1_8 Manesh Girn: Curiosity as Freedom from Circumstance, the Default Mode Network, and Nature of the Networked Mind

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MG: Thanks so much, Raad. It's a pleasure to be talking to you. 

RS: I initially edited your bio to say let's just say a very, I don't wanna say dominant... you're somebody that people hear about a lot, right? But then I edited it out because I remember being an academic too, it's like you don't wanna beat your drum too much. But the [00:01:00] fact still stands that you are somebody who is very commonly seen in the psychedelic space. People really admire and respect your nuanced opinion on psychedelic sciences.

RS: And we'll speak about all that work and what your research currently is on. But I often find with people who are psychonauts studying psychedelics from whatever perspective, there's a whole backstory that brought them to where they are, whether they intended it to be that way or not. Tell us a little bit about who is Manesh, how did you grow up, and what's the story?

MG: Where can I start? So, I'll start with brief thing on my parents. So, my dad moved to Canada from India, from a pretty small village, maybe I don't know, like a four hour drive from Delhi, in India. He moved at around, he was only 16, 17, it was in the eighties. And so he moved to Vancouver and has lived there ever since. So he's spent the majority of his life living, in Canada, in Vancouver. He's a big hockey fan. He's very, Canadian, but he is also Indian in a variety of ways.

MG: So that's my dad. My mom grew up in the uk, in England, in what's it called? The Midlands in Wolverhampton, if anybody knows where that [00:02:00] is. And moved to Canada, when she got married to my dad, basically which was an arranged marriage. 

RS: Which is like analog Tinder really, if you think

MG: Yeah. Yeah. . And yeah, so she grew up in the uk grew up speaking English, her dad is from India. So growing up in our family, we very westernized, very Canadian, grew up speaking English. We're a Sikh family speak Punjabi, and in the family, et cetera.

MG: But I understand Punjabi fairly well, but I never really spoke it, and for that reason, it never caught on or stuck in my mind. So, my Punjabi is soso. As my Indian friends call me, I'm a coconut, brown on the outside, white on the inside. And and it's because yeah, like my, my family upbringing was very westernized and so on.

MG: I was born in a city called New West Minister near Vancouver. It's I don't know how long of a drive, like 20 minute drive from Vancouver. And I went to high school in a city in a suburb called Surrey. And anybody from BC will know that Surrey has a reputation of having a lot of brown folk, brown people, and they [00:03:00] don't have the best reputation.

MG: It's kind of a, it's kind of a problematic neighborhood. Some parts of Surrey where there's, what the news media would call like gang violence or just like what I would call stupid high school kids with immigrant parents who give them too much freedom and who, get pulled into the concept of, Oh, I'm a gangster.

MG: I sell drugs, I'm gonna, be this alpha dominant person and, beat up anybody who messes me with me, et cetera, and be top of the pack and sell drugs and all this kinda stuff. So that's very common in a lot of the places near where I grew up including at my high school. But luckily my high school grad class was a bit of an anomaly. Were very diverse. It wasn't very clique-ish in terms of ethnicity. My closest friends are, one's Canadian, one's Polish, one's Filipino, one's from Sudan, one's this one that, Korean. And so I had a very diverse friends group growing up. And so yeah, growing up in that context only a fraction of the people in my close friends group, went to a top post-secondary institution. lot of people went to more like trades [00:04:00] or just, I don't know, doing a hodgepodge of things, including selling drugs or coke or whatever. So I mean, I didn't grow up in the most kind of academically supportive environment. And my parents, neither of them have bachelor degrees. They're not particularly academic.

MG: So I was a bit of a black sheep always. And and growing up in high school, I mean, I was always, I feel like a bit, I don't know, aloof in the clouds, a bit socially clueless throughout elementary and also high school. 

MG: I never quite felt like I fit in and I felt like other people understood this game of social dynamics in a different way than me.

MG: And yeah, the short, long story short, in terms of my process of growing up, I feel like in early high school I was kind of ostracized from a lot of my people who claimed to be my friends when I was younger. So I went through a period of kind of feeling socially rejected, being bullied, and talked about behind my back about people who claimed to be my friends when they saw me and was having a rough time.

MG: And. I can go on [00:05:00] and on. I'm not sure if you wanna ask me a question to alter this narrative right now. 

RS: No, I'm, no listening and I think this is really important. You and I talked about inflection points, right? I think these inflection points, they alter our trajectory of our life, and we might not have ignore it at the time. So please continue. You said a few interesting things, like socially clueless is one sort of very interesting way of putting it. I think people with our backgrounds often have this identity crisis, right?

RS: You're a hodgepodge of so many different things, so you don't know really sure how to show up. So what was it exactly that sort of led to that further feeling of alienation. 

MG: So, Okay. I think, part of it, I think is temperament and personality. Like I am more of a, I guess these days it's kind of blurry, but more of a introvert and more inclined to be in my head thinking about stuff than engaging socially.

MG: And I, I gain energy from learning and reading, hence why I'm a researcher as opposed to interacting with people. And I think partially that, and then also, I mean, things I discovered through doing all sorts of self development type work and therapy sessions and so on. My first five [00:06:00] years of my life, my mom wasn't working and she basically raised me to be a polite, nice good boy who never walks the boat and is this good kid. And anger is bad whatever. And and I think what this led me to do at an early age was when I saw kids who weren't like that, who were like these badass kids who are really just mischievous little shit, disturbers, and like seeing them, I'm like, they're cool.

MG: I want to be like them. They're not lame like me. So I intrinsically devalued that upbringing that I internalized and cause I wanted to be more rebellious and cool like those kids. And I think that created this kind of complex within me that persisted throughout elementary and into high school where I felt like I had to be like others in order to be.

MG: And this was like the, one of the causes for being bullied is Hey man, Manesha is just like some conformist loser. He doesn't know. He's not anything. He, his opinion doesn't matter. And that was the kind of stuff I would get thrown at me, right? And so I think partially that upbringing and how I internalized what it means to, like, how to act basically set me up for it.

MG: [00:07:00] Yeah, I think that in combination with my temperament and personality, I personally never felt conscious of my ethnicity growing up. I never felt Oh, like I'm a brown dude, therefore things are different from you. Or people treat me differently. That was never a part of my lived experience and still isn't, to be honest.

