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Trips & Microbes: The Connection You Didn't Know Existed! 🦠✨
Recorded: May 23, 2025 Duration: 1:02:18Space Recording
Short Summary
In a groundbreaking Twitter Spaces event, MicrobiomeDAO and SciDAO unite to explore the transformative potential of psychedelics in gut health, highlighting emerging trends, partnership opportunities, and the need for funding to advance this vital research.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, hello everyone.
How's my sound?
Everyone can hear me okay?
Yes, I can hear you very well.
Good, thank you, Maria.
Hi, good morning, Tyler. How's it going?
Good, good. We just got off a really interesting call with quantum bio.
Just got off a call with quantum bio down at our science working group meeting.
So going from quantum biology to microbiome biology, it's going to be really fun.
Amazing. I'm excited for this one.
All right.
What's up for me? Can you guys hear me?
Yep, I can hear you very well.
Steven, how's it going?
It's going very well. My first time speaking at the Twitter space and I was just
switching some settings, but happy it's working. I'm very much looking forward to our conversation.
Cool. Yeah, me too. Thanks for joining this. I'm very excited for this spaces today. So I invited
Riley to co-host, if you can accept my invite and then we can get started in a few seconds All right.
Riley, if you want to also join the co-host or speakers, let me know.
Otherwise, I suggest we start.
So we have everyone on board. Tyler, Maria, Steven, Kishore, he just dropped
actually. But let's wait a few seconds for everyone to come. Thank you. Hi Kijo, if you could request to speak and then we can get started.
I'm sending you a few invites but I think you're not seeing those.
Anyway, when you're ready, I'll be ready too.
So let's get started guys.
I'm so happy to see so many familiar faces and thank you for accepting this invite.
I think this topic is very, very interesting and I'm excited to dive deeper into it.
So hello everyone again and welcome to today's Twitter Spaces.
It's hosted by us, MicrobiomeDAO and SciDAO.
And my name is Katia and I will guide you today to what promises to be a really mind-blowing and gut-expanding conversation.
So today we're diving into the frontier of both mental health and human biology,
the intersection of psychedelics and the gut microbiome. So we're asking the questions that a few years ago might have been a bit like science fiction or controversial,
but I think it's very important that we start this conversation today
and continue this in the future,
especially seeing some developments on the FDA lately.
I'm excited to dive deeper into the topic of psychedelics
and how gut microbiome is connected to a lot of things. So the questions
that I want to discuss today involve things like, can gut bacteria influence a psychedelic experience?
Could we one day personalize or predict a psychedelic journey based on our microbiome?
And is it possible to potentially prime your gut to support emotional healing or
your trip? So today we have amazing speakers. Those are really the brightest minds across
microbiology, longevity, psychedelic science and neuroscience. We have Maria from MicrobiomeDAO. She's a PhD in longevity and microbiome researcher.
We have Tyler from SciDAO, who is a science lead there.
We have Stephen. Stephen is also a scientist at SciDAO, and I've heard he's also exploring the connection with microbiome.
And we have Kiho. Kiho is also from MicrobiomeDAO. He's a co-initiator and strategy lead.
So excited to start. Let's start with a little bit of introduction here.
I invite Maria, maybe you can start and we can go one by one.
Brief introduction of who you are, what are you doing and what excites you the most about this conversation that we're about to have.
Thank you, Katia. Thank you, everyone, for being here.
Very quick. So, as Katia said, I have a PhD in the space of the gut microbiome science.
move also into the space of longevity, looking at the intersection between microbiome and longevity
and how can enhancing the microbiome help us live healthier and longer. So everything that
we would like to cover also here at Microbiome DAO. So what I'm currently the science and
the flow lead at Microbiome DAO. And I think what i'm really excited about this conversation is that
psychedelics is such a new topic and microbiome has been around for a long time now i would say
still like not as old as chronic disease but a few decades and i've seen always the same kind
of studies coming in you know intervention in terms of diet, probiotic, prebiotics, and now something
new is coming up.
And I'm really, really excited to dig into this and explore how this connection would
work.
Cool.
Thank you, Maria.
Tyler, you want to go next?
Sure.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me and thanks for having us side out at the space today.
I'm really excited to dive in as well.
I have a background in animal behavior.
I got my PhD at Arizona State studying honeybees.
And I actually dove a little bit into gut microbiome research myself while studying honeybees.
Bees have a very similar, they're an interesting model species for studying the gut microbiome
because they're a social species.
And so they have their own
like species specific gut flora that is also regulates their cognition and behavior. And so
I operated a study looking at the effect of butyrate on honeybee. I think across the blood
brain barrier, the study itself failed for a variety of reasons, but it was an awesome foray into this field.
