← Science of Perception Box
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- [00:00]
Michael Pollan
One of the great ironies of the supermarket is that the quietest food is the healthiest food. Broccoli doesn't have a health claim on it, but if you go to the. It just sits there, but you go to the middle aisles and everything's screaming. You know, cookies are telling you that they're low fat or high fiber or whatever, they're making health claims. So one of my rules of eating is don't buy any food that makes a health claim.
- [00:24]
Elizabeth Koch
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. We all live inside our own personal, private perception box built by our genes and the physical, social and cultural environment in which we were born and raised. In this podcast, we explore how although the walls of this mental box are always present, they can expand in states like awe, wonder and curiosity, or contract in response to anxiety, fear and anger. I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts, two incredible and distinguished minds, Dr. Heather Berlin, professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and Dr. Christoph Koch, chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot foundation and the current meritorious investigator and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
- [01:30]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Science of Perception Box. I'm your co host, Dr. Heather Berlin.
- [01:35]
Dr. Christoph Koch
And I'm Dr. Christoph Koch.
- [01:38]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Every week we feature an aspect of the Science of Perception Box, highlighting the latest research together with our expert guest. I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Pollan to the show. Michael is an author and researcher who describes his interest as the places where the human and natural worlds intersect. On our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. He's the author of six New York Times bestsellers including the Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Rules, this Is yous Mind on Plants and Cooked. He's received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gastronomic science and in 2020, he co founded the UC Berkeley center for the Science of Psychedelics. I'd like to welcome Michael Pollan to the show.
- [02:24]
Michael Pollan
Thank you. Thank you, Heather.
- [02:26]
Dr. Heather Berlin
So you've written a lot about the cultural and biological connection to what we eat for decades. So can you talk a little bit about how food can change or affect our perception, folks, and our perception of the world?
- [02:40]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, I mean, food has a profound effect on our mood and not very well studied. We don't know that much about it, but we know that it happens. And the most obvious case is sugar, especially in children. I mean, it is a drug. I mean, it acts if you have kids. Basically, child rearing is a Matter of sugar management. You feel really different after you're full. You feel different when you're hungry. The absence of food does sharpen you.
- [03:07]
Dr. Heather Berlin
It is interesting because the same food can affect you, impact you psychologically in different ways depending on where you're at. So, right. If you're food deprived, a good piece of chocolate is gonna be like. You're like, oh, my God, this is the best thing I've ever eaten. Now you've eaten six chocolate bars and somebody says, here, you can have another, and that same chocolate bar is gonna be disgusting.
- [03:26]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, exactly. And of course, that's true with drugs as well. I mean, Right. The dose makes a huge difference in how you respond to it. But I think it's a frontier of research to understand the links between food and mood. I know there've been some studies on prison populations, which you can do in England, but I guess they don't have IRBs. I don't know, but they do. Well, they get away with this where they use a prison population where you have ultimate control over the. Over the diet. And the addition of omega 3s, bumping up the omega 3s in the diet, whether through fish or greens, I don't know how they did it, led to reductions in violence and, you know, real changes in the behavior of people in prison. There's also been some very interesting studies around ultra processed food. You know, a term you're beginning to hear a lot more because there's now a body of science around this category. We used to just call it junk food, and that was a kind of amorphous category. Ultra processed food is still a little amorphous, but it has some more precision to it and rigor.
- [04:36]
Dr. Christoph Koch
So can you give an example?
- [04:37]
Michael Pollan
Well, an ultra processed food would be, it's usually snack foods or ready to prepare meals that you would buy frozen. The definition, the best definition is they're made with ingredients. They usually have a lot of ingredients. They're made with ingredients that you don't have at home. You know, emulsifiers, stabilizers, things that bind things together.
- [04:59]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Many syllable words.
- [05:01]
Michael Pollan
Yes. And they're unrecognizable generally to the normal person. But you don't have these ingredients in your pantry. And you also need a factory to make this food. Even if you wanted to make a Twinkie, you don't what you need. And this kind of food, if you offer people, over the course of a month, two versions of food, one is ultra processed and one is whole foods matched for all the macronutrients, same amount of fat Same amount of sugar, same amount of fiber, all that stuff. Actually, I don't know if they match fiber, it'd be hard to do. Ultra processed food usually is very little fiber. People will eat 500 more calories a day. And so it's food that's been designed on the drug model in a way to make you crave it.
- [05:47]
Dr. Christoph Koch
You mean the eat. The people who eat the ultra processed food will eat.
- [05:50]
Michael Pollan
Will eat 500 more calories a day and that'll put on the weight pretty quickly. And we don't know the mechanism, whether it's some of these additives that are responsible or the combination or the fact that it's been specifically engineered to get you to overeat. I mean, that's how they.
- [06:07]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Maybe it's reducing the satiety, you know.
- [06:10]
Michael Pollan
Feeling satiated because there is no fiber that may be part of it. It's absorbed very quickly too. So the insulin reaction is different.
