Joe Rogan Experience #2002 - Amanda Feilding

Imaging work from Feilding’s Beckley Foundation shows psilocybin reduces blood flow in the brain’s default mode network (linked to ego and rumination), while people who experience classic ‘mystical’ states often have the strongest and most durable reductions in depression.

Functional MRI studies reveal that LSD and psilocybin massively increase cross-talk between brain regions, creating a more globally integrated network; this likely underpins enhanced creativity, emotional processing, and new perspectives that can be therapeutically leveraged.

Feilding cites early data and vivid case reports of very low LSD doses improving mood, increasing neuroplasticity, reducing inflammation and pain, and even temporarily reversing severe Alzheimer’s symptoms, all without overt intoxication.

She argues that Schedule I prohibition caused 50+ “lost years” of research, fueled mass incarceration (especially of minorities), and blocked access to non-toxic therapies—despite growing evidence psychedelics can outperform current treatments for conditions like PTSD, addiction, and depression.

Feilding’s theory is that opening a small hole in the skull restores childhood-like cranial ‘pulsation’ and blood dynamics, possibly reducing headaches and neurosis; she insists no one should self-trepan and calls for controlled clinical studies using modern imaging.