Now, focusing on psychedelics,
I'm still interested in the ways that the gut and the brain can speak,
either directly through enteric or vagus nerve nervous systems
and or the metabolites that are excreted out into the blood,
get through the blood-brain barrier into the brain
and how psychedelics could impact that process.
Thank you, Tyler.
Thank you for the intro.
Kiho, you want to go next?
Sure.
GMGM, I hope everyone can hear me well.
I'm Kiho, also known as Kishore, and I'm the operations and strategy lead at MicrobiomeDAO.
And my personal journey into microbiome started with winter depression, again, like something related to mental health. And I think microbiome, optimizing microbiome, like really helped me come out of this big time. And during
this process, I learned a lot about how intertwined that, you know, our neurochemistry is with gut
microbiome, because you see like bunch of these different species of microbes in our gut,
influencing the prediction of general neurochemistry that we need in terms to
feel complete or happy or motivated. For example, you have cell tronin, you have GABA, you also have
in some cases DOPA in different pathways. But I think, you know, for in general consensus, I could say this, the rise in mental health disorders, I think gut microbiome is one of the leading causes for that. which are involved in these neurochemical synthesis pathways or like aiding these
neurochemistry synthesis, probably because of lacking these microbes, we are not able to produce
the neurochemistry within ourselves. And I think that's the primary reason where we rely on
external supplements and endless drugs to feel complete or feel more than what we
feel right now, right? So I, the first step starts with your gut.
And so what I'm interested in, in today's space is like, you know,
to discuss like, you know, to, to learn from the folks from side out,
to understand how, you know,
you can prime your gut microbiome in terms to, you know,
optimize your trip or optimize your psychedelic therapy protocols.
And I think that is one of the interesting topics for me.
Yeah.
Happy to be here.
Yeah, we're super happy you joined us.
You're joining us today.
And we have Stephen.
Stephen, you want to give a brief introduction as well?
Of course.
Yeah.
First of all, I'm really happy to be here with so
smart people and all these amazing backgrounds so that's amazing. So I'm Stephen, I'm a psychedelic
researcher in the Netherlands. I have a background in psychology, neuroscience and also transpersonal
psychology and yeah currently I work as scientific advisor for the Dutch Smart Trap Association.
In the past, I've done studies with Ayahuasca retreat centers here in the Netherlands and
currently we're doing a study with Kratom users.
And I think my main takeaway with psychedelics is that they force us to, they challenge commonly held
narratives and assumptions about consciousness and the way the brain works. And they force us
to expand our narrative framework or our stories with how we explain things. So, for example, the field of transpersonal psychology, it evolved from the insight that people,
when they take psychedelics,
they don't just experience stuff that happened
in their, let's say, biography, in their life's history,
but they experience things that go beyond
their personal biography,
that are sort of cultural archetypes that influence the experience on a content level.
And I see the same thing happening also on a physical level where we are very focused on the brain right now.
And we really want to understand like which receptors are doing what to explain consciousness and to
explain psychedelics but what i see now also is that we feel or we understand that only looking
at the brain is insufficient because we're not just brains we're very complex organisms and
i feel that now this resurgence of research into the gut microbiome
and into the connection between the microbiome and the brain
is just fitting into this pattern of expansion.
So, yeah, that's why I'm really passionate about the topic as well.
Cool. Thank you so much for the introduction and you said it right, I'm also
very excited to have all those amazing speakers with interesting backgrounds and happy to make
the links and try to create connections between the brain and the gut and how psychedelics and
microbiome can work together for lots of different reasons and potentially expand our biology.
So before we dive deep, I want to take a moment for our audience to anchor ourselves with some
shared language. So if you could, guys from the PsyDOW, if you could answer the question about what are psychedelics and what are the mechanisms that are
involved within our body that make psychedelics work and expand our consciousness or work in one
way or another. So if you could share a little bit of this, that would really help us to move forward with this conversation.
Sure. Stephen, I can share a brief explanation, then please jump in any gaps I miss out,
because there's a whole bunch to talk about in that question. But ultimately, psychedelics refer to a class of compounds that enter the brain and induce some sort of change in subjective experience.
The term psychedelic comes from Latin roots, meaning mind manifesting, but it doesn't
necessarily describe a discrete chemical class. There's debate on, for instance, whether like ketamine or MDMA
is a psychedelic, but if we can just set the definition of psychedelic broadly to mean
something that induces a revelatory dissociative or trippy mindset, we can just call that psychedelic.
And so psychedelics in the broad sense work in a variety of ways, but ultimately
they're a compound that interacts with receptors in the brain that have to do with our, the way
that we perceive the world, the way that we perceive emotions, the way that we process
information. And so that ranges anything from a mushroom or an LSD trip where 5-HT2A receptors are activated,
and this changes the way that neurons fire in some way that ultimately alters consciousness.
Maybe you are seeing patterns on pieces of wood or in the sky.