- [06:18]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And it's kind of like they call like a super normal stimuli. Right. Like it's creating, I don't know what that is. So there's like the normal kinds of sugars we would find in nature. Right, like picking fruits and berries. But then you artificially create these things that are very high in sugar and fat that wouldn't be naturally things that you would find in the environment, but that we're super attracted to.
- [06:38]
Michael Pollan
Right, because evolution, absolutely, that misfit between what our body expects to get and what gets from highly processed food is a big problem. There was a study also done at Yale where they gave people a series of drinks in an fmri. Some were matched, in other words, the sweetness and the sugar level were matched and then they were not matched. There were drinks that were sweeter or less sweet, had artificial sweeteners. And on the artificial sweeteners the body becomes confused and the insulin response is to perceive level of sweetness. But if you're not getting the calories to absorb, the body will look for them. And that's one of the reasons people on no calorie sodas don't lose weight. Their bodies will find those sugars eventually.
- [07:33]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And there's a psychological. There's some work that was done by Ali Crumb at Stanford who looked at these milkshakes and they had the same number of calories. But in one case they said this was a really like high fat milkshake and the other said it was this diet, you know, so that's the infant of belief. Belief can also affect. So there's the physiologic aspect to it. But there's actually this top down where when people believed it was this high fat, you know, nutritious, and it would, they would feel more satiated. They would, and they wouldn't want any other food. When they thought it was the diet one they sold and they wanted to keep eating. So there's the psychological aspect of it as well that affects us. And there's also like the cognitive framing. You know, if they say there's a really expensive bottle of wine and people say we really like it, and then you say it's really cheap, it's the same wine and it's not as good. Yeah. And the pleasure centers don't light up in the brain. So we really are, you know, it's this combination between what's happening in our bodies but also in our minds. But you know, in terms of our perception box, it's like how what we believe, our beliefs and our expectations impact how our body physiologically.
- [08:41]
Dr. Christoph Koch
I guess it's really three things, right. It's the molecules we ingest, then it's the state of our body, Are we hungry? Are we satiated? And then it's what we believe, what we believe we eat. Is it good or bad? Is it expensive or is it not expensive? And all those three things combine to affect our health.
- [08:58]
Michael Pollan
And I'm sure if you eat something you believe is indulgent and not good for you, it has an effect. Whereas if you eat something that you've been told or you think is very.
- [09:09]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Healthy, I believe that Musa chocolat is a cognitive enhancer. I can show you the evidence.
- [09:16]
Michael Pollan
I believe chocolate is definitely chocolate. Is.
- [09:21]
Dr. Heather Berlin
There also, I mean, there are also studies that show, you know, if you're sleep deprived, if you're stressed and you know, they give people a choice, they tend to go for the, the junk food, the more higher fat foods. And um, so there is this aspect of impulse control as well because often it's more attractive to have the food that is not so good for you. And so when you are sleep deprived or stressed or you know, you tend to go for those. So I think there's aspects that's probably.
- [09:47]
Michael Pollan
The quicker high of the sugar. Yeah. Or satiation. I mean that these are foods in general. Processed food is absorbed by the small intestine and very quickly. So you get your sugar rush. And so if you're in a depressed or low energy mood, you're looking for that quick response. And so there's food that kind of unfolds more slowly through digestion and offers your microbiome something too. That's the other. I'm sure that's the problem with a lot of ultra processed food, that it doesn't feed the 10 trillion organisms that you have to think about when you're eating besides yourself.
- [10:22]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Do you think it's like a hidden sort of epidemic of people not realizing that there's psyche and their bodies, everything is being affected?
- [10:29]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, no, I think it's a misfit. I think, you know, we have this incredible mechanism designed by evolution to tell us what to eat. And you look at animals, they know what to eat. Cattle will self medicate. You know, when they're pregnant, they'll eat one kind of grass and when they're putting on fat for the winter, they'll eat another kind of grass. I mean, there is a nutritional wisdom that food science has learned how to manipulate and thwart. And so we, you know, we know, you know, fruit, we're attracted to fruit because of the colors and the smells and the tastes. And we have some nutritional wisdom that is in danger of being lost because it can be manipulated.
- [11:10]
Dr. Christoph Koch
You wrote this beautiful article that stayed with me back in 2007 called Unhappy Meals. I think you start off with this very short statement, eat food, not too much, mostly plant. So by, is this what you mean when you say nutritional wisdom?
- [11:27]
Michael Pollan
It sounds a little cryptic, but what I mean by that is real food. I mean, there's certain substances we dignify with that word that we shouldn't. I mean, I think a lot of ultra processed foods are not really food. So it's really eat real food. And I define that as, you know, food your great grandmother would recognize as food or food that doesn't have ingredients your third grader can't pronounce. So that was an article that eventually became a book called In Defense of Food where I was asked by my editors at the New York Times, do a deep dive into nutrition science and figure out what do we know? What can we say with some certainty about how to eat? Because there's a huge amount of confusion and the science around nutrition changes and, and there's also a lot of companies putting out bogus research to confuse people and their health claims on very unhealthy foods. I mean, one of the great ironies of the supermarket is that the quietest food is the healthiest food. I mean, broccoli doesn't have a health claim on it, but if you go to the, it just sits there, but you go to the middle aisles and everything's screaming. You know, cookies are telling you that they have, you know, that they're low fat or high fiber or whatever, they're making health claims. So one of my rules of eating is don't buy any food that makes a healthy claim.