MG: I forget. I forget that I look a particular way or whatever, cause don't, it doesn't come up as a theme for me. And I don't feel like consciously I'm aware of any way it's blocked my ability to do what I want to do in life. I've always had a diverse friends group. My entire immediate family. My cousins we're all like very westernized people. I think we haven't internalized a culture that's distinct from the culture of our surroundings. That's the important part of it. And so it was very seamless for me to interact and understand, life living as a Canadian, cause I am through and through Canadian Vancouver, and yeah, so yeah, so then high school, getting bullied and stuff. And then to make it a long story short I used to hang out with this dude who was a career counselor at at my high school.

MG: And he was like this interesting character that nobody else really got [00:08:00] along with. They didn't get him, but I liked the dude. He was this funny guy who always made dad jokes and he was just like a weird dude. But I would hang out with him and around this time simultaneously, I was working at a restaurant as a dishwasher. This was, I was 16, and there's a dude at this place who would always talk about Esoterism and a cult knowledge and astrology and secret societies and all this kind of stuff, right? There's always that one guy who's off the deep end in this stuff. 

RS: So what I spent five years washing dishes in the university too, is there's always that one guy, there's always that one guy. Some of the weirdest shit. . 

MG: Exactly. So me and that guy became good buddies cuz like, I thought, I was like, cool what he is talking about. And he linked me to different books and like lectures. At the time there was this like really famous, esoteric called Manly P Hall and this guy was totally prolific, giving lectures for decades and wrote multiple, like extremely wide ranging books on, all these topics.

MG: And I used to listen to his stuff and it got me kind of more interested in spirituality and mysticism consciousness [00:09:00] and stuff like this. So I would bring it up to this K counselor dude. And and then he eventually recommended me this book called The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Klo or Roche Klo.

MG: And and I loved it, and just the concept of, training or purifying your mind for deeper insights and for enlightenment and what that meant and this kind of stuff. And I was like, This is super cool. And then that got me, that helped me also discover my love for learning and reading and my aptitude for it.

MG: And I started reading a lot more and getting into stuff. And eventually I came across Dennis La Gros book. It's a LSD doorway into the Newmans, which is basically just like a kind of, I don't know, like a, like an in detail discussion of his work. Supervising over 4,000 high dose LSD sessions working in Czechoslovakia, then also in Baltimore around, yeah, like mid sixties to mid seventies, something like this.

MG: And I was fascinating. I'm like, okay, people are having these profound, my experiences and these, and also stuff way off the deep end related to that of, he was talking about people [00:10:00] having experiences of inhabiting the consciousness of a lizard or the whole planet or some other species and this kind of stuff.

MG: And I was like, this is far out stuff from a guy who's like a metal key train professional who portrays himself as a skeptical person and so on. And I'm like, okay, if psyched dogs can do that, why do we have this drug education telling us it's in the same category as heroin or, and it's gonna make us go crazy and fry our brain and whatever.

RS: What did you know about psyched dogs at the time? Did you know what even the word was? You said you had a lot of friends who were. Dealing drugs and getting in trouble and stuff like that. 

MG: That was a bit older. That was a bit older .I was like 12th grade. 

RS: So was that part of your vocabulary at that time?

MG: I think I knew peripherally of magic mushrooms and stuff. I don't think the word psychedelic, I think the word psychedelic, I learned through him through Stanislav Grof in reading stuff. 

RS: So one thing I am curious about is that you said having that book that your counselor first gave you really highlighted your penchant for learning and curiosity. I also grew up feeling pretty... nobody was trying to make me feel alienated, but I had [00:11:00] this strong sense of alienation. So for me, books and music was like really the place. And I go deep inside of my head and float around and find what's there. I always get curious about how other people deal with their social awkwardness or isolation or whatever. 

MG: Totally man. Here's how it went. I discovered learning and I discovered knowledge and the joy of it.

MG: And I, it was my way of think, in the initial stages, it was my way of feeling superior or enough, it's like I'm screw all these other people. I don't need them. I'm doing stuff that matters. I'm not dicking around at parties. I'm, gaining knowledge, that was my narrative.

MG: That was my kind of response, counter response to feeling alienated exclusion. So I think. It became my coping me mechanism to learn and read and just probably maybe similar with you and guitar and reading as well, learning. And so I think the reason why I attached so hard to learning in the initial stage is, was because it was my source of meaning validation and fulfillment, which I wasn't getting socially or in other contexts.

MG: And that lasts for a while until probably four years ago. I was [00:12:00] always devalued relationships. Always like in undergrad I barely ever partied. I would spend my weekends, I would be excited for the weekend cause I can finally read all the stuff I wanted to read as opposed to my schoolwork.

MG: Which I had some interest in as well. But I always wanted to read other things. And so I formed my life around reading and learning for the majority of my early twenties, which I have no regrets like that. I'm so glad I did that. And because yeah, partially it was a coping mechanism at the time.

RS: How did your parents react to that? You said that, you weren't really, you didn't grow up in a rich academic setting. How did that come about or how did they react to that? 

MG: Yeah, very supportive. My mom is always a curious person. She's she doesn't do it as much anymore. I try to get her to, but she used to read a lot and and be curious and so I would talk about ideas to them, et cetera in whatever way I could to that they can understand basically. And but yeah, they're always very supportive, very proud of me, still are. 

RS: I'm gonna come back to this because, obviously looking at or working on psychedelics now, I'm curious always how brown parents react.

RS: At [00:13:00] what point did you say, I wanna study how consciousness works, right? I wanna look at psychedelics. Where did that come from? 

MG: So, it came through a couple things. So that didn't come a bit late to maybe second year of undergrad. I got into that, which was four years after what I was just talking about. And interestingly, I went through a phase after after high school where I was obsessed with all this Huxley. And it's very interesting. It's very interesting. I very much I feel like. He I feel like I, I lacked an explicit role model at the time of what I could be like, or what is desirable desirable to be like, and somehow I kind of hitched my cart to Alda Ley and like I remember, I think what might have, yeah, I don't know how it started, but I ended up reading one of his early novels, his first novel, it's called Chrome Yellow, and it's a kind of a satirical take on the British in intelegincia of the time. Like the aristocratic smart, [00:14:00] educated class and this like poking fun of the different characters in their kind of how pretentious they are and everything. But he did so in such like an eloquent, beautifully articulated and witty way, and I was just like, I was just like taken aback in aesthetic appreciation of his.

