This is Iquitos, Peru,
the world's largest city inaccessible by road.
The only way in and out is by air or by river,
the Amazon River.
I'm about to head up the Amazon to a remote jungle retreat
called Refugio Altiplano, the Refuge on the Higher Plain.
There, I will meet with local shamans
to drink an ancient psychedelic drug, ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca contains dimethyltryptamine, DMT,
a molecule shaped very similar to serotonin,
a neurotransmitter in our brains.
Ingesting ayahuasca and flooding the brain with DMT
leads to what many describe as spiritual experiences...
Strong, vivid visions,
a sense of oneness with the universe,
even a sense of one's self dying.
But mystical, magical language like that
doesn't really seem relevant to scientific inquiry.
It can often scare away those who are scientifically minded.
However an understanding of the human mind
isn't complete unless it considers
everything the brain is capable of.
What does it mean to feel at one with the universe?
Why should our brains even be capable of such a feeling?
This isn't about having fun or taking a risk
or doing something extreme.
I want to learn what my mind is capable of.
I'm about to embark on a journey.
Psychedelics are chemicals
that are structurally similar to neurotransmitters
already used by our brains.
When we ingest them, they bind to receptors
and alter cognition and perception
in ways we're still trying to understand.
When many people think of psychedelics,
they think about people challenging societal norms
and recreational thrill-seekers,
but that only attends
to a particularly narrow slice of human history and culture.
Fossil records, cave drawings, and archaeological digs
have all provided evidence that humans
have been using psychedelic compounds
for thousands of years, and by "used," I don't just mean
in the stereotypical "trip out" sense.
For instance, among the indigenous peoples
of the Amazon rainforest, psychedelics were and,
in many places, still are a normal, common,
and totally mainstream experience.
As a member of these groups, believing psychedelics can heal,
give visions of the future, and connect you with deities
is not some weird or New Age idea.
It's the way things are.
But when psychedelics became associated
with certain counterculture movements,
the United States banned research on them in 1970.
Most other countries followed suit shortly afterwards.
From then on, testing on humans was essentially gone,
but recently, restrictions have begun to loosen up,
and a few researchers have started
to investigate these substances
in what some have described as a psychedelic renaissance.
Research universities are conducting
comprehensive studies on the beneficial effects
of psychedelics on addiction, depression,
and cancer-related trauma.
By approaching psychedelics scientifically,
what we find could fundamentally transform
our understanding of the human mind.
When I go to Peru, I will be accompanied
by Dr. Robin Carhart Harris, one of the first
British researchers in over 40 years
to investigate the effects of psychedelics
on the human mind.
He and his colleagues have found that psychedelics
don't increase brain activity, as previously thought.
Instead, they decrease activity in certain areas.
And the greater the decrease,
the greater the reported feelings
of what is called ego dissolution or ego death.
Your ego is your self-identity.
It's the part that separates you from everything else,
the part that creates narratives about the outside world
and your story in it.
When the ego dissolves, your sensations
and feelings don't cease like when you're unconscious.
Instead, your attachment to your identity does,
and all that's left is naked perception.
Ego dissolution is a concept
that I find difficult to wrap my head around,
but people who take psychedelics say that it can be
an extremely frightening experience,
but also a profoundly transformative one,
one that makes them feel more connected
to others and to nature.
Now, I knew that I might feel ego dissolution on ayahuasca,
so to make sure I was ready,
I decided to speak to some experts.
Before setting off to Peru, Dr. Carhart Harris traveled
from Imperial College, London, to meet with me.
This will be one of the first times
that anyone has scanned a healthy person's brain
with FMRI before and after ayahuasca.
- Yeah. - It's quite pioneering work, really.
- The thing that's on my mind right now is intention.
- Yeah. - I've heard you should know why
you're drinking ayahuasca.
- Yeah, I would suggest that you think
about an emotional intention.
- To make it emotional is a lot more frightening to me.
- Yeah. - Partly I think I'm quite happy,
and I don't want to ruin that, right?