- [12:51]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Oh, I love that.
- [12:52]
Michael Pollan
Most health claims are bogus.
- [12:53]
Dr. Heather Berlin
What do you think about all those, like, super green powders, you know, superfood?
- [12:57]
Michael Pollan
It's not food.
- [12:58]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Right? That's. And there's no evidence, I mean, and.
- [13:01]
Michael Pollan
Nutrients, you know, and so it's a very interesting case of science as a problem in terms of public education. In other words, scientists need to study nutrients to understand food. You need reductive science to a certain extent, to a certain point. But for the consumer to focus on nutrients is a tremendous mistake. We don't eat nutrients, we eat foods.
- [13:27]
Dr. Christoph Koch
But tell me, do you believe, if you equate everything else, which is of course never the case 200 years ago, let's say, when people were eating still mostly foods, do you think the mindset of the people was fundamentally different from today when, let's see, every large fraction of people eat large proportions of meat, let's say every day. You think actually their sense of who they are, their sense of reality, their sense of the world was different?
- [13:56]
Michael Pollan
It's a good question. I'm not sure. I think that with regard to meat, it was a special occasion food. Meat was expensive, and you had chicken on Sundays, and that was a very special thing. And you had meat a couple times a week. We have meat three times a day. Many Americans, we eat 8 ounces of meat per person per day. And you're not, you know, holding your own. And I'm not holding my own.
- [14:18]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Neither are I vegetarian since 14.
- [14:20]
Michael Pollan
So people are eating for us. So. And the idea of having meat three times a day, which now a lot of Americans think is an entitlement, is destroying the planet, not to mention the damage it's doing to people's health. I think people had a stronger connection. You know, food is. Is not just a substance we take in our bodies, it's a relationship. It connects us to the person who produces it, to the animal, if there was an animal involved, to the earth, to nature. And food is one of our key connections to nature. And we have lost track of that 100 years ago, 200 years ago, most people either were farmers or new farmers. So they had a real sense of where the food came from. And I think that changed the process of eating. I think no accident, people said grace because they understood that this is a marvelous thing and it's a real gift of Nature or God. And. And I think we've lost that. Food comes from the supermarket. Kids have no idea how food is produced. You know, I remember standing in line at a McDonald's once and with my son. And yes, I did take my son to McDonald's occasionally.
- [15:30]
Dr. Christoph Koch
That's how you start off the book. The only one.
- [15:32]
Michael Pollan
That's right. That's right. Yeah. We're having a McDonald's meal, which I proceeded to follow back to the farms. And there was a kid there who, who. They had a picture of a steer or something and was shocked to learn that that's what she was about to eat. So, you know, it's just stuff. It's protoplasm from the supermarket for many of us. So I think there's a communal and a sacred aspect of food.
- [16:00]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Do you think that education is key for children? Like, I became a vegetarian not because of any political reasons, but I had dissected my first frog and I noticed the, like, ligaments and the tendons and the bones. And then I was like, I don't want to eat these animals. You know, it looks like chicken. And there was this sort of disgust response. And then it just made me not want to eat animals, you know, But I think, you know, children are smart and early childhood education around this could be something that changes their mind.
- [16:30]
Michael Pollan
No, I think everybody who eats meat should go to a slaughterhouse once and they're like, it should be a field trip. I mean, that's what got me off meeting, just watching how the animals were treated on the feedlots. Just to give you an idea how far away we are from that. There are 14 or 15 states in America where it's illegal to take pictures of a feedlot, even from public right of ways.
- [16:50]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Oh, wow.
- [16:50]
Michael Pollan
In other words, you could be on the road in Finney County, Kansas, where I went to write about the meat industry. And if I took a picture of that feedlot, there is law I'm breaking in the state of Kansas. I have a friend who's a photographer who just did a beautiful book about the food system, and he traveled all over the world with his paraglider, taking pictures of food production. And it's a stunning book. And he was arrested in Kansas for taking pictures from the air of a feedlot. So they've got something to hide and they know it. And so anyway, so, yeah, I stopped eating industrial meat anyway when I, you know, having done all this reporting and gone to all these chicken houses and feedlots and confinement pig operations, which to me were. Was the most upsetting because pigs are just so intelligent.
- [17:45]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Why food for you? Like, why did you become hyper focused and specialized in that?
