This Is Your Brain on Psychedelics

29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Why is that still unknown for sure? Well, I've been looking at a brain for like 100 years. Well, because it's very, very sparsely encoded and it's dynamic. and it is distributed across, you know, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses. And so, you know, it's not, and it's not encoded in like, you know, philosophers have, you know, speculated about the existence of a grandmother cell, for example, like you can just poke a electrode down in the brain and identify the neuron that responds to grandma. We have never found anything that looks like that. Instead, it looks like the way that the brain encodes memories is by population coding.

29:58So the changes in the patterns of activity across many, many, many, many neurons is how the memory gets encoded. So an analogy that might be useful is think of a QR code. So if a QR code represents all of the, a cell, a neuron, and the black and white pixels on that QR code each represent a synapse, the memory isn't the whole block turning, you know, more black or more white. It is the pattern of black and white pixels on that QR code. And so the memory is just how the pattern changes, not some sort of gradation, graded effect, which makes it very difficult to measure from a distance. Yeah. And is that, could that also be, and maybe there's a different reason, but what I'm hearing, maybe that's why memories are so unreliable.

30:57you know, in terms of the recall? Well, I mean, I think that they can be unreliable if you think of them as being constantly modified, right? So things that are very reliable memories are the ones that are essentially encoded because the same event triggered sort of redundant networks of neurons, reinforced, either reinforced because of a reward signal or reinforced because of a fear signal or reinforced because you, it was so powerful at the moment, you, your, your olfactory system, your visual system, your emotional system, your social system, all of these networks encoded it redundantly. And so you have lots of different ways to access that memory sometime in the future.

31:49Right. Whereas if something just happened today and it was like, ho-hum, you know, just another, you know, hard-boiled egg for breakfast, you probably will only encode that in the least redundant way possible, and it will kind of fall away over time. Wow, that's a great, great explanation. Are neurosciences now looking at psychedelics as the master key that will unlock the brain's plasticity? Yeah, so that's definitely the way that my lab and like a handful of other labs that have reproduced our findings are our finding. And I just want to back up to you to explain what a critical period is and why this is such a big deal for neuroscience.

32:31So critical periods were first discovered and or first described in 1935 by Conrad Lorenz. He used that term to describe imprinting behavior in geese. And what he noticed is that those baby goslings sort of within 48 hours after hatching will form a lasting, really robust, learned attachment to whatever is moving around in their environment. So normally that would be their mom. But if mom isn't available, it can be any other, you know, caregiver in the immediate environment. But it can also be, you know, a kooky scientist like Conrad Lorenz. But after that first 48 hours is over, then they no longer are sensitive to what's moving around in their environment, and they don't learn those attachments.

33:24And so Conrad Lorenz called that a critical period. Basically, every memory that we, every part of learning and memory that we think is important for enabling humans and other organisms to develop complex behaviors, we think now is regulated by a critical period because there aren't enough genes in the genome to encode every possible behavior. Instead, what's encoded is the ability to flexibly learn from your environment depending on what you're growing up with, right? So it doesn't make any sense to have, you know, a genetically hardwired one single language to rule them all, if you will. Instead, what you're born with is the ability to learn whatever language you happen to hear in your environment when you grew up.

34:21So for me, it doesn't make any sense to be genetically hardwired with Turkish. I learned English because I was born in the United States and then also Turkish because my parents spoke it to me. So language is also governed by a critical period. And what we have discovered over, you know, since 1935, is that there are dozens of critical periods. We haven't discovered all of them yet. And probably the reason that we're so terrible at curing diseases of the brain is because by the time we get around to intervening, the relevant critical period has closed. So neuroscientists have been dreaming of a way to reopen critical periods basically since 1935.

