On an afternoon in Baltimore,
Sughra Ahmed prepared for her very
first psychedelic experience at
Johns Hopkins University.
Sughra is a teacher and leader
within the Muslim faith.
She signed up to be part of a study
that measured what happened when
religious leaders took psilocybin.
We told you about it in our last
episode.
And after entering the treatment
room, she took some time to pray.
My prayer before
I ingested the
medicine was about
healing,
physical healing, spiritual
healing.
In Arabic, the word is shifa,
complete healing.
Then she swallowed a pill that
contained psilocybin, she put on a
pair of eye shades, donned
the provided headphones, and laid
down on the couch.
From that point on, the main sensory
input she received was the
music playing through her
headphones.
From memory, it had
a lot of Euro-Christian,
a lot of, maybe Bach, and maybe
Mozart.
The music had been selected
by the researchers,
and most of the songs in the
hours-long playlist were.
Classical music.
It felt like a
brilliant choir singing in
this huge cathedral.
Bringing the players to life through
these words that were holy and
precious, I couldn't understand
the words because of the way that
they were sung.
So Sughra is hearing orchestral
music, and at this other point
she's hearing a choir singing the
words of an Eastern Orthodox
Christian worship song.
And according to Sughra, it's all...
Really sort of high church,
this is very posh.
That kind of music is not
unfamiliar, it reminds me of the
schools that I went to as a young
girl.
But even though the music is
familiar to her, listening to
these pieces, in this moment,
doesn't feel right.
My ear is not tuned to
that kind of music.
A lot of this music was very
melodic, and I think the sort of
aspiration there would be that you
have an experience with the divine,
possibly. But I know I wasn't in there.
In other words, Sughra
felt her traditions weren't
reflected in the music.
A number of other religions were,
but not hers, even though
she had asked the researchers if
they could modify the playlist for
her sessions.
You know, I have Qawallis and I have
other kinds of music that would be
amazing if I could add to it and
say, no, the same music has to
be played to every person.
Obviously, it's a clinical trial.
As the drugs started to kick in,
Sughra wanted to be hearing this.
Tu Jhoom, a track performed by
Naseebo Lal and Abida Parveen.
But instead, she was
hearing this.
I don't regret my experience.
I have such reverence for my
experiences.
They are my truth.
And I am so curious
about the fact that if
I had been present in these
ways that we're talking about,
whether it's a playlist or whether
it is a guide or whether it
something else, what more
would I have been able to move
through? What trauma would I've been
able let go of?
What joys would I been able
experience because I
felt seen and I felt heard.
The
playlist that Sughra listened to
during her sessions is pretty
famous in psychedelic circles.
It's known as the Johns Hopkins
playlist, and it was one of
the very first music compilations
curated specifically for psychedelic
study participants.
Versions of it have been used in
clinical trials at Johns Hopkins
University for more than 25
years.
The playlist is on Spotify,
YouTube, Tidal, basically every
music streaming platform, which
has allowed it to reach people far
outside the lab, shaping
the music that is played during
private psychedelic therapy
sessions, as well as what's played
when people use these substances
recreationally, which for me
brings up a few questions.
Questions that Sughra had too.
Maybe this is the beginning of a
really important conversation about
music and playlists.
And how do we even decide what
goes in these things?
Right. Like what are we even trying to achieve.
And that's exactly what we're going
to explore in this episode of
Altered States.
I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
Stay with us.
I do have the dubious distinction
of being the last to
give psilocybin to a patient
before everything became dormant
for 22 years.
Talk about death and rebirth.
This is Bill Richards.
Officially William A. Richards.
When I decided to dig into the
history of the Johns Hopkins
playlist, he was my first
stop.
Bill is a clinical psychologist.
He has a master's in divinity from
Yale, and he's one of the pioneers
of psychedelic assisted therapy
going back to the 1960s.
I just turned 85
and I'm
completely incapable of retiring.
Actually, Bill was one of the
scientists who worked on the study
in which Sughra Ahmed was a
participant, the religious leaders
study.
