Is microdosing the next frontier in ADHD treatment?

When you think about someone taking a psychedelic drug like magic mushrooms, the first images that come to mind probably don’t involve a medical professional in a white coat or any sort of clinical setting. 

However, the perception of these drugs is changing as researchers and health professionals continue to learn new ways these drugs can treat a variety of mental health conditions. 

Much of the research has to do with microdosing, or taking such a small dose of a drug that it doesn’t produce a “trip.” One of the more commonly microdosed drugs is psilocybin, the naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in “magic mushrooms.” 

That led our small-but-mighty team at Hyperfocus to wonder, “What could this all mean for ADHD treatment?” 

So, we looked for someone who might know, and it led us to Dr. Richard A. Friedman. He’s a professor, psychiatrist, and director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University’s medical school. Richard has also written about his areas of expertise for The New York Times and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.  

On this week’s episode of Hyperfocus, he sits down with mental health journalist Rae Jacobson to answer all her questions on microdosing, psychedelics as medicine, and what it could mean for ADHD and more. 

• ADHD alternative treatment 

• ADHD treatment without medication: What are my options? 

• Richard’s piece on microdosing in The Atlantic

(02:58) What is microdosing?

(10:43) What do we know about ADHD and microdosing?

(15:30) How do psychedelics work in the brain?

(30:44) Richard’s hopes for future research and microdosing

We love hearing from our listeners! Email us at hyperfocus@understood.org.

Richard: People usually, when they hear the word psychedelic, think, "Wow, I'm going to have a trip. I'm gonna have this hallucinatory, extraordinary, transcendent-like experience." But microdosing doesn't do that. So, it must do something else, otherwise it wouldn't be so popular.

Rae: If you've been consuming any health or science news over the past couple of years, you've probably seen at least one story talking about possible new uses of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin (that's magic mushrooms to you) and LSD. A lot of these stories focus on the possibilities of microdosing psychedelics, taking small amounts but not enough to get you high, and the potential that it might have to treat mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more. And lately, we've noticed people wondering if it could be helpful for ADHD, too.

Now, I want to be really clear. We are not endorsing microdosing or any other kind of drug use. But we were curious. What do we actually know about it? Does it have potential to help people with ADHD or other mental health disorders? So, we reached out to Dr. Richard A. Friedman.

Richard is a professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell, that's Cornell's medical school. He's very knowledgeable about this. And though, as Richard will be the first to tell you, research around microdosing is very much in its infancy and right now, psychedelic use remains illegal in nearly every state, this isn't some off-the-wall idea. Microdosing's potential for medical use, specifically in treating mental health issues, is being studied by some very serious scientists.

So, what is microdosing? Can it help people? And what does this all mean for ADHD brains? Today on "Hyperfocus," Dr. Richard A. Friedman.

Well, hi, Richard.

Richard: Hey, Rae.

Rae: Thank you for coming. Will you, just for our listeners, tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Richard: Sure. I'm a psychiatrist and I'm a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, and I run the psychopharmacology clinic there, and I do a lot of teaching and training of psychiatric residents. I also treat patients, and I have a particular interest in people who are depressed and anxious and are having difficult times and haven't really responded to usual treatments. And I also write for the public about psychiatry and behavior, and neuroscience, and cool stuff like that.

Rae: You say write for the public, but I think you're being humble here, because you don't write for just like any old place.

Richard: So, I write, I've written for years as a contributing op-ed writer at the Times. And nowadays I write for The Atlantic.

Rae: All right, well, we're gonna talk about microdosing in ADHD. Just so we can set like kind of a baseline for our listeners, could you just describe what microdosing is and why somebody might do it?

Richard: Sure. So, microdosing is the use of psychedelics at dosages that do not produce one of the so-called trips, like a transcendent oceanic experience. So, it's a very, very, very small dose, hence microdosing, and the intent and the reason why most people do it is because they feel that it gives them some kind of advantage. And those advantages are typically things like enhanced creativity, a sense of flow, people report feeling better. And it is controversial because it's poorly studied, so we don't actually know how effective microdosing is, but the idea doesn't go away that microdosing has benefits.