Maybe you are feeling in your body different feelings, you know, have the somatic approach.
But it ultimately is different for everyone. The mindset that you go into a psychedelic trip, the setting that you
go into the trip, but there's also genetic differences between individuals that gauge
how they respond to psychedelics. The expression of certain enzymes that metabolize psychedelics fast or slow alter how one experiences
psychedelics. And so another definition that another way to describe them is something that
goes into the body and messes with the body's homeostasis in a way that's unique and that
ultimately alters consciousness. But to think that the gut microbiome doesn't have any role in that especially
with psychedelics that do enter the stomach first or into the gut first i think is short-sighted i
think that there's definitely likely some genetic and individual differences in how people interact
with psychedelics based off their gut microbiome but uh steven if there's anything i missed or
you think that's relevant to the conversation please jump in yeah that was great uh tyler maybe just adding something from let's
say the experiential point of view because i think it can be so abstract for people who have never
had the psychedelic experience to like listen to these descriptions and to have sort of a point of reference for themselves.
So I think a good point of reference is dreams.
Surely everyone has had dreams, also intense dreams before.
And I think psychedelics, they put you in a state that could be described as dreamlike.
could be described as dreamlike and this description of or the meaning of the term
psychedelics or mind manifesting. I would expand it to say it's manifesting the unconscious mind
specifically. So it's also psychodynamically, it seems like the continuation of Freud and Jung, they talked with their patients about their dreams to sort of interpret what is going on beneath the surface, so to say.
this state where emotions and all these things that may have
lied dormant for people for a long time,
they can come up and they can take all kinds of symbolic shapes
and structures and feelings and, yeah,
make the unconscious come alive.
Wow, that was really amazing, both of your perspectives.
I think that gives a good understanding of what psychedelics are,
and I totally understand this is such a big question
and it involves so many things,
but thank you guys for giving this brief
and very good intro into the psychedelics.
I'd love to segue into the microbiome
and ask my colleagues from microbiome,
Maria Kishore, if you want to share a little bit
with our audience about the microbiome
and how it influences the brain
and what's the connection behind gut and the brain
and what are the mechanisms that are involved.
Okay, maybe I'll go.
Kio, do you want to tick and then I might add anything
or the other way around?
It's the same.
Yeah, you can take the question, yeah.
All right.
So I'll try to explain easily.
So the microbiome is a living ecosystem that live within and inside of us. And it's made of this microscopic living microorganism that obviously we cannot see. bacteria, viruses, archaea, fungi, that it seems maybe disgusting,
but they do live with us and they are super important.
So they live within the majority of our organs, in the gut, in the mouth,
in the reproductive organs, on the skin.
But I think one of the very first areas of interest for science was the gut microbiome,
I think one of the very first area of interest for science was the GAM microbiome, because
it's where the majority of the bacteria, well, the microbes in general are.
I say bacteria because since the field started, the majority of the research has been focused
on sequencing specifically the bacteria portion of this ecosystem, but it's not made only
of bacteria.
But the most, let's say, knowledge that we have so far of how the microbiome interact
with the rest of the body is indeed about just the portion of the bacteria itself.
So basically, the microbiome, we coexist with it since the very beginning.
So scientists started to ask the question
why we co-live with such an ecosystem.
Obviously, there must be a reason,
and obviously it's because it's advantageous
for the human species.
And we discovered that it's because these microbes
not only help us to survive,
but help us to thrive in the very meaning of the word.
They can help us to digest food.
So every time we eat, as Tyler was mentioning before,
even the psychedelics, when you take it orally,
they do pass through the gut.
So everything that pass through that gets metabolized
by these bacteria because, again, they are living microorganism.
They have enzymes, so they can metabolize molecules.
And what they do in returns is they produce
other molecules that could be beneficial or not beneficial for the rest of our body,
depending on what we are feeding them. And then these molecules, they go and talk to the rest of
the organs that we have. So they go to talk to the brain, they go to talk to the lungs, to the kidney, to the muscle. I think they have discovered axes for really every single organ we have in the body,
meaning that the gut can talk to every single organ, and that's how important it is.
Regarding the brain specifically, we have two, I would say, two communication channels.
One which is direct, which is the vagus nerve,
Tyler mentioned quickly before.
It's really considered an highway to run through your spinal cord
and that basically connects the brain to the gut.
It's an highway of signals that goes bidirectionally
bi-directionally from the gut to the brain and from the brain to the gut.
from the gut to the brain and from the brain to the gut.
And we have a huge amount of
neuronal termination in the gut itself.
So imagine when I told you that the bacteria, they produce molecules.
These molecules, they act on this cellular
termination, on this neuronal termination, and then they talk to the brain.
And also the brain producing specific metabolites,
they can talk to the gut back.
We can dig into this later.