I straddled both fields,
the research, psychopharmacological,
psychotherapy research world,
and the implications
of that for religious
scholarship.
From what I understand, you are the
person who put together the
very first Hopkins playlist.
Is that correct?
Yes. Yes.
This is how Bill described the
playlist to me.
Okay. The Hopkins playlist
is designed for
a moderately high or high
dose psychedelic session,
one where the dosage is sufficient
to give
access to
these transcendental realms
of human consciousness.
And it's designed with
the different phases of
the response to the
psychedelic substance in
mind.
So in a well-designed playlist,
say with psilocybin,
which has usually a six hour
duration of action,
there's music to
be playing softly in the background
when the person enters the room.
Comfortable background music that
doesn't demand a lot of attention,
but it's kind of soothing.
Then there's music for that
opening up, that
onset, that launch
period.
Where some people might tend to get
very frightened.
So it's music that's steady,
no surprising changes in
rhythm, no words for
the intellect to try to decipher.
It's just unfolding,
supportive sound.
I like to use the Kyrie
of the Bach B Minor Mass,
for example, opening
up, opening up opening
up transporting you.
As a participant approaches the
peak of their psilocybin experience,
they hear.
Samuel Barber's Adagio for
Strings, kind of chromatic
development, dissonance
into harmony, more dissonant
into harmony.
Picking you up and transporting
you.
Just builds and builds and build
and builds, and reaches a
climax in a
very meaningful way that
speaks to the minds of
most humans.
About an hour in, hour and
a half, you're at the peak.
In the early days, we always used
at least one movement of a Brahms
symphony.
Often the first movement, it
has this very steady progressive,
you know, on with it, on with it
into it, in and through, in,
and through.
Then in the.
Transcendental, if you will,
period of the drug session,
if that occurs, works like
Sir Edward Algar's Nimrod,
the ninth variation.
The slow movement
of the Mozart
Clarinet Concerto,
the slow movement of
the Beethoven
Fifth Emperor Piano
concerto or the Brahms
Second Piano Concerto.
They just reliably work
well with many different people.
But then as a study participant
comes down from the peak,
Bill says there's a little more
wiggle room.
If it's been a positive session,
you can appreciate almost anything.
And it's even fun to listen
to music that's from
different countries,
different genres.
And it just kind of a celebration
of welcome back to earth.
This is when participants are
welcomed by songs like Here Comes
the Sun by the Beatles, Storms
in Africa by Enya, King
of Kings by Ladysmith Black Mambazo,
and What a Wonderful World by Louis
Armstrong.
There's an openness to,
gee, play anything I'll try
it on.
So that's the Hopkins playlist, at
least in terms of its content.
And on the face of it, it makes
sense that a playlist of this nature
might exist because, of
course, study participants are
listening to music during their
sessions, right?
Well, when Bill first entered the
world of psychedelic science,
there was no guarantee that you'd
listen to music at all during a
session.
In fact, Bill's first experience
with psilocybin
I was 23 years old
in 1963.
I went to the University
of Göttingen in
the western
part of Germany at
that time, and
at that point I had
not even heard the word psychedelic.
I had no idea what
psilocybin might be.
But two friends of
mine who I had just
met had participated in
an interesting research project
in the nerve clinic or
psychiatric clinic of the
university, which was just around
the corner from our
dormitory.
So anyway, I went over to the clinic
and asked if I could be
a research subject as well.
What was the setup like for
that experience?
It was terrible.
It was a little basement
room with
a cot and end table and
a chair with a window looking
out over the hospital garbage
cans, and I was
left totally alone with
a research assistant checking
in on me every now and then.
The only music was the
garbage man emptying the metal
cans outside my window,
which I call tinkling temple
bells.
I'm sure that sounded lovely.
Somehow, Bill still managed to
have a good experience.
They injected me with
CZ74, which was
a short-acting derivative
of psilocybin.
To my total amazement,
this very profound transcendental
state of consciousness opened up
in this 23-year-old
kid I once was.