Rae: What is the benefit of microdosing, especially, you know, we're sort of speaking specifically for people with ADHD in this episode, but in general, what would somebody get from microdosing if they were just trying it out?

Richard: Well, first of all, they wouldn't feel it. It would be a kind of invisible drug in the sense that people usually, when they hear the word psychedelic, think, "Wow, I'm going to have a trip. I'm going to this hallucinatory, extraordinary, transcendent-like experience." But microdosing doesn't do that. So, it must do something else. Otherwise, it wouldn't be so popular. You know, and one can't rule out the fact that... It may be a placebo, but placebos are real anyway. They have real biological effects, and some of your listeners may take issue with that, but there's no way really to know.

In fact, studies have been done comparing microdoses to placebos, and people can't tell whether they're on a microdose or a placebo. But their brain can tell. So, subjectively, if you ask people, what are you taking? Is it the placebo or is it the microdose? They're just as likely to guess right as they are to guess wrong. But if you study their brain electrical activity, the microdose is having an effect.

Rae: It is?

Richard: Yes. There's preliminary evidence that it is having an effect, even though the person can't subjectively get the right answer. They can't tell you. "I feel it. I know I'm taking it."

Rae: You talked to us when we had a pre-interview for the episode about something called default mode network.

Richard: Yes.

Rae: You said psychedelics turn it off. Could you explain that to me?

Richard: Right, so the default mode network is basically a series of interconnected circuits in the brain. And the default mode, and there are several of these default mode networks that operate in the brain, and the way we know about them is it was discovered by putting people in F-MRI scanners and while they were waiting to do something like a task — think of a problem, do a math problem, read something out loud — researchers noticed that there was a lot of activity in the brain, even when they were at rest.

And this activity connected different regions of the brain, and this interconnected base state of activity and the brain is your default mode. And it's basically thought to be a self-monitoring function in which when you're thinking about yourself, you're daydreaming, you're thinking of what you did today, what you're going to do tomorrow, you're aware of yourself, you're monitoring yourself. This is active and the minute somebody comes into the room while you're in the scanner and they ask you something where they give you a question or they ask you to solve a problem, the default mode shuts down meaning you're not focused on yourself, you focused on the person, you're focused on a problem, you're on the world outside.

So, psychedelics do something that no other drug that we know of does. It turns down the default mode network as if the person has turned their focus and attention away from themselves, their self-consciousness, and out into the world, onto something else. And that's thought to represent the so-called ego-less state, that experience when they are using psychedelics or tripping. It's been studied in people who are taking psychedelic doses of classic psychedelics, but I'm unaware of any evidence that microdoses have been studied and have been demonstrated to actually turn down the default mode network the way a psychedelic dose of a psychedelic would do.

Rae: I have to say, when you describe turning off the default, you say default and I say default, and I'm trying to...

Richard: Default.

Rae: Default, default. It makes that meta-narrative that you have going all the time, "I need to be here tomorrow, I've got to remember this, I can't, how am I, do I look OK?" Is this all of those sort of constant internal chatter that we use to sort of regulate all the things around ourselves, and I guess probably for me, a lot of that would approach anxiety levels of like worrying. You turn it down when you use an adequate dose of a psychedelic, but we don't yet know if microdoses are enough to turn it down.

Richard: Correct, exactly right. So, people who are using microdosing don't describe a trip, but they describe other benefits. They're more creative, they feel the sense of flow, they like the way it feels, it's very subtle. I wouldn't be surprised if they show a decrease in their default mode activity, it just hasn't been studied.