- [17:51]
Michael Pollan
So all my writing, both the food writing, the nutrition writing, the agriculture writing, the psychedelic writing, it all grows out of my interest in gardening. I was a passionate gardener. I started as a little kid. I had a garden when I was 8 years old outside my family's house. And anytime I could grow a couple strawberries, I would put them in a cup and sell them to my mother. And so I was very entrepreneurial. And then I fell away from it for many years. But in my late 20s, I started gardening again. And we bought this piece of property in Connecticut, and it was a weekend house. I was working as a magazine editor, and I just got very absorbed with what happens in the garden and that kind of engagement with the natural world and the problems, you know, dealing with pests, keeping your soil fertile, which I gradually realized are the same problems that farmers deal with. And so I kind of went from this focus on the garden, and it gradually opened up onto an interest in agriculture and farming. And I was running a column about my garden for the New York Times Magazine, like a monthly column, and using the garden as a laboratory to think about our relationship to nature and the environment. And this became my first book. But then at a certain point, when GMOs were introduced, genetically modified crops, I thought, oh, you know, that's a good column. I'm going to get some seeds from Monsanto, plant them in my garden, see what all this brouhaha is about. Although there wasn't actually a lot of controversy at that time in this country, it was a huge controversy in Europe. And in the course of writing that piece, Monsanto, I had wonderful access because I had approached them as a garden writer, you know, the most benign creature on earth. And they gave me some of their potatoes to grow. And they took me out to witness some of their farms out in Idaho, where I saw industrial farms of a scale I just didn't know existed. You know, 50,000 acre farms, completely remote controlled irrigation pivots using pesticides that the farmer was so careful of. He would not go into his fields for three or four or five days after he sprayed. Not even to break a. Not even to fix a broken irrigation pivot. That's how neurotoxic these pesticides were. It was a pesticide called Monitor, which is now off the market. And why was he using that? And he explained, well, potatoes get something called net necrosis. It's spread by aphids. And net necrosis doesn't really damage the food, but it leaves those brown lines you sometimes see inside a potato. And I said, is there any other way to deal with net necrosis? And he says, yeah, don't grow russet Burbank potatoes. And, oh, it's a problem with this kind of potato. Yeah. I said, well, why don't you grow another kind of potato? I said, well, McDonald's only buys Russet Burbank potatoes now. The people at McDonald's don't understand that because of their insistence on that kind of potato, which is purely aesthetic, by the way. They want the longest possible french fry to put in those little red boxes, that little bouquet of french fries that they're so good at, that there's such an easy fix. And nevertheless, the food chain is so the point I'm coming back to is the food chain is so long and opaque that people at one end don't realize that their aesthetic choices are forcing farmers to do things that endanger them and potentially the consumer as well. So. So that's kind of how the interest in gardening morphed into an interest in agriculture. And I've always been really interested in plants and our symbiotic relationship to plants. In botany of desire, I dealt with this most, you know, manifestly. And I was very interested in the fact that domestication is a two way street and that these are very clever creatures that have learned, and I use the word metaphorically, that by gratifying certain human desires they will get more habitat.
- [22:13]
Dr. Christoph Koch
I mean, it's a co evolution.
- [22:14]
Michael Pollan
It's co evolution. Exactly. It's a special case of co evolution. And so I looked at four cases and I looked at the plants, but I also looked at the human desires that they evolved to gratify. And so I looked at beauty, I looked at sweetness, and I looked at intoxication. And this is what I mean when I say all the work begins that way. And there's a long chapter on cannabis, which is a plant that has succeeded far beyond anyone's dreams because of the fact that it does something to our consciousness that we really like. And I looked at the neuroscience around cannabis and THC and anandamide, and I got very curious then when I was working on that book as to why would we like to change consciousness? You know, on its face, that might not be such a good idea. Why would it be adapted to change consciousness? Now there's some obvious cases like pain, right? If you can change your consciousness to pain, that's a really positive thing. I mean, One of the most important plants in the pharmacopoeia are the opiates, which I've grown and written about and gotten in trouble with.
- [23:25]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Yeah. Isn't that illegal or.
- [23:27]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Well, actually, it's a complicated.
- [23:29]
Michael Pollan
It's complicated. It's legal to grow it, but as soon as you turn it into a drug, you're breaking the law when you start cutting them. Exactly, exactly. And I did do that. So it's a curious human desire, though, because when you're in an altered state of consciousness, you are more likely to have accidents. In a wild setting, you're more likely to be the prey of some other animal. Yet we like to change consciousness, and many animals like to change consciousness. I suspect some of it has to do with sheer boredom. You know, that we want to vary our experience of the world. And, you know, we happen to live in a highly distracted, entertained culture. We don't have the same boredom problem that I can imagine people a couple hundred years ago. You know, life could get pretty tedious. So being able to change consciousness with alcohol or with caffeine or with any number of things would be attractive. But I think there are more positive benefits to changing consciousness. Caffeine is a great example. Caffeine has a lot of benefits. It improves focus, it helps you stay awake.
- [24:39]
Dr. Christoph Koch
It's a great drug in a capitalist society.
- [24:42]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But too much is not good either. I mean, you can get anxious and jittery.
- [24:46]
Michael Pollan
Caffeine is, on balance, has been a boon to humanity, at least within the context of capitalism.
- [24:55]
Dr. Christoph Koch
And it's now, I understand, the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world.
- [25:00]
Michael Pollan
Yeah. In the form of coffee, tea and soda.
