Dr. Rick Strassman (Interview Archive)

Announcer: You're listening to A Psychology of the Future, an online summit put together by Erik Lenderman, where leaders in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine share what they've learned about practical psychology. Thanks for being here.

Erik: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for spending time with us at A Psychology of the Future. My guest today is Dr. Rick Strassman, who wrote DMT: The Spirit Molecule, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, and Inner Paths to Outer Space. He conducted some of the earliest clinical research into DMT, a psychoactive compound, looking at how it changes consciousness in human volunteers. Rick, maybe you could start by telling us a bit about yourself. Glad to have you with us.

Dr. Strassman: Thanks, Erik. I'm glad to take part in what you're building here. It strikes me as a worthwhile effort.

Erik: I appreciate that. Thank you.

Dr. Strassman: And it should widen the conversation, which is something one of my own teachers always pushed people to do. As for how I got here: I grew up in Southern California in a conservative Jewish household. We weren't strictly observant, but there was Hebrew school and some grounding in the faith. College took me to the West Coast, medical school to the East Coast. Once I finished medical school I went into general psychiatric training.

The thing that steered me toward psychiatry was a curiosity about psychedelic and drug experiences that I'd carried for a long time. What first pulled me in was noticing how closely the accounts of people in psychedelic states resembled the accounts of people deep in Eastern meditative practice. The visions, the voices, the insights, the sense of leaving the body: where those two sets of experiences lined up, it seemed to me there had to be some shared biological basis underneath. Put differently, sitting in meditation and taking a psychedelic substance might be switching on the same region of the brain, and that would explain why the experiences came out looking so alike.

So the goal I tucked away for the long haul was to study the biology of spiritual experience, and the surest route I knew of for triggering those deep shifts in consciousness was the psychedelic drugs themselves. Given that, psychiatry looked like the field where I'd have the best shot at chasing that question.