JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we're talking about bliss.

JAD: And so far, I've gotta say we're not doing so great. I mean, we had a fleeting moment, a dream that crumbled, snowflakes that evaporate in your hand.

ROBERT: But in the next story, we're gonna shoot for bliss that lasts.

MIKE YOUNG: Hello, this is Mike Young.

ANDY MILLS: Mike.

MIKE YOUNG: Speak up, Andy.

JAD: Comes to us from our producer Andy Mills.

ANDY: Can you hear me?

MIKE YOUNG: I can hear you.

JAD: All right, so set this up. Who is this guy?

ANDY: His name's Mike Young.

JAD: All right.

ANDY: I called him up because of something that happened to him a little over 50 years ago.

MIKE YOUNG: Let's see, this was 1962.

ANDY: It was something that he still thinks about all these years later.

MIKE YOUNG: I was in my early 20s—22, something like that. 21.

ANDY: He was an undergraduate at a theological school in Boston, and one day he received a very different kind of religious education.

JAD: A very different kind.

ANDY: Uh-huh.

JAD: That's a good tease.

MIKE YOUNG: The event occurred on Good Friday.

ANDY: And it happened at ...

MIKE YOUNG: The Boston University Marsh Chapel.

ANDY: He was sitting not up in the main chapel, but down in the little basement chapel. And he was sitting with about 19 of his fellow classmates.

MIKE YOUNG: The meditation service was being piped down to us from the chapel above.

ANDY: They have speakers in the front of this little chapel in the basement.

MIKE YOUNG: It had organ music and an excellent choir, and ...

ANDY: The voice of the preacher. It was this kind of famous guy named Howard Thurman.

MIKE YOUNG: And we relaxed, and interesting ideas began going off in my head. Sometimes it was hard to pay attention to what was going on in the room. And we slid gently right into the psilocybin experience.

JAD: Wait, he said "psilocybin?"

ANDY: [laughs] Yes.

JAD: What?

ANDY: As in magic mushrooms.

JAD: Shrooms? You're gonna have to explain that one.

ANDY: This was actually something called the Marsh Chapel Experiments.

JAD: Marsh Chapel Experiments.

ANDY: And it was run by this guy ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Let me ...]

ANDY: His name was Walter Pahnke.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... very briefly summarize the ...]

ANDY: And he was a graduate student at Harvard at this time. And he was studying religious experiences.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... peak experience. Now this has also been called the cosmic experience, the transcendental experience or the mystical experience.]

JAD: What exactly was he looking at?

ANDY: You know, like Christians, Muslims, Jews, Mystics, like, what kind of things do they all have in common? So he did a bunch of research and interviews and he came up with a basic catalog of the ingredients in a religious experience.

JAD: Hmm.

ANDY: And one day he's at Harvard and he bumps into ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Timothy Leary: Turn on, tune in and drop out.]

ANDY: ... that guy. Timothy Leary. He was actually a teacher at Harvard at the time, and he was famously giving psychedelic drugs to undergrads.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Timothy Leary: By teaching people how to use their heads. The point is that in order to use your head, you have to go out of your mind.]

ANDY: And when Pahnke got a chance to talk to these students who had tripped, he noticed pretty quick that they used really similar language to the people he'd been studying. And he started to wonder if you put people into the right situation and you give them this drug, could you induce—actually induce a religious experience? So on that day in 1962, Pahnke put 20 theological school students into this church basement, you know, during this Good Friday service.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ANDY: 10 of them got a placebo and the 10 of them got a hefty dose of psilocybin.

MIKE YOUNG: Things in the room morphing.

ANDY: Which brings us back to Mike Young.

MIKE YOUNG: You would move your head and there'd be an after image from the lights. At one point, the visual effect was especially powerful.

ANDY: And he had this one moment that has just stuck with him ever since.

MIKE YOUNG: I was in the middle of a technicolor sea. There were bars of color, and I was floating through them and they were floating through me. And it was just glorious. And the bars of color then resolved into a wheel. I was at the center, and there was a different color going out from me in every possible direction. At first, this was quite nice, and then I realized that I had to swim out one of those color bars. I had to. And each of those different color bars would be a whole different life experience, and I could choose any one of those life experience color bars that I wanted, but I had to choose one. And I couldn't choose one. It was very painful. It felt like my insides were being ripped out of me. And I died. And at that moment that I died, I heard Howard Thurman say ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Howard Thurman: I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for death.]

MIKE YOUNG: And I stopped dying.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Wow! What are we supposed to make of that?