- [25:03]
Dr. Christoph Koch
I mean, just to riff a little bit more on the. So what, what are the changes involving when you take caffeine in terms of consciousness? Cause for sure you get more alert, so it modulates the level of arousal, right? Yes, but what about changes in conscious experience which are different from arousal?
- [25:20]
Michael Pollan
Coffee's a funny case because the experience is completely transparent. If you compare it to psychedelics or cannabis or lots of other consciousness changing things which have a kind of, you know, you see the windshield.
- [25:34]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Oh, you know, when you're on magic mushrooms.
- [25:37]
Michael Pollan
You do. And even with cannabis, there's this physiological noise. There's all these sort of weird side effects. Coffee caffeine is like perfectly transparent. It's wonderful that way. It improves people's stamina. It's very good for athletes, and it's legal for them to use it, and they do in large quantities. It improves memory. If you study For a test, then take a dose of caffeine. It will lock those memories in and you'll perform better on the test. The negatives are pretty minor. I mean there is, as you mentioned, jitteriness. Some people can't really tolerate it. The big negative is sleep. It does interfere with sleep. Caffeine has a long half life, so it's in your system. For if you drink a coffee at noon, at midnight, there'll still be 25% of the caffeine will still be circulating. So it's a good idea to knock it off in the morning.
- [26:37]
Dr. Christoph Koch
But it is legal. But now people, thank God, also want more, stronger changes. More.
- [26:44]
Michael Pollan
Yes. They're consciousness changing plants and fungi that improve your performance in various ways, give you a certain edge. And caffeine is a good example. There are others that render you useless to capitalism and psychedelics would be one of them.
- [27:00]
Dr. Christoph Koch
And to warfare at the CIA.
- [27:02]
Michael Pollan
That's right. It wasn't. Well, we think that's what they discovered. They haven't really told us, but we're assuming that's what they discovered. I've thought a lot about this and what consciousness change at that level of intensity could offer us. And we're learning of course about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, but I also think they play a role in cultural evolution. I really think that radical consciousness change is one of the ways that new ideas, new metaphors, new insights enter into our culture. And in the same way, borrowing Richard Dawkins scheme, that you've got memes in culture, you've got genes in biology and memes evolve in a similar kind of way through a process of mutation and then spread. I think psychedelics. But cannabis too, and other consciousness.
- [28:02]
Dr. Christoph Koch
This is all very recent, it's 20th century at least in Western culture. If we just stick for the moment with Western culture.
- [28:08]
Michael Pollan
Well, the opiates were being used for thousands of years again in Western culture.
- [28:13]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Was really the opening under the British, the route to China. So that was Opium War. But that was sort of the 19th and 20th century. I mean before. Yeah, there was probably some usage back with it.
- [28:27]
Michael Pollan
Well, there was alcohol. Alcohol in the West. Yeah.
- [28:32]
Dr. Heather Berlin
I mean it's a cultural evolution that. But it seems to be linked to sort of creativity, right?
- [28:38]
Michael Pollan
Oh yeah, novelty.
- [28:39]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And not all consciousness altering substances induce creativity.
- [28:47]
Michael Pollan
No. And in most people they don't. And I would say, you know, 99% or 90% of the insights or metaphors or creative thoughts people have on psychedelics are worthless.
- [28:58]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Right.
- [28:59]
Michael Pollan
Just like most mutations don't serve the.
- [29:03]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Solistic One of the greatest bursts of creativity, at least in Western tradition. The Renaissance. Yeah, right. What evidence do we have that drugs were involved?
- [29:12]
Michael Pollan
Well, caffeine. Caffeine shows up, I think, in the 1640s in England and France, many of the Enlightenment figures were big coffee drinkers. Voltaire, Balzac. It's very hard to pin this down. But I do think that if you look at their role, there are people. I mean, there's a history of scientists who've had breakthroughs on psychedelics.
- [29:41]
Dr. Heather Berlin
At least from what I know, the microdosing doesn't increase creativity. There's no evidence for that. But I think it would be interesting to look across time, like if once we introduce psychedelics into mainstream culture, was there a burst of creativity or. I think certain psychedelics are a quick route to get there, and in a very extreme way. But that's not the only way to get there.
- [30:05]
Michael Pollan
No, by no means is it the only way. It's just one of the tools. It's one of the mutagens we have that. That changes things. So I think it's had. You know, on balance, I think you could point to some positive effects that consciousness change has for our species. I mean, you're talking about another kind of consciousness change as part of creativity, giving up, unconstraining the self and the mind. So there was a study done on creativity in the 70s at Stanford Research Institute, where they gave a group of creatives 100 micrograms of LSD. They had architects, they had writers, they had engineers, they had people across the. And everybody supposedly had a block was stuck on a project and they gave him the lsd and they kind of rolled around on the floor for a while, and then they told everybody, go to your desks. And they had their work tables, and they went to their desk and the architect worked on. He was designing some mall or something, and the writers worked on their problem. And. And it was an interesting study, and many people reported a breakthrough, but there was no control. There was. You know, it was like, surely we could do a better job of that. Now we have better measures of creativity. We have. You know, I think we could better control something like that. You know, Allison Gopnik has various creative tasks that she gives to kids. Some of those could be used. So I think it's a really rich area to explore, and maybe you can. You know, you don't need a massive dose to get these effects.