35:09And so when I was a graduate student at MIT, I remember there was another competing lab at Harvard and they were making the claim that, you know, we just have to understand these mechanisms and eventually we'll get a master key and we'll be able to unlock them. And I remember sort of making fun of that idea. Like no way anything that would do that to the brain would either cause it to structurally melt down or cause amnesia or cause some kind of seizure activity because of what we know about the mechanisms of critical periods. So it was quite surprising to me when we just, you know, when we first discovered that psychedelics reopen critical periods and that In fact, all of them do it.

35:57And now it seems that they share the same mechanisms as other ways of reopening critical periods that we've known about for a really long time. And now a bunch of other labs have shown that they can reopen not just the critical period we discovered, but other critical periods that people have been working on for a really long time. So can I ask you this, okay, based on what you just explained to us, which sounds really cool. Like there's a lot of potential there of what you just said. But what came to my mind, and I'm a huge advocate for people to use psychedelics for positive purposes. But the way you say this opening a critical period, I also kind of hear maybe opening a Pandora's box.

36:45Because that critical period, like maybe there are some things in there that were neatly tucked away. and then you open it up and now I'm totally effed because there's things in this critical period are open again to me. So what do you do for that?

37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:So is it a paradigm in your field to presume that access to early states of mind and emotions is always a good thing? Yeah, what he said. Yeah. Yeah, right, like right on. I love this, yes. Yes. So it's the case that we think that critical periods need to close, right? Like, you know, and that if you don't close them properly, you can end up with diseases of the brain. We think, for example, autism might represent a failure to close critical periods properly. Furthermore, we think that that's because if you've ever walked around like a forest with a two-year-old, you know that it is very difficult, right?

37:50They notice everything. They're curious about everything. They are solving problems in a totally different way than we as adults are solving problems. But it's terribly inefficient. Like you usually don't get very far. And, you know, if there was a saber-toothed tiger running around, you'd be, if everybody was experiencing the world that a child, the way that a child does, you'd be done, right? And so they need to close. It's less efficient. We need to eventually get into the mode of experiencing the world, relying on our habit-based memories and our learned efficiencies for accomplishing different things.

38:32But if, for example, we learn something and it was adaptive at the time, but no longer adaptive, for example, let's say that you were a child and you experienced some horrible trauma, then you probably learned how to, in that moment, adapt to that situation in a very guarded learning to be hypervigilant about threats around you and not trusting people. And that was protective and adaptive at the time. But as you get older and that threat disappears and you're now physically mature and able to defend yourself better, then those kinds of learned responses around your trauma are no longer appropriate.

39:20So what we're imagining is that the way that these psychedelics are helping for diseases like PTSD is that they are enabling a sort of reopening of that window of time when you learned so that you can reconfigure the memories and patterns of behavior in a way that is appropriate for your current circumstances. But is that in tandem with the therapeutic phase of maybe some therapy, some psychiatry, and not just a standalone? Just give them psychedelics, they'll be fine. What are the accompaniments that go along with it? Yeah, so this is another really cool thing about our mechanistic explanation for how psychedelics work is that we have known for decades that, and actually Timothy Leary is one of the first psychologists who described it this way.

40:13He said that psychedelics effects are dependent on the set and setting. And what he meant by that is the mindset that you're in when you take them and the setting that you're in, who else is around you when you take them. And that can have a huge effect on whether you have a good trip or a bad trip, whether or not you have a therapeutic effect or whether you have something like, you know, you hang out with Charles Manson and you end up, you know, murdering people because you think you're accomplishing something great, right? So that context dependence of psychedelics effects has been known for a really long time.

40:52And what we discovered is that critical period reopening with psychedelics is also context dependent. So if we give MDMA, for example, in a social context, we can reopen the social reward learning critical period in mice. But if we give it in an isolation context, we don't open that critical period. And what I think that's analogous to is if you take MDMA and you go to a rave, maybe you're reopening a critical period for socializing or dancing, but it's not going to be the right kind of environment for unlocking those traumatic memories and trying to have a therapeutic effect, which we think requires a therapeutic context in order to achieve.