MG: Really just turned me on basically and I loved it. And I was like, Wow, this guy his manipulation of language, his iion, his ability, Yeah. To articulate abstract concepts and play with them was just so astonishing to me. And so, inspiring and I just loved it a lot. And so I read I think maybe three or four of his other novels, I started reading his biography.

MG: I started reading some of his essay collections and all this kind of stuff. And And later in his life, especially after around the forties, he was really into mysticism and psychedelics. And he, there's a collection of his writings called Moha. And it's this collect collection of his writings on mysticism and psychedelics and reading those.

MG: And I was like, This is fascinating. I want to continue the project that he started back then [00:15:00] of articulating these experiences and characterizing them in a very rigorous and thoughtful way. And and so that was part of the motivation and that also amplified my love for knowledge cuz just seeing the depth and breadth of his knowledge, I was like, I wanna be like that.

MG: I want to, be commissioned to be the editor of the Encyclopedia Botanica. Like he was like that's how crazy his knowledge was. And that just really inspired me as a model. And so yeah, that's what that. Led me to want to just be a researcher forever. Cause it's like I could be a full-time nerd the rest of my life and just continue learning. And it's what better job is that, than that. 

RS: And it's a good thing that a university didn't kill that passion. Cuz often that's what happens. You go to school, they're like, Fuck, why am I here? I don't know about you, but for me, that, that was one of the reasons I hated chemistry was cause of the profs I met there. My background was in molecular biology and I loved bio I made, because my best teachers were in biology, talked about interconnectedness of things. . . 

RS: At what point did you say, I wanna study this for the rest of my life? 

MG: Okay, ending high school. I was like, I wanna study the [00:16:00] mind, I'm interested in the mind. And so first psychology, right? So I signed up at Simon Fraser University. This was before I was at University of British Columbia, where I finished my undergrad and signed up for the psychology program. And after one semester I realized psychology is not what I was looking for.

MG: It wasn't the study of the mind as I thought it would be. It was more, clinically oriented, therapeutically oriented and that kind of stuff. And I was like, okay. But I took a philosophy course in that my first semester did really good in it and enjoyed it. I was like, Okay, I'm gonna be a philosophy and psychology double major.

MG: And then I was continuing along that path and then I found out there's a program at Simon Fra University called, was actually, I think it's folded now cause of funding. But anyway, the cognitive science, which blends together. Philosophy, psychology and also computer science mainly, and linguistics in this kind of interdisciplinary study of the mind.

MG: And this was a more kind of abstract mechanistic type approach that I was looking for. It's like, how does the brain work? How does the mind work? How, what are the models and tools we can use to conceptualize and characterize and study it? [00:17:00] And so I was really interested in that. And then funny enough, my entry point into that because it's a very, in some sense, cognitive science is very in a lot of cases I would say what's the word?

MG: Reductionistic. And obviously physicalist, it's like everything's in the brain. You just gotta break down the brain as if it's a computer. That's one approach to it. As an information processing machine. And that was a dominant framework in some of my classes and I got into, With the goal of showing them why they're full of shit

MG: So I'm gonna get in there and, show how it's not the case. And that was my initial entry point which is funny enough. And and then eventually, I realized that, okay, I wanna do research in this field. And then I looked into labs at SFU and there weren't really any labs that appealed to me.

MG: I looked at UBC and there was two professors who really caught my eye. So one was Dr. Evan Thompson. It's a very well known philosopher. And particularly you can call him a cross-cultural philosopher and philosopher of mine. And he did a lot of stuff [00:18:00] on Buddhist philosophy, has presented for the Dalai Lama, has involved in all sorts of organization, has written multiple, like very well known cognitive science and also Buddhist psychology philosophy books.

MG: And I was like, I want to take classes with this guy. I wanna meet this guy. So there was Evan and then there's also Dr. Kalina Christoff whose lab I later worked in and I still, collaborate with. And she ran the cognitive Neuroscience of thought lab at ubc. And I saw in their publications, they were doing stuff related to meditation, to daydreaming, mind wandering.

MG: And I was like, this is the cool, like kind of abstract subjective research that they're doing in a rigorous way. It's like a model for the things that I'm interested and for psychedelics, right? And so I was like, I gotta get to ubc. And so then I transferred there and, through a couple synchronistic events I got into Clean's lab.

MG: And that turned into, that changed my life, basically made me on this cognitive neuroscience path and clean as amazing. And I met some great mentors there who really gimme opportunities to step [00:19:00] up even as an undergrad. And and then with Evan, I took like a bunch of his classes and now I, got to know him very well and that was a great thing I formed as well and learned a lot from.

MG: And so, yeah. So then at that stage, the main thing that precipitated me transferring from SFU to UBC was this like, There's people doing research I'm interested in. I'm gonna be a researcher cuz that means I can continue to learn and contribute to the world's knowledge in those areas.

MG: So at that point I'm like dead set on, I'm gonna be a researcher. And also psychedelics are my angle. And I think why psychedelics is because I was interested in so many things and still am and psychedelics are this hub. They're like an interdisciplinary hub where you can't just study psychedelics in some siloed off discipline.

MG: You need to incorporate psychology with psycho-pharmacology, with anthropology, with clinical psychology, with neuroscience, with, religious studies, with philosophy, with sociology, with, there's so many ways that, that, so many disciplines that intersect so strongly with psychedelics. And I was like, here's a way for me to anchor in something that allows me to read in various fields [00:20:00] in a way that's relevant.

MG: And so that was partially. What drew me towards psychedelics and wanting to be a psychedelic researcher. So that was around end of second year of undergrad, which would've been in 2014 that I got really into that. 

RS: So interesting. I had two, two immediate thoughts as you were talking.

RS: One is you talked about, growing up with all these kids who are just shit disturbers and that's causing trouble. You are a shit disturber, but on your own terms, right? You're like, you come to classes, go you guys are all full of shit and lemme tell you how this really works, right?