- [31:40]
Dr. Christoph Koch
I mean, there are management classes that offer this now, that offer you. To take you outside the US to the Caribbean somewhere. Where you can sort of be more.
- [31:49]
Michael Pollan
Creative and we don't know if it works or not.
- [31:51]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And also we should find out.
- [31:53]
Dr. Christoph Koch
People believe that they're more creative. That may well make them more creative.
- [31:56]
Michael Pollan
Well, it might improve their confidence. But if their product still sucks.
- [32:00]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But there is something in the letting go that where creativity thrives. And I think these drugs are an avenue for that. Oh, about that. But they're all different and they all, you know, I think lumped together with psychedelics. But like, you know, MDMA is a different, you know, has a different effect on consciousness than ketamine, than you know, lsd, than ayahuasca and works on different receptors and opioids, all of it. So, so do you have, do you have a favorite, do you think like if there was a recommendation, you know, everyone. That's my favorite caffeine.
- [32:30]
Michael Pollan
Well, it's the one, you know, I can use most often without disturbing my life too much.
- [32:35]
Dr. Christoph Koch
But you don't lose a sense of self.
- [32:37]
Michael Pollan
No you don't. In fact it's intensified. I think it's an ego building drug and that's part of the reason it's so good for capitalism. And that is an interesting model for drugs. Are they enhancing the ego or softening the ego?
- [32:52]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But also everybody has different needs, right? Some people are too open and impulsive and they need something to constrain them in a way that's right. Others, some are too constrained and they can take amphetamines to help them. Others are too constrained, they need to be able to let go. And you know, it's interesting. So it's not one size fits all but how this affects our perception. But you know, there's this like is it opening the doors of perception? Is it all about expanding our perception.
- [33:15]
Michael Pollan
Box or you know, but some people need to do, to constrict it, right.
- [33:19]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Because they're too scattered, too, too expansive, too much. And so it's, it's not, you know, I think it's personality dependent totally and set and setting.
- [33:28]
Dr. Christoph Koch
So what about the other extreme where those substances that completely make you lose a sense of self yet isn't it remarkable that you can totally lose your body, your memory, your identity, yet there's still something there that experiences, right?
- [33:43]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, I mean one of the most powerful experience I've had on psychedelics has been one of complete ego dissolution. I had always assumed I was identical to my ego and discovered that my ego could dissolve. In my case, it was detonated into a cloud of blue post it notes.
- [34:02]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Oh, that's interesting.
- [34:03]
Michael Pollan
It was interesting.
- [34:04]
Dr. Heather Berlin
We can analyze that from a brain.
- [34:06]
Michael Pollan
I know blue post it notes. Somebody said, yeah, well, you're a writer, so you probably use a lot of post it notes. And I don't know what the blue was about, but it was definitely blue. But I wear a lot of blue.
- [34:16]
Dr. Heather Berlin
We need to unpack that.
- [34:17]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Who saw that? Who explained?
- [34:19]
Michael Pollan
Well, that's the question. I knew that was me and I was no more. But there was some perspective. But it was not a familiar perspective. It was highly disinterested. It wasn't troubled by what it was seeing at all.
- [34:37]
Dr. Christoph Koch
There was no personal memory.
- [34:38]
Michael Pollan
There wasn't you, it wasn't me, it wasn't Michael. But I was perceiving it from some vantage. It was an unfamiliar vantage.
- [34:45]
Dr. Christoph Koch
So I think you need to be then careful with the word I.
- [34:49]
Michael Pollan
Yes, I know, but it's like, well.
- [34:51]
Dr. Heather Berlin
It'S his brain in a way that's doing the perceiving.
- [34:54]
Dr. Christoph Koch
We have no idea of the brain. It could be the liver or the heart. Many people thought.
- [34:57]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Are you, Is this you, Christopher Scientist?
- [35:00]
Michael Pollan
No.
- [35:00]
Dr. Christoph Koch
All I'm saying is you never experience your brain.
- [35:03]
Michael Pollan
That's right.
- [35:04]
Dr. Heather Berlin
We are assuming as scientists that these consciousness is coming from the brain, not the liver.
- [35:09]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Yeah, but we haven't at all talked about the physiological substance here. We're just talking about consciousness, phenomenology, feeling. And so my point is when you say yourself disappears, then seeing, I.
- [35:21]
Michael Pollan
He's sort of like the concept of.
- [35:22]
Dr. Heather Berlin
The self is disappearing, but the brain is still giving him the experience that he's having.
- [35:27]
Dr. Christoph Koch
This is what I would call a non dual experience.
- [35:29]
Michael Pollan
It was non dual, and I shouldn't use the word I, but I don't know what pronoun to use.
- [35:33]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Well, I would say the brain that's inhabited in this skull was experiencing that.
