PT536 – Psychedelics and Creativity, Endo-Tripping, and the Origins of Life on Earth, with Dr. Bruce Damer
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The path of the psychedelic renaissance has largely touched on the aspects of therapy, personal growth, and initiation rites, but now, the relationship between psychedelics and creativity is being studied more and more. Can psychedelics really increase intellect, novelty, and problem solving?
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Bruce Damer: astrobiologist with a long history of work at NASA, and now the president and co-founder of the Center for MINDS, a new nonprofit researching the best ways to improve creativity and problem solving.
He talks about how we're losing our best creative minds to hyper-specialization, and while there is lots of research pointing to psychedelics as creativity-enhancers, we need to develop frameworks and protocols to be able to measure exactly how that works, and the best ways to encourage better results. The Center for MINDS is sponsoring research while running its own three year project studying creativity in a naturalistic setting, and aims to answer: How do we unlock more genius? What's the main driver for novel thinking?
He discusses:
- His path to psychedelics, including his time with 'endo-tripping': training his mind to trip without any external substances
- The importance of adding 'set up' to set and setting, representing one's intentions and preparatory work up until that point
- The tale of his extraordinary ayahuasca experience where he journeyed together with Mama Ayahuasca all the way to the beginning of life on earth
- His theory on the real origin of life, and why the 'survival of the fittest' framework shouldn't be our North Star
- The absolute necessity of mentorship from elders
and more!
The steps the Center for MINDS will take in studying psychedelics and creativity will largely be steered by people's personal stories, so please share yours with them by filling out their survey. What has worked for you? What is your personal protocol?
For links, head to the show notes page.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. This is Joe Moore coming at you from |
| 0:13.9 | Bracken Ridge, Colorado. Today on the show, we have Bruce Damer. Bruce Damer is the president |
| 0:18.9 | and co-founder of the Center for Minds, which is a very interesting |
| 0:23.3 | nonprofit looking at creativity, creative problem solving, psychedelics, and doing it in a very |
| 0:30.1 | rigorous way where we will have a very strong foundation for using psychedelics for real- world problems outside of our heads and relationships |
| 0:40.8 | and more in terms of science and engineering and practical solutions. So this is a really big treat |
| 0:48.4 | for me. Bruce has been a hero for a while and very influential on me. So thank you, Bruce, |
| 0:53.8 | for being here. And |
| 0:55.5 | plenty of interviews with Bruce over at Psychedelic Salon, if you want to dig into the archives. But |
| 1:00.8 | this is about specifically Center for Minds. I think you're going to like this one. All right. Thank you |
| 1:05.7 | all for tuning in. And we will see you on the other side. |
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... |
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