41:42Wow, that's great. Let me just ask you, just as an aside, what is it about ketamine that causes dumbass billionaires to think they know anything about running a government? You know, I'm not going to be able to answer that. I don't know said dumbass billionaires. What I can say is that in general, psychedelics have this ability, this property called the noetic property, which was actually described by William James in the late 1800s. And that noetic property means that when you take a noetic property is that feeling that what you're experiencing is the really real. Everything else up until this moment was sort of a limited view of the world.

42:35But now that I've had this experience, now I really, really know. And that noetic property is part of, I think we think it's important for achieving the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. It's also probably appropriate when you're a child to have this kind of approach to everything that you learn, like, this is it. I know it now and I can really lock in this memory. But it's also, you know, potentially if it's misused or misunderstood or, you know, if you if you weren't aware of the seduction of that kind of I really know now, you know, you can end up believing that you understand or know more than you do, which is why I think that we have to be sort of careful about the potential for using these compounds and then ending up with sort of narcissism or potentially sort of a messiah complex.

43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:But Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, upon returning to Earth later on, would create the Noetic Institute. Oh, what? That's right. Here's what happened. On his way back from the moon, he was positioned in the capsule in such a way that the rotation of the capsule was in the same plane as the plane of the solar system. So that as the capsule turned, he would see in sequence the Earth, the moon, other planets, the sun, and that would repeat the entire three days back to Earth. Wow. And so this experience, he kept thinking to himself, am I getting a deeper understanding of reality by this repeated exposure to something no one ever would otherwise get to see.

44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so he was certain afterwards, or at least confident, that there was some state of mind beyond what our normal reality was that might be achievable when you're exposed in this way as he was. Ah. That was his own ibogaine. The solar system was his ibogaine. Yeah. He's got a universal fix. Yeah. He was rotating like, I'm high as hell right now. Yes, essentially. Yeah. Yes, that was his transcendent state of mind. That was the first time I'd heard the word or seen the term noetic. Noetic. I didn't know what it meant. And you're reaffirming this belief that you have achieved something that no one else has, so therefore we all must come to you for the answers.

45:22Right.

45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:And it's Edgar Mitchell's quote that I opened one of my books with, which is, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty, you want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch. He got angry, didn't he? Earth floating in the air. Wow. Yeah. That's the same guy who started the Noetic Institute. Yeah. Just saying. Hey, listen. I'm with him.

46:05That guy's awesome. All right, we all. Yeah, that's pretty... He's feeling it. He was feeling the cosmic perspective. That is intense, but deservedly so. Yes. Yeah. So when we reopen these critical periods, can they be beneficial for resetting, re-educating, giving us a better look at maybe the sciences? Maybe astrophysics? No, I love it because guess what? I'm not high. I'm just trying to get better at calculus. Is that what it is? Okay. Officer. Officer.

46:45Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Absolutely. Absolutely. This critical period idea certainly extends beyond the notion that it only could be useful for therapeutic properties, but, you know, also for improving our ability to learn new things when we're adults, right? So once our critical periods have closed, you know, the adage, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. You know, the idea here is, is that if you take psychedelics, well, maybe you can. And so, yeah, if you had something that, gosh, you know, I, for example, I struggle with learning languages if I want it. you know, in theory, the idea, if this turns out to be true, is that, you know, we would be able to use this for all types of learning, not just learning around neuropsychiatric illness like PTSD.

47:37And in fact, actually, you know, one of the ways that we are testing this idea of, you know, the generalizability across lots of different critical periods is that in collaboration with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Steve Zeiler, and the team of neurologists and occupational therapists that we are working with, we are using psychedelics, in this case, psilocybin, to try and reopen a motor learning critical period for people who had stroke. And so after you have a stroke, your motor learning critical period opens for about a month or two months and then it closes. And so whatever physical therapy, whatever occupational therapy you get within that first two months after you have a stroke, that's kind of it.