Another system is through the bloodstream.
So the bacteria, the microbes in the gut,
they produce molecules and they not only,
they don't stay just in the gut. They go into the blood and then through the gut, they produce molecules and they not only, they don't stay just in the gut.
They go into the blood and then through the blood, they reach other organs such as the brain talk to it.
I think one example I want to give to you that it was very open-minded to me and it
was one of the first experiments they did to show that the microbiome is actually a
causal factor for determining brain condition. It was through mice experiments. So
they perform an experiment that is called fecal microbiome transplant, which means they take
poop from humans and they put it into mice that they don't have microbiome. And then they see
how these mice react. And there were two groups. One was control and the other one was depressed people.
And what happened is that when they transplanted the pupus
from depressed people into the mice,
the mice that got this, they show symptoms of depression
compared to the ones that were transplanted
with the control group.
And I think this is one of the most powerful examples
we have to show that the microbiome can really
be causal.
It's not just a consequence of changing in the body.
I saw it there.
Kishore, please, as well, add anything that I missed.
So it might be easier to explain.
Thank you, Maria.
I think, Kishore, if you can continue
with exploring a little bit
about the serotonin production, I
know that you love talking about this, so
since 90% of
serotonin is produced in the gut,
could changes in the gut chemistry
be shaping our
mood, perception of time, or
even our experience,
so if you could share a bit more of
knowledge behind this that would be awesome thank you yeah of course so um it's not just serotonin
but uh it's always fancy to use uh serotonin because um a lot of people know uh serotonin
and its functions um but uh in general like the the
whole neurochemistry as i was mentioning earlier um you have multiple pathways from uh you know
short chain fatty acid production butyrate production and and also like you know different
neurochemistries like neurotransmitters like gaba dopamine or serotonin so there is a lot of pathways that kind of
intertwines with gut microbiome the gut and the brain my notion is that our body is capable of
producing enough neurochemistry that the body needs and the brain needs.
But the problem is, I think you might all know that
as part of the industrialization
and the whole evolution pathway that we took,
we lost half of our ancient microbes, right?
Like half the population.
And we could still see this
in some tribal populations populations uh in tanzania
i think hamza tribe is one of the uh example right like uh where we see like these ancient
populations still surviving because uh they they feed primarily on uh plant proteins uh honey and
all these things that are like you know locally sourced and fresh and you know specific to their
geography and their microbiome is very well preserved and why does this loss is important
like why we should talk about it we have lost 44 percent of our ancient microbes like 44 percent
is nearly half and how are we compensating to this loss? I think 44%, it is not just a number. If you look at the gene levels, right, like it's much more. Each microbes were like, you know, each species would contribute to like 10,000 genes. And these are like operational units that can help you do multiple functions within your body, be it like, you know, neurotransmitter protection or whatever.
functions within your body, be it like, you know, neurotransmitter protection or whatever.
And I think this loss is the primary cause for any sort of gut health issues or suboptimal
performance of our body. I think that's where we are currently compensating with,
you know, multiple different supplements and drugs and all of that.
I think the best play would come in place when you optimize your microbiome
with your diet and lifestyle.
And then like, you know, any sort of drug or any sort of supplements
or any sort of therapies that you take will see its optimal output.
But this is still to be you know proved
like you know what's the far-fetching uh influence of gut microbiome but definitely like we are
seeing uh certain early indicators of you know gut microbiome uh helping in prediction of
parkinson's prognosis or like alzheimer's disease prognosis or like Alzheimer's disease prognosis, also like with cancer.
So these are like, you know, just early evidences.
But let's be honest and agree that microbiome field needs,
still needs a lot of, you know, scientific breakthroughs
as I say, like, you know, we, there are certain
technological bottlenecks in terms of what we are
seeing with the, with the stool sample, right? Like we are just seeing a snapshot. We are not
really seeing it, what the gut looks like. So these are certain things that, you know,
we need to like advance in the field of microbiome science to, to then, you know,
look at a real time, like what's the influence of these uh psychedelic compounds on
on gut microbiome like what's the communication that's happening between the gut and the brain
i think one one such uh interesting idea is to you know like maria and i was discussing
uh how can we tap into this uh the vagal nerve activity which is the the highway where
bi-directional community communication between the brain and the gut happens if you could use variables to tap into this uh you know uh the nerve nerve activity
probably we would see like you know we'll eventually uh get an understanding of what is
happening like you know how they communicate with each other and uh yeah i think I think in general microbiome can controls a certain part
of your neurochemistry and and this is specific to certain species which has the
capability to do that if you happen to not have that certain species like a
group of microbes which are responsible for this then i think you know any supplements any sort of
therapy that you do will yield only suboptimal results so i would say like you know optimization
and therapy has to go hand in hand to to see like you know a very optimal output for any sort of
therapy yeah absolutely i think there's so much we still
don't know and talking about the psychedelics and the expansion of consciousness and like we
only focus on the mind it seems like as tyler and steven mentioned and specifically the brain so and
the gut microbiome is sometimes called the second brain which is you know bringing
me to this question um could it also be a second seat of consciousness the gut microbiome what do
you guys think oh theories of consciousness that's a fun one i. I think Steven might be able to speak to this better than myself.
