🫠 Psychonaut POV

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Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that still remembers the oddly soothing screech of dial-up internet. Or was that all a dream? 🤔

Manoj Doss started studying memory after a rollerblading accident wiped his own clean for eight hours. Now he's at UT Austin asking whether psychedelics might rewrite the rules of how we encode, retrieve, and decipher our memories.

We asked Manoj whether recovered memories on psychedelics can be trusted, why people tend to feel so insightful while tripping, and how his “fluency hypothesis” could explain breakthroughs and delusions alike.

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What drew you to study the intersection of psychedelics and memory? How did that become your focus?

I was studying memory as an undergrad at UT in Allie Preston's lab, doing fMRI work. Part of what got me interested was this bizarre experience my freshman year. I had a bad concussion from rollerblading and couldn't form new memories for about eight hours. I was awake the whole time, but I'd ask my friends what happened and they'd tell me, and then ten seconds later I'd ask again. Eventually they just started telling me “blueberry giraffe” and I'd say, “okay, cool,” then immediately forget and ask again. That experience with recollection versus familiarity, remembering specific details versus just knowing something feels familiar, ended up being directly related to what I studied later.

From there, I worked in a lab studying psychoactive drugs during my master's at University College London, and then I went back to a memory lab at UC Davis. During my PhD at Chicago, I finally got to combine everything, studying memory distortion with Dave Gallo while collaborating with Harriet de Wit on MDMA research. Then Fred Barrett recruited me to Johns Hopkins to bring what he called “the cognitive revolution” to their psychedelic research program.

Combining psychedelics and memory made my research more applicable. When you're just studying memory, it can get so pedantic that you forget the big picture. But this lets me ask bigger questions about how these drugs might actually help people.

Recovered memories are a hot topic right now. If someone takes a psychedelic and recalls being abused as a child, can they trust that memory? What does the research tell us?

People will quickly assume that if something feels right, it must be right. But you have to think about these phenomena against the backdrop of memory research, which has shown that if you can't remember something traumatic and then suddenly recover a memory of it, it's highly unlikely to be real. The Satanic panic is a classic example. People were coming up with disturbing memories of their parents sacrificing babies, but investigations couldn't find any evidence.

There's a book, Remembering Satan, about a sheriff who didn't initially remember abusing his daughters, but after being told to pray on it, he came back with a full story that later turned out to be completely false. We can show this feature importing in the lab. People will claim they saw a lollipop when we never showed them one, just because we showed them related visuals and the word itself.

We already know psychedelics can produce false memories because people will claim to remember past lives or alien abductions, which are highly implausible. When someone says they can remember being abused prior to two years old, that's just not possible. There's no episodic memory for that age.

What really stands out to me is the ‘Me Too’ movement. In none of those cases did anyone say they didn't come forward earlier because they didn't remember. They said they were afraid of retaliation or didn't think anyone would believe them, but they definitely remembered. The problem with PTSD isn't that you can't remember; it's that you can't forget.

We're empirically testing whether psychedelics produce false memories soon with some new funding we just got. To my knowledge, no drug has ever been shown to enhance memory retrieval.

Why do we feel smarter and more insightful on psychedelics when the evidence shows they actually impair cognition? What's creating that disconnect?

I think there are two things happening. First, the tasks we use in cognitive psychology are simple and standardized. They might miss the specific things psychedelics enhance. We've found one memory process that gets enhanced—familiarity—even though standard hippocampal-dependent episodic memory gets impaired. But there's something else going on: processing fluency.

Processing fluency is essentially the ease of information processing, and it seems to be enhanced by psychedelics. There's a study showing that under psilocybin, if you give someone the word “cat,” they'll be quick to react not just to the word “dog,” but also to, say, “wolf.” They skip a level of semantic association. You can imagine how this could result in increased creativity. You’re connecting concepts more easily.

But here's where it gets interesting. This processing fluency drives things like the illusory truth effect. If you hear “all polar bears are left-handed” enough times, it starts to sound true because the ease of processing becomes a heuristic for truth. So if psychedelics are ramping up fluency, you might think all your ideas are brilliant and true when they're actually bullshit. You're mistaking this heightened fluency for truth.

I think certain cognitive processes can genuinely be enhanced. But you have to be aware that you can also misattribute these feelings and overdevelop your conviction. Just because something feels profoundly true doesn't mean it is. That goes for all ideas, by the way, which is why science and peer review are so important.

Given what you know about how psychedelics affect memory, how would you design a therapy protocol specifically for cognitive decline or memory issues?

For something extreme like dementia, I don't think psychedelics will ever truly cure or reverse it. There's too much atrophy. Even if psychedelics grow new connections, the rate of that plasticity may never fill in a massive lesion.

But for depression or PTSD, there's something really interesting we could do. Episodic memories form rapidly but fade quickly. Semantic memories take months to years to form, but once they're formed, they're really hard to change. If someone with depression has spent ten years thinking “I'm a horrible person,” that belief can become as true to them as “George Washington was the first president.” It's semanticized.

If psychedelics enhance cortical plasticity and ramp up this fluency process, we could potentially use them to drive new information into semantic memory. Under their effects, we could remind people of reasons they are a good person. We could make those ideas feel true through repetition while the drug enhances fluency and plasticity. We could potentially create a new semantic memory that overwrites the maladaptive one.

I suspect this approach could work even better for PTSD, if MDMA were paired with exposure therapy. The beauty is that fear-extinction learning under psychedelics might be more context general than without them. Gains from traditional exposure therapy sometimes don’t carry over outside the therapist's office.

Outside of clinical use, what interests you about psychedelics for creativity and problem solving? What questions do you want to answer there?

Sometimes our semantic memories can be kind of rigid. A psychedelic that makes me jump between different concepts could help me find new connections. That fluency process could lead to creative ideas you wouldn't otherwise come up with.

But I'm also interested in whether we could use it to enhance learning that normally requires critical periods to be open, like language or music. I've been doing French on Duolingo since the pandemic started, but I don't know if I've gotten much into semantic memory. Compare that to Spanish, which I learned as a child. That's in there permanently. Could we make language learning easier under psychedelics? Could we reopen that critical period that closes around age ten?

Finally, we’re running a survey right now looking at work-related creative insights on psychedelics. It’s not about personal insights but tangible outcomes related to people's jobs or hobbies. We're trying to map out the parameter space: what drug, what dosage, when did the insight happen? Eventually, we want to replicate that famous study from the '60s with the architects and mathematicians, only with proper controls. Right now, we don't even know if it's massive doses, therapeutic doses, or moderate doses that work best. That's what we're trying to find out.

Want more from Manoj?

Follow his work through the Center for MINDS, and get paid $15 to complete his survey on work-related creative insights under psychedelics.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.