RS: It's really super hilarious. And the other thing I couldn't agree with you more... psychedelics is really, again, we'll talk a little bit about this, but people make it about the drug, but it's really about the mindset and the sort of the world views that this substance, or for the lack of a better term, this topic sort of brings to the table. Because we talk about the mind, you're really talking about experiences, perceptions, values, identities, as well as the wiring and all the plumbing and all that stuff, right? And the brain and the mind. It's super fascinating. Okay. So [00:21:00] fast forward, you are now currently a PhD students of neuroscience at McGill University.

RS: Tell us a little bit about your area of focus and research. And I have some questions that I already have thought of, but let's start with you describing what kind of problem are you exploring? 

MG: Yeah, totally. So like right now I'm in the last stages of my PhD. I graduated in the spring in the spring.

MG: And my dissertation itself is focused on Theon mode network. And very briefly, Theon mode network is a set of brain regions which seem to kind of preferentially interact with each other in relation to certain cognitive functions you could say, and perceptual and emotional, but certain processes. And the interesting thing about this Is that it comprises regions of our cortex, the more advanced part of our brain that are most expanded and most kind of distinct from other animals, including higher primates like chimpanzees who are closest genetic cousin.

MG: Right? And so these are kind of areas of the brain that are disproportionately developed in humans and which also underlie human [00:22:00] specific aspects of thinking. So our ability, like the main theme of what the Defo Network does is it allows us to Process and manipulate information that's not perceptually present.

MG: So it allows us to remove ourselves from the here and now into this abstract realm where we're generating information internally, whether it's in the form of experiences or concepts, semantic or episodic memories we would call it. And so, the Defo Network is this kind of almost abstraction network that allows us to abstract from concrete particulars of experience, of sense, experience.

MG: And it's also involved in maintaining things that are conceptually based, including our identity, our, our sense of I'm this person with these traits and characteristics and beliefs and I, that person that was me yesterday and the gonna be me in the future is all me. And that's a concept we have, which is mediated by regions within Default Mode Network.

MG: And also when we think about the mental states of other people, like what is that person thinking? Default Mode Network comes online. [00:23:00] And when we just more broadly remember and imagine experiences. And so, my dissertation is starting Default Mode Network and in a few different ways. So one way is how does the Default Mode Network allow us to use our prior knowledge to inform our perception of the external world, our visual perception.

MG: So how does memory and knowledge kind of prime us to notice certain things and bias our perception? So I have one project broadly on that and I have another one. It's like, how does AFA O Network relate to a whole variety of different types of behaviors in this kind of large scale study. How does it relate to our social behavior and our emotional behavior and our demographics actually, and personality and cognitive abilities and just like throwing them all together.

MG: And what are these large scale we would call multi variant relationships between them 

RS: with our, without presence of psychedelics or is that part of the study at all? 

MG: No. In this context I'm discussing completely independent of psychedelics. Yeah. And then also I have another study on like kind of whether certain regions are, rightly included as part of the Default [00:24:00] Mode Network or not.

MG: And so, so my dissertation itself is focused predominantly DFA o network, not on psychedelics necessarily, but what I've done is I've created collaborations with others in the field, such as Robin Kahar Harris, who have shared lots of data with me. And so I have published papers on psychedelics, et cetera, in collaboration with Robin mostly.

MG: Based on ideas I proposed and sent to them and they sent me data in return. And so, one project, actually, this can be a part of my dissertation that involves psychedelics, is was a paper published earlier this year where we wanted to see whether one way to describe it, whether a psychedelics can be described as reducing how distinct areas in their brain that process abstract information such as in the Depot O Network, how distinct are they functionally from sensory areas.

MG: And we frame this as a flattening of hierarchy cuz there's a hierarchy from this concrete thing as you could see all the way up levels of abstraction to like abstract concepts [00:25:00] and beliefs, which are more general, and so we wanted to see, I applied this analysis technique developed by others to characterize.

MG: How hierarchical organization changed in the psychedelic state and whether that's a kind of a reliable marker of the brain state induced by psychedelics. And so, so that's one of my other projects, which is basically how I frame it for my dissertation is like looking at the differentiation of abstract processing encoded by the Default Mode Network from concrete sensory processing.

RS: There's a few things you said, and I want to tease all these ideas out a little bit. A few words you were using to describe what the default mode network is. First you said preferential activation, so , what does that mean? Second of all it's, Why do you think it's so pronounced in higher primates? I'm sure there's lots of ideas about this. Nobody really has a concrete understanding, but why do you think that is? And then we'll come back to this hierarchical structure of the mind. 

MG: Yeah, totally. So, okay. [00:26:00] Preferential activity. What I meant was like, if you think of the brain, it's not all one homogenous blob. There's ways to cut it up, or parsley. It, as neuroscientists would say. And so one way, let's imagine you pars the brain into a hundred distinct regions. You say each region does something different. If you then look at how different regions correlate with each other, you'll realize that maybe, regions one to 10 are very connected to each other and less connected to regions 10 to. But then 10, 20, 10 to 20 are also connected to each other, but not to one to 10.

MG: And so then you could say that regions one to 10 have preferential activity with each other, and 10 to 20 have preferential activity with each other. And so the def O network is a set of regions like that, that are more chlor correlated with each other than they are to the rest of the brain. So you can kind of pull them out of the entire brain and say, Here's a network of regions, which preferentially interact, as you would say. 

RS: But the preferential activity is subject to the entire context, right the -other regions around it. Because one of the questions here is that, [00:27:00] traditional neuroscience, as I understand it from what I've read, And this is particularly informed by a book called How Emotions Work by Lisa Barrett... and I think, what she talks about is the traditional understanding of the mind and the brain is that we used to think that there was disparate parts of the brain right? The Anger Center, the Happiness Center, the, the Lusty Center, whatever. Yeah. But these aren't static spaces, if you take a part of somebody's brain out, it's seems that the brain learns how to adapt and it compensates for other parts that might be missing.

RS: So that's what I I wanna touch on a little bit. When you said preferential activation, it's relative, right? 

