Using Psychedelics to Understand Spiritual Experiences - Dr. David Yaden, Roland R. Griffiths Professor in Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-Being at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Shiv Gaglani: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani and today on Raise the Line I'm happy to welcome Dr. David Yaden, the Roland R. Griffiths Professor in Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-Being at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he studies the subjective and behavioral effects of psychedelics as well as related ethical issues. 

He has written over fifty academic articles and is the author of a new book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences, 21st Century Research and Perspectives with Oxford University Press,

which I actually finished reading recently and it's very, very good...so I recommend people listening to this take a look at it. 

His scientific and scholarly work has been covered by mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the BBC. His colleagues, Dr. Fred Barrett and Dr. Al Garcia-Romeu, have also been guests on the show and I'm really looking forward to learning about how his research fits into the overall work of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

So, David, thanks for taking the time to be with us today. 

Dr. David Yaden: Great to be here, Shiv. 

Shiv: So, we always like to ask our guests to, in their own words, describe kind of how they got here. So, what got you interested in psychology and then ultimately psychedelics?

Dr. Yaden: So, we talk about research being “me-search,” especially in the psychological sciences. You tend to be interested in something that you have a lot of or none of. For me, my interest in this area began with a spontaneous mystical type or spiritual type experience that happened to me with no drugs or psychoactive substances or meditation practices of any kind.

It's a totally spontaneous experience that involved a very intensely altered state of consciousness, deep feelings of love and meaning and renewal, and left me feeling refreshed with a perspective on life that was enhanced and positive and left me completely fascinated with what happened to me, this kind of experience. 

This became an obsession, really, to understand this experience. I learned that other people have these kinds of experiences. They've been studied throughout history by scholars and increasingly by scientists, and as I learned more, it became more and more clear that this is what I wanted to understand. This is what I wanted to study, and that's what I still do.

Shiv: Yeah, and it's been quite a journey since I think you had that first experience. And you have quite an impressive background, including a stop at the Positive Psychology Group with Dr. Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Do you want to tell us a bit about positive psychology and maybe for our audience -- who are primarily health care professionals and students who focus on abnormal psychology -- maybe you can paint the difference of what positive psychology is for them and why you're fascinated by it?

Dr. Yaden: Yeah. I did my doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania in psychology, and Marty Seligman -- who's the discoverer of learned helplessness and also the founder of positive psychology -- was my mentor. It was a bit difficult for me to find a good fit for a Ph.D. program. Now we talk about altered states of consciousness or mystical type experiences all the time. In the context of psychedelic research, it seems normal. But you have to remember, ten years ago, even five years ago, this was basically a taboo topic to talk about. And if not taboo, certainly fringe, and didn't seem to fit well with mainstream scientific research. 

So, I first studied with Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/radiologist who studies these experiences with meditators in neuroimaging scanners, but I was interested in more psychological topics. So the question was, well, how do I fit my interest into a Ph.D. program? Marty Seligman at that time was spearheading this initiative to focus more on what enhances well-being...looking at nonclinical populations to see what provides a protective effect and an enhancement effect.

The way my interest fit in there was to say, well, here are these pretty brief experiences - minutes or hours long at most -- that can have effects that last months, years, and even by some accounts, decades. These experiences that occur briefly in time but have long lasting positive results ended up being a good fit with the study of well-being more broadly, and so I did my doctoral training with Marty on that topic.

Shiv: Fascinating. It's interesting how one can connect the dots looking backwards -- because I see a direct correlation of what you're doing now and what you did back then -- but I'm sure going into it, I don't know if you had a knowledge that psychedelics would come into play. So, before we get into that and what you do at the Hopkins Center for Psychedelics and Consciousness Research, you mentioned your own personal spiritual experience which helped prompt your interest in psychology in the first place.

I learned quite a bit from your book-- not only about spiritual experiences and the types of them and what potentially causes them and the effects they could have -- but also about William James. In college, I always walked by the William James Hall, but never really took any classes in there. I've got a much better appreciation for someone who is so influential now in how we think about psychology and who coined terms like stream of consciousness and leap of faith. 

So, tell us a bit about your fascination with William James -- just whatever you want to share and what you think our audience should know about him because many of them probably haven't heard of him as much as they have heard of Freud or Jung -- but also what's the thesis of the book and what should our audience know about it? Why should they read it? 

Dr. Yaden: Good. Yeah. Thank you for the kind words about the book. I'm really glad you found it useful. So, after my own experience, I was struggling to find good books to help me just understand what happened to me, and I'm so grateful that I stumbled on William James's classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Here's a guy who studied as a physician, wanted to become a naturalist, studied as a painter for a while, eventually became interested in scientific work in psychology, founded the first psychological laboratory in North America -- right there at Harvard, where there's William James Hall where you walked by. And, actually, Hopkins and Harvard always debate about who actually had the first psychology lab in the US. William James had the first, but he was bringing students in to help them understand psychology, and Hopkins had the first official one, so there's this kind of weird historical debate. 

