but those molecules that are creating that experience of pure consciousness are organized in such a way to allow that to emerge. If those molecules are separated out and they're in the plants and the earth and everything, that's beautiful, but I don't know that they're communicating in an IIT kind of consciousness way, integrated information theory, that would create a sense of experience. We end every episode by asking a perception box question. And so our perception box question for today is for everyone, we're all going to answer it.

• 41:24Heather Berlin?

  How would you describe the difference between who you are publicly and who you are privately?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Well, almost by definition publicly, particularly in a context like this, you're much more socially interact with each other. But privately, I'm perfectly happy, sitting at home, listening to music the entire weekend. I spent this blissful three weeks over Christmas with my wife and my Bernice Mountain dog, three weeks on a tiny island. It was just. Wonderful. Just by itself. Well, I mean, with one other person and one other almost. Mr. Felix, who I met is a wonderful guy. So there are these differences between, you know, public, when you're on stage, when you're surrounded by other people, you become very, you know, very extroverted. Very extroverted. And then people think, oh, you know, the person's always like that back home.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  But back home, they may be very different and introverted and maybe shy.

• 42:19Heather Berlin?

  Okay.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  I'm actually shy.

• 42:22Heather Berlin?

  I mean, I've seen you in various contexts. And I think it's intermixed. It's intermixed.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  All right. Yeah, well, similarly, I mean, I do a lot of public things like this. And I do a lot of public talks and I teach. And I'm very sure of myself and very sure-footed. And I have my opinions and I always have an answer to any question. In reality, I don't. And I'm reminded of this by my wife and my son all the time. You know, who will remind me that you don't really know anything about that, do you? So, um, so there's a certain confidence that I betray in, um, in public. That I don't necessarily feel.

• 43:02Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, there's a persona that you put on of, you know, this is the person, the idealized person that I want to be.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  And it's reinforced, of course, by others. I mean, it's just, I mean, there's a social self. And, and it's how we perceive ourselves in the eyes of others. And I've always wondered, you know, and I've had periods of really being isolated, being alone, going somewhere to focus on my writing or something. And there is this way in which you sense your sense of identity just kind of softening and eroding. And if you did it long enough, um, it would disappear. It wouldn't quite disappear, but it would change fundamentally. So I think our public identities reinforce all sorts of.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Things about us and our ego that wouldn't otherwise exist.

• 43:53Heather Berlin?

  Right. And it's almost like an identity that's created outside of your true self. Like, I really, I mean, the pandemic was difficult for a number of reasons. Not the least of which, my children were home and had to be, you know, homeschooled. But I did enjoy this idea that I didn't have to go anywhere. I didn't have to be, there was no pressure and I could just, you know, you don't have to wear makeup. You can wear sweatpants and just be this true self of, you know, not being on, which I found so enjoyable. And when things started to lighten up and we could go out in the world, I wasn't like that thrilled about it, to be honest.

• 44:23Speaker 03

  But is it a true self or is it just a different aspect?

• 44:26Heather Berlin?

  A different aspect. I enjoy this too, but I enjoy the majority of the time to not be on. And then occasionally you're on and you're sort of, there's a performance aspect to it. But then to kind of retreat, I think you need a little of both.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  I think performance is a key term.

• 44:43Heather Berlin?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like performative and you're a character. And, you know, I once spoke with Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and he was saying like, there's the guy, you know, and then there's Bill.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:55Heather Berlin?

  And there, and a lot, sometimes people lose that distinction between their like performative self and their, you know, sort of non-performative self, let's say. But I think that we all have to kind of be humble at some level and, you know, realize that we don't know everything. And I just, I'm gonna leave on this.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Speak for yourself.

• 45:13Heather Berlin?

  My grandmother said to me, my grandmother's advice is always great. And I was very nervous. I was in graduate school and I was giving my first lecture to all these like professors. This was at Oxford. It was very intimidating. And I called her, I'm so scared, Grandma. And she said, they all take a [BLEEP] like you and me.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  All right, grandma.

• 45:30Heather Berlin?

  And on that note. And on that note. That has been this episode of Perception Box. So I want to thank you, Michael, for joining us today.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Thank you both. Thanks for having me.

• 45:42Heather Berlin?

  So amazing.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:44Heather Berlin?

  And if you'd like to learn more about your own Perception Box, spend some time this week answering the same Perception Box questions that we asked our guests. And check out other questions on the website at unlikelycollaborators.com. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box, created by Unlikely Collaborators in partnership with Pod People. I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Nein, Dr Christoph Koch. Thank you very much.