Yeah, it's a good one.
What I'm actually thinking of is that...
Sorry, I lost my train of thought.
No worries.
I think that, if anything, that if we can think about us as an ecosystem and the emergence of us as
a bunch of organ systems with lots of other organisms involved in it, there is an emergent
consciousness from that rather than just the brain itself. And so if you can connect anything
systemic to brain function, I think it's feasible to say that there's a way that that can influence consciousness,
especially if it's something as direct as when you eat food or when you ingest something,
it alters the way that the brain interacts with the body.
That's obviously like there's something there that's related to how we are experiencing
the world itself.
And so that could then be extrapolated into consciousness itself
yeah now i i got it back i was distracted by the like whole consciousness uh thing because that that's opening pandora's box kind of but uh what came to mind immediately was that so with
psychedelics and when we think of how they work in the brain there's the so-called entropic brain theory and it basically
states that psychedelics they increase the amount of entropy in the brain while they're active so
the amount of let's say randomness and they do that by decreasing default mode network activity
so basically usually in your normal state of consciousness your brain has a
certain range of neural pathways that are activated in quite predictable ways or at least
more predictable than in a psychedelic state and yeah when you take these substances this
the amount of diversity in the brain you could say gets increased and if we
say okay the gut microbiome is perhaps the second brain maybe there's also an entropic gut theory
that could be applied because we also know in the gut microbiome if it sort of is if the
at a range of bacteria is very limited and if you always eat the same foods, then you have inflammation and you have all kinds of negative effects.
yeah microbiota that are present in the gut during the experience but perhaps also as lasting effect
yeah that's a great point and you should coin that phrase before someone else does steven
well we have it on recording. Okay, good.
That's right.
Really, I think one thing I would like to add is that it was another nice experiment.
It just came up to my mind now that you talk about consciousness.
It's like, how does the gut actually control?
Because I remember listening at this TED Talk
where it was very impressive.
The guy started saying,
the gut can control how you react to specific
situation and it was this experiment that they transplant no they actually infected mice with
the toxoplasma which is a parasite in cats and they saw that when they the mice that were infected
they would lose fear against cats or danger in general.
So I like to think that in a way,
there is a consciousness there that does control what we feel
and how we react to specific situation.
Oh, that reminds me of The Last of Us
with something causing the host species
to seek its next life cycle phase.
Wow.
Yeah.
Really cool.
I'm wondering, too, for the microbiome people,
so most psychedelics are – they might not actually reach the gut first. i mean mushrooms obviously if you're taking a whole
mushroom you're eating it just like a food and then your body processes it breaks it down the
psilocybin gets converted to psilocin and that the idea is that that gets into your blood and that's
the compound that actually passes the blood-brain barrier but say for acid for example the most
common route of ingestion is a tab under the tongue, which just gets absorbed right through the buccal cavity and foregoes the gut pathway seemingly. I wonder
when a person ingests a compound and it goes into the blood, does that also impact the gut
microbiome in any way?
Like, does the gut microbiome interact with the circulatory system
and the things that are inside of it?
So my answer is yes.
I would say more because of the changes in the brain.
So it's because the psychedelic would anyway cause changing in the brain. And as I
mentioned, there is this bidirectional pathway, like path between the two organs. So whatever
change in the brain will cause a change in the gut. Bloodstream, I'm not 100% sure. I would
have to look into that if there is any evidence that we know.
Yeah, very interesting. Thank you.
Maria, can you speak a little bit about the balanced and imbalanced microbiome
and how could the changes in our gut microbiome be playing a role
when we take certain psychedelics?
Perhaps does it affect, you know, this outer states and perhaps in one way or another,
depending on how our microbiome is primed or in what state it is?
Yes, yes, absolutely. Actually, I did some research, I think, just in preparation of this
call because I wanted to be prepared to give some evidence to the audience.
And so what we know, we have some studies, some preclinical studies, very little clinical
studies.
So I'm going to speak first about the preclinical one.
And it's a specific mouse model, which is a mouse model of maternal immune activation, which what it means is basically these mouse produce offsprings that have neurodevelopmental issues and also gut dysbiosis, which means like gut imbalances, as you were saying, Katia.
So the gut microbiome is different from a normal mouse and is different, but in a bad way.