ANDY: Right. It is—it is strange.

JAD: Yeah.

ANDY: And in fact, this is actually right around the time that there's this huge cultural backlash against this drug. By the end of 1962, you've got Harvard making the decision that these experiments are not gonna be done at their university anymore.

JAD: Yeah.

ANDY: '63 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: That evil man ...]

ANDY: ... they fire Timothy Leary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Timothy Leary.]

ANDY: He's outta there. 1970, Congress outlaws psychedelics. 1971 ...

[NEWS CLIP: Nearly every country in the world, including the United States ...]

ANDY: ... bans them from research.

[NEWS CLIP: ... is a signatory to an international law banning the use, sale, cultivation and possession of dangerous drugs that have no useful place in medicine.]

JAD: I mean, on some level I get that because, like, what could you learn from a bunch of people tripping? Like, scientifically?

ANDY: I mean, I think that there actually is something that we can learn from this.

ROBERT: Hmm. What?

ANDY: Well, if you look at Mike Young, on the day that he walked into that chapel ...

MIKE YOUNG: I was still a theological school student.

ANDY: He was—you know, he was experiencing doubts.

MIKE YOUNG: Without any real confidence that ministry was something I was gonna stay in.

ANDY: But after this experiment at the chapel, he went home to his wife ...

MIKE YOUNG: And when I walked in, my wife was very much aware that something rather unusual had occurred to this guy she was married to.

ANDY: Did she just—you carry yourself differently? Did you ...?

MIKE YOUNG: She's never been that explicit about it. She just said she knew that—that I had had some kind of a major experience.

ANDY: At first, he just kind of wrote the whole thing off, but as time passed he couldn't stop thinking about the death and the rebirth experience. And to make a long story short, if you fast forward ...

MIKE YOUNG: I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister as a result of—partly a result of that drug experience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Young: I want to share with you this morning a little exegesis of the New Testament.]

JAD: That's him?

ANDY: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Mike Young: The story of the good Samaritan.]

ANDY: He has been preaching for 45 years. Here—here's the thing that I think is really strange: all of the people who took the drug that day, those 10 who got the psilocybin and not the placebo, all but one became ministers.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: So nine out of 10 went into the ministry?

ANDY: Nine out of 10.

JAD: What about the others?

ANDY: The placebo group?

JAD: Yeah.

ANDY: None.

JAD: None?

ANDY: According to Mike, absolutely none.

JAD: Wow, that is interesting!

ANDY: That was the first thing. I was like, "Wow, that's—that's crazy!" But at the same time, you know, it's a really small sample set.

JAD: Yeah.

ANDY: Who knows why anyone becomes a minister. I'm sure it wasn't just the drugs. You know, maybe they didn't even play that big of a role for everyone else. But this did make me, you know, like, more curious. Like, what exactly is happening to people when they take this drug?

JAD: Yeah.

ANDY: And I was surprised to find out that, like, right now, there are actually a few laboratories who are starting to experiment with these drugs again.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We thought well, why not?

ANDY: This is Roland.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Roland Griffiths, psychopharmacologist. I study the effects of drugs on behaviors.

ANDY: He's at Johns Hopkins.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Been at Hopkins for 40 years now.

ANDY: He's really well known for studying nicotine and Ritalin, but he told me that back in 2000, he was reading about the old psilocybin studies from the '60s. And this is right around the time when ...

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: The Drug Enforcement Administration and the FDA ...

ANDY: ... were starting to loosen their rules on experimenting with psychedelics. So he applies, and he gets approval.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: A study of that sort had not been approved for 30 years. And I can tell you that I've never had a protocol that was as rigorously and carefully reviewed and scrutinized from every angle.

ANDY: Since no one had studied this drug for, like, three decades, he started with some really basic questions: how does this affect behavior? After people have taken this drug, like, do they feel confused or afraid? Is it habit-forming? And how he did this test was he has a—this lab room at Johns Hopkins.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ANDY: That he's made really nice and cozy.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: It's a—it's an aesthetic living room-like environment.

ANDY: There's a couch and a stereo system. And then one at a time, volunteer's brought in, given a hefty dose of psilocybin, blindfolded ...