Even without music,
Bill says he had a transformative
experience, but eventually
the sessions he took part in became
less garbage dungeon and
more soothing therapy,
thanks to another scientist that
Bill met in the winter of 1964,
a psychiatrist named Walter Pahnke.
He suggested that we do
another experiment and raise the
dosage a little bit and
bring me out of the basement into
a room with some plants,
and he'd be there to hold my hand
if I needed it, and
we used music for
the first time.
To be clear, Pahnke didn't come
up with the idea of playing music
during psilocybin sessions in
a research setting.
This is just how Bill gets
introduced to the combination of
music and psychedelics.
With Walter Pahnke, we use
the Brahms Requiem,
which I love.
The way it richly
unfolds moving forward,
especially the first two
choruses.
"Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen", "How
lovely is thy dwelling place."
It's really a requiem
for the living, and it's
not the words really.
It's the music itself that
just unfolds in
a very rich
and supportive manner.
It's probably clear by now, but Bill
is a classically trained musician.
He plays piano and the
organ.
How was your experience made
different because there was
obviously a very different set and
setting, but also because there was
music?
I don't think the music causes
content,
but the music
provides nonverbal
support that
enables many people, I
think, to go more deeply
within consciousness than
they otherwise would.
Sort of like a strong flowing
river if you're a piece of
driftwood.
If you just relax into the
music.
It takes you places.
It enables you to go much
more deeply than you
otherwise might if the music is
well chosen.
That insight about music helping
people go deeper with psychedelics.
That's the nugget of information
that eventually leads him to make
the Johns Hopkins playlist decades
later.
But Sughra might never have listened
to this specific playlist had
it not been for another person's
contributions.
A colleague of Bill's who worked
with him at the Maryland Psychiatric
Research Center in the late sixties
and early seventies, a woman
named Helen Bonny.
She was our music therapist
at the Maryland Psychiatric Research
Center.
She was a very fine
music therapist and
she developed the first playlists.
Bill told me that Helen was the
first person that he knew of who'd
made a playlist specifically for a
psychedelic session.
Unfortunately, I couldn't speak with
her about that because she died in
2010.
Today, making a playlist might
sound like a small thing,
but you got to think of the context,
right? I mean, we're talking late
sixties.
So playing music means playing
records.
We didn't know what a playlist was,
you know, we had 33
RPM records and
that's one reason we needed two
therapists in the room that if
one was holding the patient's
hand, someone else had to change the
record.
Oh, wow.
I've always wondered about the two
therapists thing and how that was
quite common back then.
Well, some would say you need
two because these drugs are so
dangerous and you might have to
control the person if they get
psychotic and more
psychoanalytically trained people
would say, you need a mother
to project on and a father to
project on, but I think
the real reason was we needed help
to change records.
Though we took it very seriously
and we were very self-important,
we were really playing disk
jockey as well as therapist
all the time.
And so Helen, she changed that.
She got these psychedelic therapists
to use.
Cassette tapes, they
were labeled things like Peak
Experience and Affect Release and Comforting anaclitic and so on. Death
Rebirth.
And she put these tapes
together as
her dissertation for
her doctorate.
Did Helen come up with this idea of
making these tapes?
I think so.
Yeah, the cassettes.
That's not the only contribution
Helen made during this period.
She also contributed the structure
of the psychedelic experience that
became popularized and
enshrined in the Hopkins playlist
itself.
That whole thing about the build to
the peak and then the come down
and then timing of it.
That's her and Walter Pahnke.
She talked about this at a
conference in North Carolina in
1995, 15 years
before she died.
My first task was
to try to find out what music was
best for what part of the drug
reactivity.
When she arrived, she could
see what we had been using.
We used a lot of music
in our psychedelic
research there.
And I did a little research with
the therapist and
through this process of finding what
they thought was best at what time
came together with a
body of music.
And then she made suggestions
and introduced us to some new
things and developed
the tapes.
We almost immediately found out that
the classical music was better than
any other kind.
We would use favorites for
people at the beginning and
at the end when they were in a
fairly normal state.