So that's why we call it dysbiosis is affected in
a bad way and what they saw is that the response to the psychedelics specifically was an analog to
of psychedelics the DOI maybe the guys know this better was completely different between these mice
and the control so the researcher hypothesized that this is because there is dysbiosis in the gut microbiome.
So the response to the psychedelics is different.
And to prove that, what they did is that they introduced changes to the microbiome.
So they give antibiotics or they switch around with different intervention.
And they found that the response to psychedelic kind of went back to normal state.
So as you can see, the baseline microbiome is definitely, in this study,
so it is definitely a determinant of how the model in this case,
in this case, the mouse model, can react to the psychedelic experience.
Now, regarding humans, it's a little bit more complicated
because, again, we don't have much evidence there,
but what we know for sure is that the microbiome can metabolize drugs. And what research saw is that there is one review that can support all this about psychedelics, which show that the
microbiome can predict a response to psychiatric medication. Now, obviously, I'm not talking about psychedelics.
I'm talking about regular medication,
but it still involves the brain.
So the idea here is that this is an example
that goes to the principle that the gut microbiome
can shape the response to specific medication
or the intervention that actually interacts with the brain.
Please, Tyler, go ahead.
Yeah, that's super interesting. Thank you for bringing that up. It's pretty widely known that people react differently to different psychedelics, especially in terms of the
nausea that it produces and the nausea going into an altered state can really affect the
therapeutic outcome of that state. You know, if you are taking something and you're nauseous the
whole time, feasibly, you would not be able to understand or like pay attention to or like gain
benefits from therapy as much as someone who's maybe not feeling nauseous. And I can, I'm almost
certain, or I am certain that the clinical
studies that have been done on psychedelics are not taking into taking gut microbiome differences
into account as it's probably true for most clinical studies um so i think it's super relevant
to not only just psychedelics but just drug studies in general to understand the effect of
gut microbiome on not only not only just the ingestion
of psychedelics and the experience that one has, but also if the gut microbiome is different
amongst people and they do metabolize drugs, feasibly then the derivatives and the analogs
that are converted, the metabolites of psychedelics that are being created by the gut microbiome could
also be psychoactive in different ways um like uh if you take lsd there are a ton of derivative or
analog or sorry derivatives that are created by our enzymatic systems that could potentially have
psychedelic effects that could also impact um psychedelic experience. This is often called the
entourage effect when it's referring to like different compact, different alkaloids in a
plant medicine that could have effect on a psychedelic trip. But it's really the analogs
of psychedelics, like the direct derivatives after one metabolic change that could probably have the
most effect on what you're actually experiencing, what compounds are actually going into the brain and interacting with receptors and so having these differences
in gut microbiome could be one of the reasons that people react so differently to different
compounds themselves especially at a subjective level absolutely maybe i'll just cut you know
maybe your question i let you ask i don don't know, because I could actually elaborate a little bit on that, saying that indeed, we also know that what has been found
is that the bacteria have enzymes that can metabolize
specifically the active compound of psychedelics.
For example, I think the psilocybin was the one I read about.
Correct me, if I'm wrong, guys, like psychedelics, but the active compound is the psilocybin was the one I read about. Correct me, if I'm wrong, guys,
but the active compound is the psilocine.
Is that correct?
Right.
And I was reading that there is this enzyme
in the microbiome that is an alkaline phosphatase.
They can basically react by transforming
the psilocybin into his active compound.
So you see if you don't have the specific bacteria,
probably the activation of the psychedelics you are taking
is going to be completely different.
Yes, and there are actually ways that are quite common
in, let's say, psychedelic culture to hack this process so there's
this technique called lemon tech where basically you put uh mushrooms into a tea with um lemon
and basically the the process that you're describing where the let's say the acid in the
where the let's say the acid in the stomach it starts transforming the psilocybin into
psilocin um it starts already in in your cup of tea so to say in your cup of mushroom tea
so when you drink it it hits you way faster because what you're drinking is already converted
so i think that goes to one of the points of,
hey, how can you prepare, I guess, for a triple?
How can you take microbiome mechanics into account?
I think that's one way where the psychedelic community
is already intuitively doing that.
Yeah, I think that's the main word here.
Intuitively, I think there's so little that we know how we can optimize our microbiome
and prepare it with ferments, fibers, probiotics, like fasting.
And I'd love to give some time to the side, our account.
I think you were raising.
Yeah.
Hi, this is Riley Kaps. Can you guys hear me?
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Okay, yes. Okay, well, I'm on the core team at PsyDOW. I had a few
thoughts and questions. The first is that a lot of Indigenous people that use psychedelics use
them specifically for gut health. They will often do it not as a way to expand
consciousness or get in touch with spirit, but people will come to the healers and say,
my stomach is upset. And they give them ayahuasca for the specific reason of helping
the stomach. And we don't understand why. There hasn't, as far as I know,
there haven't been any studies about whether that works or not.
