#478 — The Psychedelic Mind
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Robin Carhart-Harris about psychedelic research and its therapeutic potential. They discuss the current state of the field, the FDA denial of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, the critical role of set and setting, risks for vulnerable populations, the REBUS model of how psychedelics work on the brain, the default mode network and ego dissolution, microdosing, the neuroscience of consciousness, DMT entities, and other topics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. |
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| 0:24.4 | I am here with Robin Carhart Harris. |
| 0:26.5 | Robin, thanks for joining me again. |
| 0:28.3 | Thanks for having me on. |
| 0:29.6 | So remind people where you are doing your research on psychedelics. |
| 0:35.1 | I'm at the University of California, San Francisco. I have my lab there. |
| 0:39.3 | And what's the focus of your research at this point? It's consciousness science and how it's |
| 0:43.9 | encoded in brain activity. That's a big part of it. How can we use psychedelics to try and tackle |
| 0:49.4 | that question? And it translates into therapeutic applications of psychedelics as well. I also look at harms. |
| 0:58.2 | Yeah, so try and cover much of the sort of full gamut of psychedelic science and research. |
| 1:04.4 | Yeah, well, I want to get into all of that. I guess big picture to start. What are your impressions |
| 1:09.4 | of the state of the field at this point? Where are we |
| 1:13.2 | with research on psychedelics and therapeutic potential and safety? I mean, how vulnerable are we to |
| 1:20.3 | having the rug pulled out from under all of this by some new regime of there being a war on drugs? I mean, what's your perception |
| 1:29.4 | of the field, high level? Well, it's rich and complex. We rode a wave through a kind of peak |
| 1:38.1 | of a hype cycle, perhaps after Michael Pollan's bestseller, How to Change Your Mind, published in 2018. |
| 1:44.1 | And yeah, there was a period Change Your Mind, published in 2018. |
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