Rae: It seems like that is kind of an endemic problem with microdosing, is that there just isn't that much research. You know, but what I will say I've seen is, you're lovely piece accepted, there are a lot of think pieces and news bits and sort of hand-wringing or very exaltering, like, "Oh, I'm so excited about this." There's so much coverage of microdosing, but there's not that much research to draw from. But it sounds, if you were to listen to these pieces, like everybody and their mom is microdosing all the time, and that's how they get through their day. Is that accurate? Do we really know how many people are using this kind of?

Richard: There are some poor quality surveys about microdosing. Most of the surveys about, let's say, recreational drug use are psychedelics, you know, psychedelic doses of psychedelics. You know, trips. But not microdosing. You know, but it is mostly in the realm of anecdote, you know, their personal accounts. Many people have written about it. It's all over the place, but it's not, it's not the subject of serious epidemiologic investigation.

Rae: Well, then I guess, I mean, maybe this next question then is a bit challenging to answer because there's not enough research and you're a scientist, but I'm really interested because, you know, I have ADHD and I've been wondering a lot about the applications of things that are not yet studied for ADHD. And one of the reasons we were so excited to have you on the show is that a lot of people, anecdotally, that we've been hearing about, to go back to the anecdote part, are talking about microdosing as a means of treating their ADHD, especially during the shortage of ADHD medication. Is there any research around microdosing and attention deficit disorder?

Richard: In a word, zero. We simply don't know. We actually know a fair amount about the neurobiology of ADHD and what distinguishes the brain of the average person with ADD from someone who doesn't have it, but we don't know what psychedelics might do.

Rae: Can you tell me a little bit more about that distinguishing factor, like how is, for example, you don't have ADHD to my knowledge.

Richard: No.

Rae: How is your brain different than mine?

Richard: This was studied by a remarkable scientist, Nora Volkow, who is the head of the NIAAA, National Institute of Alcohol and Addicition. And she studied it first in adults. She took a group of adults who had ADD and a group of people matched who didn't have ADD and put them in an F-MRI scanner, and she found something fascinating, which was the people with ADD, on average, had fewer dopamine receptors in their reward circuit of their brain. What does that mean? Well, the reward circuit in the brain is a critical circuit in your brain, and it's the target of all self-reinforcing drugs of abuse. They all have a common target in the brain, and they target the reward center of the brain and cause the release of dopamine.

And we get that little squirt of dopamine, it has multiple effects. One is: it feels pleasurable. The other is it creates a signal to your brain of importance, salience, as in "This experience you're having right now is important, remember it." So, it's pleasure, it's salience, and it's also craving, wanting. I mean, you want that experience again. So, it's those, that signal of dopamine encodes multiple meanings, conveys multiple messages. And in a sense, since people with ADD on average are walking around with fewer dopamine receptors, you could say they're understimulated at baseline.

Their hedonic state is lower on average than people who don't have ADD, and their sense of the world is generally less stimulating and less interesting than people who don t have ADD. Which is why, although it's called attention deficit disorder, I think of it in a different way. It's not so much that the primary problem is attention. The manifestation of ADD is focus and attention. The primary issue in ADD in a way a high taste for novelty and newness, and sensation.

So, if you ask someone who has ADD, you know, where do you have your biggest problem? It's in places where things are repetitive and dull, like a lecture that goes on and on and on for two hours, you're sitting in your seat, it's the same thing, the voice is drawing on and on, you've extracted very quickly what's new and interesting about that situation. And after 10 or 15 minutes, your focus goes somewhere else, because it's no longer new.

Rae: So, can I ask then, based on all of that, just, I know my parents listen to this podcast, but I'm gonna be honest, I have taken psychedelic drugs in my time. And I love them because I have ADD, and everything seemed new all the time. And I feel like, you know, you wrote that wonderful piece in The Atlantic about how psychedelics affect learning and they have mind expansion and they can help cope with past trauma, which is often endemic with people with ADHD.

But, how did they actually work in the brain, and do they work the same way? And again, probably a non-researched, unanswerable question in the brains of people who have ADHD.