But that's just a super interesting thing.
And sometimes we take examples from indigenous people of the way they use psychedelics, and it turns out to be real and right.
The second thing is that in psychedelic psychotherapy, people often, like the therapists often ask the people, listen to your body and what's your body saying?
And when people tune into their gut, they'll often find that like the gut is saying something to them. This could be all in their head. This could be whatever. But if the gut is the second brain
and you can actually listen to it, people say that you can listen to it more easily on psychedelics.
And then the gut will say something like, it's often something healthy, like eat more plants, you know, stop eating junk, stop eating so much sugar, stop eating so much refined food, put healthier things into your body.
And I think that's another way in which it's super interesting. And then I had a question for the microbiome people, which is, what do you think is the practical thing that those of us who like to use psychedelics could do?
I know you mentioned fermented food and fibrous food.
What else is a possible practical thing for us to do as we're trying to get ready for using psychedelics.
I think, yeah.
Sorry, yeah.
So I think priming your body like a week ahead
before of any sort of psychedelic intervention,
probably with a lot of polyphenol rich food or prebiotic rich food, like a lot of polyphenol-rich food or prebiotic-rich food,
colored vegetables and fiber-rich diet.
I think we can bring those.
I think, Kishore, you're breaking a little bit.
Is it just from me?
Yeah, no, I couldn't quite hear that either. But I heard fermented foods and I didn't catch that one word. sort of effect on your uh so maybe i can't so yeah i think um it all then comes to uh
prepping your gut and again like with a caveat everyone's gut is unique so there is no generalized
uh prescription or suggestion on what to how to do it but think, as you said, like, you need to listen to
your gut. And. Hey, Kishore, you're still breaking, but we could hear some things. Maria,
maybe you could take over. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I wanted to cover actually the first point that you brought up about the ayahuasca and the fact that, you know, like previously, probably psychedelics were used. But I, I would argue on the fact that they were used as a gut health option, I would say that it was the previous understanding of gut health, which is about like, clean, like clean the gut, where people think that by do these intense cleansing
on your gut, then you can purify all the toxin
and then you actually reset everything,
which please don't do that because it's a very invasive,
well, obviously not with the psychedelics,
but people do it mechanically
and it could be a very invasive
and dangerous procedure
so I think it has always been to be medical advice
but in terms of psychedelics
so you ask I was using it
in this way of
because of this side effect
let's say of
like vomiting, nausea
and like cleaning
and releasing everything from the body.
And the people will use it for that.
But it's more than a side effect.
It could be indeed the T-tacks on the serotonergic part.
Because the gut is full of serotonin receptors.
So obviously, these psychedelics, most of them work by activating these receptors. And serotonin is known to increase mobility of the gut.
So it's probably this was the mechanism by which ayahuasca was working.
And again, it could be a way of clean and, yeah, like in this practice, probably a disclosure of cleaning your interior.
Regarding the second point, how do we prepare?
So I think the most important connection here in terms of preparation
would be around the immune system,
because I saw that there is this synergistic approach,
a pathway that both psychedelics and the gut microbiome
influence the immune system so the idea is that in the gut also the gut has a bunch about like 80
of immune immune cells there and the gut itself can produce anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory metabolites.
So the idea, the hypothesis is that maybe a microbiome that is rich in anti-inflammatory
commensals or bacteria that can produce these metabolites could amplify the psychedelic
ability to dampen maladaptive inflammation, whereas a pro-inflammatory microbiome might counter-interact or limit these benefits.
So again, what Kishawa says is right.
It's about probably prompting the microbiome to be more anti-inflammatory
rather than pro-inflammatory.
And to do that, you usually want to prioritize food such as fibers very different
type of fibers probably fermented food which is known to to contain very beneficial bacteria
lactobacillus or bifidobacterium so yeah at the end this is what I would say, just try to prioritize anti-inflammatory intervention to prep your microbiome.
This made me think about how we usually think about the psychedelics and how they influence our mind.
And we focus a lot on the mind.
But I want to turn this question around and ask you guys, what do we know about the systemic effects of the body?
And specifically on the gut guard if you could speak to
that the systemic effect of psychedelics yeah yeah it's a good question i think um it's accurate
to say that a lot of attention has gone to the brain, but that we are starting to understand a little bit more about the effect on the periphery.
I wish I had a better example, but the one that's probably the most studied is the effect of
psychedelics on 5H2-2B receptors, which are mostly expressed in cardiac muscle and cardiac tissue.
They can be overstimulated and start to deregulate if, say, you microdose every day for many,
many months.
Basically, you can throw off the equilibrium of your cytotone receptors, can have really
bad cardiac effects.