So we more or less eliminated
all but the classical selections.
It's during this period that the
practice of using classical music
during a psychedelic session became
a standard at the psychiatric
center.
Thanks to this newish invention,
cassette tapes.
This was something that hadn't been
done before. Before you were using
records, she puts together these
tapes and you start using them in
the context of psychedelic therapy.
Is that what happened?
Yes, not necessarily
exclusively using them,
but they were one resource.
I still have her cassettes.
You do?
Really?
You've kept them.
How did having those tapes change
things for the work that you were
all doing at the psychiatric center?
Well, it freed up the
therapist to
stay centered, to be
present with the patient
rather than being distracted
by what shall I choose next?
The record's almost over
as I call it playing disc
jockey all day.
By 1970, the federal government
had made most psychedelics illegal.
By 1976, psychedelic studies
had stopped altogether at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research
Center.
But by then, Helen had already moved
on to something new, because while
she was at the psychiatric center,
Helen began testing something she
had been thinking about for some
time.
That music, on its own,
without psychedelics, could produce
an altered state.
She actually tested her theory out
with the family members and friends
who accompanied patients when they
came in for a psychedelic session.
When there were couples, one
of the persons would have a session,
the other person had to wait all the
10 or 12 hours because I
was a woman and I took care of them.
She would take the accompanying
person into a room and basically
mimic an LSD session without
the drug.
She describes testing this out in
the talk she gave in 1995.
So I remember this day, this woman
came in and I laid
her down on the couch and I
said, now I will just
pretend I'm giving you the drug and
I'll start playing some of the music
that we use.
Well, for three hours,
we listened to music.
She said the people she tried this
with would often have these really
strong experiences.
And again, no drugs involved,
just music.
She was talking the whole time,
giving me all this wonderful imagery
that was happening for her.
And that's when the light bulb went
off for me.
For Helen, the benefit of just
listening to music was clear.
Afterwards, they get the husband and
wife together. And of course, he'd
had amnesia.
He didn't have anything to share
from the drug experience.
And she was, she was talking
away.
She said that her patients tended to
remember these experiences more
strongly than the people who would
come out of an LSD session.
It doesn't help unless you have
a memory for what you've
gone through.
These tests that she ran on the
side, they became the foundation for
an entirely new form
of therapy that she called guided
imagery and music.
She founded this new modality in
the seventies and it gained traction
in psychology and music therapy
circles in the US and abroad.
Here she is describing a session in
a documentary made by Bonny
Institute Productions.
I'm watching Jill's breathing
patterns change.
Her body is becoming progressively
more relaxed.
She is going deeply.
Very fast.
Very heavy.
Just let it be heavy.
Let yourself go as completely as you
can.
In just a short while, you're going
to be hearing the music.
You let yourself go with the music
and let the music take you wherever
you need to go.
My mind is fully concentrated on
her experience.
I try in my imagination
to see what she is seeing,
feel what she is feeling to
keep in touch.
Today, the Bonnie method of guided
imagery and music is still
considered an effective form of
music therapy.
In the year 2000, psychedelic
science resumed in earnest in the
US.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins, where
Bill Richards worked, secured
government approval to study
psychedelics in healthy people who'd
never taken these substances.
And to prepare for this big moment,
Bill made a playlist.
The challenge in making a playlist
is to
separate the very good from the
excellent.
It's not black and white,
right, wrong kind of thing.
And when most people say, boy,
that was really helpful,
then you think, man, maybe there's
something universal in this music
that within our
minds, there are layers
of human consciousness.
That are just kind of
genetically given, if you will,
perhaps encoded in our DNA
and it has
nothing to do with our
personal preferences or
the preferences of our therapists
for that matter.
You know, it's just something in
the very structure of
the sound itself that
is facilitative and
supportive and helpful.
And that's what those of us who make
playlists try to find, I
think.
You know, what is it that
speaks to these universal
tendencies deep within us?
And was there a basis for
the playlist itself in terms of
the research? Like what were you
sourcing from?