MG: Yeah. No, I love that you bring this up cuz it's such an important point. And I wasn't gonna go there cuz it complexifies. No, that's fucking go there man. . Yeah, it's funny, I have a paper under review right now at the Journal of Trends in Cognitive Sciences with Robin and others arguing for this point in relation to psychedelics cuz Yeah, it's like there's this, all this kind of persisting framework where it's like a functional specialization.

MG: Yeah. Like Region A does [00:28:00] function X and region B does function y, But yeah, the brain is this complex system of dynamically interacting elements and the whole system is what matters at any given point in time, right? And so you can't really abstract from the entire neural context as you would say, the whole brain's context.

MG: And so, Yeah, so Default Mode Network is something you can statistically pull out of the brain, but that's, kind of ignoring the fact that it's constantly influenced by other networks in the brain, which up-regulate it down-regulate it, modulate certain subsets of it, and it's very complex and dynamic and constantly changing.

MG: And, but the thing with the Def O network and other networks is that if you take on average, let's say the activity over 10 minutes, then you can say, here are these distinct networks. But in reality it's like they're waxing and waning in different dynamic interactions with each other. They're combining, certain regions are combining into other networks and it's switching to a different configuration.

MG: And it's like this kind of dynamic instability of [00:29:00] different patterns over time. So that's the reality of how it works. 

RS: It's so fascinating. Looking at behavior as an emergent property intelligence as an emergent property, rather than going okay, that's part of the brain that's lighting up.

RS: So ego must live there. And I'm gonna point out that you haven't said the word ego at all so far because colloquially people go Oh, default mode network, ego, it lives at the center of your head, above the nose. Yeah, totally. 

RS: I read these two books that really blew my mind. One was How Emotions Work by Lisa Barrett and the premise of the whole. Is really to say, Okay, traditionally this is how we thought the brain worked, you have . Distinct parts of the brain that were thought to be centered. So if somebody lost that part of the brain, they will no longer be angry, and no longer be lusty and no longer be happy, blah, blah, blah, blah.

RS: But really what she pointed to is that the brain also the mind takes all sorts of stimuli, all the senses provide the mind with information. And based on your values, your past experiences, your mind creates an entire view [00:30:00] of the world. And your place in it. And projects it both into the past as well as the future.

RS: So there's no such thing as memory or anything static. It's all a lived experience that is constantly being updated. Yeah. There's a saying, the future is fixed. It's the past that is unpredictable. Totally. 

RS: And then there's another book that I read called Life 3.0 Max Tegmark. And he talks about artificial intelligence and artificial super intelligence likeliness of when it's gonna come around, how it's being modeled. And he talks about two things. One is you can either build a plane by, modeling it after a bird. In, in other words, you can build a mechanical bird or you can actually build something entirely new that does what a bird does, but something else.

RS: And so artificial intelligence now is okay, we can model after the mind or the brain or we can build what we think intelligence is. But then you get to the black box problem. Both the mind and AI are both black boxes. And so all, the whole point of saying all this is that looking at experience and behavior and intelligence at an emergent property that you can't really [00:31:00] point backwards one on one. You can't infer that, Oh, that thing did this, the wirings did this. It's very difficult to pinpoint like that. 

MG: Yeah, totally. I mean, it's like life is a process. The brain is a process in demarcating different objects or substances that's just a a kind of bias we have in the languages we use and the frameworks we've inherited a lot of the time.

MG: And so, yeah, it's really, I think, and that's emerging more and more as there's a whole field of complexity science and noting that there are unique properties common to complex systems. Whether they're e ecosystems or economies or or the brain or the, the immune system or the body as a whole.

MG: It's there's things encoded in a distributed fashion that you can't just isolate and yeah. And a lot of these complex functions are emergent in that sense, and. And then the, then we have to develop new tools and perspectives in order to characterize that. It's what kind of concepts should we be using to describe these things?

MG: Here's a little kind of taster of this paper we have on the review. It's like, [00:32:00] the usual way to talk about it in general is that, oh, what are the regions and networks that were changed? When you take a psychedelic, oh, Default Mode Network is disintegrated, or visual network has increased connectivity.

MG: That's the signature of the psychedelic state. And and so what we're saying is no, not really, maybe on some level of analysis, but rather it's like, in order to characterize the brain under psychedelics, you have to characterize the properties that characterize the dynamics over time.

MG: It's what are the dynamical system levels, properties that change over time in which can give rise to varying patterns. It's like abstracting from specific patterns, specific regions to the dynamic unfoldment of them. And I think that's the really the way to go for understanding the brain in relation to most cognitive processes.

RS: So in that way, psychedelics is one set of states that it induces, but it's not about, again, THE psychedelic per se. Cuz I mean if you talk about altered states and what the effect on the default mode network might be, alcohol has a certain effect on default mode network as well. It's not a psychedelic, at [00:33:00] least in the classical sense. Putting your psychedelic scientist hat on for a second. I think we should touch on this because colloquially speaking, the DMN is known as the ego and you, so far, you haven't said the word ego, which is really awesome and fascinating.

RS: Yeah. Cause I'm sure you get this a lot. So you've been very careful probably. Yeah. Have you reconciled the, the need for people to pinpoint, and this is not, doesn't have to be a bad thing necessarily, right? I think we all want to understand and we want to attach meaning to things that are ultimately relevant to our lives and how we experience reality.

RS: How do you reconcile the fact that the default mode network colloquially has become this thing whereas like ego dissolution, ego death, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do you process that and how do you actually communicate nuance. 

MG: Yeah. I mean, people like to jump on narratives and like simplistic explanations, right?

MG: And the whole ego idea was I think most notably popularized by Michael Pollen and how to change your mind. And it is kind of a, useful way to [00:34:00] help people maybe frame and interpret what might be a scary and jarring and destabilizing experience. So there's like pragmatic value perhaps in saying something like that.

MG: If you look at the research, and I've covered this in my YouTube channel and stuff, and other people have talked about it a lot. It's As yet, there's no consistent evidence that eco dissolution is related to the DEF i o network. Some studies have found it, some studies haven't.

MG: Some studies have indicated that it's not the only network involved and there's a whole variety of issues here related to what the hell is ego dissolution.

RS: Are you talking about the sensation of ego dissolution or some sort of scientific definition of ego dissolution?

