Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Science of MDMA with Ben Rein About this episode Can MDMA make you a better person? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly learn about the neuroscience of empathy, psychopathy, and MDMA in the brain with neuroscientist Ben Rein, PhD.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming up on StarTalk Special Edition, we're tackling the subject of the neuroscience of empathy and how MDMA plays its role in that study. We've got neuroscientist Ben Raine here, a researcher at Stanford University. You don't want to miss that one. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my usual co-host, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, how you doing, man? I'm good, Neil. Nice to be back, man. Yeah, yeah, former soccer pro and sports commentator, and I'm delighted that the sports universe has shared you with us. And I got Chuck Nice. Chuck Nice.
1:06 Chuck Nice? What's up?
1:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Professional stand-up comedian and actor.
1:10 Chuck Nice? Yes.
1:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So today, we're going to study a fascinating subject that I think everybody cares about, or at least should care about, and it's the neuroscience of empathy.
1:23 Chuck Nice? Ooh, empathy.
1:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, like, some people have it.
1:27 Chuck Nice? Oh, well, sorry, I'm out. There you go. It's over for me already.
1:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some people have it, some people don't, you know, and why don't they, and should they or could they? And we got to get to the bottom of this. So Gary, you put together this, you and your producers put together this show. Why don't you take us in?
1:48 Gary O'Reilly? We've been thinking about this idea for a long time. So kind of how this begins is As with a lot of things, the Beatles. One of their most iconic songs is "All You Need Is Love."
2:02 Chuck Nice? Wap, ba, ba, ba, ba.
2:03 Gary O'Reilly? Thank you, thank you, Lennon McCartney. But this signpost isn't always recognized by some people. So how do you go from hate to love? It is said you get empathy. But what is empathy? What are we as humans with empathy? And what are we the humans without it? Can you chemically infiltrate the brain's neural processes and influence it?
2:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like hijack your brain to do the right thing?
2:31 Gary O'Reilly? Kind of, yeah. And if you can, what do you need? The answer may well be something called empathogens. Or if you like to put it another way, it's time to do some Molly.
2:41 Chuck Nice? I was gonna say, or if you want to put it another way, of the good drugs.
2:45 Gary O'Reilly? All right, so Neil, please introduce our guest.
2:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'd be delighted to. We have Ben Rein? Ben, am I pronouncing your last name properly?
2:53 Speaker 03 Typically, I go with Ryan, but if you do Rain, then it turns into Brain if you use my first initial.
2:58 Chuck Nice? Oh, B-R-E-I-N.
3:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm going with Brain, yep.
3:04 Speaker 03 Perfect.
3:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm totally going there.
3:06 Chuck Nice? If we go Rhine, if we go Rhine, then with your first name, it's just Brian.
3:10 Speaker 03 Right.
3:11 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
3:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Stanford University? And you're studying the neural bias of empathy? And how drugs like MDMA can act on the brain and influence that? You've also been in the world of science communication. We need more folks like that, especially in your field. Because however vast and complex the universe is, the human mind is greater than that. And you're also active on social media. We love to see that. Let's just start from scratch. So we've all heard of MDMA, I think, or Molly's. How does it operate on the brain's neurochemistry?
3:56 Speaker 03 MDMA acts on three major neurotransmitters or neuromodulators. It basically takes serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, those three, wherever they already exist in the brain, and just causes them to be dumped down essentially.
4:12 Chuck Nice? Flooded, flood your brain.
4:14 Speaker 03 That's right. Just like Chuck said, just floods it. So, and that creates a whole bunch of effects, which we will definitely talk about, but many of them are well-known, this sort of euphoric experience. A lot of people get this really intense sort of stimulant experience. They're grinding their teeth, they're running around, they're sweating, you know, their heart's racing. And, and those have more, have recently been kind of parsed out as far as which systems are doing which of those things.
4:39 Chuck Nice? Well, that's why it's such a great club drug, because you have people who experience two things simultaneously. One is the stimulative effects. So you're the dancing, you know, and then the other is the euphoria, because the music becomes more intense, more meaningful, because you're experiencing this euphoric state. So basically, you're like dancing and having the best time of your life ever. By the way, by the way, I am not advocating for the use of Mala.
5:20 Speaker 03 Chuck has never done it.
5:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, this is, he had friends who've done it. Yes, okay.
5:24 Chuck Nice? Yeah, exactly. From what I heard, from what I heard.
5:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what you're saying is we have these, we naturally produce these three chemicals, but MDMA enhances that production. It doesn't actually put it in you separately from the outside. It just boosts what your body would be doing otherwise.
5:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, so there are some drugs that will act like dopamine, for example. Well, they will come into the brain and they will bind to dopamine receptors and act as if there's, the brain will basically think that there's more dopamine suddenly. But MDMA acts on the existing serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, and the sort of places where it will be released naturally, and just causes it to be released.
6:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
6:10 Gary O'Reilly? So then chemically MDMA is very similar to meth. Meth, as we know, not good, but MDMA can have some really positive beneficial effects. So why is, if they're so close, why are they so close? How are they so close? But why do they have such differing effects on the human body?
6:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, so they are, if you look up a picture of meth and MDMA, like the structures, they're very, very similar. In fact MDMA stands for-
6:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, just to be clear, you're talking about the chemical structures?
6:41 Speaker 03 Yes, the chemical structures, yes.
6:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If I just look up the pill or whatever, you know, you mean like get into the chemical bonds and how they're all linked up? Okay, take me from there.
6:56 Speaker 03 Right, right. And I'm not going to talk too much about that because frankly, not a great organic chemist, or an organic chemist at all. But yeah, if you look at the structures, they're very similar. And the full name of MDMA is actually methylene dioxymethamphetamine.
7:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Methamphetamine is right in the name.
7:13 Speaker 03 Right, it's right there. And so methamphetamine acts primarily on dopamine, doing the same thing, taking the existing dopamine systems and causing them to dump dopamine. MDMA does that as well, but then it also stimulates serotonin and norepinephrine release. And so the sort of stimulant properties of both are likely driven by this dopamine release. And a recent paper out of my lab, the Rob Malenka's lab, led by this researcher, Dr. Boris Tyfetz, who just recently started his lab also at Stanford, found that the pro-social effects and the reinforcing sort of addictive liability properties of MDMA could be separated between serotonin and dopamine respectively.
7:55 Speaker 03 So, for example, they took these mice and deleted this gene, SERT, that allows serotonin to be, you know, sent between cells. And then they gave them MDMA, and they found that MDMA no longer made these mice more social, but it still had the reinforcing, rewarding, like dopaminergic properties.
8:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, how well were the mice dancing? That's what we really want to know. Chuck wants to know.
8:21 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
8:22 Speaker 03 I wish so badly the mice danced when they got MDMA. The only thing that happens is that their hair starts to stand up. It's the only real perceptible difference between a mouse that has gotten MDMA or saline.
8:33 Chuck Nice? Do the mouse like to, you know, just stroke each other gently like humans do when they're on MDMA? So.
8:42 Speaker 03 Well, we've looked for things like that, actually. We've looked for sort of like sensory kind of stimulation behaviors or
8:51 Speaker 03 or consolation behaviors where they would like lick each other and
8:54 Chuck Nice? Right.
8:54 Speaker 03 interact and console one another. And we actually didn't see, I didn't see any consolation behavior in that MDMA studies. But yeah, who knows? They might be, they're probably experiencing a whole lot. I would think through olfaction, through the sense of smell. They're very olfactory animals. And when they get MDMA, they're probably picking up on each other's odors a whole lot more. And there's probably a lot of things going on that we could never understand.
9:16 Gary O'Reilly? If we look at empathy as a spectrum, do you need to be in a sweet spot on that spectrum to gain the most empathetic response? Or does it work well throughout?
9:30 Speaker 03 It's a good question. I mean, to answer that really gets deeply into the mechanisms of what MDMA is doing to drive empathy, which is a whole big question. It's really what's been the focus of my project.
9:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but if I'm already empathetic and then I take it, what happens to me?
9:46 Chuck Nice? You are a lot more empathetic. Believe me.
9:50 Speaker 03 It's a good question because it's like if you're already here and you take it, like, is there a ceiling? You get, can you only bump a little bit versus someone's much less empathetic?
9:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's what I'm asking. Is there a ceiling to this?
10:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, I would say not. I would say as long as you have, well, spoiler alert, in the study, we found that the serotonin release in a particular brain area, the nucleus accumbens, is really critical for MDMA's empathogenic effects. So as long as you have a normal or reasonable amount of these serotonin terminals in this brain area that MDMA can act on, theoretically, you know, you should certainly experience it just like anyone else. And everyone's ceiling is probably different, I would think.
10:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Ben, after 9/11, I was eyewitness four blocks away from the collapse of the towers and the bodies dropping from windows. And I was very moved by that.
10:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That firsthand experience in ways that I had not ever experienced. Maybe it's a form of PTSD, I don't know. But in the days that followed, no, the months that followed, I had an enhanced awareness of people's emotional states. It wasn't just an awareness, I would have reactions to their emotional states. I remember distinctly, I was walking through the airport and there was a woman seated against the wall, kind of slightly tearing, like something must have happened, I don't know. But I deeply felt that. It was, I have to go over and console her. What, I have to help, I have to find out, what can I do? And, and it was normally, you know, I'm a New Yorker.
11:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? People sit in the street all the time.
11:29 Chuck Nice? People cry on the street here all the time.
11:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All the time, so.
11:33 Chuck Nice? It's just something you see in New York. People walking around, literally boo hooing.
11:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so this, this repeated, the people that had a sense of joy, someone was walking with, with helium balloons. And I felt joyous just watching that. And I said, oh, I wonder if they'll let me into their party so I could, you know? And so, so this was something that was externally triggered. And it faded slowly, but I think I'm still in a new place for it. And this was now 23 years ago.
12:05 Chuck Nice? Are you back to being your regular New York self? When you see someone, when you see someone crying and you go, shut up?
12:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so I just wonder, you must know whether or not natural events around us, life experience, can trigger these chemical reactions that the drugs would otherwise stimulate.
12:31 Speaker 03 As you're talking through that, I was thinking about it. And without getting too deep into like mechanism, it sounds like what you experienced was this sort of increased salience of others' emotions. And what's interesting to me about that is that many of the brain areas that are involved in empathy, which we can go there, we can take a separate route in through that. Those areas are also involved in sort of this, it's called the salience network, paying attention to the outer world, which makes sense because of course, part of empathy is detection. It's understanding what someone else is going through and really sensing out their emotional and cognitive experience.
13:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like an empathy IQ.
13:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah. And so perhaps the experience on 9/11 that, you know, really forced you to turn outward and imagine, you know, all these tragic experiences really stuck with you and, and kind of potentiated those systems for a while. And it's interesting that you initially said a few days or weeks, and then you said a few months. I'm curious if that has gradually depreciated that, that attention, or if that's remained.
13:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm pretty attentive, just in general, just as a scientist. I pay attention to a lot of stuff that most people don't care about. No, I would have noticed the crying woman. It's just a matter of whether I would have felt anything for it. So it has faded, but it has asymptoted to a level much higher than it was before 9/11. So I'm a different person because of it. And so that's a, I would say it's a permanent shift, but not as severe as that shift was in the days and weeks that followed.
14:24 Speaker 04 Hello, I'm Vicky Maroc Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neill Grass Tyson.
14:40 Gary O'Reilly? Ben, there was a case in 2021, when it was reported, the leader of a white supremacist group went through an MDMA trial, and after having experienced that, came out the other side, thinking very differently, really thinking very differently. Is it simple or too glib to say he was cured of his own racism? Or do we have to look at this scenario from a different point of view?
15:05 Speaker 03 It's probably too glib, but I would say, as Neil just explained, empathy is certainly, exists on a kind of a slider and can be modified by experience, no doubt. That experience can be, for example, in Neil's case, a really intense emotional event, or in the case of this 2021 report, a pharmacological event where this intense emotional experience was evoked through a drug taken deliberately. In both cases, I do think it can obviously have a longstanding effect. But what's really interesting about this particular case is that it was about really the way he perceived those of different races.
15:49 Speaker 03 And when I heard about this, it made me immediately think of empathy, of course. And it made me think about this question, actually, so we were talking about earlier, that how if you're already here, can you go to here? Where do you exist on this slider, where your natural levels of empathy? This was a person who was previously a white supremacist or leader of this white supremacy group, obviously had very little empathy for those who look unlike them. And after taking MDMA, suddenly said, what am I doing? Why am I leading this group? Why don't I appreciate everyone equally? And it's so interesting to me because it makes me think that he may have just been in a sort of an empathy deficit when it comes to empathizing with those who are unlike him.
16:33 Speaker 03 And MDMA suddenly rushed in all these emotions that he had never previously experienced. Suddenly he...
16:38 Chuck Nice? Are we familiar enough with the case to know whether or not there was information introduced to him while he was under the influence of MDMA? Or was this something that emerged after the trial just organically from within him? Because there would be two different things totally.
17:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To do the forcings on what the results were.
17:07 Chuck Nice? Absolutely.
17:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's several episodes of The Twilight Zone where they get some racist bigot, evil, mean person who goes through some... A psychological or or some sort of or dream state where he becomes the oppressed group that he was offending or slaughtering. And you go with him through this experience so that he can have a new place to stand to then make that evaluation.
17:36 Chuck Nice? Walk a mile in my shoes.
17:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To Chuck's point, exactly, walk a mile in the shoes. So to Chuck's point, would one need to do that? Or can you just pop up and say, oh, you look differently from me, so but I don't care. Let's go have a beer.