I don't want to drink ayahuasca and then think, "My gosh,
I'm not close enough to my mom,
or I don't show my wife I appreciate her enough,
and now I just feel terrible."
- There's something to be said for sitting with those thoughts,
being mindful of them. - Right.
- And in so doing, they become less of a threat.
You look them in the eye.
All of a sudden, they reveal things to you,
and their scariness seems to dissipate.
- I hope I can embrace that while I'm surrounded
by people who are all filming me, you know?
- Yeah, the most important thing is that intention to go in.
You dive in... in and through. - You don't resist.
- Yeah, I think that'll really be important
while I'm on the trip.
Robin has arranged for me to have a number of scientific tests
in order to measure brain activity,
behavioral differences,
and physiological changes to my brain.
Today, we are scanning Michael's brain
with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or FMRI.
This allows us to see the whole brain
and how different parts connect and talk to one another.
This way, we can compare how Michael's brain may change
before his experience with ayahuasca
to after the ayahuasca experience.
I expect to see that one network of the brain
that relates to introspection
will become more strongly connected after the ayahuasca.
After meeting Robin,
I still felt some trepidation about my trip,
but with my pre-ayahuasca FMRI completed,
it was time to go to Peru.
The trip to the Refugio Altiplano retreat
involved a flight to Lima, Peru,
a second flight to Iquitos, Peru,
followed by a 90-minute boat ride up the Amazon River.
It was a long journey.
And every minute I got closer
meant it was that much harder to turn back.
The Refugio Altiplano retreat is in a remote area
of the Amazon rain forest in the northern part of Peru.
It would be an authentic setting
for my ayahuasca experience.
So, Kelly, what does the word "ayahuasca" mean?
- "Ayahuasca" means the "vine of the soul."
Ayahuasca's been used for possibly over 4,000 years
in shamanic rituals and is the primary
plant medicine for healing in the villages.
With the ayahuasca ceremony just hours away,
I met with José, the shaman who would be
my guide during this experience.
- Hola, José, Claudia. - Hola, amigo.
It's my pleasure to have you here.
Welcome to Refugio Altiplano,
where many people come to look for a change in their lives.
José, how do you feel about someone like me coming in,
who is not part of your culture, taking part in it
in a way that might not come from the same history?
For me, there's no difference,
and for the medicine, it makes no difference.
This medicine, all it wants is to make your life better
and heal you.
On the very first night with our guests,
we give them a very small medicinal dose
to see how each person's gonna react differently
to the medicine, and then tomorrow night,
we'll dial it up a little bit.
It was great to speak with José
about what the ceremony will entail.
I am nervous about the emotional part of it,
and I'm nervous about the visions and feeling
like I've been disconnected from the real world.
Scientists know very little about how ayahuasca works
since its illegal status in many countries
makes it difficult to study.
We do know that its key ingredient
is dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, which is a hallucinogen
thought to occur naturally in the human brain
in small amounts.
DMT can create psychoactive effects
by acting on certain receptors in the brain.
But normally, DMT is broken down rapidly by enzymes in the brain.
However ayahuasca is actually a brew made from two plants.
One contains DMT,
and the second contains a chemical inhibitor
that blocks our body's ability to break down DMT,
allowing the effects to last four hours.
Dr. Carhart Harris gave me a series of tests
to compare how I change during this experience.
Given that we're in Peru, we're in the jungle,
and you're drinking ayahuasca, it has authenticity
that perhaps sometimes you lose
when you give psychedelics in the laboratory environment.
- Yeah. - Because we're going to be doing this
after you drink ayahuasca, we need a control condition,
so what I'm going to do now is I'll ask you
a short list of questions about your journey here,
and I want you to rate how you feel about these questions
on a scale here.
We have zero to nine.
Nine will be strongly agree,
and zero will be strongly disagree.
So "I learned more from my journey here
to this retreat center about how past events
have influenced my present behavior."
Two.
- I got ideas during... - Two.
- Five. Six. - Great.
With different psychedelic drugs to ayahuasca
like LSD and psilocybin, also DMT,
we've found some quite consistent changes
in brain activity.