My own knowledge of music.
And of course, Helen's tapes.
I certainly used
pieces of many of her
tapes.
For example, her peak experience
playlist includes
many, probably most
of the works in
the Hopkins playlist.
I'd have to listen to it to find
out. Actually, I don't think I
have a cassette player to listen to
it on anymore.
The thing that Sughra and I both
wish to understand was about
the history of the playlist, but
also how it ended up being so
specific.
So I asked Bill,
there is quite a bit of classical
music in the playlist, including
songs that I think maybe
there's a little bit of an
over-representation of songs that
some people would characterize as
having a little of a Christian bent.
Some of them have, you know, they're
actual masses.
We're talking about like.
Vivaldi's Gloria in D major.
There's the Mass in B Minor by
Bach.
I think there's even the St.
Petersburg choir as well, right?
Was that intentional to have
Christian music in the
playlist?
Well, when we first made it,
most of our volunteers were
Christian.
In fact, even including Christian
clergy, and
it was music I was personally fond
of and I chose it.
Subsequent variations,
for example, we
just completed a study
at Hopkins with
religious leaders from different
world religions.
And the playlist
we used for that was
much less Christian.
But this more toned down playlist
still registered as very Christian
for Sughra.
So it kind of sounds like, you know,
by virtue of who was putting
together this music in the sixties
and seventies, and then you
coming back to it in 1999, that's
why there were quite a few
Christian songs.
Yes, in the early days we
were working primarily with
treatment of alcoholism and
narcotic addiction.
And many of those people
did have Christian backgrounds.
Okay. So that felt appropriate for
those individuals.
That's right.
If someone, if they already know
what's going to be played before
the session starts, or if they're
in the session and they say, Hey, I
really don't like this song, what
would you counsel a music therapist
to do or a guide rather?
Thanks for asking that.
Because often there is
the experience of saying,
I can't stand the screeching
soprano,
please change the music.
I hate this music.
The way I've learned to deal with
that is to encourage
the person to hate it with
passion.
Wait, what do you mean by that?
Hate it with passionate.
It will be over soon.
No peace goes on forever.
The playlist will change,
but right now just go ahead
and hate it.
You know, I mean, there are extreme
situations where I might change
it, but generally I
have learned that when
I encourage the person
to just hate it and keep
continuing,
many times the person will say, Oh,
that's so much better, thank you.
And it's the same music playing.
So what is going
on often is
that something frightening
at the growing edge of
that person's development is
emerging and the
music is facilitating it
and the person wants to avoid
it, escape from it,
turn it off.
And they think by changing the
music, they can escape
it. Where, if they
stay with it, maybe
with a little extra support from
the therapist,
the very same music is
experienced as helpful.
I'm glad you brought up the
religious leaders study because we
actually spoke to one of the
participants of that study, Sughra,
do you remember her?
Oh, yes, lucky you.
Yeah, no, she's fantastic.
And she herself mentioned to us
that a lot of the music had a
Christian bent and, you know, she
talked about how she felt that it
was a little churchy, you now,
cathedral music, very
Euro-Christian.
And she said that she would have
preferred to hear music that
was more part of
her own tradition, right?
Islamic musical tradition.
She said she's Punjabi, that
it would have been nice to hear
maybe the dhol, those kinds of
instruments, but that that was not
possible.
And so I'm curious, what's your
reaction to that?
I'm sure you were already aware of
her saying that, but yeah, what do
you think of that?
I agree with her a hundred
percent, you know, if
we could have designed
the playlist for
each person separately,
it certainly we would have had more
Islamic music for her.
I wish we could've done better.
If there's a defense, it's that
there's only 24 hours in
a day and I'm just one person and
I do the best I can, but
there are.
I'm sure there are other
playlists that can be every bit as
effective.
Why wasn't it possible to have
individual playlists for every
participant?
Well, we like to standardize
things in the research world.
Bill explained to me that there are
already lots of variables to take
into account, like people's ages,
different dosages, and so
whatever they can keep the same
across participants,
they do.