17:50 Chuck Nice? Yeah, like it's one thing if you introduce the subject to him, subject matter while he's under. It's another thing if he just takes MDMA and then comes out of it and goes, now I gotta tell you, before I took that pill, I just didn't like these negroes at all. I don't know what it is about them, but it made me sick. And but now I gotta tell you, I gotta go make friends.
18:14 Speaker 03 You know, as far as I'm aware, Gary, I'm not sure if you have any more information on this. I don't think he was presented with anything. I think he was part of a trial for, who knows, maybe PTSD or something else, anxiety, and just came to it organically.
18:29 Gary O'Reilly? That is what I've read in the reporting and the report is on the BBC, so it's a really authenticated, proper source of information you would hope.
18:37 Chuck Nice? That's extraordinary.
18:38 Gary O'Reilly? Yeah, and he, she then reached back to the people who conducted the trials and said, thank you, da da da, I now know what it is I have to do. And those, those words, basically, or some similar words, sent a chill through these people that said, we've got to reach this guy just in case something wrong is going on. So they reached out to him and said, no, no, no, I now have understood what the direction is I need to be going.
19:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Christians recall that he had a coming to Jesus moment.
19:07 Chuck Nice? Come to Jesus moment.
19:08 Gary O'Reilly? Right. There you go. And so he had an open, a spot in his mind that was a little bit more.
19:18 Gary O'Reilly? And I think the MDMA from kind of reading between the lines, expanded that spot of open mindedness. And so that's, they say, we don't think he's completely cured of his bigotry, but he's in a better place.
19:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ben, let's get to the bottom of how does your field define empathy? Because empathy feels so abstract. It feels almost too abstract for science to define in a traditional way.
19:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is a bit of a challenge, but the way that it's generally defined is the sharing or stepping into another person's experience, whether that's a cognitive experience or an emotional experience. And actually, I've just defined sort of two key players in this is there's cognitive empathy and there's emotional empathy. So cognitive empathy is really being able to imagine it's perspective taking. It's putting yourself in their shoes and thinking, okay, I can probably guess what they're thinking, what they're going through, what, you know, what type of emotions they might feel. Emotional empathy is then actually sharing those emotions.
20:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this is the same, this comes out of that world, your EQ, your emotional quotient, right? Where people with high EQ were more likely to rise up and become managers because they had a sense of what people who reporting to them were thinking. So you would know how to speak with them in ways that could maximize their productivity. And if you're just detached from that, you got no, you got no place to reach them.
20:40 Speaker 03 Right.
20:41 Chuck Nice? With that in mind, is empathy something that we can learn? Let's just say that you are naturally at an empathy deficit and that's your natural state. Is it possible to raise the level of empathy that a person has resonant within them and make them more empathetic?
21:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, I believe so. I think that in general, yes, empathy can be learned. It could be taught and it may not even be necessarily need to be taught. It can be probably kind of. Enforced individually, where you can, I believe, use cognitive empathy. That is, taking another person's perspective, trying to ask yourself, what is it that they're going through? You can use that skill, which everyone should possess, even those who are psychopaths and can't experience emotional empathy or don't experience it. You can still experience cognitive empathy and put yourself in someone's shoes, and then using that understanding will yourself into the emotions. You can say, okay, I understand what they're probably experiencing, what would I feel like in that situation?
21:42 Speaker 03 And this is really just a sort of simple practice that can be exercised. And for some people, that empathy, that emotional empathy, might be very automatic. As Neil described, you walk by someone crying on the street and you start to tear up yourself. This really immediate impactful, robust empathy. For others, it may not happen automatically. There's this kind of, like I said, a slider. For any trait, there's really a continuum of how strongly or weakly it will be expressed. And I think the empathy is no different. And I also think that your natural level of empathy is partially driven by your experience in your early life, what sort of empathy modeling your parents led. But in the context of psychopathy, it may be a bit different. Because what I've been talking about so far is, kind of picture this continuum, and if
22:26 Speaker 03 you're sort of lower on this continuum, meaning you're less likely to naturally experience empathy, you could probably will yourself up a bit. But if you're on the very bottom of that continuum and your brain is fundamentally different, I believe that in the context of psychopathy, it's generally driven by some sort of genetic difference that affects the functioning of those empathy-related brain systems. And so it may not be as simple as just saying, what do I think they're feeling? How can I get there myself? Because it might just not be your brain's natural state. Your brain might actually be somewhat incapable of performing that exercise.
23:03 Gary O'Reilly? Are there kind of no hope cases in this scenario?
23:06 Speaker 03 I never like to say there are no hope cases, but I think that maybe in certain cases, it might be useful to employ some sort of pharmacological agent, if they want to, to kind of bump them in the right direction, maybe sort of like what we saw with this 2021 report of this white supremacist.
23:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This has severe ramifications in the prospect of free will. Because if someone actually is at the bottom of that spectrum, in that range, and...
23:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're not, they don't feel what the rest of us feel in order to make decisions for the betterment of civilization, and then they're capable of heinous acts. How accountable are they for their heinous acts? If you study their brain and find out that they are very low on the empathy spectrum, neurochemically.
23:51 Speaker 03 Are you asking me? Because that's a real dumb question, Neil.
23:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm asking Chuck. Chuck, what's your...
23:58 Speaker 03 Chuck, please help.
23:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think you're the only one with a PhD in neuroscience on this call right now. So...
24:04 Speaker 03 It's an interesting question, really, because, you know, it reminds me actually of another case. I've talked about this in a video on social media. This guy started basically demonstrating pedophilia. He was downloading all these images and, you know, terrible illegal things. And then it was discovered that he had this huge tumor in his brain. And they removed the tumor and it went away.
24:24 Chuck Nice? And it went away, yeah.
24:25 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it's kind of the same question. It's like, should he go to prison for that? It's like, oh, man, was it him or was it him?
24:32 Chuck Nice? As a matter of fact, he was arrested, as a matter of fact, that particular case. And he was not imprisoned because they were able to sufficiently prove that this tumor affected him. And once it was removed, he was not a pedophile. Period.
24:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. So at what point, I mean, you will surely be brought forth in future cases as neuroscience matures, as a field continues to mature. Somebody's going to want to know whether, a court is going to want to know whether someone's behavior was beyond their control, outside of their free will. And you're going to be in the center of that. So I just, just, just get ready for that.
25:15 Speaker 03 That preparation starts today. Thank you, Neil.
25:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay, today. Yeah, well, I want a full report in the morning on where you're going to be there.
25:27 Gary O'Reilly? So, Ben, you mentioned earlier on there were different types of empathy.
25:31 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
25:32 Gary O'Reilly? Talking about the emotional feeling and connection. But did you say cognitive empathy as well?
25:39 Speaker 03 That's right.
25:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he did say that.
25:41 Speaker 03 Yes, cognitive.
25:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What does that mean, cognitive empathy?
25:43 Speaker 03 Yeah. Cognitive empathy is the perspective-taking element. So let's do this. Let's pretend that we're walking through a jungle and we're with our best friend. And...
25:55 Speaker 03 Suddenly, you hear them yelp, and we're barefoot. Again, it's a jungle. You hear them yelp, and you look over, and you see them reaching for their foot, and they're grimacing, and they appear to be in pain. Cognitive empathy is this perspective-taking. They're reaching for their foot, so you're thinking cognitively, okay, they're probably in pain, it's probably coming from their foot, something's happening to their foot. That's cognitive empathy. It's assessing what someone else is going through. But then emotional empathy is then starting to feel that sense of discomfort that you experience when you see someone experiencing something painful. It's that oof, like, get me away from this, I don't want to see this. For guys, it might be seeing another guy get kicked in the nuts, you get that, like,
26:38 Chuck Nice? Right.
26:38 Speaker 03 That response, that's just like...
26:41 Chuck Nice? Now, what if you see your friend reach for their foot, and you're in the jungle, and you think to yourself, let me check for snakes before I rush over there to help, because if he just got bitten by a snake, I don't want any parts of that.
26:53 Speaker 03 That's a great question, because that's sort of the, one of the functions, the many functions of empathy, is that by being able to, without having to communicate a single word, you can understand what your friend is experiencing. It's, you're kind of living vicariously through them, and you're able to apply and extrapolate their situation to your own circumstances, which could be protective. In that case, you know, maybe they were bit by a snake, maybe they were bit by a thorn, whatever it is, in that moment, you know to stop moving and to look on the ground, because you don't want to hurt your foot. That's one of the really valuable evolutionary benefits of empathy.
27:26 Gary O'Reilly? What about firefighters, Ben? Those that run to, not away from, the flames? What level of cognitive empathy do they have?
27:34 Speaker 03 That's a sort of a different perspective, or sort of a different situation, because it's a responsibility, right?
27:40 Chuck Nice? You're paid for that.
27:41 Speaker 03 In that situation.
27:42 Chuck Nice? They're paid.
27:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. That's the thing about empathy that's so interesting. It can be really manipulated by a lot of different things, like, the context is really important. So in that case, surely they're experiencing empathy, but they're not going in because they're experiencing empathy and they want to help. They're going in because they're financially compensated to.