48:32Like whatever improvements you get after that time, that's it. But for a lot of people, it takes, you know, after that is closed, those people still have motor deficits. And so the dream here is that, you know, we could go back a year out from the stroke when they're no longer able to get any motor improvements anymore and give psilocybin, pair it this time instead of with psychotherapy, with physical therapy, with occupational therapy. and now the therapeutic context is motor learning and can we get, you know, improvements in motor function and rehabilitation?

49:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're taking care of the mind and body. There you go. So now you've made me think, can you replicate this sort of practice with dementia patients with Alzheimer's sufferers or is that just one step too far right now? Well, right now what it looks like is that unfortunately this mechanism doesn't really suggest a way that it would be useful for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or any of the neurodegenerative diseases because it doesn't cause neurons to regrow. It doesn't cause new neurons to be born. And those neurodegenerative processes are unlikely to be interrupted. So even if you could use psychedelics to get some kind of, you know, motor therapy to help Parkinson's patients, you know, regain some of the functions that they lost by teaching them alternative pathways for, let's say, swallowing or moving, the neurodegenerative process is going to continue.

50:13And so we don't think that they will be that therapeutically useful in those cases. I just have one question about when you're talking about learning things or when you open a window. So I read that, I forget the particular period, but cocaine was used in marriage therapy, you know, in couples therapy, which is not a good idea. However, could you use these psychedelics to reopen a period where the chemical attraction between two people was greatest and kind of spark a reignition of their romance so that they're more open to receiving one another? You're asking for a friend. Yes, of course. No, I'm not, because my wife hates me.

51:12Like, let's get it, don't get it twisted. No, yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, Alexander Shulgin, who is the chemist who is most frequently associated and who did the first sort of scientific characterization of MDMA, but also invented hundreds of other psychedelics. He loved MDMA and was particularly enamored of the idea that it could be used exactly for that for couples therapy. And so I think his wife, Ann Shulgin, was a therapist. And in fact, before MDMA became a Schedule I drug, it was actually used legally by psychotherapists for helping people be able to explore conflict in a very open and honest and vulnerable way that was especially useful for people who were having difficulty communicating with each other, for example, in couples.

52:13Not so much as a, you know, aphrodisiac, but more as a way of being vulnerable and open to get past conflicts that are ordinarily too scary or too, you know, that you might not say because you'd be afraid of hurting somebody's feelings. But to be able to be open and vulnerable in this way seems to be one of the options. Well, I'm a sensitive guy, so vulnerability is an aphrodisiac to me. Absolutely. I think that's right. That's right. No, that's right. I think that, you know, people who focus on just sort of the immediate attraction rather than the importance of these kinds of more vulnerable states for building long-term trust and being able to really communicate.

52:59This is what sets apart love and lust. And I think that But it's better to, I think it's more appropriate to think of psychedelics as fostering this type of behavior, this altered state called love. And, you know, I could do a whole podcast on the different types of love and oxytocin neurons and the subtypes for different subtypes of love.

53:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Now you tell us. That's what we would have done this podcast on. Okay. Go on. Yeah, I mean, you know, when I first started my lab, one of the things that we really worked on was trying to figure out the different subtypes of oxytocin neuron. And we discovered that there are, you know, the big oxytocin neurons that are important for what I what I call like mad love, like falling in love with your partner, falling in love with your baby. And then sort of platonic love that are encoded by oxytocin neurons that are smaller, release smaller amounts of this prosocial peptide oxytocin and are really important for things like being able to form communal attachments, knowing who to let into your friend group and who not.

54:12and also, you know, encodes love in a much more guarded and nuanced way. And it seems that those two types of oxytocin neurons have evolved in parallel in species that do more or less of this pair bonding type of love behavior.