We've seen that the brain activity
is richer and more varied.
Of course, we can't wheel an MRI scanner
up into the jungle, so the EEG setup that we have
is pretty much the best possibility
that we have to do this.
According to Jose, this flower bath would protect me
from bad spirits during the ceremony.
I didn't believe in such things, but I was glad to do it
because it was a symbol of José's good intentions.
Hola. Buenas noches.
The initial smaller-dose ceremony
was expected to last about two hours
with the effects beginning after about 30 minutes.
We'll begin with our ceremony tonight, asking God to guide us,
to give us knowledge and intelligence.
We're going to bless the medicine first.
Gracias.
The ayahuasca tasted earthy.
Maybe also a bit like fennel or something.
It's hard to say.
I'd never tasted anything like it.
After swallowing it all,
my heart started racing.
It was the most nervous I would be all night.
DMT from the ayahuasca was flowing
into my blood and brain.
There was no going back.
Throughout the ceremony, shaman José is saying icaros,
or chants, which were meant to guide me
through my spiritual experience.
The initial dose was meant to gently introduce me
to ayahuasca.
The effects began slowly and were mild.
I began to feel as though the room
were swinging like a cradle.
I was aware that the motion wasn't really happening,
but it made me feel sick
and nervously off-balance nonetheless.
My imagination was more vivid.
Images in my mind were more detailed,
but almost always under my control.
The ceremony ends when the shaman lights a candle.
I was comforted by this because it was a sign
that the effects would only be weakening from here.
Thank you, José.
I think there were two moments where I was actually
was surprised by something that I saw.
One was like a very vivid...
Like bamboo that had been cut so that it was at a slant,
and I remember going, "Wow, where did that come from?"
But as soon as I did, it was gone.
One of the effects of ayahuasca
is to kind of create a sort of chaos in the cortex.
That can lead to dreamlike visions.
The second time I was like, "Yeah, nature,"
and, like, "Do I feel more at one with everything?"
And I imagined trees, but only in this ring.
And all of a sudden, they came really close,
and they were all right here in my head.
But I was like, "I did not think that.
I didn't intend for that to happen.
I think a good comparison for what I felt last night...
If you, in a sober state of mind, just imagine something,
like think of a pink elephant.
Okay, now an image probably popped into your mind,
but not like a super detailed one.
If I asked you a specific question like,
"How many wrinkles are on its trunk?"
you'd have to probably imagine it again
and then, like, basically fill in that detail.
But under the effects of ayahuasca,
those details were already in these...
These imagined images.
They seemed only as real as an imagined image,
as a daydream,
but they came with more detail, and a few times...
I'd say maybe three or four times,
things appeared that I did not feel like I had put there.
But as soon as I was aware of that, they disappeared.
I'd like to look at the stars.
Yeah, let's do that.
The morning after my initial dose of ayahuasca,
my head was clearer, and I wanted to discuss
my experience was shaman José.
- Hola, Michael. - Hola.
You had a perfect introduction ceremony.
Emotionally and sort of personally,
the only sort of revelations I had
was that I was probably more worried
than I needed to be beforehand
and that I let that affect my behavior,
and now I'm not as dominated
by what might happen or what has happened.
I'm just kind of in this moment right now.
Like, I feel much more open to mystical thinking.
- He recommends that you complete with more medicine tonight
so that this will help you complete
the insight into yourself.
- Last night, I had a third of a cup?
- Three-quarters will be the dose for tonight.
- Three-quarters. Okay.
It's weird. I had an intention going in.
I experienced this
as a very interesting scientific endeavor.
But I'm fascinated by how I want it to have meaning.
I feel like I didn't hit that oneness yet.
Tonight might be different.
Michael's getting the higher dose tonight,
and the experience is very likely to differ
quite substantially from the dose that he had last night.
I'm interested in personal development.
I know that that's a big part of ayahuasca
for a lot of people.
I'm open to it, for sure, but I do feel still
some apprehension for a larger dose tonight.
Hey, Michael?
I'm here to pick you up for ceremony.
- Buenas noches. - Buenas noches.
