Dr. Nolan Williams

I don't fear that the chemical imbalance is still imbalanced.

I don't fear that these things that I couldn't control in my childhood, you know, are going to be there and drive this problem forever.

And I think that's what's so powerful about this.

I think it's an evolutionary neurobiology answer, right?

I think that we end up being a result of probably a lot of biology that's not that useful in the modern era.

And I think in the brain for...

for say, let's say PTSD, right?

A lot of veterans come back and they experience these PTSD symptoms and they're not at all useful back home, right?

They hear some loud noise and all of a sudden they're behind a car or they're behind a, you know, I've heard of folks who jump and run behind a trash can or whatever in the middle of San Francisco when they hear a loud noise.

But if you put them back in the battlefield,

highly adaptive that's highly adaptive right we hold on to those things from i think an evolutionary neurobiology standpoint but what seems to for whatever reason

of alleviate that are these um are these substances some new like mdma some that have been around for thousands of years like psilocybin seem to have a therapeutic effect that seems to be pretty long lasting for these phenomenon and so it's just curious right it's curious that in the absence of that these things will keep going on and on but in the presence of that exposure

then all of a sudden you see a resolution of the problem.

And we have some work now, we're treating folks with Navy SEALs.

The anecdotes that we're getting, right, are folks are coming back and they're saying these set of PTSD symptoms are finally gone.

And so this idea that for whatever reason, going into what's probably a highly plastic state and re-experience memories, and then, as you know, we're reconsolidating it in that state, for whatever reason, may drive a therapeutic effect.

My business is to find treatments that help people, and so I'm much more pragmatic about it.

If this sort of thing, which has a lot of cultural...

baggage but if this sort of thing ultimately ends up being therapeutic if we can design trials that convince me and others that it is then we should absolutely use it and if it doesn't then we clearly shouldn't use it right the work that's been done so far the first psilocybin trial the first

MDMA trial is published in Nature Medicine recently.