Anyway, he was a foundational thinker in creating scientific psychology and he was also a towering figure in philosophy and helped to found the field of comparative religion as well. So, he had massive influence. He also influenced the very definition of mental illness, which focuses on the consequences of a particular mental illness, rather than specifying its exact origin. In order to have a mental illness, you need to have suffering of oneself and others and role dysfunction. Here's this absolutely towering figure in the history of science and thought who I hadn't really known much about, strangely, and it's a little weird to try to think through why that is. 

My theory is that William James's views are so contemporary and modern that they're kind of just baked into all of these fields and how they work now. He didn't have this very strange and provocative kind of iconoclastic views like Freud or Jung. He basically said, let's look at the evidence, whatever the topic is, let's go to the evidence. Let's see what we can understand in terms of biology. Let's look at how people actually experience these things and how they report them.

So, the way that he thinks about psychology is just very recognizable to contemporary science. But he provides a very, very sensible and evidence-based perspective that I still think we can learn a lot from, especially when we get into topics that are newer and maybe attract more extreme statements. He's the perfect person to have worked on these meaningful altered states of consciousness that we call religious, spiritual, mystical peak experiences. And of course, there's direct relevance of William James's thought to psychedelic experience.

And so when we look back to history for guides about how we can best go forward in approaching a particular topic, I think you can't get much better than William James and that he deserves to be looked to much more than Freud or Jung, who are much more popular.

Shiv: Yeah, you make a very compelling case in the book about all of his contributions and how he influenced the work we do today and just culture without being really recognized for it. So that's a lot of the first part of the book. Then you get into the types of spiritual experiences, as well as how to induce them and the outcomes that people often have once they've had these. Do you want to talk a bit about some of the types of spiritual experiences that our audience should know about? And why is it even important? Why should we study spiritual experiences? What's the effect it has on abnormal psychology or positive psychology?

Dr. Yaden: I think the first thing to say is, what is a spiritual experience? What is the topic of the book? We kind of know what we mean when we hear that phrase -- like people probably have in mind an idea of what that means -- but the way we define it in the book is an intensely altered state of consciousness involving shifts globally in cognition, affect and perception involving a seeming perception of an unseen order of some kind. That's a long, convoluted definition, obviously, so I'm going to break it down. 

It's basically two parts. One is you have to feel really different; it has to be a really intensely altered state. Secondly, there has to be a sense of meaning involved in the content of the experience. Those two parts allow us to rule out things like a strongly held belief. A strongly held belief is not sufficient. It has to be an intensely altered state. It also just can't be any old, altered state. It can't be just a fever or pain or feeling under the influence of some drug like opioids or something. I mean, these are altered states, but they don't have this meaningful seeming perception to something beyond our normal sense of reality.

And so when you think about putting all of those things together, still, it might be important to provide some concrete examples. Big polling companies like Gallup or the General Social Survey will ask these questions every few years to big swaths of the population. They'll say, “Have you ever had a life-changing religious or mystical experience? Or have you ever felt lifted out of your sense of self and entered into a feeling of connection with existence? Have you ever experienced what some people call God?” 

So, they'll ask these questions, and around 35% of the population in the US and the UK will endorse these statements. They'll say completely “yes.” As much as you allow them to, they'll affirm that they've had one of these experiences.  I find that really interesting. I would have thought that only a few percent of the population at most would endorse these items, but it turns out quite a lot of people have these kinds of experiences.

I think the natural next question is, well, OK, are there different types of experiences? People clearly report a broad range of phenomena. What we find in our survey work when we use clustering algorithms like factor analysis, is that of the people who say they've had one of these experiences -- when we ask them a bunch of further questions and then cluster them -- they cluster down into three main types.

The first one is involving an all-pervasive perception of mind. People usually call that God. They call this a “God experience.” Number two, feeling connected to other people and things, and even all things. We call this “unity experiences” or mystical type experiences. And then thirdly, a non-physical entity of some kind. We call this “ghost experiences.” So, it turns out if you ask any group of people -- and I do this pretty frequently when I give talks -- I say, “How many of you have what you'd consider a spiritual type of experience?” and you'll get about a third of the room will raise their hands. Of those, if you ask for how many did it involve God, about a third will raise their hand. How many did it involve unity? A third. How many ghosts? A third. Very, very roughly speaking here. That covers most of the experiences in terms of types. 

Now they break down into even further types, which I get into in the book. Earlier we talked about the definition of mental illness, which William James impacted. It has to involve suffering and dysfunction. So, if these experiences are happening relatively frequently, and the majority of the time, people are saying that they're contributing to well-being and not causing suffering or dysfunction, well, then that means we can't use mental illness as a framing for these experiences. In fact, they generally boost well-being. The last thing I'll say is it's not as if these experiences are only happening to religious believers. They're reported by people who are religious believers of every faith, as well as a spiritual but not religious, and agnostics and atheists as well.