The higher-dose ceremony
was expected to last four hours
with stronger and more vivid hallucinations.
José smoked a cigar made of a tobacco plant
that's indigenous to the Amazon called mapacho.
The smoke is believed to clean the energy fields of the body
and remove negativity from the ceremonial lodge.
The second ceremony included another shaman, Daniel,
who drank and spread floral water.
I started to see these very geometric,
bright squares, like, stacked like Aztec pyramids,
moving, and I was traveling down
through these, like, repeating kind of, you know,
fractaled images of everything.
I mean, too many things to really describe,
music notes and colors and shapes and squares.
Then I started to feel like, "My gosh,
this is going faster and faster, and this is too fast,
and it hasn't even been that long,"
and then I felt my body being covered with these blocks,
and I, like, saw my body from above
and felt like I was disappearing.
And that's when my heart started racing,
and I said, "This was very bad.
This is not good."
A lot of emotions I always have were amplified
so loudly I couldn't ignore them.
And I had to come up with ways to console myself
so that I wouldn't be consumed by them
and have a complete breakdown and panic attack.
And I resisted,
and I successfully brought myself back
to calmness just by saying, "I'm fine.
I'm not going to die, and everyone here can help me."
The visions were really, really vivid.
They didn't feel like they were under my control.
It really felt like they were just there.
A note from the song would occur,
and it would cause this image, and that was pretty frightening,
because I wasn't... I was, like, on a ride
that I didn't know the path of.
- Robin? - Yeah.
- I can do the EEG now. - Yeah, sure.
I spent a lot of the ceremony being anxious
about having to do these tests with Robin.
I don't know how to deal with the lights coming back on
and Robin talking to me and asking me questions,
but the more I concentrated on why I feel anxious,
the more I realized it was just about me.
It was about how I felt, but then I said,
"I'm here to do a show. We're filming this.
Robin wants this data.
Everyone will be happier if I do it.
So I'll just tell Robin I'll try my best,
and that gave me the courage to do it.
So being less selfish
basically saved me from a panic attack.
Each time I read an item, if you could give me a number
according to how you see yourself at this moment, okay?
"I see myself right now as extroverted, enthusiastic."
- Um... one.
- Okay.
This is a big change for Michael.
Usually, he's very extroverted,
and on his pre-ayahuasca answer,
he gave a higher number.
"Extroverted, enthusiastic."
Five.
But now I'm seeing signs of withdrawal
and introversion from him.
"I see myself right now as critical, quarrelsome."
Two.
"I see myself right now as critical, quarrelsome."
Six.
The experience has led to a change
in how he sees himself.
It's in a way reflective
perhaps of a higher waking state.
It's interesting to already see those changes,
and it's only halfway through the ceremony.
Shaman Daniel sang in Shipibo,
an indigenous language
spoken by only 5,000 people in the world.
I've always been frustrated by the difficulty people have
explaining what it felt like
to have a psychedelic experience.
And now I know why.
It's a different state of mind,
and trying to describe that is like trying to describe
anger to someone who has never felt it
or what colors are like to a blind person.
Man.
I'd say about five minutes into that first song...
I...
really panicked.
My heart rate picked up, and I actually touched my chest
to make sure it wasn't beating as fast as I thought it was.
But that moment, I may have left my body
or something near it before I stopped.
I was very scared that I was disappearing.
Michael is describing what to me sounds like
quintessential ego dissolution, the start of it,
that feeling that he's disappearing,
that his control over his mind and his body
is ceding entirely,
and he felt some resistance to that.
With a high enough dose,
you're just forced into that space.
My feeling is that the intensity of his experience
was just short of that kind of profound
transformative type experience.
I think he got a bit of that,
but I don't think he was all the way.
I was there in that ego-dissolving state
for a moment, and it terrified me.
I wish I've been able to surrender more fully,
but I definitely got a good taste of it.
So the dosage last night was much higher.
- Yes.
- Visions... The visuals were really vivid,
and the feeling of strangeness was really strong.
I'd be curious to know what José was doing last night.
What was he reacting to that he saw in me.
