On Psychedelics, Interns, and the Sleds in My Brain

“So, what questions do you have?”

I am sitting in my home office. When I said that before March 2020, it meant I was sitting in my firm’s office in the Denver Technology Center, as opposed to being on the road at a client or in another office in another state. But since this conversation happened in July 2020, it meant I was sitting in the office of the house we rent in Denver.

“Tell me how you have managed to find balance and success in the remote working environment.”

I am being interviewed by one of my firm’s summer interns. It is the second week of July and the very first week of their internship, which means there are a lot of big picture questions to be answered, dreams to be shared, opportunities to inspire and be inspired.

The pandemic has led to our firm offering its first completely virtual internship, so this interview is being conducted via video conferencing. I am heading into my seventh year at the firm. As we always have a class of interns every summer and a class of interns every winter, working with each new class has become another way I observe the seasons.

It didn’t occur to me until the virtual internship kicked off how much of a physical presence each intern class had before COVID. Although I still feel young myself, intern classes coming into the offices or coming out to client sites always felt a little like a high school fieldtrip joining up with a standard workday. They brought with them energy, a level of excitement, and provided endless insights on “what the kids are up to these days”. These things are not completely absent in the remote work environment, but what remains feels like a muted version of what was, like the colors have washed out.

I have to catch myself before I start answering the question. The first thing I want to say is, “We have no choice.” But I adjust my approach in order to come across with as little despair as possible.

“One of the many skills you develop as a consultant,” I tell the intern, “is how to learn on the fly. You often have to make spur of the moment adjustments and work with the unexpected, all while giving off the impression to your client and other folks that whatever you are doing is what you had planned to do all along.”

The intern signals her approval this answer by jotting down several notes in a notebook, nodding her head as she writes. I didn’t think anyone from Generation Z used a notebook.

I never fail to learn new things from our interns.

##

This is the first thing I have written for a non-work purpose since April 2020. As we have all discovered during 2020, time has had a different feel since the pandemic started. It is at once expected and impossible-seeming that six months have elapsed. Many things these days seem at once expected and impossible-seeming.

Someone asked me if I was waiting to be inspired before I started writing again. Although inspiration is always nice, most writing is less glamorous: you sit your ass down and bang it out. Waiting for inspiration in 2020 seems as futile as waiting at the light rail stop in front of our house for a train: the stop has been marked out of service for years. Theoretically a train driver could take pity on you and stop, but I haven’t seen that happen yet, no much how much screaming and fist shaking the people at the out-of-service light rail stop do.

I have been working too much, like many folks who have been fortunate enough to keep their jobs and get to work from home as a result of COVID-19. My productivity at the firm is measured in billable hours. I have about the same number of total billable hours now that I usually do at this point in time in previous calendar years. The difference is I used to log about 20 to 25% of those hours traveling, whether that was driving in a car, flying on a plane, or riding a train. So I have essentially turned that 25% into screen time at my laptop at the desk in the office at home.

But I love my job. I love coaching my team. I love talking to my clients. I love thinking about banking regulations and the financial services industry. So the increase in hours only bothers me when I realize how much it has been consuming my thoughts. It is the few times I have gotten a chance to unplug from work since COVID set in, like this long weekend Basil and I are taking to celebrate our wedding anniversary, that lead me to realize how little I have been thinking about things that aren’t work related.

I have tried to remember how I used to think before mid-March 2020, but I can’t.

##

I have been listening to a lot of books during the pandemic. I don’t have the energy or focus to sit down and read a book these days, but audio books are perfect to have in my ear when I am running, driving (mostly to the store or to the recycling center), or doing housework.

Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind has been one of my favorite recent listens. I often struggle to say interested in any text which dwells on extremely technical subjects and/or serious science. I have loved Pollan’s writing since the fateful day a customer abandoned a hardback copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma in a Peet’s Coffee I was managing in Pasadena. I waited for a month for someone to come back and claim it before I took it home and started to read it. Pollan’s kind, thoughtful voice combined with his tendency to take an interest in things I love (food, coffee, tea) has made me a loyal follower.

But it surprised me that Michael Pollan’s skills as a writer are so great that they could keep me interested in the topic of neuroscience. I have been told there is so much about the human mind we do not yet know, but that hasn’t been enough to motivate me to learn what it is we already know about the brain. It is one of the many subjects I am glad other people are around to care about, because I simply do not.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of reading/listening to How to Change Your Mind, it covers the intersection of psychedelics and research into the human mind, ranging from formal medical research conducted prior to the 1960s to Timothy Leary to recent studies with terminally ill NYU cancer patients. My discussion of the book here is going to be limited to one idea from one small section of the book. I highly encourage anyone reading this to check out the book, as I will not do it justice.

Psychedelics were actively studied in the scientific and medical fields for decades prior to their prohibition in the late 1960s. Since the early 2000s, there has been a growing movement in the medical and scientific fields to bring psychedelics back into use for research and potential medical treatment purposes.

One group of researchers Pollan spends time with are conducting experiments to observe how communication via neural pathways in the brain differs during psychedelic experiences versus how these pathways operate in a brain not undergoing a psychedelic experience.