So, people may interpret these experiences differently, but they'll still endorse that they had one of these experiences and usually benefit from them.

Shiv: Fascinating. Really interesting. And as you said, the pragmatic approach that William James espoused -- what's the actual outcome of this -- is one that's very positive. These spiritual experiences lead to a lot of positive change in people's lives. I see how the work you were doing there, your passion for this, resulted in you coming to Hopkins to work with Roland Griffiths, because I know a lot of that original research he and his team were doing were on mystical experiences from psychedelics.

Many things can induce these spiritual experiences, it seems, and psychedelics seem to be one of the more common or reliable or predictable ones. But you talk in the book about transcranial direct current stimulation, neurotheology like neurotech, meditation, just kind of idiosyncratic, it just happens. 

So, tell us a bit about you joining Hopkins. How did that work out? And then now it's culminated in you becoming the first Roland Griffiths endowed chair -- congratulations on that -- which is a really big accomplishment and you have big shoes to fill, obviously. So yeah, tell us about that journey to Hopkins and then your focus on psychedelics.

Dr. Yaden: Thank you. It's been a long journey and overlapping with my other training. I remember when, in 2006, Roland Griffiths’ first study on psilocybin came out and what a big moment that was. I remember presenting in a class on that study. A few people in the class were really upset and one even said, “I can't believe this research is even legal.” What was so interesting to me is they weren't objecting to the risks. They were objecting to the magnitude of how meaningful people rated the experience. As you probably know, pretty frequently, two thirds of these samples will say that the psychedelic experience was among the top five most meaningful in their whole life. I found that scientifically to be absolutely fascinating. But for some, it causes some alarm and for good reason. I mean, these are profound and powerful experiences. 

I actually wrote an email to Roland at that time and asked him about the belief system of the participants involved. A lot of them endorsed some kind of spiritual or religious belief system. I asked, “Well, what would happen, do you think, if this study was conducted with atheists?” And he said, “I don't know, but we should do that study. We don't have the funding for it.”

Skip ahead fourteen years later or so, we were sitting around the dinner table talking about this exact study. I said, “You know, I did email you about this.” And he said, “Oh, what did I say?” And I said, “Well, you said we should run the study. So, maybe we should do it.” And we are, in fact, planning to run that study now. But basically, over the years, we corresponded periodically. We cited one another's work. We tried to do a couple of grants together.

I was pretty convinced that I would be able to find a laboratory model of inducing these experiences using things like noninvasive brain stimulation, so I devoted a year or so of my research to that topic and I found that it just didn't work, to cut to the chase. I tried meditation research and virtual reality to induce strong feelings of awe -- and these are all interesting areas to do research in -- but it wasn't getting me what I wanted, which is a quite profound experience in a controlled laboratory setting. So, it became increasingly clear to me that psychedelics were really the only game in town to study the kinds of experiences that William James wrote about and that I was so interested in that I had experienced.

It seemed clear to me that the future of this kind of research was in psychedelic research, and so I did my postdoctoral work with Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins and joined the faculty fairly recently. At around that time, Roland Griffiths had his terminal cancer diagnosis, which he's spoken very bravely and gracefully and publicly about. Roland and I started to talk about how there could be a place for this research to continue in perpetuity because it's so difficult to find funding to study this topic. You have to find it in such strange places and it's often scattershot and unstable, so you really have to be very creative in how you try to find funding for this research. Roland's mission was to try to create a research fund that would allow this work to continue, and he knew from our conversations and from my book and our correspondence and my previous work that I was already planning to devote my life to this topic and that wasn't going to change anytime soon.

So, I'm honored and humbled that he named me the first recipient of this research fund. Now we can get down to the business of the actual scientific work rather than spending most of our time trying to find funding for this work. It's really an extraordinary opportunity and I think that this research fund, my lab, will attract a lot of young people who also want to devote their life to this topic because this is now the place to do it.

Shiv: Totally. I definitely have seen that energy and that excitement, and clearly it seems like a lot of the pieces are coming together, not accidentally, by design. It's very exciting. So, speaking of your research priorities, what are some of the studies your lab is doing that you're most excited about or studies that you will be doing...like you mentioned, the one on spiritual experiences and people who are atheists? Just give us an overview because we talked to Fred and Al and heard about their research endeavors specifically. We'd love to hear your focus.