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57:00This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

57:10Cool. You're recently searching to ibogaine. A, you know it's a rock star. B, what is it? And what are its origins? Yeah, so Ibogaine is a psychedelic that, you know, I can divide up psychedelics into different categories based on their acute subjective effects. Ibogaine is what is called an onirogenic psychedelic, meaning onirogen just means induces a dreamlike state. Yeah. And so, you know, typically when people talk about Ibogaine trips, they're talking about, you know, this dreamlike state that feels very much like you're doing a history of your life in a slideshow or like a dreamscape. People do life reviews.

57:59People talk about how important those life reviews are for their ability to understand whatever psychological issues that they are having. Ibogaine comes from a, it's a chemical that is synthesized from iboga, which is a chemical that comes from the Tabernanthe iboga plant. It's a tree and the ibogaine is concentrated in the root and the bark of that tree.

58:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's found where? Where do you find that tree? It's found in Gabon mostly in Africa. And it is traditionally used by the Bwiti tribes. And its use dates back, you know, depending on which sort of standard you use. And this is, you know, definitely not my field. But, you know, anthropological evidence suggests that it has been in continuous human use for, you know, at least a thousand years, probably more than that. So it says, you know, humans have been using Ibogaine for as long as, for example, psilocybin. Those two are probably the two oldest psychedelics that we have historical anthropological evidence that people have been using them.

59:16So, yeah, and it's different from other psychedelics insofar as, you know, the trip is very, very long. And it has been especially interesting because it turns out that the veterans who are dealing with a huge amount of PTSD and depression and suicidality are trekking down to Mexico and other countries to use Ibogaine to help treat their PTSD and their addiction and their depression. Is that because it's viewed as an illegal substance here in the U.S.? It is an illegal substance. It's a Schedule I psychedelic, and so it is not used therapeutically in the United States. But in Mexico, the legal status of Ibogaine is a little bit more unclear.

1:00:13It's basically not illegal, but it's not totally legal either.

1:00:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Who establishes these levels of drugs? The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 is what established psychedelics, including Ibogaine, as a Schedule I drug, and it is regulated by the DEA and the FDA. But because of this incredible therapeutic promise of Ibogaine, you know, Americans for Ibogaine has done an amazing public awareness campaign and also legislative campaign to try and use some of the money that came to governments for reducing or addressing the opioid crisis. starting first in Texas what they were able to do is get legislation passed that and it unlocks state level money to do research on Ibogaine for addressing you know sort of the opioid crisis in this country and most recently the Trump administration has acknowledged that this is a priority for them to try and get these medications you know research.

1:01:30I will say Ibogaine I just want to be careful about Ibogaine, though. As powerful as it is and is sort of remarkably effective, the evidence, the anecdotal evidence and sort of this, you know, in the clinics in Mexico kind of evidence to suggest that it's useful for opioid use disorder, Ibogaine is a little bit, I mean, it has cardiotoxicity, meaning that if you take it and you have a pre-existing heart condition, it seems that, you know, you need to pair it with something that can stabilize the heart like magnesium in order to overcome this cardiotoxicity. So the FDA and the DEA are very interested in supporting this research.

1:02:18The National Institute of Drug Abuse actually just gave a group at Harvard$11 million grant to work on a phase one safety study for Ibogaine. And that is going to be really, really important to determine whether or not we can eventually use this medication clinically for opioid use disorder. Oh, that's great.

1:02:44Neil deGrasse Tyson:So these, many of these rules are 50 years out of date is the point. And somebody needs to get in there and at least review it every decade or so. I mean, there's got to be some sensible way to keep you guys, your labs active and vibrant in the effort to explore these connections. That's right. And we are, you know, very excited about the possibility that, you know, MAPS, you know, you guys had Rick Doblin on this show a couple years ago. MAPS is an organization that spent the last 40 years working on trying to provide the clinical data to say, you know what, these drugs don't belong in Schedule 1 because they do have therapeutic efficacy.

1:03:28And it's looking very hopeful that approvals for MDMA and psilocybin may come through as early as this year, but we're all sort of waiting.