And yet the study was written
to allow for clinical
judgment that the therapist,
if justified, could deviate.
Okay, but it still wasn't possible
to add more songs from her own
tradition.
Well, if we had thought about it
more, maybe we might
have.
My conversation with Bill yielded
a lot of answers to some major
questions, but it also brought
up some new ones about
what music in general does for our
brains while taking psychedelics.
Do we actually know?
How is it contributing to people's
experiences exactly?
And has anyone looked at which types
of music are better or worse?
Hear, what I found out after
the break.
I've played the trumpet the longest.
I also play the drums
and the guitar and
the bass and the violin.
This is Fred Barrett.
And according to the state of
Pennsylvania, I can play and teach
all standard band and orchestra
instruments up to a third grade
level. But it's been a while.
Fred is a musician, but he
also works at Johns Hopkins
University.
He's actually the director of the
Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic
and Consciousness Research.
I am trained as a cognitive
neuroscientist who's completed
a fellowship in behavioral
pharmacology.
His research focuses on memory,
music, and psychedelics, a mix
of topics he's passionate about.
Just recognizing that all
of these things, musical
experiences, emotions, memories,
pharmacologically mediated or not,
really cut to the core of who we are
as people sometimes.
And that's endlessly fascinating
to me.
I honestly have trouble thinking of
anything more interesting or
important that I could be doing with
my life.
With that background and passion,
Fred seemed like the ideal person
to walk me through the science of
what music does to our brains while
tripping.
When he started at Johns Hopkins,
Fred had a lot of thoughts and
ideas.
So here I come in 2013,
arriving from UC Davis, having
completed a PhD,
spending six years of my life deeply
invested in the question of what
music does to people and how to
select music to evoke specific
experiences. And so I sat down and I
asked Roland, what's going on with
the music?
Along with Bill Richards, Roland
Griffiths was an early psychedelic
researcher who led the religious
leaders study, the one that Sughra
Ahmed was in.
So during Fred's first days on
the job, Roland told him that
the purpose of the playlist was
partly to standardize the study
setting.
I remember him kind of briefly
explaining this to me.
And I said, well, that's interesting.
Making everybody listen to the same
music is all
but guaranteeing that everyone's
going to have a different experience
because people respond
to music differently, they do.
And this is no knock on Bill
or the playlist.
What do we know about the Hopkins
playlist? What has been studied
about it?
So there's a pretty famous landmark
study here at Hopkins.
The study that Fred told me about
was actually an offshoot of
a clinical trial on tobacco use
disorder that had a pretty big
impact on how we think about
treating substance use disorders as
a whole.
The music study was sort of a side
project.
The researchers had the participants
listen to two different playlists
during their sessions.
Over the first few sessions,
participants heard either the Johns
Hopkins playlist or an
overtone playlist, a playlist with
a bunch of performances of music
by instruments that had a great
number of overtones, including
things like didgeridoo and certain
types of gong.
And then for the third session,
participants got to choose which
playlist they heard.
The researchers found that people
chose the overtone playlist for
their third session at about the
same rate as they chose the Hopkins
playlist.
Listening to the overtone playlist
did not impair the
therapeutic response long-term
and that at its very least,
people didn't necessarily prefer the
Hopkins playlist reliably over the
overtone playlist.
That study was published in 2020 and
according to Fred.
That was the first, at least
somewhat rigorous analysis
of whether there's something
really special about this playlist
compared to other playlists.
That's really as much as has been
done so far.
The impact of having so little
research on this is that scientists
still don't know all that much about
the different ways in which music
can impact the psychedelic
experience.
With the caveat that there are
a number of practitioners in
the world who are
quite convinced that they know
how to select music to
facilitate and best guide and
optimize the psychedelic experience.
And I don't
doubt that some of them are
definitely skilled in that regard.
The problem is that doesn't mean we
understand it in a way that we can
translate it or operationalize it.
It doesn't that we necessarily know
the best way to train others to
do this.
And so as a shameless self-plug,
a few of us at Hopkins published a
scoping review of work done on
set and setting. This was published
in 2022.