Dr. Yaden: So, the basic scope of the research fund is to focus on non-clinical samples. There's a lot of people suffering from mental illness and there's an enormous need to develop new evidence-based treatments for a variety of mental disorders. I should also say that there are effective treatments that a lot of people don't avail themselves of enough. So, there are effective treatments, but we need more. No one would argue with that. And psychedelics could be, for many, an effective treatment. That kind of research is absolutely essential. But I think it's important that in addition, there's at least some space to study non-clinical questions in psychedelic research. 

This relates to enhancing well-being, for example. The World Health Organization's definition of health explicitly mentions well-being, and psychedelics seem to boost well-being pretty substantially for a pretty long time. It's possible -- with the caveats that there are risks and adverse events do occur -- but it's possible that psychedelic experiences are the most potent positive intervention so far discovered. So, better quantifying the risk-benefit ratio of psychedelics as a kind of positive intervention or a well-being enhancer is, I think, an important research priority.

Additionally, these experiences induced by psychedelics sometimes result in subjective experiences that are similar or almost identical to experiences reported in meditation contexts or prayer contexts or spontaneously in historical accounts as well as contemporary accounts. So, how does psychedelic experiences that have a kind of mystical type or spiritual type character relate to mystical type or spiritual type experiences not triggered by psychedelics?

That's another really important avenue. 

Then, a lot of the psychedelic research that's been done so far has been in these quote-unquote WEIRD settings -- Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. When you look at where the labs are, the main ones are in Baltimore, London and Zurich. It's great that there's work happening, but these are pretty similar cultural contexts and we don't really have studies coming from other large population centers all across the world, as well as from places and peoples who have been using psychedelics for decades or centuries or perhaps longer in some cases.

We really need to collect these data to provide a full and more complete picture of what psychedelic experiences involve and how much beliefs and cultural expectations play a role in constructing or influencing these experiences, as well as how similar they are across cultures, because there's probably similarities as well.

Shiv: Yeah, that's super fascinating, the global context especially. One of the reasons I think our audience is so interested and excited about this area is that we're trying to train as many healthcare professionals as possible to, as we say, raise the line and strengthen the healthcare system. But it's a very leaky bucket because so many healthcare providers are burning out due to moral injury, and potentially, this therapeutic area could help. I'm sure you know this from the person you dedicate the book to -- your wife, Bit, who is a psychiatrist. I know you worked with Dr. Seligman, and I give her a shout out because I know she's also involved in your work at the lab. So, very cool that you have that direct connection to the clinical side, too.

Dr. Yaden: The book is dedicated to my wife, Bit, who's a psychiatrist, and she's focused on a lot of educational initiatives in medical education. We have medical students and residents and other trainees from across the country -- really the world -- emailing us en masse to try to learn about these substances, these compounds, these experiences, and psychedelics in general.

There's not really a formal curriculum. There's not really a trusted source to learn about psychedelics and psychedelic experiences, so I think it's really important to provide an evidence-based perspective that demonstrates the potential without going overboard and getting into potentially dangerous hype, you know, or just “all or nothing” thinking...seeing psychedelics as the answer to everything on the one hand or having no therapeutic value whatsoever. The truth is between those. There are risks, but I'm cautiously optimistic that psychedelics could be a way to enhance well-being and potentially help treat mental disorders in the future. I think that's very exciting.

Shiv: You're singing our song about trying to educate the masses about this, and it’s one of the reasons we have you on. I want to be respectful of your time, so my last question for you is in two parts. One is, do you have any advice for our audience about meeting the challenges of this moment in their careers and just approaching their careers in general? And then the final word, is there anything else you want to share with our audience that we didn't get to cover? 

Dr. Yaden: Well, I should say I have been extremely lucky, and so I don't know that my strategy is one that can generalize. I would say my path has been defined by following my interests almost to an obsessive degree. But what I find interesting is that a lot of times the work that I do out of pure, unbridled curiosity and interest ends up being what has furthered my career the most -- in other words, the stuff that I didn't think would be helpful and I was working on, on the side, out of my own passion.

Those things have ended up -- not always, by any means -- but sometimes being what really helped open the next door the most. So, I would say it's worthwhile to make some space in your life for your true passions and interests understanding, of course, that you've got to do what you have got to do for most of the time. But finding some space for intrinsic interest seems so important to me.

Shiv: That's great advice. Really good advice. And relatable, again. My side project became Osmosis. Any final words about you, the lab, psychedelics, anything else you want to share?

Dr. Yaden: Well, if you want to find out more about this research fund, you can go to Griffithsfund.org. That will describe the mission of the research fund, the kind of research that we hope to do. If you want to donate or if you just want to get in touch, please do go there. I just want to thank you, Shiv, for having me on. It's been a really fun conversation.

Shiv: For sure, David. Thanks so much for taking the time and more importantly for the great work you and your team are doing to help humans flourish. 

So with that, thanks to our audience for checking out today's show. Go to Griffithsfund.org to learn more. And as always, remember to do your part to raise the line and strengthen our health care system. We're all in this together. Take care.