Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

I'm not saying that it doesn't feel great.

What I'm saying is that in my experience, it doesn't sustainably improve things over time.

And in the worst cases, what it actually does is masks, right?

Because you're taking this psychedelic that is like changing your mood, your anxiety, your feeling of your connectedness with the world.

But the moment that the psychedelic goes away, you're back to where you started, right?

And so what that sort of means is that it doesn't lead to a sustainable improvement.

You're not actually fixing the problems of feeling disconnected from the world without a psychedelic.

The last thing that I want to talk about is something that's kind of fun, which is more of a subjective experience of how psychedelics work.

So remember that we talked about the 5-HT2A receptor, we talked about neuroplasticity, but there's one other really interesting mechanism which seems to be responsible for psychedelic healing.

Now, this mechanism is subjective.

So what I mean by that is that we can look at things like receptors, right?

But then there is the actual trip.

And it seems like there is one kind of trip that correlates with healing over time.

And that is a trip that involves ego death.

So if you have a psychedelic experience that involves just looking at colors, this does not appear to cure depression or treat PTSD.

The trips that actually involve healing are ones where your sense of identity starts to crumble and fall apart, where your sense of connection to other people increases.

And there's actually studies on this.

So I want to show you all this is super cool.

So someone did their thesis specifically on ego death.

So prescribed ego death, the therapeutic effects found in the psychedelic-induced absence of self.