- [35:39]
Michael Pollan
But the brain, as Christophe says, the brain's not part of our phenomenology at all. And I'm trying to describe it. It was very hard to write about. Yeah, but it was. But it's cool, isn't it?
- [35:49]
Dr. Christoph Koch
That's all they know.
- [35:50]
Michael Pollan
It was extraordinary. And it wasn't frightening? No, I wasn't frightened at all. And earlier in the experience I had had frightening moments, but at this point it was complete equanimity. And what was interesting is that when the ego dissolves the wall between us and them, for me, and it also goes away. And that leads to this experience that William James described of this merging into something larger. And for me, it was a piece of music which surprised me.
- [36:27]
Dr. Heather Berlin
I mean, what Drug was this Psilocybin. Psilocybin.
- [36:30]
Michael Pollan
This was a pretty high dose of psilocybin. And I heard that music in a new way because. And again, the pronouns wrong, because I didn't hear it. I became it. There was no space between me and that piece of music. No distinction.
- [36:46]
Dr. Christoph Koch
That's what Arthur Schopenhauer, the German idealist, calls the aesthetic experience.
- [36:50]
Michael Pollan
I had one for the first time in my life. There's no separation.
- [36:56]
Dr. Heather Berlin
So you are the music.
- [36:57]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Yes.
- [36:58]
Michael Pollan
Yeah.
- [36:58]
Dr. Christoph Koch
You are the art. You are the painting, the music.
- [37:01]
Michael Pollan
And at moments, I could feel the horsehair of the bow going across my body again. That implies I had a body at that moment, but. And I felt like I was inside. I mean, as the thing evolved, I was inside the well of sound. And it was extraordinary. It was a very sad piece of music, but I didn't feel sad at all. This felt so right. And it taught me an important lesson that I think is relevant to the perception box idea that I'm not identical to my ego, that I'll survive its disappearance, and that. That the ego stands between us and amazing experiences, not to mention love and connection to nature and all the other things, but that we build these walls, and they may help us in some ways. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Without an ego, I'd be.
- [37:51]
Dr. Heather Berlin
You probably wouldn't have been survived this long if you.
- [37:54]
Michael Pollan
Yeah, I wouldn't have gotten any books written.
- [37:57]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But there's a difference between temporary ego death and death death.
- [38:01]
Michael Pollan
Well, what's interesting, though, is, I mean, I've interviewed a lot of the cancer patients who've had psilocybin therapy, and the ones that undergo an ego death, it does change their attitudes toward their physical death in ways that make it less frightening to them. It's a rehearsal. And that rehearsal seems to help them, even though they're, you know, they're not. They're not saying, I believe in an afterlife or anything, but they just sort of feel okay.
- [38:29]
Dr. Heather Berlin
The letting go.
- [38:31]
Michael Pollan
And it is the letting go, I think. I mean, letting go is a very hard thing to do. And.
- [38:35]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But when you let go in that way, you're letting go into becoming one with the music, and you're still having an experience.
- [38:40]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Yeah.
- [38:41]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Whereas there's a letting go into what we think is no experience.
- [38:45]
Dr. Christoph Koch
We don't know.
- [38:46]
Dr. Heather Berlin
It may be lovely if you.
- [38:50]
Dr. Christoph Koch
There's this. You know, there's this mental entity. It's like a river. And then in the river, there are all these billions of little eddies had formed. And these eddies all feel, well, Here I am. I'm forever. I'm a me. And you know, and then.
- [39:02]
Michael Pollan
And it's how you define your me too. I remember interviewing this one woman who had cancer and she was. She had psilocybin therapy at nyu. And she told the story about flying around the world and finally going into the earth and dissolving in the earth. And her molecules were taken up by the plants. Now that's a very naturalistic afterlife. But she could identify with the molecules so strongly that it didn't frighten her.
- [39:36]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But there's no. This is the thing. And not to harp on this, but it's not about me, the ego. But I like the experience of consciousness. And the way that our molecules happen to got together gives us an experience of consciousness.
- [39:48]
Michael Pollan
Consciousness.
- [39:48]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Hear what you say.
- [39:50]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Okay, the consciousness.
- [39:52]
Dr. Christoph Koch
No, no, I get it. It's your ego.
- [39:53]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But when all these molecules are disorganized and separated, the world will still go on. But there will be no experience of consciousness of those molecules.
- [40:03]
Dr. Christoph Koch
There will be no ego. There will be no heaven.
- [40:05]
Dr. Heather Berlin
But you think they'll still be conscious?
- [40:07]
Dr. Christoph Koch
We don't know. But what we do know, there will not be an ego.
- [40:11]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Ultimately, I don't need the ego, but I like the idea of consciousness.
- [40:15]
Michael Pollan
Again, you see, I. Aye, aye. Well, the other thing. The other important takeaway for me was that consciousness survived the death of the ego and that there was still experience.
- [40:27]
Dr. Heather Berlin
No, I'm all about that. I want consciousness to.
- [40:30]
Dr. Christoph Koch
And I thought the two were identity insight. Because many people claim self consciousness is a defining feature of consciousness. Without self, there isn't consciousness, which I think is nonsense.
