Dr. Nolan Williams

There's a psychiatrist down at UCLA Harbor who's done a lot of work with this where he's looked at children even that have been exposed to small doses of ayahuasca as kind of a sacrament within medicine.

Amazonian tribes and found no neurocognitive effects, no neurocognitive effects in adults.

And so it appears to be safe.

It's kind of part and brought into various religions, including kind of merged with Catholicism in South America, which is kind of very interesting.

And so, you know, in some sects of Catholicism in Brazil, it's used as a sacrament during religious ceremonies.

And so it became interesting to Brazilian researchers as to whether or not they could affect recidivism rates for prisoners in Brazilian prisons.

So they gave half of the prisoners some sort of inert substance and half of the prisoners an ayahuasca session.

And the recidivism rate or the return to prison rate in the ayahuasca exposed individuals was statistically significantly lower

than the recidivism rate in the control group, suggesting that whatever is going on there seems to have an effect on whatever drives criminal behavior, whatever criminal behavior that happened to be.

And I don't have the details on the exact nature of the crime.

I am also in no way saying that we should just be giving psychedelics to folks in prison and all of that.

I think that that is...

a very edgy thing to do and probably not something that anybody should try, but it does bring up this curious question of what is it about that that would drive people to change those behaviors and why do people make those behavioral decisions

SAINT, or what we're calling it S&T now, Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy, or now what we're calling Stanford Neuromodulation Therapy.

The idea there is that TMS is a device that delivers a treatment.

And the treatment is the protocol.

And the protocol is the stimulation parameter set in a specific brain region for a specific condition, whether it be transcranial magnetic stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation or deep brain stimulation like what Casey Halpern talked about.

In all of those cases, the device itself is a physical layer conduit of a stimulation protocol that's therapeutic for a given condition in a given brain region.

We decided, gosh, you know, this problem I talked about at the beginning of the show where you have these, you know, this problem that we don't have a treatment for people who are in these high acuity psychiatric emergency states, right?

This idea that we're going to engineer a treatment where we can reorganize the stimulation approach in time.