1:03:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:I hope so. Wasn't marijuana a schedule one at some point? Am I remembering that correctly? It was, without a doubt. That was because they were convinced that black people were using it. They were like, you know, we got to do something about these jazz musicians. You know, they're playing their notes all over the place. They must be high. Well, you know it. Little white kids will love jazz. Yeah, so So, yeah, if there's disproportionate usage in the black community, then you get to arrest them, but not the alcohol abusers that are in the white community. And then you have a disproportionate— A disproportionate point of people going to prison.

1:04:19Same thing with crack cocaine and regular cocaine. Right. You know, crack cocaine, you know, you go to jail for a lot longer. Why? Because there's a disproportionate use in the black community. Yeah. However, I will say this, what's great about what you're doing, what has to happen is people have got to understand that in general, no one wants to be addicted to drugs. That's right. Period. Like full stop, we got to get over this whole notion in this nation. And it's pretty much like the only nation in the world that does this. When we look at people whose brains have been hijacked by a substance, and we say the treatment for that is to throw your ass in jail.

1:05:06It is the dumbest freaking thing in the world. And if we divorce ourselves from that philosophy, then it will free us to go ahead and explore ways that we might deal with the problem to help people and solve the problem at the same time. Chuck, for president. Yes. Before we sadly have to let you go, Goul, I must ask you, Studying psychedelics, does it affect your relationship with reality?

1:05:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thank you for asking that. With objective reality. Whoa. Right. So true. I like that. Objective reality. Yeah. I mean, I often end up on panels, especially within the psychedelics community, where, you know, there are four of us on stage and three of them say, oh, yeah, you know, psychedelics reveal that, you know, it pulls the curtain. And now I'm able to see the really real. And now I know that there's a reality beyond the physical world. I am a biologist and an evolutionary. I see things in terms of evolution and biology and physicalism. You know, I started my career as an undergrad, but my major was sponsored by the philosophy department and it was called comparative perspectives on the mind.

1:06:29And I really sort of considered all different philosophical views on this. And I have to say that for me, the study of psychedelics has convinced me even more that we live in a physicalist reality and that the very fact that you can take a molecule, put it in your mouth and have that molecule essentially mimic another molecule that's in your brain already, and then drastically alter your perception of reality and consciousness, tells me that what we think of as consciousness is just the manifestation of two molecules interacting with each other and that the universe is explainable, even if we can't do it right now, in terms of physical reality.

1:07:23Well, you're great at a party, aren't you? God. Thanks for bringing me down, Gull. I know, I often get that. People are like, you're killing my dream, you know, but I just...

1:07:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, Gull, you're my hero, Gull. Neil's over here. I'm loving it. Grinning from ear to ear, man. No, no, Gull. But I've always said that the brain barely works enough to decode objective reality from that which is not. It barely succeeds at this. So to stir in some chemicals and then say, oh, now I can see it better, I don't get that. It could be an augmentation, Neil. It doesn't necessarily have to be a detraction. I mean, I think going back, though, to this notion of the noetic property, right? Like it is a every I wouldn't necessarily frame it as the brain is barely working. Rather, I would say it's that we are interpreting the universe through our sensory modalities.

1:08:30And this everything that we see was evolved as a response to what was required to adapt and survive as an organism. To not die. To not die, right? And so to me, there is potentially a reason why we would want to reopen critical periods. So I'll give you another example. We have known for many, many years that you can reopen critical periods by doing deprivation experiments. So in mice and humans, this looks like, for example, if you wanted to reopen the visual critical period, you can blindfold somebody for two weeks or, you know, blindfold an animal for two weeks, and then it'll reopen the visual critical period.

1:09:18And when you do that in humans, that experiment, it causes mystical experiences and hallucinations that are phenomenologically very similar to psychedelics. And we know that mystical traditions and religions have used this sort of deprivation type of experiment for millennia to achieve mystical states, you know, going and living in a cave for a month or, you know, what the Zen Buddhists called beginner's mind. I mean, if you're looking for a neurobiological description of beginner's mind, critical period reopening is it. And so in my view, the sort of phenomenological overlap between psychedelic mediated critical period reopening and deprivation mediated critical period reopening suggests that what it feels like to be in this altered state of consciousness is just what it feels like to reopen critical periods.