28:00 Chuck Nice? And it could be the marrying of two separate neurostates. One could be that they have a higher level of empathy, which made them, from their younger years, say, "When I grow up, I want to help people, you know, by being a fireman." But they could also be somebody who is a bit of a thrill seeker. And so they want to be, when the fire happens, it's not necessarily the empathy that's kicking in that says, "Oh, let me go save these people from a fire." It's a combination of that and, "Yeah, I'm about to run into a fire," you know?
28:35 Speaker 03 Right. There must be some gratification in saving someone, helping someone.
28:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, other than realizing the causes and effects of this drug, there are people with very real emotional, psychological problems out there. And what is the medical community, rather than just simply the neuroscience community, doing with these tools that you are exploring that can help people with serious mental problems, especially PTSD?
29:22 Speaker 03 Right. MDMA specifically is being explored, even more than explored. It's now being approved in certain places for the treatment of PTSD. And it's very, very interesting because, from what I've been told, I'm not a clinician. I don't work with patients. I don't have done any of this type of therapy. But MDMA, as Chuck described earlier, makes everything euphoric. And so when you have a deep, a deeply repressed, a deeply uncomfortable memory, this trauma, it's uncomfortable to explore it. Because every time you bring that memory up or that concept up, it evokes these intensely negative emotions. And that can be a huge barrier for those going through psychotherapy for PTSD. But MDMA allows for those with PTSD
30:08 Speaker 03 to explore those ideas and those memories with this kind of...
30:14 Speaker 03 Cover, this protective cover of this MDMA euphoria over top of it, where you can really uncover more depths of these memories without evoking that really intensely negative experience. And so it's a very valuable aid to psychotherapy. And importantly, psychotherapy is kind of the key word there because there's no reason to believe that just giving someone with PTSD MDMA will suddenly affect their PTSD. It's really about a conscious process of exploring it.
30:42 Chuck Nice? So when you're experiencing the memory, you're reliving the event, which brings about intense anxiety because your brain thinks you're in danger through reliving the event. But you're not in danger, so you're suffering needlessly. So then you take the MDMA. And what that does is completely mitigates the anxiety because you're having these intense emotional euphoric experience along with experiencing the memory. And the removal of that intense anxiety now allows you to recognize that the memory itself is no longer harmful. Therefore, I don't have to suffer through it
31:25 Chuck Nice? whenever I recall this experience.
31:29 Speaker 03 Well said. Yeah. I mean, and a big part of that, too, is that it's not only anxiogenic, it makes you anxious, but it's also that it's so intensely emotional that it's like a light switch. You just shut it off and like put it away. And it's like, I can't go near this. And with MDMA, it's not so unpleasant. You can still approach it, you can still toy with it and get to understand it. And yeah, and sort of restructure your understanding of that memory in maybe a not so intensely negative way.
31:58 Chuck Nice? Wow.
31:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If we look at external forces, you know, social media, how people are treated on social media, the forces operating that make people want to change themselves. There's their like.
32:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who they are on social media relative to who they actually are? Or how about violence, not only in video games, but films? Can this desensitize us? What's the evidence for or against that operating on our sense of empathy?
32:28 Speaker 03 So there is very little research exploring this question directly, but I have a very strong theory on this. You know, being a person who exists sort of at this weird interface between empathy research at a neuroscience lab and social media, where I'm posting videos and engaging with audiences, I couldn't help but notice the absence of empathy that I witnessed on social media. And that's people behaving towards me in a very hostile way, people arguing with one another in the comments over things that were truly insignificant. Like, what's the book on my bookshelf behind me? Like, and then going at each other's throats and really becoming violent. And after spending a lot of time thinking about this,
33:09 Speaker 03 I realized, you know, the human brain evolved for face-to-face contact. We have all of these incredible systems for evaluating the experiences of each other, using things like our faces. Like, for example, our, you know, our eyes are lined with white so that we can easily see where one another are looking. And our eyebrows allow us to emote, you know? We can express emotions. And all of these things, you know, we imitate one another's facial expressions. And through feedback, that informs us about their experience. We start to take on their emotions.
33:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And none of that's in a comment thread, none of that?
33:44 Speaker 03 None, none, especially in a comment thread where it's purely text. For example, in the comment section on a news article, right? Where it's anonymous, you don't even have a profile picture or a name. You've been completely dehumanized to a string of text purely representing whatever idea you're trying to talk about. And there is just no system in the human brain for empathizing with that. You know, in that sense, we're no longer humans. We are just strings of text that we can be, you know, unleashing attacks upon without having to feel any sense of discomfort or any empathy for the resulting emotions. And so I really think that the sort of format of social media brings out the worst in people. It's not that we have mean, mean people
34:29 Speaker 03 who are jerks to everyone in real life, being jerks to everyone on social media. We have people who are kind throughout their normal day, going on social media and arguing with others just because their brain is not... Meant to perform this type of social interaction.
34:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We caught hints of this at the dawn of email, where you would misread the emotions of someone's comment in an email. And in the early days, I remember, people said, let's just get on the phone and talk. So at least there's tonal variation, or, you know, let's meet up for lunch or coffee. So people knew that something was missing relative to whatever we were doing before. And but that but no one heeded those warnings with social media, which is now a cesspool, as far as I can tell, all of social media.
35:16 Speaker 03 Earlier, I said that there's really no research on this on social media. But there's a whole field of what's called CMC, computer mediated communication. So in those early days, when emails were starting to, you know, become popular and people were interacting on the computer, researchers started looking at this. And even back then, this is in the 80s, they saw that people behaved differently on in computer mediated chats. They were, you know, more hostile, they were more likely to swear, they would call each other names and be uninhibited and just behave strangely.
35:44 Gary O'Reilly? Ben, is it the lack of social reaction? Say, for instance, a child misbehaves in a family group. The family group give that immediate reaction to the child that this is unacceptable. And you get all the emotive reactions and some words as well. In this scenario with an email, very historic email, or with social media, and that just no social reaction when you press send, is this now where we are?
36:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it. I mean, it's unquestionably easier to send a difficult message in an email than speak it to the person's face. Or it's much easier to leave a note on someone's car that said, you parked like a jackass, then wait for them to return and then tell them to their face. Right? It's so much easier to not be there because you don't have to feel bad for them. You don't have to be confronted with potential attack. But there's also all of these social cues that that really impact us and not only inform us about what another person is feeling. So if you insult someone, you see the look on their face. You know, you see the tears streaming down their face if you're really mean. You not only understand that they're feeling bad, but you feel bad as a result. And that's the emotional empathy piece.
36:57 Speaker 03 And there are so many of these systems built into human exchange. For example, A paper came out last year, super, super interesting. They had these women watch sad movies and they collected their tears. And then they had men sniff the tears or sniff saline solution. And then play this game where basically they were measuring aggression. And they found that the men who sniffed the tears from the women right before had no idea what they had sniffed. Were 43% less likely to behave in an aggressive manner. So there's some sort of chemosensory thing happening where the smell of women's tears is enough to inhibit our aggressive behavior.
37:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm gonna wait until that study is duplicated before I jump onto that one.
37:39 Speaker 03 It's been shown in rodents.
37:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is it just one study?
37:42 Speaker 03 Rodents. That's that, yeah, that paper just came out last year.
37:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, I'm gonna wait around until it's duplicated, yeah.
37:50 Chuck Nice? Is there, is there a study that can explain why drinking the tears of children makes me happy?
37:58 Speaker 03 Nothing on that yet.
38:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So tell me again, can, can our empathetic system be shut down because we are desensitized? By violence, either, like I said, in entertainment or just in the evening news? Wars going around in the world today are, I mean, some, you know, some of that happens because initially when war breaks out. There's an outcry and there's, and then if the war drags on for months and months and months. It becomes less interesting to cover in the news. Because it's not fresh and it's not, and we're, we're basically desensitized. So what do we do about that?
38:39 Speaker 03 So it's a very good question. I mean, you know, there's certainly, this is not my field to be really speaking on, but there's this definitely research on how, like you said, being exposed to extreme news stories all the time, you become desensitized to them. You know, what, what five years ago may have been extremely alarming and terrifying to see in the news today is a everyday headline. And, you know, our experiences or perspectives change. The role of empathy in that is, yeah, it certainly is desensitized because you could only carry the weight of that for so long without being able to, to act on it. You know, if you hear a story about someone being mistreated or a group being mistreated across the world. And you feel deep, deep empathy for these people.
39:21 Speaker 03 But then another week goes on and the same same story keeps popping up. You know, it's it's hard to carry that weight. It wears you down and and eventually you kind of are forced to desensitize yourself to it in a sort of adaptive way, you know, because it's it's no longer benefiting you. It's actually starting to hurt you to carry that with you.
39:42 Gary O'Reilly? Can we increase our capacity? I mean, we talk about sensory overload and this is kind of in that whole part. Can we maybe through other psychedelics increase our capacity to still feel the right level of empathy, even though night after night after night, we are seeing horrific images in the news channels?
40:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. And what is the future of psychedelics in that way? We we focus primarily on one here, but what's not psychedelic, but a brain altering, emotion altering drug. But there's no shortage of emotion altering drugs and especially entering this psychedelic realm. So do you see a future for this? If I can tag that part of my question onto Gary's comment.
40:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, if there were any drug that were used for this enhancing empathy, it would very likely be MDMA. It's it's the one with the greatest, you know, the most robustly demonstrated effects as an empathogen. Other drugs show kind of similar effects, like, for example, psilocybin, which is psychedelic mushrooms, shows this, it creates a sort of effect of like unity and oneness, which is a little bit different. It's it's kind of similar to empathy, but it's it is different. But this question about what's the future is a very challenging one. And, you know, I it's something I think about all the time because the paper that's about to come out that I've been working on for the last few years, we and using mice.
41:09 Speaker 03 So we don't know if it's true in humans, but we figured out the mechanism of how MDMA enhances empathy in the brain. And that was an interesting question to answer. But now that we have the answer, creates a bunch of more questions, many ethical questions. It's like. Do if we have the power to enhance empathy through a specific pharmacological or deep brain stimulation mechanism, do we, should we, who should, who gets it, who doesn't get it, who decides who gets it? And those are questions that I'm certainly not in a position to answer.
41:41 Chuck Nice? I am. Here's what we do. Before, before any war is ever fought, we take the soldiers and we have a big rave and they all get molly and then they get to dance with one another and hang out with one another doing molly, then everybody retreats back to their neutral corners and now we have the war.
42:05 Speaker 03 No one's gonna want the war.
42:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that's my point. There you go.
42:09 Speaker 03 Chuck Nice for Secretary of State. Yes. Well, similarly, I mean, this is kind of a joke, but I'm kind of serious. One amazing application would be make it, this is so controversial, so I feel silly saying it.
42:23 Chuck Nice? No, say it.
42:24 Speaker 03 Before presidential or political debates, let's induce this state of empathy where people can actually understand and deliberate about differing opinions instead of just throwing hostile comments at one another, attacking each other's points, and just get to the bottom of who's actually right here, you know, which, which perspective makes more sense, you know, imagine what that would do for politics. It would be transformative. Oh, my gosh. Mm hmm. Yes.
42:49 Chuck Nice? I don't understand. Well, I feel this way. This is the best I've ever felt. I'm the most empathetic, no one's more, no one knows empathy like I do. Very empathetic, very, very empathetic.
43:04 Speaker 03 It would be a spectacle. Wouldn't it? But then there are also other realistic applications, which would be really the, the clinical applications, like, for example, psychopathy, or maybe in, in certain cases of autism spectrum disorder where there's a, there's a deficit, a deficit in empathy and this person wants to experience empathy to a greater degree, you know, and then it just becomes very, very controversial because. Who makes that decision? You know, of course, it should be the person making the decision for themselves. What about in the context of psychopathy? What if you have a person who's imprisoned for, you know, a heinous act that they did because they did not experience empathy for the victim?
43:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Another side of this is, is there a difference between handing someone a bit of chemistry to alter how they think, possibly changing what their free will is, and then there's an ethical conversation about that? Is that any different from sitting on a psychologist's couch every day for six months and have those conversations change the mental chemistry of the person? Is that really any different?
44:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up because, you know, if you think about comparing, let's say, for depression, SSRIs versus psilocybin. SSRIs, we don't really truly know how they work, how they help, but one of the ways that they may work is just by increasing plasticity. And by increasing plasticity in the brain, that is, making the synapses more flexible and, you know, allowing for change, you might be able to reframe your perspective, you might be able to sort of distance yourself from negative or harmful perceptions, whatever. And it's a long gradual process that takes weeks or months even. It takes weeks for it to even start, but months, and it should be accompanied by psychotherapy so that you're creating this flexibility and then you're also sort of reshaping it with the proper therapy.
45:02 Speaker 03 I like to think of it like taking a hat that doesn't fit and, you know, blowing a hairdryer on it to warm it up and then putting it on your hat and letting it kind of melt back into the right position that you want it to be in. But the thing about psilocybin is it does the exact same thing. It induces neuroplasticity, it does so through serotonin, but it happens in hours rather than weeks or months.
45:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if it's the same effect, then there's, because no one speaks of the moral consequences of getting therapy for six months, right? That's, that never, no one ever mentions that, right? So Ben Rein, delighted to meet you and to speak with you and, and as you know, we-
45:39 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry, Neil, I'm so sorry.
45:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
45:43 Chuck Nice? I just have one very important question for Ben before we let him go.
45:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's that?
45:48 Chuck Nice? Do you have any molly?
45:51 Chuck Nice? And can you send some to my house?
45:54 Speaker 03 You know Chuck, as soon as you started, I was like, I was thinking this is not going to be a question I want to answer right now.
46:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Ben, thanks for giving us your time, sharing your time with us as well as your million followers on social media. Keep up that work and we'll be monitoring this space for future developments. All right. Chuck, always good to have you.
46:19 Chuck Nice? Always a pleasure.
46:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Gary, you too. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.
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