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: And then they're asked to lay down and direct their attention inward. We were bringing people in two months after sessions and asking them so what—you know, what was the sessions like? And they filled out some questionnaires. And the thing that I really wasn't prepared for was how salient and important these experiences were said to be on follow-up. You know, they were saying "Well, it was really important," you know? And I would say, "Well, how important?" And they would say, "Oh, well it was the most important experience of my life." And I'd go, "What?" And they would say, "Yeah. You know, it's like—you know, like when my daughter was born. It changed my world forever. I recently lost my father, and—and I'll never forget that." And they'll say, "You know, it's kind of like that." And that's totally improbable. So we didn't—we didn't have any metric that could even assess that.

ANDY: And what made things even weirder for Roland is that when he gave these volunteers a questionnaire ...

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: About 75 percent of people are saying it's in the top five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their life.

ANDY: A vast majority were talking about it like it's a spiritual experience.

ROBERT: Huh.

ANDY: So Roland, he went back to look at Pahnke's studies from the 1960s about the basic ingredients that make up a religious experience.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Let me list the characteristics, a very summary list. First the characteristics of awe and wonder.]

ANDY: Everyone would report that they felt like they were in the presence of something great and enormous.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: The second characteristic is transcendence of time and space.]

ANDY: People described time slowing down or space getting weird.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: The third characteristic has to do with mood, very deeply self-positive mood.]

ANDY: Fourth—and I'm skipping over a few here ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: Unity. This is a sense of cosmic oneness.]

ANDY: This feeling of intense connection to everything around you.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: A part of everything that is, the whole universe and even every blade of grass and grain of sand and so forth. These are words that people used in describing it, anyway.]

ANDY: So based on this one guy's research, and keep in mind, you know, a lot of people have different opinions about this, Roland believes that you can actually take this little drug, and for a majority of people, you can induce a religious experience.

ROBERT: But—I don't—as soon as you call it that, then I'm starting to think, "Hmm, I don't know."

ANDY: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: This is a real—a real—I mean, I don't know to you guys, but for someone who is—who takes this very seriously, to say that you can pop a pill and then in some shortcut fashion suddenly get this experience that hitherto had been very rare and had been assigned the value of grace, to say that is to say an enormous thing.

JAD: Well, it sounds like—it sounds like you're not—I'm guessing how you're taking it, Robert, is to say that it devalues the thing.

ROBERT: Yeah, it devalues it.

ANDY: It kind of does the opposite for me.

ROBERT: Really?

ANDY: I mean, when I hear the stories from—from, like, all the people in these studies, it reminds me, like, I've had these, like, very meaningful experiences that I didn't think would last.

ROBERT: On a pill did you have them, or ...

ANDY: No, not—not a pill. No drugs.

ROBERT: So what happened?

JAD: Yeah, what are you talking about?

ANDY: Well, it goes back to when, like, I was Christian. I used to be an evangelical Christian, and when I was about 15 I was at a church camp. And me and some of my best friends were all gathered around a campfire. It was hot, and the stars were all bright and shiny. I remember they were playing this song that I really liked, and you know that feeling that you get when—when you and a crowd of people are all singing, like, really loud, some song that you all really love?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Sure.

ANDY: And as we're all singing this song, I remember my friend who wasn't raised in the faith like me, leaning over to me and saying that, like, he wanted to accept Jesus and be a Christian. And he asked, "What am I supposed to do?" And I remember that being like—great's not even the word for it. I—in this one moment, I got caught up in something that just felt so enormous. It's hard for me to explain how I felt. Like, it's hard to describe how I felt like we were all one, like there was something powerful that was —that was, like, both over us but also inside of us. And so much has changed since then that sometimes I look back and I think, "Did that happen? Like, did I hallucinate like some dude on drugs?"

JAD: Hmm.

ANDY: Because that friend who reached over to me? He's dead now. That faith that I was a part of? I left it. Like, all I have is this weird feeling that I can remember that's good.

JAD: And even though you're not a Christian anymore, you—you still have that feeling?

ANDY: Oh yeah.

JAD: But what is it about the idea that that feeling, that campfire feeling could be triggered by a pill and that maybe that's what was happening to those folks in Roland's study? What is it about that idea that helps you?

ANDY: For me, like, I see something concrete, you know? Like, I see—I see something that's harder to write off.

JAD: How so?

ANDY: Well, if I can go back into reporter mode, I will introduce you to one more guy, who I think is gonna help you understand what I'm talking about.

CHARLIE BESSANT: Hello!

ANDY: This is Charlie.

CHARLIE BESSANT: Charlie Bessant.

ANDY: He's a long-time smoker.

CHARLIE BESSANT: You know, I started at 17.

ANDY: Smoked for 40 years.