MG: So science is only good as its measurements, right? And the whole area of psychometric assessments in the psychedelic space is very much in its infancy. We're just getting started. And really what is a measure? What is an assessment? It's just scientists come up with a bunch of questions that are based on past research, and then they see are they consistent?

MG: Are they correlated? Do they correlate with other stuff? Do they not correlate with stuff they're not supposed to correlate with? And so on. But that doesn't mean they're indexing something real, and this is a whole thing in psycho, [00:35:00] psychometrics and stuff. And so, and in particular with measures such as ego dissolution.

MG: So I guess somebody asks you rate from one to seven, how much your sense of ego. It's like people are gonna interpret that radically different. What the hell is a sense of ego, , And it could mean a variety of things. When I think of it, and I don't know if this is shared by most people, I think of it as comprising two components.

MG: So there's like a sense of bodily ego you can call it, of I am in this body, my eye end where my skin ends. This desk is separate from me. This sense of a distinct first risk and perspective, philosophers call it the minimal self. And then the second component is like kind of our conceptually created narrative identity.

MG: I am Manesh with this story and these characteristics and so I think a true ego disillusion experience is when you transiently fall into a state where, First of all your sense of physical existence is gone. You have no sense of I am this, concretely, and then you forget all sense of who you are, , And so you're just like this free floating awareness, which has no distinctions and it's [00:36:00] undifferentiated and so on.

MG: And I think psyched can indu that experience. But is that, for somebody who's never experienced it, and they're rating these measures, it's what are they rating exactly? It's oh, I felt like I forgot about myself and my problems for a while. Oh, I must have dissolved.

MG: Whereas somebody else was merging with the universe. And there's a whole variety of experiences and maybe they both rated the five, for that si. So it's it's really messy in that sense. And that's why maybe the correlations have been more unreliable too. So I. For us to really make a definitive statement about this, we need to develop more refined measures.

MG: And there's some great work ongoing on that right now. And I'm actually collaborating with a friend you know as well. Sharday, er and John. Having trouble saying her last name, but on, and a critique of these kinds of assessments to show how they're biased in varying ways. And there's a lot of cultural critiques coming out nowadays.

MG: How they, how conceptualizations of ego dissolution in relation to my experiences, how to differentiate them, alternative interpretations of them, and how they're framed by [00:37:00] different cultures. There's so many issues there. And and not only that, the existing data sets for brain imaging, now I'm going on around the existing data sets for brain imaging for psychedelics.

MG: Yeah. For psychedelics are very small and. What we've learned through tons of FMI research is that you need large, massive samples in order to get reliable correlations with subjective experiences or behavior. And so with 15 to 30 people and you're correlating at that style, that size, it's like most neuroscientists or neuro imaging researchers would laugh at that.

MG: You need 500, a thousand. Some have argued you need thousands. So at the minimum you'll need I would say a hundred if you wanna say something, with some kind of strength and and have it replicated and let's say two data sets of a hundred people. If you get it, then you're like, okay, there's something there.

MG: But we're no nowhere near that. And so we're so premature in making any definitive conclusion about psyched looks in the brain, and and people are running away with this simplistic narrative when Theon one network is this complex thing that's involved in many processes as I [00:38:00] described. And so I think, yeah, we're ways off from saying anything there.

RS: There's also the added, aspect of people fetishize almost. The ego dissolution, whereas in a lot of cases it actually amplifies the ego. The ego has a very elastic quality to it, right? , it might, it might temporarily dissolve or go away, and that boundary between the sensing self and the external world might dissolve, but it may come back, , people who are, have background of schizophrenia, bi bipolar, and things like that. And in people who are like at the baseline normally, locally, again, culturally speaking, the aspect of psychedelic narcissism, things like that. , where the egos actually amplified. It's strengthened. And I frequently talk about Jerusalem syndrome. Have you heard of this? 

MG: No, I've heard of the term, but can't recall like what exactly it refers to. 

RS: It's super interesting. And I found this I looked it up cause I first read about it at in Jamie Wheel's book stealing Fire. And basically it's a phenomenon. It's been recorded. I mean, obviously in, in a lot of [00:39:00] religions when you have like great migrations or really profound religious experiences near, near monuments or whatever sort of spaces or places like in Islam, you have maka, you have the sort of like the Holy Kaba in, in, in Jerusalem of the wailing wall. When you're near these places, you are often people talk about how they're overwhelmed by a sensation or presence of the divine or whatever you wanna call it. And they have, deeply meaningful and emotional experiences. In a certain set of people. They've seen, and this is why it's called Jerusalem syndrome.

RS: There certain group of people they've seen that, whereas normally people might say, I'm in the presence of God. Certain amount, certain people start to feel like God is speaking to me only. . . Yeah. I am the chosen one to receive this message. Now I might go out, I must go out and amplify and proliferate.

RS: So there's this God complex, this prophetic Messiah complex comes into being. And I don't think people on psychedelics are, are immune to that. [00:40:00] And it could happen to anybody for it could happen to anybody. So I mean, coming to the point about ego dissolution, I think we ever talk about ego amplification as well, yeah. It's all about what is socially constructed and culturally reinforced. 

MG: Totally. Yeah. This is how I see psychedelics, and I think a lot of people are seeing them is they're intrinsically neutral. They can take you in extremes in either direction. And obviously this is nothing new.

MG: Aldous Huxley, one of his early essays was called Heaven and Hell. And to emphasize that it's not a purely, positively biased compound. It's a painting neutrally and it's what you make of it, right? So you have a late intensity towards narcissism and this. Grandiosity then that can be activated in a particular context pretty easily.

MG: It's not people say what I believe to be pretty stupid stuff like, Oh, is give all politicians some ayahuasca soul, Simon, they will be better. It can make them much deeper into what their worldview already is. It depends, do they have a willingness to change? Do they have an openness to new ideas and ways of thinking?

MG: And are they in an environment that would support them in what people would view as a harm more harmonious [00:41:00] direction? And if not, then you know, you can be a KKK member taking acid and just going deeper in bonding with your mates at the kkk. It's like you're not gonna take it and there's no guaranteeing like, oh, like now I realize the uni unity of all cultures and ethnicities and beings and I'm a Buddha now.