1:10:16And I think that the reason that these things exist, like why does the brain need a mechanism for reopening critical periods? If it's so important that we close them, why would we ever want to be able to reopen them? If we're an ancient person, And why would we do it with, you know, a psychedelic or a religious practice? And I think the reason is, is because learned habits of memory are very useful so long as your environment is stable and you're exposed to rules that you can follow and easily, easily navigate the world following your sort of trained habits of thought and behavior. But imagine if something radically shifts in your environment, right?

1:11:02So if you're a mouse, if your whole mouse colony gets eaten by a wolf, or if you're a human and you move to a new culture where nobody speaks your language, these would all be circumstances where your brain would probably want to hit the reset button and say, you know what, the statistics of the world that I'm in right now are changed. changed and I need to relearn for the environment that I now find myself in. And so I do think that, you know, this, these altered states are not really a broken brain so much as a brain experiencing a radical shift, kind of like if you and I were having this conversation and the video started flickering, we might not do anything with the flickering, but if it froze for any amount of time, we would hit the reset button, reset the internet, reset the browser, and try and go again.

1:12:03And I think that's kind of what the brain has evolved to be able to do when there are big shifts in the environment. Can you repeat all that? You were breaking up.

1:12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I want to take this out. I want to take this out, if I may. So Ghoul, I'm still stuck on your octopus, okay? Because we didn't really... That was an hour and a half ago. I know, it was an hour and a half, however long ago. Let me just say that you already said, I did not know that octopi, octopuses, are asocial. So humans are generally not asocial. We're very communal, generally, as a species, for sure. So it seems to me, as much as we all love us some octopus, especially after the documentary, My Octopus Teacher, No one, love me some octopus. But as a next species to test, I don't see why you would glean any insights back into humans by treating octopuses other than have a hilarious time watching them react.

1:13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the reason why I ask is, we already talked about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks for all the reasons you gave. Why not do this on dogs and then demonstrate that you can teach an old dog new tricks, and a dog is a mammal, vertebrate. It's not a squishy, invertebrate, eight-legged creature that squirts ink or whatever they do. It's ink. Okay. So wouldn't dogs, in this adage, can't teach an old dog new tricks, wouldn't that be a more useful other animal to test this on rather than an octopus? Dogs like meth. Instead? Yeah. Okay, they told you. Dogs don't like MDMA. They like meth.

1:13:51Well, I will tell you, you know, this is an old debate in neuroscience. And in fact, I have to say my lab studies humans, mice and octopuses. And the reason for the octopus experiment is actually it's not our idea. Jay-Z Young, who was sort of the great granddaddy of neuroscience meets ethology, was the first to propose this idea that if you want to understand how to build complex behaviors from synapses, molecules, circuits, you can certainly look at the human brain and then look at the most common closest relative. But another way to do it would be to look at an animal that is maximally different from humans and yet still capable of these complex behaviors.

1:14:47And what advantage of that is, is that you get, you don't have to get distracted by accidents of evolutionary history. So the best example of that is, is that, you know, an octopus doesn't have a cerebral cortex. It doesn't have a nucleus accumbens. It doesn't have a brainstem. It doesn't have an amygdala. None of those brain regions exist in an octopus. And yet, when you give them MDMA, because the molecular similarity is there, you can induce these complex behaviors that are very similar. And so that tells us that all of these studies out there that are doing like fMRI brain imaging and saying, oh, look, I gave a psychedelic or I gave whatever, I had people play Tetris or whatever experiment they're doing, and look, this part of the brain lit up, that kind of inference about the mechanistic relationship between those brain regions and those functions is a little bit misleading.