Fred and his team went looking for
all the set and setting studies they
could find and they went way
back, even digging up research
papers dating back to the 1930s.
We basically scoured the published
literature from as far back as
we could reach.
And what they found was
underwhelming.
After they removed the studies that
didn't actually test anything or
compare at least two different
environmental conditions, the
researchers were left with fewer
than 30 studies.
And one of the things that we
realized upon digging through all
this literature is that there's
a lot of received wisdom.
Oh, obviously set and setting is
important. Obviously music is
important, obviously you should do
things this way and that way.
Well, why do you say that?
Well, because, because it's obvious
or because maybe someone experienced
it and is reporting that back or
because they heard it from someone
else who trained them.
And again, not knocking clinical
experience or expertise,
but that doesn't mean that we
actually truly know it.
At least from a scientific
standpoint, right?
Exactly.
There's a bit of a vein of
if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
To a degree, the set and setting
model we have right now
obviously has generated the
results that everybody's excited
about. It works.
What's the big deal?
We should just continue doing this,
but you know, it also isn't that
simple because psychedelic therapy
doesn't work for everyone.
And some of the aspects of set and
settings, if they could be changed
or optimized or modified,
could we do a lot better?
Not only that, but most
of the work that has been done was
done on what scientists call WEIRD
populations: Western,
Educated, Industrialized,
Rich and Democratic.
And Fred says that means the
findings don't necessarily apply to
a global population.
What questions do you think we still
need to answer when it comes to
the Hopkins playlist specifically in
its use?
I think it'd be helpful to
understand what's necessary
in the playlist and what's not,
whether you can tailor it at least
at some level by giving
people an option to opt out of
the things that they could a priori
identify as problematic
for them, whether it truly tracks
the time course of drug effect for
most people.
Can we pick and choose songs to keep
or drop based on whether
a participant has late onset of
psychedelic experience?
Or abbreviated peak period?
And or are there other
songs that we could insert at
various times to kind of
increase the likelihood that a
person has a peak experience?
And are
there clearly identified populations
for whom the playlist really just
doesn't work?
What does the music do without
drug on board and without the
expectation that you're going to
have a psychedelic experience?
I was very surprised to hear that
last bit.
So I told Fred the Helen Bonny
story about her doing mock
LSD sessions with music alone.
I'd never heard that story before,
but it makes perfect sense.
And it aligns with something
else I haven't told you yet, which
is we're in the process of writing
this up right now, but we
conducted a pilot study and
this study is no drug on board,
just music under this mild
sensory deprivation context.
We lined people up with an hour of
music listening in the style of
a psychedelic therapy session.
And that doesn't sound quite like
what Helen Bonny did, but.
We bring people in for a
preparation session.
We then invite them for an hour long
music listening session where we lie
them down on a couch with eye shades
and headphones tucked into a warm
comfy blanket and listening to music
turn inward, be present for whatever
arises in consciousness.
We're also collecting EEG data,
some other psychophysiological
measurements and a host of
questionnaires the day of the next
day and a week later to see if any
of these playlists, just the music
listening has an impact on people
short or long term.
Fred says the preliminary findings
are quite remarkable.
The researchers witnessed
participants crying,
sobbing, laughing to tears,
a full range of human emotion.
And some people even, this
is a 30 participant study, some
people, even reported experiencing
synesthesia.
Meaning that some people had sensory
crossovers, like feeling or
tasting colors.
Fred told me that the way the study
was built, each participant took
part in four different sessions.
Everyone listened to the Hopkins
playlist in one of their sessions.
Then in another session,
participants listened to music that
was personally meaningful to them.
In the remaining two sessions,
participants listened to either
nature sounds, electronic music,
overtone music, classic psychedelic
rock. Or a playlist that was built
for the study by a sound healer.
Suffice to say, the music
is definitely doing something.
And we're hoping this paper
will be real kind of eye opener and
real talking point for people
because compared to psychedelics,
I think we often expect the music
alone to really not be driving
a lot of this.