RS: It's it's just a tool man. It's just why the CIA did MK Ultra, right? Cuz you're right, secularists are just non-specific amplifiers, right? So it amplify, based on the context that's in. So you're training to be a terrorist or you're training to heal. Who knows? It all depends. Exactly. I think it's, we have to have a much more nuanced conversation about this. Let's switch gears. . So I think this part, this is where I think it's really important to talk about your most meaningful psychedelic experience. Tell us what that was.

RS: Right, totally. And yeah, and I paused it before cause I knew you wanted to wait to talk about it. So like for me, it was my first one when I think it was the summer after 10th grade, as I mentioned, my friend's older sister got us some mushrooms. And so, I mean, during this time I hadn't fully formed, I guess my identity as a person who [00:42:00] loves to learn and who is this kind of, philosophical, introspective person who's into, self development and consciousness and all this stuff.

RS: I wasn't there yet. So we took these, so we got the mushrooms and it was I think it was either Canada Day or in Vancouver. We have these yearly fireworks, It's like an international fireworks. It's a week where each day is a different country or something like that. And so the beaches are packed.

RS: And so this was I think Friday night and we're walking down to, we go down to Vancouver to Kitano Beach if anybody knows that. And take this, take these mushrooms. And so prior to that, I had smoked weed or I'd never done any psychedelics other than that or any psychedelics. I don't, cannabis is not psychedelic.

RS: And in my opinion and so we're going there and I notice it coming on and obviously feeling a bit funky and different than what I've noticed before. And. , what was particularly salient about this is, okay, so we get to the beach and the environment is more of a party environment.

RS: People are hammered, they're hollering, they're making lots of noise. And then when the fireworks come off, I [00:43:00] just it really hit me like the absurdity of what was happening and like because like how I was starting to perceive it is we're on this like fucking planet flying through space and we're a bunch of these advanced evolved primates, on a beach, yelling and hollering at lights in the sky.

RS: And it just seems so ridiculous and so absurd. And I'm like, we humans think we're different. We think we're not animals. We think we're somehow exceptional in the grand scheme of things. And but here we are at this beach hollering at lights in the sky, acting in kind of ways that we have no understanding of, we're just like, Acting what fuels true and right in our impulses, which are evolutionarily strongly determined in which we don't have any conscious insight into.

RS: We're just acting what comes to us. And I'm like, we're just more, just evolved animals on this beach expressing our innate tendencies and behavior, . And it made me realize kind of what I can call now, like the [00:44:00] phylogenetic continuity between us and other animals, and we're just in this multidimensional spectrum of traits and we're just like different in degree than not kind, and that's kind of, I maybe wouldn't have formulated like that back then, but that's kind of my understanding of what was going through my head, and it was just hilarious. And then having that insight and then turning that to myself, I'm like, Okay, so. Who is this manes character? What is this being? I'm obviously just like them and I felt like I had this experience where I was able to see myself as if, from a third person perspective.

RS: So it's here's this guy named Manesh and his characteristics, his thoughts, his tendencies, his beliefs, behaviors and viewing it is essentially not me. It's like this is something I'm experiencing, I'm watching and which follows its own laws in a sense. And and I'm just along for the ride.

RS: So I felt like this kind of, yeah, it separated my identity from my, you can say ego identity and my other deeper identity. However you want to conceptualize that. And like [00:45:00] then, It just made me, like fascinated. It's okay, I just ate some mushrooms and it radically changed my perception of reality of myself and shook things up so much.

RS: And and then after the fact it was just like fascinating for me. I'll say, Okay, so it showed me the potential of the mind to perceive the world in a radically different way, which is equivalent to your reality itself shifting, because your perception is your only access to reality, right? So it's like reality.

RS: It can fundamentally shift. What is, what are the bounds of that? What's, is everyone having a completely different experience? What kind of experiences are possible and how does their mind construct all this? And how can we understand these altered states? And and are there other ways to tap into.

RS: How can I change my consciousness through meditation, through other practices. And so that experience made me really much more introspective philosophically oriented, more interested than I already was in eastern traditions and west of mysticism, esoterism and stuff. And solidified my desire to study psychedelics and study the mind and learn about these kinds of things.[00:46:00] 

RS: I have to find a way to sneak in the words, philo genetic continuity into the podcast title somehow. Yeah, it's pretty well said. No, but I mean, quickly reflect on that. I think once you start to condemn that content that everybody's reality could be very different, then you start to think about what is ultimately then the function of culture, religion, belief, ideology. Anil Seth has this amazing Ted Talk, I'm sure you've seen it. He talks about like reality just being a shared hallucination. Yeah. We all agree that this is what reality is, and it's enforced by the infrastructure, by the fact that we all drive the same fucking cars on the road. All the workspaces feel the same. We celebrate the same holidays. . So what is the function of these things? If not to reinforce the fact that we are actually all schizophrenic in some way, but our culture kind of like diminishes that and summarizes our experience in such a way they can experience reality together in the same.

RS: Totally.

RS: Okay. I know we're gonna be out of time very soon. So I [00:47:00] wanna look to the future and you are at a very special pivot in your life. It sounds like, you're almost gonna finish your PhD soon. You're also going to U C S F soon to study with the, or work with the famed Robin Carhartt Harris. Tell us What's next for Manesh and what is the, in the best version of yourself, what is the work that you want to do? What do you hope for the movement? 

MG: Totally. In terms of the work that I will be doing with Robin at U C S F and that I wanna move into is focusing more on kind of a deeper understanding how of, how psychedelics affect our sense of.

MG: And I don't say ego here very clearly, so I say sense of self and I think my experience of psychedelics and many people is that it shifts people's perception of who they are, their identity, what beliefs they say they attribute to themselves. I am this type of person, I am that type of person.

MG: And also how they relate to the concept of identity and selfhood. And this stuff hasn't been rigorously studied in the psychedelic space yet. And there's a large literature in clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience and elsewhere kind of [00:48:00] conceptualizing what selfhood is and studying it in different ways.

MG: And so I find this fascinating because we all live, as you're kind of saying, it's through these kind of homogenizing abstract structures, whether it's the self at the individual level or cultural at the collective level. And so it's like understanding how those can be altered and shifted in, in more healthier ways.

