I love messing with the mind. I also love messing with the brain. The two aren’t the same thing, although some things mess with both. My graduate training was in receptor biology, g-protein couple receptor biology to be a little more specific. I could get way more specific, but then I’d be doing the thing that had me leave the bench in the first place. I like to talk and think about ecosystems, about how everything fits together, I like to model and visualize the complexity, and I like to make connections obvious and non-obvious. So a little background before I go back to messing with the mind.
I like to tell the story of Darwin and how he relates the Aha moment in which the Origin of Species came into existence. I’m all about making connections, and subsequent research has demonstrated that while it may have looked to him like it came to him in a flash of insight, I like to think of it as his brain making the last little connection that tied his decades of thinking all together into a beautiful bow.
My decades of wandering started while I was realizing 8 year old me’s dream of being an astrophysicist. Sitting in the Array Operations Center at the Very Large Array, in front of the terminal with lines of green code on the dark screen, I realized that this is not what I wanted to do with my life. Mind you, sitting there was the result of me responding to an innocent “You wouldn’t be interested in Astronomy, girls don’t do Astronomy”, so I’d never really explored what I could or would want to do. But from my vantage now, that is life isn’t it? Taking a journey to see what works, to find out what there is for you to find out, to learn all the lessons along the way?
Last year, I took a dear friend’s suggestion and participated in a guided psychedelic retreat, ‘cuz I like messing with the mind, ergo it had to come to that eventually, right? I didn’t commune with God, or see my ancestors or anything cool like that, but it did start me on a journey of letting go. For the past year, I have been catching up on the Psychedelic Renaissance happening all around me. Given how much I like messing with the mind, I was shocked that I had been oblivious to it all. Turns out oblivious is not far off track. You really don't see what is right in front of you.
Back in 2006, I wrote a blog post on The Power of LSD, based on an article I’d found. I got so much of that article wrong. I remembered thinking that psychedelic research was a limited phenomenon, that the studies in that review were isolated work, that not much came of the research people were doing. In fact, the first sentence of that article reads "The therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs have recently resurfaced as a topic of debate in neuropsychopharmacology." In my own defense, at the time I found the article, I wanted to get back into working on the brain after having done a stint in program management and event coordination in transformational education, in fact, that was the year before I started working at the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
So I was around, though I wasn't necessarily present to the birth of this psychedelic renaissance. And it has captured me. Medicine that could actually cure (loaded word innit?) mental disorders, instead of treating the symptoms?! I'm all in. Well kinda. What is someone who loves to study the brain, loves to teach others about the brain, and loves to map and explore possible connections for innovative ideas to do in this space? Well that is the question. And the inquiry I'm on these days. Mostly I'm gathering my thoughts and using all my talents to determine what is next for me around here.