Richard: Such a great question. So, probably they don't work so differently because these are very specific drugs. So, just to make it simple, all classic psychedelics, whether it's LSD or psilocybin, or mescaline, or ayahuasca, or DMT, they all stimulate a special serotonin receptor in the brain called the 2A receptor. There are about 15 or so different identified serotonin receptors. And serotonin, just for your listeners, is a neurotransmitter in the brain that's really important in mood and anxiety. SSRIs, for example, increase serotonin activity in the brain, and are thought to relieve some of the depression and anxiety that are linked to, you know, depression and anxiety problems by raising serotonin signaling.

So, but these drugs specifically stimulate only one subtype of serotonin receptor, which is located in your prefrontal cortex, which is this part of your brain right over your forehead. That's your executive reasoner in chief. That's the part of your brain that allows you to have a conversation and think critically, analytically. Think about the future, make a plan, understand the relationship between, you know, doing something and a consequence. If I do A, then B, if I do B, then C. And it stimulates those receptors, and the net effect of stimulating those receptors is eventually to deactivate the default mode network and create this ego-less state.

It's a series of cascading events. No other drugs that we know about can do exactly the same kind of thing.

Rae: I'm trying to make sure I'm getting it right. Psychedelics work differently than basically any other drugs that we know of, from what you've been saying.

Richard: Yes.

Rae: And they turn off parts of the prefrontal cortex, which helps people feel less anxious, less depressed, because they're turning off the default mode network, the part of this part of our brains that is sort of our warrior in chief?

Richard: They take away self-consciousness, the stranglehold of self-consciousness of everyday life. And the way they do it is they decrease the activity in the default mode network, which includes areas in the cortex, the prefrontal cortex.

Rae: Got it. So then, can I ask a question? Because based on everything I know about ADHD, it kind of sounds like we need that part more. I mean, I feel like a lot of the challenges that go with ADHD, like impulsivity, maybe not thinking before you act, or trouble with executive functions, which is definitely something that I can relate to, that prefrontal cortex, it almost feels like it underperforms for us sometimes. So, tamping down some of its activity does feel like it's possible that...

Richard: That could make things worse.

Rae: Yeah.

Richard: Yeah, but your own experience was, actually, everything seemed really intriguing and interesting.

Rae: Very much so. However, had you asked me to sit down and like, take a test or go to my job. I don't know if that would have worked that well.

Richard: Right, which is a very interesting observation, which is that although the drug may enhance your experience of novelty and make things more interesting, you have to have the ability to leverage that novelty and use it.

Rae: Yeah.

Richard: And so, if I decrease the activity of your prefrontal cortex, which gives you control, you may experience novelty and you may feel everything is interesting, but you may be unable to do anything with it. So, what you really want is to enhance the sense of interest, but not take away control.

Rae: Yes. From people we've spoken to for this episode, because we were sort of like doing a little bit of checking around of what was it like to have ADHD and microdose, I haven't experienced it. And we kept hearing from people that it was kind of like having an extra cup of coffee, like they had a little of improved focus, mood lifter, and it sounds like, you know, there's definitely potential for that to be a placebo effect, like you said. But I'm now thinking that, based on everything you've said that it's possible that sort of has the opposite effect of what I think of as ADHD medication having.

Richard: It's interesting. It may be, you're right. And one of the reasons that might be a problem in trying to figure out why it may or may not be true is self-report. People will say something feels good. But feeling good, feeling better, isn't the same as functioning better, right? I mean, I can imagine situations in which we take away, it would give you a sense of interest in everything, and you're like a kid in a game room, and the work is getting done, but if I said to you, "How was that experience?" You'd say, "Wow, that was fabulous. I had a wonderful time, I went from this thing to that thing," and then I would say, "Yeah, and how was your essay? How did you get your work done?" "Oh, funny you ask. It wasn't that interesting. How could I compete below these other interesting things?"

