Octopuses, MDMA, and the Ecstasy of Torah

This is the spiritual successor to my article "Playing with Torah," which I've updated and reposted every few years. It's also about the Torah equivalent of giving ecstasy to octopuses. Enjoy!

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Artwork: DALL-E’s response to the prompt: “psychedelic octopus studying from a Sefer Torah.” I guess DALL-E doesn’t know what a “sefer Torah” looks like.

Octopuses, MDMA, and the Ecstasy of Torah

Preface

I recently listened to episode #667 of The Tim Ferriss Show, entitled Dr. Gül Dölen on Rethinking Psychedelics, New Applications (Autism, Stroke, and Allergies), The Neurobiology of Beginner’s Mind, Octopuses on MDMA, and The Master Key of Metaplasticity. Here’s the synopsis of the episode:

Dr. Gül Dölen is an associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a pioneer and world leader of psychedelics research. Her laboratory has discovered a novel mechanism that could account for the broad range of therapeutic applications that psychedelics are currently being tested for. Her lab has discovered a novel critical period for social reward learning and shown that this critical period can be reopened with psychedelic drugs, such as MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, and ibogaine. Building on this discovery, she has formulated the hypothesis that psychedelics may be the long sought “master key” for unlocking critical periods across the brain. To test this hypothesis, she has initiated a nationwide, collaborative effort to determine whether psychedelics reopen critical periods for ocular dominance plasticity, bird song learning, anatomical plasticity in the barrel cortex, serotonergic neuronal regeneration, dendritic spinogenesis, and motor learning.

Towards the end of the interview, Tim references an article published in Spectrum: Autism Research News entitled “In deep water with Gül Dölen.” The article chronicles how Dölen’s struggles in her scientific career nearly culminated in a decision to “quit science” altogether. Her mentor, Dr. Mark Bear, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, gave her a pep talk, stressing “the importance of science being fun,” saying, “If you lose sight of the fun in science, it’s hardly worth continuing.“ The article sums up how this downward spiral led to a game-changing decision:

Dölen decided that if she was indeed going to give up a life of science, she would go out on her own terms. She would do one final project — a fun one, just to see what would happen, and it would have only a tenuous relationship to everything else she had been studying.

The idea was this: Dölen wondered whether octopuses would make friends while on ecstasy.

The bulk of Tim’s two hour interview details the results and ramifications of this monumental experiment. As alluded to in the title, Dölen’s work with octopuses on MDMA led to groundbreaking discoveries. Her work has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of autism, strokes, and allergies by utilizing psychedelics to reopen critical periods of metaplasticity in the brain.

I listened to all that stuff with great interest, but I was not expecting that Dölen’s take-away message would be exactly what I needed to hear at this critical juncture in my career as a Torah educator. I have a feeling that this same message will be helpful to many of my readers and students as well, no matter where they happen to be at in their Torah development.