MG: Things that promote mental and physical health is a very fascinating area that I think is understudied and psychedelics in particular are fascinating because they seem to directly modulate this. And so I think to gain a further understanding of how psychedelics, help people either suffering from mental health conditions or healthy people like, who are just trying to grow and gain insight into themselves.

MG: We need to have a better understanding of, what comprises our sense of self. And I'm particularly referring to what philosophers would call our narrative self or our story, our conceptual self. And how can you change the narrative that you're operating under? And, what, how does that relate to how can we understand how that relates [00:49:00] to our emotional responses, to things, our interpretations of life events, and our overall wellbeing and ability to function adaptively in the world?

MG: And so this is what I'm gonna do with Robin and and I'm very interested in pursuing that path. Because for me, what's most interesting is the mechanistics side is how are they working? How can we understand how they're working as opposed to whether they're working, which is important obviously, but I find it more interesting to get into the.

MG: And then why perhaps? And yeah, so I'm really excited for that. And I think partially why I'm excited about that too is because it doesn't necessarily only apply to psychedelics if we're seeing how psychedelics, psychedelics are a window, let's say, into understanding the self and how it's constructed and maintained and changed.

MG: And then we can use that to work way, work our way backwards to have perspectives for other ways to do it, or just to inform clinical practice in general. And so I think there's a lot of generalizable kind of information that can be accessed through that kind of research. And so I'm really excited for that.

MG: And yeah, more broadly with the movement moving forward, I think. Just a [00:50:00] renormalization and destigmatization of altered states of, moving yourself out of normal waking consciousness into different states in a way that's geared towards something more wholesome. Stand grf called them holotropic states, right towards wholeness.

MG: And just reframing cuz instead of pathologizing, which is a, it's Oh, you had that experience. You must be schizophrenic, you must be psychotic, or you must be this. And instead seeing these as all as, kind of value neutral expressions of the human spirit of human consciousness and seeing how you can work with them and use them for different forms of insight.

MG: And psychedelics are normalizing them to a greater extent. And I think that'll be to the benefit of everybody, of being able to more freely explore consciousness and, explore and expand the range of experiences you can go you can have, without changing your physical circumstances necessarily internally.

MG: And and yeah, so this kind of internal shift and shift towards a variety of different experiences. I think psychedelics are bringing that more and more into the culture on a larger level. And so that's like on a very broad level what I'm excited [00:51:00] about. 

RS: So, Very well said. I lied. I have one more thing that I want to come back to, which I said I would earlier on, which is, How do your parents look at the work you're doing now and what has that process been like to involve them in, how would they want to participate in the journey and particularly around stigmatized, criminalized topics like psychedelics and drugs and medicines and the mind and all this stuff.

MG: Yeah I mean, I'm very open with them. Like my mom shares my videos on her Facebook, for example, of psychedelics. And and then my entire family, like I, I have no filters. I share what I'm doing openly cuz I believe in it and if they have a problem with it, if somebody does awesome cuz then I get to prove them wrong. and. And so I have no, filters around it. And my parents, obviously are super proud of me and supportive and they've always been very supportive. I was lucky they never strongly imposed any ideology or religion or anything on me. It's really. [00:52:00] I can be or do or think whatever I want.

MG: And maybe I could have turned out in the wrong way cuz of that, but I didn't. And and so, they're very supportive. I obviously, they don't fully understand a lot of it for obvious reasons and, but I try to describe it, include them when I can and just try to bring this discussion into my family.

MG: And funny enough, one of my aunts and my dad's sister she just invested a bunch of money in Enter tech, the company I'm involved in. So it's coming into the family and people are acknowledging it and seeing, watching some of my videos or some of them had heard of Michael Paul talking about it and it's slowly coming in.

MG: And so, In my immediate social network and including my family and friends, they're completely destigmatized. And so I'm sometimes taken off guard when people still hold these kind of outdated beliefs on them. Cuz that's not my reality. Like people I talk to are very open, very accepting, very curious and interested.

MG: I never received resistance. In fact, in my entire life, I never received strong resistance from anybody to stop me from studying this stuff, whether it was at the university [00:53:00] or in my family and in my close friends and anybody I contacted basically. And so, yeah, that's the bubble I operate in. But again, like from that vantage, I try to spread education and des stigmatize to people who still kind of are let's say regurgitating or repeating the nonsense of the drug war and so on.

RS: I completely agree with you. I think ultimately its about showcasing your curiosity and conviction in a very nuanced way, saying that it is paradoxical it's good and bad. And so framing it in a wholesome way where somebody can come into the conversation no matter where they stand. . So it's not about glorifying anything or criminalizing anything.

RS: It's really about knowing that, look, it's a set of tools that can enhance the human experience and also maybe make a positive impact on the world. I'll close up on a short story, which is similar to you. In the beginning my parents didn't quite understand. I post about it openly, very openly.

RS: And my dad, I remember the first time I was saying, Dad, cause I'm working on this thing, psychedelic. He's What's psychedelics? And then halfway through explaining to him, he fell asleep . And [00:54:00] then I remember once one time we were at my sister's place in DC and my parents had come to visit from Bangladesh and we were hanging out. And Trevor no was on there. He was talking about Michael Pollen's new book. And he said the word psychedelic and my dad like his ear perked up and he looked to the right. He is psychedelic where I'm like yeah. Psychedelic. There you go. Now that celebrity has said it. Now you know I'm doing something important. Yeah. and and I had this sort of screenshotted a WhatsApp message my dad sent me a couple of months ago. It's like he just said, Sounds like psychedelic is changing medicine. I'm like, I just screenshot that. I'm like, Yes, my dad. 

MG: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. conversion is in progress.

MG: Yeah, exactly. 

RS: Slowly. Yeah. This has been a fantastic conversation, Manesh. Thank you so much. I mean, I feel like we could talk for hours and I love how you weave through really difficult to understand, but you have this beautiful gift of language and it's very welcoming. It's very it's very insightful, very interesting.

RS: And I think you're super charismatic. So I'm really excited to have more scientists such as yourself in the movement that [00:55:00] make people feel smarter, not dumber. You know what I mean? . So thanks so much for spending this time with us. 

MG: Yeah, my pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thanks so much.