But that has yet to be seen.
When I was speaking with Bill
Richards, he was telling me,
for him, music is really the safety
net, the supportive thing that helps
move you along, that transports
you, but it doesn't cause
any of the content.
And I would love to know what you
think of that.
That's an interesting assertion.
And I don't believe
that's been tested.
Dr. Richards also told me
that a therapist heeding a request
to change the music during a session
should be extremely rare.
That there have been instances where
people have told me, I really hate
this music.
And that his response was,
then hate it with a passion.
What do you make of that?
It gives me pause due
to the potential that a therapist
insisting that to be the case is
ignoring safety signals in a
participant's experience.
You know, I'm not aware of instances
where those things have really
caused harm, but I worry
that it leads to some element of
self-blame or victim blaming, like
you're having this experience
because it's something in yourself
that you have to work through.
Well, that's exactly what he said
actually, that maybe it's coming up
for a reason and that that
is what you need to work through.
The problem becomes when the
therapist makes that decision rather
than the individual.
Do you think that there's such a
thing as an ideal playlist to
take shrooms?
No.
No, absolutely not.
Not something that could actually
work really well for everybody.
I think the missing pieces here
in the kind of thought process are
whether or not you believe
that this music will make everyone
feel the same way and not
just you, or
whether or you acknowledge
that people have varying reactions
to music.
And the reason people don't react to
the music the same ways is because
we have this filter of preferences
and idiosyncratic relationships.
So I think, you know, one hypothesis
that I've been working on is that
psychedelics to some degree remove
that filter.
They remove the gatekeeper of liking
so that you may experience the
music in a more pure or
less kind of socio-culturally,
socio-economically biased or
filtered fashion.
That's certain to not be true in all
cases, but I wonder to what degree
psychedelics, you know, remove the
filter or like open the filter up a
little bit.
This reminded me of something that
came up in my conversation with
Sughra.
When I spoke with her, she told me
that she had no affinity for the
Christian music in the playlist.
So I found myself wondering if her
filter had stayed intact during
and after her session and
whatever she experienced maybe
happened despite the music.
At the end of the talk, Helen Bonny
gave in 1995,
she took questions from the audience
and this one person basically asked
her if there are any risks to
using music other than classical
music in these therapy sessions
to which Helen answers.
I used to be pretty adamant about
classical music just because I felt
comfortable with it and we
had tested with it.
I didn't want to hold this too close
to me because I didn't know all the
possibilities and I still don't.
I trust you all to try.
I think that we can all try music
and we learn from that process.
I want people who are trained and
able to go and explore
this and certainly to explore it
musically, classical music
and other musics.
So, try it! See if it works.
Before her death, Helen Bonny became
open to the use of other musical
genres.
And when I spoke with Bill Richards,
he also seemed willing to make
bigger changes to the Hopkins
playlist to better support study
participants in the future.
After speaking with Bill
and Fred and learning about Helen
Bonny, I can totally understand
researchers wanting to play music
that study participants aren't
familiar with during sessions.
I can also totally understand study
participants wanting to listen to
music that feels appropriate for
their sessions.
And if that means culturally
appropriate, then so be it.
Ultimately, I think that we still
have a lot of unanswered questions
about the impacts
of music during psychedelic sessions
and what kind of music is
best for what kind session.
And my hope is that we're gonna find
out a whole lot more in
the coming years and decades.
Altered States is a production of
the UC Berkeley Center for the
Science of Psychedelics and PRX.
This episode was reported and
produced by me, Arielle
Duhaime-Ross.
Adizah Eghan is our senior editor.
Our executive editor is Malia
Wollan.
Jennie Cataldo is our senior
producer.
Our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum.
Our associate producer is Jade Abdul
Malik.
Our audio engineers are Terence
Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo.
Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.
Special thanks to Michael Pollan
from BCSP.
Our executive producers are Malia
Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzalez.
And our project manager is Edwin
Ochoa.
Our theme music is by Tao Nguyen and
Nate Brenner.
I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
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