1:15:51And that the true mechanism is really at the level of molecules. And depending on the evolutionary history of the animal, they can use the sort of anatomical toolkit in whatever way makes sense for their evolutionary history but you don't need a cortex

1:16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:to do it god it just would be really cool if you had an old dog and then you gave it your medicine and then it did a new trick you could do that on the today show and then that would do you you and you get all the funding you want after that exactly well i i sort of yeah i mean i i sort of did that in mice. And I'm hoping that if we can show this in humans, then we, you know, by doing the stroke experiment, then I think it will radically shift the way that we understand this mechanism and will really open up all kinds of other avenues of study and all kinds of other diseases. I mean, we are currently, for example, also interested in, does an octopus even have a critical period?

1:16:56Do they, you know, just to challenge this notion, like what are critical periods good for? You know, an octopus is able to regrow its limbs if you cut them off. Sometimes they cut them off themselves. There are some species of octopus that are so asocial that the male, in order to mate with the female, just dislodges his sperm-delivering hectocotylus arm so that he doesn't get eaten. And then he can regrow it. And so maybe they don't need critical periods in the same way that we do. And in fact, if they have some sort of novel, you know, innovation in their genetic code that enables them to do that, we want to know about it so that we can, you know, sort of co-opt their superpowers if having those superpowers doesn't come with some other, you know, risk or downfall that we don't want.

1:17:52Right. And so we want to understand them. All I know is this. If you're ever with a woman who makes you have to dislodge your heptocondolus arm, you are with the wrong woman. You got terrible taste of women. Okay. I'm like, girl, I need that.

1:18:14I do have to say working with octopuses is fun because they are unlike mice, which are sort of, you know, the potato chips of the animal kingdom. Right. Everybody eats them.

1:18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:So the tasty, tasty snacks. Yeah. So when they get scared, though, they you know, they do they are sort of obligate stoics. Right. So they don't have much of a response. They freeze. They kind of cower in the corner. When you do something an octopus doesn't like, it will squirt you with water or ink and it will let you know. And I sort of I like that they have attitude like that. It feels, you know, they're more similar to us. And that is why, actually, I think that there is such a instinct to anthropomorphize around octopuses and to sort of imagine that they're like as smart as us, because they sort of occupy the same top predator role in their habitat.

1:19:11And so we have a tendency to see a lot of ourselves in them. But I would just ask everybody to exercise some caution about that kind of anthropomorphizing because, you know, the truth is compared to a mouse, you know, we are olfactory morons.

1:19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson:Or even dogs, yeah. Are you kidding me? Exactly. Not to mention bears, please. But not only that, if an octopus wanted to imprison you, it would just need to put you in a room with a door that has three doorknobs. You would never get out. But it could easily just open it up. Oh, that's funny. Well, you know, and Aristotle thought that octopuses were the dumbest animal because they were easy to catch. All you had to do was dangle a piece of, you know, something shiny in front of them and they would reach out and explore it. and then you just lift that shiny thing out of the water. And so he thought they were just dumb.

1:20:07And, you know, by that measure, you know, humans are pretty dumb too. You just dangle a couple of, you know, dollars in front of them and they'll go chasing. So, you know.

1:20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, Aristotle got almost everything wrong in the physical sciences. Tell me about it. So, yeah, you have no hero worship about him from me. Yeah. Well, thank you. And we understand you were going to be with us in person, but the sea gods, Neptune and Poseidon, got in the way. The storms closed Newark Airport. And so thanks for joining us from your, you've been holed up in a hotel in Chicago. So thanks for joining us nonetheless, in spite of those challenges. Thank you very much. It's been great. And how do we find your lab online? Is it, how do we track what you do? So my lab is at dolenlab.org.

1:20:58Oh, cool.

1:20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:DomeLab.org. There you go. All right. Okay. Thanks for joining us once again. Thank you. All right. So this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition. Chuck, thanks again for being on here. Gary. Pleasure, my friend. Always having you guys here. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always. Keep looking up. Thank you.

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