Design Your Own ‘Mindapps’ to Expand Your Smarts & Creativity – Thomas Roberts, Ph.D., with Dave Asprey – #702
In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, my guest is Thomas Roberts, Ph.D., who’s devoted a nearly 50-year career to the study of psychedelics. Tom has developed “mind design” technologies and practices he calls mindapps.
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In this Episode of The Human Upgrade™...
In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, my guest is Thomas Roberts, Ph.D., who’s devoted a nearly 50-year career to the study of psychedelics. Tom has developed “mind design” technologies and practices he calls mindapps.
Just like writing and installing apps in our electronic devices, we can construct “mindapps” and install them in our brain-mind complex, he says. And just like digital apps add capabilities to our devices, mindapps can expand our intellectual capacity and creative abilities.
Tom’s mindapps also offer benefits for artistic performance, mystical and spiritual experience, and scientific research by improving creativity, open-mindedness, problem solving, and inner-brain connections—the ultimate performance hacking!
“There are things we can install in our brain/mind complex that allow it to do new things and to do things more strongly,” Tom says. “I’m not saying that a mindapp is like artificial intelligence in electronical sense. I’m just taking that idea and transferring it over to things. Now, my favorite, of course, is psychedelics, but it includes brain stimulation, hypnosis, breathing techniques, biofeedback, chanting, yoga, hypnosis, on and on. All of these are mindapps that we can install and use our brain/mind complex in different ways.”
We’re intentionally redesigning our own minds, he explains, and lays it all out in his most recent book: Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design. We talk about mindapps and how they connect to consciousness and psychedelic science.
Tom is a professor emeritus of educational psychology at Northern Illinois University and a former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, He’s presented around the world on consciousness and psychedelic science. For 32 years, he taught Foundations of Psychedelic Studies, which was the world’s first university-cataloged psychedelic course.
Enjoy the show! And get more resources at Dave.Asprey/podcasts.
Key Notes
- 50 years of looking at this stuff. What was the impetus? – 1:26
- I changed like a big aircraft carrier, a little at a time. – 6:20
- So I called that Bicycle Day. – 8:57
- All of these are mind apps that we can install and use our brain/mind complex in different ways. – 11:01
- What’s your favorite psychedelic? – 14:44
- What happens when we combine, let’s say, LSD with hypnosis and brain stimulation? – 17:01
- I think this has to be studied very carefully, probably in very small amounts. – 19:03
- If you change a setting in your brain, it may very well be invisible to you. – 21:00
- Different mind/body effects will have different effects on people at different times. – 22:25
- Why do hallucinogens work for some people in a certain way, but not for others? – 24:00
- I use mind/body state in the sense that Charlie Tart means, an altered state of consciousness and mind/body functioning. – 28:19
- What happens when you invent new states? How will perception vary in those state? – 30:01
- What is your take on microdosing versus doing a full dose experience from that or any of the other hallucinogens? Pros and cons? – 32:44
- If you could go to 7-Eleven and get your tab of acid, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? – 39:07
- I’m interested in the use of the entheogenic use of psychedelics. I use the word entheogen only to apply to religious and spiritual uses. – 41:19
- Once the Army Medical Corp and the Veterans Administration Hospital get into using MDMA with PTSD, that’s definitely going to be a big advance. – 45:36
- Consilience. It’s the idea of taking all the theory and facts that we have on different areas, all the way from let’s say subatomic physics through physics, and chemistry, and biology, and psychology, and the social sciences and linking them all together in one big structure, one structure of ideas. – 49:53
- Towards the end of the book, you talk about that achieving the philosophers mind. What is the philosopher’s mind? – 54:43
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Enjoy the show!
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Links/Resources
About Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D.: niu.academia.edu/ThomasRoberts
Books & Interviews: innertraditions.com/author/thomas-b-roberts
More About Thomas B.Roberts, Ph.D.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dr-thomas-b-roberts-8b463213
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