CHARLIE BESSANT: Pack a day. Breakfast, coffee, talking on the phone.

JAD: Wait, why are we talking about smoking?

ANDY: Well, Roland's new study he's doing right now, this pilot program that he's just started a few years ago?

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ANDY: Is trying to see if there's something in the transformation that you have in the psilocybin experience that can help smokers quit smoking.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Really?

ANDY: Stick with me.

CHARLIE BESSANT: They gave me a pill, a blue capsule. And ...

ANDY: He closed his eyes, and like Mike, he says he had a hallucination that changed him.

CHARLIE BESSANT: The thing that I found so amazing, the one thing that was more amazing than anything else was when I was on this mountain.

JAD: This is a mountain in his head?

ANDY: Yes.

CHARLIE BESSANT: When I had traveled to the very top, I was looking out over this greatness.

ANDY: This vista of everything. He says he was just this microscopic thing. He was—he was so small and it was so big ...

CHARLIE BESSANT: But my experience at this one place was so exalted.

ANDY: Because he was struck by this feeling, this deep feeling that ...

CHARLIE BESSANT: We were the same thing. We were the same.

ANDY: This right here is another hallmark of these experiences. You're somehow confronted with this radical shift in scale, and things that formerly felt like too big for you to deal with, they suddenly—they suddenly looked different.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We had one person involved in our cigarette-smoking study who had had a dose of psilocybin. And in the course of that session, the idea of smoking came up to him. And he said, you know, it was like a fly had landed on his arm, and he just took his finger and he flicked it off. And he said he was done with it.

JAD: Done done?

ANDY: Mm-hmm. And that's exactly how it was for Charlie.

CHARLIE BESSANT: The morning afterwards ...

ANDY: He says he didn't want cigarettes anymore.

CHARLIE BESSANT: I just didn't. They just weren't an issue anymore.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: And how long has he been off of it?

ANDY: Three years.

JAD: Wow!

ANDY: Now this is just a tiny pilot program. I don't think that we should make too much out of it yet, but the insight I feel like is, like, because—because, like, Charlie has this real experience, like, it's not—it's not a question of, like, something invisible like faith, but it's like a tangible reality. For me, it's like the closest thing I can come to having some kind of real evidence that what happened to me was real.

JAD: With the campfire.

ANDY: Right.

ROBERT: To me, the mystery is you've done this occasional thing with an artificial stimulus, had a extraordinary but temporary feeling, and then mysteriously it isn't temporary.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: It just goes on and on.

JAD: Yeah, do we have any idea why it persists?

ANDY: Well, Roland has a very educated hunch. I asked him about this, and he's looking right now at getting in there and doing research with some new FMRI machines. But his hunch is that the psilocybin drug experience, it somehow rewires the brain.

ROLAND GRIFFITHS: We're talking about rewiring a personality at a fundamental machine programming level.

ANDY: Like, he calls this experience a "rearranging experience."

JAD: Huh.

ANDY: You know, maybe—maybe one day science will figure out what's happening in the brain of a person that's experiencing something like this, but one of the things about this that troubles me, like as a reporter and then even, like, personally is that going back to Walter Pahnke, like, remember his list of ingredients from earlier?

JAD: Yep.

ANDY: His final characteristic ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: And the final characteristic that I'd like to mention here ...]

ANDY: ... final ingredient was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Pahnke: ... the characteristic of alleged ineffability, which means that the people who had such an experience claim that it can't be described in words, that it's non-verbal. Basically indescribable.]

ANDY: And that's one of the main things that I'm gonna take away from all this. I mean, talking to Roland and Mike and Charlie is just how hard it is to talk about the thing that I've just spent the last 20 minutes trying to talk about.

CHARLIE BESSANT: I understood something, some life, some eternal truth. [laughs] Words really don't match the thing. I was at the top, I was feeling divine source of—of self-awareness. [laughs] I'm sorry, it's a trick of words, I guess. It's—God, larger.

JAD: Thanks to producer Andy Mills. Thanks to you guys for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[MIKE YOUNG: Hi, this is Reverend Mike Young, and here are the credits.]

[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Radiolab is produced by Jad Adambrad?]

[MIKE YOUNG: Abumrad.]

[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: Our staff includes: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard ...]

[MIKE YOUNG: ... Brenna Farrell, Malissa O'Donnell, Dylan Keefe, Andy Mills, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.]

[ROLAND GRIFFITHS: With help from Chris Berube and Kelly Benham.]

[MIKE YOUNG: Hope you got it!]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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