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So there were a few things I would like to ask you. First of all, this trial with Cilisibin, your research group, right? Yes. It was one of the first in the world to do brain imaging on people high on magic mushrooms.
I think we were the first people to do brain imaging on the effects of magic mushrooms. That's right. When you introduced these results, you said this is for a neuropsychology, what the Higgs boson is to physics. So actually that was in relation to the LSD.
We were absolutely the first people ever to do brain imaging with LSD. Which is sad really because we've had brain imaging techniques for many 30 years. But the regulations controlled these drugs are so oppressive that no one could break through them, but we decided we had to do it. So we did it.
And I think that's true. I would defend myself in saying that people spent 50 years looking for Higgs boson. We spent 50 years looking for to understand what LSD does in the brain. And now we've revealed it and we've revealed remarkable findings.
We can now explain why people get hallucinations, why we can explain, how people get the sense of ego dissolution that they don't feel part of their body, they feel their bodies. We can actually point to the circuits of the brain which are responsible for these altered states. And this is a remarkable thing. It's remarkable.
It's lovely. When you're describing fear of dying and depression and the OCD, you're actually sort of describing the trifecta that makes up my personality. And I've been self-medicating since I was 16. Really?
As a whole, you're finally helping. The Cilosubin absolutely and the LSD too, absolutely. The other drugs that have come across my tabletop in the course of my life as a stand-up comedian where you encounter quite a few recreational drugs haven't really helped me but I've had a great deal of fun. I think that's a really important point you make.
And this is such a fundamental point that psychedelic drugs are about changing people for the better. They're not about having fun but they've got labored as recreational which is wrong. They got their transformation on that recreational. And that's why they were banned.
LSD was banned because it's changed the way American young American men were voting. They were voting against war and they were voting for peace. And the American society could not cope with that at the time because they were fighting the Vietnam War. I usually say that I was born today.
I took LSD. I was 16. That's interesting. I think it changed my personality for the better.
It made me a more empathic person, a more understanding person. It's interesting. So we have shown that when you give LSD to people in a brain scanner, three weeks later, they've got positive personality changes. They're not even seeking it.
They're just being a subject but yet it does change the brain to make people more open and more optimistic. And that's why it was banned because it was changing the way Americans thought about life. And they didn't want, they could see that bombing Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam was a kind of point this thing to do. It was difficult to be better ways.
And of course, you know, we still have a lesson. The campaign against the nuclear bomb, the campaign against the war in Vietnam was to some extent fueled by people who took psychedelics LSD. And I think maybe, rather than drop bombs in Syria, maybe we should use... You've got social dial then.
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So psychedelics are sort of changing the way people think and come to them. Maybe more rational solutions because certainly blowing people up hasn't really worked. But LSD was developed sort of to be used in war, wasn't it? No, it wasn't.
So the history of LSD was discovered completely accidentally. The guy, Albert Hoffman, he was trying to find a better treatment for migraine. And he was working on a migraine substance called ergot, which we still use for migraine today. And he was trying to make a longer acting version and he changed the molecule and he made LSD.
And he accidentally took it because he was, in those days, there wasn't very automated processes. You had to suck up solutions of drugs to pipette them. And he accidentally took it and had this profound change of state, his mind changed. He describes his 30-minute cycle home as if it took seven hours.
And music became more meaningful and colours changed. So he realised it, he'd taken something that changed his brain. And for the first four or five years, in the late 40s, early 50s, it was being used experimentally to as a therapy for psychiatry, but also to model aspects of psychiatric illness because some of the experiences are a bit like the hallucinations that some people getting in mental illness. But it was later then- Like psychomimetic, they wanted to know it's very- That's right, exactly.
So it used to be, I met out psychiatrists who would give an LSD the first day they started by their boss, who said, right, you're going to talk to patients who have got strange things going on in their brain, you're going to have an experience. And many of them say it was a profound and very positive experience because they- For the first time, they'd gone from being an analytical doctor to being someone who realised that the brain is capable of almost anything. But the problem with that is decaying when the Americans, they're almost certainly the Russians, the Secret Service, started to see if they could use it for brainwashing. And this was the American program called MK Ultra, which unfortunately and strangely most of the papers on it disappeared.
We can't know why that would have been. And they were trying to brain what they thought that you could use psychedelics. And then in high doses repeatedly to wipe out people's perceptions and then you could bring in plant what you wanted. But in fact, it didn't work, it was going to point this.
And it created a lot of unpleasant effects because they were giving it to people without telling them. They were giving it to CIA operatives and seeing what happened when they suddenly became very strange. And a lot of the bad trips that people talk about with LSD because by the people using it being, having it given to them without them now, what an atrocious thing to do. When I was in the Army, they told us that LSD had been weaponised back in the 50s or something, as a gas.
And it was tasteless and odourless and it didn't have any colour. So you could pass through it and then hours later you'd be in a ditch thinking you were a bug. And considering that the set and setting in war is not the best. Yeah, whether you can vaporise it or not, I do not know.
You might possibly be able to have some kind of, I suppose you might suspend it in steam or something like an inhalation. I don't know about it. But certainly, I think fighting a war when taking it in steam might be quite difficult. Although, you know, it's not impossible.
I mean, it's going back to your ancestors. The Vikings. The Vikings, when they used to have the berserk at, you call it berserk a berserk. Yes.
And my understanding is that when they came to the shores of Britain, they drink a lot of mead, the beer, and they take their mushroom mushrooms and they go into this berserk estates where they would then be supernaturally strong and very immune to suffering. And they would just go become very extreme warriors. So I think, again, it depends on whether you're doing it intentionally, whether it's being forced on you. Well, now your research into depression, by the way, this magic mushroom study sounds like one of the most fun studies to be a participant in ever.
Yes and no, yes and no. Because depressed people don't necessarily get the same positive. What was interesting is that some of them did enjoy it, but some of them didn't. Some of them found it was actually, they were put back into estates under the trip where they confronted memories they suppressed, which were not pleasant memories.
But they were able to deal with them. And that's many of them, some of them said that that was the benefit that even though it wasn't fun when they did it, they were able for the first time to deal with that problem. And then they said, for the first time, I could actually take to my father what a horrible man he was. I never had the courage to do that.
So in that trip, he was able to realize his father was horrible. And kind of deal with that. And then he fell a lot better on. Well, every other channel is fine for your customers.
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