Rae: I think I'm getting what you're saying, which is that ADHD brains are novelty seeking by nature. It's how we're built. And this microdosing or macrodosing creates some amount of a novel experience, whether it's on a subconscious subclinical level or whether it's like you're very obviously experiencing a trip. And that feels good to everyone. Well, maybe not everyone. I've definitely experienced people who don't enjoy it. But for the most part, we like it because it is new, but it isn't necessarily something that is an alternative to the medication that we take so that we can function within a much more ordered society.

Richard: Yes.

Rae: Am I picking up?

Richard: Yes.

Rae: OK.

Richard: And in contrast, when you take a stimulant medicine like Adderall, what that does, going back to the whole finding, initially, of Volknow's, that people with ADD have fewer dopamine receptors in their reward pathway, is stimulants release dopamine in the reward pathway and create the feeling of interest, novelty, you know, pleasure, and focus. But they do not, unlike psychedelics, they do not make you less self-conscious. They don't shut down your default mode network.

Rae: Not at all.

Richard: So, you basically have an increased feeling of salience and focus, and you have the capacity for focusing and self-control.

Rae: So, I think I realized sometimes you want two things to be the same when they aren't. And just the experience of people with ADHD having a good response to microdosing does not necessarily mean that it is a great alternative to ADHD medication, it sounds like that's what you mean.

Richard: Right. And, you know, we know there are studies, not with microdosing, but with stimulants in which you ask people to rate themselves, their experience. How did you do? Their perception about how they did or performed on an academic task is actually better than the objective result of the task.

Rae: You specialize in psychopharmacology, and you're a psychiatrist. Is microdosing something that people in your community have high hopes for in any way? If there could be research, does it seem like a treatment that could offer help for even conditions, maybe not ADHD, but things that are parallel to ADHD? There's a lot of comorbidity with anxiety, with depression.

Richard: Yes, wonderful question. So, the answer is yeah, because if it turned out that microdoses were capable of inducing the same neuroplastic effects of classic psychedelics at psychedelic doses, but without the trip, it would open up a whole new area, potential therapeutic area, because believe it or not, not everybody wants to have a trip. People are afraid of it, the experience, some people who have certain kinds of psychiatric histories shouldn't have a psychedelic trip because they may become psychotic.

And yet these drugs have therapeutic potential because they increase the capacity for learning and they may augment the effects of therapy because they're rapid cycloplastogens, meaning they enhance neuroplastic activity in the brain, and they do it very quickly. So, if it turned out that microdoses also induce neuroplasticity, and we could talk about neuroplasticity, but they don't give you a trip, that would be a very interesting finding with a huge therapeutic implication.

Rae: Neuroplasticity. The ability of our brains to remake and rewire themselves over and over as we take in new experiences, new information, new input of all kinds. Richard explained that this is a literal change. Neurons sprouting new little dendrites, forming physical connections, and creating new pathways for our minds to traverse.

Richard: So, neuroplasticity is structural and functional. Means the neurons have sprouted new dendrites, and they're now more densely connected. And as a result, they're more functionally connected. And neuroplasticity is the molecular basis of learning.

Rae: But as we age, our brains become less plastic, more static. It's the reason young kids can pick up languages like it's nothing, while adults have to plod along, awkwardly Duolingoling our way to even the most basic phrases.

So, could this have implications for other learning issues, not ADHD, but something like, say, dyscalculia or dyslexia?

Richard: Yeah. I mean, to the extent that, you know, learning will make people better. And psychotherapy is a form of learning. You learn, let's say, to have a different way of thinking about your problem. You need new information. You use new information and new data to update your views about yourself. Let's say you're depressed, and you have really very negative thoughts and feelings about yourself, you would be much more open to evidence to the contrary. And you might incorporate that into your self-image, which is another form of learning if you were in psychotherapy and on a psychedelic, because it enhances the ability to learn.

It's been used in PTSD, where people have had traumas, and they have to learn how to function in the world and learn the world is a safe place, where they suddenly feel it isn't. They have to have new learning. They have learn how to be unafraid and all kinds of things related to that. So, wherever learning is involved, psychedelics may enhance the process.