What plants did he call forth and why?
- He knew you were going through an intense ceremony.
It was strong for you.
But he said he was very happy because he knew
this was going to have a positive ending for you.
I'm really interested in what the lessons were.
- I felt so small... and so humble.
But... but, honestly, I liked it. I wasn't afraid of it.
I was glad to be reminded that I'm weak.
I feel like the experience amplified
everything I'm concerned about way above what would be
a normal amount to care about it.
But that made my fear and anxiety big enough
that I could actually relax them.
The question is will I remember to apply that,
or will this kind of stay in the jungle?
Before leaving Peru,
I completed one last round of tests with Robin...
I'll place this on your head.
In order to gather data
after my higher dose of ayahuasca.
- Thank you so much. - Thank you.
I can't wait to see you back in L.A.
and see what other thoughts you've had with these tests.
Being here in the jungle, it's more organic.
Because of that, I feel that I've collected data
that's going to tell us something important
and meaningful about how psychedelics
and ayahuasca specifically work on the mind and the brain.
After returning home to Los Angeles,
I had my second MRI so that Robin could see
if there were any changes.
Although my ego dissolved only for a brief few moments,
I was teetering on that edge throughout the entire ceremony,
and I was anxious to see what it looked like in my brain.
Robin, welcome to my home. Thank you for coming back.
I can't wait to see what results you got.
- Yeah. - How did ayahuasca affect my brain?
- Okay, so we found something quite interesting.
We found that your brain activity became more complex,
more diverse, more rich, more varied
under the ayahuasca than at baseline.
- What does it mean to have
more complex brain activity
in terms of how I experience things?
- I think we can understand it in terms
of the richness of your imagination, of your ideas.
Trains of thought can be more varied,
more changeable, more dynamic.
- I definitely experienced that. - Yeah.
- All right, you looked not just at my brain
through the surface, but you went deep inside.
- Yeah. - What did you notice there?
- We looked at a particular brain network
called the default mode network that seems to relate
to our sense of self or ego.
We've seen in other studies
that during a psychedelic experience,
that network is dramatically compromised.
It shows a kind of disintegration and actually,
that process relates quite strongly
to people's ego dissolution, and yet after the experience,
the network comes back as a kind of reset
or a kind of rebooting of the network,
and what we found in your brain after ayahuasca,
as predicted, was that your brain reset.
The network became more cohesive,
more integrated, more strongly connected within itself.
Wow. Yeah you know, afterwards, I really did feel
much more preoccupied
with my identity and my past, my future.
- Yeah. - You asked me a lot of questions
before and after
about my insight into experiences.
- Yeah. - How did those compare?
- Well, actually we saw something really nice in those data.
So your ratings of insight for the journey,
the lower dose and then the higher dose with ayahuasca,
what we saw was that there was a graded increase
in your levels of insight.
Your score at baseline was 27.
After the low-dose experience, it was 39.
After the high-dose ceremony, it was 49.
Wow, I definitely felt like the larger
the ayahuasca dose, the more I considered
and learned about myself. - Yeah.
- Well, Robin, I'm glad that we were able
to do such a, you know, in-the-environment-type study.
So thank you for coming all the way out to Peru with me.
I really appreciate it, and I hope that I helped.
- Yeah, it's been a great experience,
and I've learned a lot.
As I look back on it now,
I feel like my experience with ayahuasca
was one of resistance.
Instead of surrendering myself to its effects,
I dipped in and then got scared,
and I told myself, "It'll be all right.
I'm not going to die,"
but I should've just gone in and through.
That said I learnt a lot about how to control anxiety,
that relinquishing control and selfishness
can make it vanish, but perhaps in doing so,
I lost the chance to experience my mind operating
without the controls and dampening
I'm so used to that I'm more comfortable with.
Scientists like Robin have managed to break through
tight legal restrictions surrounding these substances
and have begun to find out what they can teach us
about the mind.
Their findings so far are just the beginning
of our understanding of these powerful compounds,
which shows us how much we have yet to learn
about the mind and brain.
And, as always, thanks for watching.