- [40:41]
Michael Pollan
No, I think that psychedelic experience proves.
- [40:44]
Dr. Heather Berlin
That that's not pure consciousness. But those molecules that are creating that experience of pure consciousness are organized in such a way to allow that to emerge. If those molecules are separated out and they're in the plants and the earth and everything that's beautiful. But I don't know that they're communicating in an IIT kind of consciousness way. Integrated information theory. That would create a sense of experience. We end every episode by asking a perception box question. And so our perception box question for today is for everyone. We're all going to answer it. How would you describe the difference between who you are publicly and who you are privately?
- [41:31]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Well, almost by definition publicly. Particularly in a context like this, you're much more social. You interact with each other. But privately I'm perfectly happy sitting at home listening to music. Then the entire weekend I spent this blissful three weeks away Christmas with my wife and my Bernese mountain dog for three weeks on a tiny island. It was just wonderful.
- [41:54]
Michael Pollan
Just by myself.
- [41:55]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Well, I mean, with one other person and one other. Almost there.
- [41:59]
Michael Pollan
Mr. Felix, who I met, is a wonderful dog.
- [42:02]
Dr. Christoph Koch
So there are these differences between, you know, public. When you're on stage, when you're surrounded by other people, you become very extroverted, Very extroverted. And then people think, oh, you know, the person's always like that back home, but back home they may be very different and introverted and maybe shy.
- [42:19]
Michael Pollan
Okay, I'm actually shy.
- [42:22]
Dr. Heather Berlin
I mean, I've seen you in various contexts and I think it's intermixed. It's intermixed, yeah.
- [42:29]
Michael Pollan
Well, similarly, I mean, I do a lot of public things like this and I do a lot of public talks and I teach and I'm very sure of myself and very sure footed. And I have my opinions and I always have an answer to any question. In reality I don't. And I'm reminded of this by my wife and my son all the time who will remind me that you don't really know anything about that, do you? So there's a certain confidence that I betray in public that I don't necessarily feel.
- [43:02]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Yeah, there's a Persona that you put on of, you know, this is the person, the idealized person that I want to be.
- [43:09]
Michael Pollan
And it's reinforced, of course, by others. I mean, there's a social self and it's how we perceive ourselves in the eyes of others. And I've always wondered, you know, and I've had periods of really being isolated, being alone, going somewhere to focus on my writing or something. And there is this way in which you sense your sense of identity just kind of softening and eroding. And if you did it long enough, it would disappear. It wouldn't quite disappear, but it would change fundamentally. So I think our public identities reinforce all sorts of things about us and our ego that wouldn't otherwise exist.
- [43:54]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Right. And it's almost like an identity that's created outside of your true self. Like I really, I mean, the pandemic was difficult for a number of reasons, not the least of which my children were home and had to be, you know, homeschooled. But I did enjoy this idea that I didn't have to go anywhere, I didn't have to be. There was no pressure and I could just, you don't have to wear makeup, you can wear sweatpants and just be this true self of, you know, not being on, which I found so enjoyable. And when things started to, like Lighten up and we could go out in the world. I wasn't like that thrilled about it, to be honest.
- [44:24]
Dr. Christoph Koch
But is it a true self or is it just a different aspect?
- [44:27]
Dr. Heather Berlin
A different aspect. I enjoy this too, but I enjoy the majority of the time to not be on. And then occasionally you're on and you're sort of. There's a performance aspect to it, but then to kind of retreat, you need a little of both.
- [44:42]
Michael Pollan
I think performance is a key term.
- [44:44]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Yeah, yeah. It's like performative and you're a character. And you know, I once spoke with Bill Nye, the science guy, and he was saying, like, there's two. There's the guy, you know, and then there's Bill.
- [44:55]
Michael Pollan
Right.
- [44:55]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And there. And a lot. Sometimes people lose that distinction between their, like, performative self and their, you know, sort of non performative self, let's say. But I think they're. That we all have to kind of be humble at some level and, you know, realize that we don't know everything. And I just, I'm going to leave on this.
- [45:12]
Dr. Christoph Koch
Speak for yourself.
- [45:13]
Dr. Heather Berlin
My grandmother said to me, my grandmother's advice is always great. When I was very nervous, I was in graduate school and I was giving my first lecture to all these, like, professors. This was at Oxford. It was very intimidating. And I called her so scared grandma. And she said, they all take a shit like you and me.
- [45:30]
Dr. Christoph Koch
All right, grandma.
- [45:31]
Dr. Heather Berlin
And on that note, that has been this episode. Sounds like a great grandma. So I want to thank you, Michael, for joining us today.
- [45:40]
Michael Pollan
Thank you. Thanks for having me coming.
- [45:43]
Dr. Heather Berlin
Yeah. And if you'd like to learn more about your own Perception box, spend some time this week answering the same Perception Box questions that we asked our guests. And check out other questions on the website@ unlikelycollaborators.com you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box, created by unlikely collaborators in partnership with Pod People. I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.
- [46:12]
Dr. Christoph Koch
And I'm Dr. Christopher Koch. Thank you very much.