Rae: And hearing you say that, I do, you know, even if it's not a necessarily a treatment for the struggle with focus and executive function of ADHD, one of the things that people talk about in terms of the sort of more invisible symptoms of especially undiagnosed ADHD or people have been undiagnosed for a long time is that there's a lot of poor self-concept, a lot, you sense of being a broken person, a negative view that you of yourself, and I could see within that, that this might be beneficial.

Richard: Yes. It could be.

Rae: This is cool.

Richard: Yeah. You know, I mean, one thing I think that's really important just to keep in mind is this whole concept of enhancing neuroplasticity, which is the buzzword, everybody talks about neuroplasticity. A: there are limits to neuroplasticity. You know, you're not going to retain, you are not going to get the kind of neuroplasticity you had during the sensitive period when you were a child, and it was so easy to learn math and learn a foreign language and learn how to ride a bicycle. That's you're in the heightened state of neuroplasticity. It's a window in development, which opens and slams shut.

And every kind of cognitive function has got a different sensitive period: math, language, et cetera, different periods where that happens. And so, what's really important in thinking about neuroplasticity and psychedelics is, if you increase neuroplasticity, it's really critical what your environment is like when you're under the influence of a psychedelic.

Rae: Set and setting.

Richard: Yes, exactly. Setting is, you know, the environment around you, the people who are around you, and set is, your mindset, what you're thinking and feeling at the moment, right? So, you can think of a psychedelic and the experience of neuroplasticity a little like taking a glass vase and putting it back into the kiln where it's really hot and making it soft again, where it can be reshaped and molded, and there are several outcomes, right? You can bake a glass vase that is, let's say, not necessarily the most beautiful or functional and improve it. It's beauty and function. You can also make a mess of it.

So, you need the environment and the people around you to be the right ones. You need people who are supportive and loving and care about you because you're in a very easily influenced state. That's critical. Meaning, if you increase neuroplasticity or trigger neuroplasticity, you have to leverage it. It's not enough just to take a psychedelic, to sit in a room and think, "I'm gonna be healed. I'm going to have all kinds of new things happen to me, and I don't have to do anything to leverage that."

Rae: So, whatever the implications of this potential treatment are, it's very essential that they're paired with intentional therapeutic settings. Otherwise, it could be dangerous.

Richard: Yeah, I mean, they don't necessarily have to be therapeutic. They have to be supportive and warm. So, you may just wanna hang out with your friends and have a wonderful time. So long as they're supportive and loving, that's great. You can learn all kinds of things. I'm not saying you have to be in therapy in order for neuroplasticity to be leveraged. It's just that you don't wanna be in a place that is scary and unsupportive because you're gonna have a very bad trip.

Rae: Very reasonable, but not if you microdose.

Richard: No, not if you microdose.

Rae: So, what hope is there for microdosing as a potential... I don't know, I'm trying to think of the right word, but start again. But what hope is there for microdosing as an actual treatment option for people who are dealing with anxiety, depression, anything else that seems, as the research unfolds, to be a good application of the treatment? Because in many states it's still illegal to possess mushrooms or to take LSD. So, it seems like there's two things that are missing right now. There's research that needs to be done, and there's a legal angle.

Richard: You're absolutely right. I mean, we thankfully, you know, psychedelics, really for the first time, have been subject to rigorous scientific testing in just the last decade. So, you know, we've actually progressed, I think. And, but that's using classic, you know, psychedelic doses of classic psychedelics. Microdosing has not been subject to the same kind of rigorous scientific scrutiny. And given the current administration and its attitudes about science in general, I wouldn't hold my breath, unfortunately. Which isn't to say that there can't be other venues for funding this research privately, because I do think it's promising, and I think that the fact that these drugs may cause neuroplastic benefit that's comparable to classic psychedelics at higher doses needs to be studied.

