“We’re not just studying psychedelics. We’re reimagining who they’re for.” [Matt’s Interview with Reality Sandwich]

From neuroscience labs at MIT and Harvard to ayahuasca retreats in South America, Matt’s story is a testament to the deeply personal (and deeply scientific!) potential of plant medicine. Watch his interview above or on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pxPhSY0How 

Highlights from the transcript:

Matthew X. Lowe, PhD at Unlimited Sciences

• During my bachelor’s degree, I just happened to take on a psychology course, as many people do when they’re trying out new subjects. I went into my bachelor’s thinking, I’m going to try out philosophy and English and creative writing. And I ended up in psychology. And particularly within psychology, I was really fascinated with the cognitive neuroscience courses in psychology and high level aspects of the brain. So I became really fascinated in this neuroscience behind everything that we do. And just that it was this kind of black box that we still knew so little about and there was so much to explore. So after I left Cape Town, when I was 21, I pursued a master’s and PhD at the University of Toronto in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. And that’s why I really became a lot more familiar with neural mechanisms associated with perception, sensory experiences, personality.
• But during this time, I continued to battle with depression. Actually little known fact, but over half of academics in graduate school were at some point suffer from depression. It’s a very strict, harsh, regulated program. There’s a lot of competition. It’s often people who are perfectionists, who are used to being the best in their class. so there’s a lot of pressure that you put in yourself. so I struggled with depression throughout this time and nothing had really helped. And I tried a few more SSRIs.
• They determined that I had treatment resistant depression and that was kind of it. But the big change happened when I was accepted to MIT for my postdocs. I had yet to start my postdoc at MIT in Boston, that the depression hit me really hard. I had what I now recognize as what’s called the arrival fallacy. It’s this idea that we have these lofty goals that we set for ourselves. And when we get there, we’re going to achieve happiness. When I get this thing, that’s when I’m going to be happy. So I had always wanted to go to MIT. And this has been my goal for years throughout graduate school and I finally got this position accepted at MIT and it actually left me feeling pretty empty. It wasn’t associated with the happiness or joy that I was expecting it to feel. 
• There wasn’t a sense of pride or accomplishment. I just kind of felt flat and that spiraled me into a really bad depression right before I started my postdoc. And it was just coincidentally around that time that I became more open to new things because sort of my barriers were down. I was kind of at the bottom of the barrel, so to speak. And my family had always been kind of anti-drug. I’d never really explored any drugs up until that point. I’ve been very straight-laced throughout my life and very kind of introverted and focused on my academic work.
• I remember doing [psychedelics] for the first time and thinking, wow, this is what it’s like to not have anxiety, just to be in your body in the present moment, to be there gathered with your thoughts. And it was just this really interesting phenomenon that I experienced. And through that, had some really profound experiences, more intense, that got me to think about my own cognitive behaviors, the patterns and the rituals that I had in my life that I didn’t even see, these things that were protecting me from taking opportunities and living my life the way that I wanted to. I got this new perspective in very intense and difficult and challenging ways, but ultimately really profound ways.
• I found a lot of catharsis and release with psilocybin from repressed emotions. But during this time, what was really fascinating about the experience is psychedelics did what no SSRI could do for me at the time. And that was they started to shift me out of my depressive state. So they started allowing me to explore new things. I became a little bit more social, a little bit more gregarious. I said yes to new things. I kind of took on this new persona in my life. 

MJP at Reality Sandwich

• I think that is the one very, very common thread that I feel like comes up and there’s various ways of saying that, but ultimately it is, is, is letting go. You know, and, and yeah, and, and exactly. And, you know, on a grand level, the experience that we’re in of life, you know, surrender to, to this variance and, know, people phrase it a few different ways, but, you know, kind of remaining unattached.

Matthew X. Lowe, PhD at Unlimited Sciences

• Yeah, surrendering to the experience.

MJP at Reality Sandwich

• You know, and I feel like, I like I share similar sentiment with you there in that, you know, we get this very tunnel vision of how something’s supposed to go. At least I feel that way. Tunnel vision of how something’s supposed to go. What, what you are, you know, how you look, how you portray what your life is supposed to be like. And, and then when it doesn’t exactly fit, you know, then everything kind of breaks down and it’s to me, it is really uncanny how as soon as you let go of that tunnel vision, the whole world opens up to you and you realize that you are living that already and you just couldn’t see it because you these weird blinders on that I don’t necessarily understand on a neurological level. You might be able to enlighten me a little bit more of why we end up with those blinders over time. Maybe it’s that.

Matthew X. Lowe, PhD (16:51.638)

• And so there’s actually some really solid neuroscience behind that, that I’d love to share with you. So essentially, serotonin, psychedelics, classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin are primarily acting on the 5-HT 2A receptor, so the serotonin 2A receptor. And this receptor is really abundant in human biology. mean, it affects everything, mood, cognition, even circadian rhythms, sleep, you name it, sexual function, it affects it.
• What’s really interesting about this is it’s also primarily involved in learning and neuroplasticity. So serotonin density is associated with increases in neuroplasticity and learning, the ability to adapt and learn new situations. And when we’re kids, so serotonin density actually begins very early. It starts at about five weeks of gestation in utero. And by the age of two, serotonin density really starts to increase and it has the highest density between the ages of two and five years old.
• So that’s this period of extreme neuroplasticity and learning. We’re forming new associations, we’re learning, we’re hardwiring different patterns of thinking. What’s really interesting about that is it slowly declines until about the age of 14 years old in adolescence and then it remains stable throughout the rest of our life. If you think about this in the context of childhood development of childhood trauma, of learning habits, social award learning. All of this happens in those crucial formative years before the age of 14. So these experiences that you have early on in your life, these patterns of thinking, these interactions you have, they become rigid. So the more you perform an action, a ritual, a behavior, anything, it reinforces that action. And these pathways that we have, you can think of them like ski tracks.
• So you’re forming these ski tracks and you aren’t really able to break out of them because they’re so entrenched in your mind. These rigid thought patterns. But what psychedelics do, and this is really fascinating, it was a 2023 paper that came out in Nature. And they found that psychedelics can reopen that critical period. It’s a critical period of learning when we’re younger.
• So it allows for the critical period to be open and we can essentially relearn new behaviors and form new neural network associations. So it essentially leads our brain from this modular state into a global state of connectivity. We see more communication across different regions. We see enhanced neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, which is the formation of new neurons. And all of that allows learning to take place much more easily. So when you think about mental health disorders and why this is so critical, so for example, psilocybin.
• So psilocybin is a critical window that’s estimated to be about two to three weeks after the psilocybin experience. So this is this period in the experience where your brain is incredibly neuroplastic, where you’re open to learning new behaviors, new patterns of thinking. So really going into the psychedelic experience, those next two weeks, the experiences that you have during the experience and the follow-up integration are incredibly important with forming new behaviors.
• Sort of this master key that unlocks a new state of learning that we’re not really able to do otherwise outside of childhood. We get this kind of second chance to rewire and remap our brains in ways that we never thought were possible. That’s why I think psychedelics will be so crucially important, not just for mental health conditions, but understanding human physiology, human consciousness, and they affect all parts of the mammalian sphere of biology. So we’re going to see a lot of really interesting things happen with psychedelics and how they promote neurogenesis and the formation of new pathways. I’m really excited about the next few years.