For the non-psychedelic brain, neural pathways communicate in patterns that are well-established/expected. (It is here where my indifference to brain science is going to limit my powers of description, but I’ll do my best.) An adult brain tends to operate within a well-established set of pathways: these routes might not be the shortest path from point A to point B, but decades of experience living life have lead to the brain having often-trodden “paths” for this type of communication.

When observing brains which are undergoing a psychedelic experience, these scientists have noted neural communication often “jumps the track”: suddenly neurons are connecting in new and unexpected ways. They theorize this is why psychedelic experiences can lead to individuals experiencing things like synesthesia (the hearing of colors, the tasting of shapes, etc.).

They also theorize this is why psychedelic experiences can lead to some people to experiencing life changing “break throughs” or changes in perspective: parts of the brain that may have never “talked” to each other before are suddenly being connected, leading to an entirely new understanding of life.

One of the scientist invites readers to think of the brain as a hill covered in snow. Each thought we have is like a person on a sled, sliding down the hill. The older we get, our thought sleds tend to wear paths in the snow. The more defined these paths become, the more likely all of our sleds are to use them. While not inherently always a bad thing, these paths can be destructive if they are related to negative behaviors, such as addiction, anxiety, or depression.

This same scientist (I think this is attributable to Dr. Carhart-Harris, but am not sure) likens a psychedelic experience as a “shaking of the snow globe”: these experiences can help flatten the grooves these sleds have cut over and over again during the years and allow for the possibility of our neurons connecting in new ways—literally, a different way of thinking.

As an anxious person, this analogy made sense to me immediately: I can quickly recognize several trains of thought on which I am a frequent rider. Many of these trains inevitably end up looping in the same circles, over and over again. If I am on a plane, I ride the train where I consider all of the different circumstances which could lead to the plane falling from the sky. If I am a passenger in a car, regardless of the driver, I am usually staring at the road ahead, my mind conjuring the familiar horrific potential scenarios that could unfold on the street in front of us at any minute. Even when my ruminations aren’t focused on my potential untimely demise, some conversations I have with myself are like playing a CD with a big scratch on my favorite track: should I have a drink? Should I have a second helping of food? The inner thoughts are so routine on these subjects I almost feel like I am not a part of the conversation going on in my own head.

I do appreciate the time I am getting to spend at home with Basil and our pets. In 2019 I logged over 200 nights in a hotel room. While some of those nights were spent on vacation, this statistic really means I spent less than half the year with the man I love and adore. For 2020, I’ll have spent less 40 nights in total away from Basil and our fur babies. I have gotten to pitch in more around the house and help with grocery shopping. More importantly, I have gotten to be around for the impromptu little moments a loving life together provides: an especially funny joke that makes Basil and I laugh until we lose our breath; being able to make a quiche for Basil when he is hungry after a long day working with his clients. Every time I experience these moments in 2020, I think about how many I missed in the years before.

But living during the quarantine seems designed to make the grooves of those sledding paths in my brain as deep as ever: the number of things we are allowed to do, where we are allowed to do them, and who we are allowed to do them with are greatly reduced.

Someone at worked asked me if I REALLY actually missed going to clients, especially those who are nestled amidst cornfields, where the nearest town has a population of less than a few thousand, where asking someone at the local diner if there is a vegan option on the menu is enough to draw gasps from fellow patrons.

And my answer back to them has been and remains an emphatic YES. I love getting to see new and different places, whether that new place is in the heart of a bustling metropolis or a quiet countryside. I love getting to meet new people, whether that person is the Chief Risk Officer at an important new client or the night desk clerk at a Hampton Inn. I love having to solve a new problem, whether that is a compliance challenge a client has is asking for help with, or figuring out how I am going to make myself comfortable at a hotel in Chicago for one night since my flight was delayed and Southwest Airlines has possession of my checked suitcase with all of my clothes and toiletries.

These experiences help me try to carve new paths in the snow globe that is my mind. These experiences help me think of what is before me now, instead of dwelling too much on memories of the past or the potential traumas of the future.

In short, travel helps keep me sane.

##

“Do you think once this is over your clients will want you to come back onsite again?”

I am nearing the end of the first 30 minute session I have scheduled with this intern. Because our interns were going to miss out on the usual opportunities to socialize and ask questions that would arise in a normal office environment, our firm’s learning and development team took great pains to ensure each intern had a number of “virtual coffee breaks” and other check ins scheduled with a variety of folks from across the consulting practice. I feel badly for the interns having to plan for all of these structured conversations throughout their internship instead of getting to have a more organic experience of meeting our team, but it is better than the alternative. We need to help them feel connected in whatever ways we can.

“I don’t know,” I say candidly. “Some people say COVID-19 will change the way we do business forever, that the ‘one tip meeting’ is dead, that teleconferencing is the only way we’ll do meetings from now on. And while that is undoubtedly true in some part, I am counting on human nature. I am counting on the innate desire we all have to connect with others, to not feel alone. I think our clients will have us back one day.”

The intern nods some more, jotting something down in her notebook.