Dr. Richard Davidson

And you can look in the United States today and see that

Many major universities, including my university, not through my involvement, are offering these one-year kind of certificate programs to become a psychedelic guide for people with very little prior training.

And this is something that's occurring all over the place.

it deeply concerns me because I wouldn't trust the kind of people who... I mean it's not to disparage these people, I'm sure that they have good motivation, but I just don't think that taking a person with no prior training and putting them in a program for a year is sufficient to cover all of the issues and nuances that are going to arise.

The other related issue is that when a person has a psychedelic experience, what happens after and what is kind of the residue of that?

And what I sense is the residue is that they have a memory of the experience.

And so they remember aspects of what happened during the experience.

And the recollection of an experience is very different than the embodied transformation that is required to produce real change.

You know, for me, there's a simple question you can ask.

Is this person kinder?

Does their spouse report that they're more enjoyable to be around?

Is their flourishing contagious?

Those are the questions that I think can be asked and I haven't seen a lot of convincing evidence of that.

I'm a big fan of the research going on and continuing to use these substances for treating people who are in various states of significant distress.

but I'm cautious about their use in a broader way to promote human flourishing at scale.

And I think in general the use of neurostimulation, neuromodulation methods in conjunction with other modalities of intervention, whether it be psychedelics or meditation, for example, is a very promising avenue for exploration.

And we're doing some research right now combining neuromodulation with meditation to see if we can boost

the impact of meditation

with some targeted neuromodulation and it's specifically neuromodulation to help facilitate sleep.

What device are you using to stimulate?