Ibogaine also can have pretty bad cardiac effects as well. So there are definitely systemic effects to be aware of regarding psychedelics in terms of
the dangers that they can pose to the body, especially of long-term exposure. But I don't
off the top of my head have a great example of a positive effect on the body outside of the brain.
Unfortunately, maybe Steven or someone else does, but no, I know anecdotally, this is Riley again, that people use it for pain and also for endurance
athletics. There's a good number of people that run ultra marathons or bike for 500 miles
or train for really important, you know, big ski races and stuff, who microdose psychedelics and
say that it helps their endurance and helps their pain tolerance. This has not been studied,
but it's widely reported. Yeah, so there have been a few studies that showed that psychedelics reduce inflammation acutely but also long term and yeah of course
there can be various factors that contribute to inflammation so you can take the approach that you
sort of take your the conscious experience first so you know that people who are depressed or who are suffering from any kind of mental health
condition most likely also the levels of inflammation in their body are higher than
people who would be considered healthy but we also know that for example a, unhealthy gut microbiome leads to inflammation in the body. So even though it has
not been tested directly, it could be that, yeah, indeed, psychedelics, they improve gut health. And
through this, the inflammation levels in the body generally are reduced.
Yeah, that's an excellent, that's an excellent example.
I know we're about to be at the end, but I really wanted to sneak a question into the
microbiome, folks.
I've seen some studies about a potential brain microbiome.
Is that a real thing?
And do you guys have any uh speculation on its importance itself
for cognitive processes i've seen that um yeah i don't know the problem with the microbiome
isolation is that it's very hard to make sure when you isolate the tissue to make sure that
it doesn't get contaminated by anything else
around so i've seen different cases of organs you know like the the placenta for example they've
been arguing a lot whether the babies are already exposed to microbiome when they are growing in the
placenta and people some people say yes because they could prove that there are bacteria there. Some others say no because they say that actually it's just like a contamination from when you get to the sample and then sequence it.
So I'm a bit skeptical about it.
I think we need a little bit more study around it and people that really dig into it.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah, thanks, Maria.
This actually brings me to maybe the last question of today's spaces.
So we here as microbiome DAO and PsyDAO in the decentralized science space,
and I'd love to ask you guys, what do you think we can do to help us break open
and democratize this field, run more experiments,
understand more of our biology and how psychedelics
and microbiome work together. Happy to hear your thoughts.
I want to go first. What we can do? So collaborate. It's all, in my opinion. We have a meeting
community. The PsyDA We have a meeting community.
The PsyDAO is a great community of people that are enthusiastic about psychedelics.
We have an amazing community of people
that are enthusiastic about microbiome.
So it's just a matter of putting these two together
and perhaps, I would say,
start proposing very simple studies to see how we can,
for me, the best would be the prep the gum microbiome for the whole psychedelic
experience probably you know make sure that you could have the experience that you want to have
instead of kind of the little random chance whatever is going to happen once you take
this first dosage for someone that has never used it before. Yeah, absolutely. I think you guys are developing a kit where individuals can basically assay their gut microbiome at various time points.
Cool, I'm seeing thumbs up.
Yeah, that would be probably the lowest hanging fruit is to operate a citizen science study,
collect data on individuals' gut microbiomes and then have a
surveys have them fill out a survey relating to their psychedelic experience we have plenty
of researchers in our network even here on the call um that have experience in developing psychedelic
surveys and um i think that's probably the best way to get some some pilot data at least on if there is a connection between
gut microbiome diversity and subjective experience and we have a quick plug for our opsy program which
is we're working on tokenizing surveys so you take a survey tell talking about psychedelics
talking about psychedelics and gut health and we'll send you some tokens and help you to have a reason to do it.
Right. Yeah, a little incentive.
Besides, of course, pushing forward the envelope on cool fields of science.
Yeah, that's important to mention.
Thank you so much, guys, for your inputs.
I don't know if anyone from the audience would love to come up on stage and ask some questions. Otherwise,
I suggest we close the space for today. It's clear for me that we're just beginning to understand
this interface between psychedelics and microbiome. There is a huge potential for healing, for research, for various breakthroughs. And I see ourselves as part
of this larger kind of goal. So thank you guys for coming. Incredible speakers, Tyler, Riley,
Steven, Maria, and Kiko, I appreciate you all. And thank you to everyone who tuned in. So stay updated.
Follow us on Twitter and MicrobiomeDAO and CyDAO and join our Discord.
We have really cool communities and a lot of interesting discussions in those two realms.
And I hope we can connect microbiome and psychedelics by working together and running more citizen science experiments.
And, yeah, let's keep building the future of science together
and decentralized and live.
And stay open, stay symbiotic, stay weird.
And I love you all, guys.
Have a good day, everyone.
Let's do it.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Katia, for listening.
Thank you, everybody. Let's do it again. guys thank you so much thank you thank you thank you everybody let's do it again Thank you.