Rae: I mean, I can only hope that there is some amount of understanding of the potential benefit of these pre-existing compounds because, you know, I think about how long it takes to just create a new drug at all, and if we have these things that are already there and we have some evidence for benefit, it would be amazing to see what we could do with that.

Richard: Yes, I mean, psychedelics actually are pretty safe. There are no known reported cases of overdose. In fact, a British researcher who's an expert in psychedelics, David Nutt, got himself into a fair amount of trouble because he was asked by one of the government advisory panels to come up with a scale of relative safety of drugs, the most dangerous drug and most physicians and psychiatrists would agree with it, the most dangerous drug is alcohol. I mean, it's associated with more death and sickness, morbidity, hospitalization than any other drug that we know about, perhaps except for the scourge of opiates, high-potency opiates like fentanyl.

So, you know, alcohol, close. Opiates, and all the way at the bottom, and then you'd have to put tobacco in there, right at the top because of the cardiovascular and cancer death, all the way at the bottom, the safest drug, psychedelics, medically.

Rae: Wow. That's wild.

Richard: Now, I mean, at the moment in the United States, they are classified as in the most restrictive category by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, it's classified in class one, meaning there's no medical use for them. So, I think that that will change.

Rae: From your position as a psychiatrist, as a researcher and academic, what do you hope to see happen with psychedelics in this context?

Richard: I hope that they receive more research funding and that they are studied for a wide variety of mental health conditions. And also, I'm very excited about the next generation of psychedelics, which are tripless, so-called non-hallucinogenic psychedelics. These are synthetic molecules that have the capacity to unleash neuroplasticity, but they don't cause a trip.

Rae: These are being made now?

Richard: Yeah.

Rae: What?

Richard: Yeah. They were discovered, we've actually, we've known about them for a while. They induce neuroplasticity, but they do not produce a classic transcendent trip.

Rae: I didn't even know that existed!

Richard: Yeah. I wrote a piece about this in The Atlantic a while ago. It's the next generation of psychedelics. Tripless, the tripless psychedelics, they won't produce a hallucination or a trip.

Rae: Wow. But you will get the default mode turning off, you will the egoless feeling, and the benefits of extended neuroplasticity.

Richard: They haven't been studied yet very well in humans. They're in their early stages, but based on their neurobiology, it's entirely possible that's true. Despite the fact that, you know, people love the transcendent experience, and I understand it, of psychedelics, and the therapeutic effects of psychedelic is directly correlated with their transcendent effects. But remember, I mean, correlation's not the same as causation. They may be correlated, but that may be the reason why they are therapeutic. It may be neuroplasticity.

Rae: Don't know if it's good to say how excited I am about drugs on the radio. Everything you've said really feels revolutionary and exciting and like there's something good that can come from this entire world that is sort of just developing now that there's something that's been around but it wasn't used for therapy and it has tremendous potential to be wildly beneficial, and that's really exciting. I can only hope that the research and the funding, and the studies follow.

Richard: Yes. I share your enthusiasm.

Rae: Can you hear it in your voice? Is there anything else that you feel like, "Don't miss this! You should know this."

Richard: I would say if there's one thing to take away from this, it's to be skeptical about all claims that you hear and simply ask yourself one question. What is that based on? What's the evidence? What's data for its effect, its efficacy, its use? And also, where's the that it's safe? It's not enough to have an anecdote. We need these things to really be studied.

Rae: Richard Friedman, thank you so much for coming on here. This has been delightful, and I learned, genuinely learned a lot.

Richard: My pleasure, Rae. Thank you for having me.

Rae: Thanks for listening to this episode of "Hyperfocus." If you have any questions or ideas for future topics, write me an email or send a voice memo to hyperfocus@understood.org. "Hyperfocus" is made by me, Rae Jacobson, and Cody Nelson. Our video producer is Calvin Knie. Our music comes from Blue Dot Sessions. Ash Beecher is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director, and Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, you can donate at Understood.org/give.